Ancillary Shield Boosters

Orakkus over at 2nd Anomaly From The Left (mandatory reading people!) did a couple posts talking about the new Ancillary Shield Boosters and I thought I would take a look at them as well.

There are small, medium, large, and extra large versions and the description is:

Provides a quick boost in shield strength. The module takes Cap Booster charges and will deactivate once these charges run out. If not reloaded, it will start consuming the ship's capacitor upon reactivation.

Note: Can use Cap Booster 50, 75 and 100 as fuel. Reloading time is 60 seconds. Prototype Inferno Module.

So the idea is that its a combined cap booster and shield booster, thus saving you a slot to run your active shield tank. Intriguing! So let's compare stats, looking at the Medium Ancillary Shield Booster and the Medium Shield Booster II.

Stat	Medium Shield Booster II	Medium Ancillary Shield Booster
CPU (tf)	58	50
Powergrid (MW)	13	12
Energy Activation Cost (GJ)	60	142
Duration (sec)	3	3
Shield Boost Amount (HPs)	90	146
Capacity (m3)	NA	20
Reload Time (sec)	NA	60

Although the energy cost of the Ancillary shield booster is 142, you can get a full boost of 146 from a Cap Booster 50, 75, or 100. Since the biggest energy bang for your buck is Cap Booster 50 to fill in for 142 energy, and since the module can hold 10 of them instead of only 5 of the Cap Booster 100, it makes sense to go with the smaller charges.

You can run the module without charges in it and in my testing last night I found that with auto-reload turned off, it would run out of charges and keep running off of my ship's capacitor. It also works with a Shield Boost Amplifier so on a ship with active shield tanking bonus like a Harpy and a amplifier, the Ancillary booster gives 273 hit points every three seconds while the Medium Shield Booster II only repairs 168.

The downside is that your cap chargers only last for 30 seconds (10 charges and 3 second cycle time) and after that the hungrier ancillary booster will drain your cap dry... or you wait for 60 seconds to reload it with charges. Either way your tank may be dead in the water in that time and your ship to soon just be dead.

So, this module is not intended for long drawn out fights or for fights where you have to tank hard. Setups where the fight is over in 30 seconds (i.e. high DPS gank ships) or where the enemy is incapacitated in that time (such as a bait ship waiting for ECM reinforcements to arrive) or where you only need to pulse the repper have the time might work with this module that gives a significant amount of boosting over regular reppers. Any setup that needs to run this module a lot will not work unless you have insane capacitor capacity and recharge rates (I can't think of one that can handle it).

Unified Inventory

On Sunday night I logged in for the first time in about a month and gave the game a spin. Did some hunting but no luck shooting anything, and did some logistics.

I understand a lot of people are opposed to the new unified inventory interface. While I can understand being frustrated with bugs, I do not understand the desire to keep the million-multiple-container windows approach. I hated it. I am so pleased with the streamlined initial version of unified inventory and will personally NOT shoot CCP Arrow's ship if I ever run into him in space. I'd buy him a drink instead.

Unified Inventory for the win, people, for the win.

Ripples

The biggest change to New Eden since Apocrypha is coming. Not in one fell swoop but in several changes that combined will rock the cluster. In fact, the mere announcement of these changes has caused sweeping economic fallout, like the waves from ripples amplifying each other where they intersect.

Pebble #1 - Drones changing from mineral drops to bounties. While this will have some impact on mission runners and explorers, this will totally cause the Drone Regions' economy to change. The large number of high end drones dropping very valuable compounds that melted into high value minerals effectively swamped the cluster's markets when the regions opened up back in the day and drove the prices of the high ends into the ground as hordes of PvE pilots effectively became miners with their guns. This massive source of minerals is going to be shut off.

Pebble #2 - Rats will no longer drop manufactureble T1 loot (aka Meta 0 mods). Any mission runner will tell you that a large amount of minerals can be gained from picking up all the loot in a mission and melting down the cheap stuff in station for minerals that can be sold. For low end minerals especially, this is a big source in the markets as mission runners are usually not manufacturers and don't care what price they get for them extra minerals. As Ripard Teg pointed out, the named modules reprocess to half as much minerals leading to an interesting domino effect:
- no meta 0 mods from mission runners will cut supply which will lead to increase in price as demand remains the same and manufacturers can ask for more ISK for their items.
- as meta 0 prices rise the demand for meta 1 and 2 modules will rise as pilots see the increase in performance worth the smaller increase in price. However, their supply may increase if the loot table produce more of them for rat drops to replace the removed meta 0 mods.
- as pilots move from meta 0 to meta 1-2 modules for fitting ultra cheap ships, you should see a price equilibrium where the difference between meta 0 thru 2 is fairly consistent with the performance gains.

Regardless, the end effect is less minerals entering the system.

Pebble #3 - Banning of Bots will Occur Daily. No one knows for sure exactly how much ISK from ratting bots and minerals from mining bots enters the system, but it is significant. Significant enough to assume that a large portion of the minerals entering the system today are being generated from bots, especially the lower ends like tritanium and pyrite. If the war on bots is successful and they become a margin note on the mineral books, this will also lower the amount of minerals coming into the system.

* * * * *

So consider those three things for a moment. What they all have in common is that the amount of minerals from non-human-controlled-mining sources is going to drop (in fact, already has started dropping), and drop a lot. Across all types of minerals, low to high end. You are already seeing the fallout of this as market speculators buy up stocks in anticipation of rising prices and the banning of botters combining to the market volatility and rising ship prices. 55 million for a Drake? 150 million for a Rokh?!

Fear not, good reader, for this is simply a market correction driven by changing technologies and we have plenty of real world examples to draw analogies from to know that enterprising individuals and groups will step in to take advantage of the changing landscape and bring the market back into equilibrium.

Here are some things you can expect to see:

Ripple #1 - Return of real mining corporations. Player corporations dedicated to hard core mining ops on large scale that combine abilities for the most efficient ore extraction and mineral processing are pretty rare these days. Typically mining ops done by real players are a couple guys with a couple of alts working in a belt or ice field for scratch while doing something else to fund their other activities. With the vast increase in wealth to be generated from concentrated and dedicated mining, expect a professional class of miners to re-emerge and band together. Mining ops of 10 hulks and an Orca with a couple haulers should become far more common, maybe even in low sec pockets, if the wealth is comparable to mission running or better.

Ripple #2 - Mineral prices will stabilize but remain higher than previous levels. Even with professional mining corporations the volume generated by ratters in drone regions and legions of mining bots cannot be matched, and in fact, won't be because human miners will stop mining if profitability drops too low again. Thus an equilibrium will be reached at a higher level prior to these changes.

Ripple #3 - Mining ops in null sec will become common. With decreased supply and higher prices in high sec markets, it may finally reach the point in null sec space where importing and supporting miners is more cost efficient than importing minerals and manufactured goods. This could lead to more organized mining ops in null sec space to feed the engines of war, and thus more targets for roaming hostile gangs.


Ripple #4 - Explorers may actually be happy at finding gravimetric sites. Right now its hard for an explorer to give a gravimetric scanned site away. But once the professional mining corporations become more common, they may seek these sites out for high end ore they can't find in high sec or for mining in low sec in a harder to find location.

* * * * *

That's all I can think of for now. Other thoughts and opinions are welcome in the comments.

Radical Idea: War Decs Are Stupid

One of the things getting looked at in Inferno is CONCORD sanction wars, more commonly known as war declarations or war decs. The background story is that one alliance/corporation bribes CONCORD to look the other way as they perform criminal acts on a target alliance/corporation, the upshot is that CONCORD also ignores criminal acts going the other way.

When  the two entities in question are willing to fight, the mechanic works fine. See Red Versus Blue. When the target is large enough or powerful to ignore the aggressor in most cases, the mechanic is not overly harmful to the game. See war decs on null sec alliances or Eve University. When the target is vulnerable and unwilling to fight but the aggressor is one or two guys looking for easy kills or ransoms, its not the worst thing in the world. But when the target is weak and the aggressor is strong, the target corporation usually tries to avoid the war dec by docking up or hopping to a new corp that is not at war. This tactic leaves neither the target (who has to change corps and reset up shop when all he wants to do is play the game in a non-pvp manner) nor the aggressor (who has to watch his target melt away like snow in the hot sun and thus gets no kills nor ISK out of the effort) happy. Any effort to make war decs easier or harder to launch or avoid is going to piss off the other party.

And let's be frank: war decs are stupid in any internally consistent world.

In a logical world the empires would look at the violence, destruction, economic impact, and chaos caused by high sec war decs and then look accusingly at CONCORD and ask "what the hell are you doing?" It would be as if crime families in major cities could pay the police to look the other way as they blew up buildings and shot at each other in the streets. Sooner or later the military would come in to restore order and sack the entire police force.

Now, I acknowledge that using real world examples to apply to an internet spaceship game where we supposedly play immortal god-like beings of cast wealth and power and are dealing with what amounts to essentially a independent police force free from government interference is a stretch. I'm a big fan of making storyline fit good game design and not making poor game design to fit with storyline.

And I also acknowledge that we need some method of allowing non-consensual PvP in high sec beyond market shenanigans and suicide ganks/can flipping. But at the same time, I think we need a mechanic for players not looking for PvP to have some assistance in dealing with unwanted aggression.

So, here is my proposals (flame as you will):

1) Reduce the time and effort it takes to declare a war. The 24 hour voting and then24 hour to war start is too much.

2) Allow the war dec'ed corp to pay to CONCORD to end the war dec, but make the cost high and make it so the aggressive entity gets it costs back. Once done, war cannot be declared on that corp for at least 24 hours.

3) CONCORD will no respond to hostilities in high sec, but faction navies will and they will engage anyone involved who does a criminal action. This will not be enough to give non-PvPers a complete pass but might be enough support to give them a fighting chance. Nothing changes in terms of low sec though.

4) Do not allow pilots to leave or join a corp in an active war declaration (either target or aggressor).

* * * * *

I know I'm not a war declaration expert and this idea may have holes or issues large enough to drive a Megathron through. Mostly I wanted to write a post pointing out how stupid war decs are.

Eve Online: Inferno

New Dev blog today announces that the big summer expansion will be called Inferno:

Let's cut to the chase and pull out the only relevant facts:

The next few months will be spent reinvigorating Concord-sanctioned warfare, giving tools and a framework to groups who wish to take advantage of these conflicts both directly and indirectly. We are also looking to introduce many new things which will mix up all forms of combat in a way not seen for a long time. Factional Warfare will also be seeing changes to make it much more relevant and fun by giving real reasons to fight for your faction.
As we continue development there will also be smaller changes, improvements and usability fixes, and we will not forsake our game performance focus. We will be making some changes and additions to our avatar technology and many other parts of the game. The websites will continue their metamorphoses and there may even be sight of more developer events on TQ.
Finally, we will revealing more concrete steps in the link between EVE and DUST 514, bringing an unprecedented level of collaboration, conflict and purpose to both games living in the same EVE Universe.

Translated:
- New war declaration mechanics
- New modules and/or ships
- More Faction Warfare rewards and/or bonuses
- Code improvements
- More tattoos and clothes (mohawk plz?)
- website changes
- more Dev fleet roams
- finally find our how Dust mercs are going to screw with null sec alliances and vice versa.

Now I want details! Especially on the first three.