Some surprises aren't nice

The steady hum of the tractor beams and buzz of the salvagers was lulling her into a soporific state. Out here, one could easily fall into comfortable meditation. The beautiful nebulas reminded her of life in the caravan with her parents. Mara was remembering the attack, the walls exploding as the boarding parties bypassed the airlocks and just punched straight through the ship's hull. The slaver hounds, drool hanging from their gaping, razor-toothed maws. The growling.

On The Forums Today

Here are some galnet postings I stumbled across today.

Features and Ideas Discussion

Discussion about changing lasers to allow a capsuleer to bias towards EM or Thermal damage. The basic idea is that all crystals currently focus on EM damage which most armour is more resistant to, while other weapon systems are able to select for explosive or thermal damage, which typically isn't as highly resisted in shields or armour as other damage types.

Some people need help learning how to manage new players in PvP corporations.

There is still more to be done with revamping EVE's PVE. A long time ago I was keen to have all missions tuned to be flyable with PVP style fittings, and to have NPCs behave a little smarter. We now have the Level One AI, it would be nice to have NPCs flying more player-like ships rather than wimpy things that can only beat you by throwing superior numbers and spamming DPS. CCP still need to follow up on providing more storyline missions so that people flying Distribution missions can get a Distribution storyline instead of Shipyard Theft or Materials for War Preparation.

There is (another) thread discussing the removal of attributes.

Tora Bushido would like alliance-level player notes. That is, alliance-wide versions of the "notes" tab on a character's info window.

No feedback on IRC-style chat highlighting since CCP Sisyphus responded at the end of February. I did raise the idea of having alliance, corp and player-created chat channels available as an IRC service during the Web round table with CCP Alice at FanFest 2013. We also raised the idea of mail available as an IMAP service (and potentially as an SSMTP service) and calendars available as a WebDAV iCal service. No doubt CCP will decide to follow the NIH route to awesomeness though :(

The Escort Carrier proposal is still bumping around in the darkness of F&I. The ability to fly 10 drones would allow an escort carrier pilot to "assist" two rookies with firepower and reppers during PVE, and I believe would fill the hole between Logistics cruisers and Carriers.

People still don't like space camouflage.

That foolish notion of separating all empire space with lowsec borders is still bumbling around.

Someone thinks the Mining Foreman Mindlink is too expensive.

The idea of scaling damage as fleet size increases has reared its head again.

It would be nice to have an agent finder for locator agents. Locator agent locator maybe?

CCP needs to sort out their thinking on the issue of logging in to change skills. I am convinced that what will encourage players to stick around in the game longer is remote chat: if there is someone to talk to you are less likely to log out. If there is someone in game chatting to you you are more likely to log in to start with. Exposing the skill queue to the web (or mobile applications) can come after remote chat, but it must be delivered. Yes, I wrote an essay in response to that thread.

There is a suggestion that the undocking animation should involve the ship leaving the pad and slowly moving down the tunnel.

Aquila Sagitta would like audible prompts to warn of fleet broadcasts.

The idea of hacking abandoned POSes raises its head again.

Allow players to build, probe down and destroy star gates.

No word from CCP yet on the topic of off grid boosting.

As for the rest of the threads in Features & Ideas discussion today? The forum continues to demonstrate that many players make really bad game designers.

So, are Incursions actually paying "too much"?

Short version: Yes. And no. It's not about the ISK, it's about the risk.

Make sure you've read my two previous posts: Tippis' Rants - Faucets and Sinks, and Incursion vs Mission Income, along with Tippia's post Faucets and Sinks which spurred all of this blathering of mine.

Incursion vs Mission Running Income

There's increasing focus on the "imbalance" of Incursion income versus L4 security mission income. People see Incursion runners making a hundred million ISK an hour and feel that this is imbalanced compared to L4 security missions. I'd like to contribute my experiences to the community, in the hope that people can actually add some evidence to their arguments instead of just winding themselves up into foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic ranting based on second- or third-hand information.

Flash Post: Tippia's Rants, ISK Faucets and Sinks

Tippia has a post up about faucets and sinks: http://blog.beyondreality.se/?q=node/3

My first response to Tippia's "average income for mission runners" is that such a figure is a little misleading: it throws people running all levels of missions into the same bucket, thus drawing an average from apples, oranges and pumpkins. In addition, it ignores a basic distinction between motivation to participate in a particular activity.

This issue is a little behind, I've been busy playing the game instead of being a forum warrior. Complaints may be directed to /dev/null :)

Missions & NPCs

Mission runners use playbooks to complete missions, and get terribly upset when the playbooks aren't available. People still want to fly Drakes in L4 missions.

Faction/Corp/Agent standings are math, and math is hard:

• https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=32263
• https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=32373

Wormhole rats still surprise new explorers. As far as Incursions go, the question with the OTA is: bring a bigger boat, or spend time hacking arrays?

Economy

There is usable advice out there about how to break into the world of trading. Speaking of which, Emkayu Goffish has a series of blog entries dealing with trading and raising startup capital.

Piracy

There are all manner of useful tips for wannabe pirates.

Apparently Goons have upset too many new players with their "recruitment" scam.

Rebalancing

• Some people are looking for love for EAS.
• Some people don't understand that EVE is a PVP game.
• Transferring POS ownership is a perennial question.
• Where are the Capital NPCs?
• The biggest problem with nullsec is the people that live there.
• Cerebral Accelerator lost in podding? Get it replaced! https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=32085
• More comments about ganglinks and off-grid boosters.

On The Forums Today

Aura will not re-issue lost tutorial items. Some tutorial missions are accompanied by tutorials which spawn items required by those missions. If a tutorial is skipped or disabled, that item will not be spawned.

Many missions require the fetching of an item, but are marked as completed when the item is dropped. I wonder if these completion triggers could be adjusted to be more like the new revision of "Cargo Delivery" where the trigger is the looting of an item.

Another suggestion about moving belts to grav sites. The interesting suggestion here is playing tutorial videos on CQ screen (e.g.: the probing tutorial).

Lowsec: some discussion about exploration, and a question about finding a region of lowsec in which to look for frigate fights.