October 7, 2013

Things I know nothing about (and you too)

Today's blog is about things I don't know anything about, and I'll close by suggesting there are things that even you, incredibly experienced and jaded eve blog reader out there, don't know that much about either.

I had someone complement my blog in local yesterday.  Yeah, having a blog that says I like to go through lowsec looking for tags or targets isn't exactly going to make someone want to stick around a belt in their PVE boat.  Then again if they are alert enough to look up who entered local and follow the blog link in my bio then I wasn't going to surprise them anyway.  If he had complemented my blog and also come out to give us a fight that would have been ideal, but since there were three of us I can understand.  In any case it helped push me to update.


How to Pick Fights

Two Thoraxes down to a Scythe Fleet Issue and a Rupture.  I pretty much figured I didn't have a chance against a faction cruiser, but what the heck.  From chatting with the pilot afterwards it sounds like I came pretty close to smashing through his reps.  I think I know what I did wrong there which is both frustrating (I could have beaten him) and reassuring (it wasn't an entirely foolish fight to pick).  The Rupture was one of those great examples where the other guy saw what I had, then shipped down to a T1 cruiser to come meet me.  Both of those losses actually ended up in great conversations with the people who killed me.  So much for Eve being full of evil-minded blobby jerks. 

On the other hand, just the other night I ran into someone who apparently was all set to take on my Thorax with his Sacrilege, but then was pretty pissy in local when a corp mate of mine showed up in local.  Yup, HAC vs. T1 cruiser all good, but HAC vs. T1 and an unknown is us being terribly unfair I guess.  Honestly, he probably could have taken us both.  The other ship was a Pilgrim.  I'm guessing that a Sac really isn't going to care too much about neuts since its firing missiles and is probably plated.  If it tore down my Thorax first it's not like the Pilgrim's drones are going to be able to kill it before the HAMs rip apart the Pilgrim.  A good example where the pilot could have had quite a win to talk about if he'd only taken the fight.

Recently went for a cloaky roam with corpmates.  I got to learn a bit about scouting down targets, but unfortunately that also meant that I wasn't in position to get in on either of our two kills.  Ah well.

Capital Stuff

Why are there no T2 capital guns?  I ran into this when looking at some of the big killmails in the news.  Seems like something that might be a small feature to throw to the high-end players.  It's still out on the horizon as something for me, since I could drive towards flying a Moros - though the guns is the smallest part of that.  It seems like CCP is trying to make the path to race up to higher end ships easier - which is mostly good for people spinning up a Dreadnaught alt I suppose.


Wormholes

I have a lot to learn here.  I'm intrigued by the idea of daytripping to wormholes.  Solo doesn't seem feasible though.  If I start by assuming the ship needs to have a probe launcher and a cloak, and it needs to be cheap enough that I can afford to lose it, that narrows it down a lot.  Pretty much a Stealth Bomber for PVP, unless I'm willing to write-off a Arazu or Pilgrim.  Then there's a question of what I'm going to find in a wormhole that I can solo with that.  Certainly the Tiger Ears blog is an inspiration, though her cloaky Loki has a lot more dps than the ships available to me.

Which brings up when I should fit out my first Proteus.  Advice from a corpmate was that having the subsystem skills to 4 wasn't quite good enough.  I may take some time to get those up to 5 then test out a PVP fit in some PVE situations to get a feel for it.   What I can afford to lose is a very ambiguous thing - I have a lot of hulls spread all over Eve, but having the right hull already fit for what I want to do is different.

I'm guessing PVE should be off the table since I'd probably have to rotate three ships through. CovOps to find a C1/C2 hole, Battlecruiser (no probe, no cloak) to run a site, then Noctis to salvage - and since I don't have Salvaging 5 I understand sleeper wrecks are going to be very time consuming.  Sheer ISK-making wise I'd probably be better with L4 missions.


Things We Know Nothing About



Anything I don't know how to do must be trivial. - said by Eve Pundits everywhere

I used to be a commercial software developer before I moved into management paths.  It is a pet peeve of mine when I see people saying things like "The interceptor immunity to interdiction is a trivial change, they just have to change some line like bubble_immune=true somewhere."  If all you know about programming is scripts or trivial size college projects, I can understand that naivete.  When you're talking about a product with tens of millions of lines of code in multiple languages, developed over 10 years, it's pretty damn unlikely it's that simple.  Given what we've heard about the level of modularity and encapsulation we've heard about (ex: the POS code) I'd bet a lot of ISK that it isn't as simple as a private member of Class Ship that returns true or false.

Now I wasn't playing Eve back then, but weren't bubbles introduced well before T3 cruisers and their interdiction nullification capabilities? If so, that means that barring a refactoring effort it's unlikely that the two things were cleanly designed into whatever engine is used for warp movment.

So when you hear somebody out there saying that a particular Eve feature would be easy to do, unless they are CCP or ex-CCP, just save yourself some bitterness and ignore them - they're almost certainly clueless.

4 comments:

  1. The T3 subsystem skills are low multiplier skills. I've got the Caldari ones lined up in my EveMon plan, and Level V skills take less than 3.5 days per skill (with +4 implants and Min-Maxed attributes.) It should take less than 20 days to get them all to level V.

    I think you'll have a problem flying your T3 around in high-sec, just stay away from anyplace you could get jumped (like Jita undock, or .5 space)

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    1. Did you mean "I think" or "I don't think"? I can't afford to put a lot of bling on a Proteus, so I expect anyone scanning it will decide it isn't worth the trouble of a highsec gank. Of course if I go the plated route then ganking would definitely not be worthwhile.

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    2. I don't think it'll be a problem.

      The whole point of getting a T3 cruiser is to take it out and do something fun with it, though. Mission running in high-sec is not that sort of fun.

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  2. I too was a commercial software developer before moving into management paths.

    It is a pet peeve of mine when people assume any code much more advanced than "hello world" must be tremendously complex and difficult to change.

    Another pet peeve is when they automatically assume everything is written in a supposedly dummy proof OOC language. About all OOC really does is allow companies to hire cheaper, less capable programmers since it's harder for them to break anything when they don't have access to anything powerful enough to do much damage.

    Yeah for a guy like that I can see how "no change is trivial".

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