Sunday, May 11, 2014

Dodixie Pricewatch 11 May 2014

My methodology is changing this week. I am logging in to the client to get the numbers now. I haven't created a market alt to do it yet. That probably would notch me up a few points on the Bittervet test.

Fleet Firetail: 11.5 million to 9.5 million ISK. 
Pretty clearly the blip recorded last time was not just the lack of Dodixie data. A spike shows in the price history at about that time. 

Navy Comet: 15.1 to 13.0 million ISK. 
Hey man, as soon as it hits 10 million, I'm in there again! Am I sounding pitiful yet? 

Hookbill: 18.2 to 16.5 million ISK. 
Warzone control has swung back in Caldari favor, or at least no longer in Gallente favor. I would have guessed because of the gatecamp that leads me to being in Dodixie in the first place. 

Navy Slicer: 14.2 to 11 million ISK.
Still elevated from its long stay at under 10 million.

I list the lowest sell first, followed by the highest buy. The names I use here for the navy frigates are the minimum you need to type when searching in EVE-Central to go directly to each of their pages. 

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Hiatus Quietus

I've had to reorganize my EVE fandom a little bit. I think you're going to see the posting frequency go down to once a week. Dodixie Pricewatch will likely skip this week, as I am going to approach my methodology differently. I've decided EVE Central is leaving out some data that are important.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Live and let gank

Last week I commented on JestersTrek about a refreshing thought experiment he did. How would the miners, supposing they wanted to unify, resist those who suicide-gank their ships? Can they stop it from happening? 

I very much like that he is regarding the miner as a thinker with his own autonomy. I would like to take it a step further. A lot of miners have probably already seen the low prospects of success in fighting the gankers and just go on doing whatever they want. Teaming up has its own overhead in time and organizational structures. Some PvPers aren't the sort to team up either, to be fair. Live and let mine or gank or sandbox out however you like, I say.

Nonetheless, it's a good read as he goes into some detail about the odds of success of various methods the miners might employ. It resonated with me because I often have to think through my low-sec faction war lifestyle in the face of gate camps. 

Gate camps are the ants at the faction war picnic. For real. Ganging up is valid gameplay, though. I can coordinate with my buddies and have a fleet and try to break up the camps. It's all fair. Part of my fun in flying solo, in fact, is to slip past most of them and feel all bad-ass. No danger, no pleasure.

Sometimes when you express this kind of workaday sentiment about some game features being less fun than others, people will pipe up and say "play a different game." My thinking is that we should go light on that in a good-faith discussion. It does not contribute much. When someone posts simply that, as many did in the Jester post referenced above, then they are just trying to shut the discussion down. The option to quit is always there after all. We're talking because we want to have fun playing. 

That said, I reiterate that those who mine (or do any other solo activity in a game that encourages team play) have a concomitant obligation to understand what they are getting into. 

We can't do like a children's cartoon and say predator bad, prey good. 

It's like 
everyone wants to be enlightened, but nobody wants to meditate. That's the proper application of the HTFU principle.* We learn the lessons so we can have the great fulfillment of getting good at a tough game. It's not available at any lower price. 

And that's what always gets me undocking again. 

I've never let someone else's idea of a good killboard hold me back. 

* Harden The Heck Up, for my non-EVE-playing readership.