Category: Personal

Asset Control and Consolidation

One of the most challenging things in EVE online can sometimes be the logistics of merely existing in the game. If you play for long enough you’ll end up with a ton of modules, trade goods, ships, etc. all over the place in the universe.

Recently I took at look at my assets window and had to wince at how many stations held a great big pile of mission loot, or a shuttle, or a pile of ammo I’d bought and only hauled a portion of it to where I’d needed it.

So, what to do about this? Well, make a decision like I did: commit to traveling light.

Step 0: Pick a home base

Pick a place to be your home, some place with a reprocessing plant, medical bay, and repair facility at a minimum. If you’re a builder type, consider one with factory/research facilities to suit your needs. Pro tip: make sure your home is owned by a corp/faction who likes you a lot, that way you don’t get penalized a lot for reprocessing things.

Step 1: Get your crap together.

This entails the painful process of running around in a hauler, collecting all of the assets you might have all over New Eden. Pick a primary base and haul it all there.

Step 2: Sort through it

Take a look at what you have. Buy some station warehouse containers to help with organizing your gear. Tech II and Meta-class modules are usually things you ‘ll want to keep, most other stuff like Tech I gear is so cheap it’s not worth keeping around. But go through your items and compare with the way you play, and ask yourself “do I really need this?”

What to keep? Things of value, obviously. Even if you might not want it, someone else might. Meta-class modules can fetch a decent price on the market, so you might want to do the research here and see what you can get on the free market for them. Got extra skillbooks you don’t need? Put them on the market for an amount less than the NPC price and they’ll get bought in no time.

Step 3: Spring cleaning time

What I like to do is keep a station warehouse container and name it Junk, or Recycle Bin, or something of that kind. Drag all the junk you don’t want to keep around into there so you can easily identify it later. For basics, get a second container for things you want to keep. If you’ve got a nice clean Items window with a couple of containers, you’re ready to go.

Pull out those items in your Recycle Bin back to your Items window. Select everything, minus your containers, and right click. Hit Reprocess, and look in the report window at how much yummy minerals you didn’t know you had just sitting there. If you’re pleased with that number and are now ready to commit to living light, hit OK and watch all of that crap get mashed down to minerals.

Step 4: Everything else

Ask yourself “do I really need all of this?”  Seriously, moving it around is a pain in the butt, right?  You could be asked to relocate to another region as part of your corp, to better be able to participate on ops.  It’s annoying to have to move things around so damn much (trust me, I’ve had to do this myself a few times, recently).  If you don’t need it, sell it, donate it to the corp or a friend, or just store it somewhere where you won’t need to move it around.

Step 5: Ships and fittings

I’ve been looking at how much I really need all these extra ships I cart around, once that I’ve used to try a few things out and then never really went back to try again.  It’s a lot easier to move around if you have only the ships that you need.  I don’t often rig my ships so that makes it easier to do since I can repackage them up.

Fitting wise, I’m finding it handy to have a can with the fittings of my ships in there, separate from the other stuff.  This way if I need to swap out combat fittings for some reason, I know where all that gear will definitely be.

Conclusion

In the end, I drastically reduced the amount of stuff I had all over EVE, as well as made it extremely easy to move around if it’s required.  This process worked well — for me.  Your milage may vary, because maybe you want to take the time and sell a lot of that gear on the market instead of melting it down for minerals and using/selling that.  Personally I find the latter to be much more time efficient.

So, have you ever had to do anything like this?  How did you go about it?

CSM Press Release

Hot on the heels of the first Council of Stellar Management meeting in Iceland, comes a first press release from the CSM itself.

News Release, 25th June 2008
‘Internet Chieftains’ Head Home from Iceland

First Council of Stellar Management meeting hailed a success

Delegates from the first democratically elected MMO player Council have declared themselves pleased with their initial face-to-face meeting with CCP (www.ccpgames.com), the developers of leading Internet spaceship game, EVE Online (www.eve-online.com).

Over 25,000 EVE players voted to select the initial nine delegates to represent them on the ‘Council of Stellar Management’ (CSM). Following the elections, the nine Councillors worked with the player base to identify and prioritise game-related issues ranging from combat through economy to design of the user interface. These issues formed the basis of the agenda for the three-day meeting at CCP’s Headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Prior to the face-to-face meeting, Councillors (and players) aired concerns that the CSM had been created simply as a PR tool to generate publicity for the game. However, it soon became apparent that senior management at CCP have really bought into the process and see a long-term role for the CSM as an important institution for player participation in the future development of EVE.

Over the course of the CSM meeting, more than 30 game related issues were discussed by Councillors and senior members of the CCP development team, which included game designers, programmers, storyline staff and members of the quality assurance team. The meetings were chaired and moderated by a neutral arbitrator from an Icelandic university.

Many issues and ideas raised by the CSM were accepted by CCP and are being built into the game development pipeline for implementation in future patches. Other ideas were seen as problematic to implement but compromises and alternatives were discussed for further feasibility investigation by CCP. A few ideas were dismissed outright on the basis of being technically difficult to implement without diverting huge programming/development resources, at the detriment of advancing other elements of the game.

“We had a great dialogue with the developers and they were exceedingly open to our ideas and suggestions and pretty straightforward in explaining technical limitations where not. It was clear that some changes we suggested were already on CCP’s agenda, but it was also nice to see the occasional ‘Eureka’, – ‘why didn’t we think of that?’ moment amongst the developers. This clearly demonstrated the value of the process both to us as players but also to CCP,” said Andrew Cruse, Chairman of the CSM.

As part of their trip to Iceland the CSM Councillors were taken to visit the birthplace of Icelandic democracy at Thingvellir (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Eingvellir). Thingvellir is reputedly home to the oldest Parliament in the world. From 930 AD chieftains’ from across Iceland would meet there annually to discuss the law and settle disputes. During the visit to Thingvellir, Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, CCP’s lead economist, made a rousing speech describing the CSM delegates as the first ‘Internet chieftains’ and ‘pioneers’ of democracy in online communities.

“While it is very gratifying to be described as an ‘Internet chieftain’ what really matters is proving to our constituents, the players of EVE, that we have actually delivered results that improve the virtual universe in which they play. To that extent we are reliant on CCP continuing to be an active partner in the process and delivering on the promises made in Iceland,” said Sean Conover, a CSM delegate.