EVE is a wonderfully dynamic environment. I've commented before on how there are very few games I can think of where my activity in the game is drastically affected by what other people are doing. Even other MMO style games are often very compartmentalized where you are playing in a world together but not in a way where player actions directly impact other players. Certainly not in the way that EVE does. It is probably the thing that I love most about the "game".

The past week or two has been a definite flux state for the corporation. First, our newest alliance member, SUSU moved on. It was a wonderful experience having Longinius Spear in the alliance for a while. He was, as I expected, a catalyst for action. It does sound like he is moving on to a very different and exciting opportunity. We wish him the best of luck in his new endeavor. His time in the alliance definitely had an impact. It solidified some things we needed to improve and also helped us define what we are and are not about. Independently, we've also had a few people move on and have seen a number of new people come on board. It is always interesting working with new people and hard to say goodbye to those that we have enjoyed working along side. 

It was timely then, that I read Rixx Javix's post today about Life and EVE. It so perfectly summed up my feelings on this game and our place in it especially as I contemplate change in membership. Our experience in EVE is what we make it, not what anyone else does for us. It is not your corporation that defines you but you and your actions. It is your response to other players actions that determine if EVE will make or break you. We cannot ever begrudge people for pursuing their passion in the game. I will continue to play the game that interests me the most. As a CEO, I'm happy when people will run along side me for a spell or even longer. I look forward to the new adventures with new people and can't wait to hear how our former members are getting along and wish them the best of luck on their journey.

From my previous post when Thera was announced

It wasn't long before the star system identifier for Thera was confirmed as 31000005 as can be seen by the zKillboard feature of linking systems by their ID.

https://zkillboard.com/system/31000005

You can see also there the region identifier for Thera as G-R00031.  Wormholes have always occupied regions with C1 through C6 space marked as Regions A through F with sub-regions depending on the size of the wormhole space itself. When Thera was introduced, it occupied region G. 

The unique shattered system known as the Sansha Override of J005299 occupies region D which is C4 space. This is consistent with that system being a C4 wormhole, though with special properties. It is notable here also that the system ID is 31002552, not one of the missing five systems in the numbering scheme. 

The small shattered systems, however, occupy Region H, seen here in J000214, the The Sleeper Bioinformatics HQ.  This system also, numbered 31002599, is not one of the special numbered systems.  Prior to the Carnyx release, the five missing numbered systems were still uncharted.

We know now that behind the unidentified wormholes lie five Drifter occupied systems. These are

• J055520 - Sentinel

• J110145 - Barbican
• J164710 - Vidette
• J200727 - Redoubt
• J174618 - Conflux
  

Using zkillboard, it was trivial to confirm that each of these systems corresponds to one of the missing IDs.  It should also be noted that these systems all occupy Region K skipping two regions.  I and J both are missing now. Numerically, Region H and Region K follow each other as 11000032 and 11000033 respectively with no missing numbers between them.

While there has been much talk recently about these new systems, I hadn't seen anyone confirming these IDs and wanted to highlight this as it was a definite point of interest in the lore story along the way. I'm confident that I'm not the first to notice this as I believe it was almost mentioned on the last Hydrostatic Podcast lore panel but didn't quite make it into the conversation.

EDIT: Removed references to Region H being "skipped" earlier.  Apparently I fail at basic alphabetics. 

Anyone that does market transactions or industry in EVE has probably been in the position I was yesterday. You are going through your process, building this, buying that, delivering jobs, putting items up for sale when you hit the OK button and a horrible sinking feeling descends into your bowels.

A market typo!

Those Entosis Link I up there... Yeah, those are worth more like 36.9M, not the 3.69M that I sold them for. For a casual industrialist, that typo was a 332M ISK error that represented a huge chunk of my working capital and profit. 

Huge chunk?  But you're a wormhole CEO swimming in Sleeper ISK!  

Truth is, I keep my characters in EVE very separate, maybe too much so. My main is the CEO of the wormhole corporation and does his wormholey things which oddly enough, doesn't consist of as much ISK making activity as it used to. My second account is an ice miner and takes advantage of a lot of keyboard time that I have where I can nom nom on ice and make enough from the noming to PLEX that account.  Having a second account in wormhole space is a huge benefit and my wormhole alt on that account is one I've trained for boosting as well as some combat, but most of all he serves as a scout when we need one. He is invaluable in that role. My third account is actually from my first attempt at EVE back in 2007. He didn't take back then and much to my amazement when I did latch onto EVE the second time, he was still there sitting in some kind of gaming cryo-stasis waiting to be reactivated. When I did, I turned him into a second ice miner but he has now morphed into a high-sec anomaly scavenger and industrialist. When the Entosis Link came on the scene, I decided to try my hand at some industry mostly because it felt like it was a unique time in EVE. There was a new module being introduced that was likely to be widely used (and destroyed), no one in the game had an advantage in terms of BPOs or even time, and it was relatively inexpensive to get into and build. All of these things sent me down the road of doing industry in EVE for the first time in a real way. The work that he does though, isn't funded by my wormhole activities. He has to make it on his own. Of course, I managed to mess that up too!

But this isn't a post about mistakes, it is in fact, one of how people in EVE can sometimes surprise you with their kindness.

Immediately after I made my mistake, I recalled some posts on other EVE market blogs I read that spoke of market mistakes. In those cases, people had reached out for mercy from those who had benefited from their errors. Some responded with laughter, some didn't respond at all, but a few responded with generosity. So, I took to email and contacted the three buyers of my ten units and asked if they would have mercy on me. I wasn't asking for my intended price, but just the market buy price. It was a middle ground and likely the price they had intended to buy at in the first place, just not the price I intended to sell at.

What happened next will astound you!

I received back a total of 172M ISK of the 332M ISK mistake I made. That 172M plus the 36.9M that I originally got for the sale means that in the end I received a little bit more ISK than the buy price of the items I bought. Sure, I lost the "profit" difference between that buy price and the sell price and that buy price was, in fact, lower than the build cost of the items, but it was nearly all of my invested ISK. Three random EVE players had responded with complete generosity towards me and eliminated much of the mistake that I had made.

I truly, truly am grateful to those players who responded. It is situations like this that reinforce your belief in the kindness of strangers and the good that lies beneath the surface of EVE's dark exterior.

Carnyx is upon us.

An ancient device used to incite troops to battle. An appropriate name for the latest EVE expansion heralding the first release of the complete overhaul of the Dominion sovereignty system. With this first change, null-sec station services are no longer attack-able by conventional means. They can now only be engaged through the use of an Entosis module. After a warm-up cycle, a minimum of 5 minutes is all that is needed to disable station services. The defensive index of a system will increase that time to a maximum of 30 minutes for a fully indexed system. What does this mean for a wormhole corporation?

For us, it potentially means content, of the pew pew kind. It is not uncommon now, as we are growing into our numbers, to take a small group of people into null-sec either via a standard or frigate sized wormhole and look for targets. I hesitate to say fights here because primarily they are ganks by the truest definition. Sometimes our presence will bring a measured response from the local residents but we have found measured to mean overwhelming and often times unnecessary. For example, not too long ago, we had a frigate hole into some null-sec system and brought forth a few ships, mostly frigates. I don't even think we had people flying any of the new T3 Tactical Destroyers at the time. Instead of finding a decent engagement, we found ourselves dropped on by carriers and eventually a super-carrier as a response. The entire encounter was comical as there was little either of us could do to the other in that situation. I'm sure we lost a few ships to some support ships that were present, but the idea that a carrier/super-carrier fleet was an appropriate response to a frigate wormhole was simply laughable. 

Will Carnyx change this?  In the most heavily occupied null-sec areas, probably not, but it is not the occupied, super-ready systems that will probably generate the most content. It is the endless series of empty or semi-empty systems where residents scurry to their station once we enter. These systems are the ones that interest me and I think interest other members in our corporation. It is these systems were 10 or 15 minutes with an Entosis link will disable an outpost upgrade. A disabled upgrade will require someone from the owning alliance to come to the station and apply an Entosis link for a similar period of time to enable it. This has some obvious repercussions for players that either choose to dock up when hostiles are present or are not part of the alliance that owns the station they are using. Previously there was no means to provoke or otherwise entice a station sitter to take a fight.  Now, just a single ship and as little as 10 minutes of time is enough to damage a system. The hope is that this threat of damage is enough to bring people on grid. If not, we will certainly take the satisfaction of causing trouble for those who refuse to fight. I respect their choice to not engage. We've certainly taken our share of opportunities not to engage a force stronger than us with no reason to whelp ISK. I do, however, hope that this system and the consequences start to alter the landscape of the average null-sec resident and bring about a more varied set of encounters. Currently the all-or-nothing responses we get are not the kind that provide fun and enjoyment on both sides of the equation.

Be careful what you wish for and karma is a bitch and all that. Maybe we'll find ourselves whelping ISK after all when the bears show their claws. Regardless, at least it will be interesting in a game that often times has huge swaths of waiting for the shake-inducing exciting times that make it all worth while. The fact that using an Entosis on a structure generates an alliance-wide notification should be interesting in and of itself.

I would be remiss as a wormhole resident and someone quite interested in the lore side of EVE not to note that this release also brings forth new k-space accessible content in the form of the unidentified wormholes. From the early information, this content is both difficult and requires multiple people to engage. Being a wormhole resident, my opportunities to engage in this content are a little more challenging to come by. It was the same with the Sleeper Caches in k-space, which I have yet to experience since I do not spend much time in k-space scanning signatures. While the sleeper caches contain loot valuable enough to make them worth doing, I'm interested to see what the rewards are for the Drifter sites. If they are commensurate to the difficulty, I can see them being very interesting additions to the higher-end PvE, but if they require too many people and the rewards are to low, especially after splitting the loot, they may languish after their lore secrets are discovered.