It is story time kids.  Gather around and listen while I tell you of Nightmares!

About two weeks ago now, I was scouting out our static C3. Jumping in, I hit dscan (basically the first thing to do other than bookmarking the exit side of the wormhole) and was greeted with an insane sight. 

http://eve-dingo.com/s/kFAQs76

It is rare for us to see a dozen ships on dscan, let alone close to sixty with forty of them being faction battleships. Not knowing what was going on in this system, I set out to investigate and quickly found that they were all massed around a specific moon. Either there was a bash in progress or something very strange was happening. After narrowing down the location, I was greeted with this

I had never seen anything quite like that. At least 40B worth of ships idling at a tower. The pilots were all online and mix of different corporations. Something was going down. I didn't have to wait long though, within a few minutes, the entire gang aligned as one and warped to another tower in the system, this one owned by yet another corporation. Warping there and setting up a perch (I was in a simple scouting Helios), I watched as this fleet of Nightmares began to bash the neighboring tower.

Now, I'm not necessarily one to get involved in other people's business but this was just on the edge of insane. It is rare enough to see a faction battleship in a wormhole but then to see forty of them...to bash a tower? I knew that this was the type of thing that larger, more PvP oriented wormhole organizations live for.  It was very late in the US TZ so none of my corpmates were online to even pretened to want to try to have some fun with this fleet, but I started to look around for others. We are not a big wormhole corporation by any means but I pay enough attention to the "metagame" to know who is who. We had run into Bronya Broga not too long ago in our C2, knew him from the podcast community which two of our members are involved with, and had a great 1v1 with him. He was also organizer of a meetup very close geographically to me that unfortunately I couldn't attend. I figured he might be interested or at the very least, know people that would. As it happened, he was logged on. 

As it happens, this was basically at the same time that his corporation, Rolled Out, was disbanding and he told me that everyone was busy moving stuff, but I might want to try Hard Knocks. I knew of them but didn't really know anyone in the corp. After a little digging around, I found an HK member online and had a convo with him. It was a bit of a strange conversation as there really wasn't much, ultimately, that could be done right then. The high-sec wormhole in this C3 was mass critical with scouts on it and it wasn't long before, during the conversation still, that the entire Nightmare fleet warped off only having incapacitated a few guns. Looking at the field, it seemed that the logi, only 2 Basilisks, had not held and the attackers had lost some ships

https://zkillboard.com/kill/39774227/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/39774273/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/39774546/

I suspected they were done for the night and it was very late for me even though it was a Friday evening. I convo'ed the HK pilot and let him know that I would be able to scout out the new high-sec the next day and get them an entrance if they wanted to have some fun with this apparently mulit-boxing Nightmare fleet. Next day came and I was able to get the system entrance to them and while I was scouting out the high-sec, the owner of the besieged tower convo'ed another member of our corp that was also scouting in the C3 and we learned that she was bringing in some mercenaries to help defend her tower. I let her know of my conversation with HK, just in case she ran into them and wished her luck. Our C3 static was dying and we were about to be collapsed away from this encounter. 

For the next couple days I watched the killboard, curious if my efforts had turned into anything. I did notice that the Mercs she hired, N0MEX, had some success

https://zkillboard.com/kill/39786603/ (and more)

but I never saw anything from HK. *shrug*  It was a long shot and perhaps just something that they couldn't get involved with. 

Fast forward to today.  I see this simple tweet pop up in #tweetfleet

Seems like it might be funny so I click and find that the kill is from a Nightmare with an Ibis on the killmail with this in the comments

I look close at the Nightmare owner and start to put pieces together. This was the same 40 nightmare fleet that I had encountered in the wormhole. I had wondered if they were an incursion fleet because many of the ship names were HQ something. Some of the corporations had changed but many of the character names I recognized. It appeared that this guy may regularly change his corp to avoid wardecs and the like. 

While seemingly inconsequential, the fact that these type of "connect-the-dot" moments happen in EVE is fascinating to me. This isn't part of a scripted game or even something that in any normal circumstance would mean anything in true game terms. Yet for me, in my game, it is truly the icing on the cake where I am acutely aware that the world in which I play is a fluid, dynamic environment with connections abounding through nothing more than the actions of the people who choose to play in it. 

#eveissmall

So I read this today when I logged on today where Suzariel Kel-Paten asks what you would tell a new player in EVE to entice them to play. It got me to thinking about my post yesterday where I rambled on but I'm not sure I said anything intelligent as well as where Sugar Kyle also rambles about alliances touching on ship replacement programs and the like. How do all these things tie together? I think they are deeply ingrained in answering the question of the EVE new player retention issue.

What if the problem with the EVE new player experience is simply one of ISK?

As a wormhole corporation, we have the reputation of living in some of the harshest space in an already harsh game. I hear it often from people I am recruiting. "I don't think I can survive there." My response is often one of ISK. Maybe you can't jump into running sleeper combat sites as a one week old character, but what we can do is get you some ISK while you get ready. Our planetary interaction is excellent and you can do that while you do all your normal activities out our high-sec static exit until you are ready. The problem is, it takes two weeks to train enough PI skills to really get the money rolling. Two weeks. Half of your first subscription and you can't train it on a trial account.

ISK is the great equalizer. If you have it, that ship you lost while running your mission doesn't feel so painful. If you don't, it is devastating.

What if the problem with the new player experience is simply that the new player simply cannot earn enough ISK to fund their gameplay in a short enough period of time to retain their interest?

It is, after all, why people mine early in their career, isn't it? This isn't a new idea. Mining is, however, the thing that many new players are almost forced into in order to make some reasonable ISK. It is still where I make ISK though I have the luxury of large chunks of EVE time that others may not have. 

Is it simply the case that EVE is impossible for the casual player to play? Many of the people ranting about the upcoming industry changes think so at least when it comes to industry. Market gurus like those linked in my post yesterday would tell you that it isn't impossible at all to earn large sums of ISK as a new player. But is EVE as a .01 game any better than EVE as a mining game for the new player? Is it better than mission grinding for pennies?

Simply showering new players with ISK cannot be the answer. There is game balance to consider. Much of the recent industry focus has been on encouraging players to cooperate. Corporation membership can be key in EVE but shouldn't be required. However, joining up with other players will often provide the necessary assistance a new player needs to continue playing.  

The harsh and awful truth though is that EVE actively discourages group play in most PVE content by forcing division of the rewards between participants instead of scaling it up. From some previously released statistics, the largest ISK faucet (ISK created out of thin air in EVE, not from product changing hands) is Bounties from killing pirates. It is these very bounties that are split, not balanced between members. If a person in a corporation can complete a mission/rat/explore alone, they are disincentivised (is that a word?) to include others. 

What if corporation or alliance membership combined with presence in a fleet actually increased the bounty and mission rewards in EVE?  Would it break the EVE economy? Would it tip incursions over the edge in value? Would null-sec ratting generate too much income? 

I think there is a way that group play can be encouraged in the early stages of EVE. Allow for combat anomaly, DED, and mission bounties and rewards to scale up with player participation in a fleet in a corporation or alliance. This would encourage player corporation members to band together, run sites and complete missions for greater rewards than they could do alone. 

Of course, none of this would help us as a wormhole corporation. I think some of the ideas from the wormhole community around lower class wormhole escalation content brings this same idea to lower-level wormhole space. Add more people or certain ships in combat and the rewards increase. But when it comes to the new players in EVE, in high-sec, I believe this mechanic of increasing rewards for groups is invaluable to both retaining players and promoting a more enriching and rewarding early EVE experience.

When I started EVE, my goal was simply to never pay for my game time. Perhaps not something that a game company like CCP wants to hear, but one of the more interesting aspects of EVE is that PLEX does not exist in game without some real person buying it with real money.  I need not feel that I was somehow not pulling my weight putting money into CCPs coffers, I was simply finishing what someone else started. 

A year ago, this PLEX was right around the 500M mark. In terms of ISK/day, it meant I had to earn just over 15M/day in order to stay afloat, not to mention all the shiny ships and fancy skillbooks I needed to have. While I started my career in a mining corporation, it wasn't long before I felt the call of wormholes and started my adventure on this path of being a wormhole CEO. Since then, planetary interaction has been my bread and butter. It is fairly simple for a character with only a couple weeks training to easily pull in 10M/day. This requires dedication and a daily interaction with the planets but when you consider three characters per account, that 30M easily covers the PLEX and then some.

Fast forward a year (almost) and I now run three accounts, all paid with PLEX beyond the initial startup but that same PLEX now costs me right around 775M.  That works out to almost 25M/day, more if you factor in missing days. Despite our love, most of us can't play EVE every single day of the year. That PI that once funded the accounts so easily is now scraping the bottom of the barrel and barely covering the expense. And because of how my alt characters are structured, my three accounts equates to 6 PI characters. Before, that was 1.8B per month to pay for 1.5B in PLEX.  Now that 1.8B doesn't cover the 2.3B needed. 

Thus I often find myself doing the dreaded ISK/hr calculation

• PI - 60M/day, 6 characters, about 1 hour of work, 60M/hr
• Ice mining (I have an alt that does this) - 20M/hr
• C3 wormhole anomalies - 60M/hr

When you start to combine the two (ISK/day for PLEX and ISK/hr value) you start to factor in how much time you can spend in EVE. It starts to color your view on everything you do: "If I can run wormhole anomalies for 2 hours on a weekend night, that equals 4 days of time". Quite a slippery slope I find myself on.

Of course, not every activity in EVE requires you to be in game to take advantage of it. Lately I have been experimenting with market activities. It stemmed from my ice mining where my co-founder and I saw the value in refined products over raw products and I moved from mining ice to buying ice and refining for profit using my co-founders standings. This worked well until the isotope market made some moves that made the refining where we were operating less profitable to the point of it being "not worth it". This was just a pure numbers game. It was a regional issue since the value in Jita was still much better, just required hauling.

Since I had trained to fly a freighter, I looked for intra-regional and inter-regional buys I could make that would net a profit.  That 25M/day was not hard number to hit but by the end of the month, when the PLEX man cometh, my capital was reduced by a harsh 760M (I found a deal on PLEX that day) and my ISK making velocity had decreased again dramatically. It takes money to make money and EVE is no different. I not only needed the ISK stream to hit the PLEX goal but also plenty of ISK on top of that to keep the wallet flush for the next market buy.

As an aside, at some time I would like to write up some thoughts on the EVE market. It vexes me. I read plenty of other blogs like marketsforisk or EVE PLEX in 21 days which revel in the ISK that can be made on the market hand over fist. I must be very bad at it because I can't seem to implement the concept with any degree of success. Even Sugar Kyle with her inspirational low-sec store leaves me frustrated with my own inability to implement the same idea. 

As the head of a corporation, there are additional aspects to my game I have to keep in mind. Most notably, how to fund the corporation. Similar to how I view each of my accounts as distinct entities (with very little sharing of resources between them), the corporation too has its own identity and goals. As wormhole residents, we have towers to fuel which equate to PLEX as without them, the corporation ceases to function. As such, the corporation has an income goal that it must reach, but it can only reach this goal via some very specific methods. Yes, we have corporation taxes but most of our players are not operating in normal space where bounties are paid out. For those that do occasionally, we appreciate every penny. We gain income from our customs offices, but that is dependent on our members taking advantage of PI. Generally speaking this is good income for us but somewhat cyclical as not everyone is 100% dedicated to running theirs. Besides that, we have little else in the way of corporation "dues" or even any in game method of collecting them. 

I don't want to run a corporation that has the feeling of charging its members for everything. Operating in that way adds a burden to the individual player who may already be running through many of the same calculations that I do and trying to keep their wallet positive. At the same time, if the corporation wallet falls short, I have to simply add that to my own calculations as one more item to be accounted for personally. I don't begrudge this, it is how the corporation operated when it was just myself and my co-founder and it is simply how we choose to operate.

I'm not sure how other wormhole corporations handle their expenses. I've seen various posts or comments suggesting that there are a variety of ways ranging from PI donations to loot taxes to outright dues per player. I have hope that the future revamp of corporations (and alliances) includes some new management tools to enahnce this type of bottom-up corporation funding. I believe that for a corporation that provides value, such as a POS in wormhole space, its members are more than willing to contribute to the success and necessary funding of that corporation. Corporations may end up abusing this relationships by over taxing their members, but I suspect those corps would not be long for this universe. Tools and options will always be a welcome improvement to corporation management in EVE. 

I'm looking forward to Crius and some additional options it will provide us in wormhole space between manufacturing and mining.  How our members and thus the corporation can take advantage of it remain to be seen. In the meantime, I'm continuing to refine my personal finances (no pun intended) and make sure that I have my house in order before the next big changes land.