Missiles in Early Eve, and Cruise Missile Kestrels

If you had the fortune (or misfortune, as it sometimes was) to play Eve shortly after launch, you’d remember that missiles used to be very, very different from today — and different from any other weapon system in the game at the time.

Missile launchers existed in similar varieties and meta-levels as today, but had names that denoted their capacity.  For example, all heavy launchers had a 50m³ capacity for ammo, and all had names starting with H-50.  (For example, “H-50 ‘Arbalest’ Heavy Launcher”.)  Likewise, you had the M-12 Standard Launcher, the A-3 Assault Launcher, S-110 Siege Launcher, and so on.  The crucial difference between those days and today is that any missile launcher could load and fire any ammunition that it could fit in its bay.

For example, a single reload of a plain M-12 Standard Launcher I could hold your choice of:

• 40 rockets
• 12 light missiles
• 2 heavy missiles
• 1 cruise missile

Regardless of what missile type was loaded in it, it’d fire every 14 seconds before skills.  The same was true for larger launchers; a meta-0 siege launcher could hold 10-20 cruise missiles / torpedoes or 40ish heavy missiles or hundreds of light missiles/rockets, but always fired every 20 seconds before skills.  In general, smaller launchers featured faster firing rates (meaning higher spike DPS) but had less flexibility and more frequent reloads.

Assault launchers were particularly different back then: they had frigate-sized fitting requirements, and were intended to be a midpoint between the standard launchers and the rocket launchers of the era.  The rocket launchers in retail launch and Castor had a tiny capacity and could only fit 3-4 rockets per reload, but had miniscule fitting requirements and fired incredibly fast; assault launchers were roughly in the same space that rocket launchers occupy, with the added bonus of being able to load 4-5 light missiles if you needed to engage at long range.

With missiles working like this — and with the fact that missiles of this era were AOE weapons with splash damage — the dominant frigate of the era was a Kestrel with four standard launchers, loaded with cruise missiles.  Loading cruise missiles meant that they could only fire off a single volley before reloading, but it allowed them to put out extremely high spike damage: A single cruise missile of the era did 300 damage to targets at its center, meaning that a single volley of four cruises was sufficient to one-shot frigates and smaller industrials. [1]  Stow a few lights in the cargohold just in case, and you were good to go!  Needless to say, cruise Kestrels were fantastic for high-sec suicide ganking as well, where they were known as “KamiKestrels.”

Eventually, during the Castor Period, missiles were refactored into the groups that we know and love today.  Some collectors still have Kestrels squirreled away with cruise missiles loaded in their launchers; however, using them in combat is considered an exploit.

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1: At this time, all ships had roughly 1/3rd of the base HP that they do today, across all sizes and classes.  CCP would eventually bump up the base HP for all ships during Red Moon Rising, in the interest of making combat take longer and be less brutal; from there, most ships have slowly crept upwards in base HP over repeated rebalances.

Blog Banter: Understanding How To Fit

Kirith Kodachi’s latest Blog Banter is a topic that’s very close to my heart:

“Obviously that is a not just a bad fit, its horrific. But the guy might not know any better. We get these all the time circulating social media and corp/alliance chat. How do we educate players on fitting? This guy has been playing four months and can fly a BC, but has no idea how to fit one. What could be done to help bro’s like this?

Furthermore, what (if any) responsibility do veterans players have in finding these players and instructing them on the finer arts of ship fitting? If it exists, does it extend beyond them into teaching PvP skills, ISK making skills, market skills, social skills, life skills…

And another question you can think about is this: do purposely wrong fits, aka comedy fits or experimental fits or off-meta fits, offend you or your corp? Would you, like Rixx Javix when he was in Tuskers, face expulsion for fitting your ships differently than the accepted standard?”

Multitasking: It’s Not Just A Skill

I think a large part of this problem originates in a new player’s attitude towards their ship.  Namely, I’ve noticed that new players tend to identify with their ship in a way that older players don’t.  A new player might say “I’m a Drake pilot” or “I’m a Hulk pilot,” where a veteran pilot would just see ships as merely a tool to be used.

This is one of the reasons that we tend to see ships out there attempting to multitask — that is, to have a mix of short and long range, to have utility modules like probes and data/relic analyzers, to mix shields and armor, and so on.  These new players are attached to their ships, especially if it’s the first ship they’ve ever flown in a given class.  They’ve scrimped and saved for that ship, and they probably only have one of them; they’re going to use them for everything!  (Plus, they want to feel like they’re progressing in the game by moving to ever-larger ships.)

Having more than one ship, each fit for a different purpose, requires lots of spare isk — an amount that boggles the newbie mind.  So, instead, they have one ship, and they try to fit it to do everything they’ve seen in the game… and die horribly.

That’s the first issue: You have to teach new players to break that temptation to multitask, and help them build up an early supply of ISK that allows them to afford to specialize.  Nosy Gamer was close to this when he described older players keeping spare ships as a form of “pre-paying the death penalty“; new players get attached to specific hulls precisely because they haven’t done this, and they don’t think of a ship as a canvas with which to create utility and specialization.

Once you can get a player thinking in terms of specialization, they’ll automatically avoid some of the worst sins of poor fitting.  They’re less likely to mix weapons, less likely to dual-tank, and so on.  That little bit of mindset goes a long way.  Not all the way, though…

No, We Don’t Really Need EFT In The Game

A few of the early responders to the blog banter have proposed implementing an equivalent to an offline fitting tool (EFT/PyFa/EveHQ) directly in the game.  This would be a nice feature; however, adding it wouldn’t really solve the problem of bad fits.  After all, BattleClinic’s fitting section is full of the wreckage of terrible fits that were lovingly handcrafted in EFT!

Fitting tools, whether offline or in-game, are fantastic for comparing the performance of different fits, and for experimenting with small subtle changes before you go on a Jita shopping trip.  However, neither of them really guide you on how to create a fit; they’re just a drawing board!  When an experienced player creates a fit for a ship, there’s a mental process that they go through:

• Picking a role for the ship
• Determining what modules are 100% necessary for that role (i.e. “I need a scrambler, I need a MWD, I need at least 300dps”)
• Getting those modules to fit
• Filling in the gaps (i.e. “I have two spare lows after meeting my core roles; I’m a bit thin, so let’s add a suitcase.  I’m a bit slow, so let’s add an overdrive.  I have a spare mid; should I put in a web, a TD, or an injector?  Maybe I’ll skip on the injector, and fit a nos instead?  etc.”)

Giving new players the ability to replicate that mental process is the real meat in the center of the fitting nut.  Everything else is just tiny tweaks and mechanics.

I’d actually love to see a section of the new player tutorial that guides people through coming up with a fit for a ship, comparing modules, and fitting up the ship.  Barring that, Von Keigai has a great idea on having a fitting “checker” that scans your ship for a list of venial sins, and I’d love to see this feature added to Eve.  (I’d add one more entry to his list of sins: Players should get a big red flashing warning if they’re less than 6 months old and attempt to undock a ship with an officer module fitted.)

Alliance Doctrines

That said, any alliance worth its salt will have a doctrine — a set of pre-approved ship fits to use.  A standard doctrines have a couple purposes, such as simplifying logistics and training programs; however, the most important tool they serve is allowing an FC to create a checklist of ships to have, and be able to figure out their ability to gank and tank with just basic multiplication.  For example: “I know that our doctrine Drake does between 450 and 600 dps, depending on pilot skill.  Therefore, if we have ten Drakes in fleet, I know that I’ve got 4500-6000 dps.”

The double-edge sword of a doctrine is that players can fit up a doctrine-compliant ship and contribute to a fleet without understanding what makes that fit good (or bad).  And, unfortunately, understanding doctrines is crucial: it’s important for making new players into vets, and it’s important for keeping alliances relevant.  Doctrines get stale if they’re not constantly questioned and improved.  Also, many alliances’ doctrinal fits are great for large-fleet PvP, but are not suitable for soloing or missioning or exploration; players need fits for these roles as well.

Doctrines are a useful tool, but you have to make sure that your players understand the purpose of the doctrine, and be willing to debate on changes to them, and be capable of living outside of doctrine when they’re not in fleet.

The same mechanisms of teaching people mechanics and thought processes can be done for anything: market trading, wormhole running, optimizing mining, optimizing level 4 mission running, or even out-of-game life skills.  If your alliance isn’t full of players teaching each other, you’re in a bad alliance.

Oddball Fits

Are you kidding?  My main claim to fame is a PvP video where I exclusively fly combat-fit covert ops ships.  (Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition… or a Buzzard with rockets, scram, web, and two TDs.)

Creativity, surprise, and the threat of the unexpected is what keeps this game interesting.  And if you fail, the only thing lost is the isk in your ship.  If your alliance truly cares about that, you’re probably in a shitty alliance.  Boredom is the universal killer of alliances in Eve; keeping your players logged in and entertained is far more important than keeping your stupid killboard green.

If you have a rank newbie who is flying bad fits because they don’t know any better, then help them.  Teach them how to fit competently, teach them how to think about ships as tools, and make the newbie into a vet.  But if you’ve got a bored veteran who wants to try killing canflippers using a tackle-fit miner, or wants to go welp dual-rep battleships into the local gate camp, or go solo roaming in faction cruisers?  Let them.  Whether they win or lose, you’re letting them build a story that they’ll tell for years, and you’re keeping them interested in Eve.

So, here’s an action item for you readers: Next time you see a killmail that’s an obvious shitfit, go ahead and laugh for a bit — and then convo the pilot.  Ask them if they understand why they’re suboptimal.  Explain.  Teach.  Help that pilot become better.  It doesn’t take long, and it means they’re more likely to keep playing the game… even if that means that you get an opportunity to kill them again.  :)

The Server Tick (or, “WTF, Why Didn’t My Point Turn On?!”)

It’s a scenario we’ve all experienced: You’ve got a fleet on a gate (or a station undock), and a hostile’s just appeared.  Everyone drops drones and assigns them to the fastest locker in the gang, waiting for “point!” to be called on voice comms.  The hostile de-cloaks, and it’s a fast ship.  Everyone starts locking, and a few of you even appear get a lock on him… but before your point activates, the hostile warps away.

Congratulations: You’re yet another victim of the 1Hz Destiny Server Tick, the processing loop that forms Tranquility’s beating heart.

What IS the Destiny Server Tick?

There’s a few different parts of the Eve Server. [1]  But, when it comes to shooting things in space, the most important part of them is Destiny.  This is the part of the Eve server/engine that simulates grids — it handles advancing the physics simulation of Eve (ships and drones and missiles flying around), and communicating things to the client (physics updates, module activations, target locking, health/status, and other visual elements).

Each solar system, on the server, has a Destiny processing loop associated with it.  At all times, this loop is running, and the code inside this loop looks something like this:

• Pre-Tick Work:
  • Move people between grids, as they warp in/out or cross grid lines
  • Manage client actions (“I want to warp to gate X”, “I want to orbit object Y at 2km”, “I want drone X to return to my bay”)
  • Manage server actions (“Drone X just exploded”, “Object Y just spawned a missile”, etc.)
  • Send packets to clients containing everything they need to know to render the game for the next second
• Physics (aka “Evolve”):
  • Simulate ships/drones/missiles moving around on grid.  Handle bumps/bounces.
• Post-Tick Work:
  • Clean up, and go to sleep until the next tick.

The goal of the server is for a server tick to run exactly once per second (or, 1 Hz).  If it takes less than a second to do a tick’s work, then everything’s great, and we go to sleep for the rest of the second.  (Or do a tick for another system on the same node.)  But, when it takes longer than that, we have a hard choice to make: either put off some work until the next tick, or come up with more time to process the tick.  And that’s where Time Dilation comes in — it stretches player activity out so that we have several seconds to do one tick’s worth of work.

Does This Mean Eve Is Actually Turn-Based?

Nope!  Quite the opposite, in fact.

Destiny does a lot of work on the tick, but it can do a lot of work outside the tick as well.  When client messages (including “start locking a target” or “turn on a module”) are received by Tranquility, it typically processes them immediately, and will even tell your client the result if it can.  For example:

• If you’re trying to jump through gate, it will mark you as “jumping through the gate” the instant that it receives the message, and will send back an acknowledgement right away that you’re jumping.  However, everyone else on the grid won’t know that you’ve started jumping until the next server tick.
• If you activate a turret module, it’ll immediately calculate the damage, and immediately apply it to the target.  It’ll send back a packet right away, telling you, “I activated this module for you.”  However, you won’t receive information about how much damage was dealt until the next tick!  And neither will the target!  Yes, this means you can be dead for up to a second (or up to 10 seconds, in the case of severe TiDi) and not know it yet!

Also, some tasks are completely divorced from the tick and can happen at any time, subject only to the latency between you and TQ.  (For example, starting a scan with probes.)

The most important place where this affects you is a pair of closely related actions: aligning/warping, and locking a target.  In both cases, they get “rounded up” to the next nearest server tick!

Rounding Up: Warping and Locking

The biggest example of rounding happens in align times.  When you click “Warp to X” in the UI, your client immediately sends TQ a message: “Align me to celestial X, and warp me as soon as possible.”  TQ immediately acknowledges this request, and queues up a work item for the next server tick.  At the next server tick, it switches your state from Impulse Mode (normal grid flight) to Pre-Warp Mode.  Then, immediately after that, and for each server tick afterward, it’s going to do this check: “Are you above 75% of max velocity, and in the proper direction?  If so, immediately switch you to In-Warp Mode.  Otherwise, continue to move on grid as needed to align.”

Because the check for 75% is done on the tick, your align time gets effectively ’rounded up’ to the nearest tick — if EFT lists your ship’s align time as 4.5 seconds, the actual time needed to enter warp will vary between 5 and 6 seconds.  If this sounds bad, don’t worry; it’s even worse for a would-be tackler.

Imagine that you’re sitting on a gate, with a warp disruptor “primed” (i.e. pre-activated, before you have a lock).  Something jumps through the gate, and you want to lock it and turn on your point.  You have a 3.5 second lock time, and you have a 75 millisecond latency (aka a 150 ms “ping” time, since pings measure round-trip) between you and Tranquility. [2]  What needs to happen?  In order:

• TQ processes the tick in which the target decloaks and starts aligning.  It sends a network packet to your client that tells you, “ship X just appeared on grid, and it’s aligning towards Y.”
• 75 ms later, the “target is decloaked” packet successfully crosses the Internet, and your PC receives the packet, processes it, and the target appears on overview.
• Your eyes and brain see the ship appear on the overview, and get your finger to click.  Let’s say this takes 150-200 ms to do. [3]
• Your PC sends a network packet to TQ, saying “please start locking target X.”  Another 75 ms to cross the Internet!
• TQ receives your “lock it” packet.  It immediately starts counting off lock time, queuing a “finish locking” work item to trigger in exactly 3.5 seconds.  It also immediately sends a packet back, acknowledging that you’re starting to lock.
• …
• 3.5 seconds later, outside of the tick loop, the work item fires.  TQ says, “Okay, mark down that they’ve marked ship X (for preventing cloak).  At the next tick, tell the client that they’ve successfully locked.”
• At the next server tick — which could happen instantly after, or could happen up to a second later — TQ sends a packet to your client, saying, “You locked ship X; it has this much HP on shields, armor, and hull.  By the way, it’s still aligning towards Y.”  That packet takes another 75 ms to cross the Internet!  (At the same time, it’s sending a packet to the pilot of X, notifying them of a yellowbox.)
• Your PC receives the “lock finished” packet.  It sends TQ a packet saying, “OK, activate my warp disruptor module on X.”  Yet another 75 ms to cross the Internet!
• TQ receives your “tackle it” packet.  It immediately activates the packet, and queues the “You warp scrambled X” message to be delivered at the next tick.

That’s a huge list!  Most importantly, it requires four trips across the Internet between your PC and the server.  At a minimum, it rounds up to the next server tick — and it can be worse if you’re on a high-latency connection. From your 75 ms perspective, it took you four seconds to lock; adding an additional 100 ms of latency would add a full second to your final point activation time, making it a five-second lock!

Practical Application: Instalocking Gatecamps

These rounding effects are particularly painful when it comes to very quick-locking ships, and very quickly-aligning ships. The 1Hz tick of the server produces some nasty thresholds when it comes to gatecamps.  Given the above information, it’s pretty easy to write a tool that plays with delays in server tick and effects of latency to TQ, and simulates ships trying to lock other ships.

Imagine that we have a Keres with two sensor boosters on it, both scripted for scan resolution.  This gives the Keres an advertised lock time for of 1.2 seconds for most interceptors.  For comparison, the official align time for most interceptors is between 1.9 and 3.0 seconds, depending on fit and player SP.  In theory, the Keres should be able to catch all interceptors with plenty of time to spare.  Does it?

In practice, due to latency and server tick rounding, it doesn’t!  The threshold is two seconds; any interceptor with an align time of less than two seconds will get away from the Keres.  (At best, the Keres will appear to lock them, but the point won’t activate before the interceptor can start warp.)

So, let’s look at nano-fit interceptors.  What lock time do we need for the Keres to catch a ship that aligns in 1.9 seconds?  This answer depends a lot on your latency to TQ:

• With a 100 ms latency to TQ, the Keres needs to be officially able to lock them in less than 0.725 seconds — achievable with three sensor boosters.  And, again, this is highly thresholded; anything below 0.725 seconds will catch everything, and anything equal to or above 0.725 seconds will miss everything (due to the point not activating in time).
• With a 150 ms latency to TQ, the Keres needs to be able to have an official lock time of under 0.625 seconds to lock and point a 1.9 sec-align interceptor.
• And so on.  In general, each 50 ms increase in latency to TQ requires a 100 ms (0.1 sec) reduction in lock time to compensate for it.

To put it bluntly, if you want to catch instawarping interceptors, the most important part is living in London!  That, or have a lot of remote sensor boosters — which, unfortunately, are subject to stacking penalties.

Can We Fix This?

Ironically, we can, and not by nerfing interceptor mobility.  Increasing the server tick rate to run twice per second, instead of once per second, completely eliminates most of these distortions — and, far more importantly, it makes playing Eve a much better experience for people on high-ping connections such as Australians / New Zealanders.

The server tick time in TQ is actually a compile time switch; flipping it is as easy as recompiling the server and deploying it.  (And, in fact, this has happened in isolated parts of TQ, during the “inverse TiDi” mechanic of Alliance Tournament.)  However, don’t expect it to happen any time soon.  Doubling the server tick rate means roughly doubling the CPU load for each node.  In a world where Jita regularly has TiDi kicking in just from normal player activity, bumping up the server tick rate is probably a non-starter.

Alternatives include sending “prime my module” packets to the server (to eliminate one of the roundtrips), or varying server tick frequency with load (i.e. Jita/Amarr/Rens is probably just fine with 1Hz ticks, or even 0.5Hz).

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1: Can any CCP employees, past or present, ping me and explain how Michelle and Macho got their names?

2: For where I live (northwestern United States), a 150-160 ms ping to TQ is typical.  Australian players can have 300 ms or more.

3: Reaction times (for a simple ‘I saw something, immediately flex a muscle’ response) will vary between 150ms and 200ms, depending on age and mental agility.  If you have to select between two targets and pick one to tackle, your brain’s pattern recognition systems have to kick in, taking 400ms or more.

Modules With A Story: Micro Auxiliary Power Cores (MAPCs)

(This will be a short one; I was planning to do a piece on server ticks today, but I need a few more days to work on an interactive demo for that, as its a slightly tricky topic.)

What is a Micro Auxiliary Power Core, and when should you use it?

There are three general categories of modules in Eve that can increase the power grid on your ship for fitting mods.  All of them consume a fixed amount of CPU, and add grid:

• The Reactor Control Unit (RCU) increases your power grid by a percentage — +10% for tech-1 modules, +15% for tech-2.
• The Power Diagnostic System (PDS) increases power grid by a smaller percentage (+5%), but also gives you bonuses to capacitor size, capacitor regeneration rate, and shield size/regen rate.
• The Micro Auxiliary Power Core (MAPC) increases power grid by a fixed amount: between +10 and +13, depending on meta level.

The distinction between percentage and fixed amount is mainly important for frigates and destroyers.  An Atron has between 37 and 46 MW of power grid to fit modules (varying with skills); a +10% bonus would only yield 3.7 to 4.6 grid, not enough to make a significant difference.  Adding an absolute +10 grid, on the other hand, is a significant improvement.  The same is true for most destroyers.  But once you start working with cruisers, an RCU (or even a PDS) yields dramatically more grid to work with.

As a general rule of thumb, if you’re looking for more grid, you should only use MAPCs for frigates and destroyers, and only use RCUs/PDSes for cruisers and larger hulls. [1]

In fact, there are actually very few modules in Eve that add absolute bonuses to a ship attribute/stat, rather than percentage boosts:

• MAPCs add a fixed amount of power grid.
• Capacitor batteries add a fixed amount of capacitor.
• Drone Link Augmentors (and equivalent rigs) add a fixed distance of additional drone control range.
• Armor plates add a fixed amount of armor HP and mass.
• Shield extenders add a fixed amount of shield HP and signature radius.
• Signal amplifiers and auto-target-lockers add a fixed bonus to your max number of target locks.
• Propulsion modules (both ABs and MWDs) add a fixed penalty to mass.
• Data/relic rigs add a fixed bonus to virus coherence.

(Most of these absolute boosts are particularly beneficial when used on “undersized” ships — which is why Stabbers with 100MN MWDs are used for bumping, and why cruisers tend to use large shield extenders and 1600mm plates. [2])

MAPCs were the only “Micro” module whose blueprint continued to exist after Red Moon Rising; throughout most of the game’s history, only the plain Tech-1 module and some meta versions were available.  Navy versions were added during the introduction of Faction Warfare in 2008 (as part of the Empyrean Age expansion), and the Tech-2 version was added during Crucible.

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1: The one exception to this is when you're flying a shield-tanked frigate with unused low slots.  The PDS is the only low-slot module capable of increasing raw pre-resist shield HP; if you have absolutely nothing better to fit in a low slot, you might consider a PDS.  In practice, there's almost always a better use of that low-slot; the main frigates that use PDSes are shield-tanked tacklers such as the Hyena and Keres.

2: It's also that absolute boosts are generally not subject to stacking penalties.  In fact, RCUs and PDSes are one of the very few modules that are not subject to stacking penalties.

Interceptor Balance: Risk Versus Reward

Over 17,000 pilots flew an interceptor in combat in the month of May.  (Either because they showed up on a killmail, or because they became one.)  Looking at those pilots, 38% of them didn’t lose a single interceptor in May — if those pilots flew nothing but interceptors, they would have an infinite kill-to-death ratio!

If we dig further into this data, we can select the set of capsuleers with a K:D ratio higher than 10:1 in interceptors; if you check their choices of interceptors to fly, three hulls are used almost exclusively: the Malediction, Crow, and Stiletto.  The Stiletto’s appearance on this list is fairly unremarkable; it’s an extremely popular fleet interceptor, and we discovered earlier (in Wednesday’s post) that it does comparatively little damage in most fights.  However, we also found on Wednesday that the Malediction and Crow do relatively good damage — between 80-95%, on average, of the damage of a “gank” interceptor like the Taranis or Crusader.  That’s odd, and deserves some looking at.

Committing To The Fight

The Taranis, Crusader, and Claw are all extremely high-DPS ships — and they can even be reasonably sturdy.  (Taranises favor reinforced bulkheads after the Kronos changes; Claws typically carry a local armor repairer, and Crusaders typically fit a 200mm plate.)  However, all of them have weapons that encourage engaging at very close range: 1-3km for blaster/AC fits, and 6-8km for railgun/artillery/pulse laser fits.  Fighting at this range exposes them to a lot of danger:

• It puts them in range of warp scramblers, stasis webs, and medium neuts.  (In the case of blaster/AC fits, it also puts you in range of small neuts and smartbombs.)
• When orbiting, you can maintain full speed in a large orbit, but tend to lose speed when in tight orbits (subject to your ship’s agility stat) .  This means that you’re more likely to be hit by light drones.

As a result, these close-range ships are forced to commit 100% to a fight; they rarely have an opportunity to escape if things don’t go their way.  Taranises and Crusaders wade into a fight, guns blazing, and don’t leave until at least one party has died.

Rote Kapelle once had a guide to interceptors on their forums, and it had five points that looked roughly like this:

1. Pick how far away you’re going to engage (i.e. long range vs close range ammo)
2. Pick how you’re going to avoid damage (i.e. keep-at-range versus orbit).  Set that range.
3. Burn in.  Press whatever movement key you’ve decided on.
4. Overheat everything.
5. Cross fingers.

 

In summary, these hulls present a lot of risk to the pilot, but that risk is balanced by the reward: extremely high DPS for an interceptor.  The Taranis and Crusader are capable of burst DPS that can overwhelm local tanks easily, and take down hulls much larger than themselves.

We can contrast this with the classic tackle interceptors — the Stiletto and Ares — which present a low risk, low reward choice.  These hulls lack the damage bonuses of their counterparts, but get a bonus to the range of warp disruptors and warp scramblers instead, allowing them to tackle at long range.  Both of them typically fit some weapons; however, the hulls have extremely low power grid and a limited numbers of low slots, discouraging long-range weapons or high damage builds.  Their guns/missiles are largely intended for shooting down drones that are chasing them, and potentially defending themselves from other frigates that have successfully warp-scrambled them.  In exchange for that limited utility, they can operate largely risk-free: they’re nimble, and can maintain a point from 30-36km away, well out of the range of most weapons and even heavy neuts.  When orbiting at long distance, they can maintain high speed, meaning that drones have to shift in and out of MWD mode and will struggle to apply damage to them.

The Brave Sir Robin of Interceptors

The Malediction and Crow, however, live in an intermediary area: they are low risk, but moderate DPS.  They’re billed as tackle interceptors, and have the matching bonus to point/scram range; however, they also have bonuses to all missiles, and the grid/cpu to fit light missile launchers.  As a result, they can both tackle at long range, and apply damage at long range.  They aren’t required to close to a hostile ship’s web/scram/neut range, and can fight for a sustained period of time.

This explains why Wednesday’s findings showed Maledictions and Crows with a median damage-dealt value so competitive with the high-damage interceptors: the high-damage interceptors are forced to wade into dangerously close ranges, and have a lifetime measured in seconds.  They output a very high DPS for a short period of time!  The Malediction and Crow, on the other hand, output a moderate amount of DPS for a sustained period of time (due to not being threatened by tackle, neuts, or light drones) and end up putting out a similar amount of damage on each completed kill.  And the player base has certainly figured this out, given that over 90% of Crows and Maledictions are fitted with light missiles.

This is particularly notable given how difficult it is to fit LMLs, since they have high grid/CPU needs.  The general theme for most of Eve’s weapons is that close-range weapons have high damage potential and low fitting requirements, while long-range weapons have a slightly lower damage potential and high fitting requirements.  Fitting LMLs to a Crow or Malediction requires significant compromises in tank and mobility, compared to a rocket-based fit; however, the vast majority of Eve players prefer LMLs.

While the Crow may be more popular, I’d argue that the Malediction has the lower risk-to-reward ratio here.  While it may have much lower damage potential than the Crow, the Malediction compensates for this in two ways:

• It has four low-slots, giving it room for mobility mods, at least one damage mod, and at least one tank-related module (either a suitcase or a small armor repairer).
• It’s significantly more mobile than the Crow, and does so with a smaller signature radius (being armor-tanked instead of shield-tanked).

A Malediction with two speed modules is capable of jumping through a gate, aligning to its outbound destination, and entering warp in under two seconds.  Meanwhile, it is tiny enough that even the fastest-locking ships will take one second or longer to lock it.  This means that it’s exceptionally difficult to catch — even if you have a remote-sensor-boosted interceptor or Keres that can lock a frigate in less than a second, you will struggle to activate tackle modules on the ship, because the tackle modules won’t activate until the subsequent server tick after you lock the target.  (I’ve got a blog post on server ticks queued up for next week.)

As a result, Maledictions that are fitted in this way are near-invincible.  They’re only killable by catching them while they’re in the process of killing something (i.e. while the pilot is distracted) or killing them in mid-warp with a smartbombing battleship.

I actually don’t think that this mobility is a bad thing.  I find it quite interesting to have a ship that’s nimble enough to evade instalocking gatecamps, especially when combined with the bubble immunity that’s common to all interceptors.  (In particular, I think the Taranis is excellently balanced against the Enyo.)  However, when you have this functionality AND the ability to put down decent damage from a safe range, things start breaking quickly.

Steps Forward

There’s a fair amount of argument among Eve bloggers that giving bubble immunity, or high mobility, to interceptors was a mistake.  I disagree with this — I think they’re fantastic for running down targets, and for providing an interesting alternative to assault frigates.  However, the long range of Maledictions and Crows is a problem.  Thus:

What if Maledictions and Crows had a bonus to rocket damage only, instead of all missiles?

In this case, LMLs would still be an option to those pilots that desired to fit them; however, their damage on those systems would drop to be comparable with the Stiletto and Ares.  However, they could still fit rockets to get moderate-to-high damage for self-defense versus drones, or for high-risk ganking at scrambler/web range.

Interceptors Kills/Losses, May 2014

I’ve got a post coming up regarding two of the interceptors; rather than just making a bunch of assumptions, I figured that I’d actually gather some data about how inties are actually being used in Eve.  (I love data!)

Squizz and Karbo are generously allowing people to query the zKillboard database through a JSON API, and I wrote a quick set of Python scripts to pull down all killmails involving interceptors for the month of May, and do some number crunching.  In the end, I got the following spreadsheet:

Interceptor Kills/Losses, May 2014

There are three pages to this spreadsheet.  The first page tracks all killmails where an interceptor died.  The second page tracks all killmails that had at least one interceptor on the attacker list, and marks what system it took place in and what weapons were used.  The third page is the interesting one — it breaks down killmails by the ship class of the victim (i.e. all T1 frigates, all cruisers, all interdictors, etc.) and computes median damage for each interceptor against that class.

There’s a few interesting conclusions to draw, most of which will be no surprise if you do any amount of PvP with, or against, frigates:

• The Crow is the most popular interceptor, leading the pack in both kills and deaths.  For kills involving interceptors attacking, the Stiletto sits in #2, and the Malediction #3; for interceptors exploding, the Stiletto and Taranis are tied for #2, followed by the Malediction.  Hardly anybody uses the Raptor — or, as it’s better known, the “Craptor”.  While a strict K:D ratio isn’t particularly meaningful here, the Malediction would certainly win at it.
• Roughly 80% of kills with at least one interceptor on the mail occur in null-sec.  (The Malediction and Crow, however, have a little more popularity in low-sec space.)
• The Crow and Malediction are primarily being used for damage dealing, as opposed to tackling.  How do we know this? For each engagement in the game, the Eve servers track the last module you activated on the target, and your total damage.  However, if you’re activating a slowly-cycling non-damaging module, such as a warp disruptor, the server may forget your last weapon. In that case, when the target actually and the server assembles a killmail, it will put the name of your interceptor hull as the weapon, which zKB and EveKill treat as “Unknown”.  For most of the interceptors, these unknown weapons account for 30-50% of killmails; however, for the Crow and Malediction, they account for less than 1% of killmails, because their weapons are constantly cycling and applying damage.
• Crow and Malediction pilots overwhelmingly favor light missiles.  In 92% of killmails where a Crow had a visible weapon, it was a light missile; 88% for the Malediction.  In comparison, the other eight interceptors mainly favor close-to-medium range weapons.  (I consider the artillery Claw to be close-range, since it’s typically aiming for a 10km optimal.)
• Almost all other interceptor pilots use short-range weapons. The Taranis, Stiletto, and Crusader favor close-range weapons almost exclusively; Claw pilots mostly favor autocannons, although there are a few artillery fits designed to kite in scrambler range with high-damage ammo. Ares and Raptor pilots are split between railguns and blasters, but when they do take railguns, they’re typically 75mm Gatling Rails due to grid or tracking constraints.
• Breaking it down by target ship, in most cases, the Taranis leads the pack on average damage output (as expected), followed by the Claw and Crusader.  However, the Malediction and Crow are usually right behind them! Why is this remarkable? The Malediction and Crow are billed as the “tackle inties” due to their point range bonus; the other two tackle inties (the Ares and Stiletto) typically do very little damage to their targets, while the “combat inties” (Taranis/Claw/Crusader/Raptor) do not get bonuses to point range.  In fact, for nearly all target classes, the median damage of the Malediction and/or Crow are within 20% or better of the Taranis’ median damage.  Pretty good, especially for a a weapon system that’s good out to 30km, instead of the Taranis’ 1km-optimal blasters or the Claw’s autocannons.
• In many cases, if at least one interceptor was on a killmail, there was more than one interceptor, and those interceptors did a healthy chunk of damage.  In fact, if you lost a frigate and had an interceptor on your killmail, there’s a 25% chance that you died solely to inties.

Is this data indicating a balance problem? Probably.  The full explanation will come on Friday, once I finish writing it.  :)

In the meantime, the source code for my scripts and the raw output is here, if you’d like to look.  To run the scripts yourself, you’ll need Python 3.4, a copy of the CCP SDE in SQLite3 format from Steve Ronuken, and about 600MB of free disk space for all the killmails.

Missing Skills: Black Market Trading

If you poke around EveBoard’s list of the characters in Eve with the highest SP, you’ll notice that a few pilots have some skills trained that aren’t found on the Market.  Where did these skills come from?

In many cases, these are skills that were added for an upcoming feature and made available early (through market seeding, agent LP rewards, or NPC pirate drop tables), only to have that feature canceled.  CCP would stop seeding the skillbooks on the market, but any of the already-purchased skillbooks in people’s inventories would remain.  If you had already injected the skillbook and trained it up early, the SP would stay in your head, forever useless. [1]

After their cancellation, skillbooks for these lost skills would occasionally show up on Contracts for huge prices, catering to collectors, but are otherwise not widely available.  CCP even makes a nod to collectors for some of them: the description of Astronautic Engineering, should you find one of those rare skillbooks, will read: “Skill and knowledge of Astronautics and its use in the development of advanced technology.  This skill has no practical application for capsuleers, and proficiency in its use conveys little more than bragging rights.  Can not be trained on Trial Accounts.”  Out of the 6.7M players currently being tracked by EveBoard, only 143 characters have this skill — bragging rights, indeed!

Some of these skillbooks eventually get removed from the game entirely: for example, Mobile Factory Operation and Mobile Refinery Operation have been marked in the Eve item database as “unpublished,” and will no longer appear in-game in Market or Contracts searches.  But, the skillbooks definitely existed in the past, and were being traded for billions of isk each, as late as 2010.

However, there’s three of these lost skills that are particularly special: they never had skillbooks created for them in the first place! They are:

• Genetic Engineering
• Mnemonics
• Black Market Trading

The first two of these skills, if you were lucky enough to have them, were removed from all character sheets (and their SP refunded) during the Crucible expansion.  However, the Black Market Trading skill can still be found in some players’ sheets.  How did you get these skills?

These three skills were obtained during the old character creation system.  Today, when you create a new character, you always start with the same balanced attributes, and eleven skills: the appropriate turret skill and frigate skill for your chosen race, and nine common basic skills.  But, this wasn’t always the case.  Character creation used to completely and totally suck:

• Your choice of character race, family, and occupation determined your base training attributes; certain races would learn skills faster than others, in certain fields.  This is why, in Eveboard’s global ranking, the vast majority of the highest-SP characters are either Gallente Intaki Reborn or one of the Caldari Deteis — they had the highest Perception score, which is used in the most skills.
• Your choice of occupation would also determine what skills you started with.  Not only was there a wide variation of starting skills, but some skills were worth more SP than others — a character could start the game with as little as 6,000 SP, or as high as 300,000 SP, depending on their choices.
• No matter what you picked, you were pretty much useless at the start of your Eve career.  Today’s “ten days to get into a competent PvP Catalyst” simply wasn’t happening back then.  On top of that, you had learning skills to do first!  (Eve used to have meta-skills that gave you permanently higher attribute points, making all other subsequent training faster: the first order of business on any newly rolled character was training up those skills to 5.)

If you think Eve is unfriendly to newbies today, then trust me — it used to be much worse.

So, when your choice of race/family/occupation determined your starting skills, some of those combinations included unique skills that could only be received on birth.  Black Market Trading, the only one to still exist, was obtained by rolling a Minmatar Vherokior Retailer.  There is no other way to obtain this skill: you need to have a character of that combination, created prior to the character creation revamp in late 2006.

What does Black Market Trading do?  Officially, the skill description states that it reduces the chance for high-sec Customs Agent NPCs to detect contraband — boosters, and certain roleplay / mission items such as the Khumaak — in your cargohold.

However, repeated testing indicates that the skill is broken (or never implemented) and doesn’t actually affect the game.  So, it remains simply a memento of how much better Eve is today, and a good story to tell.

—

1: Sometimes, forever is a short time.  For many years, Salvage Drone Operation was one of these canceled skills; when CCP eventually implemented them, nearly five years later, they simply reused the existing apocryphal skill, and started seeding the books again.

History of a Ship: Ishkur

This will be the first in a series of articles that talk about a ship’s past and present.  Let’s open with the Ishkur, the drone-focused Gallente assault frigate.  The Ishkur is generally overshadowed by other frigates today… but it used to be one of the most overpowered ships in Eve!

The Ishkur was added to Eve Online during the Castor era.  Castor was the first expansion after Eve’s launch, and one of the hardest to document: the initial expansion added the baseline mechanics for Tech-2 ships (both flying them and building them) to the game.  Then, over the course of Castor’s “lifetime,” a series of micropatches were slowly trickled out that added/revealed individual classes of T2 ships over multiple months.  When the Ishkur was introduced, it was by far the most powerful AF in the game, and even competitive with most cruisers.

In The Beginning: Drones Were Broken

During the Ishkur’s golden years, Eve’s drone mechanics were very different from today.  Individual drones did significantly less damage, but there were three things compensating for that:

• The Drone Interfacing skill actually gave you an additional +1 drone control per level, instead of a flat increase to drone damage.  This stacked with the Drones skill, meaning that a character with Drone Interfacing V could control ten drones total.
• There was no drone bandwidth mechanic.  Players could put out, and control, any drone that they could fit in their drone bay, up to a limit of 10.  (Or less, if they didn’t have perfect drone skills.)
• The Gallente T1 drone hulls — the Vexor and Dominix — got an additional +1 drone control per level of Gallente Cruiser/Battleship.

This was interesting, because it gave a great deal of flexibility and power to pilots who were willing to specialize their training into drones:

• The Thorax, given its 50 m³ drone bay, could choose between carrying five medium drones (for optimal performance versus cruisers), or ten light drones (making it a flexible frigate-killer).
• The Vexor‘s 100 m³ drone bay could hold five mediums and ten lights, and deploy all 15 of them at once with max skills.
• The Dominix had room for fifteen heavies, or a huge variety of heavy, medium, and light drones.
• The Ishtar and Ishkur didn’t get the +1 drone control skill of the Vexor or Dominix; instead, they had ship bonuses that increased the size of their drone bay.  This would both add flexibility and directly add DPS potential to the ships:
  • The Ishkur started with 25 m³, capable of deploying five lights; with Assault Ships trained to V, it grew to 50 m³ of drone bay, and could deploy ten lights or five mediums.  (Or some mix between.)
  • The Ishtar started at 125 m³, and could grow up to 375 m³ at HAC V, giving it Dominix-level DPS and flexibility.

These mechanics also had some side effects that could be badly abused.  For example, if a Dominix dropped a full load of heavy drones on a gate and then warped out, any ship with a drone bay of 25 m³ or could warp in, scoop in each drone (filling its drone bay) and redeploy it, repeating until it had control of all 10-15 drones.  A Thorax or Arbitrator camping a gate with ten heavy drones out (or a Vexor with fifteen of them) was horrible to fight!

This didn’t last forever, of course; whenever drone ships were brought to a fight, intolerable lag would follow, as the servers struggled to track hundreds of drones.  (In fact, some alliances had agreements to only bring turret/missile ships to wars.)  CCP eventually removed most bonuses that allowed additional drones to be controlled: Both the Drone Interfacing skill and the Gallente hull bonuses were changed to a +20% damage bonus, effectively doubling (or tripling) the damage of all drones, in exchange for all conventional ships being limited to five drones.

However, even after this change, there was no drone bandwidth mechanic.  The Ishkur still benefited directly from its +5 m³ drone bay bonus: at Assault Ships V, it could choose between carrying either five mediums or two waves of five lights.  Of course, most players with that skill preferred to do the former.  This made the Ishkur an absolute terror — a dualprop Ishkur with five Valkyries and a nosferatu module was very hard to hit with medium guns, was quite sturdy for a frigate, and did over 400dps between Valks and blasters.  Ishkurs were capable of engaging both frigates, cruisers, and even some battleships with relative ease.

The Other Shoe Drops

Finally, December of 2007 brought the Trinity expansion, and drone bandwidth mechanics were added to the game, limiting the Ishkur to five lights.  Since then, the little drone wonder has never regained its crown.  (The Myrmidon and Eos would also be crushed by this change.)

Between 2008 and 2012, the Ishkur still remained a somewhat popular hull, despite no longer being the clear king — at the time, the Enyo had only two mid slots, so the Ishkur was considered the superior tackler and more well-rounded.  In 2012, the assault frigates were rebalanced in Crucible 1.1, buffing the Enyo, and the Ishkur dropped even further in popularity.

Today, the main challenge that the Ishkur faces is that it’s considered a weaker version of its blaster-oriented brother, the Enyo.  The two hulls have many similarities: identical resist profiles, the same number of low/mid slots, and common bonuses to hybrid turrets.  The Enyo, however, has higher base armor/hull HP, more generous power grid, a fourth turret hardpoint (to use up that power grid), a stronger damage bonus, and a bonus to turret tracking; the Ishkur retains its largely useless drone bay bonus and a bonus to drone durability.

In theory, the Ishkur should have superior flexibility due to drone DPS — i.e. reduced weakness to neuts or tracking disruptors — however, in practice, the Enyo is usually the preferred ship on TQ today.  The peak damage on the Enyo is far higher, and the extra grid ends up being useful for more than just fitting an extra turret.  Also, drones have their own weaknesses: they can be shot down, or smartbombed away, or abandoned accidentally after a fight.  On top of that, the total DPS of five lights (even with a Drone Damage Amplifier module) doesn’t really compensate for the fourth turret of the Enyo.

Typical Fits of Today

All this said, if you really want to fly the Ishkur, you won’t be disappointed — while no longer the king of AFs, it’s still a reasonably solid pick, especially if you only have Assault Ships trained to 3 or 4.  (The Enyo really needs AF 4 or 5 to shine.)  This is a reasonable starting point:

[Ishkur, Baseline MWD+Scram+Web]
Damage Control II
Small Ancillary Armor Repairer, Nanite Repair Paste
Adaptive Nano Plating II
Drone Damage Amplifier II

Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I
Warp Scrambler II
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator

Light Ion Blaster II, Null S
Light Ion Blaster II, Null S
Light Ion Blaster II, Null S
Small 'Knave' Energy Drain

Small Anti-Explosive Pump II
Small Auxiliary Nano Pump II

Acolyte II x5
Hobgoblin II x5

This is a fairly tight fit on grid, and may be 1% over if you don’t have Armor Rigging IV or Advanced Weapons Upgrades V trained.  In that case, you can either use an implant to get 1% more grid (either the EE-601 or the Genolution CA-1), or replace the Small Auxiliary Nano Pump with something else suitable: a drone durability rig might be good.

This will perform well against both frigates and cruisers; in most fights, your goal will be to operate at roughly 4km away, putting you out of range of the highest-damage close range weapons but still in range to use your nosferatu module.  If you’d like a little more survivability versus cruisers or battleships, you can consider replacing the web with a tracking disruptor (use a ‘Balmer’ Series Tracking Disruptor I to save on CPU) or even an afterburner (replace both rigs with Ancillary Current Routers) to mitigate incoming damage.

Alliance Tournament participation and prize levels

CCP Fozzie recently made it public that they had a less than full signup for Alliance Tournament 12 — only sixty-three teams registered, so there will be no need for the typical lottery followed by silent auction that has been a mainstay of previous ATs.  A few bloggers have turned this into the usual “Eve is dying” screed; in my case, though, I’m actually quite happy.  It means that many alliances have started to figure out one of the nasty truths of AT: participating in the Alliance Tournament is generally nothing more than really expensive advertising.

This probably sounds strange, given that I run a tournament (the SCL) and I’ve been involved in every AT to date in some way.  But bear with me; I’ll explain!

Problem 1: The Prize Structure

The root problem with the AT is that it has a very strange prize structure: Only the first and second place finishes get prizes, in the form of BPCs for limited-edition tournament ships.  (And, in some cases, the prizes don’t really reflect the challenge; in all but one case, the tournament frigates have been in higher demand than the cruisers.)

Dear reader, imagine that we lived in an alternate universe where the AT was held on Singularity; all ships/setups were free, and that the sole cost of participation was the 5 PLEX for the entry fee.  Even under those conditions, the AT would still be a poor proposition for most alliances:

• You pay 5 PLEX (~3.6B ISK) to enter into the tournament.
• You spend 1-2 months of spare-time evenings practicing for this tournament.
• When the tournament actually starts, you dedicate four weekends in a row, waking up early and spending most of the day playing Eve.  (Especially for players in the Americas, where the first matches of each day can be as early as 6am.)
• The top two teams (~25 people) get massive prizes, and the other 60 teams (~750 people) in the tournament will get nothing and lose their entry fee.  At best, they might get an alliance commercial to run on the Twitch.tv stream between matches, and if they reach the top eight, they might get a bit of buzz to help recruiting.

Definitely not a good return on time investment, nor money.  For contrast, most tournaments for other video games have no entry fee, and offer prizes for at least the top four or eight players, plus occasional smaller prizes — for example, the Fragbite SC2 tournaments allow spectators to vote on a “play of the day” that won a small prize.  AT doesn’t even give you a damned participation ribbon.

Besides being inherently discouraging, this prize structure also causes massive problems with talent migration.

Problem 2: Talent Migration

Speaking bluntly, I can tell you the outcome of AT12 without having to look at the rules in any way:

• First place: Hydra Reloaded.
• Second place: Either Pandemic Legion or Camel Empire.  (My money’s on Camel.)

In most cases, the third place team ends up being whoever Hydra’s practice partner was.

The vast majority of world-class, tournament-level players will quickly learn after an AT run or two that they cannot carry a lower-tier team into the top two finishes by themselves.  If they’re going to invest time and energy into practicing and participating in a tournament, they want a return on their investment, and the only way to do that… is to move to an alliance that’s also full of world-class players.

I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes: Rote Kapelle had most of its competent tournament guys leave for Hydra Reloaded shortly before AT11, and I don’t blame them at all.  Talent migration would be a problem even if the tournament was free to participate in… which it is not.  This problem is unique to Eve in eSports; you don’t see the same players (or the same teams) winning SC2/LoL/DOTA tourneys over and over.

These two issues, by far, are the biggest factors that discourage people from participating in AT.  Imagine what the World Series of Poker would look like if there were no side events, and the main event had no prizes for anything other than the final table, and that the final table would be nearly guaranteed to contain both Hellmuth and Nguyen.

However, there’s a third issue: On top of the entry fee, AT also requires you to pay for your ships.

Problem 3: Costs of Participation

A competent AT team not only needs to stockpile ships/modules/hardwires for the 12-man fleet compositions they’ll be flying, but they actually need to have multiple compositions ready to go at any given time, due to the banning mechanics.  (Or, at the minimum, compositions with interchangeable parts.)  These have to be stockpiled before-hand: depending on where you are in the bracket, you’ll have less than 15 minutes between matches, and you will not have time to run to Jita and buy new ships.  (And this is assuming that Jita has the parts you need; it’s not uncommon for people to buy Jita out entirely of certain drones, hardwires, and ships leading up to an AT.)

The consequence is that you need to have a fairly large bankroll at the start of the run to fund ship and module purchases.  Then, after the tournament is completed, you’ll recoup some of that bankroll by selling the ships that weren’t destroyed during matches.  With the current AT12 rules, a serious contender team needs ~30B ISK in initial bankroll, plus any extra optional costs for faction/officer modules for their flagship.  (I arrived at that number after some debate with members of Hydra and Camel.)  You’ll recoup 60-70% of that 30B expenditure after the tournament ends, by selling off the ships and modules that didn’t explode; however, you still need the initial amount up front, in order to have a serious shot at first or second place.

That’s a lot of money — and some teams choose to spend far, far more than that.   Pandemic Legion was famous in AT10 for bringing 100B ISK worth of ships and modules in just a single match alone… a match which they ended up losing.

Ironically, it’s also less money than it used to be.  In previous tournaments, CCP allowed players to use +5% and +6% hardwirings, which cost hundreds of millions each.  The Rote budget for our entire run in AT10 was 90B, and 40% of that was spent on hardwirings.

Summary: Blech.

Someone who previously participated in the SCL came up to me a few days ago and asked if they should consider participating in AT.  I told them to save their money and do it next year, and stick to submitting a player commercial.

If CCP wants to see wider player interest in AT, they have to start with reforming the prize structure.  At a minimum, ensure that anyone who wins at least one match will recoup their entry fee; ideally, getting into the top 16 in either bracket will let them recoup some of the cost of ships.  Spreading out the availability of tournament ships between 1/2 (and maybe even 3rd, or 4th-8th) is another worthwhile activity as well, as Suitonia suggests in this excellent post.  Get some minor prizes out there too; there’s a ton of possibilities for them:

• A prize for the team who wins a match with the fewest ships on field.
• A prize for the team who wins a match with the fewest points on field.
• A prize for the team who wins a match with the cheapest setup (ISK-wise) on field.
• A prize for the player who gets to the lowest HP during the match and survives.
• etc.

There’s also room for handing out little trinkets that aren’t clear prizes — for example, the New Eden Open gives all participants an in-game tshirt for their player avatar, and these have become collectors items over time.

Until there’s actual incentive for smaller alliances and lower-tier teams to compete, it simply doesn’t make sense for anyone to sink months of practice and effort into AT, unless you’re in Hydra or Camel.  This situation also doesn’t make for exciting video for CCP’s Twitch.tv stream; as Tyrus Tenebros recently put it, the typical AT stream consists of three days of cripple fights, two days of actual close matches, followed by three days of the eventual 1st-4th placers mopping up.

The data’s staring you in the face, CCP — and you’ve got a new guard in charge of AT as well.  It’s time to shake things up!

Footnote: Why This Matters

A quick footnote here that I’m opting to add after the initial publication:

Yes, despite all of the above, tournaments can be fun to participate in; that’s why I continue to run the SCL, and why I’ve done the AT every year in non-Hydra/PL teams.  It’s spaceships exploding, it’s theorycrafting, it’s sitting with your fellow competitors on Mumble, and it’s the shaking hands that everyone gets before every match.  Competition is fun, and it sharpens your PvP skills and makes you a more effective player.

However, as it stands today, the group of AT participants is a tiny subset of the group of people who participate in PvP in Eve.

I want to see Alliance Tournaments become something accessible and interesting to a wider audience of PvPers; I want to see more players competing, and more players watching that competition.  That won’t happen if a watcher can predict the outcome easily, and it won’t happen when there’s no clear benefit for new players to get involved, other than a promise of “it’ll be fun, I swear.”

Adding incentives for smaller and less experienced/successful teams to play is a good first step towards making AT appeal to more players.

Addendum 2, 12jun2014: Fozzie mentions that prize changes may be coming for AT12.

Don’t Fly Dual-Rep Vengeances (aka a short note on missile damage mechanics)

I get asked fairly often for assault frigate fits, and the Vengeance is a pretty common request in particular.  I usually suggest a fit with a single ancillary armor repairer, and the nearly universal response is, “Why not put two armor reps on it?”  The answer is a little complicated, with the short version being “You need a web to apply damage.”  Let’s go into detail.

Armor repairers need capacitor to run; an armor rep that you can’t afford to run (even in pulses) is largely useless.  A single SAR, or SAAR, has the advantage that it can be powered by a single small nosferatu module, leaving your three midslots available for a propulsion module (MWD preferred) and tackle.  However, two SARs are incredibly capacitor-intensive: with an AB fit, you can permanently run one repairer and pulse the other occasionally using a single nos.  Using a MWD, you will barely stay cap-stable running a single repairer, much less two.  (And this assumes that the nosferatu is draining at full strength; in practice, you will be even more unstable than you think.)

As a result of the capacitor problems, nearly all dual-rep Vengeance fits will include a small injector in one of the mid slots, typically spending the other two on a prop mod and a scram.  And this is where we run into problems: Without a web, a Vengeance struggles to apply damage to other frigates effectively.

Eve’s servers will compute missile damage using the following decision tree:

• If the target is moving slower than the missile’s explosion velocity AND is larger than the missile’s explosion radius, then the missile does full damage.
• If the target is moving slower than the missile’s explosion velocity AND is smaller than the missile’s explosion radius, then the missile does reduced damage proportional to the difference in size between them.  (For example, if you shoot a stationary interceptor using a torpedo, it will do a tiny fraction of the torpedo’s listed damage.)
• If the target is moving faster than the missile’s explosion velocity, then the missile does reduced damage, proportional to the difference in velocity and inversely proportional to the difference in explosion radius and target radius.  (In other words, if the target is significantly bigger than the missile, then this will reduces some of the benefit of speedtanking.  If the target is smaller than the missile AND faster than it, the benefits of speedtanking are increased.)

Most fitting tools, like EFT or PyFa, don’t have a convenient way to model this.  But you can use Excel or Google Drive to produce the resulting curve, for any given ammo/skillset and target.  Here’s what DPS looks like for a Vengeance shooting at an armor-tanked frigate (an Enyo) with its MWD off, as it varies with speed.  The red line is Nova Rage Rockets, and the blue line is Caldari Navy Rage Rockets:

What’s important to recognize here is that an Enyo with no propulsion module at all will move at 340m/s; with a Tech-2 Afterburner, it will move at 860m/s.  So, here’s what the damage output looks like:

• Nova Rage, versus an unwebbed Enyo with no propmod (or MWD off): 139dps
• Nova Rage, versus an unwebbed Enyo with an AB running: 61dps
• Caldari Navy Nova, versus an unwebbed Enyo with no propmod (or MWD off): 137dps
• Caldari Navy Nova, versus an unwebbed Enyo with an AB running: 103dps

In case those numbers sound acceptable to you, consider that the Enyo can put down over 320dps with Antimatter without overheating, or 275dps with Null.  A typical Retribution outputs 200dps, and an autocannon Jaguar around 180dps.

Adding a web to the mix means that an Enyo moves at 140m/s with no prop mod, or 340m/s with AB.  This allows you to do full (or nearly full) DPS with rockets; but, we’ve already established that you need an injector to effectively run dual-rep.  It’s a catch-22.

My preferred solution is to simply stick to a single armor repairer, and take a web.  You still have a fantastic tank on a single rep, and you’ll be able to effectively apply what little damage the Vengeance can put out.  (On top of that, it frees up a low-slot for a Ballistic Control System, further improving your DPS.)

The total fit that I use for the Vengeance:

[Vengeance, Single SAR (MWD)]
Pseudoelectron Containment Field I
Small Ancillary Armor Repairer, Nanite Repair Paste
Corpii A-Type Thermic Plating
Ballistic Control System II

Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I
Faint Epsilon Warp Scrambler I
Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I

Rocket Launcher II, Caldari Navy Nova Rocket
Rocket Launcher II, Caldari Navy Nova Rocket
Rocket Launcher II, Caldari Navy Nova Rocket
Rocket Launcher II, Caldari Navy Nova Rocket
Small Diminishing Power System Drain I

Small Bay Loading Accelerator I
Small Warhead Calefaction Catalyst I