You'll get arguments over that - bear in mind that isks are created when your ship explodes, in the insurance payout. You've not 'destroyed' isks, because you bought it from another player, who now has your isks, and you have a pretty explosion and an insurance payout.
That's an excellent balance point on 'pimp gear' mind - enough gear is destroyed to make it not worth the pricetag for PvP. For isks leaving the game, that's what you get when you buy stuff from NPCs - things like insuring your ship is an isk sink. As too, is buying stuff from the LP store.
Not necessary. EVE works on the basis that ships and their fittings are destroyed. You buy an expensive toy, it blows up. It's gone. So there's a natural self limiting of 'pimp' gear, simply because 'high end' stuff, isn't so much better than low end stuff, that you don't have to consider the relative value of 1 really pimp ship, vs a hundred replacements for an 'acceptably pimp' ship. (And the possibility that you hand the person that killed you a really fat loot drop)
Goods do perish in MMOs. Maybe not as fast as inflation, but 'power creep' and 'nerfing' are par for the course. Of course, you also get boosts to equipment and stuff, which means you can speculate if you've a large inventory.
Why? What does it gain? Downtime happens for less than an hour a day, and 'everyone' is used to it. It's the most straightforward solution to having to do scheduled maintenance on anything - yes, you can do 24/7 fault tolerant systems, and maybe it would be nice if EVE did. But... it's _not_ like they lose 'millions in sales' during their downtime, like Amazon might. It's also quite unlike a distributed shopping website, because it's a single interlinked cluster. You can't just 'shut down' a few of the nodes, and close part of the galaxy whilst downtime occurs.
I'm sure they _could_ architect a solution, but there's no guarantee it'll actually provide benefit in proportion to the cost.
Of course you have. And sometimes there's an idiot flying the ship, that gets themself killed. But... we weren't talking about whether there is a _chance_ you might die. We were talking about the risk of doing PvE - and the risk is negligable, because in order to die, you need a weird glitch to happen, in such a way that it doesn't get recorded on the server and your ship re-imbursed as a result.
Can it happen? Yeah, I'd have thought so. Does it often? No. You've got lots of people who run L4s day in, day out in Motsu in Ravens, Drakes, CNRs, Golems, Nighthawks. They do so quite comfortably, and rake in quite a lot of isks doing it.
Well, if you weren't warp scrambled, then warping out remains an option. If you were... you might be in trouble, but the DPS from a mission isn't actually very high, compared to peak tank capability.
Your tank also keeps running until your ship disappears too, even if you are scrambled. I don't have many problems with disconnects, but for those that do, Nighthawks and Drakes do very nicely at staying alive, thanks to their sustained tanking. (Actually, you can sustained tank Golems and Ravens too, you just pay for it on mission efficiency)
Golem + fit clocks in at about a billion isks. Odds of losing it: Next to zero. Missions in highsec are entirely predictable in terms of outcome, and I've put a Raven through the entire selection quite comfortably. Golems are better at it than Ravens - they tank harder, salvage faster, do more damage. *shrug*. Keep your risk down, use a Raven - it's _almost_ as fast. But either way, your odds of losing it are so very low unless you go out of your way to do something stupid.
Risks to missions in highsec are negligable, and entirely in the hands of the user. This is entirely unlike going out PvPing.
As someone who does buy money in an MMO, permit me to share with you why I do it - I've been playing EVE for something like 5 years now. Over that time, I've made a lot of ISKs, and have similarly blown up collossal chunks of the stuff, playing EVE. I'm currently involved in a fairly active PvP alliance, and am enjoying it immensely. But one of the things about PvPing is that fundamentally, it's a loss making activity - ships die, tend to be expensive, and it's quite rare to reclaim the cost from your combat activity (loot is profitable, but you need a lot of kills to replace one ship, as most 'loot' is destroyed).
So I have a secondary income stream, to finance combat activity - I do industry, and go ratting/missioning to make some isks, to buy new toys, to get back on the front line, which is where I'm have most fun.
However, 'going missioning' takes me time in game, and it's somewhat fun, but I enjoy getting into combat more. So for me, dropping about an hour of overtime pay on 60d GTC for resale, netting me 600mil isks, is equivalent to _not_ spending 20 hours running missions, and instead going and killing pigdogs.
I don't _like_ the real money for in game cash particularly - I think it's somewhat unfair. But none the less, as the option exists, I'll use it. EVE is one of the few games that is 'self balancing' there though - a bad pilot cannot buy the kind of advantage to stop them being a bad pilot. More, they get a bit of an edge, and someone else gets a nice killmail and a pile of valuable loot.
Now, if I were to lose my job, and end up with more EVE time, and less payscale, I'd probably change my mind about it - going the other way and 'playing for free'.
I do a fair chunk of industry to fund my PvP habit. I make around 300mil/month fairly easily, with 'a couple of hours' of work. Industry being a matter of queuing build jobs and leaving them to run, it's hard to quote 'isk/hour' - my 14 day build jobs net me a useful chunk of cash, with relatively low capital outlay, and low time investment. It'd be enough to fund my account off buying gametime for isk were I so inclined. (I'm not - I'd rather have the isks;p)
What utter nonsense. Expensive toys are not mandatory, and in the vast majority of cases only represent a marginal improvement in capability over MUCH cheaper alternatives. Sure, if you consider the 'point' of EVE to fly a Titan, then you're right, but... you'd be missing the point of the game entirely.
2 years? Not hardly. You can do quite impressive amounts of cash if you run level 4s in a T2 fit Drake. Maybe not quite the rate quoted, but it's not far off. 30mil/hour isn't particularly hard if you're clever about how you handle missions, loot, salvage and disposal of LPs.
But it doesn't actaully take very much liquid capital to run industry or start market trading, and that's even more efficient on 'working' (More real time generally, but less 'making isk' time if you appreciate the distinction)
Buy a Golem, run L4 missions - I can do 300mil in 8 hours in a Nighthawk, so a Golem should be faster.
Alternatively, it _can_ be far faster if you do trade/industry in terms of 'actual hours'. I make a few hundred mil a month, but do so with about 2-3 hours of 'real time' spent hauling materials/product to market, and you could fairly easily expand that throughput. (I'm doing something that's an excellent ROI but not such a great return on time, with 14 day build jobs).
If you're savvy, you can do better market trading. I never really got the hang of that though, so take your pick.
Indeed. 12-13:00 GMT is in the middle of the day in Iceland, and doesn't clash with EU and US timezone players. Sure, you could have an 'out of hours' downtime, but... well, there's a lot to be said for having daily D/T when everyone's fresh, alert and in work.
Well, said - I've long since come to realise that managers will bully staff into working every hour they can - because it makes -them- look good. No other reason. Your extra hours are not appreciated, and they are not valued. Get compensated for the time you do, or don't do it.
Compensation can take many forms - time off in lieu, overtime pay, or... whatever. Actually, so does 'good PR' in the form of working a miracle once in a while - ironically, if you work 60 hour weeks routinely, then you'll never benefit. Pull it off once when 'everything just went wrong' and you'll be hailed as the hero of the hour.
I've come to realise that companies don't actually expect a man-day out of someone, they just expect them to look busy all day. Actual productivity is something of a moot point - the more you do, the more you'll be asked to do. (Barring bare minimums of 'doing your job' below which they'll sack you)
I used to have a good solid work ethic. It burned out over a course of about 6 months where I _was_ doing the hardcore '60-80 hour week' thing. I even got paid for it, at a healthy rate, but it wasn't worth the price.
Overtime is... just about compensation for the impact on your life. It's not extra pay, it's not 'good'.
He who plays the bills, calls the tunes.
If there is someone who is on the same skills as you, but is prepared to work more hours for the same pay, then your job is at risk.
That is all. If you don't like your terms and conditions, then quit and find somewhere better. If you're lucky, you'll manage it, and can laugh at those shmucks you left behind. If you're not, then they'll be laughing at you.
Employment law only goes so far, and in the real world it's of marginal use - companies will push as hard as they can get away with, and then a bit more.
Religion has always been underpinned by a fundamentally unprovable assertion - the existence of a being so much more powerful than us, that could cohesively and comprehensively deceive us reliably.
If you could ever prove the existance or lack thereof, then the thing you'd just proven wouldn't be God.
And it's that that all the hardcore atheists stumble on, and apply bad analogies to it e.g. I can't prove unicorns don't exist - which is fine, until you bear in mind that we can define a Unicorn, and no where in the definition does it include 'fundamentally so powerful that it could always hide from you if it chose'.
But... so what? The point is largely moot - you have one camp saying 'there is God' and the other side saying 'There is not' and neither can ever prove the point. At which point the question in my mind is always 'so what?'. If you can't prove there's a God, why does it matter if there is/isn't one? All the 'established' religions are castles built on sand as a result - they make a block of assertions about the way the world is, extending the 'does God Exist?' question.
Just because someone is or isn't religious, doesn't mean they can't give good advice - 'don't eat pork' was pretty good advice in hot countries where it was a really good way to get diseases, for example. Don't murder people is also... not such a bad plan, for a stable society.
I'm still not sure why this is such a big problem. For the religious - God gave you the ability to reason. Look at the Bible - written by men, translated by more men (and DEFINITELY altered in some translations). Even if it was the word of God, you'd have to interpret the very human biases from the people writing/translating it. For the non religious - just because someone's a believer in something unprovable, why do you choose to reject their advice as flawed? I mean, you can't prove it either way, pretty much by definition. And a priest can give good advice regardless of belief. So basically, God's existence is moot. Why are we still arguing about it?
I've downloaded a bunch of PDF documentation for various IT products we use, onto my PRS-505. It works quite nicely - eminently readable, thanks to it's ability to reflow the text. About the only thing I have found it having a hard time with is some diagrams and pictures - partly because of the lack of colour rendering, and partly because... well, it seems to take some processing time to display complicated images.
I'm still not sure it's necessary, either. I mean, if you accept your ebook reader is for reading, then... actually, I don't mind the text in all my books being 'just' black and white.
Given my ebooks are pretty much all under a meg, not much bandwidth is needed. A meg a week (and that's a good week, where I get a lot of reading in) when I can pre-load 160meg internally, and... many gigs on a memory card.
Only reason I have to plug it in is to charge it, and it's good for a couple of weeks of fairly steady use. Oh, and when there's a new book out that I want.
I certainly hope these are less fragile than the PRS-505. I've had that flake out on me twice with the screen going 'a bit mental'. Not actively trying to abuse it or anything, but just... carrying it around, much like I would a paperback, and presumably clonked it on something. (At least, that's what they said when I tried to get it under a warranty repair).
Repair costs thanks to the price of the screen are somewhat absurd too. I'm quite annoyed with Sony that they ended up charging me more than a brand new one would have cost for a repair. They charged £50 'examination' and then another £170 to repair it - after the guy in the shop rejected their original quote (£220). Net result is that it ended up _marginally_ more expensive than if I'd just bought a new one - an then the prices dropped to £180 or so if I looked around.
To add insult to injury though, they ended up replacing it instead of repairing it anyway.
One thing that bothers me a little, is the weight given to marriage. I'm not a particularly religious man (e.g. I'm not) and I have no real problem with co-habiting long term partners as couples.
The on thing that bothers me a bit, is the incidence of marriage with built in get out clauses - it's not like you _need_ to get married in most western societies any more - there's no particular financial advantage, nor is there any particular social stigma any more.
Which is why I'm firmly of the opinion that anyone who's going into marriage with divorce even remotely on their minds, shouldn't be getting married. Marriage vows are 'until death do us part' and they're not mandatory. So to take 'em and break 'em is... well, a bit contemptible really. If you're not certain, then don't say 'em. Wait until you _are_ certain, or make a different kind of a vow - something with a timescale you can utterly and wholeheartedly commit to. A year and a day is a traditional sort of a time. The duration of a morgage is also a reasonable sort of a timeframe too. Or y'know 'until our children have left home' too. Which... oddly enough is about the sorts of breakpoints where divorces kick in too.
Geek lesson number one - establish your communication protocols.
Er. That's about it really. Anyone who thinks 'true love' can make everything right is wrong. What it really takes is open and honest communication - even about stuff that you might feel uncomfortable bringing up.
How you accomplish this is different for different couples and 'geeky' couples might well handle it differently.
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You'll get arguments over that - bear in mind that isks are created when your ship explodes, in the insurance payout. You've not 'destroyed' isks, because you bought it from another player, who now has your isks, and you have a pretty explosion and an insurance payout.
That's an excellent balance point on 'pimp gear' mind - enough gear is destroyed to make it not worth the pricetag for PvP. For isks leaving the game, that's what you get when you buy stuff from NPCs - things like insuring your ship is an isk sink. As too, is buying stuff from the LP store.
Not necessary. EVE works on the basis that ships and their fittings are destroyed. You buy an expensive toy, it blows up. It's gone. So there's a natural self limiting of 'pimp' gear, simply because 'high end' stuff, isn't so much better than low end stuff, that you don't have to consider the relative value of 1 really pimp ship, vs a hundred replacements for an 'acceptably pimp' ship. (And the possibility that you hand the person that killed you a really fat loot drop)
Goods do perish in MMOs. Maybe not as fast as inflation, but 'power creep' and 'nerfing' are par for the course. Of course, you also get boosts to equipment and stuff, which means you can speculate if you've a large inventory.
Why? What does it gain? Downtime happens for less than an hour a day, and 'everyone' is used to it. It's the most straightforward solution to having to do scheduled maintenance on anything - yes, you can do 24/7 fault tolerant systems, and maybe it would be nice if EVE did. But ... it's _not_ like they lose 'millions in sales' during their downtime, like Amazon might. It's also quite unlike a distributed shopping website, because it's a single interlinked cluster. You can't just 'shut down' a few of the nodes, and close part of the galaxy whilst downtime occurs.
I'm sure they _could_ architect a solution, but there's no guarantee it'll actually provide benefit in proportion to the cost.
Of course you have. And sometimes there's an idiot flying the ship, that gets themself killed. But ... we weren't talking about whether there is a _chance_ you might die. We were talking about the risk of doing PvE - and the risk is negligable, because in order to die, you need a weird glitch to happen, in such a way that it doesn't get recorded on the server and your ship re-imbursed as a result.
Can it happen? Yeah, I'd have thought so. Does it often? No. You've got lots of people who run L4s day in, day out in Motsu in Ravens, Drakes, CNRs, Golems, Nighthawks. They do so quite comfortably, and rake in quite a lot of isks doing it.
Well, if you weren't warp scrambled, then warping out remains an option. If you were... you might be in trouble, but the DPS from a mission isn't actually very high, compared to peak tank capability.
Your tank also keeps running until your ship disappears too, even if you are scrambled. I don't have many problems with disconnects, but for those that do, Nighthawks and Drakes do very nicely at staying alive, thanks to their sustained tanking. (Actually, you can sustained tank Golems and Ravens too, you just pay for it on mission efficiency)
Golem + fit clocks in at about a billion isks. Odds of losing it: Next to zero. Missions in highsec are entirely predictable in terms of outcome, and I've put a Raven through the entire selection quite comfortably. Golems are better at it than Ravens - they tank harder, salvage faster, do more damage. *shrug*. Keep your risk down, use a Raven - it's _almost_ as fast. But either way, your odds of losing it are so very low unless you go out of your way to do something stupid.
Risks to missions in highsec are negligable, and entirely in the hands of the user. This is entirely unlike going out PvPing.
As someone who does buy money in an MMO, permit me to share with you why I do it - I've been playing EVE for something like 5 years now. Over that time, I've made a lot of ISKs, and have similarly blown up collossal chunks of the stuff, playing EVE. I'm currently involved in a fairly active PvP alliance, and am enjoying it immensely. But one of the things about PvPing is that fundamentally, it's a loss making activity - ships die, tend to be expensive, and it's quite rare to reclaim the cost from your combat activity (loot is profitable, but you need a lot of kills to replace one ship, as most 'loot' is destroyed).
So I have a secondary income stream, to finance combat activity - I do industry, and go ratting/missioning to make some isks, to buy new toys, to get back on the front line, which is where I'm have most fun.
However, 'going missioning' takes me time in game, and it's somewhat fun, but I enjoy getting into combat more. So for me, dropping about an hour of overtime pay on 60d GTC for resale, netting me 600mil isks, is equivalent to _not_ spending 20 hours running missions, and instead going and killing pigdogs.
I don't _like_ the real money for in game cash particularly - I think it's somewhat unfair. But none the less, as the option exists, I'll use it. EVE is one of the few games that is 'self balancing' there though - a bad pilot cannot buy the kind of advantage to stop them being a bad pilot. More, they get a bit of an edge, and someone else gets a nice killmail and a pile of valuable loot.
Now, if I were to lose my job, and end up with more EVE time, and less payscale, I'd probably change my mind about it - going the other way and 'playing for free'.
I do a fair chunk of industry to fund my PvP habit. I make around 300mil/month fairly easily, with 'a couple of hours' of work. Industry being a matter of queuing build jobs and leaving them to run, it's hard to quote 'isk/hour' - my 14 day build jobs net me a useful chunk of cash, with relatively low capital outlay, and low time investment. It'd be enough to fund my account off buying gametime for isk were I so inclined. (I'm not - I'd rather have the isks ;p)
What utter nonsense. Expensive toys are not mandatory, and in the vast majority of cases only represent a marginal improvement in capability over MUCH cheaper alternatives. Sure, if you consider the 'point' of EVE to fly a Titan, then you're right, but ... you'd be missing the point of the game entirely.
2 years? Not hardly. You can do quite impressive amounts of cash if you run level 4s in a T2 fit Drake. Maybe not quite the rate quoted, but it's not far off. 30mil/hour isn't particularly hard if you're clever about how you handle missions, loot, salvage and disposal of LPs.
But it doesn't actaully take very much liquid capital to run industry or start market trading, and that's even more efficient on 'working' (More real time generally, but less 'making isk' time if you appreciate the distinction)
Buy a Golem, run L4 missions - I can do 300mil in 8 hours in a Nighthawk, so a Golem should be faster.
Alternatively, it _can_ be far faster if you do trade/industry in terms of 'actual hours'. I make a few hundred mil a month, but do so with about 2-3 hours of 'real time' spent hauling materials/product to market, and you could fairly easily expand that throughput. (I'm doing something that's an excellent ROI but not such a great return on time, with 14 day build jobs).
If you're savvy, you can do better market trading. I never really got the hang of that though, so take your pick.
Indeed. 12-13:00 GMT is in the middle of the day in Iceland, and doesn't clash with EU and US timezone players. Sure, you could have an 'out of hours' downtime, but ... well, there's a lot to be said for having daily D/T when everyone's fresh, alert and in work.
Well, said - I've long since come to realise that managers will bully staff into working every hour they can - because it makes -them- look good. No other reason. Your extra hours are not appreciated, and they are not valued. Get compensated for the time you do, or don't do it. ... whatever. Actually, so does 'good PR' in the form of working a miracle once in a while - ironically, if you work 60 hour weeks routinely, then you'll never benefit. Pull it off once when 'everything just went wrong' and you'll be hailed as the hero of the hour. ... just about compensation for the impact on your life. It's not extra pay, it's not 'good'.
Compensation can take many forms - time off in lieu, overtime pay, or
I've come to realise that companies don't actually expect a man-day out of someone, they just expect them to look busy all day. Actual productivity is something of a moot point - the more you do, the more you'll be asked to do. (Barring bare minimums of 'doing your job' below which they'll sack you)
I used to have a good solid work ethic. It burned out over a course of about 6 months where I _was_ doing the hardcore '60-80 hour week' thing. I even got paid for it, at a healthy rate, but it wasn't worth the price.
Overtime is
He who plays the bills, calls the tunes.
If there is someone who is on the same skills as you, but is prepared to work more hours for the same pay, then your job is at risk.
That is all. If you don't like your terms and conditions, then quit and find somewhere better. If you're lucky, you'll manage it, and can laugh at those shmucks you left behind. If you're not, then they'll be laughing at you.
Employment law only goes so far, and in the real world it's of marginal use - companies will push as hard as they can get away with, and then a bit more.
Religion has always been underpinned by a fundamentally unprovable assertion - the existence of a being so much more powerful than us, that could cohesively and comprehensively deceive us reliably. ... so what? The point is largely moot - you have one camp saying 'there is God' and the other side saying 'There is not' and neither can ever prove the point. At which point the question in my mind is always 'so what?'. If you can't prove there's a God, why does it matter if there is/isn't one? All the 'established' religions are castles built on sand as a result - they make a block of assertions about the way the world is, extending the 'does God Exist?' question.
If you could ever prove the existance or lack thereof, then the thing you'd just proven wouldn't be God.
And it's that that all the hardcore atheists stumble on, and apply bad analogies to it e.g. I can't prove unicorns don't exist - which is fine, until you bear in mind that we can define a Unicorn, and no where in the definition does it include 'fundamentally so powerful that it could always hide from you if it chose'.
But
Just because someone is or isn't religious, doesn't mean they can't give good advice - 'don't eat pork' was pretty good advice in hot countries where it was a really good way to get diseases, for example. Don't murder people is also... not such a bad plan, for a stable society.
I'm still not sure why this is such a big problem. For the religious - God gave you the ability to reason. Look at the Bible - written by men, translated by more men (and DEFINITELY altered in some translations). Even if it was the word of God, you'd have to interpret the very human biases from the people writing/translating it. For the non religious - just because someone's a believer in something unprovable, why do you choose to reject their advice as flawed? I mean, you can't prove it either way, pretty much by definition. And a priest can give good advice regardless of belief. So basically, God's existence is moot. Why are we still arguing about it?
I've downloaded a bunch of PDF documentation for various IT products we use, onto my PRS-505. It works quite nicely - eminently readable, thanks to it's ability to reflow the text. About the only thing I have found it having a hard time with is some diagrams and pictures - partly because of the lack of colour rendering, and partly because ... well, it seems to take some processing time to display complicated images.
I'm still not sure it's necessary, either. I mean, if you accept your ebook reader is for reading, then... actually, I don't mind the text in all my books being 'just' black and white.
Netbooks have active screens. They're therefore much less pleasant to use 'as a book'
Sony PRS-505 is 170dpi, which is 800x600 ish. Can't easily directly compare though with 'resolution' though, simply because of the way it appears.
Given my ebooks are pretty much all under a meg, not much bandwidth is needed. A meg a week (and that's a good week, where I get a lot of reading in) when I can pre-load 160meg internally, and ... many gigs on a memory card.
Only reason I have to plug it in is to charge it, and it's good for a couple of weeks of fairly steady use. Oh, and when there's a new book out that I want.
I certainly hope these are less fragile than the PRS-505. I've had that flake out on me twice with the screen going 'a bit mental'. Not actively trying to abuse it or anything, but just ... carrying it around, much like I would a paperback, and presumably clonked it on something. (At least, that's what they said when I tried to get it under a warranty repair).
Repair costs thanks to the price of the screen are somewhat absurd too. I'm quite annoyed with Sony that they ended up charging me more than a brand new one would have cost for a repair. They charged £50 'examination' and then another £170 to repair it - after the guy in the shop rejected their original quote (£220). Net result is that it ended up _marginally_ more expensive than if I'd just bought a new one - an then the prices dropped to £180 or so if I looked around.
To add insult to injury though, they ended up replacing it instead of repairing it anyway.
One thing that bothers me a little, is the weight given to marriage. I'm not a particularly religious man (e.g. I'm not) and I have no real problem with co-habiting long term partners as couples. ... well, a bit contemptible really. If you're not certain, then don't say 'em. Wait until you _are_ certain, or make a different kind of a vow - something with a timescale you can utterly and wholeheartedly commit to. A year and a day is a traditional sort of a time. The duration of a morgage is also a reasonable sort of a timeframe too. Or y'know 'until our children have left home' too. Which ... oddly enough is about the sorts of breakpoints where divorces kick in too.
The on thing that bothers me a bit, is the incidence of marriage with built in get out clauses - it's not like you _need_ to get married in most western societies any more - there's no particular financial advantage, nor is there any particular social stigma any more.
Which is why I'm firmly of the opinion that anyone who's going into marriage with divorce even remotely on their minds, shouldn't be getting married. Marriage vows are 'until death do us part' and they're not mandatory. So to take 'em and break 'em is
Geek lesson number one - establish your communication protocols.
Er. That's about it really. Anyone who thinks 'true love' can make everything right is wrong. What it really takes is open and honest communication - even about stuff that you might feel uncomfortable bringing up.
How you accomplish this is different for different couples and 'geeky' couples might well handle it differently.