A great Community

The longer I am in EVE University, the more I appreciate the community we have. Yes, there are moments that I get frustrated, or annoyed by people complaining all the time, but for the most part, our community is great.

We have 1500 pilots, most of whom are dedicated to the idea of helping people learn how to play EVE.  I regularly see people handing out items to new players, helping players get skillbooks, donating items for our hangars, answering questions in corp chat, or contributing on our forums. The managers and officers in my department regularly devote hours each week to helping out, usually with no recognition. They do it because they think its right.

To everyone in EVE University who helps out, thank you.

I'm back

Once the holiday season started to hit, I found I just didn't have the time I needed to make frequent blog posts.  Unfortunately, once you get out of the habit, its hard to get back into doing it.  Well, I'm back into blogging now, and I'm going to try and make at least one post a week.  I'll probably do more, but thats a decent goal for now.

Next Steps

I find myself within 1 day of having to respend a lot of SP across various accounts.  I've decided what to do on several accounts, but I'm not sure about the others.  I only need so many commandship/t3 command pilots.

My thoughts on some of my accounts:
One character will definately get some decent t3 command skills, and another will finish off some trading/corp management skills. Some of my other accounts will finish off jump skills, or maybe train titan to a decent level just to say I have it.  How is everyone else planning on spending their SP?

Mea Culpa

I have to admit, I made a rather stupid mistake when formulating a University policy.  We decided to start having a period of 0% tax for 2 days after each war, so people could pack in some mission running and rebuild their personal wallets.

However, when doing this I completely missed the fact that by setting it to 0, I would have no data on how many people took advantage of this. As a result, I lost all ability to compare that mission running spurt with previous data, cannot comment on how changes in tax rate influence number of mission runners, and lost a valuable data point in predicting future revenue at various tax rates.

In the future, the tax rate will be set at .1%, instead of 0, allowing me to gather data while also giving people some nice mission running opportunities.

Noctis was a Success

Last week the noctis was introduced, and we at Eve University had to find a way to get it into our player's hands as quickly and easily as possible.  It helped that a BPO was donated to the Univeristy, so that all we had to do was start building.

We did a simple auction, where our students just placed a bid (anything over mineral price), and we starting building noctis as quick as possible using 2 prints.  The highest bids were filled first, and we proceeded down the list.  By the end of the week, we had put over 60 noctis into the hands of our students.

The majority of the bids were close to mineral price, but several was significantly higher.  As a result, we made some isk off of this deal.  As soon as we had firm numbers on the isk, we started looking into ways to use the isk to help Uni players.  Since the mission runners of the Uni had been the Noctis' primary consumer, and they supply us significant isk in taxes, we decided to do something to help them. 

After the wars ended, we lowered the tax rate to 0%, and will keep it there for 2 days for people to enjoy the new ship and rebuild their wallets.  After 2 days, it'll reset to the normal rate. We will continue this tradition of 2 days of 0% tax after wars until we've gone through all  of the Noctis isk.

Enjoy your ships and fly safe.

Late to the Party

I'm back from my vacation with my wife, and ready to get blogging again.  The internet at our resort was fairly bad, so I had difficulty just checking my PMs and director forums, let alone trying to blog.

I know its old news by now, but one of the best things I saw when I came back was the news about learning skills.  In E-UNI, I've constantly seen how new players are encouraged to do learning skills early.  A lot of older players, myself included, would try to reinforce that they should concentrate more on skills that will make the game more fun in the beginning, but human nature would always win.  People who play videogames will often go for the min/max approach, and this trait, combined with learning skills, would lead to a poorer new player experience.

CCP's plan to remove learning skills isn't perfect, but it is a great plan.  Some of my chars (older) have had the skills long enough to almost pay it off (except for some of the adv learnings to V), so those bonus SP are extra.  Others of mine, because of younger age or not training the adv to V until further into their life cycle, haven't had a chance to pay off the SP invested in learnings, so the extra reimbursement is very nice.

The plan of reimbursing skillbooks in hangars is also nice, as E-UNI would take a hit if those skillbooks just disappeared on the patch day, as would a lot of older players I know that have some in their hangar to hand out to new students. 

Yes, min/maxers won't be able to get quite as high of an sp/hour value, but I consider that slight decrease well worth the benefit to new players and EVE as a whole.  I've heard a lot of people complain that this is dumbing down EVE, but I really don't see it.  EVEMON told people exactly which learning skills to train to maximize their time in a plan, and its almost impossible to be a new player and not get advice about learning skills. There was no real thought about it.  It was just "If I plan on being in game for x years, train y."  The slight lose of complexity is vastly overshadowed by a more new player friendly plan, removal of a pointless and flawed mechanic, and removing skills that were some of the least fun skills in the game to train.

Away for a Bit

I'm going to be heading out of town with the Wife this weekend for our honeymoon, and won't be back for a week.  That means I will probably not be checking into EVE (at least not much), and will only be checking forums and evemails once a day or so.

BYOM and refining will not be operating during this time period. If you drop a container for me to process, it will not occur until I get back.

The blog will probably not see many updates :(