Exploration Sites in Odyssey – It’s Graph Time!

It's been several weeks since the launch of Odyssey and the introduction of new mechanics in exploration sites by Team Prototyping Rocks. Since the launch we've been tracking usage statistics for our features and this devblog is going to take a look at some of the more interesting things we've seen from the high-level statistics. All of this has been made possible by a push towards gathering a lot more metrics from the game. Team Data, our dedicated metrics guys have given us some really powerful tools to crunch logs and generate the information below.

Impact on Exploration Sites

There have been two major changes to exploration that impact on the graphs I'm going to show. It's much less painful to scan sites down which means more people should spend time doing it and the mechanics in the newly named Data and Relic sites are different than they were previously therefore more people might want to spend time finding them.

First we'll look at the top three (by completions) Data and Relic sites:


Ruined Guristas Monument Site (null-sec)


Central Guristas Sparking Transmitter (null-sec)


Local Guristas Virus Test Site (high-sec)

It's pretty clear from these three graphs that usage and completion of these sites has increased immensely since the launch of Odyssey. Some of them very significantly, for example the Sparking Transmitter site has seen a near ten-fold increase in usage even if we ignore the initial release spike. Significantly the first two sites are only found in 0.0 space. In high-sec there is again a significant increase in traffic but this time only twice as many sites are being completed.

In the interests of comparison we should take a look at the Combat Sites being scanned down. Here is the top null-sec site by completions and the top high-sec site by completions:


Angel Forsaken Hub (null-sec)


Sansha Hideout (high-sec/low-sec)

High-sec at least seems to be on a similar trend, albeit with a much smaller jump in usage but what on earth happened to null-sec Combat Sites? We'd need to gather some more information to find out exactly but clearly people are much less interested in them now. I'd be inclined to hypothesize that people are typically out exploring null-sec in cloaky frigates as rats have been removed from the Data and Relic sites and they are reasonably effective for avoiding other players, so the Combat Sites in null-sec are out of most ship capabilities without having to multi-box or reship.

Whatever the reason for the dip in use of Combat Sites in null-sec it's clear that the Data and Relic sites are seeing much more traffic across the board and seem to be trending towards stabilizing at a much higher level of use than before. When compared to Combat Sites that have followed a similar trend they are still more popular suggesting that there is more at play than just an increased ability to find these sites.

Hacking

The trend for total Hacking attempts since launch looks like this:


Total Hacking Attempts Per Day

Here we can quite clearly see the initial interest and gold rush as people attempted to get rich before the market value of the loot dropped thanks to the increased supply. After which we can clearly see the next two weekends highlighted by the increased activity. I expect the trend to level out somewhere in the region of 100,000 attempts per day. It might even trend higher as the market recovers from the initial onslaught and we've recently fixed a bug that meant sites were not respawning as they should. This is a figure we can watch as a good 'large-scale' judge of changes we make to Hacking.


Global Ratio of Wins

In the above graph you can see that the global win/loss ratio quickly stabilized. Currently around 65% of Hacking attempts are successful. As a metric this is interesting as a high level view of how hard hacking is for the player base. However we have way more data and are working on automating finer grained metrics to let us see how successful people were depending on their ship, skill, rigs, etc. across various difficulty tiers.

Scattering

As you would expect from a mechanic closely related to the Hacking the scattering usage graphs follow a very similar pattern so we'll skip those for now. However the ratio of the cans collected to lost is very interesting when we take a look at the types of container:


Ratio of Cans Collected by Type
(Blue – Parts, Orange – Materials, Red – Data, Green – Equipment, Purple – Scraps)

We can see within a week of release that the player population had generally worked out what was and wasn't worthwhile to take. This graph also shows that quite a large number of cans are going uncollected, losing whatever value they happened to contain. We'll have to do some more digging to see how much value is represented there.

Summary

This has just been a quick poke through the high-level statistics we have for our exploration site changes. Part of our work towards Odyssey 1.1 involves getting more fine grained statistics into our automated tools so we can track changes we make to Hacking and Scattering in the future. We'll doubtless be back with more information in the future and I'm sure other teams will be along shortly with more pretty, pretty graphs.

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"Looks like we're not done with Space Truck balancing yet! CCP Rise does a great…

"Looks like we're not done with Space Truck balancing yet! CCP Rise does a great job explaining the balancing process to this point, and gives us a hint for what's coming in the next couple days in this posting on Eve-O.
So many game companies will blow off feedback and just plow ahead with what they're doing anyway. One of the things that makes CCP unique is their ability to take constructive feedback, and hone it into something awesome. Very much looking forward to what CCP Rise has in mind." - FunkyBacon (EVE Radio Personality and TheMittani.com contributor)


[Odyssey 1.1] Tech 1 Industrials - Features & Ideas Discussion - EVE Online Forums
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[Odyssey 1.1] Tech 1 Industrials: I find this thread a bit frustrating to follow.. Several players are pointing out some really important facts and issues, and its basically being ignored by both Fozzie and Rise.. A word of advice get the BIG picture philosophy of ALL of industrial ships...

Development Status Update

Hi Everyone. It's been a few weeks since we've posted much in the way of news or updates, and I wanted to check in real quick and bring you all up to date with what's been going on.Among other things, E3 was last week in Los Angeles (the Electronic Entertainment Expo, one of the bigger gaming-related conference), and I was out there, briefly demoing the game on the OUYA and speaking to business partners. It was a useful trip, and while I can't talk about most of the business discussions (under Non-Disclosure Agreements), I can say that we unexpectedly received a Gamestick device as well, and will most likely be supporting that, as Vendetta Online should "just work" on it out of the box (the Gamestick is an Android-on-console device, similar to the OUYA).I'll drop a quick mention that we received an Oculus Rift not long before I headed to LA, and we already have a simple prototype of the game that can be played on the VR headset. Our current implementation is far from elegant, but we do intend to release support for this system after we've improved our UI experience a little. If you have a Rift devkit, or plan on buying the retail version, keep an eye out for the VO support; it'll hopefully happen in the not-too-distant future.We've also been intensely busy in development. We had some opportunities come up in the last couple of months, to do some development for outside parties that will also help the game in various ways, particularly in graphics optimization. These opportunities provide chunks of funding that will allow us some extra time to take on larger development tasks. These funds are quite helpful, because the big gameplay development cycles tend to also have a large associated burn rate on funds.To look at this another way, I'm still targeting the same set of Kickstarter goals that I laid out in the videos back in January, but with a modified timeline, funded by a handful of brief external development deals. The result has slowed visible game development for a little while, but the payoff allows us to then focus much more intently on some of the "Big Gameplay Goals" that we know are going to take some time. In my world, "money" and "development time" are interchangeable; and since I don't have a zillion dollar Kickstarter or other windfalls, I have to juggle other opportunities to let us evolve Vendetta Online into the experience of our dreams.We are planning some meaningful gameplay changes for the near future. There has been quite the clamoring on the forums for enhancements to capship usage, allowing Trident owners to switch to controlling turrets and such. We've certainly heard that loud and clear.Dynamically Conquerable Stations can expect to see continued tinkering. The turret sizes need to be increased, along with some potential gameplay improvements like a countdown at the final do

Community Spotlight: Red Frog Freight

Moving large amounts of goods from one end of New Eden to the other can be a time consuming, difficult hassle for people. If you can't pilot a freighter yourself, or don't have a friend who can, you might spend days moving ships and equipment from one place to another. If you're in a war, you'll have your enemies trying to blow you up the moment you undock. And even if you are safe and have a freighter, it can still be a long, sometimes tedious process to get from point A to point B.

That's why there are many entrepreneurs who have set up services to provide for those who can't, or don't want to, haul their property across the cluster. One of the more successful groups is Red Frog Freight. We were lucky enough to get answers from several of their directors and contract managers to answer our questions about their organization and freight empire.

 

History

According to Ryomanni, one of the directors of Red Frog, legend has it Locin WeEda original created Locin's Freight Service in 2008, due to the difficulty in finding quality high security public courier contracts. Shortly thereafter, the service was renamed Red Frog Freight Service after including additional members from Red Frog Investments.

In 2010, Zaxix, a former director and CEO of Red Frog, got the idea of creating a separate alliance called Red-Frog, containing the various freighter services. They then started the transition from being a division within Red Frog Investment to having Red Frog Freight as a standalone corporation within Red-Frog. In August 2010, the transition was done.

Originally, Locin did not want Red Frog Freight to have anything to do with low- or null-sec, but they started to get a lot of requests for such a service. However, ideas for how to pull this off soon emerged. Black Frog Logistics was originally started as a one-man support corp for Zaxix's PVP alt. After he became a director with Red Frog, he decided to break into the low- and null-sec freight markets, which at the time was only serviced by the corporation Dark Cross Industries. So Zaxix decided to extend the brand and turned the alt corp over to Red-Frog. He asked M'uva Wa'eva to join him in the venture and Black Frog opened its doors publicly on September 28, 2010.

Over the years, the feedback from the community has been fairly consistent. In the beginning, channel advertising was more prevalent, with growth due to word of mouth also playing a role. Outsourced hauling allows miners, manufacturers, and traders to have their goods moved without spending their own time on hauling. Today, many members of the community rely on Red Frog to maintain their operations. And while there are always people who are unsatisfied with prices or delivery times, for the most part feedback has been positive.

 

Daily Operations

Running a corporation as massive as Red Frog requires a lot of work. Their service is available 24/7 to take on contracts and also must deal with rush orders and other special circumstances. It works a little bit like a real life logistics company, with around 600-700 contracts daily, moving goods all over New Eden.

Pilots log on when they are able and haul what they select themselves. Recently, the corporation has instituted a 5% mandatory contribution of base contract rewards toward the White Frog Insurance fund; before this, pilots kept 100% of the rewards. Office feeds are paid by the initial funders and much of the infrastructure costs are covered by donations.

Pilots select their contracts from a specially built web tool that utilizes the API to read contract information. They can then search and select an order that meets their criteria in regards to route length, origin, destination, collateral value, and volume. Some pilots like to take the time and plan out a 70+ jump route, others prefer to go back and forth. They can then click one to open the contract automatically in game.

Behind the scenes, contract managers look over the outstanding contracts and reject any that are set up incorrectly. Recruiters look over applications and introduce new pilots to the corporation. They also keep an eye on any contracts that are going overdue or failed. On each failed contract, they launch an investigation to find out its cause.

The corporation also runs a dedicated public support channel, where pilots and management provides assistance, as well as an internal one for contract alts that remain inside the corporation and their freighter pilots.

 

Security and Safety

Obviously there's a large concern about scams and other problems for potential customers. According to Locin, the biggest concern is the safety of their customers' packages and Red Frog dislikes seeing contracts failing. They try to educate their customers to set the correct collateral to limit their risk for contract theft and loss due to a suicide gank. In the event a Red Frog pilot commits a contract theft, he is immediately booted from the corporation.

However, Red Frog cannot guarantee thefts don't happen and say their service is only marginally safer than public contracts. The risk remains for those who do not set a collateral value that does not cover the cost of the goods. The contents of a courier contract are opaque until it is accepted, so unless a contract has been set to a 0 collateral, Red Frog won't be able to realize an improperly set collateral until too late.

They have had the occasional hiccup, however. In June 2010, they had their first theft of uncollateralized contracts by a Red Frog pilot. They quickly moved to issue a press release and get ahead of the story. The subsequent thread was well received and the corporation actually found their total contract volume tripled shortly after, as the good will and free advertising provided the kickstart for a major growth curve.

 

 

Hurdles and Challenges

Running something as major as Red Frog has many difficulties. Currently, the main challenge is to keep up with all the contracts and deliver them in a timely fashion. This requires constant recruiting. Pilot turnover can be high, with the average pilot sticking around for 2 months. As Red Frog grows each month, it needs more and more pilots. Luckily, many tools have been built to help with recruiting, and the alliance even has a team dedicated to background checks.

The high volume also puts a strain on their web site. Each 15 minutes, they need to download one month of contract data (about 15-20000 contracts) and process it.

Educating clients so they set up safe and proper contracts that do not pose any easy targets for possible theft is also a large issue. Because not everyone is familiar with the contracts system and terminology, Red Frog uses web tools to help filter and quickly locate “dangerous” contracts so they can be rejected and the clients notified.

Protecting pilots has also been a major hurdle in the past. Several months ago, Red Frog started their own insurance company, White Frog Insurance. Pilots pay a premium based on the rewards they receive from contracts and this ISK is used for instance claims later on. This makes their pilots feel more comfortable, as long as they haul according to the Red Frog rules and guidelines (which are mandatory for the insurance claim to be fulfilled).


An example of the tools Red Frog pilots use

 

Getting Involved

For those that want to join Red Frog, Locin suggests they make sure they really want to be a freighter pilot. It is not for everyone. Quite a few have dreamt of becoming one, but once they did so found it not so glamorous. Pilots should be ready for some repetitive work, though the rewards can be great and your fellow pilots can be even better. They say the experience is what you make of it.

However, they also have plenty of advice for those people who might not want to join Red Frog, but have always thought about hauling as a profession nonetheless. Zaxix says the keys to success are the same as any business: Consistent quality service, easy-to-understand pricing and service options, stick to your core service, and know your limits. According to him, more than one competitor has failed due to burnout. Stretching yourself too thin by making commitments beyond your capacity to deliver and giving in to unreasonable customer demands can lead to inconsistent service, broken promises, bad press, and drive people to groups like Red Freight.

BlueWaterNight also suggests interested haulers have a contract alt to protect your freight pilot from suicide gank squads based on the contract you pick up. For those who can't manage a contract alt, he says to be smart. As the saying goes, if it's too good to be true, it probably is.

 

The People

There are a lot of people behind Red Frog who make it successful, too many to list here. Some of the few who were able to answer our questions and are involved in the highest levels of Red Frog include the following.

Locin WeEda is the current CEO of Red Frog Investments, a director in Red Frog Freight and Black Frog Logistics, and is the founder of the Red Frog Freight Service. He joined Red Frog Investments in 2006. While he's mainly focused on Red Frog, he also does some small scale manufacturing and mineral trading on the side.

Ryomanni is a director in Red Frog Investments, current CEO of Red Frog Freight, a director in Black Frog Logistics, and works as the web programmer for the Red Frog Alliance. He joined Red Frog Investments in 2006.

Red Frog Rufen is a director in Red Frog Freight, the CEO of Black Frog Logistics and Blue Frog Freight, and is the director of recruitment for all three branches. She joined Red Frog Investments in 2010. Aside from Red Frog, she mainly does missions, mines, and explores. She once had her own blueprint research and copy service, but has since run out of time.

Zaxix is the former CEO and founder of Black Frog Logistics and a former director of Red Frog Freight. He joined Red Frog Investments in 2009.

Beatrice Khamsi is a director in Red Frog Freight and a Red Frog and Black Frog pilot. She joined Red Frog in 2012.

Ari Kes is a contract manager and recruiter, a Red Frog pilot, and joined Red Frog Freight in 2013. Apart from this, he also sometimes enjoys a bit of mining and simple Planetary Interaction.

BlueWaterNight is a contract manager, a Blue Frog and Red Frog Pilot, and joined Red Frog Freight in 2012.

 

 

Final Thoughts

Locin would like to thank all former and present members of Red Frog for making the corporation what it is today. He additionally wants to thank all their customers, who have driven the corporation to a place where it finishes nearly 200,000 contracts per year.

Ari Kes wants to say being part of Red Frog has been a bombastic experience and says the community is by far the best and most friendly he's come across in EVE.

BlueWaterNight invites everyone interested to come join them, whether it be to just casually haul on the side or be “hard core” and make hauling your primary EVE activity.

Beatrice wants to thank all the loyal customers and says remember, always set collateral to your cargo's value so you don't lose any ISK!

 

Those who want to check out Red Frog's history can see check out their 2012 and 2011 Annual Reports. People can also view at their live freight service status. Those interested in applying, as well as those who are just interested in other details about the service, can find details in the Applicant Guide.

New system requirements for EVE

TL;DR: As of July 10, 2013, we’re changing the minimum and recommended system specifications for EVE Online and adding official Windows 8 support. On Windows, minimum system is now a AMD X2600 or NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GPU, and a dual core CPU @ 2.0 GHz. Recommended system is an AMD Radeon 6790 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 GPU, and a quad core CPU @ 2.0 GHz. The specifications are somewhat higher on the Mac.

In order to make EVE Online's second decade even more beautiful than its first, we need to update the minimum and recommended system specifications. You can check out the exact specs here, and read on for more information. We've completed extensive performance testing of the new specs to ensure a good user experience.

There are three important reasons for these changes:

  • First, some of the old hardware is or will soon be unsupported. For example, as of the R310 driver update NVIDIA’s minimum supported hardware will be the GeForce 8 series. 
  • Second, the old hardware is difficult to find. If we cannot find the hardware to test our game, we cannot guarantee a smooth player experience.
  • Finally, EVE looks better than it did when we last updated these specifications, and some amount of that is due to more complex graphics. We cannot release more shiny and keep our performance the same in all cases. Note however that Windows min spec has changed relatively little; we make these graphical updates optional where possible.

And two specific call-outs:

  • Mac users: Because the Mac's drivers are not well tuned, and our Mac client is not a native client, the minimum and recommend specs are beefier than Windows. As you Mac players know, this update has been a long time coming, and the game should run more reliably on the specified hardware.
  • AMD users: For a long time, the minimum/recommended AMD cards were not matched to their NVIDIA counterparts. They are equivalent now.

Our numbers tell us these changes will affect a small number of people, and we'd also like to stress that you can still try and run the game with unsupported hardware, we just can't guarantee a good experience.

And in the spirit of not only saying goodbye to the old but also saying hello to the new, we're officially supporting Windows 8. If you play on Windows 8 and experience any client problems, we really want to know about them!

CCP Zorba, CCP Explorer, and CCP Vertex

Alliance Tournament XI – Results of the auction

After a nail biting silent auction we have our winners and competitors for Alliance Tournament XI. I know a lot of you are bursting with excitement to find out who got in so without further ado here are your 32 teams that qualified through the silent auction. Everybody ready? Everybody gripping their chairs with excitement? Everybody have a buddy nearby to catch you if you faint? Ok, that’s enough of that.

Silent auction

Random draw

CAStabouts

Confederation of xXPIZZAXx

Choke Point

Moist.

Curatores Veritatis Alliance

Test Alliance please ignore

D3vil's Childr3n

Exodus.

Darkspawn.

The Obsidian Front

Dead Terrorists

Drunk ´N´ Disorderly

Exiled Ones

Outbreak.

Goonswarm Federation

End Of Life

Heretic Initiative

Clockwork Pineapple

JIHADASQUAD

Perihelion Alliance

Kill it With Fire

HUN Reloaded

M.I.F.

Urine Alliance

Ministry of Inappropriate Footwork

Circle-Of-Two

Noir. Mercenary Group

HYDRA RELOADED

Nulli Secunda

Angeli Mortis

Of Sound Mind

Synthetic Systems

Pandemic Legion

Darkness of Despair

Quebec United Legions

SCUM.

Rote Kapelle

WHY So Seri0Us

RvB - Blue Republic

Agony Empire

Sicarius Draconis

RAZOR Alliance

Sleeper Social Club

Wormhole Holders

Solar Fleet

Late Night Alliance

Surely You're Joking

Babylon 5..

The Fourth District

Shadow Cartel

The G0dfathers

DarkSide.

The Initiative

Sadistica Alliance

The Kadeshi

R.E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N

The R0NIN

No Holes Barred

Transmission Lost

Mildly Sober

Verge Of Collapse

Rainbow Dash Friends

W-Space

YOUR VOTES DON‘T COUNT

Here are your teams for the Alliance Tournament XI! (Note, auction winners are listed in alphabetical order). Congratulations to the alliances that have made it this far. I can safely say the journey will be harder from now on, some will try and fall; others will succeed and advance. But one thing is certain: at the end of the tournament we will have our champion!

But we are not done yet. Our wonderful web team have been working hard on getting the tournament website up and running and I highly recommend that you check it out if you are interested in who is playing who and at what time, what the rules are and the latest news about the tournament.

One more thing before we wrap this blog up. This year we are adding something new to the Alliance Tournament broadcast. For the first time we will have an entire broadcast hosted and commentated in Russian. This is a test run to scope the viability of alternate language streams when it comes to tournaments in our effort to break down the language barrier that may have kept previous Alliance Tournaments out of reach from some of our non-English speaking players. As commentators for this stream we will have CCP Vesna Prishla and CCP Leeloo.

As always we love to hear what you have to say, so leave a comment and let the theorycrafting begin!

If you are new to the Alliance Tournament and want to learn more you can watch videos from previous tournaments on our Youtube page here.

 

On behalf of the tournament team,

CCP Bro