Witty Ranter #2

Episode 2 of the Witty Ranter podcast has been posted over at VirginWorlds. This episode featured (host) Adam from Troll on Fire, Brenden from Another Here, Mike from Hardcore Casual, Darren from The Common Sense Gamer, and myself.

In an effort to differentiate itself from Shut Up We’re Talking, create wild topic drift, and generate the maximum number of unsupportable statements and too late moments of mental “What I should have said was…” anxiety, no topics were divulged by Adam in advance of the show.

In fact, the exact recording time and date as well as the method to be used to record the show were kept secret until the very last minute. (I had to log into EVE to find Darren when the secret “Go” code was issued.)

Once we arrived at the secret location and were able to remove our blindfolds and begin recording, the topics were:

1) RMT Will Pwn You – Brenden opened up with a rant about RMT, micro payments, gold sellers, Chinese farmers, in-game ads, and how they are all here to stay so just shut the hell up with all the whining and get used to it. The panel then went on to explore the different sorts of ways companies could dun us to play their games, why some companies are favoring certain methods over others, and, of course, the inevitable “What Would Blizzard Do?”

2) Honor the Old School, For They Are Your Betters – This was Adam’s turn to rant, and he went off on new players these days who bag on the MMOs of the past that built the base on which today’s games stand. We spent a few minutes on that then veered off again to World of Warcraft, the great MMO magnet that draws all attention. Highlights from that trip include who plays WoW, should we bother comparing WoW to other MMOs, is WoW too easy, are current WoW players looking for an MMO that is more challenging than WoW or not, and do players who leave WoW play other MMOs at all? No consensus was reached on anything except that the world will be a strange place when WoW is old school and that you young punks should stay off our damn lawns!

As usual with this sort of podcast, it was a lot of fun to do. We had some issues at the outset getting the recording going, but that was more because Adam was used to dealing with people who knew what they were doing than anything that he did. So when I showed up, I put him off his stride completely. When he started up about “Audacity” and a “multi-ender” I thought surely I was on the wrong show. Still, we muddled through, though he had to go buy and download some software, so I might only get invited back if I become a show sponsor. (Who is the sponsor?)

And, with a little editing… okay, probably a lot of editing… the show sounds very good. I’m just sorry about that Skype beep towards the end, which was me sending out a message that I had to go read a bed time story. Ah well, at least he managed to edit out the other four.

You can find the show on iTunes and here.

Another Tech II Blueprint!

After my last “success” at creating a Tech II blueprint, I decided to set my sights a little lower. I thought I would shoot for a tech II version of the Expanded Cargohold blueprint.

The Expanded Cargohold route had a couple of advantages.

First, I was pretty sure I could afford to actually use the blueprint. That was, of course, the hitch with the Cargohold Optimization rig blueprint; I would have needed another 400 million ISK just to use it.

Second, there is a pretty active market for Expanded Cargohold IIs. If I made some, I was pretty sure I could sell them.

And, third, Expanded Cargohold research uses the same skills (Minmatar encryption methods, nanite engineering, and molecular engineering) and the same data cores as my work with the Cargohold Optimization rig, so I was at least done investing in skills. I just had to make some copies of the blueprint to get going.

I set to work and on only my third try I got the success message. A tech II blueprint:

Of course, now it was time for me to learn something new.

I had assumed, for no good reason, that “Licensed Production Runs” meant the number of times a blueprint could be submitted for use, and that “Production Limit” was the maximum units that could be produced.

I thought that, with this blueprint, I was good for 100 units. That would have been more than enough, at the current market price, to pay of the research and datacore costs, pay for materials, and leave some profit for me.

My assumption was all wrong. Licensed production runs in fact means the total number of units that blueprint can produce ever. Production limit is a cap on the number you can produce with any given submission at a manufacturing installation.

Of course, I only figured this out after I ran out and purchased the materials to make 100 units. I tried to submit the job for 100 units and got an error… and a sinking feeling.

Yes, I was able to make exactly one Expanded Cargohold II, which at the current market price, did not even cover the cost of the datacores I used up for the research.

So now I am back to copying the Expanded Cargohold blueprint, maxing out the number of runs available per copy this time around. Copying is, as usual, queued up for weeks, so some time around of the end of the month I will be able to try again.

At least I have the materials on hand to make 99 more, should I get a blueprint copy with more licensed production runs next time.