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We’ve received an overwhelming response from our readers with offline POSes to shoot – thank you! Keep them coming.
If you’re going to send them to us, please include:
* Solar system, planet, moon
* Name of the corporation
* Type of tower
* Estimate of modules worth
We’ve had several mails of that say, “I’ve found a POS that’s worth 700m, are you interested?”. Yes, we’re interested. Just send all the details in the first mail! =)
I got tired of opening Market and then looking up each POS module value, when trying to determine if a POS is worth shooting.
So I wrote this excel spreadsheet to do it for me.
Simply add the number of modules for each type into the ‘Number’ column and check the TOTAL row at the bottom. If faction modules are present, look them up and enter under ‘All Other Mods’. I grouped many common module types together as prices are close to the same; and these prices are based on current Jita prices, lowest sell order.
Enjoy!
By request, here is my guide to quickly determine if any offline POSes exist in a system, and at which planet and moon they are anchored.
As a general tip for finding offline POS towers, remember that POS towers can only exist in systems with 0.7 security and below, so don’t even bother with (for example), New Caldari or Dodixie. I also suggest systems that do not have a station. This forces players to haul in goods and fuel, which makes upkeep slightly more difficult. It also means the POS is far more likely to have a Corporate Hangar Array with valuables inside, and a Ship Maintenance Array.
We hope that you will use this to find offline towers and report them to us – and by doing so enable yourself to get 20% of the value if we decide to take it down. The two previous reporters collected 150M and 310M respectively.
In order for a POS to be valuable to us, it needs to be:
* Offline
* Have 500M or more in modules (Faction items, Labs/Advanced labs, and assembly arrays are best for high-value. Weapons and defenses are not.)
* Be owned by a small (less than 20 member) corporation. No alliances.
Setting Up Your Overview Filters
Our method will rely upon using the overview filters and the directional scanner. You need to create two overview filter settings and save them.
The first one I call “POS SCAN”. Create this by deselecting EVERYTHING from the filter. Right-click on every category and select “deselect all”. Once you’ve removed everything, we need to re-add two things: Control Towers and Force Fields.
Find and select Force Field under ‘Celestials’, and then Control Tower under ‘Structure’.
Save this filter as “POS SCAN”. Your second filter will be called “POS MOONS”. This will be just like POS SCAN, except add Moons under ‘Celestial’. Since you’ve just created the POS SCAN filter, the selections are still active. All you need to do is add Moons and save the filter as “POS MOONS”.
Finally, create two new tabs on your overview. This can be done by right-clicking on an existing tab and selecting ‘Add Tab’. Name them POS SCAN and POS MOONS respectively. Select each, and load the appropriate overview filter that you created.
Now we’re ready to find some offline POSes!
Using The Filters
In your target system, warp to the sun. This will give you best coverage of all the planets in the system. Open your directional scanner and set the distance to maximum, by filling the field with 9s entirely and hitting enter; the max value is 2147483647. Set Angle to 360. Check the ‘Use Active Overview Settings’ box – this is key to this method working!
Now select your ‘POS SCAN’ overview tab. It should be empty. Run a directional scan, and there you go: A list of all POS Towers and Force Fields in the system.
Why do we care about Force Fields? An online POS has a Force Field; an offline POS does NOT. So now it’s easy to see if we have any offline POSes. Count the number of towers and the number of force fields, and if there are less force fields than POS – one of these towers must be offline!
In the above graphic (which was a very populated system), there are 21 POSes, and 16 Force Fields. There are 5 offline towers in this system. This is not unusual, by the way – today I found a system with 20 POSes and 11 offline!
So Where Are They?
If you’ve found a system with an offline POS, your next step is to locate them. We will do this by warping to each planet and running another directional scan of limited distance. Go down the list of planets. If the planet has no moons, obviously skip it. If it only has one or two moons, it will likely be faster just to warp to each and check them out.
If the planet has a lot of moons, here’s the technique. Once at the planet, set your directional scanner to 30,000,000 (30 million) km. This should cover every moon. I previously used 15 million KM but discovered that some moons were beyond this range.
Run another d-scan with your ‘POS SCAN’ tab active and you should see all the local POS and Force Fields.
The example graphic is very simple, showing one tower and force field; we know this tower is online and can move onto the next planet. If you’ve got several towers, and less force fields than towers, you know an offline tower is at this planet. At this stage we switch the overview to the ‘POS MOONS’ tab and scan again.
Sort the results by distance and you’ll see what we have in the graphic above. Two towers, one force field, and moons listed by distance. We can now find the offline tower by progressively reducing the scan range to hide each moon and then scanning. If a tower is at that moon, it will also drop off the scan, and you will know where it is located.
For example, the first step for the above graphic would be to set the scan range to somewhere between the distance of Moon 10 and Moon 11, so we exclude Moon 11. A range of 5,000,000 km would be a good value.
In the next graphic I’ve reduced scan range down to 1,000,000 km (between Moon 5 and Moon 6) and the small Amarr tower (and force field) dropped off the scan. This leaves us with the Dread Guristas Control Tower Medium – which we know is the offline one because there is no force field on scan.
Continue to reduce scan range between moons until the tower drops off. In my case I continued until the only one left was Moon 1; so that’s where it had to be. Warp there and see what you’ve found.
We have a medium tower with defense batteries and shield hardeners. Unfortunately for us, the value of these modules is low, from 1M to 5M each, making the total value around 75-100M ISK. This is not enough to justify the time to take the tower down – keep looking!
That’s all you need. Go forth and find us some towers, and make some ISK! Also please feel free to comment with questions, suggestions, etc.
From my most recent exchange with GMs:
As we have stated in our replies, what you are referring to is not an advertised or supported feature. It may, at our discretion, in the future be declared an exploit. Current available information indicates that this is not as it should be, until we have more information we will not be announcing anything nor taking action against those making use of this.
Our actions have been fully within the boundaries of the EVE Online reimbursement policies which are available to you on our website.
URL: http://www.eve-online.com/pnp/
If you have any further questions or concerns then please do not hesitate to contact us again.
Best regards,
Senior GM Spiral
EVE Online Customer Support Team
CCP Spiral,
So it’s a bug. Why all the pussyfooting around? Why state that it’s “not an advertised nor supported feature”, a statement that is open to interpretation? If it’s a bug, call it a damn bug and be done with it. Instead you continually leave us wondering if it’s an emergent mechanic that is valid, or something that we really shouldn’t be doing. It took a week, thousands of words written on the subject here and elsewhere, and no doubt dozens of petitions that your staff had to deal with, and NOW you give a half-confidence “current information indicates that this is not as it should be”. Well, do you know how your game is supposed to work, or not? Do the other GMs?
I strongly suggest a memo to all your GMs informing them that this is a bug and reimbursements are valid for it, because there have been as many different answers to these questions as there have been GMs responding to petitions on it. I know that it only takes a GM 30 seconds to produce a noncommittal answer to an exploit petition, but for us it impacts the core of our gameplay. Next time, hold a damn meeting, decide on a stance, and start responding appropriately. These milquetoast responses from folks that are supposed to be authorities leave a tremendously sour taste in our mouths.
Phew. Sorry you all had to see that.
So if CCP won’t say it outright, I will. Aggro extension is a bug, and if taking advantage of it isn’t an exploit now, it certainly should be. I’m considering this “resolution” for my purposes, but I’m very unhappy with the way CCP has handled this. Customer service fail, CCP. Maybe the GM training program is taking an 18 month break just like development on your flagship software product?
A blog reader asks:
If you create a 21-day trial with the buddy system, Then activate it with a PLEX (crediting both accounts with the 30days, As I understand it) — Is there any connection between the accounts that would show up, for instance in the information available through limited API key, if said key was requested by the Corp you wished to join on the (hopefully, anonymous) alt?
First off, last time I did this it didn’t credit both accounts automagically as it should. This has something to do with PLEX activations being different from the traditional forms. You may have to petition a GM to get them to credit the account. Explain clearly what you’re trying to do and you should have no problems.
To answer your question: In order to get PLEX onto your new account to activate it, you’ll have to station trade it, contract it, give money to your alt for it, or drop it in a safe spot for your alt to pick up. All but the last option will leave an entry in your wallet, and will show up on a full API check. Dropping a PLEX in a can is something that is only recently possible with the ability to undock with them, but I haven’t tested it. I imagine that no entry will be made in your wallet at all that way, making it look as if you were paying a regular subscription. Can someone test this for me and post in the comments what you find out?
Ignoring PLEX for a moment, there is still no non-suspicious way to seed ISK to your alt unless you want to drop unrefined ore in a can, sell it a little at a time, and claim you were mining. Regardless, none of this will show up in a limited API key check, which should be all you are giving out anyway. In every case where I’ve been asked for a full API key I’ve (quite reasonably) refused on privacy grounds, but I can see that there are more and more corps that will not let you in without a full API check, period.
So as far as the buddy system? You’re good to go as long as you either refuse to give anything but a limited API key, or go through more trouble to transfer PLEX and pocket money to your alt through untraceable means.
Paul and I were just discussing our different styles of posting stories on My Loot, Your Tears. In particular we are both highly amused that we often get people giving us grief in the comments section, because they don’t like the content of our stories.
Each of us (myself, Paul, and Captain) write in different styles and often about different things. We rotate around doing different things – Paul has been perfecting his art of gank videos lately, while Captain and I have been working on corporate infiltrations. Our other two members don’t blog here, but they also both act very independently – Zarago likes to spend a lot of time hunting down and shooting our war targets, and lexera is on the European timezone.
All of us are playing Eve for the same reason, which I can summarize in a pithy internet meme: The LOLs. Be it shooting up mission runners who ‘just want to play the game!’, stealing a bunch of tasty ships from a careless corporation, blowing up auto-piloting freighters, or laughing our asses off at horrible ship fits, we do this for the enjoyment of it – usually shared with each other.
We blog all of this because we think you’ll enjoy it too. From the replies we get both in and out of game, we know a whole bunch of you do – we’ve grown to over 400 unique readers a day (not counting anyone on an iPhone or using an RSS reader). We’re pretty happy with that.
In the end this is why we find it equally as funny that some people leave us comments bitching about what we write. Why are you still reading? We don’t care if you don’t like it. We do this for us. But please feel free to keep bitching if it makes you feel good! We will continue to point and laugh =)
Paul also linked me to this great article on haters. My favorite bullet point was #4: “If you are really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative.”
Part 2 of the war journal isn’t going to be nearly as exciting reading as part 1.
From our last report, Ludi Sacerdotales had just dropped out of their self-owned alliance to get a 24-hour break from our wardec. Our new wardec against the corporation went live, and the corp members universally stayed docked up all the time we were logged on, with a few exceptions.
With some help from locator agents, we hunted down tej kai and exploded his Tristan. A little bit later, his velator and pod also got the axe. This was the extent of kills for the last two days, due to station-spinning fever on their part.
We did catch some guys running out to lowsec and nullsec, but they rapidly docked up as we were moving in for the kill. We then proceeded to station camp them for hours while doing other stuff with our alts. It appears that their current plan is to move to 0.0 – we’ve seen several members in 9UY4-H a few jumps out into Providence.
I took a Force Recon out there and had the chance to see the Griefers-Be-Gone take ownership of the UNITY station, and then take sov away from Ushra’Khan. Ludi CEO jaksparra was not outside the station, so I’m guessing G-B-G are not blue to them. If Ludi thinks we’re not going to chase them down in 0.0 they’re sorely mistaken. Jerks has been working on its Black Ops program for a while. =)
Ludi has now joined a new alliance: Retribution. I link to the killboard so you can see how fail this alliance is at PvP. Jerks is not exactly worried; we declared war on Retribution promptly.
The usual plan by targets at this point is to try to wait us out by just staying holed up forever, “until we get bored”. People reviewing our war history will discover we’re very patient. When MoonRabbit Collective joined OWN Alliance, we dec’d OWN for about two months and just kept shooting.
In unrelated news, I recently had invested some ISK which was just “in reserve”. The particular investment vehicle was through a friend from a previous corp that I well trust, and I was not disappointed: My 1.2 billion ISK investment returned me 91 million ISK in the first two weeks. That’s an excellent rate of return. I also have a previous investment of 500m in another investment that has steadily returned 20-30m every two to three weeks for almost a year. I encourage anyone with an ISK reserve of a few hundred million to look for a quality investment platform.
While CCP are trying to put the magic smoke back in the servers – which apparently are now on a 36-hour downtime instead of a 6-hour downtime – I have been reading the Eve Blog Pack.
Mail Lite over at The Beginnings of Piracy has written about his alliance leader who was permabanned for being associated with another player who was ISK buying:
A few weeks ago Gilgamesh1980 and his other 2 accounts got banned for 14 days for breaking the EULA. When he first started the game he had a RL friend who asked him to put up some hard earned ISK to go towards a POS network in exchange for monthly/quartley payouts down the line.
He missioned, saved and bought a few GTC’s to donate to this friend in return for a stable revenue to help him in his EvE career. So far so good. It lasted a 3 year period.
Then one day a few weeks ago he got a message from GM Nova. His accounts had been banned as his ‘friend’ had been selling and buying ISK for real money out of game. He had also been selling high end items for real life money.
Gilgamesh knew none of this and when he got banned for the 14 days he asked the GM for a full investigation to clear his name. The outcome? Permanent ban of all characters.
So to follow the connections:
I’m going to first assume Gilgamesh1980 is totally innocent (or believes he is innocent – no attempted bad behavior). The question that arises here is the EULA and mechanics of “buying GTC with ISK” and “donate GTC to Other Player”. Was what was done here a) possible and b) EULA allowed?
All the Eve Online forums are currently down, so I’m linking to this cached copy of the “Secure GTC trade 101 – Updated” thread in the Time Code Bazzar.
Q) What do I do?
A) If you are selling a GTC for isk, you open your account management page;https://secure.eve-online.com/login.aspx
My account >> Account services >> Securely sell GTCs
# Select the character selling the code (receiving the isk)
# Enter the name of the character you are selling to.
# Enter the code.
# Enter the amount of isk you want to sell the code for.
# Confirm the selectionThe seller will see an open sell order in the account management page as well as finished orders.
The buyer should receive an EVE mail detailing the offer. (Could be bugged at the moment) In any case, all the buyer needs to do is log into the account management page and accept the trade. It should be listed under, “Common Tasks.” The offer is valid for 48 hours.
This confirms that Gilgamesh1980 could acquire GTCs, by buying them through the Time Code Bazaar – another character sends him the offer and he accepts. So far so good. The next question is about “donate GTC to Other Player”. As far as I can tell, there is only a few ways this can happen:
The first method is clearly EULA allowable. Buying a GTC for ISK, reconverting it to PLEX and transferring the ISK does not break any rules of which I can find. I might wonder why Gilgamesh1980 just didn’t buy 2 PLEX and trade, but I guess in 0.0 stations are more of a pain to get into.
The second method also does not appear to me to be any sort of EULA violation. Gilgamesh1980 has a legally acquired GTC that he is legally reselling for 0 ISK. Other Player can then do with the GTC whatever he wants.
This brings us to Gilgamesh1980′s ban. The reasons behind this was that Other Player was buying ISK outside the GTC system (EULA violation) and also selling game items directly for real currency (EULA violation). Nowhere is there any mention of Gilgamesh1980 acquiring any ISK or real-life currency from Other Player as a result of these sales.
We might include Other Player giving ISK back to in return for a stable revenue to help him in his EvE career because of the line “in return for a stable revenue to help him in his EvE career”, so it seems likely ISK was transferred from Other Player to Gilgamesh1980 at some point – but the usual penalty for goods acquired from ISK buyers is that the unfortunate player has the ISK directly removed from their account.
So to conclude, I first of all see no EULA violations by Gilgamesh1980. I also do not see why, if illegally-acquired ISK was transferred to Gilgamesh1980′s account (without his knowledge of the source), it was simply not subtracted from his account as is usually done.
A permanent ban for this is, as we say in the computer world, a chilling effect. If this can happen to him, can I be banned for buying an item (PLEX, ship, anything) that was bought with illegally-acquired ISK? Apparently so.
Every purchase in Eve just became an excuse to ban your accounts. Petition for it to be escalated, and the result is apparently permaban. CCP, you need to make this right – or explain exactly how Gilgamesh1980 was breaking the EULA.
I will be listening really carefully.
[soapbox]
For CSM5, I’d like to suggest you vote for Manalapan. Here is is platform:
“I love EVE for the sandbox, the complexity, the player driven market, PVP mentality, but most of all I love it for the lawls. That means you, the griefers and scammers. Without that entertainment, EVE would be WOW in space. I stand by your goals for the betterment of our kind. We must stand together against the oppressive neo-carebears. A vote for Manalapan is a vote for Scammers and Griefers everywhere! ”