To that end, I’ve decided to run my first poll! It should only take a few seconds to complete and doesn’t require login or registration, but the responses I get will be valuable for the forthcoming weeks – future development of EveHQ will be determined by this vote so make sure you have your say!

Thanks in advance to those who take the time to respond.

The side effect of this is that my Caldari standings have now dropped from +9.91 to +9.84, but I didn’t want such high standings anyway.

It’s certainly been an interesting target and one that I’m not planning to achieve with any other faction. Boredom at lack of mission variety and frustration at being given courier and trade storylines certainly didn’t help the grind, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I had a relatively high standing at the outset, I probably would have quit after the first week. But the process of achieving this target in just over 3 weeks has resulted in some positives. So, time for some numbers!

Missions run:

• L1: 33
• L2: 359
• L3: 0
• L4: 272
• L5: 0
• Storyline: 46

Total Missions run: 710

The storyline numbers are slightly higher than expected due to the use of one-time-use agents at data centers. These agents aren’t required to have run 16 missions prior to their use but do give out faction standings, and so can be a useful way of slightly increasing faction standing at the cost of tags. There has also been a couple of cases where storyline missions were declined due to passage through lowsec.

Income:

• Agent Mission Rewards 337,769,000.00
• Agent Mission Time Bonus Rewards 332,950,000.00
• Bounty Prizes 739,111,711.00
• Implant Sales 181,443,885.00 (implants gained as a reward for completing storyline missions or as loot drops)
• Insurance 3,307.60 (I lost a shuttle )

Total Income: 1,591,277,903.60

Expenses:

• Missile Purchases  103,683,475.00
• Brokers Fee 376,782.60
• Transaction Tax 1,091,235.92
• Bounty Prize Corporation Tax 5,624,704.60
• Agent Mission Reward Corporation Tax 1,103,600.00
• Agent Mission Time Bonus Reward Corporation Tax 1,109,250.00

Total Expenses: 112,989,048.12

Net Isk Gain: 1,478,288,855.48
LPs: Increased by ~1.1m @ 500 isk/1k LP = 550m approx.
Reward: a 2-run Raven Navy Issue BPC (ME20, PE8) in exchange for 30 tags costing around 4.4m isk

So all in all, I’m probably 2.5b isk better off than I was at the end of December in terms of net asset value. This will now allow me to start planning improved ships and fittings for when the corp probation period is over and they let me play properly!

As mentioned in a previous blog, my Gallente standing has taken a beating and although it hasn’t decreased much since reverting to L4s, it currently stands at -5.86. I’m hoping a combination of Diplomacy training and the running of some Sisters of Eve storyline missions will start to improve that. Based of previous gains, I’m estimating a couple of storyline encounters will get this back above -5 so I’m free to roam Gallente space again without getting shot at by their police. So, I’ll be back grinding for a short while.

Let the missioning commence!

Due to the way standing gains work, they are based on a percentage of the difference between +10 and your current standing, such that the closer to +10 you get, the actual gain becomes smaller. In my case, I get encounter missions giving +4.2%. At +9.7, this would be an actual gain of +0.0126. At +9.8, this becomes +0.0084. As I approach my target at say, +9.88, the gain becomes only 0.0504. Here, it would take 4 of these encounter storylines just to gain the final 0.02 gain required, or 64 standard missions just to get those 4 storylines.

Since starting 12 days ago, I have completed 25 storyline missions. Of these, only 5 have been encounters. There have been 12 trade missions and 8 courier missions which brings the average standing gain for 25 missions to just 1.5232%. Using the EveHQ standings extrapolation tool at that figure, it will require another 49 storylines to hit the target (or 833 missions). This figure doesn’t seem too unreasonable bearing in mind the missions required to get the first 0.10. But I really do hope that the average picks up a little bit – which brings me to a couple of really annoying point about Eve’s storyline missions.

Firstly, since the agent changes into the 3 main divisions, storyline agents have still been given out random missions into any of those 3 divisions. One particular security agent has given me trade, courier and encounter missions, which seems wrong bearing in mind I’ve chosen to do combat missions. I guess it’s not so bad for me (other than the obvious ballache of the lower standing gains) but for people who aren’t skilled or geared up for combat after doing 16 hauling or mining missions, it can be a bit frustrating to keep having to decline missions due to being unable to complete them.

Secondly, despite having 25 storyline missions, each of the missions was exactly the same within a division. I know there’s a severe lack of mission content in Eve but I didn’t realise it was so bad that you only get 1 mission per division. I’m getting really tired of selling scordite to agents – go employ some miners ffs!

It’s certainly going to be more work in the second part, and I’m expecting it to take twice as long. But given the progress so far, I should be on course to finish in early February as planned.

On a lighter note, I am now KOS to Gallente! No amount of skill training will repair that so once I’ve finished this objective, I may need to talk nicely to the Sisters in order to persuade them to increase it again!

I reviewed previous faction gains in-game and came up with an average gain with which to extrapolate when I would eventually pass the +9.90 mark (the EveHQ standings extrapolation tool makes this a doddle btw ). Turns out that it’s 14 faction L4 missions. At 16 missions per storyline and an average of maybe 20 minutes per L4 mission, that equates to almost 75 hours of missioning – definitely doable within the month. Or so I thought.

It turns out that the RNG hates me and has refused to give me a L4 encounter storyline mission since I started this challenge. A revised projection with just trade and courier missions shows that it would require 160 storyline missions, or closer to 850 hours of missioning. Not a chance, but the reality would be somewhere between the two times.

I went back to visit one of my old L1 mission agents in an attempt to work out the faction gains for lower end agents. The gains were quite a bit lower, not so much for trade/courier but significant for encounter. The only benefit was that the missions would take a fraction of the time of L4s. So I tried L2s. I was surprised to see that the trade and courier mission gains were not too dissimilar from L4s, with the encounters being approximately 50% of those for L4 missions. The L2 missions were also comparable in terms of completion time as L1s.

As it stands now, I can average 2 storyline missions in an evening which if they were all encounters, would take me around 2 weeks to hit the mark. Unfortunately I’ve only had 3 encounter missions out of a dozen or so storylines, so the RNG still hates me. I’m running L2s at a stupid rate in a ship which some would call overkill, but it seems a much quicker and reliable way of grinding faction standings over L4s. It will be a close call to see if I can make the +9.90 before the end of the first week in February.

The downside is that the L2 missions seem to have a lot more faction missions which is seriously damaging the opposing factions standing, so much so that I was KOS at one point until a quick skill training diversion brought it back below the threshold. I fear it will be well over at the end of this endeavour. And I do miss the ISK and LP too!

General Development

Development for the current year will be taken nice and steady. There isn’t really the scope to do the same kind of upgrade we performed from version 1 to 2, so subject to the items below, it will be a case of refining and improving what we have already. The Updater will have some alterations too in order to simplify deployment and updating. At this point in time, it is likely that the individual file download approach will be removed in favour of an update package, meaning one file to download for each update.

We’ll also be looking at optimising various parts of EveHQ to avoid data duplication and reducing file sizes.

Market Cache Reader

I know I’ve been harping on about this for over a year now but it will happen, and Soon™. For those that have seen the BattleClinic Market Uploader, that was the initial version. For the upcoming version, I’ve taken all the junk out the cache reader and optimised it for market files only. This will be given a new UI and enhanced abilities, so not only will it be useful for updating your market site of choice, but it will also instantly update your own EveHQ price database.

I’m unsure yet whether this will be included within the main EveHQ code or run as a plug-in, as there is scope for doing lots of market/trade stuff which may warrant a new plug-in. Chances are it will start off as a plug-in and if development doesn’t advance sufficiently, it will get absorbed into the EveHQ core at a later date. Expect a beta version of the plug-in before the end of January.

Basic IGB Functionality for HQF

It’s great to be able to view other people’s fittings in-game but what is more difficult is seeing how good or bad those fitting stats are. Currently, you can export the fitting from Eve and then import that in EveHQ to look at the stats. Which is great, but it’s a few steps too many. The proposed changes would allow you to view stats of an in-game fitting in the IGB without having to alt-tab out of Eve. Similarly, fittings saved in HQF can be shown in Eve quickly without having to go through the process of import and export. Providing the IGB allows it of course!

CorpHQ – Corp Management Plug-in

As mentioned in a previous blog, I am looking to develop a corp management plug-in in the near future. This is probably going to be the largest development feature out of the batch as it covers so many areas.

EveHQ Mobile

Having used an iPhone for the past 2 years and not convinced by Android, I’m half-way to convincing myself to get hold of a new sparkly Nokia Lumia. If that happens, I may decide to port (parts of) EveHQ to the Windows Mobile platform. Most likely, that will be character and skill monitoring, evemail, ship fitting and item browsing.

Version 3?

Unlikely. Although consideration will be given to updating EveHQ to use .Net 4. The move to .Net 4 will be highly dependant upon Microsoft fixing a critical bug which prevents serialised files (from apps running under older .Net versions) from being decoded correctly. Obviously this will affect everyone currently using EveHQ were we to go from .Net 3.5 to 4. A fix is available but it hasn’t been included in any public update as yet, so I’m reluctant to force the update.

2011 has certainly been a busy year. Having initially expected version 2 to be released early in the year, it turned out more work was needed to bring it to a state that was more like a new version rather than an update. And yet, despite the delay, I still didn’t get everything done that I wanted. But time had to be called at some point and so early September ended up being our release date.

Generally, I thought that the release went well. Naturally there will always be teething problems but they weren’t as bad as what I was expecting. Most people seemed to like the features and improvements (and even the new UI) but you ALWAYS get the odd whiner who makes a point of telling you that they hate you because you did x, y or z. Goes with the territory I guess.

As part of third party app development, CCP have made some changes to the API. Of less note (in the end) was the blacklisting of IP addresses as a result of multiple API errors. Initially starting out at 3 errors per minute, this would have blocked just about all applications if it wasn’t already aware of a problem with the account. Fortunately due to complaints from third party devs, it was raised to 150 errors per minute prior to deployment. Of more importance was the change from the traditional API access to customisable access keys (CAKs). It required a little getting used to for both developers and users but IMO, was a change that was very much needed.

And the less said about the API Licencing debacle, the better! Bad initial communication, vague clarifications and failure to deliver were the key features, as it seemed to be with CCP for most things around the same time. Luckily, things got much better approaching Crucible in terms of FiS so now we have to wait and see if the API Licencing gets looked at.

Towards the end of last year, the source code and bug tracking facilities of EveHQ were moved from BattleClinic to BitBucket. With this, the repository has changed from SVN to Mercurial (Hg). So far, I’ve been impressed with the features of Hg but I’ve yet to give it a proper test of its branching and merging capabilities. One unfortunate side effect of the move has been the lack of a decent file handling system. This makes it a pain to provide the updates for EveHQ but luckily I have some web hosting space I am using to provide the updates until I can come up with a workable solution on BitBucket.

Of course, the advantage of having full access to the update site means you can really see what is happening in terms of downloads. As I’m writing this, the 2.4 version released at the end of November has had 17,850 downloads of the full packages. This doesn’t include the updates from 2.3 which are around 8k. So far, there was been just under 22k of updates to v2.4.1 which has used over 1.5Tb of bandwidth. It’s an improvement on the numbers I had seen for the same time last year so it looks like we may be doing something right!

Part 2 of this will look at the future of EveHQ.

Either this will go very well, or there will be tears. I’m praying for the former.

Edit: Both of my updates went smoothly, so a good start I guess!

Including in the forthcoming 2.3 version, the Updater will have a bit of a makeover. As well as compacting the size of the form a bit, it will include more functionality than before. So, what’s new?

Proper File Queue

The Updater will use a proper queue so that files are downloaded in sequence instead of randomly.

Concurrent Download Limit

Prior to v2.3, EveHQ aimed to get the maximum simultaneous downloads it could from the server. While great for fast PCs and internet connections, this wasn’t so great on slower ones where stability is required more than speed. The new Updater imposes a user-defined concurrent download limit which ranges between 1 and 5. This is set in the update screen before downloading and will be retained for future updates.

Update Cancellation

The update process can now be cancelled.

Partial Update Continuation

While restricted to whole files only, this will ensure that once a file has been fully downloaded, it will not be required to download again should the full update process fail for whatever reason.

Hopefully this addresses most of the problems with the Updater.