ISKed up

Lots of work today, but I was able to semi-afk rat anoms for a good portion of the afternoon and evening while doing some things that kept me at my desk. I've found that the NewBee VNI simply doesn't require any hand-holding. It's not a bad idea to manually target frigates if you happen to have a moment, and I did that for most of the waves that scram and web just on principle. But unless local spikes with neutrals, there's no real reason to be concerned.

I've continued to drop an MTU and orbit that, then I approach and grab everything with a unit price >= 50k and all the tiny things. That means a trip back to station after every anom, which you would think would hurt ISK/hour. And it might, but so far I've managed about 520M ISK net (20% tax) in bounties, and another 175M in loot, almost exactly a third of the bounties. That's a huge hit to walk away from for literally two minutes lapse between anoms, and being in station on a regular cycle encourages one to take a bathroom break or what have you while docked instead of truly AFK. Even one ship loss due to being out of the room is another third of my bounties to date, although I can't assess the likelihood of that in this new space. Walking away from the pc was a bad idea in Catch.

We did have some neuts come through when I wasn't paying attention, though. Happily it was of no consequence. But it does prompt me to wish for a little more control over the audio alerts. For example, I cannot tell the client not to inform me if I choose the same waypoint twice, or that the autopilot is disabling itself because a waypoint was reached, and those are long, spoken word messages. But I can't even get it to make a sound when a target is destroyed or gets away/stops being targeted, or when someone outside alliance is added to local, or when a drone goes into low shield or armor, and so on. There are a bunch of audio alerts that, if set, would enable me to rely on the client to call for my attention as events occurred, rather than depending on me to poll several windows for updates. We all use workarounds like selecting all on local so we can see what changed since last we looked, but really it's absurd to think that the screen can update the list with the name and status of the new entrant, but that gameplay is harmed by a chirp if their colortag or state isn't found in a certain set.

I even question the reasonableness of having drones that auto-aggress but with a fixed algorithm. I would prefer to set them to smaller ships first in my current circumstance. I'd prefer even more to be able to tell them to get anything scramming me, followed by webbers, followed by whomever did the most dps in the last 60 seconds. This calculation would only be performed while changing targets, of course - can't have them flitting around the field letting the enemies all rep.

I appreciate that this would mean more AFK or inattentive players, but when your position is that simple automation like an audio alert in the client will allow players too little attention, the problem isn't with the alerts, but rather the mechanistic scenario. Forcing the player to act in a scripted way to perform well is actually demoralizing for the player, who feels a sense of relief when he realizes something of that kind can be omitted.

Anyway, with my earnings I can afford some doctrine ships, enough to lose a few while waiting for SRP. So I'm soon off to Fountain to play in the last great war under Dominion sov.