Well this isn’t cool!

Yet another week has passed and my real life continues to kick my ass. The long hours as a professional VMware geek combined with the summer schedule of a house full of energetic sons have me swamped. It’s sad that I once complained about mining and missions being enough to drive me to drink. It seems that my current level of EVE interaction is a daily R&D agent mission and keeping my 7 P.I. colonies going. Yes that’s right, 2 jumps to click request mission and complete mission followed by 10 thousand riveting clicks to start up all my 23 hour cycle extractors. I have even stopped logging into my combat pilot all together as it’s too damn depressing to log in and NOT get to fleet up and kill sods. I use evegate to keep up with his emails and have him set training interceptors V.

So seeing as my EVE life right now is pretty much 30 minutes of RSI inducing P.I. extractor clicking. I might as well use this time to share with you some of my thoughts on the new big awesome addition of Tyrannis.

/RANT

OK let’s start with the sheer amount of goddamn clicking required to do simple and remedial tasks in P.I. shall we. OK a click to scan each resource type. Four more clicks to drop a Command center. 2 more to drop an extractor, two more to drop a spaceport. Six more clicks to link the spaceport, extractor and command center. Three clicks to get the extractor going. Three more to get the P0 items routed some place. Oh and one submit or we do all the clicks again.

So 22 clicks just to get a single P0 resource extracting and routed to storage but that’s not ALL.

So we want to make a P1 product from all that nice P0 product. Two clicks to place the processor. Two more clicks to link it to the processor. Three more clicks to choose what you want to process. 5 more clicks to route the P1 product some place. 5 more clicks to route the P0 product in for processing. Oh and one more click to submit it or we do them all again. So that’s 18 more clicks before we get to a P1 product.

So basically if you want a single extractor and processor with a launch pad and the command center you need ~40 mouse clicks to get it done. Take into account that it’s not uncommon for an Advanced Command center to support 4-5 processors and 12-16 extractors. That’s a metric shit ton of clicks just to get P.I. up and running. Factor in 5 colonies and we are looking at enough clicking to wear down the half service life of the microswitch in the button of a $15 USB mouse.

What’s your problem EVE SOB, you only have to do it once! BULLSHIT once my ass, you jerk. So assuming I use 23:00 hour extraction cycles ('cause they yield the best bang for the buck) then once a day for as long as I choose to partake in this thing called P.I. I need to log in and tell my extractors to extract again. So with 6 colonies running 16 extractors each and 4 click per extractor PLUS a submit click and a double click to switch planets. I need to click ~402 times to tell my P.I. colony to do EXACTLY what it was doing for the last 23 hours. Don’t you DARE tell me to use 72 hour cycles on my extractors. The down time and the output are such that the cost of the colony is not going to pay for itself for a year.

This leads me to my next issue with P.I. in that the output in highsec (and low for that matter) is so bloody slim (don’t tell me I put my extractors in the wrong place) that frankly it’s going to take a looooooooooooooooong as time and a billion freaking clicks before I get any of my costs back and see profit. I am building some P4 products by now and frankly the number of days it takes to make them and the mind numbing clicking required to keep it all going isn’t worth it. Frankly P.I. is not worthy of the AWESOMNESS of a major patch. Insult to injury we get a free P.I. industry ship to click on and spin. MORE DAMN CLICKING! Oh and if you happen to be making P4 products and the processor cycle finishes during downtime. There goes your P3 products and the P4 product into the ether wasting ALL THOSE GOD DAMN CLICKS!

/END RANT

/emote punts house cat through wall /end emote

OK! So now that I’ve had a little sook and bitch season about my life and how P.I. might just have caused me to need surgery for carpel tunnel. Let’s suggest a few things to fix one of my sources of frustration.

1: Extractor clustering. So let’s say you find a nice big fat deposit of P0 type x. You know you want to deploy 5 extractors of Type x in that spot all nice and close together. You right click on that extractor type and choose “Create Extractor cluster”, choose the number of extractors in the cluster click install and then one more click to place them in the fat pocket of stuff. Those extractors are linked so two more clicks and you have linked them back to a storage node. So 6 clicks and you have created and linked 5 extractors back to the world. Now to put the icing on the cake now you click on the cluster of extractors and scan for resources, choose the cycle type, create a route. So in 6 more clicks you have told the extractors to extract and routed the P0 product. So 12 clicks to set up 5 extractors. The Cheery is when you come back on day 2 and see those lazy extractors sitting there doing nothing. You click the cluster, tell it the cycle type and click submit. So 4 clicks a day per extractor cluster. It will still be a crap load of clicks but at least it’s not telling each and every extractor that you want it to do the exact same thing.

2: A repeat previous action button: OK so processors will hang there and wait for stuff to process and continue on their merry way once resources avaliable. Extractors will extract until there extractor cycle is up and then shut down. If we could click on the colony, select “repeat previous actions” button and then submit. The day to day busy work of sucking P0 resources out of the ground and turning them into P1 resources would be 12 clicks not 402.

3: Oh shit I made a mistake when setting that 72 hour extractor cycle. WTF I’ve waited 72 hours and it’s still going. OMFG I need to destroy the extractor to change the extraction cycle time. Hey CCP how many kittens will it save if you add the ability to stop and change a running extractor cycle eh? Stupid

4: Hey you track the materials consumed by processors during downtime, how about you do the same for the output eh? STUPID!

OK I feel better about my EVE time now. If anyone can provide me with a way to never have to work, then perhaps I can get some bloody PEW PEW time.

Cheers

EVE SOB