Army of alts

by In MMO Tagged , , ,

Unlike the title says, I don’t actually have an army of alts. I currently have 3 accounts, and 5 characters. Of those 5 there’s 2 I use on a regular basis and the other 3 are used for things like trading or bearing.

The other day I decided that it was past time for me to start training my Amarr trade alt into something useful. I’ve always wanted to start into capital production. So I’m training him to be able to fly an occator, jump freighter and into capital construction.

I got myself 2 plex, and 3 injectors. Because I’m lazy and I wanted the occator train to be done sooner so I could start hauling some much needed stuff from Amarr to the wormhole.

My Jita trader can fly an occator too so if need be I can now do two at a time. Making myself a little more efficient. Or a little bit easier to kill due to sucking at dual boxing. Either works.

The first thing on my list is making myself a Nidhoggur, just because I like the ship.

One of my other goals is owning a Nyx sometime soon. Unfortunately I don’t have the ISK to afford a Nyx pilot or a Nyx itself. But it’s on my list too. Owning one has been on my list for ages.

Time to start making ISK again so I can do silly stuff like some in the Alliance do.

Stay tuned o7

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What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , , ,

But what does kill you makes you stronger too. That’s the way it goes in EvE. You’re a clone, you literally have to die in order to become a capsuleer. Everyone died once in the start, even a character that has never undocked, is not the original.

I don’t do PvE anymore, it bores me and I have no idea why I ever did it. Some of you probably know this, but all I ever did in the past was run missions. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know myself.

When you play PvP there’s always lessons to learn. If you die you learn from your mistakes, if you don’t die you learn from your victories.

And sometimes, you just learn that you shouldn’t expect to keep your ship when you fly with a certain FC.
Not always because he’s bad, but because he takes risks. The “We’re going to die in a ball of fire but it’ll be fun” kind of risks. I am the kind of FC that takes the “I have no idea what I’m doing but this will be funny” kind of risks. Although in general I try hard to make sure not to take battles we can’t win.

Wormhole PvP is fun, there’s more to it than just being part of the blob, sure, everyone has their F1 monkeys, you need them because you need numbers. Even in W-space we have them but our F1 monkeys are pilots that (usually) know what they’re doing.
Not every operation goes the way you want it to go though. That’s something you learn too.

A few days ago I was in a fight with part of the alliance.
One of the corporations found a hole with Dreads in it and we were going to try and drop them. They came in our TS channel and went “Guys, can you bring Guardians, we need them now, go to the system in alliance chat”

It was late evening but I figured I could spare an hour or two to kill something so I went along with a few of the guys. Well, I went to Jita with an interceptor, bought a Guardian and then went to where I was asked to go.

Turned out they asked everyone to bring Guardians, due to which we had about 18 of them on the gate, waiting.
This should have been red alarm number one. We had more logi than dps.
Sure, some of the dps was already en route and ready to engage, waiting for their shot.We figured there were plenty of ships around, since we had split channels with the group inside the wormhole and the ones outside. Those outside would just wait for someone to drop down and give us the go signal.

Alarm bell number two was the way we got the bookmarks. The person that was supposed to give them to us was complaining about his own corporation’s lack of clarity in bookmarking. He dropped them in a can for us but.. Well, when we needed to go in, they weren’t the correct ones so we had to use warpins regardless.

No biggy, it happens, we’re used to using warpins.
Two Dreads on field, the go was given. Time to have some fun.

I forgot to make screenshots, so here’s one our CEO made yesterday in another fight

We jumped into the target k-space and warped on to the first wormhole. The target system was two further from where the k-space entry was. The opposite party knew we were there, and tried to roll us out before we could do anything.

Four battleships had gone through before the FC decided to take the fight (another red flag) Still, no worries. We had logi, and dps (I wasn’t paying attention)

Let’s just say that in the end, we didn’t have enough DPS. Plenty of logi but the other party had 6 dreads on field and a FAX machine. With the dps we brought we were never going to be able to take that down.

Once more it took a while before the FC decided to call it and have us bail. The hole we were fighting was gone, they rolled it while we were fighting, which happens when you fight on a wormhole. But we bailed, bouncing off of pings while a new exit was being scanned.

Once we got on it, we went through with a bunch of us only to have it collapse behind us (woops)

Luckily we had scanners. Guardians that had depots with them and could refit to probes. It took a while, but we were able to get out and back to high-sec. Once more dropping off my guardian in Jita. At the time it was almost 1 am, and I get up at 5:40, so I was dead tired but happy to be in kspace.

I was salty the day after. Really salty. I didn’t even die but I was calling the whole operation a total clusterfuck.
Too much logi, not enough dps. The FC’s orders being contradicted by another FC (their CEO I think) etc etc. But in the end, there’s always lessons learned.

This one, being that next time, when telling my guys to go somewhere. I’ll make sure that I know we actually need the ships that were asked.

We’ll just bring DPS next time. At least then I can shoot things too.

Stay tuned o7

 

Getting paid for tackle

by In MMO Tagged , , , ,

It’s been a few weeks again. I actually forgot that I was going to write something down. I had a whole post stuck in my head for days. And then suddenly it disappeared.

I’ve been playing EvE a lot in the past few days. Been having quite a bit of fun in Null sec.

As in, killing the people living there.

A few days ago I made a nice amount of ISK. One of our rules is “Scout gets to keep the loot”.

This is literally what it sounds like, if you tackle something and we kill it, whatever drops is yours.

When I play and lead fleets I fly two ships. One being my tackle, and one the DPS that waits on the wormhole for when scouts catch something.

I tend to warp in on a LOT of Rorquals these days. I have yet to actually kill one that doesn’t self-destruct halfway through the battle but from time to time, they do dumb things. Like the one from the other day.

I landed on a Rorqual that was aligned, the moment he saw me pop on d-scan he warped of. But.. He forgot his drones.

Now as most of you will know, they use Excavator drones, these things are worth 1bn a pop. So as you can imagine, seeing those 5 on grid made my day.

We took the fleet there along with a DST to pick them up (750m³ per drone) and escorted the DST to our wormhole again. I made 5billion on a Rorqual’s stupidity. That was a good day for me.

A few rolled holes later and I missed tackle on an orca. But he left his ice mining drone. I also had a rattlesnake on scan so I wanted to tackle that one. Unfortunately I couldn’t catch him, so I went back for the drone, which is worth about 250m

Going back there was a Stratios picking it up. I tackled him, called the dps and we killed him. We did have to bail though because his friends were scarier than what we had. So another little payday was lost.

But I don’t mind, we had content, and fun.

I like our nullsec static quite a bit. This thing brings us content each night. And content makes people want to keep logging in.

Stay tuned o7

EvE and me

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , ,

In EvE, like in any other MMO there will be a time when you just need a small hiatus. Most people playing EvE know this feeling well or will know this feeling because it happens to all of them. You might not stop playing altogether but you’ll just let your “game time” go to other games.

Which is basically what happened to me a few weeks ago. I wasn’t feeling it anymore and spent a few weeks playing Elder Scrolls Online. Which was a fun way to spend my time.

Last week however I felt like playing again. Why? Well, I was in London. Not by a twist of fate or anything, but because the corp was going for another real life meetup over there. One of the guys was going to go there from 15th till 20th of February and it was decided that those able to join should do so too.

And thus I met up with another bunch of my corp members.

Which was fun. It’s nice to be able to put a face to the guys I’ve been talking to since August. Well, most at least. One of them was there for the Prague meetup too.

We had fun, did the touristy stuff, talked about EvE, plans for the corporation etc etc. I did bring my girlfriend along because she’s still jealous she wasn’t allowed to join me when I went to Prague so this was to make sure I wouldn’t hear her complain again for month on end that I don’t take her along.

One of the reasons why the EvE bug bit me again was due to talking about it. That never happens when I go out with real life friends. They know that I play but are not interested at all in the game itself. So I can’t really discuss anything, or tell them anything about it because they just don’t care or don’t understand it anyhow.

I’m still a big noob but I like talking about the game. Even though I don’t know too much about it 😉

Coincidentally, the EvE London meet was during the weekend too. This wasn’t something we planned in advance but we went over to the pub, sat in a corner, drank, laughed and met a few people. Most guys in the pub were Null-sec residents. So we didn’t really have much in common with the risk averse guys there. But there was one other wormhole corp and we kind off banded together.

We did meet a few guys from PL. And some guy came to say hi to us, we were supposed to know him by name but it literally didn’t ring a bell with any of us. I think it was JakeMeister or something. At least that’s what his shirt said. I’m guessing that due to null sec people knowing him he figured that others would too. He was wrong but still.

London was fun. I’m looking forward to more of these meets, although maybe in less expensive places…

Industry and me

by In RPG Tagged , , , 2 Comments

It’s been ages since I thought about doing industry.

The reason for this is because last time I did it, it started to become too much of a hassle for profits that kept on going down. I used to copy blueprints, invent them into T2 bpc’s and then manufacture those. It gave me a steady income of a few hundred million ISK on a monthly basis. But sometime last year. Actually, longer now, since it’s been since November 2015. The prices of that which I was making went down so hard that there was no longer a profit in it.

For some reason the products I was making were suddenly being sold at the material cost. This was most likely due to null sec miners and manufacturers going with the whole “Everything is profit if I mine it myself” way of thinking.

So I stopped doing it. I haven’t even thought about doing it until a few days ago, while I was looking at my two industrial characters, wondering what to do with them. They are also both my traders, one in Jita, one in Amarr.

So I fired up a few of my spreadsheets, checked ISK per hour and whatnot to see if maybe, just maybe I could get myself to start doing it again. But, I can’t.

Looking at what I could be creating with just those two characters, solo. I figured that in general I wouldn’t be getting a big enough influx of ISK from the things I make. I’d be making roughly 500m a month. Which used to be good enough for me. But that was in the time where I also had moons of my own, where I did missions for fun.

These days I take my fun out of PvP, losing ships and killing them.

After having played with a Naglfar in a C5, 500m a month is peanuts when you can make double that in an hour doing C5 sites.

So I decided to strip my industrial characters.

I might just create a new one someday. But the only thing I am really interested in is making capitals. I would LOVE to make or help make capitals. Even if it’s just the parts.

But every time I try to win some information about it I get told off because I just want to use one character on it. Want to help an alliance do it with the one character I have for this.

But alas, I might someday try and do it but for now, I’m making peace with the fact that I am no longer an industrial.

Stay tuned o7

 

My first time

by In MMO

First times can be an embarrassment to every party involved with it. Not just the person doing it for the first time, but also the other person or people involved. But that’s what makes it fun, great even. Especially when you’re doing it with people you love to play with.

Yesterday I had my first time. First time in a Tengu as a hunter on a BLOPSing fleet. We had decided a few days ago that we’d invite a bunch of people to a BLOPS-fleet and use our wormhole as a staging system. Because we can roll our null-sec static for new content.

I don’t fly T3’s much. If at all. I use a Tengu to scan and I’ve used a Proteus a few times as tackle or as an extra DPS ship. But I had never hunted for targets equipped with a cyno, until yesterday.

Most of the guys were rusty at doing it, our first target didn’t take us too long to find. One of the other hunters landed on three Rorquals. Which turned out to be fitted a bit better than our previous Rorqual encounters. So we lost a bunch of bombers and one of the hunting tengus. No big deal though, easy to replace.

After a few rolls I came upon a system in which I was earlier on grid with a Thanatos but when I was there it wasn’t within range. It was now. Unfortunately he had gone to a different site and I landed on a VNI. No biggy I’d just tackle that one. And here’s where I made a few of my mistakes.

As it turns out, if you want to cyno in your friends, you’re not allowed to go above a certain speed. So putting on my MWD to go to the target was my first mistake. But I grabbed tackle, all good right. Well here’s my second one. I forgot I had an extra-large Ancillary Shield Booster equipped. So I was dying to a VNI.

“But E’dyn how the hell do you forget about a shield-booster?” You might ask yourself. Well, it’s easy. First you need to remember that I normally don’t fly shield ships. Especially not a Tengu. The second thing that I didn’t think about was the fact that the shield booster had the cap booster icon, because it was loaded with navy cap booster 800’s. Normally when I’m flying a ship, this icon is to boost up my capacitor, and only that. So here I am, going down to a VNI in a 480m ship, wondering what the hell is going on whilst my friends are dropping bombers.

I lost the Tengu, to the amazement of both the VNI pilot and my corp mates. I spent the next 5 minutes after this death laughing about my stupidity whilst buying a new one in Amarr.

It even took me a few minutes to figure out that I did in fact have reps on this thing because at first I was proclaiming on comms that I did in fact not have a booster at all. Woops.

At least it’s not a mistake I’ll make again. And eventually I did catch a skiff and a venture afterwards. It’s not even close to what I lost. But I learned something and that’s what matters.

You always learn something when you’re doing it for the first time. And that’s a good thing.

Stay tuned o7

New Year, new opportunities

by In MMO Tagged 1 Comment

Happy new year to you all, may 2017 be better than 2016 😉

The last few days of the year we have moved around a bit. Downgraded back to a C2 and now trying to decide what the next course of action is.

I’m hoping to catch a few Rorquals again. I’ve already caught a few before and it’s entertaining to kill one with just interceptors. They hate it so much that after a while they just start self-destructing.

“Things” to do are on a special little list. Some positive, some negative. I still have to decide on where to start with it all.

We’ll see what the future brings

Stay tuned