Blingu’s rise and fall

Last night, was a good night. I got to use my Proteus again! It has been with me since I started my wormhole adventure way back with Raka, and despite it surviving for that long, I haven’t used it as much as I would have liked.

But! Storytime!

Yesterday started with a little roam in null. I was supposed to get to a gate-camp the guys were doing but once I got there the null-bears had finally decided to fight and we had to move back home with our tail between our legs after losing a few of the fleet. Once back, the guys who didn’t drop fleet since it was getting late, decided to go out for a little roam again. As per usual these days we didn’t really find much.

We did have a frigate hole in our chain, in which there were a bunch of miners on scan, and even a few Brutix’ etc. We knew this thanks to the scouting skills of one of the guys. Supposedly they even put up a bubble on the incoming wormhole to their system. So they knew it was there, and they had eyes on it. We hoped to get a fight out of it going in, or at least piss off a few miners. Seeing as most of them really hate being disrupted.

We decided to go out there in interceptors.
The frigate hole was connected to us through a C2, we wanted to go through, grab point on a few miners and keep them pointed, our heretic pilot was a bit slower, so we waited on him in the C2. When you live in J-space, you tend to use d-scan more often than in k-space. Most of us do it every few seconds, and it works. We saw an Epithal on scan, it wasn’t at a POS, not at their Citadel, so we searched for it and found him at a POCO. Before you know it we had three points on it and started to shoot. A few seconds after first point, a Tengu pops up on d-scan, the Epithal has backup. Seeing that I tend to make bad calls, we killed the Epithal and engaged the Tengu. This is with four interceptors and a heretic. We didn’t even put a dent in the Tengu’s shield.

The heretic died and we disengaged, we didn’t want to lose more ships to this. Luckily the interceptors are quite fast and getting out of point/scram range was easy.
After that our heretic pilot wanted to keep eyes on him, hoping to get revenge. “I don’t care if it takes me all night I want my revenge.”
I put my Proteus pilot in the C2 too, keeping an eye on the entrance to our home.

Meanwhile the pilot out for revenge kept an eye on the citadel and we went into nullsec. Our primary goal wasn’t forgotten, we still wanted to do annoy the miners. But they weren’t around. All of them were just floating in their POS.

As we came back a Brutix landed on the home connection, it was 60k off the hole, 70k off my Proteus. I started slow boating towards him with my Proteus, one brave Raptor went ahead and put a point on him. Giving me the opportunity to decloak and make my way over there to point him too.

While all that was happening the Tengu undocked again and warped to zero on the hole.
We pointed him too tried to kill the Brutix, who jumped into our home hole once he figured out we’d kill him. Seeing as we still needed to have our revenge on the Tengu, we started to shoot him. We couldn’t scratch it, it couldn’t scratch us. This is where alts come in handy. We made sure that we had a few points on him while others shipped up. Seeing that we couldn’t kill him with the interceptors earlier, having one Proteus as help would probably not do much either. I shipped E’dyn into a Hurricane and in the end, due to Pilgrim neuts, Falcon jams and our DPS, we were finally able to exact vengeance on the Tengu that killed the Heretic. He was shiny and had an amazing tank, but no cap and a combined total of more than 4k dps means certain death. Even if it took more than 20 minutes that fight was pretty fun. Hooray for alts! If we didn’t have those on standby, we would not have been able to break him. Kudos to him.

The loot fairy was good on us too, we had 1b in loot drop on us, so we got out with 250mill each. I paid the guys with my liquid ISK and have the mods waiting for my next Jita run where I’ll be able to sell them.

After that whole fight we decided to go and play with the miners again. They were still POSsed up. In a small POS, with no defences…. Seeing that it was late and we wanted to have some laughs, we decided to go and poke it with a few bombers.

So juicy

So juicy

I have to say, it was the most exciting POS bash I’ve been in. Mostly due to the fact that they started to panic.
The skiffs were being packed up in the Rorqual. The Phoenix started moving and logged out. It almost seemed as if they knew their tower wasn’t stronted. Due to the moving around of ships, one of the online, AFK pilots was bumped out of their shield in his hulk. It died quickly, so did the pod.

Unfortunately, the POS was stronted, so I’m still not sure why they panicked. We might have to go back there tomorrow. Even if it’s just for a few laughs. Op success.

Bummer

Bummer

All in all it was a good night, just a shame I didn’t record it.

And on a little side note, to show that I’m still a noob. During the Tengu fight my point kept getting turned off, and I had no idea why. Turns out that instead of turning off overload, I had accidentally turned off auto-repeat. Yes, you can laugh, that could have cost us a Tengu kill, I’m glad it didn’t.

Stay tuned o7

Holiday fun

I haven’t posted in the past week, because I haven’t been playing anything. Which is weird for me, and I’m pretty sure that I’m experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

I was in Austria the past week, “climbing” mountains, riding the nicest road in all of Europe, etc. etc.

The supposedly nicest road in all of Europe is the Großglockner Hochalpenstraße, basically a 48km long road up to the top of the highest mountain in Austria. I have to admit, it was an amazing experience and I would do it again if I ever am in those parts.

It's quite beautiful

View on the Großglockner Hochalpenstraße

I missed EvE though. Mostly during the evenings what with not being able to enjoy the mountains when it’s dark.

But I’m back now, and ready to get going!

I got myself a new screen and a new desktop stand for my monitors. I had two stands, one was able to support two screens, the other just the one. But I bought myself an Arctic Z3 pro. Took me a bit to set it up but I’m happy with it and it looks way, way better now.

My first hour online again was spent modifying my trades, my pi and trying out the new purity of thrones event. Kudos to CCP with this one since it’s more fun than the previous one. They’re on the right track to make something nice with PvE again.

Stay tuned o7

Skill queue fun!

It’s been a week now since I started the new character. This character was created with two goals in mind. Having a third character to fly a Rattlesnake with for when I finally decide to do C5 sites. And flying a Dread.

In order to make it a little easier on myself I bought 10 skill injectors and injected them in the character. Giving him 5 million unallocated skill points. I have only used part of them right now to get his cybernetics to lvl 4. This so I could put +4’s in him. I am still unsure if getting +5’s would be worth the cost. Seeing that they cost about 80-90m more per implant than a +4, so for now I’m leaving it at that.

I did the new opportunities on this character and also did two of the advanced career agents. Namely the military and advanced military one. I actually liked it. But I used to run level 4 missions all the time so I guess this is partly nostalgia for me. After finishing them he was brought in Jita, due to my general laziness I tend to buy everything I need in Jita.

Having an actual plan for my skills on one of my character is fun. I don’t really do much planning, both my other combat alts and my indy alt have no plan. I randomly put skills in their queue and hope they’ll be useful in the future. E’dyn is currently training JDC V aftering having finally finishing logistic cruisers V. Unfortunately Jump Drive Calibration is a skill that takes about 40 days to get it from IV to V. So this will take a while.

With the skill plan I have for the new character his first goal is to fly a rattlesnake asap with the fit I use. In theory this will finishing in about 30 days. After that he will start training into a Naglfar. It’s not that I have a Naglfar right now, or have an actual plan to put one somewhere, it’s just nice to have the option. Due to living in a C2 the only way to fly one in the wormhole is to build one in it. Which I might do eventually, we’ll see.

My other alt is also training a few more skills for the Rattlesnake, after that I had Astrometric Rangefinding and other scanning skills ready in her queue. I might decide on changing that. She’s my go to scanner for the chain but I’m not sure if it’s that much better to have those skills at lvl V.

I’ll need to check that out.

Stay tuned o7

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Death by glorious explosions.. Or not?

A few weeks ago it was decided that on the second of September we would be doing a capital roam through null sec. The idea was to fly around until we get a fight.

So that day was yesterday and I’m a bit disappointed. Once more null sec did not deliver what I expected it would. This time I expected it to deliver a quick and sudden death. But unfortunately this was not the case.

We had a fleet of around 30 people. Of which 20ish were in subcaps, 3 cynos and 7 dreads.

We figured that if we went gate to gate, we’d have at least someone who would light a cyno on our ass and give us a fight. We were wrong, dead wrong.

We went to the TEST staging system, talked in local, showed our caps and all they did was tell us that we probably had PL waiting somewhere to jump in as soon as TEST fought.

A strange reasoning but ok. All in all the fleet was pretty boring. Where’s the fun in going out with capitals if everyone stays docked up.

Now, TEST did use Delve as an excuse, since supposedly they’re deployed there. I guess that’s possible, I wouldn’t know really, I don’t care for null sec politics and have no idea what goes on where. The joy/curse? Of living in wormhole space.

At least I got a few nice screenshots out of it. If I didn’t screw it up you should be able to see them in a gallery below.

I also started a third account again the other day. I want to fly a capital. My dream ship is a Nyxx but I can’t afford that. On second place capital wise I would put a Naglfar. Due to the fact that I am already training my main into so many things, I decided that it would probably be easier to have a new toon just for that.

And thus E’dynn was born. Basically number two. I will be training him towards Naglfar, and also as a rattlesnake pilot. This way when clearing sites in the C5 I will have 3 rattlers I can count on. Making the site clearing so much faster. It will take a bit of training, but I’ve got time. At least with this character I actually have a plan.

If there’s one thing I suck at it’s making skill plans and sticking to them. I’m currently training E’dyn for JDC V but I have no idea what I’ll do next with him. Feel free to drop me a few hints on what might be usefull 😉

Enjoy o7

 

Risk Aversion

Whenever we go out on roams in Null we pretty much know that one out of two things will happen.

Either they will all dock up and stay docked until we’re gone, or they will try and get a huge fleet going so they can get us out of their little pockets.

This is because the null mentality basically equals not wanting to take risks and lose your ships. And I get that, I do. I’ve been like that in the past, but I have come to hate it.

I love fights, I enjoy not knowing the outcome of them, of being one of two teams, or even three, and wondering if I’m going to be the one that will come out on top.

What I hate though, is being part of a big blop, or being killed by one.

I know, I know, this might sound like a bit of a rant, and perhaps it is. But still, people should stop being afraid to get into a good fight.

The other day we were out on a little roam in our static, there were 8 of us, just a few Omen Navy Issues and other small stuff. We figured we could poke the locals into at least coming to shoot us by enthosising their stuff. So we brought in a Harbinger with an enthosis link.

The locals did a bit of docking and undocking, to see if we were still there, to tease us with ships, I don’t know. It wasn’t all that fun.

About half an hour later we finally saw them jump things in the system, local spike, 10 more people joining.

They undocked a FAX machine and we saw D-scan filling.

We were getting ready to fight, a few cerbs, tengu, legion, we could take that, or at least try.

That’s when they decided to make it even easier for them and they lit a cyno. They did not drop just one carrier, there were 7 on grid. Not something we could take, so we had to bail.

It was time to see if we could get some more people in the fight. We wanted to fight them, badly. After about 20 ish minutes we had 40 people ready, we knew the other guys had about 50 around so we could fight this if we paid attention.

Unfortunately, the other guys decided that they do not like playing with even odds. So they didn’t do a thing.

The alliance party split up and while we were on our way back to the wormhole the nullsec bears tried to pick off a few stragglers. Due to my own fault, I got caught in a bubble.

Sabre, 2 hurricanes, crow, stiletto on grid. I could tank that while the rest were warping back. I even nearly killed the sabre but due to me not having point he was able to get out with 10% structure, which is good for him. That kind of thing gets your heart racing.

When the other guys were back we had 2 gilas, a curse and a Stratios on grid. We could take this if we paid attention. But unfortunately, they brought in a geddon. So I told the guys to bail. We couldn’t take those neuts. I saw my tank break down slowly and unfortunately I was not the only one who lost a ship, since we also lost a Stratios.

It’s a shame that in general people in Nullsec are so risk averse. I wouldn’t have minded losing my Gila to a normal fight, but c’est la vie. It’s been replaced and I’m ready to go out in space again. Hopefully finding targets that do fight back.

I’m a bit salty about the loss but I shouldn’t be, it was my own fault. We didn’t warp back together, we didn’t fly as a fleet. It was late and everyone was in a “let’s go home” kind off mood. And that’s when stuff like this happens.

2016.08.24.12.34.16

At least I learned from it, this will help in future fights (or flights)

stay tuned o7

Meeting corporation IRL

My past couple of days were not spent on EvE for a change. Or not ingame at least. I was in Prague with members of my corporation. Which was super fun. And the week before that I went to Gamescom, which is something I’ve been doing in the past few years just because it’s a fun experience.

I don’t go to the con to play games though, because I don’t like standing in line for over three hours just to play a game in advance of its release date for about 30 minutes. It’s all about the atmosphere in the arena.

As for Prague, I never really did a real life meetup with people that I play games with, this was the first time that I decided “fuck it might as well” and went.
Prague is about a ten hour drive from my place so instead of taking a plane which would have taken one and a half, I decided that I’d do it by car. Make a little road trip out of it.

On the road I picked up two other guys from the corporation. The fun thing about doing that was not having a clue what those guys looked like. I showed them my car, told ‘em that’s what they need to look for at the designated pickup places and that’s it. That was step one of the adventure, step two was getting through Germany and the Czech Republic, into Prague.

I left on Thursday morning around 6.15 and we arrived in Prague at the hotel at around 17.45, this included a few needed stops on the way, and a detour in the city because instead of listening to my navigation system, I listened to one of the guys. As per usual on coms, that wasn’t one of the best ideas 😉

Prague riverside view

We spent a few days there, getting to know each other, putting a face behind the name and talking about EvE. It’s a nice change of pace from going out with my real life friends, since they know nothing about EvE and aren’t interested in it. I loved talking to others about it, making ingame plans, coming up with stuff to do etc etc.

All in all, a very good time. Although I did miss logging in. Since the place we stayed at did not have Wifi and my roaming charges are through the roof.

I came back yesterday, dead tired but with some great new memories. All in all, that was a good way to spend a few days off work.

The first thing I did logging in last night was turn on my PI again. Since my planets have been doing nothing since Thursday. After that, I put Jump Drive calibration V in my skill queue, because supposedly I should have that if I want to play around with a Blops. I still need to buy a Panther but I’m going to be doing that as soon as I come in Amarr or Jita.

I’m also thinking about maybe resubbing a third account. I still need to decide on it but I might want to do that again. I just need to decide on what I want to be doing. Since after training E’dyn into blops some more, I will probably start training for Dreads.

Trading wise I haven’t done much in the past few weeks. I’m buying and selling plexes every few days, same with skill injectors. It’s a small profit because I keep forgetting about the higher taxes on normal stations. But it’s something.

Stay tuned o7

It’s not always about the ISK, but sometimes it is

Going on roams means dying. Not all the time of course but you can be certain that the loss of a ship and pod are inevitable. Which means that you need to make ISK one way or the other.

I have plenty of ISK to lose a few bill in ships, but as has been said in previous blogs. I’m somewhat of a space-Jew. I used to want ISK in order to pay for a character with the skills I wanted. Now I just want ISK to see that little line on jEveAssets rise.

In the past it went along the lines of “I want to have 1b” once getting there it was 5, then 10, then 20, 25. My next goal is 30b, and this is where I’m starting to have a few problems with. I have had a few lucky breaks in the game, some of my ISK coming from winning Moros’ on Blink and selling them. Some coming from lucky trades. I think half of my ISK came from T2 production.

Came, because for reasons unknown to me, this is no longer profitable as a solo industry player.

What I used to do is buy the parts I needed in Jita, haul them to my production facilities, make the T2’s from my own researched BPC’s and haul them back to Jita. Making a solid 200-600k profit per. After being semi-afk from eve between January and June this no longer seems viable.

For some reason that would now give me a 400k loss per T2 product made. So now, I need to look into another way to make ISK, good ISK. Because I still want to get to that 50billion milestone, and more.

Right now I’m wondering what I should be doing with all the industry skillpoints on that alt. Should I extract it, sell the injectors? That’d give me a nice quick ISK injection. But what if I want to start production again? What if I’m just not looking at things correctly and I’m missing out on a good way to make ISK from production.

And what about my science SP? Do I ever want to bother making T2 BPC’s again? I’m honestly at a loss on what to do with that alt.

The only thing I can do right now, is getting her accounting up, because silly me still keeps forgetting about tax percentages when I buy “low” and sell “high”.

Where theoretically I’d get a profit of about 20m per item, due to taxes that can easily go down to only 5mill. Woops, lesson learned there.

If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them out. I need an ISK printer.

Ps: I already do PI, making coolant right now, might have to try something new there too.

I don’t even know what I’m doing

FC: “Could you take over for a bit”

ME: “Sure”

That’s how it went on TS but in my mind I was going “Oh fuck, I’m not even sure what’s going on, I’m not good at this FC bit, we only kill MTU’s when I lead a roam”

I basically don’t feel that comfortable yet in the role of an FC.
I like doing it, but I dislike not finding us anything to shoot. It makes me wonder if I’m boring my fleet members, if they’re even enjoying themselves.
I guess it’s partly due to bad luck, partly my fault? I don’t know.

Did a few things in the last week.

We had to go help defend something in null-sec. I don’t remember what because it was so damn boring. It just showed me once more why sov-null is not for me at all. Something about ihub, enthosis and waiting. All of those things are not fun, especially the waiting part, and supposedly the other two translate roughly to the same thing. You wait for things to happen.

I get that some people don’t mind that kind of playtime. Where you just follow orders, wait for the FC to call the shots and undock when you have to, dock up when told etc etc.
I’m not a fan of that. After about half an hour of waiting, finally allowed to undock, we warped to where the so called fight was happening, only to warp away again because our numbers were not needed (WHAT?!)

So that was lots of fun. But not really.

We did a roam the other day. As is usual since that’s what happens about 80% of the time.
I took over as FC for about half an hour. And while I was wondering about my own incompetence we caught an Ishtar, and a bit later a miner. It’s not much but at least it’s not just an MTU.

hPWY1rW

After that little roam it was decided to “rageroll” the static. Which basically means that we were going to keep rolling the hole in search of targets.

Let’s just say that ended up in me dying.

My death, once more taught me that station games are bad.

Fighting is fun if you outnumber them and even fun if you get outnumbered.
But only if you have a chance to beat the odds. Dying because someone drops a carrier on you or suddenly undocks in the exact counter of your fleet. No fun in that.

Well, it’s kind of funny if they drop a carrier on you to save a mining fleet. That one did make me smile.

But station games, they’re not fun. I don’t like it when people try to bait you into getting them only to then dock up, and undock in something bigger. Either you try and shoot people, or you run like hell. That’s the way it should work, and it does work. Sometimes in your favour, on other times. Not so much.

Next time I’ll just check it out from a distance and if we do get to destroy something on station, I’ll come and help. Next time, I’ll try not to die

Stay tuned o7

The joy of trading

I try to do some trading every once and a while to get my ISK flow going. But I don’t really calculate if I’m actually making a profit while doing so.

So I decided to start doing that and noticed something that I should have thought about a while back. due to the citadels and the new tax system, I was trading a few  items at a bit of a loss. Not large enough to notice but still, a loss.

I wasn’t paying attention to how much it cost me in taxes vs how much I paid for it in the first place. Seeing as I wasn’t doing that, I lost a few million ISK.

Not the end of the world, but once more a nice example of how I should be paying better attention to what’s in patch notes and start checking what that means for me.

Luckily I caught it on time.

Now the next step would be deciding if I want to stay trading in Jita/Amarr, or if I should move to a citadel one jump away. The main problem with doing that, would be my inherrent laziness. I don’t want to do one jump (I know) to put up buy orders in Jita or Amarr. It’s stupid but It feels like a waste of time.

Despite the fact that I can literally save a few hundred million ISK in taxes in the long run.

We’ll see what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll start a few production lines again but most of the T2 stuff I produced is getting made at a loss by other people. Which I still don’t get. The whole mindset of “I’m mining it so it’s not at a loss” is so wrong.

Stay tuned o7

FC, should we jump too?

Yesterday was the second time I played FC. Although maybe we shouldn’t count the first one, since it wasn’t that long one but still.

I’m still new at all this. Doing it to make sure that I, and the others, have something to do. So called content creation.

It basically started with us going through our null sec static in cruisers. I told them that we might die, so what do my fleet members do? Undock in cruisers like a Gila and Orthrus’, because you know, if you’re going out, might as well do it in style.

Seeing as I am not quite that experienced, and I never cared about null sec politics or null sec in general, I had no idea that an area like Syndicate is dead.
So dead in fact that most of the systems we jumped in were empty.
Mistake number one. But, so be it, we had a wandering hole that led to another null.
Figured we’d go poke around in there.

It was a frigate sized hole so we did have to reship, I called for interceptors or other frigate sized ships, so we went there with a few interceptors, a sabre and a magus.

This time we were in Fountain. Turns out Fountain is filled with people that do not want to fight. They just dock up as soon as a neutral is close, which is a shame.

While I was checking Dotlan on what system to jump to, I of course jumped every once in a while without telling my fleet to do so. Mistake number two.
Which basically meant that every few jumps I had the question “FC, should we jump in too?” followed with a few laughs, since all in all it’s funny to poke on the FC right?

They even made a deal that if we didn’t find anything they could kill me. I did not agree to this but I wasn’t asked for my opinion. You see what I had to work with here.

Luckily for me and my, oh so expensive interceptor, we eventually found something. The Magus pilot had a Drake on d-scan, and found him ratting in an asteroid belt (I know right). Once he called point the fleet warped in and made sure they had him pointed too. Me, being the eager fc was already two systems further so I scrambled back, while being happy that something was caught.

As you can imagine, with a few interceptors and a sabre, it can still take a while to break a Drake’s tank. Which gave him enough time to call for help in local. Not that any was forthcoming. “Guys, help, I’m in asteroid belt x, there’s 5 of them”

Even with that intel not much happened. A jackdaw did land on us, but unfortunately for him we were eager for kills so he was pointed and killed quite fast.

Not long after that we killed the Drake and his pod. The loot going to our Magus pilot. Hooray! Kills.

Onwards to the next few systems. So we went on, only to find a gate camp, the Drake and Jackdaw’s friends. Good thing we were in inties. Or at least, most of us. We did lose our Sabre, and I thought that was it.

FC was bad. I figured our Magus pilot was following us too, but turns out he wasn’t there yet. So about 10 minutes after we had gotten past the camp, he got killed. In hindsight, I should have made sure that everyone was there, I should not have taken the gate, or at least told the Sabre and Magus pilot to turn around. Seeing that we couldn’t take a 20 man T3 destroyer camp with just our little fleet.

But so be it, live and learn. I’ll do better next time, and next time I’ll know that I should reroll the static if we come out in Syndicate or Fountain.

I had my fun, and I’m 85% sure that the rest of the guys had fun too. So operation success

 

Stay tuned o7