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Another day, another stupid thing to do.

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , , , , , , ,

I lost an Orthrus yesterday. One that I should not have lost.

The day started well. My friend took some bait and they dropped a carrier on him. At which point I warped in my orthrus to try and kill the gnosis that was there while pointing the carrier. And he counter dropped it with his.
He lost a Stratios, I didn’t kill the Gnosis. And we also had to run away like little bitches from their carrier because I thought I was not using my Bhaalgorn toon but turns out he was the one in the Orthrus.

Woops. At least we avenged the death of the Stratios.

After that I fucked around a bit with fittings while keeping one eye on local. There was a fight going on. I said “Hey let’s undock our Orthrus’ and go blap a few from afar” he said sure. And we undocked.
At that point a Stork came to our citadel. Here I am, trying to watch 3 screens at the same timen going for it. Bad idea. Very bad idea.

An Orthrus was lost in this engagement. But hey, it’s my own fault, I’m rusty, it’s been a while since I had to kite.

So what do we do after losing one Orthrus? Go back and buy two more of course.

So I fill up my DST with some ships, about 1.4bill worth of ships in total. And start my small journey back.
My friend was scouting, when I hit lowsec he told me the gang of 20 was jumping to the gate I was just about to go through so told me to wait on high-sec side. What did I do? … Jump in of course because why not.

There I am, sitting with gate cloak and about 20 people around the gate. Luckily his tengu uncloaked so they were distracted. At which point I did the cloak warp trick to the next gate, and again and again.
I made it home safely, but damned if I didn’t almost lose another bunch of ISK right there.

Like I said, I’m doing stupid things in Low. But at least I’m having fun.

And in slightly other news. The guys we annoyed, reinforced our citadel.

Stay tuned o7

I finally moved to Low

by In Games, MMO Tagged , ,

It’s been a while since I last had an update. Hell during the past few weeks the site was even offline for a bit and I didn’t notice.

But I’m back and I’m in Lowsec, doing stupid things.

Lowsec is new for me. Literally never been there except for passing through. I don’t know anything about the timers, criminal or suspect or otherwise and it’s.. Well it’s all giving new thing for me. Even gate guns are new for me.

So let me tell you the story of our first day. I moved here with a friend of mine, we’re both in our own separate corporations and we both brought a bunch of ships, anchored a citadel and whatnot and ready to just do the things you’d do in lowsec.

We started the day with some smart bombing in Machariels. Nothing big, just two of us doing what we do, killing interceptors and whatnot.

Then we decided to take out our omens and go out for a roam. It would take us through one jump of high-sec but who cares right.

Now, those of you who know the lowsec mechanics may already see what is about to come. I sure as hell didn’t.
One jump before getting into high-sec we saw a floating mammoth. We, trigger happy as we are, killed it and went further along the path we set for ourself.
We come to the highsec gate, get a message stating that we’re now criminals and concord would shoot us but, whatever right. As long as we’re fast enough to warp it doesn’t matter.

What neither of us knew, is that if you have a criminal timer, concord won’t just shoot. No, you’ll also be prohibited from warping. And taking gates.

Well.. Fuck us.

A few seconds and two dead omens later we’re on our way back to our citadel, to lick our wounds.
Lesson learned, not going to happen again.

And this is just the start.

Stay tuned o7

Change is bad

by In MMO Tagged , , , , ,

I’m currently in the process of taking my ships out of our wormhole. A process that I hate doing because I’ve done it a few times in the past.

I’m going to look into doing something different in EvE for a while. Mostly because I haven’t been too active the past months. Part of the blame is real life, but another part is the direction the corporation was going.

I love most of these guys to bit. I see them as friends. Met a few of them in real life and had a blast. But a few months ago some things changed and ever since then I haven’t been able to really get into the game anymore. And that’s mostly due to these changes.

We had a merge and it basically made most of the guys I liked playing with not want to log in. Because the people we merged with were guys we didn’t know. People that would rather do PvE than come and help in PvP. And that’s the problem you get when suddenly a new group is thrown into the old group.

The ideas the new group has will come together with some of the ones in the old group. Making a few people feel left out. In this case, I’m one of those guys. I did not cope well with the change and it made me not want to log on.

And I’m self-aware enough to know that it’s mostly my own fault for not opening my mind. But damnit I was having fun! Change is bad mkay 😉

So! I’m moving out, and I’ll be looking into lowsec. In the off chance that any of you out there reading this and have a corporation that’s not too shabby. I’m looking for a corp to join! Low sec of course. I’ve never done low before so it’ll be new and shiny and might just help in getting my EvE back on.

If in the off chance I don’t find a corporation that might fit me, I might just go nomad. Take a blops, my hunter and start moving around New Eden.

We’ll see. First I need to get all this stuff out to high sec.

Stay tuned o7

The joys of real life

by In MMO Tagged , , ,

It has quite literally been a while since I last posted anything. I’m blaming this on real life. A while ago me and my girlfriend decided that we wanted to buy a place together instead of keep on renting.
As it turns out, that stuff takes a LOT of your time. Not only did we see hundreds of houses. We couldn’t find anything to our liking.

So a few months ago the decision was made we’ll just build one. So our hunt for a house, became a hunt for the perfect piece of land to build on.

Which, again isn’t too easy but luckily we had some friends on the lookout too.

In march I signed off on an agreement, a so called “promise of purchase” they call it here. And normally it should have been made official a few weeks ago but unfortunately the government decided to screw us over a bit and decide that the 10 trees are now “vulnerable” (freaking pines) and we weren’t allowed to cut them down.

So I had to contact lawyers, government officials etc etc. Luckily the government decided that they were total idiots with the decision and called it back because it was affecting thousands of land owners making their pieces of land worthless when , like me, they literally had just bought it to start building a house on.

So that’s part of the reason why I haven’t been on much.

The other part is.. Well it’s EvE. From time to time you need a break.

I just got myself a bunch of skill extractors, one of my dread alts will be scrapped. Seeing that I do not want to bear with him ever again and I have no use of an alt that can only fly a dread.

Meaning that I have about 30m in skillpoints to extract. Which will up my ISK wallet a bit again. That’ll be fun for when I have a few carriers I’ll be dropping in null soon.

Stay tuned

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I made a little deal

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , , ,

Wormhole space is a fickle mistress. And BoB a god that giveth and taketh.

The other day one of the guys on TeamSpeak was asking about someone docked up in one of our Citadels. A Russian, someone we had never seen before.

Seeing that we had bought this wormhole from someone, Astrahus included. I figured this was a previous occupant, logging onto EvE after being away for at least six months, only to log on and find him or herself in a citadel that they no longer owned.

So I decided to start a conversation with this person. And it turns out I was right. The guy (or girl I have no idea, for the sake of this story I’ll just go with him) was a member of a Russian corp that used to live here.

Now, the Russian part is pretty important in this. Since half the things that was said, was probably lost in translation somewhere. I basically offered him a way out to highsec and to buy his assets off of him. This was in my mind a pretty good deal. Since we could have easily just unanchored the citadel and taken all of the assets anyhow.

It took over 4 frustrating hours before he was finally able to show me his assets. Having never heard of EvePraisal, having never before used the fitting window to show his fits to people. It took a lot of screenshots on my end showing him which buttons to press etc etc.

I’m pretty sure he never even used a trade window before, since when the ISK I offered showed up as red for him he thought he was going to have to pay that.

But in the end I bought nearly 8bill in assets and ships off of him. Well, I paid him 8, it was worth quite a bit more but without a way for him to get it out, beggars can’t be choosers.

This has nothing to do with the post. I just like flying Panthers

After a while he logged on to another character on the account. I was ready to show him to highsec, so I warped to the first of three wormholes leading outside. He had undocked in a Kronos. Fine, he probably didn’t want to sell it to me and wanted it out. He warped to me. Only to warp away to one of the moons on which we put up a dead stick and then log off.

This confused me, I had no idea what he was doing.

After he logged on to his main again, this time undocking a Barghest and asking me to show him the way out.

Now, by this time, I decided that the way out for him, would be the pod express. The fact that he made me talk to him for hours on end to finally conclude our bargain had me frustrated. And I wanted some PvP action.

Knowing that he still had to move out the Kronos too, I decided that the Barghest could go. So I gave him a way out. Meanwhile, I asked a few of my guys to keep an eye on the tower. And I needed some tackle in order to catch him once he jumped the static.

After he was in highsec with the Barghest pilot, he logged off, and logged in the Kronos. Time for a proper goodbye.

He warped to the A3, thanked me again, and got bubbled as he jumped into our static C5.

It did not survive long. This was a marauder without a bastion module. I have no idea what it was used for, but it definitely was not made to survive too long.

I felt slightly bad about doing this afterwards. But, this is still EvE. And I did fulfil my end of the deal. He made it back to highsec.

Stay tuned

E’dyn

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