So much to do, so little time

As per usual, I have been “busier” than I thought I would be doing other things (gaming, lots and lots of gaming).
I have been meaning to write more often but unfortunately, didn’t.

My fault, so, hello there.

There’s been a few things going on in EvE, on one hand you have the new event that’s Dr. Who inspired, and on the other you have all the people complaining about it. That’s about all I know since I am staying away from reddit a bit. At least the eve one.

Every single time I go on /r/eve I regret it, mostly because everyone is so damn negative.

Sure, they’re not wrong about the fact that whomever is at the top is currently making very, very dumb decision (Ratati?).
But instead of being an echo chamber of negativity, at least try to spread some joy too.

What I was meaning to write about a week and a half ago is about me being a dumbass. Not necessarily out of stupidity, but more being a bit too cocky in what I was trying.

The new event started, I had a nice little Astero, and I was going to do some scanning.

There was a nice connection to our wormhole and a few relic sites around so I decided to hit them up. The high-sec static was nice little extra, because this meant that maybe, just maybe someone would come in with a purely hacking ship and land on me.

And lo and behold, a little heron popped up. Now my train of thought was “Oe a Heron, that’s going to be an easy kill”

I was wrong, very very wrong. Turns out that I was actually scanning around in EVE University’s home hole and I had no idea. Not only that but instead of looking up the name of the heron pilot, I was just “eh easy target”

This little Heron had a bite and I lost an Astero. It was fun though, and I learned a lesson. The first one being that I shouldn’t judge a Heron for it’s cover, and the second that my Astero was not tanky enough at all. If I had better repair modules on it there would not have been any issue at all. But hey, live and learn. Afterwards had a nice chat with the pilot and I asked for his fit, mostly because I wanted to know where the bite came from, this so I could have it happen less in the near future.

Two days before this we had a fleet going on, I am trying my best to join every single one that we do since I do want to play the game more often. We were messing around in null with Horde a bit, trying to get them to undock more ships. Which they did, but hey, I survived, so that’s nice!

Escaping intact is always great

Stories like this is what makes EVE great, the sandbox in it all. Yes, the scarcity is bullshit, yes there’s less pilots in space and that’s a shame. But those who are still out there are still making stories. Less so than before but they’re still there.

And they’re more than willing to bring out the big guns

So how about instead of complaining on reddit about the lack of pilots, you start undocking? Who knows, you might actually have fun.

Stay tuned o7

E

Eviction target

For those of you that, like me, have been living under a rock the past few days. Here’s some news for you.

Hard Knocks is getting evicted by Goonswarm.

I don’t know much about how and why but from what I gather is that The Initiative has been planning to do this for the past couple of month.  

People are currently tuning in as the current biggest Wormhole corporation in EVE is getting evicted from their home hole. Something many people have thought impossible.

I have been in wormhole groups for the past couple of years and there’s always been a bit of a love/hate relationship when talking about HardKnocks. There’s no arguing that they did good, they were the first to build a keepstar in their home, are able to bring huge fleets and rent out C6 space.

Problem that most people have with it, is that there’s absolutely no way to fight a powerblock like that. None.

As a pilot that has always been in small wormhole corporations, the moment I rolled into rage I made sure that the whole chain got rolled. I never wanted anything to do with them being anywhere near me because it meant overwhelming numbers and losing my ships without ever having stood a chance. 

The fact that they rent out the C6 space also meant that other corporations never really had a chance to set it up themselves. They’re basically to wormholes what null sec alliances do to null sec. Something I’ve already talked about in the past that I hate.

It’s a shame that this is a null sec alliance pushing them out. But let’s be real, no way in hell would us wormholers been able to make this happen. We do not have the resources, logistics or people to do this. 

I’m curious what this means for the future of wormhole space. I just hope it won’t come and bite us all in the ass. I’d rather not have HK be replaced by a bunch of nullseccers. 

Especially seeing that I am starting to log in once more. 

Stay tuned o7

The way of life

A while back I told myself that if I ever decided to go check out K-space again, I would join up with Goonswarm. Not because I know much about null sec politics and because I think they’re “cool” and whatnot. But mostly because I thought that if I were to join a group, why not join the group everyone loves to hate.

So when the guys I flew with decided to go back to Stain for a while. I just went ‘Ok, let’s see if I can get into Goons’

At the time of writing this, I have literally been part of the Goonswarm for seven days.

In those seven days I have setup jabber, mumble coms, other authentication stuff like their forums etc etc. And joined in on a few fleets. I had a few problems with the fleets itself but that’s the way of life out here.

I killed a few Rorquals earlier today, so that’s nice. We did a two hour roam with a 100+ man fleet. Which was new for me, not really as exciting as doing the same thing with only 10 to 15 people.

But I did come to the conclusion that I really, really don’t like nullsec.

I hate local with a passion, I hate that they have programs like Vintel or TACO or whatever else that can scrape the chatlog and give you a literal warning sound when a neutral arrives because scouts told you.

I hate that you are literally safe from everything as long as you use those things. It’s just not for me. I like wormhole space and the fact that my home will randomly pop in your home from time to time.

That I can scan around and watch someone without them knowing I’m there.

Kspace is just not for me.

I am currently making a few new plans. I will be setting up in a wormhole once more. But this time I won’t be joining an old one, it’ll be a fully new set up. New citadels etc. New way of living.

This is giving me a new objective. And that’s what you need in this game. Objectives to aim for and succeed in.

I’m sure it’ll work out fine. I have a few things in mind that will happen in the next few weeks.

On a little ISK related notice. I have put a big part of my liquid ISK into PLEX. There have been a few rumors that make me think that we haven’t seen the end of the price inflation yet.

A few weeks ago I had bought a few dozen Machariel hulls, right after the announcement that in the near future alpha clones will be able to use them. Since then their price has gone up by almost 50% so that was fun to watch. I still have about 16 hulls left right now. Once the price starts to drop again I’ll probably sell them. Until then, I’m keeping them around. You never know.

Stay tuned o7

EvE and me

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…

Null sec.. Why did I do this again

The past few weeks haven’t been too good for us. In order to fix this I decided to see if we can do some random stuff in nullsec. Seeing that we had people that came from nullsec around, and the guys we were joining were supposed to be pretty ok. I figured that maybe it could help us get some activity up again.

I was wrong, dead wrong. It did help in reminding me why I hate nullsec though. The guys we joined were blue with everyone within 20 jumps of them. The whole region and the region next to it were their friends. Which is just silly, no fun in that.

Not only that but when intel channels tell you where someone is, and another program literally sounds an alarm when you’re ratting. How on earth do people think this is fun? One of the guys just used our time in there to get his ISK up a bit more by literally watching Netflix while his Ishtars were AFK in Havens. Everytime a neutral came close an alarm would sound and he’d have plenty of time to get out.

Null-seccers are literally more risk averse than any other dweller in the game. Even people in High-sec take more risk.

But ok, that’s ratting, what about pvp? Well PvP wise it was pretty much dry too. With all those blue you have to travel a bit to kill someone. I joined a 250 man fleet and nothing happened. They were there to watch a Fortizar while PL was killing the shields off the M-O keepstar.

At that point I decided I wanted to get out of null again as soon as possible. Being risk averse and part of the big blop is fun for some people, but not for me. I hate local, I hate that people can just set up a program and have an alarm sound if someone’s too close. And I sure don’t like the fact that if you’re not outnumbering them 10 to 1 you won’t fight.

I’ll stick to wormhole space thank you very much. At least you need to put some effort in doing things there.

I admit it’s not always easy, especially if you’re one of the only ones doing it. But at least I feel pride in doing things.

Even something as silly as setting up an extra Citadel made me smile. Mostly because I was pretty sure Inner Hell had a fleet logged off in our hole to come shoot it once it unanchored. Glad I was wrong there. They’ve made one my guys pretty paranoid since they already dropped him a few times.

Which makes it a fun running joke on TS.

I’m leading a corp now. I should probably make some more rules for the guys to ignore.

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

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

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

Let’s go fishing

I learned something new the other day. Which, surprise surprise, can happen every once in a while.

Well two things but we already knew about the first one so that didn’t count. Let’s talk about that first.

Waiting on a hole before doing something. Don’t do that, just, don’t.

We have a few scouts in certain holes, holes of people we want to play with.

Are we doing phrasing?

The other day, one of our exits was about 4 jumps from our “friends” so we decided to go pay them a visit. We put up a fleet and went towards their entrance, having most of the fleet wait one jump out, and the tackle on the hole. The plan was basically for me and our Lachesis to warp in, point an Ishtar and Megathron, and poke them into fighting us.

Where we missed, is that we were waiting for too long. Their scout had just jumped into the system, and warped to his entrance, right as we were landing on it, he landed to. I’m going to guess their comms were something along the lines of “Guys! There’s stuff coming to scram you, get the fuck out now!”

As soon as we saw it was one of theirs, we jumped in and warped to the site, only to land and have the Ishtar warp off right in front of our noses. We stuck around for a few minutes hoping to get a fight, but they knew we had Logi waiting for us, so that didn’t really work out the way we planned. Oh well, can’t do much about that. So off we were, on to the home system to go roam null-sec.

In our null-sec roam, I learned how to spearfish. For those of you that don’t know what it is, it’s the use of Command Destroyers and their jump portals, to warp someone away from their fleet. You use two of them, one to jump in, and one to jump out again. Bringing you, your fleet, and your target, 100km away from their buddies.

Which is actually quite fun to do. Especially if they don’t see it coming, which honestly, you should. If you see two Bifrost’ come at you, you ball up, easy as that.

So we did our little fleet jump, caught a Typhoon, who’s friends existed of about 8 Domi’s, but seeing as he was over 10km away from them, we were able to catch him off guard.

pew pew

They had a crow and a Tengu that came in to help him, it was no use. We almost killed the Tengu too but had to get out because the null-sec corporation had undocked a carrier. And as most of you know, carriers hurt quite a bit.

Oh! And I got another kill mark on my Gila! That’s number 4! Hooray!

Stay tuned o7