Failed once more

You win some, you lose some. And these days I’ve been on a losing streak when it comes to trying out new things.

 As some of you know I was searching for a null sec corporation to join but didn’t really like the idea of CTA’s. And there’s a good reason for it. In general whenever I read about null, I don’t really like what I see. And my latest experiment only showed me that my gut feeling wasn’t wrong.

Please note, that in this blog I might seem extremely negative towards the people I joined. However this is negativity towards null sec and the mindset towards it. The people I joined were actually extremely friendly and fun to chat with. The mindset of the alliance however, was not something for me. You’ll see why.

I joined a null sec corporation/alliance about a week and half ago. In that time I haven’t done much at all. Not because I didn’t want to, but due to silly rules and the fact that I didn’t want to be on TeamSpeak.

The people in the corporation were nice when I said hi in the chat, I immediately got some help in getting set up with a ratter, told where to find contracts for their pvp doctrines etc. etc. 
It didn’t take long until I was ready in a Dominix to blow some rats and earn some isk. Once I undocked, I went on to one of the anomalies, released my sentries and got ready to blap. Not 5 minutes after undocking I noticed that people in corp were asking me why I wasn’t on coms. Prepare for ‘Strike one’

For my job I tend to have a a lot of meetings during the day, where I listen to people talk about what needs to be done, and where I tell other people what’s going to be done. This happens in live meetings seeing that I’m in Belgium, and the other people are all over the world. 
Wearing a headset gives me a headache due to me not enjoying noise much since I had an accident few years ago. So when I get home, I don’t really want to get on voice coms unless I join a fleet because you do need some coordination and just typing isn’t going to give you fast enough reaction times. But not when I’m just out ratting. 

That was my first mistake, figuring that people wouldn’t need me to be on coms because there was nothing going on. But for some strange reason people are so afraid of losing ships that I needed to be on coms so they could warn me if somebody came through to our systems. 

Somebody.. Not a fleet, no, just one person, one guy/girl who isn’t part of the alliance or it’s blues and I was expected to dock up. 
In the few minutes that they explained this to me I had cleared one wave of the rats, and then, as luck would have it, a neutral turned up in local. One lonely guy, probably just moving around in null a bit, but they told me to dock up, because who knows, he might be part of a bigger fleet, or drop a cyno on me.

Strike two.

If someone were to drop a cyno, on my 250m ratting Dominix just for that kill, I’d smile and tip my hat to him/her. I really didn’t understand what the big deal was for one neutral, but I docked up and seethed slightly, wondering what I would do in the meanwhile. There was no talk about hunting the intruder down, it was better to wait it out. 
After that I logged out for the weekend, not wanting to log back in. When I logged back in on Sunday evening, I had about 10-20 EvEmails about CTA’s. I didn’t really bother reading them because most of those were at times that I had better things to do. 

Yesterday, my friend joined in an operation with them. A big fleet was going to go out on a roam looking for fights. Turned out that my friend, due to the fact that he could only fly an inty, he was expected to just make pings, wasn’t even allowed to join in on the fight.

Strike three.. All of these things, are the reason why I flew back to Jita an hour ago.

I know that highsec “carebears” are something that null sec people like to laugh with. But isn’t ratting thesame? If you dock up as soon as a stranger comes into your system, doesn’t that make you worse than the carefree bear that doesn’t care. 

Null sec might be fun for some people, but not for me. I’d rather see some action or do new things. So on to the next project.. I’m going to go back to exploring wormhole space, but from my own little hub. We’ll see what happens. 
Wormhole space was entertaining because you only see who’s with you, once they uncloak right on top of you. It seems like I like the way that works.

Stay tuned o7

Fear of the dark

I did it. I made a ‘Looking for Corporation’ post. The only problem now is, that I haven’t posted it yet.
I can’t decide on whether I want to have my main (this guy) or the alt that I have in RvB in a WH.

Logic dictates that I should do it with my main character. He’s most skilled, almost able to jump into strategic cruisers and in general the character I like playing with the most.

But will this fact not change when I am no longer able to go out without the “fear” to lose a ship.
Because this is what this is all about, I’m afraid of the life beyond High-sec, I never even went anywhere but high sec for longer than a few hours.

Fear of the unknown is something most humans deal with, and I’m dealing with it in a game.
I’m trying to do what most people in high sec are afraid of doing, and that’s taking that step towards the other life. Where danger lurks everywhere. Or at least that’s what us carebears think it does. Maybe I’m exaggerating, maybe I’m not.

But I have to make a decision

Please restock..

I forgot how annoying it is when you don’t have the correct amount of materials in stock when manufacturing. A month ago I made sure that I had enough materials for my manufacturing runs for the next two months. That was before I decided to start doing it with an extra character.

So yesterday when I logged in on my alt account and wanted to create a few hundred T1 modules that I will later turn into T2, I was confused at the fact that I didn’t have enough materials.
This is why you should plan, and why you should have enough in stock. I have flown to Jita for different things, so many times, instead of just going there, buy everything I need, and then fly it back home.

I’m starting to learn though, yesterday I made sure that I have enough raw material to last.. Well I have no idea how long it will last. Despite me knowing that I shouldn’t, I still use my liquid ISK as a marker on how “space rich” I am. Which means that I don’t want to spend too much ISK on materials.

I did spend about 1b on fuel and 1b on materials. So I’m back down to 2b liquid ISK.

I’m kind of hoping that fuel will skyrocket with Rubicon and then I will sell a bit seeing that I’m going to start making my own. But we’ll see if that’s going to happen or not.

Boom!

I found a few screenshots with explosions in it… I think I will go run some missions, if my girlfriend doesn’t come over at least. 

The lessons you learn

Last night I decided that I wanted to go do a level 4 mission again. I went ahead and accepted a Guristas Extravaganza. As most of you that run missions know, it’s not too hard when you’re tanked well, you just sit there and shoot everything in sight. So that’s what I did, lock down as much as I could and just shoot them to pieces.

Naturally, that was what I did on the last pocket too, deciding to go for the frigates and destroyers first. But after a few weeks of doing mostly manufacturing, I had forgotten that shooting the trigger, is not something you want to do fast if there will be multiple battleships warping in.

Shooting the trigger of that next warp is not a smart thing to do either.

That is, of course, exactly what I did. Not only did I shoot the first two triggers, I shot every trigger. It didn’t take long for all the newly warped in battleships to get my shields down to 15%. This was the first time in a long while that I was actually afraid of losing my ship, I had to align to the closest asteroid belt and warp out of there. I tried going in there again, see if I could shoot a ship and then get back out, but that plan didn’t turn out too well.

At least that’s something I learned for next time; I’ll have to watch the triggers.

Luckily someone in the E-Uni channel was kind enough to help out, not only did she do 9 jumps, she came in here Scorpion Navy Issue, tanking everything in the room as we killed the ships.
I’m happy that she came along, very happy even that she decided to stop what she was doing to help this little noob that forgot about triggers.

This just goes to show that not everyone in EVE is a heartless scammer and that there are people out there willing to help out others. The only thing she asked for in return was for me to pay back her ammo and return the favor to someone else when someone asks for help.

Which is something I will definitely do, I’ve already been doing it whenever I could actually help anyhow. It’s nice to help out those who’re stuck.

On another note.. I really like the Scorpion, I should get one myself, the only problem is that I just can’t fly it worth a damn. And there’s still so much on my skill plan. But I want one, maybe I’ll just buy one to spin in my hangar and fantasize about all the lovely things I will never be able to do with it.

Survived to fight another day! 

Stay tuned o7

Is it worth it?

While updating my invention and manufacturing runs in my POS I was talking to a friend of mine who was helping me out with the understanding of invention when I first started doing it. He asked me if my POS is starting to turn out a profit yet and I had couldn’t help but wonder “Is it?”.

The one problem I seem to have while playing EVE is that I tend to forget to write down my expenses vs my profit. I have made spreadsheets in the past, and made a few this week, but those were easy ones, to state how much my inventory is etc etc. Nothing big yet to show the revenue of the POS.

So that’s my next goal, I need to start to figure out if the work and ISK I put in the POS is giving me a profit or a loss.

Running one is not cheap, I have a large Caldari tower so that means about 500m in fuel alone each month. Next to that I buy all my minerals in Jita, or near where I live, so I need to put that in the equation too. 

Coupled with how much ISK I spend on the invention and the actual BPC’s that come out. The only thing I know now, is that I have about a 40% chance of getting a T2 BPC out of the inventions, and that’s it.

I promised myself to start writing all of this down, now I just have to hold myself to that promise, that’s not going to be easy, I tend to get distracted easily while playing EVE. Channels, shiny ships, you name it, it distracts me. Next time, before I buy something or place a buy order, I’m going to write it down.
Same goes for selling, I guess I’ll know in a week or two if my POS is worth the upkeep.

Oh and in other news, I lost my Epithal last night. I was going from Jita back to base in it and remembered I had some PI mats in a low sec system. Thinking that nobody would be around at that time I went through the gate and started the warp. The moment I did a Prophecy popped up and insta-locked me and I got scrambled. Unable to escape my Epithal got blown up. That was a 50million ISK loss. Oh well, things like that can happen every time you undock.

Coming to a system near you!

Stay tuned! 

Carebear, what?

I am, what some people in EvE call a ‘carebear’, what does this mean? Well it’s rather simple, carebears are those of us that go out of their way to not get blown to pieces in pvp. Or at least that’s why I personally think the meaning of the word is.

I don’t mind being one, not even close, but I do want to change my mindset of going out in low. I have a few PI systems in Low, but I will only go there in my Viator, a nice and cloaky ship, people can’t blow me up if they can’t see me. The only time I’m not cloaked is when I’m at the customs office, and that usually takes about 2 seconds to get in and warp out again. But two seconds can be enough to blow someone up, or at least start to tackle him.

Luckily I haven’t gotten my Viator blown up…Yet.

A few days ago I was doing COSMOS missions on my combat alt to try and get my caldari faction high enough so I could take on any L4 I came across. The plan with this is that if I need to grind some standing, I could do L4’s or L3’s with my combat alt while fleeted up with my indy alt and then share the standing gain.

One of the missions needed me to go into low with a hauler, so I took out a Sigil and hauled the goods to the designated space station in Low.. After docking in the low sec station I complete the mission, set my route back to High to get the new one.

I should have paid attention, half a second after undocking I got a mail, someone destroyed my sigil, I didn’t even notice, I had already clicked jump to gate and I got there in my pod. Good thing that one didn’t get destroyed, +4s aren’t that expensive but they aren’t cheap either.

Lesson learned, I need to start using DScan and pay attention when in low.

My current plan for my combat alt is: finally getting the balls to go out there and shoot other Space Ships.

I did join the Tusker FFA months ago, that was in hindsight the most fun I’ve had in EvE since I started playing, so I really need to do what I just said.

It has happened

After months of reading EVE blogs, I have finally decided to start one myself. I’ve had this idea in my head for quite some time now, and I haven’t got a clue if anyone will actually read this but at least I’ll have a medium to get my thoughts out, and isn’t that what this is all about?

Let me introduce myself, I’m a 24 year old guy, born and raised in a tiny country called Belgium, which is in Europe, for those of you who flunked geography. I’ve been playing EvE Online on and off again for the past couple of, years I guess.

The first time I turned on EVE I was around 18 and heavily playing other MMO’s like WoW, EQ, you name it I’ve probably played it. But as most people who came to the game, I had absolutely no idea what was going on and it didn’t take too long for me to just go back to WoW (I know, shame on me). At the time the tutorials were non-existant, or at least everything was super confusing.

Fast forward a few more years, I read about one of the biggest scams in EvE history and once more my curiosity piqued. So, I fired up a trial, and started to play, to my surprise there were now nice tutorials and a help system that actually made sense, so I finished them and decided that I wanted to do combat. After joining a few noob channels I started to learn more about the game and combat. But, again I stopped playing after a month or two, the lure of Fantasy mmo’s was too strong at the time.

Last year I really got into EvE, so much that after a while playing my combat account, I decided to go for an industrialist. Which, in my eyes at the time was an alt account I could use to afk mine while I was doing L3’s. That account soon turned into a salvager to follow me in the missions and in the past month I have tried my hand on industry.

This blog will not be particular about combat or industry, this will be about what I want to write about that happens in the EvE universe, or at least what I know that happens… Which is, I’m ashamed to say, not a lot.

See you among the stars o7

My current two characters, Indy/Combat