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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

 

Learn by doing

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
The best way to learn new things, is by doing them. You will not learn how to draw by reading about it, nor will you learn how to set up a Hyper-V server environment with multiple Virtual Machines in it and a full Active Directory structure by reading about it either.

But it helps.

Seeing that my corps is at war, and my first plan on taking out my Machariel and Noctis team went down the drain. I decided to go out to Low and Null sec with my Nemesis, in search of prey.

Let’s just say that I would not be a very good predator. The most I saw in local was 10 people, and I couldn’t find them anywhere. When I jumped to null I came across a few people talking in chat, and after a few jumps I found them parked outside a bubble in between two gates, but three against one isn’t what I would call good odds, nor would my bomb do more than maybe, just maybe scratch their paint.
So I decided that would not be a good idea to try.
Oh hello there, what are you doing?
But I never shot a bomb, and I wanted to learn how they work, so I needed to find a spot to try it out on. After a few more jumps I came into a system with an ice belt. People love ice!
After jumping there, I saw a Skiff warp away, he must have seen me in local and figured I would be there to kill him, must be.. But I was in the belt, and I desperately wanted to shoot a bomb. So I lined up with one of the ice rocks, uncloaked, and watched my pretty bomb fly there.
Oh shit oh shit, get out!

Which, according to most people, was more than likely my fifth mistake of the day.

After reading so much about bombing, I decided to forget everything in the “heat of the moment”. Due to me being impatient I just dropped it and kept looking. It will come to no surprise then, that I got hit by my own bomb, luckily, I survived. But only barely, it was right around the time that it exploded that I had decided to warp away. Leaving me there with my hull barely intact.

At least I learned something, and I did it by doing.

Later that evening I was told about the corp’s wormhole about to close. Having never seen a wormhole close, I decided that I wanted to see it happen, so I took the jumps to the high sec static, went inside and waited on the other side. Snuggling up in my pod and looking at the hole with my cloak on.
If I were high, I would have been staring at this for ages

While waiting for the high sec static to close, we were talking in corporation chat. A call went out for having the “balls” to go out to high and get back in. Seeing that the hole were to collapse any minute, and a bet was made.

I’m still not sure why, but said bet unleashed a little game of double your ISK. We hyper multiplied it, starting with 1isk, and then going 2,4,8,16,… unfortunately I had to call it at 128. I did not have the 402m that I could send to my fellow corps member. Probably a good thing because I doubt that he was able to go to 103billion.

It was a pretty fun Sunday, not only did I fly out in low, I hung out in a wormhole, watching it shimmer and everything. I do think we scared a newbie though. As we were talking there was a flash of the wormhole. And before I knew it there was a bubble up.
Oh gods! Something just blew up in my face!
That even made me jump for a bit because I did not see that coming. Said Cormorant had de-cloaked and probably did not think that would happen either because before you could say “Booh!” the wormhole flashed again.

Then again, if I see a Nemesis, Legion and an Onyx suddenly pop up, I’d be getting out too.
After the Cormorant left, one of us came back in a Myrmidon, you know, just in case. And I said something about not knowing how to bomb, so they told me how to do a run, and try it out on the Myrmidon

I didn’t even scratch the paint

I learned quite a bit today, and it was fun.

I didn’t see the wormhole close though, as I had to work in the morning, I decided to head back out to my high sec HQ. As soon as I docked there, I heard about the hole closing, and it was wonderful.

Oh well, there will always be a next time. 

Stay tuned o7