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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…

My first time

by In MMO

First times can be an embarrassment to every party involved with it. Not just the person doing it for the first time, but also the other person or people involved. But that’s what makes it fun, great even. Especially when you’re doing it with people you love to play with.

Yesterday I had my first time. First time in a Tengu as a hunter on a BLOPSing fleet. We had decided a few days ago that we’d invite a bunch of people to a BLOPS-fleet and use our wormhole as a staging system. Because we can roll our null-sec static for new content.

I don’t fly T3’s much. If at all. I use a Tengu to scan and I’ve used a Proteus a few times as tackle or as an extra DPS ship. But I had never hunted for targets equipped with a cyno, until yesterday.

Most of the guys were rusty at doing it, our first target didn’t take us too long to find. One of the other hunters landed on three Rorquals. Which turned out to be fitted a bit better than our previous Rorqual encounters. So we lost a bunch of bombers and one of the hunting tengus. No big deal though, easy to replace.

After a few rolls I came upon a system in which I was earlier on grid with a Thanatos but when I was there it wasn’t within range. It was now. Unfortunately he had gone to a different site and I landed on a VNI. No biggy I’d just tackle that one. And here’s where I made a few of my mistakes.

As it turns out, if you want to cyno in your friends, you’re not allowed to go above a certain speed. So putting on my MWD to go to the target was my first mistake. But I grabbed tackle, all good right. Well here’s my second one. I forgot I had an extra-large Ancillary Shield Booster equipped. So I was dying to a VNI.

“But E’dyn how the hell do you forget about a shield-booster?” You might ask yourself. Well, it’s easy. First you need to remember that I normally don’t fly shield ships. Especially not a Tengu. The second thing that I didn’t think about was the fact that the shield booster had the cap booster icon, because it was loaded with navy cap booster 800’s. Normally when I’m flying a ship, this icon is to boost up my capacitor, and only that. So here I am, going down to a VNI in a 480m ship, wondering what the hell is going on whilst my friends are dropping bombers.

I lost the Tengu, to the amazement of both the VNI pilot and my corp mates. I spent the next 5 minutes after this death laughing about my stupidity whilst buying a new one in Amarr.

It even took me a few minutes to figure out that I did in fact have reps on this thing because at first I was proclaiming on comms that I did in fact not have a booster at all. Woops.

At least it’s not a mistake I’ll make again. And eventually I did catch a skiff and a venture afterwards. It’s not even close to what I lost. But I learned something and that’s what matters.

You always learn something when you’re doing it for the first time. And that’s a good thing.

Stay tuned o7

New Year, new opportunities

by In MMO Tagged 1 Comment

Happy new year to you all, may 2017 be better than 2016 😉

The last few days of the year we have moved around a bit. Downgraded back to a C2 and now trying to decide what the next course of action is.

I’m hoping to catch a few Rorquals again. I’ve already caught a few before and it’s entertaining to kill one with just interceptors. They hate it so much that after a while they just start self-destructing.

“Things” to do are on a special little list. Some positive, some negative. I still have to decide on where to start with it all.

We’ll see what the future brings

Stay tuned

Null sec.. Why did I do this again

by In MMO Tagged , , , , 4 Comments

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

Ch-ch-changes

by In MMO Tagged ,

The past few days have been, interesting to say the least. Not so far as content since it’s a been a bit slow in wormhole space ever since we moved to a C5.

But there were a few structure changes within our corporation and I’m now the new CEO of the New Eden Yacht Club.

Is this a good thing? I have no idea, maybe, maybe not. I have been CEO in the past, and it didn’t work out that well due to the fact that I was super new at wormhole space and didn’t have the experience I have now. I’m still a noob, always will be.

The reason why I was made CEO is because I’m basically around all the time, supposedly know what I’m doing and I can make decisions. As in, I don’t care as much if not everyone will be happy about the decisions I make.

I want this thing to succeed, I love flying with most of the guys in this corp and enjoy talking to them. Even when we’re not playing EvE we have fun in Rocket League or Stellaris together. Which is good. I enjoy the fact that we can also play other games and not feel bad about it.

But, like I said, our content has been a bit lacking since we moved into a C5. I’m pretty sure this is due to the fact that the move and all that took ages. And that we currently have a lot of people AFK due to holidays, sickness, RL stuff. It’ll change, I’m sure of it. But in order to make it better, I made a small decision that might have huge consequences for the corporation as a whole.

Due to this little decision recruitment might get a bit harder for us, and I probably stepped on a few toes in doing so. But so be it. Can’t make everyone happy and it seems like most of the guys are happy to be doing something again.

Once our little “deployment” is over I’ll talk some more about it.

Right now I’m busy with making plans on how to get stuff going again inside and outside of the wormhole. Not as easy as I thought it would be. But it never is.

I guess it’s a good thing I have all the time in the world for EvE right now.

Stay tuned o7

Null-sec mining operations

by In MMO Tagged , , , , ,

The other day, one of the guys in corp asked on TeamSpeak if anyone felt like going to null. Other than some people bringing stuff in through a High-sec deeper in the chain.

Me and one of the guys had been scanning the chain earlier, having checked out both Null-sec connections in it I knew of some mining going on in it. We couldn’t really do much about that earlier with two of us but I figured we had a better fleet now so might as well go check if we could grab something.

After a few bio breaks, bit of “Who’s bringing what” we had an Omen, Deimos, Jackdaw, Sabre and a Gila. Seeing as we were going out to null it was more of a: “bring whatever you want” kind of thing, instead of “bring a doctrine fit”.

After forming up on the hole to Null-sec our Sabre pilot went in, only to tell us there were a bunch of Procurers and a Rorqual on grid. Our Sabre pilot landed, went “aaawh” because of the fact that all the Procurers had warped off and asked if he should tackle the Rorqual. Seeing that due to the changes we didn’t think we could kill him, we decided to just go for it. Hit him a few times for shits and giggles and get on with it.

Imagine our surprise when his shield was going down faster than it’s supposed to be going down.
At this point I decided to ping on slack to see if anyone felt like bringing in some more DPS. Bringing in our resident mister AFK and one of the US guys. I heard later that someone was burning from deeper in the chain, but he was slow as fuck (This is what happens when you’re running sites in a C3 when others are out looking for pvp ;D)

On TeamSpeak we were guesstimating on whether or not this guy was trolling us. Due to our Sabre’s great bubbling skills and drone kiting we were able to get his shields down. And at about 75% armour he initiated self-destruct.

The funny thing is that despite that. We still thought he was trolling us. The system we were in had a Thanatos and a few Machariels in it. Not only that but about halfway through us pecking his shield a Crow came in to have a look at us. It is still unclear on why nobody came in to help him but, this guy was not trolling.

Thus the beginning of our roam, already ISK positive beyond the fleet composition and we had only just started, OP success.

We went a bit further into Cache but most ice miners had already heard about what had happened.
We did find a Rattlesnake but unfortunately he warped off as soon as the Sabre landed on grid with him.
Funny thing about that however, was the fact that a Viator landed a few seconds after the Rattler had warped off. Doing what he seems to be enjoying, bubbles went up and another ship got killed.

On to our direct connection into null.

In this we found another mining fleet a few jumps in. Hearing the Sabre pilot on comms go “jump jump jump jump!!!!” was fun to hear.
Almost as fun as hearing him get annoyed at losing when playing rocket league. (Almost, it’s seriously hilarious when that happens)

Not only did we kill a group of retrievers, we also killed one of the new Porpoise. Op success!
But luckily, null sec dwellers are either retarded or stubborn, since a few jumps later we found another group of ice miners. FCON sure likes their ice.

After killing these we got camped in, and here is where my screw up happened.

We gave them about half an hour, the Sabre had gotten out, he felt bad about leaving us but it was time for bed for this poor little baker. So he had my permission to go home. I’m a generous Lord.

We safe logged and gave it about half an hour to 45 minutes.

At that time one of the guys was flying around in an Interceptor, telling us they had docked up. He was wrong. Oh so wrong.

Logging back in we warped to the gate to be greeted by a Broadsword, Deimos and some other stuff that I couldn’t be bothered to check. Safe to say that we lost the two cruisers.

Our Magus was able to get out eventually. So there’s that.

Still, we killed about 6bill in ships, losing roughly 500m, I’d say we did well.

What did we learn the other day?

  • Not every Rorqual will be fit according to the new changes. It might be worth it to check them out
  • If we are killing someone, maybe talk to them sooner about a ransom. Before they initiate self-destruct
  • Miners are not very smart. 15 retriever drones would have killed us
  • Null-sec dwellers do not enjoy risk. Even with 4-5 people they wouldn’t come to us in a site.
  • FCON really likes Ice and hates fights.
  • Sabres are love, Sabres are life