What do you guys do in the game?

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , ,

The /r/eve subreddit gets a lot of these questions, more so in the past few weeks than I’ve seen in the past. Maybe because I just browse it more often these days, who knows.

But there’s always people wondering if EVE is still viable a game to play, is it fun? Is there much to do? How do I start playing this game?

I answer them from time to time, tell them that they need to figure out if they want to PvE or PvP or do both. Do they want to kill NPCs, do they want to do industry (or crafting as they know it in other games). If they want to PvP do they want to do it solo, do they want to do it in a big alliance where they’ll be a number for a long time until they can make themselves more known.

Do it in a small group but probably not getting the big blingy kills?

All questions that a person needs to ask themselves when going into EVE online. In many MMOs really, it all boils down to “What do you want to do with your time in the game”

I myself realised a long, long time ago that I liked being in wormhole space. All because of the things that have happened to me in wormhole space. And mostly because of me joining a corporation back in 2016 that invited me to an expenses paid trip to Prague the day after I joined them and me just going “why not”

That corporation no longer exists in the way it did but I made some really good friends there. One of which poked me months ago to join the current corporation I’m in.

What do I do in EVE though? I like to think of myself as someone who mostly PvPs and just trades to make himself ISK to pay for said PvP.

And I do need the ISK because I tend to lose expensive things.

I do sometimes escape in cheap stuff

Less than 12 hours ago I lost a Loki and pod that cost me around 2.5b. For those of you that don’t know the abbreviation that is billion. 2 500 000 000 isk, which equals exactly one month of gametime.

It was a painful loss for about 30 mins, where I was wondering why I was so damn stupid to go into that hole. But in the end, it’s what I enjoy doing, and the battle itself was quite fun.

What happened you ask?

Well, this all started when we found a few prospects huffing gas in a neighbouring wormhole, we were setting up a gank. Me in my sabre, the two other guys in a sabre and a proteus themselves.

Unfortunately, before we were even able to set up the gank correctly a few of our targets decided to go back home and saw us.

We still tried to go for it but the prospects escaped. The guys that saw us came back in 3 other ships, Gnosis, Deimos and Proteus. We had them bubbled and I figured that I should quickly reship in a ship that could easily tank them and then some.

They did get my sabre killed but I was able to go reship.

So I came back in a Loki. At this point their 3 people fleet turned into a 6 or 7 people fleet.

But whatever, I could probably tank this, let’s go!

And tank them I did. Although it was close for a while.

We were fighting on our home connection at zero. Meaning that if anyone was about to die they could easily jump in the wormhole and quickly try to make it out.

Which basically happened to all the guys that we were fighting except one unlucky Legion who I think was polarized.

But we were happy, we killed one of theirs. They were now in our home hole and we were on the connection they needed to get back. A little Mexican standoff.

This took a bit too long to our liking so what do we do? We go back into home and start pretending to roll the connection. This is what you do when you put a bunch of mass through a wormhole in order to make it collapse.

All of this, from when we saw the prospects to us doing this was about 40 minutes. Plenty of time for people to get pinged. Unfortunately for us, my corporation had nobody else online, and it turns out that theirs had a few more people online.

The guys went onto the connection about 2 minutes after I jumped back home with my Loki, my two Corp buddies went after them. I heard them go “oh shit that’s a bit more than before” but didn’t really think much of it. If they were in cruisers I’d be able to tank them for a bit longer and we might be able to at least kill one of them.

Some of them were not in cruisers.

I died at zero on the wormhole back home and got podded too. Why? Well, one was because they brought a big bad Paladin to kill us, and two, because I was polarized for about 20 more seconds when my ship died, and 10 more seconds when my pod died.

Polarisation happens when you go through a wormhole, if you were to go back through the same hole, you won’t be able to use it a second time to go back to where you come from for about 4 minutes. It’s a little countdown timer that was made to make things a bit more interesting in wormholes. And some groups know how to use it well, others do not. Especially when it’s late and they are on a pvp rush.

I died, ended up in Jita, and am currently waiting for a few buy orders to be filled for a new Loki and pod.

It’s a good thing I can easily afford these things, it would hurt a lot more if I couldn’t.

But I can’t imagine myself doing anything other than wormholes anymore. Every other space is just too boring.

Safety is relative, but in wormholes you have no idea who else is watching.

I have a problem

by In Games, MMO Tagged , ,

I have a bit of a gambling addiction. Luckily it’s not one that is using my real life money, but I am addicted to the EvE Online Hypernet.

For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s basically a raffle lottery. You buy a few tickets and you have a chance that your ticket gets the win. Usually it’s for certain ships or modules and such. The owner of the ship/module puts it up for x amount of tickets, 8/16/32/../512. Each ticket costing the amount that the owner puts the total price up for. And then you just wait until every ticket gets sold and see if you won.

With the hypernet, the owner usually buys 50% of their own tickets and then sells off the rest. The reason behind this is math. Or at least so I’ve been told. Supposedly if you buy half of your own tickets, 80% of the time you will win your own prize back and you’re making a bit of money on top of it.

I’ve actually tried it a couple of times and sure enough I won my prize back a few times, but I’ve not done it often enough to get to that 80% mark.

The reason why I’m so addicted to the Hypernet is because I’ve been EXTREMELY lucky.

I was able to have my wealth go up by about 20bn just doing raffles. I’ve won myself a few marshals, a dread and some small stuff I just put back on the market.

I lose a bunch, but I am all the way up there in ISK positivity that I just can’t stop myself from being “Just one more”

It’s bad, I know, but at least it’s not with actual real-life money.

As I’ve said before though, I’m having a good time in EVE again, all thanks to the C4 corporation I joined. Wormhole life is good.

I’ve also joined a few Thera operations but I still feel more like an F1 monkey when I join them. Which again, isn’t a bad thing. It’s just not what I like about EVE. It’s good if you want to just relax a bit and not pay too much attention though, perfect for those times.

Eve is still as pretty as ever, so here’s a few screenshots I’ve made over the past couple of weeks

Anyhow, it’s New Year’s Eve! Tomorrow it will be 2023. Time is truly flying.

I hope you all have a good one, and make yourselves some resolutions that you won’t stick by, and a couple you will.

Stay tuned o7

The joys of planetary interaction

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , ,

Despite the fact that I basically only log on to EvE for fleets on a Tuesday and Sunday, I do still play the game. Kind of.

PvP can be expensive, so you need to have somewhat of an income. In the past I used to generate said income by doing market trading, buy low sell even lower. Well, no, I am supposed to sell high but because of how the market works, from time to time you’ll be selling at a loss.

Implants were always good to me though, I was able to station trade them quite well in Jita without having to update my orders all the time and still make a few billion in profit a week.

But I don’t have the patience to play the market games anymore, so nowadays my income comes from the wormhole I live in.
And I’m not talking about how I used to go into C5’s with dreads and murdered the hell out of drifters.

No, it’s all about PI baby. Without PI I’d have no income, I would still be able to coast by for a couple of years but as is the case with money in general, so it is with ISK. I really, really don’t like seeing my wallet go down.

Extracting the liquid gold

My PI brings in a few billion ISK per month, across 3 accounts. And that’s plenty of ISK, seeing that I don’t lose that many ships. I have a bunch of high-priced ships all over the galaxy but the ones I use in the fights we do are quite cheap and yet fun to fly.

Past few weeks we’ve been using Claymores and I’ve been flying links. I trained for them AGES ago but never used them, so it’s nice to do something I actually have skills for.

Come at me

I do miss flying the more blingy stuff, but this way it gives an easier time for all of those who can’t quite afford it. It’s nice.

I still have about 4 months left before all my accounts expire, I’m not sure if I’ll keep three accounts up, but for now, they’ll be paying for themselves by way of extracting the precious goods from planets.

For those of you who want to try out the wormhole life, feel free to come and say hi. We don’t bite unless you want us to.

Stay tuned o7

Being picky about things

by In MMO Tagged , , , , ,

It has been roughly, 8 months since I last posted a blog post. Damn, and here I promised I would try and do more of them. But I have been busy so let’s just blame it on that shall we?

Today, december 14th started with the realization of me once more going “I should spend more time playing EvE Online”
Why did I come to this realization? Well, because at exactly midnight today, so when it went from 23:59 to 00:00 to ring in the new day. I got an email from paypal and eveonline, that all three of my subbed accounts have been resubbed for the next year. Which is a whopping 131 euros per account.

Yes, yes, I have been told that I could have done it a lot cheaper, but that’s not the point. I had forgotten about this recurring sub. I play eve on a bi-weekly basis, I undock and join a fleet with the wormhole corporation I am with.

I enjoy these fleets for the banter and the occassional kill we get. Although I don’t enjoy them when we go and act we are part of a low-sec blob, I decided a few months ago not to join fleets when I knew we’d be joining those.

But other than logging in to fleet up, I don’t actually do anything in the game. I wait with a lot of the others for the hunters to catch something and then go. I used to scan, be active in jita, do some hauling, made isk doing silly missions, etc etc…

And what do I do now, fuck all. Or at least very close to fuck all.

This needs to change! I have three accounts, 6 alts and only one I use.

So today after having spend almost 400 euros resubbing all of them I shall try and do more in EvE.

Starting, with figuring out how the market works these days. Do people still fuck around in Jita? Is it Perimiter now? Both? I have about 40bill in liquid ISK that should have been used in the past 12 months on other things, that ISK now is worth less than it was a year ago. The joys of economics and all that. Just as in real life when you just have your money sitting in a savings account you actually lose money due to inflation, that’s also the case in this game.

So, let’s work on this! But…How.. If only there were some people going “Ok dude, this is my stuff in amarr how I make money, do it in Jita and make bank”

But unfortunately it isn’t that easy. Time to make a few choices.

Hopefully I will actually be more active again, I guess you, dear reader. Will find out sooner or later.

Stay tuned o7

Goodbye 2020, you will not be missed.

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , ,

There’s only one thing that I truly hope for 2021, and that’s that we can go outside more than we did last year.

I have been working from home since March, haven’t seen most of my friends since then either. One lockdown after the other here in Belgium, but we’ll get there eventually.
They finally started with the vaccinations, maybe by the summer I’ll be on the list. As a 32 year old I’ll be one of the last ones, which makes sense, those that are more vulnerable to this shit virus need priority.

Past few days I’ve been trying to figure out the way I used to make ISK again, only to come to the conclusion that I no longer have some of the required skills to even make T2 stuff anymore. Not that I really feel like doing manufacturing but I found a container with over 100 T2 bpc’s in it and figured that maybe I should just create them. That’s not happening.

I’ve put a few other things on contracts, found a bunch of cruiser BPO’s that I once bought and researched with the idea of selling them at some point, well, some point is there. I need the ISK to buy new ships to die in.

The market confused me for a bit, I was used to having an alt in jita and one in Amarr and then just sell stuff in Amarr from what I bought in Jita, but due to the whole gate dissapearing between the route, that’s no longer a viable option. I’m not willing to make those 50 ish jumps myself and definitely not paying for it. So I’m doing a bit of station trading in Jita itself.

In theory I should actually set the buy orders up in perimeter but.. I’m lazy

For now the trading is working well, I made about 2b in the past week, so that’s not too bad. I could probably make more but I’m not a big fan of keeping an eye on it. So I put up a few buy orders and then forget about them for a few days, only to then realise I should update them.

Most of the things I’m looking at right now is around a 10-15% margin, I could do more for slower moving items but they move too slow to my liking, don’t want to wait too long for buy orders to fill.

Other than that I’ve also started PI in the wormhole. It took a bit of messing and a lot of clicking but I think I got it going where it needs to be. Only thing I need to mess around with a bit more is the extractors, seeing that I’m not extracting enough in the cycle I put it on. But I can fix that one too by just doing it every few days instead of every week.

I literally have no idea how long this took me
T3 PI is fun

I’m enjoying EvE again, and that’s what matters. The things joining a corporation can do.

In the past few days I’ve lost on ship, a Nergal. I had no idea they existed until a week ago, luckily I had a bunch of SP saved up so I just injected myself in one. Just training the weapons to V now, gives me something to do other than training for a Nyx I will never fly. I avenged the nergal’s dead though by sacrificing a few TEST people to BOB

Speaking of Nyxes, look what I made!

I'm blue
I need to print more things, like this Nyx!

I’m trying to find excuses to use my 3D printer some more, finally printing a few EVE Online related things to put around the appartment.

o7 Stay tuned

The way of life

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

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

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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

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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

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

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