Being picky about things

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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.

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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 , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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 , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

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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

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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

 

Meet Steve.

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Steve is the name of the drifter battleships that can sometimes make wormhole space a bigger pain than it already is. Not only does he put out about 2k DPS, he also neuts like crazy. And that’s the most annoying part of him really. The DPS is something most people are able to handle fairly well, but the neuts, my god the neuts.

Steve is here

I’m not sure where the name Steve came from. I just know that we’ve been using it for a while now, and supposedly the guys in corp that started using it had it from someone else they flew with. But his name is Steve now and I shall always know him as such.

Making ISK in wormholes can be done in multiple ways. There’s PI which is obviously the easiest one, there’s relic/data site hacking, there’s evicting people and stealing their stuff. And then there’s doing sites.

Which is what I’ve been trying to do in the past week or so. Sites can be done in multiple ways. You can do it with multiple people, or solo it (if you have two tinker rattlesnakes) Mostly when doing it with subcaps you’ll get roughly 300m per site. Without taking into account the fact that you need to close down incoming connections you’ll earn about 400m/hour, give or take a few.

At the end of the site, a structure will uncloak, and if you shoot it, Steve will spawn and he will try to fuck you up.

Luckily you can also use dreads for sites like this (if you are in a bear hole or if you have them in your own hole). Warping in a dread will “escalate” the site, spawning a few more battleships that are just a little bit harder to kill and drop a little bit more ISK in the end. But killing Steve with a dread is so easy. In the end you can make roughly 700 to 1b/hour per character doing it, IF you have this thing down. And that’s with just two dreadnaughts doing it.

I tend to forget about my speed from time to time. And bump things

I tend to forget about my speed from time to time. And bump things

I can’t even imagine what the income from this used to be. Supposedly it was a LOT better. Which kind of makes sense, most of the veteran wormholers don’t really have to worry about ISK at all.

With PI and doing sites. I might just make the ISK back that I put in this dread pilot. That makes me happy. I just hope I earn it back before the Naglfar dies. And it will die, I’m sure of it, I’ll probably do something stupid with it. That’s what normally happens when I let things die.

We’ll see

Stay tuned o7

 

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Bad at EVE

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I can freely admit that I’m not the best player when it comes to EvE as a whole. I am at best “ok” in PvP, and when I do my trading I am well aware that I’m making stupid decisions from time to time.

There are times when I feel like I am better than some of the people I come across in the game. And times when I feel like the biggest noob out there. I’m sure that a lot of people have that same issue when they’re trying out something new.

This game can make you laugh and make you want to strangle whoever fucked something up in your fleet as you throw your headset down in frustration because it was once more the same person doing that to you.

That’s what’s so great about this game. I used to play other MMO’s, I still play World of Warcraft occasionally, and I have never felt the same string of emotions in any of them like I do in EVE.

And that’s because what you do in this game matters. Whether you’re the first tackle on a titan, or the person stocking a market (or crashing it) whatever you do, will have an effect on tens, if not hundreds of other players.
This is not something that happens in many other games. In general when playing another MMO it doesn’t really matter whether you’re there or not. They might care personally, but the game itself doesn’t get better or worse without you there.

 

I need to get myself a Naglfar

I need to get myself a Naglfar

The past few weeks has been spent trying to help some fellow wormholers defend their home against HardKnocks, scanning for new places to hunt in, doing some PvP both market PvP and otherwise. And trying to make ISK.

We failed saving them, but I have a few nice screenshots

We failed saving them, but I have a few nice screenshots

A few days ago while scanning I was in a C2, there were a lot of signatures to scan down and I saw an Astero pop up on d-scan every few minutes. I didn’t really bother myself with him, figuring that he was going through all the wormholes, I was in an Astero myself so he was spending is time not much unlike I was spending mine.

I had one more sig to scan, a relic site, when it disappeared from my overview. This Astero was hacking relics. That was my cue to try and kill him at last, I already had everything bookmarked and it was time for some other kind of content. I warped to a relic at range, lo and behold, only half a minute after getting there the guy popped up on grid. Now, keep in mind, I had been scanning this wormhole for the past 10 minutes, he must have seen my probes. But I guess he thought he was safe, going to the cans slowly. I was on coms with two of my corpmates and asked them if they could bring in fast tackle. I had a scram on my astero but no point. So they brought sabres. I made them hold on the wormhole into the C2 while I figured out the best spot for them to warp to.

Turns out there was a small asteroid I could bookmark right next to one of the last three cans he’d go to. So I did. After having them jump the hole and hold cloak I told them to wait, right up until the guy started hacking the can. As soon as that happened I had them warp to the bookmark I had just made.

A minute and one dead Astero later I could go on my merry way into finding a highsec in our little chain.

Despite this being a fairly standard procedure, it still gave me the so called “PvP-shakes” not because I would die or anything, but because I didn’t want this guy to figure out I was stalking him. To suddenly warp off and leave us with no kill.

I have literally never had any of those feelings in another game. When you PvP in EVE, there’s a kind of adrenaline rush, whether you win or lose, there’s always the thrill of the hunt.

Stay tuned o7

ISK makes New Eden go round

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

Making ISK is something everyone has to do. The way how you do it though, that’s different for every single one of the players out there. But it has to be done, how else are you going to afford the ships you lose? Or get into that Nyx you’ve been craving ever since you saw the ship model.

I used to make my ISK in three ways. Trading, industry and running missions. Half of the trading I did was to complement my industry and the other half was just me messing around on the market trying to find the stuff that could make me money.

Those that have read my blog in the previous years know that my industrial side existed of making T2 things. I used invention on BPC’s I had copied and turned those things into T2 products. All the goods needed to make those T2’s were bought off the market because I didn’t want to make everything in the whole process.

I made a LOT of ISK that way and I flooded the market countless times dropping the price of the things I made. Sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose. But unfortunately my industry character hasn’t been used at all in the past year. This due to the fact that the products I used to make are worth less than their materials combined. Supposedly this is due to the null-sec groups having their hand in it now. I wouldn’t know though, I have yet to start caring enough about null-sec to start looking into things.

As for trading, I haven’t done it either in the months since the citadel change. Partly because I’m lazy and don’t want to go do that one jump to put orders in a citadel, and partly because I no longer have a clue about what’s good on the market. Ok, mostly that second part ;).

Missioning, well I haven’t done that in years, I used to love running L4’s in my Machariel but ever since joining corporations and no longer being solo I just haven’t felt the need to do so anymore.

So how do I make my ISK now? PI and C5 sleeper loot. I absolutely love doing C5 sites with a small group of people. Doing it solo is boring, but I love having 7 rattlesnakes on the field, warping from one site to the next and just melting the targets.

Beautiful snakes, flying out to their next target

Beautiful snakes, flying out to their next target

A few weeks ago we had a little group of 4 snakes, two were mine, two were my corp-mate’s. In the three hours of farming we made a total of 2.4billion ISK. Which isn’t too bad. That’s about 200m/hour per character. And half of the time we weren’t even paying attention.

Due to my love of the Snakes, I made a third character, just to fly in one.
So last Saturday I had 3 on the field, along with two other corp-members we had a total of 7 rattlesnakes on the field.
We melted the sites and in one hour we made about 320m per person. Which could have been better but the sites weren’t the best out there.

Circling the MTU like there is no tomorrow.. For the rats

Circling the MTU like there is no tomorrow.. For the rats

That’s one way to make ISK in a wormhole though, my other one is PI and all of you probably know or have an inkling of a thought what it’s about.
If I pay attention to it I make about 1bn/month across two characters. Which isn’t bad but I tend to forget about it. Woops.

Got to get it out of the hole somehow

Got to get it out of the hole somehow

There’s a third one in the Yacht club that we introduced a while ago. Well it was already there but now more people know about it. Namely “Scout gets the loot”. Basically, when you’re in the chain and find targets, if we kill them, you get the loot. If you find an Astrahus to kill you get 50% of whatever drops out of it. Which is pretty damn good.

I have yet to find myself an offline POS with an SMA hanging around it (happened already) but it’s a nice incentive for people to find more targets. And more targets for us means more content. So it’s a win win.

Scanning can be a pain though. Spent a few hours doing it yesterday and I decided to keep it to a maximum of half an hour of non-stop scanning in the future.

Stay tuned o7