Meet Steve.

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , ,

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

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , , ,

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

Skill queue fun!

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

It’s been a week now since I started the new character. This character was created with two goals in mind. Having a third character to fly a Rattlesnake with for when I finally decide to do C5 sites. And flying a Dread.

In order to make it a little easier on myself I bought 10 skill injectors and injected them in the character. Giving him 5 million unallocated skill points. I have only used part of them right now to get his cybernetics to lvl 4. This so I could put +4’s in him. I am still unsure if getting +5’s would be worth the cost. Seeing that they cost about 80-90m more per implant than a +4, so for now I’m leaving it at that.

I did the new opportunities on this character and also did two of the advanced career agents. Namely the military and advanced military one. I actually liked it. But I used to run level 4 missions all the time so I guess this is partly nostalgia for me. After finishing them he was brought in Jita, due to my general laziness I tend to buy everything I need in Jita.

Having an actual plan for my skills on one of my character is fun. I don’t really do much planning, both my other combat alts and my indy alt have no plan. I randomly put skills in their queue and hope they’ll be useful in the future. E’dyn is currently training JDC V aftering having finally finishing logistic cruisers V. Unfortunately Jump Drive Calibration is a skill that takes about 40 days to get it from IV to V. So this will take a while.

With the skill plan I have for the new character his first goal is to fly a rattlesnake asap with the fit I use. In theory this will finishing in about 30 days. After that he will start training into a Naglfar. It’s not that I have a Naglfar right now, or have an actual plan to put one somewhere, it’s just nice to have the option. Due to living in a C2 the only way to fly one in the wormhole is to build one in it. Which I might do eventually, we’ll see.

My other alt is also training a few more skills for the Rattlesnake, after that I had Astrometric Rangefinding and other scanning skills ready in her queue. I might decide on changing that. She’s my go to scanner for the chain but I’m not sure if it’s that much better to have those skills at lvl V.

I’ll need to check that out.

Stay tuned o7

Meeting corporation IRL

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

My past couple of days were not spent on EvE for a change. Or not ingame at least. I was in Prague with members of my corporation. Which was super fun. And the week before that I went to Gamescom, which is something I’ve been doing in the past few years just because it’s a fun experience.

I don’t go to the con to play games though, because I don’t like standing in line for over three hours just to play a game in advance of its release date for about 30 minutes. It’s all about the atmosphere in the arena.

As for Prague, I never really did a real life meetup with people that I play games with, this was the first time that I decided “fuck it might as well” and went.
Prague is about a ten hour drive from my place so instead of taking a plane which would have taken one and a half, I decided that I’d do it by car. Make a little road trip out of it.

On the road I picked up two other guys from the corporation. The fun thing about doing that was not having a clue what those guys looked like. I showed them my car, told ‘em that’s what they need to look for at the designated pickup places and that’s it. That was step one of the adventure, step two was getting through Germany and the Czech Republic, into Prague.

I left on Thursday morning around 6.15 and we arrived in Prague at the hotel at around 17.45, this included a few needed stops on the way, and a detour in the city because instead of listening to my navigation system, I listened to one of the guys. As per usual on coms, that wasn’t one of the best ideas 😉

Prague riverside view

We spent a few days there, getting to know each other, putting a face behind the name and talking about EvE. It’s a nice change of pace from going out with my real life friends, since they know nothing about EvE and aren’t interested in it. I loved talking to others about it, making ingame plans, coming up with stuff to do etc etc.

All in all, a very good time. Although I did miss logging in. Since the place we stayed at did not have Wifi and my roaming charges are through the roof.

I came back yesterday, dead tired but with some great new memories. All in all, that was a good way to spend a few days off work.

The first thing I did logging in last night was turn on my PI again. Since my planets have been doing nothing since Thursday. After that, I put Jump Drive calibration V in my skill queue, because supposedly I should have that if I want to play around with a Blops. I still need to buy a Panther but I’m going to be doing that as soon as I come in Amarr or Jita.

I’m also thinking about maybe resubbing a third account. I still need to decide on it but I might want to do that again. I just need to decide on what I want to be doing. Since after training E’dyn into blops some more, I will probably start training for Dreads.

Trading wise I haven’t done much in the past few weeks. I’m buying and selling plexes every few days, same with skill injectors. It’s a small profit because I keep forgetting about the higher taxes on normal stations. But it’s something.

Stay tuned o7

It’s not always about the ISK, but sometimes it is

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

Going on roams means dying. Not all the time of course but you can be certain that the loss of a ship and pod are inevitable. Which means that you need to make ISK one way or the other.

I have plenty of ISK to lose a few bill in ships, but as has been said in previous blogs. I’m somewhat of a space-Jew. I used to want ISK in order to pay for a character with the skills I wanted. Now I just want ISK to see that little line on jEveAssets rise.

In the past it went along the lines of “I want to have 1b” once getting there it was 5, then 10, then 20, 25. My next goal is 30b, and this is where I’m starting to have a few problems with. I have had a few lucky breaks in the game, some of my ISK coming from winning Moros’ on Blink and selling them. Some coming from lucky trades. I think half of my ISK came from T2 production.

Came, because for reasons unknown to me, this is no longer profitable as a solo industry player.

What I used to do is buy the parts I needed in Jita, haul them to my production facilities, make the T2’s from my own researched BPC’s and haul them back to Jita. Making a solid 200-600k profit per. After being semi-afk from eve between January and June this no longer seems viable.

For some reason that would now give me a 400k loss per T2 product made. So now, I need to look into another way to make ISK, good ISK. Because I still want to get to that 50billion milestone, and more.

Right now I’m wondering what I should be doing with all the industry skillpoints on that alt. Should I extract it, sell the injectors? That’d give me a nice quick ISK injection. But what if I want to start production again? What if I’m just not looking at things correctly and I’m missing out on a good way to make ISK from production.

And what about my science SP? Do I ever want to bother making T2 BPC’s again? I’m honestly at a loss on what to do with that alt.

The only thing I can do right now, is getting her accounting up, because silly me still keeps forgetting about tax percentages when I buy “low” and sell “high”.

Where theoretically I’d get a profit of about 20m per item, due to taxes that can easily go down to only 5mill. Woops, lesson learned there.

If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them out. I need an ISK printer.

Ps: I already do PI, making coolant right now, might have to try something new there too.

PvP is starting to grow on me

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

I started updating orders again, because I’m in need of ISK, and I’ve been too busy losing ships in null sec to get some PvE going. Thus I went to Jita, put up a few buy orders and hope for the best.

Of course, outside the buy orders I’m also doing a bit of PI. As I’ve said in a previous post, PI is a great way for passive income, I currently have a setup of 10 planets across 2 characters in the wormhole which should get me about 700m a month, updating it once a day, and hauling it every other week or so. Which is a nice amount for minimal effort.

Outside the need of ISK, I am starting to feel a need for kills. It was a bit slow the previous 3 days, we didn’t get many targets, but there were a few good ones in the past week. Which is fun, I’m starting to not hate losing ships. And that’s the whole point of all of this.

Today was a bit funny, our nullsec was close to a miner system, so we went there, saw a bunch of procurers on scan and went out to look for them.

We found a few, killed a few, and went out to the next system.

Now, killing a procurer isn’t that hard in PvP ships, finding them when you already killed a few of them, makes things a bit harder. What made it a fun roam was the fact that when we jumped back in the system, just to see if they would come back. We jumped to ore sites, large, enormous, and as soon as I landed, I noticed two of them on my d-scan, coming closer to me.

Not only, did they just wait a few minutes, they warped right on top of me. And my corps mate who warped to another belt, had the same thing happen to him.

We had that happen twice in the same few systems. Unfortunately they didn’t give us a fight. It’s not like we want to kill miners, we want fights. Good fights.

We were hoping that if we caught one and held it for a few minutes they might come and play. But unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

We did harvest a few tears though.

 

tears

He obviously didn’t get that we wanted an actual fight. But some people don’t fight, and I get that. It had taken me years before I got into PvP.

I’m doing well, and enjoying my time in the wormhole and the corporation.

Stay tuned o7

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Everyone loves explosions

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

We do, even if you don’t want to be near one in real life, we all love looking at fire. It’s entrancing.

I blew up my first citadel the other day. Well, not just me, we had a fleet of course. But I did not see the explosion coming. I had no idea about it, and it was amazing.

I’ll just let you see for yourself in the few screenshots I made.

I did lose another hound this weekend. I need to stop flying squishy ships, which is why I bought an Omen and a Gila and brought them inside the wormhole. I have a bunch of other ships on my “Get them inside” list but I need to start earning ISK again because I only see my total dropping.

The fact that PLEX prices are way down since last time is not helping at all. I have 11 PLEX parked in Jita that I bought when they were at 1.2b a pop. So that’s currently little over 3b loss just on those. Maybe I should use them to get extractors instead. I heard that they are a nice moneymaker. But that’s for another post.

Enjoy the fire!

Stay tuned o7

Woops

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , , ,

It seems that I should have been paying more attention to what was going on in the wake of citadels coming around etc.

A few months ago I had decided that it would be a good idea to put my ISK into PLEX because they seemed the most stable at the time and I figured their price would more than likely get higher at some point in the future.

Well, I guess I was wrong. After spending the last few weeks abroad I came home the other day and was able to log in, only to see that due to the fall of PLEX, my current worth has dropped around 4b.

Now, it’s not that much but still, I’m a hoarder, I like seeing my ISK rise instead of drop, so it does hurt a little bit.

But I’ll survive, I have told myself countless times that I should not be sitting on my ISK piles like that and should do something with them.

A few months ago my plan was to make a citadel of my own with it, but that got scratched when we were evicted out of our wormhole.

Which reminds me. I need to get back into a wormhole.

Stay tuned o7

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Past few days

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

It’s been about ten days since I last wrote. Which doesn’t mean that I haven’t been doing much, I just didn’t really find any inspiration to write.

Mostly because I haven’t been doing anything very interesting. Or at least not really.

Wormhole space needs patience if you look for targets, which is something I don’t have, I am not going to wait on a site or stare at a hole for hours on end. No way will I submit myself to doing that.

So I do relic sites or combat sites. Scan down holes in the chain, move from one point to the other.. Whatever I can do to keep me occupied.

I’ve been trading a bit though, and I made myself a bit of a profit in the past week. Nothing compared to what I see other bloggers get. Not even close, I wish I did, I’m actually jealous of them doing that but also glad that they know what they’re doing.

Because in general, I don’t really know what I’m doing, I just get lucky. Last Tuesday I didn’t really make use of the Skill Extractor/Injector trading. In hindsight I probably should have done so but I didn’t. I did however make about 600m profit in station trading by noticing a bit of a price change happening on one of the items I trade in. So that’s nice.

Speaking of the injectors and extractors. I have read the opinion on these of lots of people. Some hate them, others applaud them, and more are neutral towards it.

I am neutral leaning towards the positive side of them. This has mostly to do with the fact that I do use the character bazaar. I used to want ISK, so that I could use it to buy a character suiting my skill need, I wanted to fly everything out there (as long as I could afford it). I have since then gotten off this sentiment and even got quite attached to E’dyn. However, this does not mean that I would not pay ISK/Euros/Whatever currency you have. To get a bit of a boost in my skill points.

I have an industry alt with more than 3million in SP in mining. I haven’t mined in years, and I’m not going to either. So I got myself 10 extractors, extracted it all and gave it to my wormhole alt. I know that due to doing it like this I have lost about 1m in SP, but honestly? I don’t really care about the loss, because I didn’t use it anyhow, and now, I used that SP that was never going to be used again. To perfect my Tengu skills and to train up my Proteus skills. Meaning that now I can not only do more damage in a Tengu, I can actually fly a Proteus. With just a tiny injection of skills.

Running Sites Tengu“So pretty”

I shouldn’t look at them too much though. They’re a bit of an addiction. I get why, I do. And if I allowed myself, I would buy injectors. But luckily I don’t like losing ISK. So we’re safe from doing that. For now

Stay tuned o7