Boom goes the ship

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

I lost one of my favorite ships in the whole game last Sunday, a Machariel. It’s one of my favorite ships because it’s the first one I fully mastered (by doing level 4’s in it shhh) and it’s just super pretty.

Luckily, I also killed a few ships so it kind of evens out.

One of the places I live in with one of my alts, well… my main actually, is NPC null. Stain even (I don’t know names that well but do remember this one, and I’m sure you guys will know better than me).

NPC null is one of the stepping stones into the other null secs, you have stations, there’s a bunch of corporations and alliances, and you don’t need standings to dock, which means you can just put yourself somewhere and be on your merry way, coming back if you need repairs etc. It’s handy and you don’t have those silly Null alliance politics going on. Or people telling you to dock when there’s a neut in local because there’s a bunch of neuts in local almost all the time.

Back to how I lost the ship though. Due to the benefits of null, from time to time other groups decide to come and take up some territory. This is now the case with a few Russian corporations, taking down towers of our allies etc. Sunday was one of those days in which two of our towers was going to be coming out of reinforcement. We made a defense fleet and went out to meet the attacking fleet.

It was fun, despite the fact that the other guys played a game with us, warping off to another ping when we landed, going back and forth etc. We always were able to catch a few stragglers.

Them doing this only meant one thing, they were stalling. Getting a few more people on field. We knew this, and despite knowing this, we didn’t run. Because this was content, and we were getting kills.

So when all of a sudden bubbles started popping up around us, we weren’t that surprised. Our FC kept himself cool, calling out targets etc etc. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to escape the bubbles on time. Despite our logi trying hard to save most of us, they couldn’t quite keep up.

I don’t mind, I had a good time and some good fights. The fact that we now have a few new neighbours only means one thing.

More good fights in the future 😉

Stay tuned o7

What you get when not paying attention

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I decided to run some missions in my Machariel while deciding which corporation to join. I’ve been running them for ages and mostly enjoy the cleaning up afterwards in my Industrial character’s Noctis. Which I lost, due to forgetting about a certain trigger.

Imagine if you will, being told that you have to rescue a certain Damsel in Distress. She needs to be rescued from a warlord’s “pleasure garden” and you’ve been tasked with doing so.
You jump in your pod and attach to your trusty vessel, ready to kick some pirate ass.

As you warp in you get trash talked a bit by some cronies and you make them explode into the vacuum that we call space. After that, their boss shows up and you do the same thing. Everyone’s dead, so you call in your little helper that everything’s safe, after which you remember that you actually needed to rescue someone and not just shoot everything that moves in the face (woops).

At this point your little helper is already collecting the lovely loot and stripping your enemies’ wrecks for their mods and anything else that’s worth something, even poking a few corpses.
You lock up the pleasure garden and demand them to hand over their captive. Which of course, they do not. So you shoot them in the face too.

Which, in retrospect isn’t really helpful if you shoot the place where the hostage is captive into oblivion. As it turns out, as soon as that started, something was triggered.

Namely a little alarm for the pirates and all of a sudden 5 battleships are shooting my little helper and a few spider drones are webbing her and the frigates are scrambling her so she is unable to warp out or run away. Cue a nice little explosion and the loss of her Noctis.

Not only that, but due to the fact that I was already reveling in my victory, I did not notice that I was out of drones. I could destroy my enemies.. Except for those nasty little frigates and drones. So I had to sit there, laugh as they try to penetrate my shield, while my little helper shipped into another ship to come shoot their faces for me.

A nice little lesson for me here, despite being pretty much unkillable by the NPC’s in the missions, my little helper is not. She’s extremely squishy in fact.

Good thing the insurance pay out for the Noctis was more than what I paid for a new one and the old one was already a few years old, way best it’s fly date anyhow.

Loot and mission bonusses made up for the rest of the losses.

As for my industry, still chugging along, creating and inventing things that pay the bills.

I also bought myself a few dozen frigates I’m excited to go and get blown up.

Stay tuned o7

As if you know what you’re doing

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
I have spent most of my evening jumping around different systems on my ex-RvB alt, trying to get all of its assets in the same spot. Let’s just say that it’s taken me quite some time and I’m even close to being finished.
I don’t like a mess in my assets window, on most of my accounts they are spread in about 4 or 5 systems. On that one alt, the assets are spread in 16 systems. Hence the clean up.

I’ve been able to just trash some things, Noob ships that were docked somewhere because I once went into the station without a pod.. Ores that were so low in number that using my time to bother with them would actually make me lose ISK.

Most of the spread right now is between Jita and one of its previous bases of operations near Amarr, seeing that this character used to run L4’s, in a time that I can no longer remember.

While “playing” I was checking EvEMon a bit and I couldn’t help but notice that I don’t have any skill plans, for any of my characters. I create one, and then I just ignore it and just wing it, deciding on the fly what to update the queue with.

I really should stop doing this, not only is it inefficient, it’s also not really helping me into knowing what my characters can and can’t do.

As the readers of my blog know, I flew a Dominix a while back. Which is a great example of me not knowing what I can do. Because when I was first asked if I could, I said no, until I was linked the fit and I noticed that I can actually use sentries, and that I can get into a Dominix. Now, that second part is just plain stupidity on my end because I fly a Machariel and have Gallente Battleship on V so I should have actually known better, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that I have absolutely no idea what to do with my two combat characters and my industrial character. I don’t know what to train and I just pick skills at random that look good. 
Or I start working on the mastery and then just stop doing it altogether because I noticed another one that I liked better.

I didn’t actually resolve to do anything special this year. But if I’m going to, maybe I should just start with making a skill queue and decide on a path to take.

Stay tuned o7

How do you EvE?

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , ,
I’ve seen these going around the EvE blogosphere and on Reddit the past week or so, and I figured I’ll join in.
Don’t mind the mess

So this is how I EvE. My current setup is two screens, on the one screen I usually have all of my clients running, and I just switch between windows, and the other is for my Facebook, Twitter, eve-central, steam chat and so on.

There are times when I use one of my notebooks along but I don’t have enough room on my desk for now. I switch between clients because I usually don’t play on all my account at the same time. The only time that I have two on the same grid is if I’m doing missions and the other one is cleaning up behind him in her Noctis.
As shown in my first sentence, I too am a Redditor, and I browse /r/eve quite a bit when I’m supposed to be sleeping, or when I just woke up. 

While browsing the topics this morning I came across a gem of a post, someone asking for stories to tell to people in order to get them to play eve.

One post in such topic got my attention and brought a smile on my face while reading it. This guy took his time, writing down all kinds of different reasons on why to play eve, and it gets through to the gist of the game.

If you want to read it too, here’s a little link for you.(top post) I’m sure most of you already know it but I haven’t been on Reddit for that long so it was something new for me.

I’m not sure what my gameday today will be, I was planning of taking out one of my mission runners and having my second one finally undock and join him. But the corps I’m in is at war so I’m not too keen on taking my shiny, shiny Machariel out of undock.

Maybe I’ll go back to scanning a bit.

Stay tuned o7 

Every day, you learn something new.

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
As it turns out, I’m not that good at scanning. Whether it is partly due to my lack of skills or because I just suck at it in general. I’m just bad at it.

I found that out while trying to check if I could scan things in a high sec area. It took me about 20 minutes to resolve the one gas site that I found there. Twenty whole minutes.
Scanning ship, at your service

Makes me wonder how bad I’ll be at this if I tried it in w-space. And I don’t feel like training it right now because I have other plans in my queue. I’m currently training to finally be able to fly a Loki. I already have all the subsystems in place, the only thing missing is Minmatar Cruiser V.. Which will take me 17 more days, I guess that just goes to show that I should plan things better than I do right now.

But! The good news is that I finally finished Gallente Battleship V so my Machariel now has the full bonuses for both the Battleship skills. And most people know, I really, really love my Machariel.

Which makes it even better for me that people seem to want to get rid of theirs, the prices of Pirate faction battleships has been dropping ever since Rubicon hit.
The whispers I heard say that this is because of the warp speed changes, making them rather slow. But I still love my Mach, it’s my first baby and I will treasure her/him/it forever.

And in other news, turns out that I forgot to enable auto subscription on my main account so I lost 14 hours of training..Darn
Stay tuned o7

The lessons you learn

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
Last night I decided that I wanted to go do a level 4 mission again. I went ahead and accepted a Guristas Extravaganza. As most of you that run missions know, it’s not too hard when you’re tanked well, you just sit there and shoot everything in sight. So that’s what I did, lock down as much as I could and just shoot them to pieces.

Naturally, that was what I did on the last pocket too, deciding to go for the frigates and destroyers first. But after a few weeks of doing mostly manufacturing, I had forgotten that shooting the trigger, is not something you want to do fast if there will be multiple battleships warping in.

Shooting the trigger of that next warp is not a smart thing to do either.

That is, of course, exactly what I did. Not only did I shoot the first two triggers, I shot every trigger. It didn’t take long for all the newly warped in battleships to get my shields down to 15%. This was the first time in a long while that I was actually afraid of losing my ship, I had to align to the closest asteroid belt and warp out of there. I tried going in there again, see if I could shoot a ship and then get back out, but that plan didn’t turn out too well.

At least that’s something I learned for next time; I’ll have to watch the triggers.

Luckily someone in the E-Uni channel was kind enough to help out, not only did she do 9 jumps, she came in here Scorpion Navy Issue, tanking everything in the room as we killed the ships.
I’m happy that she came along, very happy even that she decided to stop what she was doing to help this little noob that forgot about triggers.

This just goes to show that not everyone in EVE is a heartless scammer and that there are people out there willing to help out others. The only thing she asked for in return was for me to pay back her ammo and return the favor to someone else when someone asks for help.

Which is something I will definitely do, I’ve already been doing it whenever I could actually help anyhow. It’s nice to help out those who’re stuck.

On another note.. I really like the Scorpion, I should get one myself, the only problem is that I just can’t fly it worth a damn. And there’s still so much on my skill plan. But I want one, maybe I’ll just buy one to spin in my hangar and fantasize about all the lovely things I will never be able to do with it.

Survived to fight another day! 

Stay tuned o7

It has happened

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , 5 Comments
After months of reading EVE blogs, I have finally decided to start one myself. I’ve had this idea in my head for quite some time now, and I haven’t got a clue if anyone will actually read this but at least I’ll have a medium to get my thoughts out, and isn’t that what this is all about?

Let me introduce myself, I’m a 24 year old guy, born and raised in a tiny country called Belgium, which is in Europe, for those of you who flunked geography. I’ve been playing EvE Online on and off again for the past couple of, years I guess.

The first time I turned on EVE I was around 18 and heavily playing other MMO’s like WoW, EQ, you name it I’ve probably played it. But as most people who came to the game, I had absolutely no idea what was going on and it didn’t take too long for me to just go back to WoW (I know, shame on me). At the time the tutorials were non-existant, or at least everything was super confusing.

Fast forward a few more years, I read about one of the biggest scams in EvE history and once more my curiosity piqued. So, I fired up a trial, and started to play, to my surprise there were now nice tutorials and a help system that actually made sense, so I finished them and decided that I wanted to do combat. After joining a few noob channels I started to learn more about the game and combat. But, again I stopped playing after a month or two, the lure of Fantasy mmo’s was too strong at the time.

Last year I really got into EvE, so much that after a while playing my combat account, I decided to go for an industrialist. Which, in my eyes at the time was an alt account I could use to afk mine while I was doing L3’s. That account soon turned into a salvager to follow me in the missions and in the past month I have tried my hand on industry.

This blog will not be particular about combat or industry, this will be about what I want to write about that happens in the EvE universe, or at least what I know that happens… Which is, I’m ashamed to say, not a lot.

See you among the stars o7

My current two characters, Indy/Combat