So much to do, so little time

As per usual, I have been “busier” than I thought I would be doing other things (gaming, lots and lots of gaming).
I have been meaning to write more often but unfortunately, didn’t.

My fault, so, hello there.

There’s been a few things going on in EvE, on one hand you have the new event that’s Dr. Who inspired, and on the other you have all the people complaining about it. That’s about all I know since I am staying away from reddit a bit. At least the eve one.

Every single time I go on /r/eve I regret it, mostly because everyone is so damn negative.

Sure, they’re not wrong about the fact that whomever is at the top is currently making very, very dumb decision (Ratati?).
But instead of being an echo chamber of negativity, at least try to spread some joy too.

What I was meaning to write about a week and a half ago is about me being a dumbass. Not necessarily out of stupidity, but more being a bit too cocky in what I was trying.

The new event started, I had a nice little Astero, and I was going to do some scanning.

There was a nice connection to our wormhole and a few relic sites around so I decided to hit them up. The high-sec static was nice little extra, because this meant that maybe, just maybe someone would come in with a purely hacking ship and land on me.

And lo and behold, a little heron popped up. Now my train of thought was “Oe a Heron, that’s going to be an easy kill”

I was wrong, very very wrong. Turns out that I was actually scanning around in EVE University’s home hole and I had no idea. Not only that but instead of looking up the name of the heron pilot, I was just “eh easy target”

This little Heron had a bite and I lost an Astero. It was fun though, and I learned a lesson. The first one being that I shouldn’t judge a Heron for it’s cover, and the second that my Astero was not tanky enough at all. If I had better repair modules on it there would not have been any issue at all. But hey, live and learn. Afterwards had a nice chat with the pilot and I asked for his fit, mostly because I wanted to know where the bite came from, this so I could have it happen less in the near future.

Two days before this we had a fleet going on, I am trying my best to join every single one that we do since I do want to play the game more often. We were messing around in null with Horde a bit, trying to get them to undock more ships. Which they did, but hey, I survived, so that’s nice!

Escaping intact is always great

Stories like this is what makes EVE great, the sandbox in it all. Yes, the scarcity is bullshit, yes there’s less pilots in space and that’s a shame. But those who are still out there are still making stories. Less so than before but they’re still there.

And they’re more than willing to bring out the big guns

So how about instead of complaining on reddit about the lack of pilots, you start undocking? Who knows, you might actually have fun.

Stay tuned o7

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The thrill of the hunt

The thrill of the hunt

A few days ago I was getting familiar with scanning again. This because in the past few weeks I haven’t been doing it much while playing on the laptop.

During my mapping of the holes surrounding our home I came across a few people on my dscan. Nothing major, a Drek here, a scanner there. You know, the kind of traffic you expect in wormholes.

I jumped into a C5 wolf-rayet and my eyes lit up, my dscan showed five Nestors and a Leshak, along with their Mobile Tractor Unit.

Now, normally when people are out farming in space, they pay attention to d-scan and vamoose the moment someone pops up. I’m not sure if these guys were just pretty sure that nothing would happen or that they did not see me but they stayed there.

After messing around with dscan a bit I came to the conclusion that the site they were in was already despawned, this conclusion was made firmer once I noticed that they had the Sleeper spawned.

So what do you do in a situation like this?

Well, you decide to see if you still know how combat probes work.

They did

So I moved out of their dscan range, got my combat probes, and scanned them down. I think I took less than 2 seconds to grab the mtu to 100%

Normally, when I do C5 pvp, at this point I would have seen it happen, but I used to do it in dreads and I kept spamming dscan the whole time, mostly because a site didn’t take too long to clear in the first place.

These guys, did not see it. So I warped at 100 and now I had eyes on them. Slowly they were poking away at the sleeper.

Unfortunately, nobody was online, it was a slow day, almost evening, around the time when most people are eating etc etc. So all I could do was keep my eye on them.

I wanted to drop a saber on them and kill the mtu as they ran but unfortunately I did not have any sabers left.

I did try and kill their salvager, but this one did pay attention.

During all this, I had a bit of an adrenaline rush. For reasons that most of you know, even seeing your would be target is a rush. And I kept thinking I was uncloaked too so that didn’t help much 😉

Next time, I’ll try and actually have something to shoot at.

However we did kill a Rorqual the other day too with the corp fleet, so that’s always nice for the killboard.

Stay tuned o7

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Random act of kindness

Random act of kindness

EVE is a pretty cut throat game for the most part. Some people will scam you if they can, others will steal all your stuff if you trust them just a little too much. And most people will happily shoot your ship to spice up their zKillboard stats.

And then there are those that from time to time, decide to nice towards their fellow EVE players, and make them smile.

Today that happened to me. To sketch the situation a bit; I was rolling our static C5 in search for a decent one to do some stuff in. In general that means pushing a Megathron through a few times, usually 5 passes with Microwarpdrive on will do the trick into collapsing the hole (MWD gives you about 100mill more mass on the battleship).

Basically 10 jumps back and forth. On number 6 it went half. Normally on jump number 9 it would go critical and you’d close it in coming back.
This time it went critical coming back. Me having my numbers near me, figured that meant that I’d have about 250 000 000 mass left on the hole, plenty for another normal pass with the ship and then come back to close it.

I was wrong.

Stuck on the other side, a C5 that wasn’t scanned down, in a Megathron, fit with a probe launcher and normal probes.
Those of you who scan from time to time will know that it’s a huge pain in the ass to do so with normal probes, let alone from a battle ship.

But this C5 had a C3 static so I figured I might be able to scan that one down and then hopefully find a high-sec exit. There were six signatures to scan down, after doing two I was sick of it.
Two gas sites and that took me over ten minutes (this isn’t my scanning alt so his skills are even worse).

Seeing that I had the option to self-destruct or keep myself busy while grinding through the scanning part I decided to do “Mr. lonely” in local. Which got me a response from someone asking me why I was sitting there and if he could help me.

He told me he was sitting on a low sec exit and to invite him to fleet so I could get out of the hole. Due to the nature of the game I was a bit apprehensive about this but my only other option was to self-destruct.

So I took a leap of faith, invited the guy and warped to him. Him being true to his word, he was sitting on a low-sec exit.  I thanked him, gave him some ISK for his trouble (yay no scanning for me).
He then told me that if I wanted to he could bridge me to another low, closer to high-sec.
This guy already made part of my day by giving me an exit, I figured “Why not, if he jumps me with something at least I got some content out of it”

But nope, I had no reason whatsoever to be sceptical about his intentions.
Not only did he help me get out of the wormhole, in a system two jumps from where I was at, he logged in his Titan, and bridged me. One jump from highsec, 13 from Amarr.

Bridging me in a Titan? Damn man you're the best

Bridging me in a Titan? Damn man you’re the best

This is literally the sixth time I’ve seen a Titan in the game and it was because I did something random, and someone decided to be nice.

Thank you for your random act of kindness man.

Days like this, is why I love EVE.

Stay tuned o7

Round two, start.. Preparing

Little over a year ago, me and a friend of mine tried to settle in a C4 wormhole. We failed, but it was fun.

In the past few days we got to talking again. He had joined a C5 corporation but still felt the itch to settle in a lower class one. Which brings us to yours truly.

I’m enjoying myself in the Null sec corporation I’m in, however, I have other alts. Alts without a purpose, they are just sitting in shiny ships in Jita or Amarr or whatever other system I logged them out in last.

Which brings us to another little plan that has been forming up and coming to closure. We’re going to try out another wormhole adventure. But this time! We won’t be going into a C4, no we’ll be settling in either a C3 or a C2. Since that’s a bit easier to run sites in solo without having to scan more exits, pay a LOT more attention etc. etc.

We’re currently busy scanning down holes, checking if there’s any activity in them, checking out the planets etc. etc.

Once we find a hole to live in, the move will start. I’m looking forward to starting another adventure in w-space. I have tried before, I have failed, but it was a lot of fun and that’s what matters. And if we can make some more ISK in the process, well, that’s even better isn’t it.

While doing all this I’m also training up an alt as a jump freighter pilot. This was done with the idea that it would make things easier for me to start a little Null sec trading hub in my new home system.

This freighter pilot will also be used as a bit of a service for the wormhole, so two birds, one stone kind of thing.

I just need to learn how it works, but I’ve got Singularity for that, once the skills are trained at least.

Now to figure out if I want to keep producing T2 stuff or if I’m going to be giving up on that. The profit on some of the stuff I made has literally dropped 80% in the past few months, on some things even going as far that the price to sell it, is the same price as the resource cost. Something I’m used to when talking about ships but never about components.

We’ll see what happens, the good thing is, I still have a few other sources of income and I just keep expanding my little empire.

Stay tuned o7

Stranded in a wormhole


In the life of a wormholer, there comes a time, where you go inside a hole, and forgot to check it’s life. 
That is what happened to me a few days ago. I decided to log onto E’dyn again and wanted to do some scanning. Or at least check if I was still able to scan things. So I went into a hole that was scanned from our Home system and didn’t look at the time.
Only about 20 minutes after going in I was asked in chat if I knew that it was ‘End of Life’, obviously, I did not.
After going back to where I came in I noticed an absence of any hole, meaning that it collapsed after I came through. Good thing I had my scanner with me.
It took me about 2 hours to find my way out of the wormholes. Not because I didn’t get any connections out to Low, High or Null. No, only because, I actually suck at scanning.
Pinpointing a system takes me ages, and I’m not sure if it’s skill point related or just because I’m terrible at placing my probes but it’s not a fast process. 
I’m currently parked in Amarr, after being able to get out in a low sec system and taking 20’ish jumps there. I needed a place to spin and buy things while wondering if I should train my scanning, or just set other priorities.
Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed yet, I’ve had a little domain change. This site is still hosted at blogspot but I’m currently working on creating something a bit “bigger” as I am not just playing EvE and have been thinking about putting down my thoughts on other games somewhere too. So I bought a domain, some hosting space, and am now in the process of doing the actual design. 
Stay tuned o7

Curiosity killed the pod

A few months ago I had my first taste at exploration. By way of being in a wormhole I learned how to work the scanner, and enjoyed it. Which was a surprise at the time because of the fact that the scanning tutorial I did way back when I started playing EvE was not fun at all and mostly frustrating.

But due to skill points and asking help on how it works, I learned to work my probes and enjoyed using them.

Unfortunately I haven’t used them in quite some time. In fact, the only ship I’ve flown in the past couple of months is my industrial character’s leopard for moving between Jita and my home system where I do my manufacturing.

That changed earlier today. I bought myself an Astero and called it Curiosity.

The plan is to start going out and learn how to hack containers. Something I tried before in for about 10 seconds before I got my then scanning ship (a cheetah I had for years) blown up because I was paying more attention to the virusses instead of d-scan.

The next few days/weeks will be spent back in the game, doing things I haven’t done before.

Chances are I’ll get myself blown up, because I’ll be popping in and out of wormholes in a semi-shiny ship. But that’s what ISK is for, to get it blown up again and again while hopefully making some people explode too.

This is a change since the last couple of months because in those months since I stopped living in a wormhole were spent playing other games, and only updating my manufacturing in EvE.

We’ll see if I can keep it up, but I enjoyed being in a wormhole a lot. We’ll see what happens once I figure out how to hack without destroying the loot.

Stay tuned o7

Wormholes and New Year

A new year, a new beginning. Or at least that’s what a lot of people think about once a new year starts. It’s a time where most people make a few resolutions that 90% of them will keep up with for a few weeks and afterwards just forget about them. The biggest example would be where I go to the gym, the months January and February it becomes a bit crowded with all the people telling themselves they’ll get fitter in the new year and some keep up with it (I’m actually one of them) but most don’t.

Which is why I usually don’t make any resolutions and just see what happens. But for those of you who do! I wish you all the luck in keeping them, or at least most of them. 😉
I hope that all of you out there had a great evening, watches fireworks and had fun with friends and/or family. And that 2015 may bring you all the luck/isk/whatever it is you wish for.
And now for something EvE related.

It’s been a week since I last posted, what with Christmas and all that, I didn’t really feel like posting much and I’m pretty sure not many people would have felt like reading it so there’s that too.
Which doesn’t mean that I didn’t do anything in the game, I’ve actually been doing more than I have in the past few weeks, even months.
“To infinity, and beyond!”

As I said in my last part of the previous post, I was getting ready to move into a wormhole. Brushing up on scanning(which I still suck at albeit a bit less) and other things. One of which was browsing the character bazaar. The friend that I was joining told me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be able to fly a Tengu, seeing as the only T3 skills I have was for a Loki and I had ISK lying about not being used, I decided to buy myself a new alt. I made a pretty good deal, paid about 9 billion for a Tengu-alt while I saw others go for a few billion more so I’m pretty sure I got lucky.

After buying the alt I started the move, moving in bombers, buying a Tengu (still haven’t moved that one in) and checking up on Wormholes in general while wondering what use I’ll be to my friend.
We moved in to a C4 and I brought a few of my PI alts in so I could start PI in the wormhole, seeing that according to what I heard that’d make me a bit more of that precious passive ISK.
While doing this I noticed that one of the POCOS up, had a way too high tax rate. So I decided I wanted to shoot it down.. I did it before, I could do it again. After reading a bit (Foo’s musings on this helped) I figured that I would need enough dps and patience to do it and come back after 24 hours to do it some more.
“This’ll take a while”

Starting this last Tuesday at around 2pm was not one of my smartest decisions. Once we got the office down to 25% of the shields it would go into reinforced mode for about 24-48 hours. I had hoped on 24 hours, but unfortunately it was 34.. The timer would go down at 1am on January 1, while I and my corp mate would be out with friends/family.
Luckily my friends play games too, they don’t play EVE but at least they understood why I had my laptop along with me and had to log in at a bit before 1 to do an AFK bash.
After it started I went back to our food (so much of it!) and an hour later there was a nice little explosion, prompting me to put up our own little gantry.

I learned that next time I’ll need to bring more than just one Glass cannon Oracle and a bomber. Next time it’ll go faster.

As for my other days in WH space.. Let’s just say that I’m enjoying the things I’m learning and there will be plenty for me to talk about. Or at least, that’s what I’m hoping for.

What about wormholes?

Plans, you make them, you break them.

I have so many things in my mind that I’d like to do but I just don’t do them. So many things I want to try out but don’t have the time for them.

A few days ago I was asked if I was interested in joining a Wormhole corporation. Which made me start to think about living in one.

They intrigue me, I love the idea of wormholes, I like the fact that there are no stations and that you need to provide for yourself. And as I said in the past, I’ve actually had a bit of fun in a few already, both PvE and PvP wise.

The one big problem I have with them, is the fact that I’d need to be able to scan. Which is one of the many things in the game that I suck at. 

I have the correct skills, all at IV or better, and yet I can’t find anything even if it meant saving my own life.
A while ago I went into null with a cheetah just to check if I could train and get better at scanning. I knew there were sigs, I knew where to find them. 
And yet it still took me over an hour before I finally scanned down two of them. Two, out of (give or take) eight. While I know that there are people out there who can do it much, much faster. It’s safe to say that the idea of scanning even more quickly turned into disgust.

This, along with some things I hear about them, and the limited experience I have in wormholes, makes me think that I might not be put out for it.

I just don’t have the patience to scan down things, to wait at a wormhole for someone to pop up. Even to go out hunting for ours through different ones only to get stranded when it collapses behind me. Something we all know happens.

“Someday we’ll be together”

But if not wormholes, what am I going to do? I need to get out of high sec because it’s keeping me down, I’m not actually doing anything and haven’t done so in quite a while.

The answer? Low sec.
The new problem that came from this? “What corporation”

So now I’m going to go and search for a corporation, willing to take me on. Maybe one that’s noob friendly, because I know for a fact that if I go out for a kill solo. I’m going to get my ass kicked and my frozen corps handed to me on a platter.

Let’s see where this path I put myself on leads.

Stay tuned o7 

And we learn something new

The other day I decided to finally go out and explore a few wormholes. Taking out my Cheetah I started to launch probes left and right, scanning for an entrance. I first started in the System I usually do my missions at. Close to home, and if I found something, even better.

This is where I made my first of many mistakes. I know absolutely nothing about scanning, I know you need probes and you need to keep configuring them and pressing that scan button until you find a 100% one.
So that’s what I did, after a while I found an unstable wormhole, giddy as a little kid that just got his first gaming system I pressed jump and entered without checking the info.

Guys! I found something!

Little did I know, that I would just be dropped 12 systems further, in another high sec system. I finally check the info and noticed that this wormhole drops someone in a random high sec one.

Thinking to myself: ‘Ok E’dyn, rookie mistake, this can happen to anyone, lets head back and try again’
Luckily for me I was still idling at the WH entrance, otherwise I would have had to scan again to find it.
So we go back, and this time I go a few systems further in, into low sec, thinking that I might be able to find something better here. Lo and behold, I find an entrance to unknown space. I go in, immediately warp away from the hole (because that’s what I think you have to do) and cloak up. To then start idling at the hole, wondering what on earth I will need to do next.

I should have bookmared that hole

I was amazed at the discovery scanner, there were a total of 15 signatures in the wormhole. Of which 11 were already at 100%. Asking in a channel I asked them if this was normal but unfortunately none of them knew anything about wormholes so I was left to think that it was.

Oh well, 4 others to scan so I might as well do that. And here’s where I made another mistake. I warped of to the nearest planet at about 70km, forgetting to bookmark the hole I just came from.
No big deal you’d think, that’s just a few scans away. So I start to scan and find another WH entrance, according to this one it goes into unknown space. So, I went ahead and clicked jump, because that’s what you do when you have no idea what you’re doing.

And the confusion starts, I wanted to enter the wormhole, I was in a clone without plugs so if I did something extremely dumb, I could just decide to self destruct.

After pressing jump, I got stuck, and I have absolutely no idea what happened, nor could anyone in any channel I talked in answer. My ship was calibrating, and I was cleared for jump in x amount of seconds. So I kept pressing the jump button, nothing happened. But according to my UI I was getting pulled into the hole. After the timer ended, I was still stuck in the same animation, and I was still in the same system. But for some reason I couldn’t warp away, I couldn’t even reload my probe launcher, because according to the game, my ship was no longer located in the same place.

I stared at this for quite some time

And when I tried to jump again, it told me I was polarized and needed to wait for 5 minutes or so.
And we wait, after the 5 minutes were up I was polarized once more. ‘Strange’, I think to myself, ‘Something must have gone wrong with the client, better turn it off and on again’. Because that’s what you do when you’re in IT and you come up with a problem, that’s the first step you try, you restart and check if the problem is gone.

After the restart I was warped away from the hole I was getting sucked in. But this time I had made a bookmark! So let’s try again.

No luck, and no idea why I have no luck. No explanation why I’m not going into the next system.
Around this time I started to realize that without anyone able to explain to me why certain things work or not, I would be in over my head.

After another restart, I scanned up the exit to low, and went back to base. Having not won any information, other than the fact that I’m not that good at scanning, and that I’m in over my head when it comes to wormholes.

And then there’s the whole d-scan. I have yet to figure out how that works, I did use it. And there were two orcas and a caracal in the hole with me. The only problem was the fact that I didn’t know how to find them. I had forgotten where a POS gets anchored, and I didn’t want to warp to every moon and every planet to check.

In hindsight I could have used Google, but I didn’t think it would have mattered.

Docking up, I store the Cheetah, not giving up my hopes on exploration yet, but logging of with the idea that I needed someone to show me the ropes.

Stay tuned o7

Every day, you learn something new.

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