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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

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End of chapter one

On Saturday we decided to leave the wormhole that we moved to a few weeks ago. This due to multiple reasons, the one that made the decision the easiest was the fact that it was turning into a huge ISK-sink. And only two people trying to make it work, isn’t easy in a C4.

The decision was made after I lost a Raven while rolling one of the statics. I didn’t mind the loss, not at all, it was beautiful and I didn’t see it coming at all.
We were rolling another C4, which at the time seemed inactive, nobody around and we figured it was safe enough to take out our Ravens to roll the hole. What happens is that you use the mass to get the hole to critical mass and after a certain amount of jumps through it, it should pop behind you.
“Bubble up!”
Cue the first jump, it went perfectly, we go in the other C4, MWD’s on (this is to increase our mass) and then go back out. Now once you jump through and back in, you get a timer stopping you from jumping for around 2 minutes, so you wait until it expires before going back through. 
I’m guessing that our first jump alerted the locals to what we were doing, because once I jumped in for the second pass, two Proteus’ uncloaked on me and scrambled me. I wasn’t too worried at first, I could just jump back through, if it wasn’t for the fact that they started to bump me away from the hole. I immediately alerted the other Raven to not jump through and asked if the ones in the hole could help me out. I could tank it for a while but there was only me and my friend, he couldn’t really do anything against two Proteus’ solo and my Raven only had smartbombs and neuts. I did do some damage, but not nearly enough to outlast it.
A few minutes later I lost my Raven, bounced to a planet in pod, exchanged “GF” in local and bounced back to the wormhole and into our POS. 
We talked about our wormhole life, decided to call it quits in the C4 and started moving out a few hours later, when our connections gave us a good highsec system to jump to. I also lost a pod while jumping back and forth, this time to a smart bombing legion (woops) 
The last of our assets got moved out yesterday and shipped to Jita with PushX and Red-Frog (got to love courier services). 
While moving assets I did lose another bomber to a gate camp in Aunenen, a system that’s supposedly known for its gatecamps. I did not know this. But after losing the bomber I went back to the highsec system I had my assets in, this time with a Cheetah, probed a hole, and got lucky with it’s other connections because one hole further there was a highsec connection 2 jumps from Jita. Which made it extremely easy to get the two Tengus I had stored in the system next to Aunenen back to Jita.
Who knew that wormholes could come in handy like that! 
Not only did I move out of the wormhole this weekend, I also joined another two bombers bar runs on my bomber character (Saturday and Sunday) and had a good amount of fun to make up for my losses, got a few more kills out of it too.
“I think they were mad we killed a Thanatos and Proteus”
Despite it being somewhat of an ISK sink I did enjoy my time in a wormhole of our own and am already thinking of going back to one, however, this time there’s got to be a better plan. Either ally with someone and join them in C4 or move into a C2. 
We probably should have seen those problems coming but it’s another lesson learned, and that’s what matters most, people make mistakes and we learn from them. 
Plus I’ve been losing a ton of ships the past couple of weeks so I’m finally learning how to not care too much about losing a ship, yay!
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

I do it my way

When reading other people’s blogs, especially the industrial ones, I always come across the same kind of things. People calculating everything. From the amount of ISK they will make with the sale of one product, to the cost of the invention, everything gets written down and put into their spreadsheet and used to calculate their total monthly profit.

I, don’t do that. I know that EVE is called spreadsheet online for a reason, and I use spreadsheets, I use them a lot. But I just can’t bother putting every single step of the process in a sheet to see if the things I make actually have a nice profit margin or not. Wether its 5% or 500%, as long as I see my total amount of ISK rise, I’m a happy camper.

Now, is this the wrong or the right way to do it? It’s neither, it’s my way. It’s definately not the best way out there but it keeps me from having to manage every single step of the process and keeping it all written down. I probably make a bit of a loss on some items, but I probably make a nice amount of profit on others.

Note the use of probably there. I have absolutely no idea which one of my items makes me the most money. And that’s where I’m doing it wrong. But I just can’t bother to try and manage everything. I still have over 600 blueprints in my hangar that I need to invent. 600! That’s 600 updates to my laboratories, and everyone working with POSes know that this is not a nice way to spend your time.
What do you mean: “You have to do us one at a time”

I keep hoping on a POS update, but I doubt that it’ll come anytime soon.

The reason why I’m starting about this is because today I will be putting the last of the T2 blueprints that I have in stock in manufacturing lines. I put a small hiatus on invention because I started to hate doing it, I hated logging in to update the lines, invent some more. 

But unfortunately, I’m at that time again where I have to.

This time however! I will try and use decryptors, something I haven’t done before, and I think I will start writing things down more, see how much of a difference that gives me.
Not using decryptors gave me about a 55% chance of getting a T2 BPC, the use of them will (hopefully) up that chance a bit. We’ll see what happens.

I still love my POS, but sometimes, I wish this was all a lot easier, but then everyone would be doing it!

Stay tuned o7