Change is bad

I’m currently in the process of taking my ships out of our wormhole. A process that I hate doing because I’ve done it a few times in the past.

I’m going to look into doing something different in EvE for a while. Mostly because I haven’t been too active the past months. Part of the blame is real life, but another part is the direction the corporation was going.

I love most of these guys to bit. I see them as friends. Met a few of them in real life and had a blast. But a few months ago some things changed and ever since then I haven’t been able to really get into the game anymore. And that’s mostly due to these changes.

We had a merge and it basically made most of the guys I liked playing with not want to log in. Because the people we merged with were guys we didn’t know. People that would rather do PvE than come and help in PvP. And that’s the problem you get when suddenly a new group is thrown into the old group.

The ideas the new group has will come together with some of the ones in the old group. Making a few people feel left out. In this case, I’m one of those guys. I did not cope well with the change and it made me not want to log on.

And I’m self-aware enough to know that it’s mostly my own fault for not opening my mind. But damnit I was having fun! Change is bad mkay 😉

So! I’m moving out, and I’ll be looking into lowsec. In the off chance that any of you out there reading this and have a corporation that’s not too shabby. I’m looking for a corp to join! Low sec of course. I’ve never done low before so it’ll be new and shiny and might just help in getting my EvE back on.

If in the off chance I don’t find a corporation that might fit me, I might just go nomad. Take a blops, my hunter and start moving around New Eden.

We’ll see. First I need to get all this stuff out to high sec.

Stay tuned o7

Getting paid for tackle

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

EvE and me

In EvE, like in any other MMO there will be a time when you just need a small hiatus. Most people playing EvE know this feeling well or will know this feeling because it happens to all of them. You might not stop playing altogether but you’ll just let your “game time” go to other games.

Which is basically what happened to me a few weeks ago. I wasn’t feeling it anymore and spent a few weeks playing Elder Scrolls Online. Which was a fun way to spend my time.

Last week however I felt like playing again. Why? Well, I was in London. Not by a twist of fate or anything, but because the corp was going for another real life meetup over there. One of the guys was going to go there from 15th till 20th of February and it was decided that those able to join should do so too.

And thus I met up with another bunch of my corp members.

Which was fun. It’s nice to be able to put a face to the guys I’ve been talking to since August. Well, most at least. One of them was there for the Prague meetup too.

We had fun, did the touristy stuff, talked about EvE, plans for the corporation etc etc. I did bring my girlfriend along because she’s still jealous she wasn’t allowed to join me when I went to Prague so this was to make sure I wouldn’t hear her complain again for month on end that I don’t take her along.

One of the reasons why the EvE bug bit me again was due to talking about it. That never happens when I go out with real life friends. They know that I play but are not interested at all in the game itself. So I can’t really discuss anything, or tell them anything about it because they just don’t care or don’t understand it anyhow.

I’m still a big noob but I like talking about the game. Even though I don’t know too much about it 😉

Coincidentally, the EvE London meet was during the weekend too. This wasn’t something we planned in advance but we went over to the pub, sat in a corner, drank, laughed and met a few people. Most guys in the pub were Null-sec residents. So we didn’t really have much in common with the risk averse guys there. But there was one other wormhole corp and we kind off banded together.

We did meet a few guys from PL. And some guy came to say hi to us, we were supposed to know him by name but it literally didn’t ring a bell with any of us. I think it was JakeMeister or something. At least that’s what his shirt said. I’m guessing that due to null sec people knowing him he figured that others would too. He was wrong but still.

London was fun. I’m looking forward to more of these meets, although maybe in less expensive places…

Everyone likes free capitals

I was only personally involved in the following for a small part. Most of this is written as a bystander, hearing about the things going on. It was pretty entertaining nonetheless.

“I just scanned down a C5 hole that’s attached to our home. It has a dick star in it. But it also has a Chimera. That’s sitting outside of the POS field unmanned. I have a warp in for it. Who can fly a Chimera?”

That was a question asked on our slack a few days ago. It was the start of a 5 day long operation, but it was totally worth it.

What happened was that in a Black Hole C5, one of the US TZ guys found an unmanned Chimera sitting outside a POS force field that he wanted to steal. It took about an hour or two before he found someone due to this happening early morning for the EU TZ and nobody being around yet. In the end a friend of ours was able to come help and get into the Chimera.

A few hours later, after them teasing the black hole residents about them losing a Chimera, we got a ping on Slack to come shoot another one. I have no idea how it happened and forgot to ask but the C5 residents had warped in a Chimera, on top of the other one. Only problem for them was that the other Chimera, was sitting right on top of our static connection to their hole.
This made it extremely easy for us to kill it.

You’d think that would be the end of it, but nope, not at all. Our US guys decided to keep an eye on them, staying in their hole to see if they’d do more stupid things, and they did. A day after the Chimera kill we were told on coms that they had managed to steal an Apostle.

And not long after that a Minokawa.

Thanks guys

For those of you reading this “how the hell is this possible”. Well it’s easy, these guys had all of their capitals in a POS, they didn’t have a XL Ship Hangar to store them in. So when someone bumped a carrier, the inertia of the bump and it being a black hole made it fly out of the POS. Where our guys waited for them.

Fit could be better though

Fit could be better though

In the end, we decided to evict these guys. We gave them the option to pay us for leaving them alone and giving them their capitals back. But they wanted to take the honourable way out. By not fighting, suiciding most of their ships and letting us kill everything.

We had our fun, and the Alliance got a little something out of it too.

Time to find the next target.

Stay tuned o7

Blingu’s rise and fall

Last night, was a good night. I got to use my Proteus again! It has been with me since I started my wormhole adventure way back with Raka, and despite it surviving for that long, I haven’t used it as much as I would have liked.

But! Storytime!

Yesterday started with a little roam in null. I was supposed to get to a gate-camp the guys were doing but once I got there the null-bears had finally decided to fight and we had to move back home with our tail between our legs after losing a few of the fleet. Once back, the guys who didn’t drop fleet since it was getting late, decided to go out for a little roam again. As per usual these days we didn’t really find much.

We did have a frigate hole in our chain, in which there were a bunch of miners on scan, and even a few Brutix’ etc. We knew this thanks to the scouting skills of one of the guys. Supposedly they even put up a bubble on the incoming wormhole to their system. So they knew it was there, and they had eyes on it. We hoped to get a fight out of it going in, or at least piss off a few miners. Seeing as most of them really hate being disrupted.

We decided to go out there in interceptors.
The frigate hole was connected to us through a C2, we wanted to go through, grab point on a few miners and keep them pointed, our heretic pilot was a bit slower, so we waited on him in the C2. When you live in J-space, you tend to use d-scan more often than in k-space. Most of us do it every few seconds, and it works. We saw an Epithal on scan, it wasn’t at a POS, not at their Citadel, so we searched for it and found him at a POCO. Before you know it we had three points on it and started to shoot. A few seconds after first point, a Tengu pops up on d-scan, the Epithal has backup. Seeing that I tend to make bad calls, we killed the Epithal and engaged the Tengu. This is with four interceptors and a heretic. We didn’t even put a dent in the Tengu’s shield.

The heretic died and we disengaged, we didn’t want to lose more ships to this. Luckily the interceptors are quite fast and getting out of point/scram range was easy.
After that our heretic pilot wanted to keep eyes on him, hoping to get revenge. “I don’t care if it takes me all night I want my revenge.”
I put my Proteus pilot in the C2 too, keeping an eye on the entrance to our home.

Meanwhile the pilot out for revenge kept an eye on the citadel and we went into nullsec. Our primary goal wasn’t forgotten, we still wanted to do annoy the miners. But they weren’t around. All of them were just floating in their POS.

As we came back a Brutix landed on the home connection, it was 60k off the hole, 70k off my Proteus. I started slow boating towards him with my Proteus, one brave Raptor went ahead and put a point on him. Giving me the opportunity to decloak and make my way over there to point him too.

While all that was happening the Tengu undocked again and warped to zero on the hole.
We pointed him too tried to kill the Brutix, who jumped into our home hole once he figured out we’d kill him. Seeing as we still needed to have our revenge on the Tengu, we started to shoot him. We couldn’t scratch it, it couldn’t scratch us. This is where alts come in handy. We made sure that we had a few points on him while others shipped up. Seeing that we couldn’t kill him with the interceptors earlier, having one Proteus as help would probably not do much either. I shipped E’dyn into a Hurricane and in the end, due to Pilgrim neuts, Falcon jams and our DPS, we were finally able to exact vengeance on the Tengu that killed the Heretic. He was shiny and had an amazing tank, but no cap and a combined total of more than 4k dps means certain death. Even if it took more than 20 minutes that fight was pretty fun. Hooray for alts! If we didn’t have those on standby, we would not have been able to break him. Kudos to him.

The loot fairy was good on us too, we had 1b in loot drop on us, so we got out with 250mill each. I paid the guys with my liquid ISK and have the mods waiting for my next Jita run where I’ll be able to sell them.

After that whole fight we decided to go and play with the miners again. They were still POSsed up. In a small POS, with no defences…. Seeing that it was late and we wanted to have some laughs, we decided to go and poke it with a few bombers.

So juicy

So juicy

I have to say, it was the most exciting POS bash I’ve been in. Mostly due to the fact that they started to panic.
The skiffs were being packed up in the Rorqual. The Phoenix started moving and logged out. It almost seemed as if they knew their tower wasn’t stronted. Due to the moving around of ships, one of the online, AFK pilots was bumped out of their shield in his hulk. It died quickly, so did the pod.

Unfortunately, the POS was stronted, so I’m still not sure why they panicked. We might have to go back there tomorrow. Even if it’s just for a few laughs. Op success.

Bummer

Bummer

All in all it was a good night, just a shame I didn’t record it.

And on a little side note, to show that I’m still a noob. During the Tengu fight my point kept getting turned off, and I had no idea why. Turns out that instead of turning off overload, I had accidentally turned off auto-repeat. Yes, you can laugh, that could have cost us a Tengu kill, I’m glad it didn’t.

Stay tuned o7

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

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.

I don’t even know what I’m doing

FC: “Could you take over for a bit”

ME: “Sure”

That’s how it went on TS but in my mind I was going “Oh fuck, I’m not even sure what’s going on, I’m not good at this FC bit, we only kill MTU’s when I lead a roam”

I basically don’t feel that comfortable yet in the role of an FC.
I like doing it, but I dislike not finding us anything to shoot. It makes me wonder if I’m boring my fleet members, if they’re even enjoying themselves.
I guess it’s partly due to bad luck, partly my fault? I don’t know.

Did a few things in the last week.

We had to go help defend something in null-sec. I don’t remember what because it was so damn boring. It just showed me once more why sov-null is not for me at all. Something about ihub, enthosis and waiting. All of those things are not fun, especially the waiting part, and supposedly the other two translate roughly to the same thing. You wait for things to happen.

I get that some people don’t mind that kind of playtime. Where you just follow orders, wait for the FC to call the shots and undock when you have to, dock up when told etc etc.
I’m not a fan of that. After about half an hour of waiting, finally allowed to undock, we warped to where the so called fight was happening, only to warp away again because our numbers were not needed (WHAT?!)

So that was lots of fun. But not really.

We did a roam the other day. As is usual since that’s what happens about 80% of the time.
I took over as FC for about half an hour. And while I was wondering about my own incompetence we caught an Ishtar, and a bit later a miner. It’s not much but at least it’s not just an MTU.

hPWY1rW

After that little roam it was decided to “rageroll” the static. Which basically means that we were going to keep rolling the hole in search of targets.

Let’s just say that ended up in me dying.

My death, once more taught me that station games are bad.

Fighting is fun if you outnumber them and even fun if you get outnumbered.
But only if you have a chance to beat the odds. Dying because someone drops a carrier on you or suddenly undocks in the exact counter of your fleet. No fun in that.

Well, it’s kind of funny if they drop a carrier on you to save a mining fleet. That one did make me smile.

But station games, they’re not fun. I don’t like it when people try to bait you into getting them only to then dock up, and undock in something bigger. Either you try and shoot people, or you run like hell. That’s the way it should work, and it does work. Sometimes in your favour, on other times. Not so much.

Next time I’ll just check it out from a distance and if we do get to destroy something on station, I’ll come and help. Next time, I’ll try not to die

Stay tuned o7

FC, should we jump too?

Yesterday was the second time I played FC. Although maybe we shouldn’t count the first one, since it wasn’t that long one but still.

I’m still new at all this. Doing it to make sure that I, and the others, have something to do. So called content creation.

It basically started with us going through our null sec static in cruisers. I told them that we might die, so what do my fleet members do? Undock in cruisers like a Gila and Orthrus’, because you know, if you’re going out, might as well do it in style.

Seeing as I am not quite that experienced, and I never cared about null sec politics or null sec in general, I had no idea that an area like Syndicate is dead.
So dead in fact that most of the systems we jumped in were empty.
Mistake number one. But, so be it, we had a wandering hole that led to another null.
Figured we’d go poke around in there.

It was a frigate sized hole so we did have to reship, I called for interceptors or other frigate sized ships, so we went there with a few interceptors, a sabre and a magus.

This time we were in Fountain. Turns out Fountain is filled with people that do not want to fight. They just dock up as soon as a neutral is close, which is a shame.

While I was checking Dotlan on what system to jump to, I of course jumped every once in a while without telling my fleet to do so. Mistake number two.
Which basically meant that every few jumps I had the question “FC, should we jump in too?” followed with a few laughs, since all in all it’s funny to poke on the FC right?

They even made a deal that if we didn’t find anything they could kill me. I did not agree to this but I wasn’t asked for my opinion. You see what I had to work with here.

Luckily for me and my, oh so expensive interceptor, we eventually found something. The Magus pilot had a Drake on d-scan, and found him ratting in an asteroid belt (I know right). Once he called point the fleet warped in and made sure they had him pointed too. Me, being the eager fc was already two systems further so I scrambled back, while being happy that something was caught.

As you can imagine, with a few interceptors and a sabre, it can still take a while to break a Drake’s tank. Which gave him enough time to call for help in local. Not that any was forthcoming. “Guys, help, I’m in asteroid belt x, there’s 5 of them”

Even with that intel not much happened. A jackdaw did land on us, but unfortunately for him we were eager for kills so he was pointed and killed quite fast.

Not long after that we killed the Drake and his pod. The loot going to our Magus pilot. Hooray! Kills.

Onwards to the next few systems. So we went on, only to find a gate camp, the Drake and Jackdaw’s friends. Good thing we were in inties. Or at least, most of us. We did lose our Sabre, and I thought that was it.

FC was bad. I figured our Magus pilot was following us too, but turns out he wasn’t there yet. So about 10 minutes after we had gotten past the camp, he got killed. In hindsight, I should have made sure that everyone was there, I should not have taken the gate, or at least told the Sabre and Magus pilot to turn around. Seeing that we couldn’t take a 20 man T3 destroyer camp with just our little fleet.

But so be it, live and learn. I’ll do better next time, and next time I’ll know that I should reroll the static if we come out in Syndicate or Fountain.

I had my fun, and I’m 85% sure that the rest of the guys had fun too. So operation success

 

Stay tuned o7

Let’s go fishing

I learned something new the other day. Which, surprise surprise, can happen every once in a while.

Well two things but we already knew about the first one so that didn’t count. Let’s talk about that first.

Waiting on a hole before doing something. Don’t do that, just, don’t.

We have a few scouts in certain holes, holes of people we want to play with.

Are we doing phrasing?

The other day, one of our exits was about 4 jumps from our “friends” so we decided to go pay them a visit. We put up a fleet and went towards their entrance, having most of the fleet wait one jump out, and the tackle on the hole. The plan was basically for me and our Lachesis to warp in, point an Ishtar and Megathron, and poke them into fighting us.

Where we missed, is that we were waiting for too long. Their scout had just jumped into the system, and warped to his entrance, right as we were landing on it, he landed to. I’m going to guess their comms were something along the lines of “Guys! There’s stuff coming to scram you, get the fuck out now!”

As soon as we saw it was one of theirs, we jumped in and warped to the site, only to land and have the Ishtar warp off right in front of our noses. We stuck around for a few minutes hoping to get a fight, but they knew we had Logi waiting for us, so that didn’t really work out the way we planned. Oh well, can’t do much about that. So off we were, on to the home system to go roam null-sec.

In our null-sec roam, I learned how to spearfish. For those of you that don’t know what it is, it’s the use of Command Destroyers and their jump portals, to warp someone away from their fleet. You use two of them, one to jump in, and one to jump out again. Bringing you, your fleet, and your target, 100km away from their buddies.

Which is actually quite fun to do. Especially if they don’t see it coming, which honestly, you should. If you see two Bifrost’ come at you, you ball up, easy as that.

So we did our little fleet jump, caught a Typhoon, who’s friends existed of about 8 Domi’s, but seeing as he was over 10km away from them, we were able to catch him off guard.

pew pew

They had a crow and a Tengu that came in to help him, it was no use. We almost killed the Tengu too but had to get out because the null-sec corporation had undocked a carrier. And as most of you know, carriers hurt quite a bit.

Oh! And I got another kill mark on my Gila! That’s number 4! Hooray!

Stay tuned o7

Ship ahoy, or something like it

“Ahoy mateys, we’ve got targets ahead.”

Or at least that’s what I was thinking when scanning the chain, seeing a bunch of retrievers on D-scan and jumping 100 off the only ore site, only to find them warping in.

It’s always fun when you have people warp in right when you get there, means you’ve got people to kill. Or to kill you I guess.

As soon as I saw the retrievers I logged onto E’dyn and grabbed my Sabre, while asking the few others online if they were up to killing them.

About twenty minutes later, we had a little fight going on. I did lose my Sabre but all in all, we came out ISK positive, and that’s what we like seeing.

2016.07.25.19.16.53

One of the miners we killed came back in a Cerberus and the other in a Stratios. Luckily we had a tanky hurricane with us that could take them on, if only for a while.

It was a first for me, seeing as I hadn’t killed someone in a wormhole for quite some time, and this was the first time I found the targets myself.

Yesterday was another first for me, the first time I played FC. Before starting I warned the others to go in ships that they wouldn’t mind losing. Seeing as I obviously have no idea what I’m doing.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get any kills other than an MTU (Yay us)! But it was good practise, and you have to start somewhere.

If any of you feel like joining us in our little adventures, join up the Y4CHT channel ingame, come and say hi. We’re friendly, I promise

Stay tuned o7