Eviction target

For those of you that, like me, have been living under a rock the past few days. Here’s some news for you.

Hard Knocks is getting evicted by Goonswarm.

I don’t know much about how and why but from what I gather is that The Initiative has been planning to do this for the past couple of month.  

People are currently tuning in as the current biggest Wormhole corporation in EVE is getting evicted from their home hole. Something many people have thought impossible.

I have been in wormhole groups for the past couple of years and there’s always been a bit of a love/hate relationship when talking about HardKnocks. There’s no arguing that they did good, they were the first to build a keepstar in their home, are able to bring huge fleets and rent out C6 space.

Problem that most people have with it, is that there’s absolutely no way to fight a powerblock like that. None.

As a pilot that has always been in small wormhole corporations, the moment I rolled into rage I made sure that the whole chain got rolled. I never wanted anything to do with them being anywhere near me because it meant overwhelming numbers and losing my ships without ever having stood a chance. 

The fact that they rent out the C6 space also meant that other corporations never really had a chance to set it up themselves. They’re basically to wormholes what null sec alliances do to null sec. Something I’ve already talked about in the past that I hate.

It’s a shame that this is a null sec alliance pushing them out. But let’s be real, no way in hell would us wormholers been able to make this happen. We do not have the resources, logistics or people to do this. 

I’m curious what this means for the future of wormhole space. I just hope it won’t come and bite us all in the ass. I’d rather not have HK be replaced by a bunch of nullseccers. 

Especially seeing that I am starting to log in once more. 

Stay tuned o7

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I made a little deal

Wormhole space is a fickle mistress. And BoB a god that giveth and taketh.

The other day one of the guys on TeamSpeak was asking about someone docked up in one of our Citadels. A Russian, someone we had never seen before.

Seeing that we had bought this wormhole from someone, Astrahus included. I figured this was a previous occupant, logging onto EvE after being away for at least six months, only to log on and find him or herself in a citadel that they no longer owned.

So I decided to start a conversation with this person. And it turns out I was right. The guy (or girl I have no idea, for the sake of this story I’ll just go with him) was a member of a Russian corp that used to live here.

Now, the Russian part is pretty important in this. Since half the things that was said, was probably lost in translation somewhere. I basically offered him a way out to highsec and to buy his assets off of him. This was in my mind a pretty good deal. Since we could have easily just unanchored the citadel and taken all of the assets anyhow.

It took over 4 frustrating hours before he was finally able to show me his assets. Having never heard of EvePraisal, having never before used the fitting window to show his fits to people. It took a lot of screenshots on my end showing him which buttons to press etc etc.

I’m pretty sure he never even used a trade window before, since when the ISK I offered showed up as red for him he thought he was going to have to pay that.

But in the end I bought nearly 8bill in assets and ships off of him. Well, I paid him 8, it was worth quite a bit more but without a way for him to get it out, beggars can’t be choosers.

This has nothing to do with the post. I just like flying Panthers

After a while he logged on to another character on the account. I was ready to show him to highsec, so I warped to the first of three wormholes leading outside. He had undocked in a Kronos. Fine, he probably didn’t want to sell it to me and wanted it out. He warped to me. Only to warp away to one of the moons on which we put up a dead stick and then log off.

This confused me, I had no idea what he was doing.

After he logged on to his main again, this time undocking a Barghest and asking me to show him the way out.

Now, by this time, I decided that the way out for him, would be the pod express. The fact that he made me talk to him for hours on end to finally conclude our bargain had me frustrated. And I wanted some PvP action.

Knowing that he still had to move out the Kronos too, I decided that the Barghest could go. So I gave him a way out. Meanwhile, I asked a few of my guys to keep an eye on the tower. And I needed some tackle in order to catch him once he jumped the static.

After he was in highsec with the Barghest pilot, he logged off, and logged in the Kronos. Time for a proper goodbye.

He warped to the A3, thanked me again, and got bubbled as he jumped into our static C5.

It did not survive long. This was a marauder without a bastion module. I have no idea what it was used for, but it definitely was not made to survive too long.

I felt slightly bad about doing this afterwards. But, this is still EvE. And I did fulfil my end of the deal. He made it back to highsec.

Stay tuned

E’dyn

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What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

But what does kill you makes you stronger too. That’s the way it goes in EvE. You’re a clone, you literally have to die in order to become a capsuleer. Everyone died once in the start, even a character that has never undocked, is not the original.

I don’t do PvE anymore, it bores me and I have no idea why I ever did it. Some of you probably know this, but all I ever did in the past was run missions. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know myself.

When you play PvP there’s always lessons to learn. If you die you learn from your mistakes, if you don’t die you learn from your victories.

And sometimes, you just learn that you shouldn’t expect to keep your ship when you fly with a certain FC.
Not always because he’s bad, but because he takes risks. The “We’re going to die in a ball of fire but it’ll be fun” kind of risks. I am the kind of FC that takes the “I have no idea what I’m doing but this will be funny” kind of risks. Although in general I try hard to make sure not to take battles we can’t win.

Wormhole PvP is fun, there’s more to it than just being part of the blob, sure, everyone has their F1 monkeys, you need them because you need numbers. Even in W-space we have them but our F1 monkeys are pilots that (usually) know what they’re doing.
Not every operation goes the way you want it to go though. That’s something you learn too.

A few days ago I was in a fight with part of the alliance.
One of the corporations found a hole with Dreads in it and we were going to try and drop them. They came in our TS channel and went “Guys, can you bring Guardians, we need them now, go to the system in alliance chat”

It was late evening but I figured I could spare an hour or two to kill something so I went along with a few of the guys. Well, I went to Jita with an interceptor, bought a Guardian and then went to where I was asked to go.

Turned out they asked everyone to bring Guardians, due to which we had about 18 of them on the gate, waiting.
This should have been red alarm number one. We had more logi than dps.
Sure, some of the dps was already en route and ready to engage, waiting for their shot.We figured there were plenty of ships around, since we had split channels with the group inside the wormhole and the ones outside. Those outside would just wait for someone to drop down and give us the go signal.

Alarm bell number two was the way we got the bookmarks. The person that was supposed to give them to us was complaining about his own corporation’s lack of clarity in bookmarking. He dropped them in a can for us but.. Well, when we needed to go in, they weren’t the correct ones so we had to use warpins regardless.

No biggy, it happens, we’re used to using warpins.
Two Dreads on field, the go was given. Time to have some fun.

I forgot to make screenshots, so here’s one our CEO made yesterday in another fight

We jumped into the target k-space and warped on to the first wormhole. The target system was two further from where the k-space entry was. The opposite party knew we were there, and tried to roll us out before we could do anything.

Four battleships had gone through before the FC decided to take the fight (another red flag) Still, no worries. We had logi, and dps (I wasn’t paying attention)

Let’s just say that in the end, we didn’t have enough DPS. Plenty of logi but the other party had 6 dreads on field and a FAX machine. With the dps we brought we were never going to be able to take that down.

Once more it took a while before the FC decided to call it and have us bail. The hole we were fighting was gone, they rolled it while we were fighting, which happens when you fight on a wormhole. But we bailed, bouncing off of pings while a new exit was being scanned.

Once we got on it, we went through with a bunch of us only to have it collapse behind us (woops)

Luckily we had scanners. Guardians that had depots with them and could refit to probes. It took a while, but we were able to get out and back to high-sec. Once more dropping off my guardian in Jita. At the time it was almost 1 am, and I get up at 5:40, so I was dead tired but happy to be in kspace.

I was salty the day after. Really salty. I didn’t even die but I was calling the whole operation a total clusterfuck.
Too much logi, not enough dps. The FC’s orders being contradicted by another FC (their CEO I think) etc etc. But in the end, there’s always lessons learned.

This one, being that next time, when telling my guys to go somewhere. I’ll make sure that I know we actually need the ships that were asked.

We’ll just bring DPS next time. At least then I can shoot things too.

Stay tuned o7

 

I did a thing

Actually, we did a thing.

In the last 7 days a few things were done within the corporation that made us, a little less active PvP wise.
We moved, going from C2 space into a C5 wormhole. Not only did we move but we also put up a Fortizar.

Let’s just say that putting up a Fortizar in wormhole space was an extremely boring EvE experience. But luckily we were able to keep ourselves entertained in other ways (Mostly by playing Rocket League).

When setting up a Fortizar you don’t want people to see something anchoring. You don’t want some random person seeing it and telling his friends so that they can come shoot it when it’s vulnerable and doesn’t have defences yet. Which meant that during the setup phase, you roll all incoming holes. Every single one, during the whole anchoring stage, the whole 24 hours it takes for you to set this thing up.

It’s as boring as it sounds, we didn’t get too much sleep.

But it was worth it, we have a Fortizar now, we can park capitals in there.

Ready for action

Which brings us to the other thing we did.
I have spent, way, but I mean way too much ISK on a new dread pilot.
Somewhere in September I created a pilot who’s only purpose in life is to fly a Rattlesnake and a Naglfar. I had injected about 10 injectors in him at the start so he could fly the Rattlesnake we used to run C5 with. After that I just started training slowly a dread. Unfortunately when the Rattlesnake fit changed, I wasn’t able to use it anymore due to cruise missiles and such. So that SP went to waste.

Cue us moving to higher class wormhole space. Living in a C5 means that the incoming static can have “Very Large” ships moving through it. In general that just means that from now on we can start using capitals and even Jump Freighters to move our stuff in. So I did a thing, bought about 40-50 more injectors, and now have a Naglfar pilot ready to go.

Never did a cyno either

Never did a cyno either

Unfortunately, this also means that at this moment, my ISK worth is half of what it was a few weeks ago. I’ve been doing a bit of trading but I need to step up my game if I want to start earning ISK again.

Soon I’ll be able to use a Naglfar to run sites with. Or at least, I hope I will be able to make back the cost and then some before losing it.

We’ll see, sooner or later.

At least I’m doing a few things and that’s what matters.

Stay tuned o7

Risk Aversion

Whenever we go out on roams in Null we pretty much know that one out of two things will happen.

Either they will all dock up and stay docked until we’re gone, or they will try and get a huge fleet going so they can get us out of their little pockets.

This is because the null mentality basically equals not wanting to take risks and lose your ships. And I get that, I do. I’ve been like that in the past, but I have come to hate it.

I love fights, I enjoy not knowing the outcome of them, of being one of two teams, or even three, and wondering if I’m going to be the one that will come out on top.

What I hate though, is being part of a big blop, or being killed by one.

I know, I know, this might sound like a bit of a rant, and perhaps it is. But still, people should stop being afraid to get into a good fight.

The other day we were out on a little roam in our static, there were 8 of us, just a few Omen Navy Issues and other small stuff. We figured we could poke the locals into at least coming to shoot us by enthosising their stuff. So we brought in a Harbinger with an enthosis link.

The locals did a bit of docking and undocking, to see if we were still there, to tease us with ships, I don’t know. It wasn’t all that fun.

About half an hour later we finally saw them jump things in the system, local spike, 10 more people joining.

They undocked a FAX machine and we saw D-scan filling.

We were getting ready to fight, a few cerbs, tengu, legion, we could take that, or at least try.

That’s when they decided to make it even easier for them and they lit a cyno. They did not drop just one carrier, there were 7 on grid. Not something we could take, so we had to bail.

It was time to see if we could get some more people in the fight. We wanted to fight them, badly. After about 20 ish minutes we had 40 people ready, we knew the other guys had about 50 around so we could fight this if we paid attention.

Unfortunately, the other guys decided that they do not like playing with even odds. So they didn’t do a thing.

The alliance party split up and while we were on our way back to the wormhole the nullsec bears tried to pick off a few stragglers. Due to my own fault, I got caught in a bubble.

Sabre, 2 hurricanes, crow, stiletto on grid. I could tank that while the rest were warping back. I even nearly killed the sabre but due to me not having point he was able to get out with 10% structure, which is good for him. That kind of thing gets your heart racing.

When the other guys were back we had 2 gilas, a curse and a Stratios on grid. We could take this if we paid attention. But unfortunately, they brought in a geddon. So I told the guys to bail. We couldn’t take those neuts. I saw my tank break down slowly and unfortunately I was not the only one who lost a ship, since we also lost a Stratios.

It’s a shame that in general people in Nullsec are so risk averse. I wouldn’t have minded losing my Gila to a normal fight, but c’est la vie. It’s been replaced and I’m ready to go out in space again. Hopefully finding targets that do fight back.

I’m a bit salty about the loss but I shouldn’t be, it was my own fault. We didn’t warp back together, we didn’t fly as a fleet. It was late and everyone was in a “let’s go home” kind off mood. And that’s when stuff like this happens.

2016.08.24.12.34.16

At least I learned from it, this will help in future fights (or flights)

stay tuned o7

Industry and Bombers

I’m getting better at scanning down the wormholes that connect our little hole to the rest of space. Which is nice, seeing as I used to hate scanning mainly because of how bad I was at it during the tutorial missions.

Which is really the one and only reason why I never decided to try again, despite knowing that back then my skills were not even close to being good enough for me to scan something “quickly”.. I’m relatively better at it, it only takes me about an hour and a half to get 13 sigs down, so that’s good… Right? Right?!

I’m slowly going through the BPC’s I have left from doing so much copying runs, I think I only have about 400-500 of them that I’ll try and turn into T2 ones. Or at least try to, I have an average succes rate of 75% inventions per 21 runs (I have 2 characters running inventions every day or so). After the invention process is done, I usually manufacture the T2’s, again, two characters so that means that every other day I have around 200-400 T2 items sitting in my headquarters ready to ship over to Jita. Which I do through courier contracts because I’m too lazy to go out there myself and it’s super cheap.

Once I have gone through my surplus of BPC’s I’ll have to check the market to try and figure out what’s needed, because right now I’m still working with a supply that started two years ago. As you can imagine, a lot changes in two years but I want that supply to be relatively gone before moving on to something else.
I do have a plan of what that something else might be, I just have to figure out if it’s a good one first before disclosing anything.

As for the other “adventures” I’m having, I’m enjoying W-space but am still checking for some other options, I currently own 3 combat characters, which gives me quite a few options.

What all three of my characters have in common though, is the fact that they can all fly covert ops ships, specifically bombers. I love bombers, the fact that you can sneak up on someone and drop a bomb or deliver a load of torpedoes on them is pretty awesome.

Which is why I finally did something yesterday that I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time. I joined a bombers bar run. Which I enjoyed, although I have to admit that it was rather boring at first.

I logged into the one character not in w-space only to be told that I needed to go to Thera, luckily I was only 12 jumps out from one of the high sec entrances so I burned towards it and someone in fleet was nice enough to give me a warp in to the wormhole.
After getting into Thera we were told to meet up somewhere and…Wait.

“Thera is pretty though”

Waiting is not something I enjoy, time spent waiting is time lost, while it is a precious commodity. But luckily the voice comms and the books I started reading a few weeks ago made sure that it wasn’t lost entirely, I was laughing along with the others and enjoying a good book until we were giving the go.

Which meant jumping through another wormhole where a black ops vessel was waiting for us to bridge us to our targets. Last night was a good night, I spend an hour or more “waiting” but those few kills that did happen were quite fun.
We first got a bridged right on top of a Legion, I was too late in getting there because the amount of bombers we had along with us meant that dmg was extremely high and it was down before most even knew it.

The second kill was a Legion too, another pilot that had no idea what was happening to him, a better kill too, he was worth a few more ISK and I did get to be on that killmail. After that we were told to ‘burn” back to our staging system. Once again we waited a bit before being dropped onto a Raven and Legion. We got the Raven but the Legion got away, and once more we burned back to the staging system.

During the burn a Paladin was spotted on one of the gates.

We were told to try and catch it, and catch it we did. I had nothing to do with the catch, but it was fun to watch. Burning to a Marauder that’s 100km away equiped with a microwarp drive is not something many people can do but it happened. After the point he was able to jump away again but our tackler had anticipated that move and was already 50km closer to the spot he was going to and was able to snare him immediately after.

The paladin did take a little while longer to kill (aprox 20-30 seconds) but he went down, and my pilot’s killboard went up by 2.8billion isk. Which means that right now, I’m sitting on a killboard of a few billion destroyed against nothing lost.

A good and fun night all in all. Missing those few hours of sleep was worth it, and I’ll definately do more of this.

“Another one today, Thanatos!”

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 can’t you do?!

When people talk about EvE, you will usually hear about the endless possibilities EvE gives you. Hence the name sandbox, you can do whatever you want, however you want it. Well, within the bounds of the game at least.
You know, in case you’re wondering. http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/


There’s a problem about this though, something that seems to be something that both veterans and noobs have to deal with. With all the options out there for you. How are you ever going to pick what you want to do? How are you even going to be doing them?

A few months ago I had a friend of mine join the game, and he liked it, but he had a problem with the diversity. He had no idea what he wanted to do. He started training something, and every time his queue finished he said just put something new in it and then logged off. 

Because he didn’t feel confident enough that he’d be able to do anything with what he just trained. He didn’t believe the whole “You can still do things with a low amount of SP” that I kept telling him.

Which is why he stopped playing and went back to WoW. Because he felt that in WoW he atleast has the ability to keep up to, and even surpass other people by being better than them.
It’s a shame that he stopped playing because I’d love it if I could get some real life friends to play. But c’est la vie.

I too am trying to get rid of this problem though, what on earth shall I do. Is a question I ask myself everything I log in. One that doesn’t get answered 90% of the time, I make plans, but fail to go through with them.

Right now I’m looking at a hangar with 510 BPC’s in it to invent, and I have no idea which one to start with.
I’m also looking at another word document in which I’m trying to write up a ‘Looking for Corporation’ post for myself. Seeing that I really want to join the wormhole life. Or at least get to know it.

Guess I need to be more decisive in general.