The Captains log 11/3

Solarsystem: Amarr

Station: Emperor Family Academy

Once more we look beneath the grit of New Eden and explore some of its beauty. This week we have a Rouge Drone super weapon, a twisted coral and a Blood Raider base hidden away in a asteroid.

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…unless you bring the right type of ship, which I didn’t.  Just as you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, don’t bring an assault frigate to a battleship/snipe HAC fight.  You will die, quickly and ignobly.  You might be tempted to think, “I’m a small fast moving target, I’ll just zip around and get on some kills and do a little damage.”

You won’t.

You will get targeted by someone who will blow you to hell and gone.  Take my word for it, I’ve been there.

One of the guiding rules of Eve is don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose.  I can’t afford to lose battleships and sniper setup HACs.  Therefore, I bring smaller, cheaper ships on operations.  My two favorites are the Taranis interceptor and the Enyo assault frigate.  I brought an Enyo to the last CTA in Providence.  It lasted less than 30 seconds into the main fleet fight.  All I saw was ab0ut 3 lag jumps then my pod was floating serenely in the midst of the battle, for about 2 more lag jumps, then I was waking up in station.

After my clone woke up I had 3 thoughts in rapid succession:

“Gee, that was fun.” (HEAVY Sarcasm)

“Fuck fleet fights!  Fuck this stupid game!”

“I think it was all my fault, not the game.”

The first two thoughts are a knee jerk reaction to getting killed, I’m sure many people think that when their ship goes poof even if only for a second.

The third thought was a calmer more analytical evaluation of the brief, for me at least, engagement.  I realized that I brought the wrong ship to the wrong part of the fight.  To be fair I haven’t been in a large alliance that has massive fleet fights for very long so I’m still learning, at least that’s what I tell myself.  An assault frigate does not belong in the thick of the main fleet engagement.  I died without getting a decent shot off on anyone which is very demoralizing.  I’m not sure where my Enyo does belong in a massive fleet fight but I’ve had an idea.  The next time I go on a CTA and a fight turns up I’m going to bounce from planet to planet trying to pick off wounded stragglers.

It seems to me to be standard procedure to align to a celestial object after you land on the grid and warp away when you start to take damage.  So, anyone warping in to a planet is probable damaged already and not expecting a fresh, undamaged ship  waiting to pounce on them.  Also I hope that being off of the main grid some will reduce the effects of lag on my ship.

This is, of course, just a hypothesis right now.  I could be completely wrong and will either die just as quickly or bounce from planet to planet with nothing to shoot at.

If anyone has tried this with any degree of success/failure please let me know.  Let me know if an assault frigate belongs in a large engagement at all.

That’s right, loyal reader, I did not manage to get shot at even one time today.  But, all total, I did make just over 60 million ISK from the loot and salvage…especially the loot.

The “Special Delivery” mission item from the last post is still up for sale on contract, so that hasn’t changed.  But, when I signed back on tonight, I found someone in an unknown mission, Angel rats, and one structure in the last room.  I left for a few minutes to drop some loot off at the station, and when I came back into that last room (which the MR was still working on) there was a cargo container where the structure used to be.  The MR (originally in a Drake, now in a Raven) was sitting about 55km away from the can, completely oblivious to its very existence, so I opened it myself.

I tried starting a conversation with the mission-runner, but he rejected it.  Then I decided on a different approach.  I really wanted someone to shoot at me, so I decided to be a total jerk.  I sent him an EVE-mail to let him know that I had stolen it, and thanked him for the generous donation.  No response at all, and he still wouldn’t shoot at me!  But it was a nice market item, fetching over 8 million in an immediate sale.

Shortly after that, I found a pair of MRs in another Angel mission.  They were a few rooms ahead of me when I found this little gem, see if you can spot it with some of my other special items:

See that Angel Diamond Tag?  That could have gotten me over 2 million on the market, but it also opens up the bonus room of the Angel Extravaganza mission, so I’ll just be keeping that one.  Besides, you should know my weakness for tags by now!

“Meddlesome” is among one of the more G-rated things I’ve been called in EvE. “Trouble-maker”, “instigator” “pirate” (really?), these are all somewhat lighter fare than the more cringe-worthy “motherf*cking piece of sh*t” “asshole” (inclusive of all derivatives and conjugations), “f*ck-stick”, “homosexually-inclined phallus consier” [edit]… it just goes on like this actually. But today it was “meddlesome”, and I kind of took a shine to it.

There’s a saying about “pitting your enemies against each other” that would sound a lot more eloquent if I could remember it correctly. The idea is, get the two guys who are after you to fight each other instead and you’ve just killed two birds with one stone (egads, making one idiom into another!).

Today I was in Vittenyn with Scopique, and after burning a Megathron (and the two subsequent “just coming back to get my loot” bestowers), we tried playing some can games with some members of the Cut Throats and Wise Guys corp. Realizing they weren’t going to play, Scop went afk for a bit, and I went to dock up and get some RL work done as well.

Docking at the station however, I realized that the reason the Wise Guys weren’t playing was that they were busy camping the station like a girl-scout troop. Hooray for carebear station games! I convoed one of the guys we’d been messing around with before and discovered they were currently at war and had the “bad guys” “camped in goodLOL”. Right. Suddenly I realized how it is I knew these guys; their corp used to be in the now defunct (and former TEARS arch-nemesis) deadspace society. :). Gears began turning.

I docked up and struck up another convo with one of  the Wise Guys’ war targets. Huzzah! I knew these guys too! E-honor waving, anti-pirates who I’d can flipped on numerous occasions before. NOW this was becoming a party!

Really for no reason other than the perpetration of chaos and hilarity, I decided to tell the war targets I’d be happy to give outside station intel to help them break up the Wise Guys’ station camp (and I would, messing with ex-DEADS? Sure!). What I didn’t mention is that I was also giving the Wise Guys intel on what to expect these guys to undock in.

I set both sides to different colors and undocked to watch the fireworks go off around me:

Silly carebears and their silly station games. I went around cackling like a kid in a candy store, cherry-picking shiney goodies out of every wreck, docking up, emptying cargo, undocking again, rinse and repeat. 7 minutes and 75mil isk in goodies later, the smoke cleared, and both sides thanked me profusely for my help. Wait, what? Yes, thanked me. I was added to multiple address books for “future help”, and both sides declared a resounding victory despite I think just about everyone except the Nighthawk dying horribly.

Go figure.

Speaking of station games: apparently the CSM is kicking ass in their elected roles and has put forth a measure to CCP which would pretty much put an end to ridiculous station warfare. In addition to *finally* being able to look out a station window (so to speak) and see who’s camping you in what, warp-scrammed ships would not be able to simply disengage and dock up when the going gets rough. Win. The full CSM summit notes can be found ->here<- (PDF form) and I highly recommend reading the full thing.

o7,

-Aiden

I’m writing this as I’m logged into the game; thank you, IGB! I moved back to Frarn the other night, so I decided to do some scanning here today before I leave for my regular Wednesday RL duties.  Apparantly the system gets taken over by Russians during the day.

I don’t have anything against Russians.  After all, a big part of my family background is Russian.  But learn to play the game!  I found a Russian MR in a Hurricane who had almost finished the Missing Convoy mission.  He had killed off all the drones, but was just sitting on the edge of the EM forcefield with his drones out.  It didn’t look like he was doing anything, so I targeted the forcefield (having an overview setting already set up for Structures).  It was completely undamaged.  So I put a few lines in local to help…

Locke Mueslix > kvarkun, looks like you’re having some trouble

Locke Mueslix > yeah, you need to target that EM forcefield instead of just sitting there looking at it

No response.  So I warp back to station, change into Sunshine Bear, my PvP-fit Rifter, and go back.  I popped the forcefield, grabbed the Special Delivery mission objective, and dropped it next to his salvaging Thrasher, hoping he’d take it.  Nothing.  I EVE-mailed him to let him know that I had it and would be willing to give (sell) it back to him.  He responded back with “мудер паганый!” which the translator doesn’t like.  So I put it up on contracts anyway.

The best part of the afternoon came when I met Vlad something-or-other.  I had scanned him down in a Domi, and when I got to the multi-pocket mission area, I find Caldari Navy and Imperial Navy wrecks…TAGS!  I start scooping, checking d-scan, and there’s the Drake mission-runner.  Scoop, scoop, wait, what?  Check d-scan again, there’s a player in a Drake a few pockets past me, and a Gallente Battleship Wreck on scan.

I finally get into the last pocket, and sure enough, there’s a Domi wreck, still chock-full of goodies, and a set of poor abandoned T2 drones.  As I’m scooping loot from the wreck, the MR in his Drake apparantly couldn’t handle all the damage, and warped out, leaving another set of T2 drones behind.  So I make a couple trips back and forth, getting every bit of loot from the Domi wreck and all the tags.  Finally, coming back, I see the same MR in a Taranis on d-scan (he doesn’t name his ships, all the more helpful for me).  I get to the last pocket, but he is about 50km away from me, so I resume stealing loot, keeping an eye on him.  Oops, he just triggered another spawn while there were still quite a few ships left!  My cargohold is full at this point, so I warp out to empty my Vigil and come back.  And guess what I find on d-scan as I get close to that last pocket?  Gallente Elite Frigate Wreck, you guessed it.

No faction mods, but I did get one nice piece of Intact Armor Plates from the Domi wreck, which netted me 19 mil just for that, along with various pieces of T2 gear from both the Domi and Taranis wrecks.  But after all the running around, I didn’t manage to get shot at ONCE.  Here’s hoping for better luck tonight…my Armageddon desperately wants some action!

Mike shoved the coffee to the side and spread the two comms before him, on one he scrolled the text while on the other he made notations. Dee watched him focus on the information in a way she sometimes he would focus on . . . other matters. He stayed that way for the next hour, pausing and thinking before making notes or muttering to hiomself over some point that was in the transcripts.

Finally she took a piece of pie from a waitress and brought it over to the table along with a fresh cup of coffee. “Good book?”

Mike grimaced and looked up from the comm. “Oh heyas, Dee, did you just get here?”

She bit back her immediate reply as she saw the bloodshot eyes. “When did you last sleep?”

“Um, yesterday? what time is it, no, the day before . . . . ” Mike shrugged and looked back at the comms. “I promised myself I would get through this and dammit, I will. Kry has given me some new responsibilities in the corp and I am still not sure what they are, just . . . ” His sentences trailed off like he lost the trains of thought in mid-word

She looked down at the pilot and smiled. He could be so friustrating and she knew she could try to force him to stop and finish when he was more alert but it was easier to help him finish the job then know that he would rest properly. “Fine, so tell me about the summit.”

“Well, from what I can see, it went better than it might have. Even the Goons worked.”

“They had to, seeing as they are seeing their world crumble around them.”

“Nah, ‘Goonwaffles with syrup’ will pick right up where the Goonswarm left off. There are few constants in this universe but idiocy and griefers are two very solid ones. But that is beside the point. They did get things done and that is what is important. My only regret in regards to the goons is that Helen did not manage to go.”

“So what did they decidee on, at this summit.”

Mike started to tick things off on his fingers as he listed the accomplishments of the CSM summit. “Now remember, not all of this is going to go through, but these are the things that were breought before the higher powers, the movers and shakers of New Eden. The first thing is that they may make the CSM term a full year with TWO trips to the summit. I think this would be good for continuity but bad in another way. It waoud better if they alternated the elections so there was an election every six months with a 1 year term. That way experience could be teamed with youthfull enthusiasm. There would be fresh blood at each meeting and some ‘old hands’. They also discussed the abolishment of term limits which might be a good or bad thing. I could see dynasties forming but then again, the continuity of a good team would be a very sad thing to see eliminated on the basis of ‘your time is up’”

“So you are for it or against it?”

“If they did the alternation, I think I would fall on the ‘for’ side, and I agree that term limits are an artificial construct that the political nature of the universe would self correct. The next thing they discussed was security, basically it came down to design better locks on the one side compared to teach people to remember to USE said locks in a proper manner on the other. There is not a perfect lock that a thief can’t get past if the owner is careless. Then they discussed the way problems at the stellar level are addressed and asked that fewer canned replies are used and research is done before a proble is treated as trivial. A higher profile of the people in power was requested on the comms and in mail contacts. THAT I am not so sure about because I have seen many a logical discussion degenerate into name calling and chanting. Mob mentality on the comms is common.”

“A mob has the IQ of the average of the members divided by the number of people in the mob.” Dee said.

“Heh, you are meaner than I am, I was just going to say they sink to the lowest common denominator. But it all comes down to expectations. If something is even mentioned then there are those who take it as a died in the wool promise and start howling if it is not delivered the next day. They discussed the shockwave events that have been causing massive fleet losses as ships fail to recalibrate coming outr of warp, but no answer was found at this meeting. Then they spent some time discussing the new plans for the tourneys to be held . . . ”

“Ever thought of going into one?” Dee asked curiously.

“The same way every young lad dreams of being a sports hero. Yeah. But I think it very very unlikely a corp or alliance such as ours would ever manage to field a team. It was interesting to hear the concepts batted about, though. How points will be tallied, teams chose, that sort of thing. Then came some issues on the background of the economic system which was mercifully brief and even then, over my head. Once they got to the next part . . . ” Mike whistled. “They want to make corp and alliance memberships open information.”

“Open? How is that a bad thing?”

“It means that all of the members of a corp will be trackable during a war and easier to hunt. Currently some effort or espionage is needed to get the complete membership list, this will make things far far easier for extortion attempts to be made in hisec. There is freedom of information to consider but I agree with the CSM that this might be going too far. The sad thing is that if they even try it all of the cats will be out of the bag and very hard to stuff back in again. The they discussed nullsec and asked that more mapping expedition s be sent out to try to find new routes into that territory.”

“Why?

“Right now the known paths are ‘chokepoints’ and often ‘camped’. It is too easy for a group to hold a vast amount of nullsec at the cost of effort in only a few systems. More maps and connections might ease that. As to why we want to go into nullsec there is talk of more research division moving their offices down there or maybe the planets in that regiuon (with the relaxed labour laws) will be more productive than their hisec cousins. Then they got onto warfare that is common to the low and nullsec space and discussed things like redesign of stations to keep people from docking as soon as a battle was going against them or allowing a captain to see the surrounding space before undocking. Discussion of current weapon designs, such as the silliness of having the close range weapons mounted on slower vessels. Things for the engineers to look to.”

“You honestly find this interesting, don’t you.” She asked, playing with a strand of her hair.

“It all IS interesting Dee. This is how the world works and we are getting a ‘peek behind the curtains’. This is the sort of thing MORE people should be interested in, but they aren’t. They just complain how they wish things were better, fail to vote during elections . . . passive whiners.” Mike shrugged. “Someone has to care, not just during the election, but the rest of the time as well.”

“Someone like you.”

“And you, it is not just the pilots that are effected. Charity events, how time is allocated in the big research projects . . .decisions that were made there have bearing on how all the lives in New Eden progress. Just because you try to ignore it does not mean that the world will ‘go away’”

“I never said that.”

Mike sighed. “I know, you do care enough to put up with me rambling on about this and that, one of the reasons I love you I suppose. But the meetings then went on to discuss the ideas that the CSM itself was bringing to the table. Thinsg like Black ops ships and battle recorders . . . um, is something wrong?”

She was staring at him intently as he yawned and blinked at her. “No, no, continue. The sooner you finish the sooner you can c . . . go to bed.”

Mike nodded sleepily. Well from there the ideas were layed out on the” another yawn, “table and discussed. Bookmark improvements, insurance frauds, suicides . . . all were presented for consideration. In the end I think the most imp[ortant thing done was the growth.” He rubbed his eyes and blinked at Dee. “The CSM is coming into its own, they are starting to be treated like stakeholders in all of this, not just representatives of the whiny masses. For all our bickering, squabbling . . . ” another yawn, ” . . tching about this and that we are beginning to be heard. I got word they even broughtin the media in to witness this.”

“That is important?”

“Things done in the light last longer . . . are truer. That is why we talk of a black market, shady deals . . . when they shine a light on what is done . . . um, what?”

She was tugging on his arm, almost lifting him from the table. “You do not know when to shut up . . . come on, time for bed.”

“bed sounds nice, I could do with forty winks”

She lead him from the diner and down the walkway. The rest of the patrons watched grinning.

“Hey, isn’t the docking bay to the right?” The customer was idly cuffed on the back of the head by the waitress.

“Matter of fact, it is.”

*******************************************************

The writeup by the devs is up and available, I just went for a short summary.

with some opinion, of course.

from what I hear, PC GAMER was invited to send a reporter. That is an issue I am looking forward to.

m

It’s been a while since I’ve updated, but I’ll try to keep this from getting too long-winded.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I did get pod-killed for the first time.  I decided to go for a roam through null-sec.  My course took me from Heimatar, through the low-sec pipe at Eifer, into Geminate, and through Geminate into Metropolis.  I gassed up my Jaguar, jumped into a clone with no implants, and started off.

I must suck at this, because I found no “prey” at all on my trip.  About halfway through the Geminate section of my trip, I happened upon a very large Red Alliance/Solar Fleet gate camp.  I jumped through, but an Eris and two inties followed me through to the other side.  The Eris dropped its bubble right away which gave the Stiletto and Malediction time to tackle me.  The other members of the gatecamp slowly trickled through the gate, and I just couldn’t manage to get close enough to either of the inties to take them out.  A Rapier multiple-webbed me, and they proceeded to finish me off.  It’s like Ron White said, and I’m paraphrasing here: “I don’t know how many of them it would have taken to blow up my ship, but I knew how many they were going to use”.  As I got into structure, the Eris was smart enough to spit out another bubble for my pod, and I woke up back in Lustrevik.  It was thrilling, but it wasn’t “fun”.  I never found a fight; that was, in my opinion, a blob, and that’s something else entirely.

The other night I scanned down an MR just starting a Worlds Collide mission.  TL;DR version, I swiped the ship’s crew (hooray for mission objectives that don’t belong to the MR!), put them up for contract, and EVE-mailed the MR.  He didn’t bite, and no tears, he just politely laughed me off.

The night after that Chagatia announced in The Ninja Alliance channel that he found a Paladin in a mission area, but the pilot wasn’t moving or fighting, just sitting there being shot at by the rats.  So I got my PvP Raven and figured I’d go ninja some bounties.  When I showed up, the Paladin pilot took off, so I started popping the rats.  As I was unfamiliar with the mission, I ended up triggering more than one spawn, resulting in a mission area with quite a few cruisers and battleships.  My buffer being unable to handle such sustained pounding, I took off and called it a night, but would imagine the MR to be a little surprised when he comes back and finds it chock full of ships.

I’ve been having good results with my new scanning technique, thanks to a couple of posts on the forums, so thanks to the SN and TEARS folks for that.  I’m getting really itchy for a good mission-runner kill, so I think I’m going to go hunting this week.

Cybernetics have reached level 4, paused training and remapped to evenly distributed attribute points to intelligence and memory and plugged in a full set of +4 implants. I have decided to keep the minmatar ship path (atleast for now.. I have plans on learning the gallante battleships for some hybrid ship PVE goodness). I am currently training all my basic support skills to level 3 as well as training my small projectile turrets to level 4, total qued training time is about a day.

Daydreaming:
Solo PVE, PVP, as well as capable gang warfare.. alot of wormhole exploration and probing.

The new (to me since I haven’t created a character in a long time) 100% skill gain has been a true blessing in creating a starter toon as this has allowed me to reach lvl 4 in all my basic learning skills and level 3 on all my advanced skills. I am currently training cybernetics to level 4 to allow +4 standard implants.

Order of progression:
Cybernetics level 1 – bought 2 +3 implants for intelligence and memory
Alternating between Analytical Mind and Instant Recall to level 4
Learning to level 4
Eidetic Memory and Logic both to level 3
All other basic learning skills to level 4
All other advanced learning skills to level 3
Currently Training: Cybernetics to level 4

I’ve recently come across a web site, while HARDDD at work.. lol, that says something about doing a neural remap of a new character to give it 11 intelligence and 11 memory. I’m going to look into the benefits of doing this at this stage before I take the plunge. From what I understand so far, it would provide a boost to the initial learning skills time, however I am kinda past that point for now. Definitely have to see what other skills int/mem affect.

*EDIT*
All 3 core support skills (Electronics, Engineering, and Mechanics) rely on Intelligence and Memory… definitely a good idea to neural remap.

Immediate plans for Renji San:
Wormhole exploration, General mission running, some mining skills (retriever).

My blog has moved to http://singularmultiplicity.blogspot.com/