The Road to Recovery

…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.

How do people make billions in Eve?  I’ve been close to one billion in my wallet but never quite got there.  I’m sure that I have made a few billion over my Eve lifetime because of the ships I’ve flown and lost but I never found that easy button some people seem to have.  I know this is an, “outside, looking in” type of  statement because I’m sure that there isn’t really an easy button for making big money in Eve.  I just get tired of the grind sometimes.

The best thing I have been able to come up with for making money is running anomalies and belts in 0.0 space.    I recently got a clue and anchored a huge secure container to hold loot in until I can bring in an Iteron to collect it.  I take as much as my Ishtar can hold, then drop it in the container until the container is full, and then haul it to the nearest alliance station with a reprocessing plant.  Once I’ve got the loot in the station I try to cherry pick the best named stuff to try and sell on the local market, then I melt down the rest for the minerals.  The crappy loot won’t sell but minerals always will.

Have I missed anything?  Is there more money to be made elsewhere?

I tried to make some easy cash by researching blueprints for the Taranis and Ares interceptors but it’s hard selling the blueprints without being in system to spam local, which I hate doing anyway.  I think I’m going to look into inventing for a different class of ship but I may have to check some skills and train up some different things.  I’m going to finish up getting heavy drones 5 back, (after my little clone upgrade snafu), then look into the blueprint thing.  At least with tech 2 heavy drones back the ratting will go a bit quicker.  Even if I don’t go ahead with inventing different types of tech 2 ships I think I’m going to train the skills that will improve my efficiency at refining the loot I get from the rats I kill, after all every little bit helps.

Here is my current wallet balance:

Current Wallet: 423,154,141 ISK

How do I compare?  Rich, poor, or average?

Addendum: March 14, 2010

Arionos was right, it seems to be a matter of just buckling down and grinding out the ISK.  Since I wrote this I have been running anomalies in our corp. home system.  I have anchored a huge secure container which I fill with all of the loot I get from the rats.  Once the container is full I take it to the nearest alliance station with reprocessing capability and melt it down for minerals after weeding out the meta level 3 and 4 items.  My wallet has jumped over 150 million in just a few days of light activity.  There really is no easy button for someone like me who doesn’t mine for moon goo and has no real trading or industrial skills.  If you go combat be ready to kill lots of rats either in belts, anomalies, or missions.  Have fun!

I haven’t posted in a while because I’m still waiting to get Gallente Cruiser 5 back.   Right now we are back in the Atlas home systems and most people are doing whatever they do to make ISK except me.   My Ishtar is sitting in my hanger 3 jumps from the system our corp uses to plex/rat but i can’t do anything right now because of losing Cruiser 5.   So, my point is I haven’t posted anything because I really haven’t done anything since the end of the Geminate campaign.   We did get an alliance mail a few days ago telling us to get ready for another deployment to an unnamed region.   Once I get Cruiser 5 back I will be able to start using a snipe HAC setup that I had to leave behind near Geminate.

I’ve been taking it kind of easy on Eve this last week.  The week before I was on vacation from work and spent as much time as I could playing and going on ops.  I got a tiny bit burnt out after that week so I’ve just been logging in to do some skill swapping and market stuff.  Now it seems that the Geminate operation is coming to and end and we are in the process of moving back to Atlas space.

Going out on my first CTA (Call to Arms) in my Eris light interdictor tonight, and flying out of an Atlas home system no less.  An alliance mate helped me out and moved all of my ships left over from the Geminate campaign down to the Atlas logistics hub station where I had already stored a jump clone.

I’m excited about being down in Atlas territory now except that I have to wait about 14 days before I can get back into my Ishtar to do some ratting for ISK because of my noob screw up with my clone.  So I’m going to be living pretty frugally for 2 weeks, but it won’t stop me from going on ops.

On the invention front I have made a Taranis blueprint and an Ares blueprint but I haven’t sold them yet.  I’m asking about 4 million each.  I have 2 more Atron blueprints to invent from but I’m waiting for my agent to cough up the datacores I need to do the invention, don’t want to spend any more money than I have to.  I’m hoping this little side enterprise yields a little cash every now and then.  If not then I may just write off the invention as an interesting experiment in the industrial side of Eve and let the research points build up so I can sell the Datacores.

That’s about all I have for now and remember, UPGRADE YOUR CLONE!  It’s going to be a long haul to get back the skills that I lost.

I was there at the fall of the K25- and 04- stations. An entire Atlas fleet was there. You know who wasn’t there? WI, the alliance that owned the system. They have been absent from every fleet op I’ve been on, save one.

Today I heard that they are actually evacuating Geminate and regrouping in the Akora system in low sec. Are they not planning on fighting for their space at all? Now, I don’t know the ins and outs of the 0.0 political landscape but I keep hearing about NC whenever someone brings up the absense of hostile targets. I think the NC are the Northern Coalition, who they are and why we don’t like them is still a mystery to me.

I keep hearing rumors that an NC fleet will engage us almost every time we go out to bash a station or hub, but they never show up. Like I said, I don’t know anything about alliance politics, I just want a fight of some sort. I’m thinking about getting some gate camp fleets going with me leading, although I know that it’s all talk, when I comes time to make the fleet I’ll come up with some excuse to back out. I always do.

I say that I want to become a hardcore PvPer but that requires some cooperation and I am a loner at heart. I’m trying to change that attitude because there is no point in playing an MMO solo.

I’m ready for the Geminate war to be over so I can move down to Atlas territory and settle in properly with my Corp.

(this post comes from mu iPod)

I made a noob mistake that is sooo noob I am ashamed to admit to it.

I let my pod get popped without a properly upgraded clone resulting in skill point loss.

Yes, I’m still kicking myself, but I won’t forget this lesson anytime soon.

Looking at my skills I lost the ability to fly HAC’s and HIC’s as well as use T2 large drones.  I also lost Propulsion Jamming 5, but it will only take 9 days to get that one back as opposed to 15 days to get Gallente Cruiser 5 back.  So, it looks like I’ll go ahead and get Propulsion Jamming 5 back first and start flying light interdictors on CTA’s from now on.  When I bring my Interceptor or Assault Frigate I don’t ever end up making the slightest difference.  If I just stayed home no one would even notice and I don’t like that feeling.

After looking over the skill repair I need to do and the alliance reimbursement policy I think the best thing I can do right now is get into and Eris and pop bubbles when we need to stop annoying bombers and such.

In 9 days we’ll see how my new plan goes.  Until then I will keep bringing my Taranis and Enyo and try not to suck too much at catching ships on gates.

Two weeks or so ago, when I first joined TFZ, I was still a 0.0 noob.  I still feel like a PvP noob but I’m coming to grips with the ins and outs of 0.0 life.  I have been in massive fleets with carriers and dreadnoughts, I’ve shot stations and sovereignty structures and I have even become an old pro at titan bridging.  The only thing I haven’t been able to do is get into a real engagement, barring one time when lag and a disconnect killed my Enyo.

So far out of an almost constant string of Call to Arms operations I have only managed to get into one real fleet fight and in that fight my wife accidentally knocked the plug out of the wall and I had to reboot.  By the time I got back into the game I was waking up in the clone bay.  I put in a petition for my ship since no kill mail was generated but I haven’t heard back yet.  Even if I don’t get reimbursed it’s OK I only lost an Enyo, which is pretty cheap to replace.

My point is that 99% of the  CTA’s  I have been on are nothing more than camping some gates while the big ships shoot at a station, IHUB, or POS tower.  I don’t know if any of you have ever tried to catch a ship with a cloaking device at a gate but it’s pretty damn hard when you only have a vague idea of what your doing in PvP to begin with.  If I can be present for another large scale engagement like the one that destroyed my Enyo I plan to stay out of the main fight, since I will be flying a Taranis interceptor and instead try warping around to the different planets trying to catch people running away from the main fight to rep up.  That plan may not even work very well but in the last fight I’m pretty sure between the lag and the small ship I was flying I didn’t contribute very much.  If I could catch some severely damaged ships away from their fleet and keep them from repairing their damage and rejoining the fight I will feel like I have really made a contribution to our side.  Also I’m hoping that being away from the main fleet will help with the lag a little, half the targets I tried to lock up in the last battle were lag phantoms.

I need to get into some action besides trying to catch stealth bombers and cov ops ships on the stinking gates if I’m ever going to get better at PvP.  On a side note our fleet bridged out to a system to try and get in on a freighter kill and then had to take the slow way back to our starting point and I was out in the lead with my interceptor when I came across a hostile on a gate and my first thought was to tackle and try to kill him.   I didn’t get the job done because he jumped through the gate and I still had aggression and couldn’t follow but I still had that killer instinct as my first reaction to a hostile target.  I’ll take any kind of change away from Carebearness I can get.

Two Posts ago I vowed to stay away from anything bigger than a frigate.  Now I am about to break that vow.  I’ve been on several CTA’s with Atlas in the Geminate region and I’ve noticed one thing, snipe HAC’s seem to be the way to actually DO anything on these big ops.  I’ve brought Rifters and Interceptors and found myself mainly sitting with my thumb up my thrusters.  So I got on Evemon and worked out a plan to get into a sniping Deimos.  I’ll give the HAC a try but if I go down in flames 3 seconds into a fight it will be right back to frigate hulls for me.

I won’t be able to fit out a Deimos the way I want for about 2 weeks anyway so I have time to think this over and save up some Isk to waste.

I am afraid. I fear that I can’t change my carebear attitude. In the past two days I’ve tried to move a clone from Eurgrana down to one of the Atlas home systems. I have failed both times, causing the loss of a Helios and a Nemesis. I could probably avoided the gate camps if I had taken a little more time but I was in a hurry and I got popped. Losing ships to these gate camps isn’t what I’m afraid of though, what scares me is my reaction to the deaths. My first reaction when I woke up back in station was to log off. Not just log off to take a break but log off in a rage. I log off thinking, “Fuck this game! I suck at it! Why do I waste my time! Stupid ganking assholes!”. Then I sit and sulk for about an hour before I log back in. To me, this sounds like a typical carebear response to getting podded. I can’t help it though, it’s a gut response. Am I just wired to be a carebear? I don’t want to be a whining little bitch everytime I die. I wonder if electroshock could cure me?

Stay tuned.