Just a quickie

I know I should write more, but the problem is that there is nothing going on worth writing about.
Currently I am more or less only saving up ISK for buying a carrier. I finally decided that Trebron needs one of his own, for transportation mainly. It is 20 days until he can sit in one and maybe 40 or 50 days until he can competently fly a Thanatos.
What I need are ISK. A billion for the skillbooks and 2.5 billion for the ship with fittings.
Other than that I am testing the new or revamped T1 cruiser hulls. Amazing! I really love those. Yesterday I chickened out in a shield tanked Thorax...I should have thought.
When jumping into a low sec system from Hisec, a Stiletto and a Cynabal waited on the other side. They both pointed me and drew sentry gun fire. I reapproached the gate, while the Stiletto warped clean, probably to come back afterwards, without sentry aggro. I should have pointed him. Maybe I could have taken them with the sentry guns as help. But I jumped back to Hisec like a coward.

World of Tanks - what is in my garage

~Five weeks ago I started to play World of Tanks. I would have done so earlier, but three things stopped me:

1. EVE was too much fun.
2. WoT refused to run properly on Linux
3. Gevlon Goblin convinced me that it is rigged.

EVE is still fun, but WoT is too. And as it is  in the nature of EVE that sometimes there really is nothing to do except ship spinning, it is good to have a backup game.
WoT is running on (my) Linux now. FPS is a bit lower than on Windows (strangely so). So I sometimes do boot Windows to play. But it runs.
That leaves the last point. Is hit chance and armor penetration rigged? I am not sure. Probably yes. There are definitely games where you hit every snapshot and penetrate with every hit. In the next game the opposite is true. But that is statistically not an uncommon thing to happen. So I really don't know.  As my "winning" condition is having fun (I already have a job in realtime, don't need one in a game) it is not so important for me. Because the game actually IS fun. Gevlon's winning condition is winning, even if this means grinding, being top ranked in win-percentage, owning all Nullsec etc. This is not for me for one simple reason:
If a game is won, the game is usually over. Finito.
I don't want the games I have fun in to be over. Simple as that.

But I digress :)

On starting with WoT I decided to stick with Russian and German for the beginning. This was quite funny, because right at that time the British tree started and everyone seemed to start with those. But I had a hard time against them, because they were not really new players. Anyway I had fun immediately and played far more hours than I usually do.
Now after 5 weeks I own the following vehicles (all fully upgraded):
Heavy Tank:
up to IS-3, Tier 8
Artillery:
up to Hummel, Tier 5
Scout (light tank):
VK2801, Tier 5
Tank Destroyer:
up to StugIII, Tier 5
Medium Tank:
up to Pz4, Tier 5
Premium Tank:
Super Pershing, Tier 8

The Pz4, Stug3 and the Hummel will all soon be ready for the next tier. I have done around 1600 matches in those 5 weeks, which is an awful lot for me.
The best fun of them all is the VK2801. The tech tree ends with it, there is no upgrade. And you don't need any. You will often end in matches with Tier10 tanks, but it does not matter. The VK2801 can really contribute there as a passive or active scout and/or Arty killer.
Don't ever underestimate his 10,5cm gun, loaded with HE shells. It can oneshot a Tier5 heavy tank if lucky and cause serious damage to the Tier 9 and 10 tanks. You can actually solo Tier 9 tank destoyers in it. Absolutely awesome machine, I am often sitting in my chair, laughing like a madman while driving this tank.
But it is good to play the other types too. So you can better understand how to battle each type of tank and also because each type has unique and entertaining gameplay. Sniping with Tank Destroyers (My Stug and Pz4 have the same derpgun mounted as the VK), wolfpack hunting with the Mediums, Brawling with heavies or raining destruction with Arty, all is unique and entertaining.
The Super Pershing is somehow a class of its own. Slower than a heavy tank, more front armor than most, a rather accurate and fast loading gun with medium penetration and low damage make it hard to learn. In the beginning I considered it to be totally crappy and had below 40% wins (I know I know...), but as I get used to it my winrate increases and the fun too. I actually enjoy to drive it by now and also already got my "Ace Tanker" mastery badge in it.

I am curious: what are your favorite tanks? And secondly: what do you think about the Super Pershing? Balanced? Sub par? Overpowered?

Be careful what you ask for

...in my last entry I complained about my empty killboard. Well, I managed to change that. Sadly in the wrong direction, by losing more ships.
On the weekend I attended two CTAs. They went like this:

• 45 minutes formup
• 60 minutes sitting on Titan.
• 40 minutes without action
• 20 minutes travel home

The second CTA almost got exciting. We wanted to shoot an SBU, but the enemy brought superior forces (Tengu fleet and Battleship fleet). Local was at 800.
We retreated to a safe POS. Some newcomer to the fleet asks for the POS password and some people gave it to him. 30 seconds later the Tengu fleet warps into the POS. As we were in Hurricanes, they did not manage to bump someone out. One has to simpy orbit the tower and nothing bad can happen.
Way to burn a spy. Good that he is gone.
After some fruitless dancing in the POS the enemy warped away, leaving a Tengu just outside the forcefield. Bait of course. We burned out anyway and killed him, barely making it back in before the enemy arrived yet again. Sadly I did not get on the mail. the thing exploded just as my lock resolved.
Thanks and props to our FC, who organised a Titan bridge to get us safely home.

Other than that I participated in some gatecamping that also netted no kills.

In the lowsec pipe to our Nullsec corner a "pirate" corp has set up their home, going by the name "Inglorious Squirrels". They make a habit of killing our Cyno ships. So we decicded to pay them a visit. We formed up in Hyperion, Drake, Crow, Loki, 2 ships I forgot, and me in a Deimos.
We wanted to teach them a lesson.
Of course they did not fight (they never do except they have the megablob on their side) and only did some station games. What we did not know: they batphoned some people not in their corp.
So when I aggressed a Tengu on station half a dozen battleships undocked and exploded me and our Drake. So we ended up being the ones learning a lesson.
And my last loss was a Hurricane battlecruiser. My friend Zak asked me if I wanted to help with a 5/10 Plex (escalation), 2 BCs should be enough. I agreed and came with a Cane (he was in a Tengu). I entered the Plex with him- did not really see how many rats there are because lots of structures cluttered my overview- MWDed to the rats and started shooting. And dropped into armor. And got stuck on some structure trying to warp out. And exploded :)
What happened? Well, it was a 10/10 Plex, not a 5/10. They seem to have the same name. Drone region...you still hold surprises.
Thankfully the Tengu was able to clear the first room  (but not more) and loot some of my modules.
I was too pissed afterwards to come back in proper ships and do the Plex. In Sansha space I did 8/10 and 10/10 "alone"(dualboxing) and got some pricey loot (e.g. a Nightmare blueprint). But I fear the drones would not drop any loot anyway. They never seem to do, not even the faction spawns.

I hope "my" EVE will be more fun soon, because recently bad luck and bad decisions seem to ruin my gameplay. Fun is different to be honest.

Shooting towers

Nothing much happened yesterday. We jumped ~170 T3 Batlecruisers halfway across the universe to shoot 2 POS towers into reinforce.
Well, it must have been important I guess :)
Hopefully I won't have to work overtime today, or I won't make it to today's CTA. My killboard is much too empty this month.

Patchday

Rollout of the new patch went surprisingly well. No issues whatsoever. This is definitely a first for me. I am playing EVE on Linux (and sometimes a Mac) and there were no issues with wine either. Launcher, Updating and the game itself work without changing anything in the configuration.
Up to now I can only comment on a few of the changes:
Hurricane Nerf: not really bothers me. I just ripped out one of the T2 neuts and all else is just like before. Maybe I will install a Powercore in the lows instead of a tracking enhancer and keep the two Neuts. Time will tell.

• Target circles and the new damage texts: very cool. I like this one a lot.
• NPC AIs: as I am ratting with sentry guns, I was a bit afraid of this change. But it turns out it is a non issue. No problems. In fact it has become easier, because rat Battleships will always target me instead of my drones. I don't even recall them anymore when new waves spawn. Awesome.
• New ships: I don't know yet. But I will probably use the Tristan as an AFK salvage boat (drones) in my alt. It can clean up the drone rat wrecks of my finished anomalies haha :) The new logis look interesting for roams. I was always hesitant to fly the expensive Scimitar, because I am not exactly space rich. The new logi T1 cruisers really look promising. I will have to buy a bunch I guess. Also I like the buff of the Vexor and Thorax, as I like flying those.

I am looking forward to testing all the other game improvements and new ships. The Retribution expansion is the best expansion since I play EVE. The trailer is awesome too. Speaking of which: the new aggression mechanics and the bounty system look very promising. Especially Highsec space could benefit a lot from this. We will probably see a lot more PvP there in the future.
Well done CCP!

Where I lay my head is home

It is good to have a helpful corp, special thanks to Archmedia (and his alt), who helped me greatly in jumping my ships to my new home with his carrier. It is greatly appreciated.
I did some ratting to replenish my funds and I must say that the Drone regions could really need a buff. Or I have to get used to the drone anomalies, somehow I liked the Sansha better. Well, on Tuesday there will be faction and officer spawns I heard. Good thing.
Also I was on my short first alliance roam and had a good time. I even managed to get the final blow on an Absolution and got on the mail for a Rupture cruiser.
But the best thing last: my friend Zaknafein Hinken resubbed and joined us. I am really happy about this and looking forward to more fleets with him.

Almost ready to rumble

indeed the awesome frogs already delivered all my stuff. So I spent the evening yesterday to go shopping in the Minmatar tradehub of Hek. I bought new rigs for some of my ships and other stuff that was left behind (sold) in LGK.
James shall have an Oneiros and a Scimitar (CTA fit) in our deployment station, Trebron should have a Naga, Tornado and 2 Hurricanes in the deployment station.
For my home system I prepared a Bomber for James and a Cynabal, Deimos, Proteus, Daredevil and some T1 frigs and cruisers for Trebron.
This took the better part of the evening to do. But some EVE time was left, so I decided to start bringing the CTA ships to the deployment station. This requires about 6 jumps through lowsec and nullsecurity space. I formed fleet with James and we headed out in a Naga and a Scimitar.
On the second outgate we landed on a Curse and two other ships(?) and I immediately knew that I was in trouble. The Naga was not really fit for solo combat, it's a specialised CTA ship. Does not even have a point. To make things worse, the large shield extender was offline, because my clone had no powergrid implant (currently training advanced weapon upgrade 5).
Two of the pirates forced me though the gate, where on the other side (of course) 2 more were waiting, the Curse also followed. To my surprise both my ships managed to warp clear before tackle could land, just to land on a Tengu on the outgate.
To make a long story short: one jump out from the Nullsec gate, where I probably would have been safe, my luck ran out and the Naga got tackled. James was in warp though. I briefly thought about bringing James back, because my opponent were only a Curse and a dps ship. But 2 seconds later a Maelstrom battleship landed on me and I decided to safe at least the Scimitar.
I gave the Naga the command to align back to the gate and turned on the MWD. I only was disrupted and webbed but not scrammed. Then I switched to James to jump him out into Nullsec.
When refocusing on Trebron I noticed that the align back to gate command somehow did not make it to the server (I hate how that sometimes happens) and I was still 18km from the gate, with shields failing. All that was left to do was getting the pod out, which I managed.
140 million down the drain.
What could I have done better? Several things:

• travel fit the Naga or solo combat fit it. Have a plan beforehand.
• not warp on like a fool from gate to gate when chased. Safe up somewhere or at least try.
• Make sure your commands got through to the server.
• Not bring two CTA ships at once. Use 1 cloaky scout and 1 deployment ship. Takes double the time but is safer.

Could better preparation have prevented the loss? Probably. I underestimated the danger and I was tired of doing hauling, fitting and stuff. I wanted to get it done finally. And I paid for it. Cocky, lazy, dead....
On a sidenote: I really really hate deploying ships that are not really solo combat fit manually. How are you guys without carriers doing it? Or do all 0.0 peeps have carriers? As soon as AWU5 is finished I will start on it again...need to make serious ISK first though. I have not much left (now 140 mill less even...must get new Naga...)

The Frogs are awesome

As I mentioned yesterday, I got my stuff moved out of LGK (NPC Nullsec). I did this using the services of a third party: Black Frog.
Black Frog is the Nullsec / Lowsec service of Red Frog, which offers freighter service for Highsec. There is a third, called Blue Frog.
In the Link above you find a price calculator, which you must use if you want to use their services (highly recommended!).

So what's the deal? Why three different ones?
Black Frog: They move up to 320000 (or even 360000) m3 of freight, with a maximum collateral of 5 Billion. It won't get cheaper if you move less than 320000, so make sure you can fill a freighter. They operate in Nullsec and Lowsec and for a typical contract with the full collateral you pay around 150-180 Million ISK.
Red Frog: They operate in Highsec only, maximum collateral is 1 Billion. So, you most times won't be able to fill their maximum accepted size. But they are really cheap. With maximum collateral and 20 jumps you pay around 17 Million ISK.
Blue Frog: They are like Red Frog, but accept higher collateral for a higher price.

Black Frog already fulfilled my contracts, yesterday I found all my stuff sitting safely in Hisec. I immediately created 6 Red Frog contracts for letting it be moved to the closest Highsec system to my new Nullsec home. There are good chances that they already delivered when I come home today.

I absolutely recommend their services. Don't transport your stuff yourself. Use those guys. Seriously!
It's riskfree for reasonable prices. Let the pro's do the hauling ;)

Moving time!

finally I decided to keep playing Eve, I really would miss my corpmates and the game.
So I ripped out all the rigs from my 35 ships and repackaged them.
I sold some stuff, so that 2 freighter loads of stuff and ships remained. Contracted everything to Black Frog for moving it out. Probably I lost 1.5 billion ISK, could be worse.
Also I moved medical and jump clones for James and Trebron to my new home. I am looking forward to some pew pew in my new alliance as soon as I am settled in.

I think I am done

On logging in yesterday, I noticed that my corporation has joined Against ALL Anomalies in the Drone region. All my assets are still in LGK and I have no carrier.
Also I never intended to leave En Garde or AAA. My mood was pretty bad yesterday, I still have not decided what to do now. Options are:

1. Leave Nullsec and join faction warfare
2. Try to get into an other En Garde or AAA corporation
3. Try to join Tr0pa de elite, Lee Chanka's corp. I always enjoyed flying with him and he might even remember me if I am lucky
4. Stay with my corp and move to the Drone regions
5.  Quit Eve

At the moment I must admit that I might chose option 5.  What would you do?

edit: why do I want to leave? There is a reason that is not to be found in the above text. The reason is: in the past (in text based MUDs)  I had to deal with developers that were playing themselves and they were giving their characters unfair advantages. I have the feeling this is also true for EVE. Many devs seem to be involved in the CFC or HBC. More than once did this show in the last months.
And this here incident is unacceptable for me. This is unprofessional and childish if it was done on purpose.

Our universe is too small

Recently I read that some capsuleers think that the New Eden universe is too big. Too many starsystems for too few players.
I totally disagree. For my taste it is much too crowded. In fact I think that the overcrowded universe is the singlemost significant reason why the EVE population does not grow. It cannot sustain more people.
Let me elaborate:
The first few weeks when you start as a new player, everything is fine. You do your tutorials, you do the epic arc and then probably some missions, mining, or production.
But then you want to try other features. Most probably exploring is on the list. There you will soon notice that there is a fierce competition for the sites in Highsec. You won't make as much money as with running missions. Much too few sites for too many explorers.
You think about lowsec then. But everytime you travel there, you die horribly without achieving anything. You actually might enjoy this first PvP experience and roam there more often.
But mining or exploring in Lowsec is in my opinion not advisable. Chances are high that you will be probed out in no time and killed. If lowsec were just bigger, chances would be better to find a quiet corner to make some money in.
So you continue with missions, but it gets boring. Sooner or later you will think about maybe moving to a wormhole. A C1 or C2 probably either for you alone or with 1 or 2 friends. I think you know what I say next: they are all occupied already. Wormhole space is also too small.
So what now? Nullsec might be your next option. You are in for a big disappointment.
There are many alliances that want to own sovereignity Competition is fierce. But there only two powerblocks now (in fact it is only one) that conquers all the space, even if they do not need it. It is true that many of the systems they own are empty and unused. You still can't have any (if you don't want to rent from them, or join a 50.000 man block).
If the universe were much much bigger, at least 5 times the current size, then many more alliances (and small ones too), could have their own space. Noone would want to conquer all.
So in the current state many players will leave after some months or maybe after 1-2 years, because there is nothing to do. Nowhere to grow into. If you don't want to stay in empire and grind missions...and who would want that?
So this is why I think that New Eden is much much too small. What do you think?

Know where you are...

Today I was zipping around in my Navy Comet frigate, exploring our new deployment zone and looking for ways to cause trouble.
I found a Northern Coalition cyno frigate on a station and shot it. And promptly got popped by sentry guns. Lowsec dooooh. I was too long in 0.0 I guess, I really totally forgot the sentry guns.
Bad trade, a comet against a cyno ship. But well, shit happens.

Still tanking it

Just a short status report about my progress in World of Tanks:

• Tier 5 artillery (Hummel)
• Tier 6 Heavy Tank (KV-1s)
• Tier 8 premium tank (Super Pershing)
• started with a scout recently (Leopard)

I could go faster, but I enjoy the above machines a lot, so I am not really hard pressed to go up the tiers faster. It was pretty quick anyway ( I guess).

Eve you say? James' subscription has run out. Trebron ist skilling up to carrier. But I am not sure if I want to farm the ISK for the skillbooks and the ship. Because I am a bit unsure how to progress. Nullsec is broken, HBC and goons "are winning" by creating a huge blue napfest and I want no part of that. Sadly they don't even recognize what they are doing...calling it a meritocracy for example.
Faction warfare or maybe wormholes sound interesting.

tl;dr: Eve hiatus not finished. Staying with WoT for the time being.

Lesson learned...the hard way

I managed to get my Proteus ganked.
In a rather idiotic way I must say. I was perfectly aware that I was scanned out and I already warped out twice. But liked an idiot I came back, because what danger can those 3 ships be?
I was able to tank them very long, but not forever. I could not do much damage because I was tracking disrupted, had no drones left and was generally misfit for PvP.
Lessons learned:
- don't PvP in a PvE ship even if you have a point.
- don't use a Proteus for PvE
- don't fit railguns on a Proteus.

This being said, I will not be posting for a while, because I am playing World of Tanks :)

Exploration

Yesterday I fitted a new strategic cruiser for lowsec exploration. It was rather expensive with over 800 millions ISK cost. All T2 rigs and a deadspace repper do this to you...
It does not need a probe launcher, because I am probing with James in a Cheetah.
As I cannot fly Caldari ships, I used a Proteus as my ship of choice. But somehow I am not convinced I did it correctly. Should I use a drone setup? Or any recommendations?

I tested it in Hisec in a Sansha site and promptly got an escalation "Nation on the rise". Which I will do today in the evening :)

Edit: I changed the subsystems.
It has a Capacitor Regeneration Matrix as engineering subsystem now and a Hybrid Propulsion Armature as offensive subsystem. Much more cap regen, Hammerheads as drones (and a flight of Hobgoblins) and four midslots (2 with tracking computers). Works much better. I did the Nation on the Rise escalation in it, the last escalation of the series in lowsec. No problems.
I was probed shortly before I finished and warped to a station after looting. Just in time, a Sleipnir wanted to get a juicy killmail.
Loot? A Sansha plate for 6 mil in the second part of the escalation and an armor plate...nothing else in all 4 parts. Not even the "endboss" dropped anything. Only a laser lens.

Weekend activities

...not much happened in my corner of Eve that would be worth writing about. As PL is still heavily camping the LGK station, I finally decided to jumpclone out both my accounts/toons.
I will install 5 (not more) combat ships somewhere else. Tornado and Naga for Trebron and Oneiros and Scimi for James. And 1 or 2 bombers of course.
PL can sit in LGK and stare at the station forever if they please. It's not my time they are wasting :)

But that was about all I did this weekend concerning Eve. I am a bit ashamed to admit it, but I started up Diablo 3 for the first time in months and leveled my Demonhunter from 47 to 54. Is it just me or has the game become easier?

It is getting old

On logging in today, I immediately warped James and Trebron to a safe POS in LGK, because I expected more camping of the station.
James was in a Hound, Trebron in a Tornado. It did not take long and a Gorgon Empire fleet (Nagas and some T3 cruisers) entered the system, warped to station and started to camp.
Together with 2 other bomber pilots, James went on a bomb run, but we failed to kill anything. I even managed to only hit the station and nothing else. Obviously I need even more practice.
A Tengu fleet was formed inside the station, as my Scimitar got killed yesterday and I have not yet replaced it, I just stayed in my bomber.
Sadly I was only able to watch most of the fight cloaked. It was a well executed slaughter I must say. Not much of Gorgon Empire survived. At least I got on a Tengu and a Crusader killmail.
After that I docked up to buy and fit a new Scimitar, in order to be more useful to the fleet. This only took me 2 or 3 minutes but exactly when I was done, a PL carrier fleet cynoed to the station and put bubbles up.
We tried to form an armor battleship fleet, but as the membercount reached around 80, the enemy jumped in more carriers. I think they were around 40. Obviously they had spies again and decided that they don't want us to undock for a fight. So they brought numbers we had no hope of fighting against. So I just ratted a bit on the other account (a concept they fail to understand, they really think we cannot play when they camp LGK) and then called it a day.
I think it is really their strategy to permacamp LGK station in the hope we get bored and disband or something? I'd bet a lot of ISK that the only ones bored is them ;) They can't really do something else while camping and we can just do whatever we want. Just not with the toons that are in the station.

Blogbanter 40: Interstellar Blood Sports

CCP Phantom has suggested a banter focus on competitive tournaments:

There is no finer spectacle in the universe of EVE Online than the explosive dance of weapon-laden spaceships in combat. The yearly Alliance Tournament is the jewel in EVE Online's eSports crown and the upcoming New Eden Open should deliver the same gladiatorial entertainment showcase.

Given the scope of the sandbox, what part should eSports play in EVE Online and what other formats could provide internet spaceship entertainment for spectators and participants alike?

My opinion on that is very simple:
eSports does not fit into the "normal" operation of our Sandbox at all. Tournaments can be done, they are fun to watch too. Maybe some lore can be written that even gives tournaments a background, so they are not so detached from every day life in Eve. Something around the lines of gladiator fights. Or an actual selection process for being allowed to switch from a mere mortal being to a capsuleer.
But even if this is done, tournaments are clearly not something everyone can participate in. There are huge barriers and one K.O. criteria that ends every aspiring young gladiators hopes at once and for all: Skills. As in training queue. You won't be able to compete, unless you wait several years to build up your skills. Or you buy a character in the character bazar. Both not really an option for everyone.

Conclusion: if eSports and tournaments shall be established, they don't fit into our sandbox. It should be on a separate server, where everyone has the same skillset. And competing should not require ISK.
Everything else would only be "for the select few". Which are exactly that: few. And thus there would be no real competition.

Dread down (and me too)

Today on logging in, the station in LGK was again bubbled by PL carriers and Navy Armageddons.
A battleship fleet was formed to clear the undock. I joined with James Kreator in an Oneiros. After undocking the enemy jumped in a fleet of Dreadnoughts. It soon became clear that we were unable to break their tanks und to make things worse, we lost quite a few battleships.
Maka told us to reship into Tengus, so James jumped into a Scimitar.
We undocked and managed to immediately kill a very expensive Revelation class Dreadnought:
Revelation Dread
TEST jumped in an additional fleet, so we were not only outnumbered, but megablobbed (again). Due to confusing and conflicting orders we started to lose Scimitars and Tengus. The killboard shows 7 lost Tengus, 8 lost Scimis and a few tackle. 
As we were facing more than 250 capitals and battleships in our fleet of roundabout 130 ships we had to dock again.
Looking at the ISK war we came out even. Good enough against those odds. If you don't count the lost battleships that is...But honestly: we should blueball them again in the future. If they don't want to fight, we shouldn't undock.
Oh, and I lost my Scimitar, but it will be fully reimbursed. At least I hope so...still missing reimbursements for two Tempest battleships and a Tornado (and a True Sansha Thermic Hardener I gave to Maka hehe j/k).

Ships delivered, good fight had

The ships I ordered yesterday evening have already been delivered and I immediately went forth to fit them. Just when I was finished, a Naga fleet was formed, which I joined.
A hostile Gorgon Empire Naga fleet with similar numbers was engaged two jumps out in DSS-EZ.
Primaries were called and ships started to explode on both sides. One of the first casualties was our FC, but the second in command was quick to take over. We were getting the upper hand though and the enemy started to disengage. Due to capacitor issues some of our fleetmembers could not keep up and we reformed on our anchor.
The enemy got reinforcements in form of a bomber wing with recon support and we jumped into MB40-4. We pulled range to 50km and waited if someone would follow.  And indeed a Thrasher and a Manticore were added to my killmails for this day. In summary I got onto nine killmails (the rest were Nagas and one Huginn). Contrary to the last engagements I was not primaried in this one and survived for a change. Good fight Gorgon Empire. We are orange to each other but still have mutual respect. Our fights against them are always fair and good natured. Overblobbing is generally avoided.

Superblob

As I mentioned yesterday, my last T1 cruiser got recently blown up and I needed new ones. Also I "invented" a frigate fitting some weeks ago, that really instantly locks bombers and covert ops frigates.
The weeks before the invasion we had many stealthbombers in our home systems, who (sad enough) managed to blow up a lot of expensive ratting ships.
The frigate fitting I created helped put a stop to that. It has a scan resolution of 2400+ and enough dps to kill a bomber. Also enough speed to not let it escape once locked and pointed. I blew up quite some bombers in it and scared off many more. I know this for a fact, because I chatted with one of the TEST bomber pilots about it (there are actually some nice people in TEST. Few, but they exist).
It goes like this:

[Atron, Bomblock]
Highslots:
Light Neutron Blaster II
Light Neutron Blaster II
Light Neutron Blaster II
Midslots:
Sensor Booster II, Scan Resolution Script
Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive
Warp Disruptor II
Lowslots:
Damage Control II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Overdrive Injector System II
Rigs:
Small Targeting System Subcontroller I
Small Targeting System Subcontroller I
Small Hybrid Collision Accelerator

It doesn't have any tank to speak of, that's true. But for fighting bombers it does not need any.
If the bomber pilot does everything correct when jumping through a gate, you still won't get him.
But the slightest break between breaking gatecloak and activating covert ops cloak and he is locked.
This is a very inexpensive and very fun ship to fly. Just be sure you do only combat ships that can't hit you as you have literally no tank.
The last one of those I lost, when trying to spiral in on two sniper Tornados from 150km away. I was only 40km away, with overheated Disruptor ready when I lost transversal for a bit and got hit...well, next time :)

Anyway I disgress. What I wanted to say is, that I also needed more of those. And I want to try a Thorax. I fly in Deimos HACs a lot, but they are a bit expensive to jump solo into a gatecamp and die. The Thorax hopefully will provide enough fun for solo roams for cheaper. So I logged an alt in and went to Jita to buy all that stuff and set up a courier contract to get all freightered to LGK. I hope it will arrive the next 2 days.
Not much else happened yesterday, we formed a CTA with 120 sniper Tornados and went to a safe POS. Then our Teamspeak was DDOSd (how low can you go?). We switched to Red Overlord comms, but our enemies did not arrive after waiting for 40 minutes and we docked up. Exact at this moment the enemy fleet jumped in with a capital fleet and bubbled the station. Spies obviously (again...how low can you go?).
Much credit to our FC, who wanted to fight anyway...(if it were my teamspeak server, I would drag those attackers to court and fight there honestly...) we switched to armor battleships, I jumped into an Oneiros with James. We undocked and tried to shoot a carrier, to no avail. After we had lost around 6 battleships we had to redock.
Also an Against ALL Authorities Ragnarok class Titan was lost shortly before downtime (or so I was told).

Not much action and a loss mail

Yesterday not much was happening in my corner of the universe. I roamed around in a stealthbomber and in a T1 cruiser but failed to produce any killmails.
While hunting an enemy Sabre interdictor,  I managed to jump my Vexor class cruiser into a gatecamp with 40 Nagas. Which,of course, resulted in a lossmail.
This was the last of my beloved Vexors, I need to order some new ones.
Other than that I did some (5) solo bombing runs on the Naga gang above and a small PL cruiser gang. Not surprisingly this resulted in no kills, but it was good practice. On  2 runs I did zero damage, so I really need to improve there.
But I am quite good now in picking my bomb spots and in bombing and getting out without even being shot at.
Probably I should try to form small gangs of bombers for my runs. If I would have had company yesterday, we could have easily taken out a good portion of that Naga gang.

Business as usual

Today, same procedure as the last days. Every few hours Test and PL drop a huge fleet with capital support onto LGK and manage to hilariously lose expensive stuff:
expensive pod
and the ship
We had 18 Tengus and some Scimis and tackle, they had a huge blob with capital support.
I don't think they will be able to break our morale like this :)

Today, we really failed

On logging in a CTA went up, for the final timer of GE-8 station.
We joined up and in intel a PL/Test fleet was reported heading our direction.
Fleetmember: FC, let's undock or we get camped in!
Nothing happens and we get camped in for 40 minutes.
Retarded Test monkey chatter in local as usual (seriously are they collecting their members in asylums?).
When the enemy fleet finally left, I used the chance to evacuate my last 4 ships from Catch.
Then another CTA goes up, FC asks for 1400 Nados and I join with Trebron. We warp to a safe POS and wait. Command goes out to dock and switch to Tengus. I leave fleet with Trebron and join with James in a Scimitar. We shoot a POS, Test/PL fleet cynoes in, we are commanded to dock and switch to 1400 Nados :)
I leave with James, join with Trebron and we are bubbled into station :)
This was the first time I really had to laugh about our own "performance".

Deployments summary

finally I would like to finish up my summary of the past and end in the here and now with the story. So this will be the last post from the past.
We had several deployments, the first I think was to X-70MU. I did not even know what the objective was, nor did I care. As I had (and still have) no carrier, I had to manually pilot my ships to the destination. As most people know, the Torrinos gate is always heavily camped, but I managed to reach my destination unharmed. In a bomber with James and in a Hurricane with Trebron.
At the deployment zone I bought several ships for roaming and CTAs. For roaming a Cynabal and Tornadoes and Oracles (mostly) for CTAs. I joined every fleet I could find and got my first experience. I still remember how high my adrenaline levels were and how eager I was to obey every command and not mess up. There I got my battle hardening and many many killmails.
Especially a roam in nano ships (where I brought my Cynabal) to Mittanigrad stays in mind. I learned to kite and to fight heavily outnumbered. We killed a good amount of ships and lost none. This was very impressive for me and I admired the FC for it.
Also in mind was a black ops which I joined with James where we busted a mining op with Torp bombers. We snagged an Orca, a Tengu and some Hulks. Also we did a bombing run (my very first!) against around 150 Goon drakes. I messed up and did not warp out in time, which got me exploded before my bomb hit. The others managed to get theirs in and this resulted in more than 100 killmails for everyone. Except me :(

When the deployment ended I had to manually fly my stuff back, we had several wardecs and the Torrinos gate was also not very inviting. But I managed to get most everything home. A cynabal loss weould be a huge loss for me, so I am always a bit nervous with those.

After that followed some weeks of roaming our home region Catch, where I got more experience in Oracle and Tornado fleets.

Then the next deployment already was to Delve / Querious. First to a Nulli Secunda station, then to 319-3D NPC station. There we were mostly camped into station by a huge blob of enemies. Goons, TEST, PL and friends. They never hesitate to throw a thousand pilots into combat against 200 enemies. That's fine and I have no complaints about that. Sometimes we even tried to give them a fight, like one day when we undocked ~200 Arty Lokis against 400 enemies. We would have fought, but they brought an additional 600 guys and we redocked. I fully understand the decision of -A- not to fight against those odds for two reasons:
o it does not make sense to whelp fleets if there is nothing to win
o we play for fun and fighting 1:5 outnumbered in TiDi is definitely not fun. Small gangs are more our playstyle.
Of course our enemies mock us for not undocking and fighting, but seriously, why should we?
They try to make the numbers look even, in order to ridicule us. They even invented a "Southern Coalition" or SoCo that never even existed. They made that up completely. All we have is some alliances that are blue to each other (the less the better), but without obligations, common leadership or goals. SoCo does not exist and never has.

We finally had to retreat to 4-07 in Querious, right at the border of Catch. The goons headed home, but TEST with PL formed their own power block, and created a huge NAPfest of about 40.000 people to fight us. Still they almost lost the fight for 49-U6U, the entry system to Querious.
We beat them on every battle, and very hard too. For the final station timer they showed up with incredible numbers. We had a huge (for us) fleet of around 500 guys and they had more than double those numbers. Also they formed up faster than we did and camped the 4-0 gate in 49-U.
So we could not jump in and the fight never happened.
Also we lost 15 supercarriers on a massive welp on their K-6K16 deployment station. Our FC Makalu Zarya warped the supers directly to their station in order to incap the station services. A move that was mocked by many, but it really was only bad luck that they got bubbled and killed.
As luck would have it, TEST just 10 minutes before had got some freighter loads of Interdictors to exactly that station. Else our tengu fleet could have easily killed all their dictors. But they had neverending supplies because of that delivery. Maka even bought up all public contracts with Dictors in it. To no avail. PL landed a massive amount of SCs and Titans and gone were our supers.

From now on things went south for us. PL blued even more alliances, created a massive propaganda offensive and snagged some of our allies to their sides.
They even have their own "news site", which does not deserve that name, because there is no objective journalism there, but only propaganda.
http://themittani.com
Also PL created a new fleet doctrine that countered our Tengu fleet very well. Long Range faction battleships with massive tank and very good tracking. Supported by carriers with for reps and with sentry drones. As we can not "ship up" because of PLs superiority in Titans and supercarriers there is not much we can do.
Still we took every fight we could and had as much fun as possible. My personal killcount went up to over 500.
So finally they assaulted our staging system and the evacuation order was given. We redeployed our PvP ships to GE-8 (our capital in Catch) and all our other assets to LGK in NPC region Stain.
After some halfhearted fighting for GE-8 we fully retreated to LGK now and GE-8 is lost.
We gave up all of Catch as we have no intention to fight those numbers. No fun to be had in that.
They can happily shoot the massive amount of structures in Catch and take everything. We will only resort to guerrilla tactics and cause as many losses for them as possible.
We lack the numbers to fight against them and we also don't want to. I really wonder what they will do in Catch. There is nothing there. No moons, no nothing. And they certainly can't install renters there, with us next door! After all -A- still is, and always will be, the single most destructive PvP alliance in all of Eve. As they surely won't live there themselves, I really wonder what this is all about. But it generates fights and that is ok for me.

Funny is how they still use their propaganda. For instance they mock ROL for not fighting back. But first they infiltrate ROL with spies and explode them from within. So they actually prevented them from fighting, but then state "fight us maybe?". Makes no sense, therefore purely propaganda.

So the purpose of the invasion seems not to be to generate fights. They don't want us to fight obviously. If someone knows what's going on, please comment and tell me. Why is PL invading?
I am just curious, it doesn't really matter. The sniper and bomber fleets generate a lot of fun and killmails for me, so it is all good. But curiosity remains. What is it all about? Has Maka touched Shadoo somewhere he should not have?

From now on I will switch to a day by day blog format.

Dropped corp

As we had comfortably settled in, we could start to enjoy our new nullsec home. Money making opportunities were plenty, mostly we did anomalies.
The -A- intel channel (we rented the systems from them, as you might have guessed) warned us about incoming enemies and we never got caught with our pants down.
The old PvP nerve started to itch again and we sometimes headed out for adventure. Now the disadvantage of being a renter started to show. We were not "blue" to everyone we should, even some of the closest allies of -A- refused to blue us.
Especially Red.Overlord (ROL) made a habbit of farming -A- renters in Catch. I think they saw this as one of the benefits of being allied to -A-: many renters to shoot.
Of course this also prevented us from going to CTAs as we got blown up when trying to join the fleets. Mostly by ROL. I lost many ships to them, most notably two or three Deimos HACs. Suffice to say: I still don't like them, even if they are +10 now officially. Suckers :)
I even giggled a bit when they failscaded (to a degree, they still exist) recently.

This escalated to a point where we had to make a decision. Stay renters, without much PvP or get closer to -A-? We decided on the later and accepted an offer to join "En Garde" alliance, the closest ally to -A-. Of course this meant that I had to drop "Nich Die Mama" again. Which I did. It is still held by an alt, that was created when we had to evade a Hisec wardec. Zak and me joined "Tolerance Training Academy", the corp of Lazerous and proud member of En Garde.

As of today this turned out to be the best decision we ever made in Eve Online. The game really started to take off from there...but I am too fast again...back to the past:

The system (UCG-4) where our POS was located was rented to another corp, so we had to move out. Thankfully only 1 jump to BUZ-DB, where En Garde promptly built an outpost which we could use.
So we dismantled the POS and the modules and moved into BUZ.
There is a very sad point to this story: my long term RL friend and ingame corpmate Zak started to lose interest in Eve (maybe triggered by the recent events? I don't know) and started to play Diablo and later World of Tanks. He has not logged in since :( Patrick stopped playing when incursions were nerfed in a recent patch, so I am the only one left of our threesome.

I soon noticed that I had a lot of skills to learn if I wanted to fly in all the CTAs and immediately went to it. I even started a secound account, to speed things up. James Kreator should become my Logi, prober and "cloaky" character. Trebron would focus on the dps ships. Sidenote: as of today I can fly in all the doctrine fleets with one ore the other. Which was the goal, so op success :)

From now on I would only do PvE stuff if I needed to (for new PvP ships).

Move to Nullsec!

I accepted the convo request and was quite surprised. As the CEO of Nich Die Mama I was asked if we would like to join an alliance that rents space in Nullsec. This sounded almost too good to be true, as we were tired of Hisec anyway. Still all my alarm bells were ringing...Eve was hard and everyone a scammer and/or griefer, right?
But I accepted to talk to the alliance leader on comms, after I consulted my friends. They were both ready to go, if the offer was acceptable and (with high probability) not a scam attempt.
The alliance leader named Lazerous Draven seemed to be a reliable and laid back person and an agreement was reached. They even offered to jump our assets to our new home. We packed up what we thought we needed and off we went.
Sounds easy, but was rather painful. And of course we had no idea what we really needed and brought a bunch of useless stuff :)

Now we had to travel ourselves. Destination was UCG-4 and BUZ-DB in Catch, sovereignity of Demolition Dogs, our new alliance. The only entry to that region is HED-GP which directly leads to Hisec (Keberz system). HED is always heavily camped and the pipe to UCG-4 is also roamed by many PvP fleets. We did not yet have access to jumpbridges either. In fact we did not even know that something lile jumpbridges existed.

Zaknafein was the first to travel with his 2 toons and went without me. He managed to reach HED-GP station and put his clone there. After that he got blown up in the pipe to BUZ but later managed to reach his destination. My journey was uneventful and I arrived unharmed. Patrick opted to stay in Hisec for the time being, doing incursons.

So there we were, sitting in a POS bubble in an unknown and hostile universe. We were expected to set up our own POS and heavily relied on Lazerous, as we had no jumpfreighters or carriers.
He sold us an Amarr tower (we had Ice belts in our 2 systems for that) and some modules and contracted us our stuff from Highsec. Puh. So, really not a scam :)
Lazerous and his corp were rather busy themselves and not helping as much as we had expected and hoped. At least that was how we felt at that time, I now know better. We just could have asked and talked more, but we were a bit shy :)

At least after some pleading and reminding we also got fuel for roundabout 2 days. Which basically meant: we had 2 days to set up our POS, haul and store our stuff and get PI and icemining up. We also missed stuff like command centers for that. With nerves very tight, but also excited we got to work immediately. Anchoring skill to 2 was soon finished. We bought an Iteron in a nearby station and other stuff. It was very exciting to scout it through this dangerous unknown territory. The next two days we were busy almost 24/7 to get everything running. But we managed. Very barely. And produced some fuel.
We now had our own home, floating in empty space, protected by a bubble shaped forcefield.

Corp evolvement, death and revival

Life continued for a while, with mission running and occasional low sec roams (where we mostly spectacularly died in a fire..which is to be expected, considering we were still far below 10 million skillpoints).
Zaknafein and Patrick both created additional accounts, I refrained from doing that.
So our corp grew in numbers, but not in people.

As you probably expect, we soon were war decced by a small griefer corp. This was not very shocking to us, in fact we were looking forward to that and happily took the fight that was brought to us. Of course we did not have the slightest chance. For instance I got blown up in a Vexor by a Cynabal. We were always totally outmatched and the fights far from fair. This is not a complaint :)
So after some weeks we ran out of PvP ships and decided to "opt out" of the wardec.
Everyone left the corp, I created an alt (on my first account) and transferred the corp to him. Or that was the plan. As soon as Zak and Paddy had left the corp with all of their toons, our enemy (Dread Space Inc. btw) withdrew the wardec. So everyone rejoined and we were fully functional again.

Hungry for more (maybe less one sided) we stepped up our PvP a bit. I was trying to find ways to PvP besides low sec roams and stumbled over a blog about Ninja Salvaging:
http://aidenmourn.wordpress.com
Now that sounded interesting. Probing was skilled and off we went. To make a long story short: not many kills were generated (less than 5 in months), because the mission runners were already well aware of the tactics involved. But lots of tears were shed.
We got a wardec by a one man corp, who wanted to be a white knight. We blew him up in his Battleship and that was that. Some other guy named erdinuss massively fell on our nerves and we suicide ganked his retriever. Which was very exciting by the way. He was a member of a 50+ man corporation which we promptly wardecced. Yes. We wardecced them!
The first days they actively hunted us which always resulted in us retreating to lowsec where they did not dare to follow in their expensive ships (Tech 3 and HACs mostly).
Their normal operations were pretty much completely interrupted by us (mining ops) and when we almost managed to kill an Ishtar, they left Cat completely. The Ishtar was nano-fit and I was in a dual rep Myrmidon which happily tanked the damage from T2 sentries and Ishtar Rails. Patrick in his Dominix had previously not managed to tank it and lost his ship. I managed to pull off a crazy ivan and got the Ishtar into overheated scram range. Sadly I failed to turn off heat (the interface was lousy) and my scram burnt out and he got away in hull. On paper we lost, but we held the field. We withdrew the wardec.
Things started to get boring again. Missions were meh, ninja salvaging was meh, exploration sites had to many competitors in T3s. Patrick trailed off to Incursions and Zak and me were roaming more and more into lowsec. One day when Zak had learned to fly bombers we had a noteworthy battle.
I boarded a heavily 1600mm plated and trimarked Vexor with small guns and drones. Zak boarded his bomber. On a lowsec gate we met a -10 Hurricane, which I promptly engaged. In went his friends in a Myrmidon and a Tempest. Ouch. I held point on the Cane which soon went down to drones and Torpedoes. After that I switched point to the Myrmdion while my tank still held. But the Tempest started to neut me and my point failed when the Myrmidon went into structure. It warped out :(
We switched damage to the Tempest, which also went into hull (as did I), but it also warped off, because I had no cap. This was a very exciting battle for us and our greatest PvP success so far.
Next I got a private convo request from a character named "TheFearlessPrincess"). More on that in the next blog entry.

My own corp

Sorry that I did not continue the story, but I am busy evacuating...(I hope that's not a spoiler). It is a bit hard to not blog about the current action but I really should cover the past first.

As I mentioned, I managed to get two friends interested in Eve and they promptly created accounts and started their careers. My toon was set to train corp management and founded a corporation when done. Name: "Nich die Mama". Ticker:"N-D-M".
My friends joined up and we had a merry threesome (ahem). Next task was to find a headquarter. It should have level 1 agents available, not be too far from lowsec and tradehubs and be quiet.
We chose "Halle". Off we went merrily missioning away.
Soon we were running level 3 missions in badly equipped Battlecruisers.

Sidenote: My mate Zaknafein flew a Drake, which was about twice as effective as the Gallente ships me and my other friend where flying and easier to train for T2 modules too! Quite imbalanced if you ask me...this imbalance was also quite frappant when we later flew Battleships, with the Raven being vastly superior (with low level skillpoints).

Soon enough we wanted to step up our game and try our hands on level 4 missions. Surprisingly those were easy to do with three badly fit Battlecuisers and mininmal skillpoints, so we moved to "Cat" in the Essence region, as it had a level 4 agent and was only 2 jumps from "Old Man Star".
We refined our tactics and soon we were able to to the missions alone. Still in low skillpoint battlecruisers. For some of the missions we had to team up (Worlds Collide), but they were all manageable, but time consuming.
So we transitioned to Battleships as fast as possible and continued as usual. All very boring, but hey that's how one starts out! Weeks of mission running followed with very little PvP in between.
This was soon to change...

first shenanigans

At that time I was of course still living in the Gallente starting system with academy school.
After the epic arc had been finished I was falling into a hole of some kind...the missions were not very challenging and a bit dull.
Mining and industry were not for me either. As I had already started reading a lot about aggression mechanics and PvP I went out and bookmarked my home system. I bought a small hauler and went to can flipping some miners. THAT got my blood pumping! But noone wanted to fight back. Not disturbed by that fact, I went forth and really collected the stolen ore in my hauler.
Properly warping to safespots in scanrange of my can and scanning for possible enemies before warping in to collect my price. The ore was worth 2 million ISK, which was a fortune for me.
The next run went not so well, as a Vexor cruiser (white knight syndrome) flipped my can. I did not aggress him, as the pilot was way more experienced than I was of course. I talked a bit to him and he seemed quite astonished that I knew everything about aggression mechanics.
With my blood still pumping strongly I went forth and posted about my adventures in a forum which I share with some friends for our gaming. Of course I hoped that they would give Eve a try too.
Which 2 of them promptly did. More on that in the next post.

The first steps

Just like everybody else, I started doing the tutorials and then switched to the epic arc.
There is one mission where you MUST die, else I finished the whole arc without blowing up.
I learned a lot about weapon ranges, speed tanking, and armor types during the last few missions of the epic arc.
The final opponent is quite hard to kill, if you have very limited skill points (which I had after only 3 days playing). I spent the playtime of 2 days, just to find a way to finish that last opponent.
Finally I managed to kill him by getting in close, speed tanking and applying explosive damage. As a Gallente this was not an easy task, I fitted a Gallente destroyer with 200mm Autocannons to accomplish it (don't laugh, it worked. With blasters and thermal it did not).
I was very proud and promptly headed to lowsec with my ~invincible destroyer~ for my first PvP experience. Really. My toon was almost a week old and had a lot of skillpoints. I thought.
But the best part is still to come: I was immediately aggressed by a frigate and managed to blow it up! No kidding. Sadly I don't have a killmail and still don't know why.
I assumed it was because I was on a trial account and so I upgraded to a full account at once. And finally got killed by two Tristans.

YAEOB - Yet Another Eve Online Blog

My first encounter with Eve Online was way back in 2005 or 2006. I played for several months and enjoyed the experience a lot. It was way better than any other game I had ever played.
Which are a lot, as I am 42 years old and had my first home computer when I was 12. And I am a computer nerd, so it is safe to say that I know what I am talking about in that regard.
Eve Online is like Elite on steroids, that's probably enough to know. It is a dream come true for every serious gamer, who got fed up with themeparks and non-persistent environments.
Sadly I stopped playing in 2006, because the guys I was playing with were serious carebears, my real friends all flocked back to WoW and I got bored with missions in Highsec.

In May of 2011 I felt the strong need to play Eve again and quickly created a new account (I forgot my old account details). Two friends of me joined in (I play computer games with them for almost 20 years now) and the fun started. I got emerged into Eve gameplay very heavily, started to consume blogs and online resources like crazy. And now, after 1.5 years it is time to start my own blog (which noone will read).

In the following blog posts I will try to sum up what I experienced the last 1.5 years with my (now) 2 accounts, the events that lead to ~today~. As soon as that summary posts are done I will switch to a day by day posting format.