Those B@st@rds!!!

 A few days ago I signed on with White Talon Enterprises (WTE) which bases out of the South East Forge Region and is just a hop, skip and a few more jumps from several 0.0 areas.  I packed my bags and bid farewell to OUCH in lower Derelik just this week and linked up with my new corp shortly thereafter.  I wish OUCH the best and I did learn some new things in the few weeks that I flew with them.  Hopefully someone recorded the class that they did on bookmarking and 0.0 bubbles and the various types and there uses.  It was very informative.

Life in The Forge is certainly much more crowded than Derelik or even the majority of Matari held space.  High security systems continue to be very well populated and the low security systems appear to be covered in player owned structures of various sizes working to keep the Caldari economic machine moving and the Jita marketplace well fed.  My trade alt is not at all pleased with her new home in Jita, though once she was able to filter out all of the daily scammers life became a bit more pleasant.

Last nights roam was extremely uneventful.  We spent nearly two hours wandering up and down low sec Forge systems and even poked our head into 0.0.  There was only four of us in the gang so our options were limited.  Eventually we gave up on actually hunting low sec targets, as low sec citizens tend to be a bit paranoid when anyone gets within scan range of them for some reason.  Then the idea was proposed that we would spread out amongst the belts in this one particular system and pretend to be defenseless ratters.

We munched on the rats for a few minutes hopeful for a solo pirate or opportunistic carebear to land on one of our belts and go for the kill.  We had a Brutix, Drake, Maller and a Rupture.  So we were not a heavy gang by any means and we did not have proper tackle or a scout, but I digress…

Local went up by 4 and a small gang appeared to be moving through.  On scan I saw three Drakes and a Zealot.  A short discussion was had on vent concerning whether we should engage this other small gang or not.  We did not delude ourselves into thinking that we had any advantage over this gang.  They were heavier than us and had superior fire power.  But as we had just spent the better part of two hours wandering around looking for a fight, we were not about to back down now.

A Drake landed 60km from our Maller pilot in a belt.  The Maller pilot started to approach the Drake.  It was an obvious trap.  I think our basic plan was to attack the Drake and bring the rest of their gang in.  That was about where our plan ended.  In retrospect we should have formulated more of a plan.  We opened fire on the Drake and earned ourselves a nice GCC along with the security hit.  It strikes me as more than a bit ironic that I was firing on a player from a pirate corp that is apparently well known enough for me to have heard of them before, and yet I was the one who was the criminal. 

So they brought the rest of their gang in and made short work of our Brutix while I think we may have gotten the Drake’s shields to 50%.  A single Drake locked me and held point while they chipped away at the Brutix.  My ECM drones flew into action and swarmed around my tackler.  I aligned for the nearest planet and watched for the Drake’s target lock to break to allow me to make my escape.  ECM drones are exceptionally gay, just saying.  I think they may have gotten a few cycles of attempts of jamming the Drake by the time the Brutix imploded and my gang mates pod rocketed towards a planet.

Come on ECM….go drones go….  The rest of the gang now was locking me.  It was now or never….

Never won that coin toss.

They all opened fire onto my Drake’s enormous shield tank and spent a good 30 seconds or so just peppering me with missile fire.  The shields melted away and I noticed that my ECM drones were being picked off one by one.  Serves the little buggers right.  As soon as my shields were gone it was just a heartbeat later that my armor was gone and I was into structure.

The firing stopped.

I was invited to join a chat channel.  How cute.

It was very professionally done.  There was a chat channel with every member of the opposing fleet and it even had a nice message to the effect of.  YOU ARE BEING RANSOMED. SHUT OFF ALL OF YOUR MODS OR YOU WILL BE DESTROYED.  Cheeky. 

The spokesperson for the group demanded 30 million isk to release my ship.  30 million for a Drake?  That seems a bit much.  The insurance payout alone is 38 million isk.  A new one costs around 26 million, which left me with most of my mods and the ship covered by the insurance payout.  Plus, with the net loss of the ship considering insurance costs, I can still make enough isk for a new Drake in about thirty minutes flying solo in a class one wormhole.

I wish that I could say I had some smart comments or some amusing smack logs to show you of that channel.  Truth be told I was too busy trying to burn out all of my mods so as to give the proverbial finger to whomever was fortunate enough to loot my soon to be wreck.  Rest assured that next time I have a whole scenario pre-planned in my head that should make for some amusing chat logs.  

I declined their “generous” offer.  

They were more than polite about it and fire resumed on my ship shortly thereafter.  Not sure on how much it costs to repair a tech II module that is completely burned out and broken.  I hope it is a lot. 

I didn’t want this Drake anyway!  

Kudos to The Bastards for bringing the good fight.  Hope to shoot you guys again soon. 

Side note: EFT lists that Drake fitting has having EHP of a bit over 90k.  Yet I only took about 1/3 of that to be destroyed as stated on the killmail.  Hm…

Delve Sov Up For Grabs

Did the Goons implode?  To the forums!!!

Something seems missing from this picture...

(2010-02-01 18:20:27) karttoon: I just went to make coffee then I started to laugh so hard I cried.

Quote:

<RB> Karttoon took all our money <Chribba> <RB> and is going to RMT it <Lake> Chribba: wouldn’t bet against it having been stated publicly, but nobody believes them because of all the rumors =p <RB> because we were demanding he resign <Chribba> ok <Lake> ^^ see <Chribba> so how much did he manage to get? <RB> 300 bill in liquid isk <Lake> 300B ISK, 1T in assets, is the word. <RB> plus whatever he got from just suiciding our dread cache <RB> plus our entire logistics cache <Chribba> ok <RB> at least 1T

 

A Roaming We Will Go

Logging into EVE last night I was pleased to see that a low sec to null sec cruiser and battle cruiser roam was in the works and kicking off in just under ten minutes.  I quickly switched over to my ever so trusty 1600 mm plated Rupture, Porky II, and hopped into fleet as soon as invites were taken.  Scouts were assigned and we ended up with a fleet of a dozen members comprised of two recons, one HAC, five cruisers, three battle cruisers and one logistics.  Not a bad mix for a light roam. 

The first order of business for me was selecting the right drink.  Up until this time I was drinking simple bottled water.  As our current path took us through some low sec systems and our main targets or opportunity would be local residents who were not exactly looking for a fight, ratters and plexers, there would the possibility that I would be taking a sec status hit and engaging in a bit of piracy.  Thus the bottle of Mount Gay Rum was selected as the drink of choice.  I am not sure if the Blackbeard drank his rum over ice with Coke Zero, but I am fairly certain that if given the choice he would have.  Being that I was uncertain on the exact time frame of the roam or where I would end up logged for the night I decided to bring both the can and the bottle with me to my computer, a decision I would not regret. 

Proud sponsors of Yarring and general hooliganism since 1703.

Our first prey was spotted as we sat on a low security gate on the Kehrara system.  The neighboring system had a dozen players in it from the same corporation and many were showing up on scan. We suspected that they were sitting outside of a station or POS, but maybe we would get lucky and the scouts would corner one in a belt or in a plex of some sort.  Then voice coms came alive. 

“Omen landing on the gate.  Jumping through to you.  Call points.”

The gate fired on our side and 10 other players all sat ready to spring our trap.  The Omen pilot was added to local and quickly started to try and warp away.  He was only 12 km from me and well within range of my warp disruptor.  Target locked and my pre-activated warp disruptor sprang to live.  Or rather it WOULD HAVE if this little warning boxed hadn’t popped up telling me what a bad person I am for even considering attacking someone in low sec.  The box took me a bit by surprise and I paused for a second to read it, which gave time for our prey to warp off. 

A bit disgruntled at our inability to spring even this simple trap, I refilled my drink.  Coke Zero was running a bit light so I was forced to make this one a bit stronger.  Oddly enough the Omen was still showing up on 360 scan and I set about trying to figure out where he had disappeared to.  Every planet and asteroid belt in range came back empty with the directional scanner and I had just about given up when the voice coms again activated.

“Omen is directly underneath us.  Off Grid…I…I think he is running a mission.” 

Sure enough mission generic wrecks were popping up on directional scan from time to time.  The Omen was either salvaging as he cleared or popping his wrecks to attempt to disguise his activities. 

“Everyone sit tight on the gate.  I am going to try and probe him out.” 

Six combat scanner probes now appeared on my directional scanner in addition to the Omen and his rapidly disappearing mission wrecks.  I reached out with my mind to this other player and slapped him upside the head.  You just jumped through a gate camp of nearly a dozen ships that tried to catch you that are all still in system.  Now you are in low security space in your mission ship and there are FREAKING PROBES SHOWING UP ON THE DIRECTIONAL SCANNER.  DOCK UP!  GET SAFE!  WAKE THE F*&# UP!

My mental warnings were all for naught and our little fleet scored our first kill for the night.  Turns out he was salvaging the wrecks as he went.  I was actually able to get a lock on the pod before he warped off but the orders were given to let him escape.  What do ya know, it looks like he was salvaging as he went.

Mother would be so proud.

Rather than wait off our global criminal countdown (GCC), a 15 minute timer in which you get shot at by gate and station guns, quietly in this system fleet management decided to move us to a planet in the adjacent system with all of the ships showing up on scan.  The planet he chose was not random, but was instead the planet closest to a station in the system.

Sitting just a few clicks off of this station was a lone Arbitrator.  This would be another Amarrian cruiser.  Now put yourself in this player’s pod for just one moment and consider the situation.  You are sitting at a station in low security space minding your own business.  Twelve players have just jumped into the system a few minutes ago.  All twelve of these players have a little red skull next to their name in local chat.  One of these players warps in next to you on the station.  He targets you and opens fire.  Again I reached out with my mental powers through the intertubes and tried to reason with this pilot to simply hit the dock button and spare his crew from an untimely death.  Clearly this is a bait ship sent to force him to aggress and stop him from docking.  The only sensible course of action is to safely dock up and escape from the impending and certain doom from the twelve hostile targets that are sitting in the system with you. 

My warnings went unheeded.  In much graver news I was now out of Coke Zero and was forced to drink the rum on the rocks.  Yarrrrrr! 

We then set course for a bit of a roam through portions of Curse.  Compared to low sec Derelik, this section of Curse is a ghost town.  Locals dock up, get safe, and POS up the moment our scouts would enter the system or drop probes.  The only action we found was a Dramiel that was constantly shadowing our gate camps and warping about.  With no interceptors of our own or a sniper BS to at least take shots at him, we posed little threat to this pilot. 

We journeyed seven jumps into Curse without a single kill and set course for home.  We made best speed until we reached the Sendaya gate in Doril. This would be the border gate between low sec Derelik and 0.0 Curse.  Our scout was cloaked just 3km off of the gate on the other side having jumped though a minute before.  Now he was reporting a Megathron and an Armageddon showing up on scan. 

Joining us at our small gate camp were now three members of the Quality Control corporation in an Arazu, Rifter and Incursus.  I didn’t catch the whole conversation but apparently these folks are “friendly neutrals” and we are in the process of getting mutual blue standing with them. 

The scout reported in, “Geddon and Mega landing on the gate.” 

We sat tight for a few moments as these new comers exchanged pleasantries with some of our fleet members.  

“They jumped through. Call points.  Mega is primary.” 

Seconds later my glass was now empty.  But now was not the time to panic and pour a new one!  There was spaceship glory to be had!  

The Armageddon was the first ship to de-cloak and slowly begin to turn back towards the gate.  I locked him and set my flight of light drones after him as I waited for the Mega to appear on my overview. 

“Geddon is now primary. I’ll tackle the mega when he looses cloak.” 

The Megathron battleship materializes on my overview just 5 km from my hull and begins to target me.  As the Armageddon was still 20km from me I sent a few salvos of 220mm autocannons into the Mega’s shields as I burned towards the tackled Armageddon.   For good measure I kept my point on the Mega as I blasted towards the Geddon.  

Multiple points were called on the Armageddon BS as it slowly began to loose chunks of armor and eventually bleed into structure.  It would never make it back to the gate that it so desperately limped towards. 

Our attention was now focused on the Megathron ship that was creeping back towards the gate.  I tried to hit my WMD and burn back towards him to add my web and dps to the mix.  Hmm…where the hell did my capacitor go?  I usually don’t have this problem…. Ah yes….I was being cap neutralized by the Mega pilot.  Well that was fairly cheeky of him given the situation he was in. 

Two minutes of DPS later and the Megathron was turned into a floating scrap pile to match his Amarrian friend.  

Much fun was had by our fleet members and it was a great way to end the evening’s roam.  I was somewhat surprised that all of the kills we achieved were more directly related to other players’ lack of skill than our own cleverness.  The two battle ships SHOULD have been using a scout.  The Arbitrator SHOULD have seen the hostile fleet in local and docked up rather than engaging the obvious bait ship.  The Omen SHOULD have been using his directional scanner and docked up when he saw the combat probes on his scanner.  

Hopefully with our assistance, these lessons will sink in.

Massive Sov Shakeup: IT Lays Claim to Delve Systems

Somewhat quiet on the blog front today considering what is currently going on in game.

First the screenshots from Dot Lan:

Shaken but not stirred?

The speculation official word is that the TCUs (Territorial Claim Units) that were placed by CCP for all of the existing sovereignty holders were set to pay their bills out of a certain corp wallet.  That specific corp wallet was left empty in some of the major alliances and none of the directors logged onto their executor corp mains to receive the warning messages from CCP.  A poster from Atlas stated that his directors did recieve a warning message concerning insuficient funds in the wallet three days prior to the bills becoming past due.

IT has laid a claim to two systems within their ancestral homeland of Delve.

They didn't want that space anyway.

The trolls are certainly out in full force on CAOD. Scrap Heap at least has a constructive thread on the subject.  The lack of trolling on that thread at least let’s us piece together the facts concerning what happened.

A cross post was quoted from someone with Goonswarm:

Here’s what happened: all of the systems that were lost were the ones with TCUs that were seeded by CCP. Their sov bills all came in at once – today. So how did we lose our space? The same way xdeathx now confirms that he lost his sov. He, too, set auto bill pay up like we did. However, he fucked up and had the alliance’s money in the wrong wallet division. Since the bills could not be paid, the TCUs all unanchored at the same time…
…So, the bad news:
We lost NOL, F-T, I1Y, 1-s, and a few stations in querious. Also our JB system is dead and most of our important jammers are gone. Years of hard work literally ruined by a failure to check a box.

Set Bonus

As I march unwillingly closer to the age of thirty there have been many milestones around the way that I have associated with adulthood.  First there was purchasing a home of my own and signing my life away for a 30 year mortgage.  Then other signs of impending senility began to rear there ugly head.  I can still remember the first time I was watching something on the History Channel for the first time that I was able to recall what I was doing when the event happened. 

Some actions were just becoming annoying as we went from one weekly trip to a grocery store to now frequenting three such establishments; a monthly trip to Sam’s Club, a weekly trip to one grocery store for a few specialty products (low carb tortillas and flatbread), then another grocery store for fresh produce and meats.  How did we ever make do with just one store before?  I wish I knew.

But the latest development is quickly becoming the most taxing: the quest for matching furniture sets.  I wish I knew that at some point mismatched furniture from various sources would become uncouth, as I wouldn’t have collected so much of it.  Shopping for the furniture was a new experience for me, as all prior furniture purchases ended at Big Lots or Target.  Now however that was simply unacceptable.

So the money that was being saved for a new car purchase was quickly reapportioned by my wife for a complete living room and bedroom set.  Well not exactly complete since our bedside lamps appear to have made the cut.  At least one item purchased from Target shall remain!  This Saturday the deliveries will be made and we will own not one but two complete sets of matching furniture. 

I think the set bonus is something like -50% wife nagging for six months.  Well worth the cost. 

I really wish I had some great stories to tell about my time thus far in OUCH.  Unfortunately I appear to be a bit of an oddity in my time zone.  There is always a high security mining op running in my time zone but that it is about it for weekday activities.  There are weekend ops but my play time is usually somewhat more limited on weekend nights than the 2-3 hours that I have to play on weekdays.  

Perhaps learning to deal with some boredom and teaching me to be self sufficient in terms of activities is all part of adjusting to life out in 0.0.  I will likely be moving a ratting BS to our high sec staging area shortly and then scout it out to some quiet section of curse for ratting and exploration.  The area that we frequent is in such close proximity to low sec that it is was too high traffic for anything like that.

It is not the OUCH organizers fault that my play schedule doesn’t quite match up to theirs and they have really been doing a stellar job in getting things organized and setting up a POS and such.

[OUCH] Enrollment

With a slight note of farewell and best wishes I left the fledgling corporation behind that served as a link between the five on line friends with which I first undocked into New Eden nearly one year ago today.  I had hoped that we would have been able to get that corporation moving and actually accomplish something, but with varying schedules and differing goals the best we ever produced was some joint mining operations and a few level four mission clearing nights.  Thus I found myself a member of a new organization seeking to make a name for itself amongst the stars, the Open University of Celestial Hardship (OUCH). 

I placed my application on Friday and by the time I logged in Saturday afternoon I was already accepted.  The corporation is based out of lower Derelik inside of a major pipeline into curse and less than a dozen jumps from the market hub system of Rens.  Ironically enough my current low sec base of Sendaya is only a hop skip and 4 jumps away from my old Derelik base of operations in Hasateem.  So I was able to pick up my cloaky covert ops scanning frigate and move it to Sendaya. 

Sendaya is literally the last low security system before entering into Curse.  Curse is an NPC region of space controlled by the Angel Cartel.  I believe that my favorite quote from all of the EVE Fanfest videos that I watched was when this Angel Cartel loyalist roll player was speaking and stated, “One does not simply fly into Curse.”  If EVE as a whole is a rough neighborhood, then Curse would be the street that even the cops and cabs refuse to drive down. 

OUCH as a whole has been a helpful group with which to be involved.  There seems to always be someone on to answer the newer players fitting and skill training related questions as well a small roam or two being formed up with the allies and blues that operate in this section of Curse and Derelik as well.  My only hold back thus far is that I didn’t ship any tech I frigates down with me when I made the move.  I will have to make a market run with the hauler on my alt account and ship down a few Rifters for suiciding into gate gamps action.

I have not yet been able to actually go on any of the ops that were run.  Saturday night there was a roam going on but I didn’t log on until that was wrapping up.  There was also a Wormhole group that had formed up in Berta on Sunday.  I will have to remember to bring an omni tanked BS down to this neck of the woods for the next time they go into a class two or three.

Looking forward to some non-safe flying!

Trying to Make a Move

Is it just me or do they all just start to read the same once you look over your 20^th recruitment post? 

I had some hopes of moving in with the Cepta folks but apparently the time that I took off from gaming to do some work around the house caused too much of a delay and now that ship has undocked on the way back to deep-deep 0.0 in Esoteria.  Their corporation killboards seem somewhat slow, but their alliance killboards are much more active.  This lead me to believe that they lived in a somewhat quiet area of space and did not have compulsory PVP ops, but that PVP would be readily available within the alliance if I so chose.  

The fact that I had to go digging on the CAOD forums to even find a post about the Sys-K alliance was also impressive.  I was not interested in some drama filled organization with an ego driven leaders seeking to make a name for himself, nor in some long standing alliance or a rebirth alliance with years and year of grudges still left to fulfill.  Other qualities that I am looking for is someone in an established alliance with a 0.0 presence.  That shouldn’t be hard to find right? 

So to the forums I go! 

The signal to noise ratio of the recruitment forums is simply astounding.  Recruitment posts are continually bumped on a daily basis with very little new information added after the initial posting.  Unlike the rest of the EVE forums, apparently trolling of posts is not allowed, thus you have unabated e-peen strokage with the occasional poster actually contributing some information about the corporation or alliance in question. 

My favorite line so far, “We don’t have compulsory PVP ops.”  Then a few lines underneath that, “Tax rates are set to 100% during certain times to encourage participation in scheduled ops.”  Apparently they are not looking for players that have trained up reading comprehension past level two.

Why Firing Your QA Staff Is Bad

Admittedly I have been spending a bit more time in Warhammer Online than EVE for the past few weeks.  Whether that is because of the long skills set to train or the fact that the other combat focused pilots in the corp seem to be logging in just to update skill training queues I don’t know.  There is always the possibility that I am just enjoying Warhammer Online a bit more than usual with the population density increases from all of the server mergers. 

A few nigths ago I won my first purple loot bag from a keep tier 4 keep siege.  I was very excited to pull this cloak out of the bag and replace some level 24 blue cloak that I had been wearing with a shiny purple cloak. Except the cloak wasn’t that shiny…  The level 24 cloak was an event award from the Land of the Dead launch event and had this unique scarab design on it.  This one just looks like a normal hide like mantle that has no unique flavor to it.

 

Check out the proc as well…at least I won’t need a spreadsheet to compute the added benefit!

Large Projectile Turrets V

Finally have that one out of the way.  Longest 22 days ever.  I loaded up Large Artillery Specialization to three just to have a small break in long skill training and now tonight I get to queue up Motion Prediction five, an eight day skill, which will then let me train up Large Auto cannon specialization. Then I will be completely done with gunnery skills for quite some time. 

The next phase of my little training plan involves a ton of missile related skills with the plans of eventually getting into a stealth bomber.  The SB seems to be the FOTM for 0.0 PVP at the moment based on sifting through the chest beating and e-peen flexing going on with the forums at the moment. 

Dominion seems to have changed very little for the folks in both high sec and low sec Empire space.

Format C:\

What a way to spend an evening, and the next morning, and most of the following evening.  Is there really any better way to pass the time than reinstalling software and downloading new drivers while trying to remember which clever hacks you had to use to get some obscure program to load?  I think not. 

What I love about a good format is the blank slate that you start out with.  Just an empty program list and a system tray devoid of tiny icons, a blank canvas to upload and install onto.  I had almost forgotten how fast my computer was out of the box.  Somehow after stuffing the hard drive to the brink of failure, then adding on a secondary hard drive, while installing and uninstalling multiple games and programs, I caused the computer to begin to run very poorly.

It all started when I got tired of my Radeon video card overheating.  It is a 1600 pro series, which is an ancient relic by today’s standards.  Word to the wise, if you have to click on the “Legacy Hardware” link on your card’s manufacturer web site to find the drivers for it, it might be time for an upgrade.  So I unplugged the video card to switch back to the onboard video.  Somehow in this process I ripped or corrupted data on the hard drive and my computer was unable to locate the NTLDR on my hard drive, which left it unbootable.

Two hours of tinkering and several Captain Morgan and Coke Zero’s later I had managed to hack together the system enough with the XP CD to get back to the command prompt and begin the formatting process.  On a personal note, I can literally walk into my house and drop my keys somewhere and completely forget about the location five minutes later.  I have left my cell phone at the self checkout lanes at a local grocery store when I had to use it to get the machine to accept the correct weight on some item. Yet even after not seeing it for several years I knew the exact location of my Windows XP recovery CD at the bottom right of my closet underneath a twisting tangle of coaxial cable left over from a college apartment when I split the cost of cable with my neighbor and we ran lines through the windows.  Desperate times, desperate measures and all that jazz. 

Someday I will forget the Contra 30 life code (up up down down left right left right A B) and the path through the Lost Woods in the original Zelda (North West South West) and be able to recall more useful information.  This will be a sad day.  But I digress.  

It was nice to finally be able to delete the partition off of my hard drive.  And be able to learn about all of these programs that I had long since deleted to save space on my hard drive in some mopping up I had done a year ago.  Apparently deleting the drivers for your motherboard can be a bad thing.  Now I have the clean slate with windows and the actual out of the box drivers for the motherboard running.  Note to self: don’t delete those this time just because they don’t show up as ever being used. 

I was able to setup EVE to download on the way out of the door this morning and had the first DVD of Warhammer Online installing as well.  Doubtful that I will be putting Dungeons and Dragons Online back on the PC.  I rarely played my account anymore and it was really just a distraction anyway.  The true decision will be on whether or not to put WOW back on.  Someone else has my account, and I hadn’t actually logged onto to say hello in several months.  But it was nice to have the option.