Long Overdue Update

What an adjustment the last few months have been.  First off, Fire Bird Squadron has formed the Terra-Incognita Alliance.  I believe that this was more for internal security reasons, but perhaps we will one day branch out again into multiple systems or add an established wormhole exploration corporation to our Alliance. 

Due to some significant changes in my personal life, my EVE time has been greatly affected.  Luckily I was able to plan ahead for these changes and remove all of my assets from within our deep wormhole pocket and plant them safely in Empire before my play time became reduced.  Hopefully at some point I will figure out how to balance MMO group activities with these new changes and do something actually worth writing about again.

Most of my playtime now consists of logging into my main and alt account and mining for perhaps an hour on the alt while running missions on the main to beef up the alts standing with some of the R&D corps.  This alt is working towards being a passive income source by running a few PI planets and 4 R&D agents.  This should cover at least half of the cost of a PLEX, and the passive income allowed by PI may very well explain the rising cost of PLEX out in non-Jita regions.  Assuming I am doing my reading write and my spreadsheet is correct, this should work out well with minimal effort.

I canceled both accounts and will be paying for both accounts with a PLEX from here on out.  The alt is paid up through November and the main is good through December.  The plan is to move the two trained up alts over to my main account and have the passive income alt running research, production, R&D agents, and PI setups to essentially finance well over half of the operation.  Assuming I am commit adequate time to the game again in adequate blocks of time, I will be rejoining the wormhole shenanigans back in Nomad, our C5 home system. 

Speaking of Shenanigans we had a small visit from the mercenary group NOIR in Nomad.  They entered the system on Wednesday September 22 and the first loss of ours was at 15:27.  There were several small to medium engagements throughout the system on that date as well as the next day as NOIR setup a staging POS.  We were on the loosing end of those as you can imagine, as our only victory was this Guardian.

We had a hero Orca, whose brave crew sacrified themselves in order to close off the main entry point that NOIR was using to get their inital force into the system.  The only other loss worthy of mention is this carrier, which then apparently started a whole debate over on battle clinic concerning cap regen and triage fit carriers.

Not having been in the system and having to glean information from killboards and corp mailings it seems that NOIR then began to setup a second staging POS and both sides more or less sat tight to see what would develop.  Last night we were informed that a cease fire had been negotiated and that NOIR would be leaving the system.  Shortly thereafter the “Terra-Incognita Eviction” contract was removed from the NOIR kill board.  While I don’t know the specific of those negotiations or the events that actually took place over the weekend, the scuttlebutt is that Terra-Incognita was able to bring in some additional allied support and secure the aid and presence of several “blue” entities inside of Nomad. 

While it would be a stretch to declare Terra-Incognita “victors,” as we clearly were on the loosing end of both of the major engagements of NOIR’s incursion, at the end of the day we are still here.

How NOT to Hulkageddon

http://www.bfwar.com/kb/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=881

Sorry for lack of posts.  Newborn + EVE do not go well together.

Wormhole Survival: Obvious Trap is Obvious

Still less obvious than the Drake you chose to use for bait.

Ask yourself; is this target of opportunity a little too good?  You have seven active pilots in your class 1 wormhole all sitting at a POS in various ships.  Maybe you’re winding down for the night, maybe you are preparing for an op.  Suddenly you notice a wreck on directional scanner and a Drake with drones out.  You hop into a covert ops frigate and cloak up.  

Crazily enough this pilot this just 3 AU from your POS in a combat site.  Doesn’t he know how easy he was to find?  Must be some noob from high security space going on a field trip to wormhole space, boy does he have a lot to learn!  Carefully and skillfully you narrow your search down to one cosmic anomaly and warp in cloaked landing just 30 km from your soon-to-be victim.  The Drake carelessly has his drones on the one remaining sleeper frigate who has him webbed and scrammed.  You give the order in fleet for your entire small gang to warp on top of you as you decloak and warp disrupt the Drake. 

Your gang mates trickle into the combat site and slowly attack the Drake.  Tales of an easy kill on TeamSpeak means half the gang is in PVE fit ships.  In all the excitement no one notices that Heavy Interdictor warping in with twelve of his buddies, who I can promise you are not in a hastily cobbled together mixed PVE/PVP response fleet.  

Is he stopping to salvage wrecks as he goes?  A bait Drake likely won’t bother with the salvage. 

How does he react to a probe showing up in system or your pilots sitting in ships at the POS?  The care bear will safe up or warp back to his point of entry, bait Drake will sit there trying to look as juicy as possible.  

Assuming that you are able to get eyes on this player, what corporation is he in?  What does the corporation description contain any mention of PVP?  Does the corporation killboard show a large amount of wormhole space based kills?   

Wormholes offer no protection or knowledge of an enemy gangs presence within your system, let alone sitting on the other side of a k162 that you haven’t even scanned down yet.  Depending on the location of your POS and entry point an entire gang with support could be sitting off some distant planet or moon while their scout has eyes on you forming up within your POS as their plan unfolds.  Your enemy FC will know your ship types often before your own FC.  

A well tanked Drake will have upwards of 90k+ EHP.  Don’t hesitate to call another primary as enemy ships begin to land.  I can promise you the opposing FC already has his first two targets picked, call your points and divide them up amongst the opposing gang members as they land (you do have a point on that PVP ship you outfitted just for occasions such as this right?)  Remember that from an effeciency perspective even destroying one tech III cruiser is worth the cost of an entire small gang of cruiser hulls.  

Most importantly is to decide before the fight if you are going to commit to the fight or prepare to run.  If you are going to commit then have everyone swarm the Drake while watching directional scanner for incoming hostiles.  If you are going to hedge your bets then you want everyone to get within weapons range and align for a celestial at top speed.  The worst thing your FC can do is say nothing and have half your fleet with one finger on the warp out button while the other half sits on the Drake and gets bubbled by an Interdictor.  

Ultimately you have to decide on a risk vs. return basis if you want the kill bad enough.  Just remember that if it is bait, the enemy FC will only spring the trap if he feels he has the upper hand.  He expects you to scatter and for your pilots to flail about helplessly while his gang picks you apart.  Remember that fights (null sec sov issues aside) are ultimately judged on an effeciency basis, so kill something shiney before your gang all gets blown up.

Above all you have to know your level of risk tolerance AKA never fly something you can’t afford to loose.  If it smells like a trap then leave the shiney ships in the hangar.  Springing a trap in throwaway cruisers and batte cruiser hulls really costs you nothing and a bit of PVP is a nice break from the monotony of life in deep wormhole space.

Veldnaut’s Television Debut

Ready for Closeup!

Pic shamelessly stolen from the EVE-O forums.  

Dreadnaught in high security space, something you actually can see every day in Amarr.

The Virtual Gift

Somehow my wife managed to pull of a complete surprise birthday party for me over this past weekend.  My youngest brother, who had a short lived EVE career that basically centered on outfitting frigates and shooting at other players for a month or so, decided to go shopping online for some Isk for my birthday present.  No not a PLEX, actual ISK. 

It all started on Wednesday of last week when my wife seemed suddenly interested in my EVE character.  She came and sat in a chair and asked me what I was doing and I explained that I was stuck in an incestuous loop of Class 4 wormholes that only seem to link to other C4 and hoping and praying for a K162 ticket out of there.  She wanted to know what my character looked like and made a comment about how unattractive he was compared to my other characters in games like FFXI or the blood elf I rolled for her in WoW.  Apparently she was just confirming my main character’s name exact spelling. 

Fast forward to Saturday night and my youngest brother asked me if I had logged into EVE that day yet, oddly enough I had not.  Thinking that he had reactivated his account I pressed him for an explanation.  He then informed me of what he had done and I had the pleasure of explaining to my uncle, who interjected that he plays Farmville so he understands what we are talking about, and my grandmother that I spend a bit too much of my free time playing an extremely important game involving spaceships. 

When I got home later that evening I logged in and noticed my wallet had not yet grown.  He has texted me a few times to confirm delivery and I have never responded to him to let him know that it has never arrived.  On one hand, I don’t want him to just waste his money; I just really really wish he had sent me a PLEX or two instead of breaking various parts of the EULA and dragging me along with him. 

I had tried to explain to him about how Isk farmers ruin aspects of the game and drive actual players out of certain areas of game play.  His eyes turned a nice doe white as he clearly was not interested.  The concept of how Real Money Trade (RMT) affects the various online worlds is a completely foreign concept to outsiders.  

So now I wait…

Couldn’t Stop Watching the Jita Cam

I was so captivated by the coverage of the Alliance Tournament 8 matches and the Jita Cam that I lost a set of 5 Sisters Core Probes by letting their timer expire.  Go me!

Minmatar Done

Such hard work grinding all these skill points!

Also my clone is now outdated.  Here’s hoping for an Empire or NPC 0.0 opening soon so that I can update that contract.

The Grand Non-Adventure

Several weeks ago I set out on what would promise to be a grand adventure.  The corporation moved it’s members to the class 5 with the class 5 static and operations in the class 5 with the class three static have all but ceased.  So off I set into deep and deadly unknown space in search of Shangri La or El Dorado, some lost city of untold riches that would allow the corp to run both large scale operations and small group content. 

Sights are set on a class five or class six wormhole with both a class 1-3 static and a class 5-6 static.  I knew going into it that the search would not be easy, but with a reward up to 4 plexes at the moment, even if it took me a month to find the right system it would still be worth it come pay day. 

The biggest problem overall seems to be getting and staying within the high end worm hole systems.  Wormholes being what they are, are unpredictable by nature.  The designers also sprinkled them with static wormholes with no rhyme or reason behind them.  The only discernable pattern is that there is no pattern.  A class five has just a high of chance of having a class 2 static as a class 6.  Searching from within normal space also proofed fruitless, as searching 10-12 systems out in null sec space looking for a single entry point is entirely too time consuming.  There is simply too much noise to sort through and I never quite feel as safe in null sec as I do within a wormhole.  

Wandering about from interconnected system to system is, at least, mildly entertaining.  Local reaction to my presence, once known, has proven to be amusing.  Pro-tip: at least bring an interceptor or some type of Interdictor if you are going to try to camp someone in a covert ops frigate, as your battle cruiser gang is completely ineffective.  

Thus far I am approaching 100 systems scanned down and rejected.  The colonization of wormhole space has been highly successful as nearly half of all systems visited had some player presence.  Even systems with seemingly little value, such as a class 4 with a class one static, can have multiple large towers and billions and billions of assets contained therein.  Others, such as a class 1 with only a high sec static, are useful for moon goo reactions and blue print research with a quick guaranteed market run on demand, or a class three with only a low sec static and the occupying corporation running small cruiser and battle cruiser gangs nightly into low sec and RR battleship gangs to clear the local sites for Isk. 

What I have yet to find is a single high end system with multiple wormhole statics.  That is, a wormhole that will have 2 or more guaranteed worm holes that lead to other wormhole systems.  I have found them with two statics but one will lead to null sec and the other to unknown space.  I am somewhat disheartened that what I am searching for could not even exist, or if it does, has already been claimed by another Isk seeking adventurer. 

I would like to plug the Static Mapper website developed by Raath Nambode.  The information provided on statics in a system has always been accurate as verified by my own scanning.  I am working on a list of systems and statics to add to his database, assuming he accepts such a thing of course.

Truth in Advertising?

Well then.

I am too afraid to click on it.  What if it is true?!

Best Update In Tyranis Notes

· Loot: NPCs are now dropping the correct size of afterburners.

Amen.