My kind of weekend

Friday night started out well. We were able to get our first load of components needed for our Rorqual into the hold, finally. We’d been looking all week but were having NO luck with highsec despite a lot of scanning and ‘WH redialing’. All told we collapsed around 10 WH’s and scanned 20-30 down in the course of the week before we got lucky and were able to get the components in. Usually we have better luck with highsec access but this time around fate was not on our side.

Hauling in was an experience in and of itself. As I mentioned previously we had a squatter in system, and in addition highsec was 3 WH systems away (past a POS) through a WH that we could only push about a billion through before it collapsed. Getting an entire freighters full of stuff (in 10,000 m3 chunks) in that hole would be stressing it to the max. Regardless, T went out of the WH, went the 28 jumps to our home system, grabbed the Obelisk and got it filled up, and then started jumping it back. We had 2 escorts along for the ride as well to speed things up and provide support should it be attacked, however thankfully we got it there safe and sound. The other pilots were harvesting some gas in 1 jump while we were waiting for the freighter to finally get to the nearest highsec, but as soon as T got close we ended the harvesting op to get hauling.

Shortly afterwards…  our squatter logged on and started scanning. I’m sure they saw the hauling ships going in and out of our home system and knew we were hauling something, and sure enough they came through the WH to 1 jump shortly thereafter and started causing trouble.

Thankfully we’d noticed them log in, and the subsequent scanner probes, so while we weren’t completely ready (he did kill an empty Itty V and podded the pilot) we had decent CAP in the air and one of our Interceptors were able to get a lock on him. It looked like he may have just wanted to fight the Inty, but hard to say really, I didn’t get a clear view of the encounter. Thankfully we were able to purge Severice2 from our home system, though our pilot did lose his ship in the encounter as well so it was a pretty close thing. Talking to our pilot afterwards, he had a list of things to do better next time, as he felt there’s no way it should have been that close (Ex: Turning on his guns at the start of the fight probably would have helped. ;P). Regardless, well done to that pilot getting the point and then his first solo kill.

After that it was more or less smooth sailing getting the Rorqual components in. Had a brush in with a Falcon at one point (who had trouble defeating the shield tank on my armor tanked pvp harbinger) who ran away when I tried to chase him, eventually warping away when they saw I had backup arriving. There was also a Maelstrom later on which I decided not to lock down as I didn’t want to force them back through the WH we were hauling through. No real difficulties though. Once everything was safe and sound I brought Kor back into the hole to collapse the route to highsec completely as one of the intervening WH’s was WELL into critical. Something about 2 pilots forgetting their last loads of components in the station after the WH  first going critical and having to go back through… *innocent look*

And then, the coup de grace of the evening… after the rest of the corp had logged off, Kor was looking for a highsec access (we had a K162 in our home system he was exploring) and he came across a group that looked like they were hauling. Once he was done scanning and confirmed lowsec access, Kor got into his Manticore and went hunting. Nailed himself a Badger  II carring 30,000 Caldari Navy Lead Charge L and a Tengu hull, which I was able to snag shortly thereafter and get somewhere safe. Almost nagged a Cheetah pilot shortly thereafter (different corp/alliance) but they got out of disruptor range before I could kill them. If I’d done a couple things better I may have gotten the kill, but that is life. All in all a good end to a good evening.

Saturday was pretty quiet overall; did some scanning, closed some WH’s, but then had to run and was gone most of the afternoon and evening. Got back late fairly late so it was pretty much a wash. Sunday we redialed a couple times till we were no longer getting a busy signal (Blame J for than analogy, at least the last bit of it) and did a whole bunch of gas harvesting and mining. It was nice to break one of our new WH members into the WH life, as well as get enough gas and ore out of a system to critical the adjoining WH. Been a bit since we’ve done that.

All in all a great weekend; corp availability was high, we made a ton of isk and brought in a lot of components for the Rorqual, and overall had a blast.

We has a squatter

WH life has been fairly constant lately. One of our members has left the hole, some others have had more time, others have had less… standard crap. One thing we do feel more than larger corps due to our small size is when a couple folks don’t have time available in an evening. We lose 2-3 members for a night, and suddenly we can’t do anything, it’s unfortunate.

And the numbers in the corp are unlikely to change much, unless we change how the corp runs, in the short term. Our corp is fairly open to folks ripping us off of stuff if they wanted, permissions are fairly wide open, Ship Maintenance Arrays are accessible to anyone, etc. And frankly, I don’t want to change that unless there a need.

Anyways… We has a Squatter. Not quite sure who they are even though we have a good idea. Regardless we’ve seen a Nemesis in our local system off and on the past couple days, and probes out a number of times. We’ll see how it goes, but in general that’s bad mojo. Either they’re going to get more allies in to engage our POS’ (though that’s really not worth their time), or at the very least we’ll have to worry about raids and interference as we go about our regular daily stuff.  It definately means having more active CAP than usual, which when mixed with our lower pilot availability is going to impact profits. Thus is life though.

Speaking of life, hopefully mine will clear up some and I’ll get more ingame time. Between the hockey playoffs and other RL stuff I’ve been on less, and less attention has been ingame as well lately.

WH Space and RL Timing

One of the issues that arises in WH space is something that wasn’t completely obvious when we first started in there, but has continued to be an issue throughout our stay in WH land.

Sometimes there’s nothing to do. There are definite ‘dead’ times while in WH space, times when there’s nothing in local we can do (maybe not enough combat pilots for combat sites and no local grav/ladar, whatever) and the WH to next door is in a bad state and we don’t want to push it. Example if it’s critical or going to collapse soon or whatever. Typically these times are at most 2 hours or so, and generally they’re controllable such that they don’t interfere with daily operations much.

Sometimes though we can run into these issues, and they arrive at the exact worst time for one of our members. Some of our corp mates have shortish availability most evenings. They have kids or RL obligations or an early work shift or whatever and they only have 2-3 hours available to do much of anything, and when that availability is taken up by one of these ‘dead’ times… that sucks. Such was the case last night, D logged on just as we were wrapping up stuff next door, and that left him with nothing to do WH wise (which clearly irritated him a fair bit, given his reaction on Vent). Didn’t help that I was pretty frustrated myself by the time they logged on, so maybe wasn’t as helpful as I could have been.

But still, what to do about it? I’m not always sure about that one. A number of our corp mates do have folks in highsec, so they have things to do, even if they’re not what they want to be doing. And while there’s always a ton do to in Eve, they often involve other people, so when you’re the odd man out and arrive at the wrong time it blows. ‘Go do highsec missioning’ when you were keen on blowing up some sleepers and mining some ore is pretty crappy.

These are the things that cause folks to change corps. And while I don’t think this is the likely in this particular case (D and I are RL family), it’s definately something I’m looking at mitigating. Part of that will come with the reactions of those who end up in this situation, and some will come with a viable option in these times.

Oh, and the Golem is pretty snazzy. Though I’ve made some changes to the posted fits; on my solo fit the highs are 2 tractors and a salvager, and on my duo fit it’s 2 tractors (salvager alt). It’s proven more effective as I rarely needed the extra drone range, but the ability to loot stuff and the like has been a nice benefit. Especially since it doesn’t actually slow down the mission running at all. Go Marauders. Missioning itself is still it’s boring self mind you, but hey, it’s something to do when no one else is around.

Iron Golem

Yeah, my Golem is named ‘Iron’. At least till I get a better name. Bite me. You’d figure I’d have a good name lined up by now, but… guess not.

Above is an ‘in action’ shot of the Golem, shooting things in a mission I was running last night. I’m being pretty cautious with the ship at the moment; getting used to the new hull and being careful while I get some skills under my belt (like Marauders IV for instance). I was going to wait to get into the hull till Mar IV was done, but it’s too smexy for that, and I’ve been pretty careful to get most of the skills done already so it’s fit to fly as is.

As for the fit, this is what I’m currently running while soloing:

And here’s my build for when I run duo with a corp mate:

In general the plan is to primarily run the Golem in a duo with a corp mate who’ll be in an Arty Machariel. He takes the long range, I take the short, and we plow through missions; the duo’d build relies on a mutual large energy transfer to be cap stable and run its 3 target painters. The free high slots are pretty much to taste; sometimes I’ll want drone range, sometimes I’ll want tractors, etc.

I still have some skilling up to do before I’ll be satisfied with the beast. It’s a decent machine now or I wouldn’t be in the hull (in general, I don’t like getting into hulls before I’m really ready for them) but it could use improvement.

Let me know what you think of the build.

It’s so close I can taste it…

By Sunday, Kor will be able to fly the Marauder. This has been a long time coming; my original ‘long term plan’ for the Marauder predates reactivating my account just under a year ago. For a primarily PvE focused character (which he was for a long time) it represents, to at least a certain extent, the epitome of mission running goodness.

I have the isk put aside for the Golem, and as per the most universal of Eve rules (Don’t fly a ship unless you can afford to lose it) I have enough to put together another one should I need; if maybe not as well fit. Between the hull and the components (no officer pieces, but still…) it’ll be fairly pricey, but I already own a lot of the components I need from Kor’s last visit to highsec, and the rest will come. I’ll have to be careful a bit about suicide ganks as all Golem pilots should be, but it shouldn’t be too much of a concern. It’s not going to pop that easy, and if it’s in space I’m at the keyboard paying attention to folks around me. Hopefully that’ll be enough. :)

This does mean that Kor is going to leave the WH for a while. The Golem is going to primarily be a mission running beast, and while Kor is already up there in rep he could still use some more Caldari State rep for POS placement. I’ve also realized recently that there is another L V agent in the same sector of space as the 2 Caldari Navy ones I was planning on using, so I’m probably going to plow through that rep while I’m in highsec. Having never run a L V mission (though I hear they’re easier than the sleepers we fight regularly) it’s on my list of things to do in Eve, and if I’m doing them, I may as well have access to doing them right.

I’m not sure how long he’s going to be out there, but at least a little while. It’s going to be nice to have regular access to the market and lowsec roams and the like, and especially nice to be in the same area of space my Fiance’s combat pilot is so we can run missions together and maybe do get killed in PvP together. The Golem will eventually enter WH space when the corp is closer to being ready for C6 combat sites, but that’s a ways away yet.

As a note, this will mean I’ll be getting my ‘Elite Fitting Certificate’ in a week or two (I’m still missing Engineering V. Yeah, PWG hasn’t been much of a concern to date). After that, I’m still working on Kor’s plan. Either head towards a Widow just because it looks so cool (and the skills are on the way to a Dreadnaught anyways, which is one of Kor’s further goals) or just fortify my current skills some. I have at least a couple months of solid skills in the ‘just get me better at what I do now’ range.

Assuming I can figure out how to put up images in here, expect an image of the new Golem when she’s airborne. I’ll probably post the fit too when the time comes; not enough folks read this blog that I’m too concerned about marking myself a gank target. And really, the ship isn’t worth THAT much.

‘Deep Safe’ removal and other stuff

There has been a recent Dev Blog post regarding changes (removal basically) of deep safe’s in Tyrannus. About time; this is one of those things I’ve read a couple times here and there in my time in Eve (and even one of my own just to test the theory) and every time I come across it I couldn’t help but think ‘This is an exploit. They should fix this, it’s clearly not intended mechanics and gives a large advantage to folks who do this. It’s a cheat, a hack, and hopefully CCP will fix it.’ And lo and behold, years later, they actually do.

Historically I’ve had a open and recorded history with a strong stance against hacks, exploits, cheats… anything that creates an unfair advantage to one party in an manner unintended by game mechanics. Asheron’s Call was my first real MMO and I avoided PvP due to the slide casting crap, and in WoW I’ve made a couple stands on Silver Hand on the matter. WoW due to it’s nature has a lot of exposure to exploits; but thankfully I’ve always been in a position to prevent the groups I run with from using them. I started in WoW as a guild leader of a small corp that was formed with RL friends, and then moved on to a raiding organization of significant size (maybe the largest in all of WoW, we were never really sure) where there was support for similar habits.

Eve still has a couple ‘unfavourable’ actions that currently are used, though some of the ones I find most annoying I think are intentional by CCP these days (Neutral repping in highsec for instance. That should be a true aggression timer, yo) but in time I think CCP will close the most egregious ones. And good on them for removing this one (though I know null sec corps in general are going to lament their removal).

On another note entirely, my Eve time has been somewhat limited lately. Some RL things, I’m mucking around in Star Trek Online a bit, and there’s been ingame issues have made me a bit less interested in logging in. Shift happens though.

The corp did have a PvP runin in lowsec on the weekend while I was busy that went rather… less than optimal. We’ve done a fair bit of analysis on it (probably more than is healthy…) and have identified areas to improve. That all being said though, a lot of our PvP headaches are lack of experience doing it, and that will continue till we lose more ships, basically. In WH space we’re in decent shape, we know the flow of combat and how it runs and can hold our own, but outside the WH it’s a different beast, and it’s a beast we don’t know yet.

Time will tell that one. In the meantime, I’m working on skilling up my toons. Kor is almost done his truck to Marauder (and elite core fitting skills), Tul is done his spider tanking skills and working on Covert Ops for WH scanning, and Kah is well on his way to being done able to build Carriers/Rorqual for our current WH home. We’ve made the decision not to leave our current system in the foreseeable future, and having cap support if we’re engaged in there would be a nice advantage over any invading force.

Hybrid Reactions… good?

We’ve started doing some hybrid reactions in our WH system; I was running the numbers the other day on them and they looked pretty profitable even factoring in things like POS fuel and setup and the like. Given that we already have all the supplies in one of our POS to do the actual reactions, it seemed like the obvious ‘next step’ for our WH home; a bit more profit on a per op basis and should defray most of our fuel costs, assuming the numbers don’t change much. Also helps that the reactions compress the gas/minerals some as well, so there will be less loads to haul out when the time comes.

They’re a bit of a pita to keep up and running; can’t refill the silos unless you offline them, which both stops the current production and means you have to re-online the suckers, and you can only fit so many reactions in one of the silos. 20,000 m3 total space, so 2000 C540 is all that fits which works out to 20 reactions (20 hours) between refills which is a pita to arrange, RL and all that.

Between the hybrid reactions pulling in their bit more to the current op, and a fair bit of good luck with the high quality gas (Instrumentals and Vital LADAR sites) and generally good pilot availability, the current op should be fairly good assuming no bad luck on the way from the WH to sale. It’s always risky moving anything through WH space to empire, but with enough precautions (and we fall on the down right paranoid side of things some days) it can usually be done without issue.

One of the things I haven’t mentioned yet out the corp is our payout structure. Basically it works something like this:

An op starts immediately after we get everything to highsec, and goes till the next highsec run we actually use (usually in the range of a week). There may be highsecs in between we don’t haul out through, but basically we deliminate based on ‘getting stuff to highsec to sell’. Within an op we divide it into days, and for each day you can earn up to 1 share. Earning a share is pretty simple; show up during that day and do some stuff that helps the current WH op. That is all, and while yes it’s possible to game this system, it works for us due to the relatively small tight knit nature of the corp. In one way or another we’ve known each other for years now through prior games mostly, and can trust each other not to deliberately screw with the other folks.

Backed by the fact that I do watch actual productivity and time in hole, and will occasionally beat people with a stick if they show a tendancy to log on for 15 mins a night and game the system(not a literal stick, unfortunately).

Once we have the share total, we figure out how much we made, take POS fuel costs and ship reimbursements(*) off the top, the corp takes 10%, and then the rest is divided into shares and distributed accordingly. In general the system is pretty simple, and encourages people to work together to achieve our goals, and has done us pretty good so far. Occasionally folks have cause to complain about some situation that sucks and makes this system sub optimal, but that happens with pretty much any system.

Oh, and it looks like Crazy Kinux has linked my blog here; thanks for that. I’m not really going out of my way to advertise my ramblings, but some traffic wouldn’t hurt either.

* – While we officially reimburse for ‘any ship and implant lost during a corp op’ most of our members don’t ask for re-reimbursement for when they do silly things like attack enemy ships that were minding their own business, etc. We also don’t tend to ask for reimbursement for expensive things we’ve accepted as our own risk. Example: One of my toons has +5 Attribute implants, means a podding runs me about 3/4 bil isk between all my implants. I don’t ask for reimbursement for that, that’d be silly. :P

A little bit bloodthirsty

So last night, we had what appeared to be a lost drake in 1 jump. They did some scanning, and logged off shortly after, as we were clearing out some gas. Nothing amazing about that; WH space has plenty of lost folks. :)

However my reaction to that is a bit more worthy of note. In short, I wanted to kill them; give them the fast station trip. Loot their corpse and go on our merry way. Dance a bit. Teach them a lesson. Etc. What’s worthy of note? This is new.

If you roll back the clock 4-5 months… I was very carebearish. Didn’t want to kill anyone, was offended by folks that pick on highsec industrial corps (okay, that still offends me), was generally helpful. If someone was in system I’d see what their intentions were before engaging. Now not so much; it made me question what caused the change. I’m still not a ruthless pirate… but I regularily shoot first ask questions once they’re at a station in highsec.

Part of it is definately experience. In WH space the ratio is definately skewed to the ‘shoot first’ crowd, so many more times have we been ganked or had someone try to gank us than try to communicate f irst. Yes, both happen, but more frequently I’m jumping in something shooty in a real hurry because that Loki just decloaked on our WH and we need to drive him off so our hulks can get through before his friends show up. Fun stuff like that.

Part of it too is a different mindset. Eve is a hard game, in many ways, and while it may drive folks off it’s better to teach them a lesson now than to shelter folks so they get screwed more later. So I don’t mind blowing someone up once in a while; lord knows I learn more  from getting podded than I do from having a chat with a guy in local, and that applies to others as well. I prefer to lose harbingers and other T1 stuff so I learn rather than not have learned when I get into the more expensive ships.

So by killing folks I get to teach them… then loot their wreck and store their corpse in the corp hangar array. I’ll take it.

Grr

I so did not want to go to work this morning. Did a quick scan… and through a new K162 they were out mining.

2 Covetors, a Harbinger and a Rokh all out mining in 1 Jump. Bubble on the WH in, but only a medium I so not that much to worry about. Could have been glorious.

Oh well… *goes and gets work done*

Good Fight

One of the things, for better and worse, about living full time in WH space is that it can be rather quiet most of the time. Most evenings are some variation of ‘scan stuff, close/critical WH’s, clear sites, mine/gas harvest/salvage, profit’.

Yesterday however, was not one of the those nights.

It started somewhat early in the evening, we were in 1 Jump (the WH system through our static) and were scanning it down when we saw some folks on the Dscan. They tried for a bit to engage our scanner but left when they were unable to and we didn’t hear from them again. It was however enough, especially with the WH to Mordus Mihi space, to convince us to close the hole instead of trying to harvest the system for its marginal gas/ore and so we closed it after scanning down a highsec route and getting a stranded pilot back in.

Unfortunately Korinth got stuck on the wrong side of the WH when closing it. Our standard method is usually very reliable, but there’s always a small chance that there’s JUST enough space left after the Orca comes back that the WH doesn’t completely close, and it was a case of that. Kor got to highsec just fine thankfully, and even got to do a mission with my Fiance, but I never like getting stuck on the wrong side of a hole.

Still, the new system looked good, no POS at the very least and no jumps recently into it, so the ‘recently back in hole’ A started scanning it down. I was only half paying attention at this point; A and T were now doing the scanning, and I was doing a mission in highsec with the Fiance so I was focusing on watching her Tengu kill stuff. Seriously, that ship is awesome.

Between my watching the Tengu circle around me at stupid speed doing more dps than my battleship… I saw A mention that we had a Loki in our home system and heard something similar on Vent. So I stopped paying attention to the Angels we were fighting, and paid attention to our WH.

It took a bit to develop, but it seems we attracted some attention from some members of a WH corp that is more PvP oriented than we are. First off they tried to interdict (Devoter) our scanning ship with little luck; he headed home but we got someone into 1 Jump to watch for enemy ships, and got ready to engage. We had a minor numerical advantage, but some of our pilots are alts so have split attention and that can make a ton of difference in PvP combat obviously and without a good spot to engage (as they had no visible ships) we decided to sit and wait.

Eventually they brought in a Megathron and sat him on our static, clearly spoiling for a fight. We took a bit to get ready, and they started chatting in local, talking about a 4 v 1 and a 5 v 1 as we had 4 or 5 ships visible. Funny stuff considering we knew they had 2 pilots in system cloaked, and we had eyes in the system next door to see their 2 battlecruisers sitting there on the other side of the WH; they did mention they’d left their Heavy Interdictor at home (which we verified to the extent that the pilot of it was offline) which was nice. Being podded in WH space can be rather irritating, and we prefer avoiding that irritation. We left our HiCs in the POS as well for that very reason.

We had already made the decision to engage and I was getting ready to warp the fleet when another of our pilots logged on; so we waited while he finished up some RL things (like talking to his wife) and got BM’s and into a ship. Once he was ready… it was on. I’m sure they were happy to finally shoot us, we made them wait long enough.

Call was made to primary the only visible ship as we landed, and re-evaluate as the fight went on. I think we caught them a bit by surprise; I did say hello in local to the two guys next door as we warped perhaps that threw them off. Regardless we got a good amount of time before that Mega got reinforcements and did some pretty good damage on him. Given that we stuck with it, forcing him to back through the WH to get out of harms way as we ducked into structure. Unfortunately Tul’s Harb was primaried early on and had to duck out himself at about that time so I missed a bit of the goings on, but we chased the Mega back through the WH and into our system where he warped away half way through structure.

Fighting in WH space is an interesting thing. It seems to go one of two ways, either you get WTFPwned in 10 seconds as they massively outnumber you ( or you outnumber them ) or it’s an ongoing affair for a while. I wouldn’t be able to guess the total fight length last night, but it was a good while, at least over 10 minutes before all was said and done, maybe as much as 20. WH transitions, reinforcements, looting, component recovery, scanning down the Mega as it tries to make a deep safe (at least that’s what it looked like) and killing it…

Yeah, I love the scanning game when it goes nicely.

Overall we did pretty well, especially given our opposition and our somewhat limited PvP experience. We lost 3 stealth bombers and a battlecruiser, they lost a battleship and a battlecruiser and did a lot more running away than we did. Really can’t complain about the encounter, and a fun way to spend an evening for sure.

And hey, this time A didn’t blow up any wrecks. :)