Sunday event, Stay Frosty FFA

The previous weekend was very busy for me. But I did manage to play a bit, mostly because I made time for one event that I was looking forward to. Namely the Stay Frosty FFA.

In general, it was ok, I didn’t have nearly as much fun as I did last time I joined in a FFA but at least I didn’t leave after an hour.

I had about 20 punishers and 20 rifters set up for this. I sent them to the nearest Hi-sec station thinking that whenever I got podded I’d ship back.
The rules of this event were quite simple, no podding, only frigates and no grouping/boosters.

But seeing as this is EvE, these rules were broken quite a lot. As a solo roamer it was nearly impossible to get any KB’s. And that was extremely frustrating to me. I doubt I would have been as frustrated as I was if I had not seen as many groups as I did.

Warping in an asteroid belt, thinking you’d get a few shots at multiple people, and immediately being scrambled, webbed and painted by Brave Newbie people was not that bad the first time. But it happened too many times to be called a coincidence.
They were there to screw things over. A bit after my third death at the hands of BNI I heard about a cyno being lit.

Reach for the skies

Me, being the nosy capsuleer that I am, jumped straight to the cyno. To be greeted by a bunch of BNI Thorax’, which made me lose both my ship and pod.

No big deal, just upgrade the clone and get back to the fight.

There were a few other gangs too, and after being podded for the 6th or 7th time I decided to call it. I spent some time with my gf watching the new episode of Dracula, and afterwards joined for the last half hour of the FFA.

Which was pretty fun, this was what I wanted, going from belt to belt, seeing two, three people fight and just get in there and take shots at whoever was winning. No killing blows (I checked and the last one before the end said 4 hours ago) but it was entertaining. Even did a small bit of damage to Rixx Javix’ Merlin. Yay!

I’m floating!

My killboard has been spiced up a bit. And I lost a total of 28 ships.
But if there’s one thing that I really learned in this FFA. It’s that I’m really, really bad at PvP

Stay tuned o7

More or less than bargained for

We all know that I’m bad in logistics. So bad in fact, that when I decide to create a certain amount of T2 items, and I finally calculated everything I need. I still forget things. Despite the fact that I actually use said calculation, have it sitting right next to me when checking the market and making orders.

And yet every single time I forget something in my whole process. Last time I made about 1000 T1’s to build further into T2’s.. I thought I had everything, I had the materials, the product, everything except the one vital part that I didn’t think of at the time.

I had forgotten to turn on my invention process for the BPC’s… You can imagine the facepalm I made at that time.

Now we’re a while later and I’m happily chugging along in my manufacturing process, about 100 products get made every other day and I invent enough to keep the lines going.

It’s only one character, 10 research and 10 manufacturing jobs, but it keeps me very busy.
I can’t imagine what it would be like if I had multiple characters creating things. Can’t imagine what else I’d forget.
“Request for docking bay, I forgot a few things”

So tell me, what is the one thing you always forget? Are there times you go to a trade hub with something in mind, and then come back empty handed, or with more than you needed, but not actually the one thing you were there for?

Stay tuned o7

A newbie’s experience

Please note; I have tried to make this blog somewhat comprehensive but when rereading it  I noticed that it seems like I go from one point to the next without finishing the previous. Let’s just blame this on me being sick and my medication, shall we? Good

The past week I’ve seen a lot of people try out EvE again. Friends of mine, people on forums I’m a member of.

And most of them have absolutely no idea what’s going on. It made me wonder, is this because of the fact that the tutorials aren’t that good. Or is it because in this day and age, people don’t actually read the instructions anymore.
“Do I have to?”

The last time I’ve done the tutorials was over a year ago, I made a new character and decided to kill some time doing them. I can’t remember them being too hard to understand. But are they actually good enough to let someone understand what EvE is all about. Because in the end, the only thing that they do, is show you how to manufacture, how to start a mission and how to mine.

They’re great because you get a bunch of skills and starter ships for your adventure, but then you just get cast into the deep end, with no lifejacket and a basic idea of how swimming is supposed to work.
Which is why about 2 out of 3 people (might be more, this is just a random number I am making up so don’t use this against me) stop playing once they did the tutorials.

Good thing there are people out there that enjoy helping others out, showing them the way and answering questions. When someone asks me something about industry or whatever I do in the game, I try to answer the question in a comprehensible way. I fail from time to time but I’ve had people tell me that they understand the game better because of what I’m telling them. (Do not that I never state that what I tell them is actually the correct thing, I am in fact, a noob)

“Oh, pretty lights”

It’s a shame though that so many stop playing because they don’t know what to do. Or because they’re waiting for that certain skill to finish training so that they can go out and have fun. Which is mostly the point where I tell them that they can have an equal amount of fun in a frigate as in a battleship. More so in fact due to the frigate being a lot quicker.

The problem for our newbros is the fact that they have no idea what they can do. I explain them what I do in the game and tell them that I can help them if they want to go that certain route. But there are so many options to go to, that it can be a bit too much.

Places like E-Uni are nice, but what happens when a newbie doesn’t want to be part of such a big corporation, what happens when he wants to do null but has no idea what the consequences of these things are?

I remember starting EvE without a clue what I could do, I was training everything, because the tutorials never did explain to me that sooner or later, I will regret spending time in training a skill that I will not use.
Makes you wonder though, how can you make sure, that people don’t stop playing. You help them, but where is the line for helping them. You don’t want this to be too easy a game, but you still want more people joining you in your game.

So tell me; how do you do it? 

To infinity, and slightly beyond

I didn’t get any kills last weekend. But I made up for that on Monday and Tuesday. Not by much, but still.

When I came back from work Monday I was told to immediately grab myself a cruiser and join the TeamSpeak. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, seeing that I don’t actually read my evemails when I’m at work, despite being able to do so. 
Once I was told that we were going to go on a cruiser roam I jump cloned to an empty clone and bought myself a Rupture. 15 jumps later I was in our starting system and waiting for the roam to begin.
Bearing in mind that I have absolutely no idea what I was doing, I just followed orders, warping and alligning when I was told to do so.
We went through Minmatar FW space, but every time we jumped into a system, the people in local warned other people and not long after that we’d be all alone. It’s a shame, we were just looking for fights but the fights ran away from us.
Reps are up!

We were “lucky” in one system, our only frigate along with the roam was slacking a bit and warped later than the rest of us from the stargate to an outpost. Funny enough, he saw a Stabber Fleet Issue uncloak and line up to his warp spot. Knowing what was incoming we just lay in wait, ready to point the Stabber. I had top damage but didn’t get the kill, that was for one of the other’s drones. No biggy, I now had a positive number on my killboard. Yay.
After flying around a bit longer we came across a system with a Drake Navy Issue on D-scan, we found him in an outpost but he warped away. To a belt. Our FC, in his “panic” of catching that Drake, he warped us there too, at 0, thinking that the Drake was probably smarter than that we thought we wouldn’t be getting that Drake.
How wrong we were. After popping him we caught his pod and tried to ransom him. We didn’t ask much, it was a 4 month old character, and we figured that he’d be able to pay 25m. He told us that he didn’t have the money, and right when we decided we’d just let him go. Because in the end we are not bad guys. He self-destructed. I have no idea why he did that, but that was funny. Especially considering that he had a 100m pod. 
Both the Drake’s fit and his pod made me wonder what he was doing there. But I just figure that he was one of those guys that buys PLEX, sells it for ISK and then flies something he shouldn’t be flying in.
It was either stupidity or not caring about it. Either way, my killboard is now positive. Yay me.
Yesterday we decided to do the same as before, but this time in Battlecruisers and Gallente FW space. Unfortunately we didn’t actually find much, we did get the drop on an Atron, the poor guy must have shat his pants because he didn’t do anything, didn’t even move. (yes I know, he was AFK, but looking at him like a deer on the road, looking at headlights coming towards it is much better).
The race is on!

I enjoyed myself during the roams, and not because I actually like PvP. No it was all because of the teamspeak, talking to the others and making jokes. I think that’s the only thing that kept me interested in the roam. Otherwise I would have stopped much faster. 
I learned that if I ever were to go out and PvP, that I really need to learn how to use D-scan, and fast.
Stay tuned o7 

Did not see that coming.

The other day, after browsing the market a bit, I decided to check up on my wormhole PI ventures. I had noticed that my launch pads were filling up slowly and it was time to go and empty them.

Good thing that the entrance to our WH was marked about 7 jumps from where I was. That meant I didn’t have to do too many jumps in my trusty little Nemesis. 

After getting in the wormhole and checking if nobody else was around I stored my Nemesis in the corps’ ship bay and took out one of our Epithals. When I cleared the second POCO I suddenly noticed an Abaddon on D-scan, I figured he’d be looking for me in the POCO’s so I jumped around a bit and cleared the last one.
Once that was done I quickly went back to the POS and took out my trusty Nemesis, warped to a safe, cloaked up and told my other corps members that there was an Abaddon in our hole. One of them was gas mining in a venture a few holes from ours and told me to search for him while he slowly made his way back.

As most of you know by now, I’m not that good at pinpointing, anyone, and I figured that the Abaddon knew I switched into a bomber so he must be jumping around himself, I didn’t want to take combat probes out so decided that it was time for me to try out the D-scan way of pinpointing someone.

Let’s just say that I failed miserably, in the half our of jumping around, readjusting the angle etc etc I did not find anything, yet he was still there. Once my fellow corporation member came in the hole in his Manticore, it didn’t take too long to find him. Turns out he was taking sleepers on in one of the sites. One of the places that I forgot about. Oh well, time for a strategy.

We were both pretty much newbies when it comes to bombing, but we figured we could try and kill him with bombs + torpedoes. Seeing that our hole doesn’t like armor tanks.

I slow boated my way to one side, the other one to the other and we waited at 30km for him to take somewhat of a beating. While waiting another one of our corp came online and we told him to come over, he wanted to try out something new so made a ship and was coming our way.
That tiny speck right there, is my target!
As he was two jumps from our hole, I suddenly see a Sabre on D-scan.. Warping exactly on the Abaddon, at first I thought it was a friendly of him, up until the point that he put up a bubble. A second after the bubble was up, three Proteus’ de-cloaked in it.
Well, that guy’s thinking: “Oh shit”

I was just staring there instead of acting, while my corps member had already de-cloaked and fired his bomb, a second after I did the same, we figured we might as well try and get in on the kill mail.
My bomb came in too late, and I have absolutely no idea how much damage I did to them but it was a pretty fun experience. 
“Where did they come from?!”

It was quite a thrill too, to suddenly see T3’s uncloak on our target. 

I went back there as they were slowly going out of the bubble and my corps mate did so too, we had decided to see if we could bomb the Sabre as they were still in the bubble, so about half a second after stating that, my corps member decloaks, fires a bomb and… Explodes.
I couldn’t help but laugh, turns out one of the sleeper turrets got him, his bomb didn’t even come close to hitting anything.
The guys that took the kill talked in local, asking us if those bombs were meant for them. Because if they were, they didn’t actually do much.. But all we really wanted was to get in on the kill mail, and maybe blow up that Sabre.

I didn’t get any kills yet this weekend, but at least I didn’t lose any wrecks either, and it was pretty fun.. I might go roam later this evening, I still want to explode things.

Stay tuned o7

ISK, APPS and FFA

I haven’t been able to spend too much time in game the past few days. I’m feeling a bit ill, which is making me dead tired, which in turn makes sure that after work, I want to do nothing but lie in my bed until the weekend arrives.

And it’s almost there! So that’s good. 

The hour or so each day I do spend in game, I spend updating my orders, my factory jobs and my skill queue’s. Although the last one is something I won’t have to watch for a while now seeing that all three of my active characters are currently training a 7 day skill.

The month hasn’t fully started yet or Aura tells me the bad news, I’m in the red. What does this mean? Well, easy, Aura (the android app) has this handy feature that checks your ISK flow each month, by counting how much you earn and spend. It’s pretty simplistic seeing that it watches your wallet, but I like watching my wallet and it helps me because then I won’t have to do it.

Since the start of the month I have spent 3.7billion ISK and made about 3Billion.. As you can imagine, those numbers should be reversed. They are a bit skewed though because they don’t count sell orders, and the negative ISK flow seems to mostly be coming from buy orders I put up. So I guess I’ll have to use jEvEAssets at the end of the month like always.

I like how all of these little apps are making my life easier, I have my spreadsheets, but at least I don’t have to put everything on there. I think I might go crazy if I had to do that.

Speaking of ISK flow.. I decided to do a good deed this month.

I’m just assuming here that most of you read EvEoGanda, if you don’t, then go have a look, it has some pretty good content.

Now after making said assumption, you should all know about the upcoming FFA. Seeing that a year or so ago (might be more, I am bad with dates) I had tons and tons of fun in an FFA made by The Tuskers, I decided to donate for this FFA.

It’s a great way for newbies to have fun in PvP without actually sacrificing ships of their own, and it’s fun for old carebear newbies like me because I can actually try my hand at PvP too and I know where to find it for once! So it’s a win win situation.

If you’re a newbie, or a vet, I urge you to join the fun and blow up some frigates. The more people the merrier.
She wants you to join too! – Rixx Javix sure makes pretty posters

And I’m sure Stay Frosty will be grateful if you help in donating a prize or two yourself.
As for now, I’m going to prepare myself for the weekend, where I’ll probably venture in a WH again in search of a kill..

Anyone taking bets on whether I’ll get killed or kill someone?

Stay tuned o7

As if you know what you’re doing

I have spent most of my evening jumping around different systems on my ex-RvB alt, trying to get all of its assets in the same spot. Let’s just say that it’s taken me quite some time and I’m even close to being finished.
I don’t like a mess in my assets window, on most of my accounts they are spread in about 4 or 5 systems. On that one alt, the assets are spread in 16 systems. Hence the clean up.

I’ve been able to just trash some things, Noob ships that were docked somewhere because I once went into the station without a pod.. Ores that were so low in number that using my time to bother with them would actually make me lose ISK.

Most of the spread right now is between Jita and one of its previous bases of operations near Amarr, seeing that this character used to run L4’s, in a time that I can no longer remember.

While “playing” I was checking EvEMon a bit and I couldn’t help but notice that I don’t have any skill plans, for any of my characters. I create one, and then I just ignore it and just wing it, deciding on the fly what to update the queue with.

I really should stop doing this, not only is it inefficient, it’s also not really helping me into knowing what my characters can and can’t do.

As the readers of my blog know, I flew a Dominix a while back. Which is a great example of me not knowing what I can do. Because when I was first asked if I could, I said no, until I was linked the fit and I noticed that I can actually use sentries, and that I can get into a Dominix. Now, that second part is just plain stupidity on my end because I fly a Machariel and have Gallente Battleship on V so I should have actually known better, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that I have absolutely no idea what to do with my two combat characters and my industrial character. I don’t know what to train and I just pick skills at random that look good. 
Or I start working on the mastery and then just stop doing it altogether because I noticed another one that I liked better.

I didn’t actually resolve to do anything special this year. But if I’m going to, maybe I should just start with making a skill queue and decide on a path to take.

Stay tuned o7

Sleepers don’t actually sleep.. Who knew

Last Thursday was the first time in my entire EvE career that I did two new things. The first one was flying a Dominix with sentry drones, and the second one was using said Dominix in order to do sleeper sites in a C4 along with a few corporation mates.

I had fun doing it, although it did require some of that patience you need as a wormhole dweller. Not only did I have to make 24jumps out of high to our wormhole entry point, all of this in a Dominix. When I got there I had to wait a bit longer because we needed to collapse the high sec entrance, and then find a good, unoccupied C4 to play in.

After three or four collapses we found one with 3 offline towers and decided this would be a good time to go do a few sites. It was about 00:00 here so I was starting to get a bit tired, but I really wanted to see how they worked.
Ok, let’s do this

My job was pretty easy, seeing as I was in a sentry drone boat, and the rookie of the bunch, all I had to do was launch my drones, put on my hardeners, and have my drones assist one of the others. Which gave me plenty of time to look around. Or at least it would have given me plenty of time if we didn’t go through them so fast. I was amazed at the speed we were doing them. 

What do you mean my friends are gone

The veteran among us was too, this was the first time he had taken anything different than ravens along and our 8 sentries + 1 raven were shooting down the resident sleepers quite fast. I think we clocked down on about 10 minutes per site. So that was pretty good.

I stayed for about an hour longer, providing over watch for the Noctis as he went about salvaging our loot and after that I jumped back to our own little wormhole, jumped into the POS and logged out, because I was dead tired and I had to go to work in the morning.

When I logged back in yesterday, I decided to set up a few extraction planets. Seeing that I have the skills trained up to level 3, but never actually used them on this character. I checked the planets and decided to just put up 3 lava extraction ones, making it easier to just extract and make 1 kind of material instead of multiple, seeing that I tend to be bad at logistics.

I had forgotten how easy it is to put up extraction jobs and let them run. This is a nice way to make some passive ISK, and it will make sure that I have to visit the wormhole from time to time.

Let’s just hope that I don’t get blown up when visiting a custom office in an Epithal

Stay tuned o7