Risk Aversion

Whenever we go out on roams in Null we pretty much know that one out of two things will happen.

Either they will all dock up and stay docked until we’re gone, or they will try and get a huge fleet going so they can get us out of their little pockets.

This is because the null mentality basically equals not wanting to take risks and lose your ships. And I get that, I do. I’ve been like that in the past, but I have come to hate it.

I love fights, I enjoy not knowing the outcome of them, of being one of two teams, or even three, and wondering if I’m going to be the one that will come out on top.

What I hate though, is being part of a big blop, or being killed by one.

I know, I know, this might sound like a bit of a rant, and perhaps it is. But still, people should stop being afraid to get into a good fight.

The other day we were out on a little roam in our static, there were 8 of us, just a few Omen Navy Issues and other small stuff. We figured we could poke the locals into at least coming to shoot us by enthosising their stuff. So we brought in a Harbinger with an enthosis link.

The locals did a bit of docking and undocking, to see if we were still there, to tease us with ships, I don’t know. It wasn’t all that fun.

About half an hour later we finally saw them jump things in the system, local spike, 10 more people joining.

They undocked a FAX machine and we saw D-scan filling.

We were getting ready to fight, a few cerbs, tengu, legion, we could take that, or at least try.

That’s when they decided to make it even easier for them and they lit a cyno. They did not drop just one carrier, there were 7 on grid. Not something we could take, so we had to bail.

It was time to see if we could get some more people in the fight. We wanted to fight them, badly. After about 20 ish minutes we had 40 people ready, we knew the other guys had about 50 around so we could fight this if we paid attention.

Unfortunately, the other guys decided that they do not like playing with even odds. So they didn’t do a thing.

The alliance party split up and while we were on our way back to the wormhole the nullsec bears tried to pick off a few stragglers. Due to my own fault, I got caught in a bubble.

Sabre, 2 hurricanes, crow, stiletto on grid. I could tank that while the rest were warping back. I even nearly killed the sabre but due to me not having point he was able to get out with 10% structure, which is good for him. That kind of thing gets your heart racing.

When the other guys were back we had 2 gilas, a curse and a Stratios on grid. We could take this if we paid attention. But unfortunately, they brought in a geddon. So I told the guys to bail. We couldn’t take those neuts. I saw my tank break down slowly and unfortunately I was not the only one who lost a ship, since we also lost a Stratios.

It’s a shame that in general people in Nullsec are so risk averse. I wouldn’t have minded losing my Gila to a normal fight, but c’est la vie. It’s been replaced and I’m ready to go out in space again. Hopefully finding targets that do fight back.

I’m a bit salty about the loss but I shouldn’t be, it was my own fault. We didn’t warp back together, we didn’t fly as a fleet. It was late and everyone was in a “let’s go home” kind off mood. And that’s when stuff like this happens.

2016.08.24.12.34.16

At least I learned from it, this will help in future fights (or flights)

stay tuned o7

Meeting corporation IRL

My past couple of days were not spent on EvE for a change. Or not ingame at least. I was in Prague with members of my corporation. Which was super fun. And the week before that I went to Gamescom, which is something I’ve been doing in the past few years just because it’s a fun experience.

I don’t go to the con to play games though, because I don’t like standing in line for over three hours just to play a game in advance of its release date for about 30 minutes. It’s all about the atmosphere in the arena.

As for Prague, I never really did a real life meetup with people that I play games with, this was the first time that I decided “fuck it might as well” and went.
Prague is about a ten hour drive from my place so instead of taking a plane which would have taken one and a half, I decided that I’d do it by car. Make a little road trip out of it.

On the road I picked up two other guys from the corporation. The fun thing about doing that was not having a clue what those guys looked like. I showed them my car, told ‘em that’s what they need to look for at the designated pickup places and that’s it. That was step one of the adventure, step two was getting through Germany and the Czech Republic, into Prague.

I left on Thursday morning around 6.15 and we arrived in Prague at the hotel at around 17.45, this included a few needed stops on the way, and a detour in the city because instead of listening to my navigation system, I listened to one of the guys. As per usual on coms, that wasn’t one of the best ideas 😉

Prague riverside view

We spent a few days there, getting to know each other, putting a face behind the name and talking about EvE. It’s a nice change of pace from going out with my real life friends, since they know nothing about EvE and aren’t interested in it. I loved talking to others about it, making ingame plans, coming up with stuff to do etc etc.

All in all, a very good time. Although I did miss logging in. Since the place we stayed at did not have Wifi and my roaming charges are through the roof.

I came back yesterday, dead tired but with some great new memories. All in all, that was a good way to spend a few days off work.

The first thing I did logging in last night was turn on my PI again. Since my planets have been doing nothing since Thursday. After that, I put Jump Drive calibration V in my skill queue, because supposedly I should have that if I want to play around with a Blops. I still need to buy a Panther but I’m going to be doing that as soon as I come in Amarr or Jita.

I’m also thinking about maybe resubbing a third account. I still need to decide on it but I might want to do that again. I just need to decide on what I want to be doing. Since after training E’dyn into blops some more, I will probably start training for Dreads.

Trading wise I haven’t done much in the past few weeks. I’m buying and selling plexes every few days, same with skill injectors. It’s a small profit because I keep forgetting about the higher taxes on normal stations. But it’s something.

Stay tuned o7

It’s not always about the ISK, but sometimes it is

Going on roams means dying. Not all the time of course but you can be certain that the loss of a ship and pod are inevitable. Which means that you need to make ISK one way or the other.

I have plenty of ISK to lose a few bill in ships, but as has been said in previous blogs. I’m somewhat of a space-Jew. I used to want ISK in order to pay for a character with the skills I wanted. Now I just want ISK to see that little line on jEveAssets rise.

In the past it went along the lines of “I want to have 1b” once getting there it was 5, then 10, then 20, 25. My next goal is 30b, and this is where I’m starting to have a few problems with. I have had a few lucky breaks in the game, some of my ISK coming from winning Moros’ on Blink and selling them. Some coming from lucky trades. I think half of my ISK came from T2 production.

Came, because for reasons unknown to me, this is no longer profitable as a solo industry player.

What I used to do is buy the parts I needed in Jita, haul them to my production facilities, make the T2’s from my own researched BPC’s and haul them back to Jita. Making a solid 200-600k profit per. After being semi-afk from eve between January and June this no longer seems viable.

For some reason that would now give me a 400k loss per T2 product made. So now, I need to look into another way to make ISK, good ISK. Because I still want to get to that 50billion milestone, and more.

Right now I’m wondering what I should be doing with all the industry skillpoints on that alt. Should I extract it, sell the injectors? That’d give me a nice quick ISK injection. But what if I want to start production again? What if I’m just not looking at things correctly and I’m missing out on a good way to make ISK from production.

And what about my science SP? Do I ever want to bother making T2 BPC’s again? I’m honestly at a loss on what to do with that alt.

The only thing I can do right now, is getting her accounting up, because silly me still keeps forgetting about tax percentages when I buy “low” and sell “high”.

Where theoretically I’d get a profit of about 20m per item, due to taxes that can easily go down to only 5mill. Woops, lesson learned there.

If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them out. I need an ISK printer.

Ps: I already do PI, making coolant right now, might have to try something new there too.

I don’t even know what I’m doing

FC: “Could you take over for a bit”

ME: “Sure”

That’s how it went on TS but in my mind I was going “Oh fuck, I’m not even sure what’s going on, I’m not good at this FC bit, we only kill MTU’s when I lead a roam”

I basically don’t feel that comfortable yet in the role of an FC.
I like doing it, but I dislike not finding us anything to shoot. It makes me wonder if I’m boring my fleet members, if they’re even enjoying themselves.
I guess it’s partly due to bad luck, partly my fault? I don’t know.

Did a few things in the last week.

We had to go help defend something in null-sec. I don’t remember what because it was so damn boring. It just showed me once more why sov-null is not for me at all. Something about ihub, enthosis and waiting. All of those things are not fun, especially the waiting part, and supposedly the other two translate roughly to the same thing. You wait for things to happen.

I get that some people don’t mind that kind of playtime. Where you just follow orders, wait for the FC to call the shots and undock when you have to, dock up when told etc etc.
I’m not a fan of that. After about half an hour of waiting, finally allowed to undock, we warped to where the so called fight was happening, only to warp away again because our numbers were not needed (WHAT?!)

So that was lots of fun. But not really.

We did a roam the other day. As is usual since that’s what happens about 80% of the time.
I took over as FC for about half an hour. And while I was wondering about my own incompetence we caught an Ishtar, and a bit later a miner. It’s not much but at least it’s not just an MTU.

hPWY1rW

After that little roam it was decided to “rageroll” the static. Which basically means that we were going to keep rolling the hole in search of targets.

Let’s just say that ended up in me dying.

My death, once more taught me that station games are bad.

Fighting is fun if you outnumber them and even fun if you get outnumbered.
But only if you have a chance to beat the odds. Dying because someone drops a carrier on you or suddenly undocks in the exact counter of your fleet. No fun in that.

Well, it’s kind of funny if they drop a carrier on you to save a mining fleet. That one did make me smile.

But station games, they’re not fun. I don’t like it when people try to bait you into getting them only to then dock up, and undock in something bigger. Either you try and shoot people, or you run like hell. That’s the way it should work, and it does work. Sometimes in your favour, on other times. Not so much.

Next time I’ll just check it out from a distance and if we do get to destroy something on station, I’ll come and help. Next time, I’ll try not to die

Stay tuned o7

The joy of trading

I try to do some trading every once and a while to get my ISK flow going. But I don’t really calculate if I’m actually making a profit while doing so.

So I decided to start doing that and noticed something that I should have thought about a while back. due to the citadels and the new tax system, I was trading a few  items at a bit of a loss. Not large enough to notice but still, a loss.

I wasn’t paying attention to how much it cost me in taxes vs how much I paid for it in the first place. Seeing as I wasn’t doing that, I lost a few million ISK.

Not the end of the world, but once more a nice example of how I should be paying better attention to what’s in patch notes and start checking what that means for me.

Luckily I caught it on time.

Now the next step would be deciding if I want to stay trading in Jita/Amarr, or if I should move to a citadel one jump away. The main problem with doing that, would be my inherrent laziness. I don’t want to do one jump (I know) to put up buy orders in Jita or Amarr. It’s stupid but It feels like a waste of time.

Despite the fact that I can literally save a few hundred million ISK in taxes in the long run.

We’ll see what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll start a few production lines again but most of the T2 stuff I produced is getting made at a loss by other people. Which I still don’t get. The whole mindset of “I’m mining it so it’s not at a loss” is so wrong.

Stay tuned o7

FC, should we jump too?

Yesterday was the second time I played FC. Although maybe we shouldn’t count the first one, since it wasn’t that long one but still.

I’m still new at all this. Doing it to make sure that I, and the others, have something to do. So called content creation.

It basically started with us going through our null sec static in cruisers. I told them that we might die, so what do my fleet members do? Undock in cruisers like a Gila and Orthrus’, because you know, if you’re going out, might as well do it in style.

Seeing as I am not quite that experienced, and I never cared about null sec politics or null sec in general, I had no idea that an area like Syndicate is dead.
So dead in fact that most of the systems we jumped in were empty.
Mistake number one. But, so be it, we had a wandering hole that led to another null.
Figured we’d go poke around in there.

It was a frigate sized hole so we did have to reship, I called for interceptors or other frigate sized ships, so we went there with a few interceptors, a sabre and a magus.

This time we were in Fountain. Turns out Fountain is filled with people that do not want to fight. They just dock up as soon as a neutral is close, which is a shame.

While I was checking Dotlan on what system to jump to, I of course jumped every once in a while without telling my fleet to do so. Mistake number two.
Which basically meant that every few jumps I had the question “FC, should we jump in too?” followed with a few laughs, since all in all it’s funny to poke on the FC right?

They even made a deal that if we didn’t find anything they could kill me. I did not agree to this but I wasn’t asked for my opinion. You see what I had to work with here.

Luckily for me and my, oh so expensive interceptor, we eventually found something. The Magus pilot had a Drake on d-scan, and found him ratting in an asteroid belt (I know right). Once he called point the fleet warped in and made sure they had him pointed too. Me, being the eager fc was already two systems further so I scrambled back, while being happy that something was caught.

As you can imagine, with a few interceptors and a sabre, it can still take a while to break a Drake’s tank. Which gave him enough time to call for help in local. Not that any was forthcoming. “Guys, help, I’m in asteroid belt x, there’s 5 of them”

Even with that intel not much happened. A jackdaw did land on us, but unfortunately for him we were eager for kills so he was pointed and killed quite fast.

Not long after that we killed the Drake and his pod. The loot going to our Magus pilot. Hooray! Kills.

Onwards to the next few systems. So we went on, only to find a gate camp, the Drake and Jackdaw’s friends. Good thing we were in inties. Or at least, most of us. We did lose our Sabre, and I thought that was it.

FC was bad. I figured our Magus pilot was following us too, but turns out he wasn’t there yet. So about 10 minutes after we had gotten past the camp, he got killed. In hindsight, I should have made sure that everyone was there, I should not have taken the gate, or at least told the Sabre and Magus pilot to turn around. Seeing that we couldn’t take a 20 man T3 destroyer camp with just our little fleet.

But so be it, live and learn. I’ll do better next time, and next time I’ll know that I should reroll the static if we come out in Syndicate or Fountain.

I had my fun, and I’m 85% sure that the rest of the guys had fun too. So operation success

 

Stay tuned o7

Let’s go fishing

I learned something new the other day. Which, surprise surprise, can happen every once in a while.

Well two things but we already knew about the first one so that didn’t count. Let’s talk about that first.

Waiting on a hole before doing something. Don’t do that, just, don’t.

We have a few scouts in certain holes, holes of people we want to play with.

Are we doing phrasing?

The other day, one of our exits was about 4 jumps from our “friends” so we decided to go pay them a visit. We put up a fleet and went towards their entrance, having most of the fleet wait one jump out, and the tackle on the hole. The plan was basically for me and our Lachesis to warp in, point an Ishtar and Megathron, and poke them into fighting us.

Where we missed, is that we were waiting for too long. Their scout had just jumped into the system, and warped to his entrance, right as we were landing on it, he landed to. I’m going to guess their comms were something along the lines of “Guys! There’s stuff coming to scram you, get the fuck out now!”

As soon as we saw it was one of theirs, we jumped in and warped to the site, only to land and have the Ishtar warp off right in front of our noses. We stuck around for a few minutes hoping to get a fight, but they knew we had Logi waiting for us, so that didn’t really work out the way we planned. Oh well, can’t do much about that. So off we were, on to the home system to go roam null-sec.

In our null-sec roam, I learned how to spearfish. For those of you that don’t know what it is, it’s the use of Command Destroyers and their jump portals, to warp someone away from their fleet. You use two of them, one to jump in, and one to jump out again. Bringing you, your fleet, and your target, 100km away from their buddies.

Which is actually quite fun to do. Especially if they don’t see it coming, which honestly, you should. If you see two Bifrost’ come at you, you ball up, easy as that.

So we did our little fleet jump, caught a Typhoon, who’s friends existed of about 8 Domi’s, but seeing as he was over 10km away from them, we were able to catch him off guard.

pew pew

They had a crow and a Tengu that came in to help him, it was no use. We almost killed the Tengu too but had to get out because the null-sec corporation had undocked a carrier. And as most of you know, carriers hurt quite a bit.

Oh! And I got another kill mark on my Gila! That’s number 4! Hooray!

Stay tuned o7