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Fanfest envy

Fanfest is currently going on in the lovely Icelandic capital called Reykjavic.. Because you know, people from Iceland just love using weird names for their things. Like the vulcano Eyjafjallajökull. You try pronouncing that correctly, it’ll take a few tries.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t be there. Not because I don’t have the time, but more because I didn’t actually think about going until it was too late/too expensive to book a trip. I didn’t really feel like paying close to 1000 euros for 4 days.

It’s a shame because when I see other bloggers post about their little adventures the coming days, I feel a bit envious and wish that I did spent some time in figuring out how to get there. But alas.

However! CCP Logibro was nice enough to send me the pass I would have gotten by airmail. Which is all kinds of amazing. I got it this morning and this is now part of my growing EvE collection.

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“I’m there, in spirit!”

In no other MMO I’ve had the kind of interaction with the dev team like I have with the CCP team, and it’s all super cool that they were willing to do what they did.

That being said, the new trailer came out yesterday, and it’s so pretty. I’ve seen people call it Space zombies but the sleepers are so much more.

Just watch it and be amazed, these trailers keep getting better and better.

“You should be watching this”

Stay tuned o7

Fear of the unknown

The one thing that stops people in EvE from trying out new things, is the fact that they’re afraid of what might happen if they get out of their comfort zone.

I’ve been part of that certain groups for quite a long time so I know how it is. You want to try new things, but are afraid of losing a ship, or just not being good enough for something.
And that’s a shame, because in genera EvE has so many fun things that you as a player can do, all you need is to try it.

I used to be afraid of wormholes/null/.. Well basically any zone that wasn’t high sec, thinking that as soon as I were to step out in lower security space I’d get my ship destroyed in seconds.

How wrong I was, turned out that in null sec the people there are afraid of neutrals, and in wormhole space nobody really knows you’re there until you bump into them. Being on purpose or accidentally (I’ve had both sorts happening on a few trips in the past)

Low sec.. Well that’s another story, most people like a fight and they wouldn’t mind going after you, but most of the time when traveling you won’t have much worry from pirates because if you go from gate to gate you’re pretty safe. Although don’t think I’m saying that you won’t get killed, gatecamps still exist and they will kill you if they get the chance, you just have to make sure that said chance doesn’t happen.

The past few weeks I’ve been going in and out of wormholes again, with a not too cheap ship, but I switched my mindset from “Oh no I don’t want to get blown up” to “Fuck it, might as well get it blown up”.. I haven’t lost my ship yet, but I’ve had a few close calls.

Still itching to join a wormhole corporation though, but yet to find one that isn’t too serious about losses, and yet serious enough not to have them happen due to stupidity..

Which is not an easy thing to find.

A shame that most people I knew in game stopped playing, I had fun two manning a C4, but we could have used a few more people in order to survive.

I’ll figure it out sooner or later

Until then,

Stay tuned o7

Curiosity killed the pod

A few months ago I had my first taste at exploration. By way of being in a wormhole I learned how to work the scanner, and enjoyed it. Which was a surprise at the time because of the fact that the scanning tutorial I did way back when I started playing EvE was not fun at all and mostly frustrating.

But due to skill points and asking help on how it works, I learned to work my probes and enjoyed using them.

Unfortunately I haven’t used them in quite some time. In fact, the only ship I’ve flown in the past couple of months is my industrial character’s leopard for moving between Jita and my home system where I do my manufacturing.

That changed earlier today. I bought myself an Astero and called it Curiosity.

The plan is to start going out and learn how to hack containers. Something I tried before in for about 10 seconds before I got my then scanning ship (a cheetah I had for years) blown up because I was paying more attention to the virusses instead of d-scan.

The next few days/weeks will be spent back in the game, doing things I haven’t done before.

Chances are I’ll get myself blown up, because I’ll be popping in and out of wormholes in a semi-shiny ship. But that’s what ISK is for, to get it blown up again and again while hopefully making some people explode too.

This is a change since the last couple of months because in those months since I stopped living in a wormhole were spent playing other games, and only updating my manufacturing in EvE.

We’ll see if I can keep it up, but I enjoyed being in a wormhole a lot. We’ll see what happens once I figure out how to hack without destroying the loot.

Stay tuned o7

Too many copies

A few months ago I decided that once I was through all my T1 copies I’d try something new in my manufacturing. Turns out I first should have checked my copies before stating this. 
With the new way industry works these days copies don’t get destroyed when you try to invent them into their T2 equivalent.

Which means that if you have copies with 300 runs, you can actually try to invent from them 300 times. 
I did not know this since I don’t pay much attention when doing my clicking of the day, but I noticed this a few days ago when I tried to figure out why my amount of T1 copies wasn’t going down.

As it stands now I have about 200 copies with all around the 300 runs still on them. So maybe I should just put them somewhere for the time being and just start something new. Seeing as it will still take me months before I get through my current stock.

This new way of working is good though. It used to annoy me to no end that I had to keep making copies of my BPO’s just to do my invention, turns out that right now I could just work with 30 copies for a few months instead of needing my stock of hundreds.
I’ll keep that in mind for next time.

As for the rest, I’m currently on the lookout for something to do with my combat alt(s), I’m doing a few missions when I log in and browsing the corporation forums, trying to figure out if there’s anything out there I could join. Because as most of you know, EvE is more fun when you play it in a group.

Stay tuned o7

Gotta catch them all

A catchphrase that most people know, and those of my generation grew up with. This phrase is why EvE has been put on semi-hold for the moment, I’m doing my inventions and that’s about it.
I currently feel too lazy to stock up on manufacturing goods and sell them. All because I decided I wanted to catch them all again last week.

Pokémon is one of those things a guy my age (26 if you must know) grew up with. There was the show, there was Pokémon Red&Blue on gameboy and there were the trading cards that we played with as kids. Although at the time I just went “I have pickachu, he’s stronger than yours now you have to give me your card” .. Let’s just say that I had no idea how the game was played and got a whole bunch of cards because of it because none of my friends back then knew either.

The last time I played a pokémon game was Silver on the Gameboy Color.. That game came out 14 years ago, which when I think about it it makes even me feel a bit old. Despite there being readers who are probably my senior by many a more years.

Due to the fact that it’s been so long I decided to try it again, I bought a Nintendo 3DS, got myself Omega Ruby and am currently hooked on Pokémon and the system behind it with EV’s and IV’s and the breeding and whatnot. It’s a lot more complicated than how I used to play it but that’s ok, it’s a challenge and pretty random sometimes.

My girlfriend saw me play the game too and for the first time since we met, she decided that she wanted to play a game with me. Not only has this never happened, she even bought a 3DS and Alpha Sapphire. So we spent the last few days in sofa’s, bed,.. Playing Pokémon.

I’m sure those of you who have girlfriends that don’t play games can understand the way I feel when mine decided she wanted it too. Although when my reasons to play are for nostalgia, hers are because the few pokémon she saw on my screen were; “Super cute” … Women..

Meanwhile my blueprint copies are chugging along, slowly being invented into their T2 equivalent. I’ll probably buy a few billion in material tomorrow, to keep me going for a few weeks.

Stay tuned o7

Logistics be damned

My manufacturing is going pretty well. So well in fact that while I stock up for a few weeks, I usually only last a week at most. This due to the fact that I can actually update my jobs at work, which means that my lines are currently spewing out T2 products two times a day.

This is positive for my wallet too. Especially when things like last weekend happen and one of the modules I tend to sell a lot suddenly went up in price and I was able to sell a few hundred of them for a million more than I usually sell them.

The station trading I was experimenting with however, has slown down once more. I made about 100million trading datacores but I tend to use a lot of them for my invention runs too, so I decided to stop trading them for a profit and just brought all the ones I had left to my home system so I can use them when the time comes and I ran out of the T2 BPC’s I have now.

I’m just glad that public courier contracts are a thing. Without these I would have given up on my manufacturing and invention ages ago. All I need to do is buy all the products I need in jita, then set up a contract for little under a million per jump et voila.. A few hours later I usually have the products where I need them to be on my manufacturing station, ready to be put in the corporation’s containers.

I still need to learn to just buy enough to last me a month or so. I still need to learn that that wallet is not doing anything with all the ISK in it. I should use it for things instead of just letting it sit there.

It’s the same as with putting your real money in a bank, it’s just sitting there, interest is almost non-existant, you might as well use it to buy stuff.

Stay tuned o7

Failed once more

You win some, you lose some. And these days I’ve been on a losing streak when it comes to trying out new things.

 As some of you know I was searching for a null sec corporation to join but didn’t really like the idea of CTA’s. And there’s a good reason for it. In general whenever I read about null, I don’t really like what I see. And my latest experiment only showed me that my gut feeling wasn’t wrong.

Please note, that in this blog I might seem extremely negative towards the people I joined. However this is negativity towards null sec and the mindset towards it. The people I joined were actually extremely friendly and fun to chat with. The mindset of the alliance however, was not something for me. You’ll see why.

I joined a null sec corporation/alliance about a week and half ago. In that time I haven’t done much at all. Not because I didn’t want to, but due to silly rules and the fact that I didn’t want to be on TeamSpeak.

The people in the corporation were nice when I said hi in the chat, I immediately got some help in getting set up with a ratter, told where to find contracts for their pvp doctrines etc. etc. 
It didn’t take long until I was ready in a Dominix to blow some rats and earn some isk. Once I undocked, I went on to one of the anomalies, released my sentries and got ready to blap. Not 5 minutes after undocking I noticed that people in corp were asking me why I wasn’t on coms. Prepare for ‘Strike one’

For my job I tend to have a a lot of meetings during the day, where I listen to people talk about what needs to be done, and where I tell other people what’s going to be done. This happens in live meetings seeing that I’m in Belgium, and the other people are all over the world. 
Wearing a headset gives me a headache due to me not enjoying noise much since I had an accident few years ago. So when I get home, I don’t really want to get on voice coms unless I join a fleet because you do need some coordination and just typing isn’t going to give you fast enough reaction times. But not when I’m just out ratting. 

That was my first mistake, figuring that people wouldn’t need me to be on coms because there was nothing going on. But for some strange reason people are so afraid of losing ships that I needed to be on coms so they could warn me if somebody came through to our systems. 

Somebody.. Not a fleet, no, just one person, one guy/girl who isn’t part of the alliance or it’s blues and I was expected to dock up. 
In the few minutes that they explained this to me I had cleared one wave of the rats, and then, as luck would have it, a neutral turned up in local. One lonely guy, probably just moving around in null a bit, but they told me to dock up, because who knows, he might be part of a bigger fleet, or drop a cyno on me.

Strike two.

If someone were to drop a cyno, on my 250m ratting Dominix just for that kill, I’d smile and tip my hat to him/her. I really didn’t understand what the big deal was for one neutral, but I docked up and seethed slightly, wondering what I would do in the meanwhile. There was no talk about hunting the intruder down, it was better to wait it out. 
After that I logged out for the weekend, not wanting to log back in. When I logged back in on Sunday evening, I had about 10-20 EvEmails about CTA’s. I didn’t really bother reading them because most of those were at times that I had better things to do. 

Yesterday, my friend joined in an operation with them. A big fleet was going to go out on a roam looking for fights. Turned out that my friend, due to the fact that he could only fly an inty, he was expected to just make pings, wasn’t even allowed to join in on the fight.

Strike three.. All of these things, are the reason why I flew back to Jita an hour ago.

I know that highsec “carebears” are something that null sec people like to laugh with. But isn’t ratting thesame? If you dock up as soon as a stranger comes into your system, doesn’t that make you worse than the carefree bear that doesn’t care. 

Null sec might be fun for some people, but not for me. I’d rather see some action or do new things. So on to the next project.. I’m going to go back to exploring wormhole space, but from my own little hub. We’ll see what happens. 
Wormhole space was entertaining because you only see who’s with you, once they uncloak right on top of you. It seems like I like the way that works.

Stay tuned o7

On the move

I did a lot of jumps last night before heading to bed.

I’ve been looking for a corporation for a while now with a friend of mine, either to go back to wormholes, or have a look at Sov Space.
Yesterday our search came to an end when we(well my friend first) decided to join a null sec corporation. So I spent the last of my evening before I headed out to bed last night, jumping down to their staging system in order to start figuring out what’s different in sov space null today;

From what I’ve seen so far the corporation seems an easy going and fun one. Here’s hoping that the CTA’s don’t mess with me too much. But it’s easy to move out anyhow, we’ll see how it goes.

My trading has come to somewhat of a standstill due to the fact that prices of the implants I was buying and selling on one of my alts has dropped quite a bit. If I were to sell them at the price they’re currently at I would be selling them with too much of a loss. So I decided to put a pause on it for now and wait for the prices to go up again.

My manufacturer however is still happily chugging along with her industry jobs. They currently make up for most of my income, with all my manufacturing and trading of the past month I made about 2.2 billion.

Along with the fact that I sold the Tengu pilot again (for 2b more than I bought it last month) I made about 14b in total. So I currently have way too much liquid ISK.

But I started training for capital production, once I get my skills up a bit I’ll be looking into that some more.

Stay tuned
o7

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NPSI, Bombers Bar joint op on Saturday

NPSI, the abbreviation for “Not Purple, Shoot It”. A mindset that communities such as Bombers Bar/Spectre Fleet use, you join a fleet of likeminded people and just shoot at whatever’s not in fleet, both allies and enemies alike.

I’ve joined in a few Bombers Bar roams now, and as those of you who’ve read my previous blog posts know, I love joining them. Not only do I get a bit more experience shooting things, I also do more than just spin my ship because of it. 

The past few hours of my Saturday evening were spent in a fleet set up by the Bombers Bar and WTM community. When I joined we were told that we’d go and try to get a few carrier kills and afterwards have a ‘Free for all’ with the people in bombers/cloakies that wanted to.

Previous Bombers Bar fleets, the amount of people joining was usually around 50 to 60. Today there were 145 people in Bombers, ready to shoot.

Let’s just say that it was fun, despite the traffic control.

During the fleet there were a few giveaways, one of which was a bomber for the person with the best cat.gif picture linked. The guys judging the pictures had a lot of work to do, about 100 people posting gifs is a lot of links to click.

Once a carrier was spotted the next giveaway got announced, the first people to get point on it (other than the hunters) would be getting a few goodies.Not only are the people who take care of the fleets giving us nice kills, they were also going to be giving us ships, and other goodies for doing things in the fleet.
We killed an Archon, there were 108 pilots involved in the kill, the amount of torpedoes shot was such a pretty sight.

“Look at them go”

After the Archon kill we waited a bit, changed region and waited for another target. 
“Ready to jump oh captain my captain”
We got another cyno & bridge a bit later, but unfortunately, due to so many people jumping at one, traffic control decided to not let us through immediately so the target was able to escape. 
“Follow the leader, he’ll be your bridge for today”
After this the fleet was going to stand down due to the fact that our Jump Fatigue timer was getting a bit too high, those who wanted to kill their team mates, were told to get ready for a little Free for All.

Instead of NPSI, the new rule was going to be NCSI (Not Cloaked, Shoot It). Every purple on grid was a target.

I didn’t last until the end, but I got my first last hit on a bomber with a bomb during the FFA. So next to the Archon kill, I’d call that an OP success.

“Tengu on grid? Kill it!”

My Bomber alt is slowly starting to get an extremely nice Killboard, and I’m pretty certain that I’ll be getting a whole lot more kills by joining them. 
Content creation at its best.

Those of you who haven’t tried it yet, I can do nothing else than tell you to try and join the Bombers Bar channel in game. There’s fleets almost every night and they’re definitely worth joining. They even set up a Reddit, Facebook and Twitter account. Check it out.

Stay tuned o7
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End of chapter one

On Saturday we decided to leave the wormhole that we moved to a few weeks ago. This due to multiple reasons, the one that made the decision the easiest was the fact that it was turning into a huge ISK-sink. And only two people trying to make it work, isn’t easy in a C4.

The decision was made after I lost a Raven while rolling one of the statics. I didn’t mind the loss, not at all, it was beautiful and I didn’t see it coming at all.
We were rolling another C4, which at the time seemed inactive, nobody around and we figured it was safe enough to take out our Ravens to roll the hole. What happens is that you use the mass to get the hole to critical mass and after a certain amount of jumps through it, it should pop behind you.
“Bubble up!”
Cue the first jump, it went perfectly, we go in the other C4, MWD’s on (this is to increase our mass) and then go back out. Now once you jump through and back in, you get a timer stopping you from jumping for around 2 minutes, so you wait until it expires before going back through. 
I’m guessing that our first jump alerted the locals to what we were doing, because once I jumped in for the second pass, two Proteus’ uncloaked on me and scrambled me. I wasn’t too worried at first, I could just jump back through, if it wasn’t for the fact that they started to bump me away from the hole. I immediately alerted the other Raven to not jump through and asked if the ones in the hole could help me out. I could tank it for a while but there was only me and my friend, he couldn’t really do anything against two Proteus’ solo and my Raven only had smartbombs and neuts. I did do some damage, but not nearly enough to outlast it.
A few minutes later I lost my Raven, bounced to a planet in pod, exchanged “GF” in local and bounced back to the wormhole and into our POS. 
We talked about our wormhole life, decided to call it quits in the C4 and started moving out a few hours later, when our connections gave us a good highsec system to jump to. I also lost a pod while jumping back and forth, this time to a smart bombing legion (woops) 
The last of our assets got moved out yesterday and shipped to Jita with PushX and Red-Frog (got to love courier services). 
While moving assets I did lose another bomber to a gate camp in Aunenen, a system that’s supposedly known for its gatecamps. I did not know this. But after losing the bomber I went back to the highsec system I had my assets in, this time with a Cheetah, probed a hole, and got lucky with it’s other connections because one hole further there was a highsec connection 2 jumps from Jita. Which made it extremely easy to get the two Tengus I had stored in the system next to Aunenen back to Jita.
Who knew that wormholes could come in handy like that! 
Not only did I move out of the wormhole this weekend, I also joined another two bombers bar runs on my bomber character (Saturday and Sunday) and had a good amount of fun to make up for my losses, got a few more kills out of it too.
“I think they were mad we killed a Thanatos and Proteus”
Despite it being somewhat of an ISK sink I did enjoy my time in a wormhole of our own and am already thinking of going back to one, however, this time there’s got to be a better plan. Either ally with someone and join them in C4 or move into a C2. 
We probably should have seen those problems coming but it’s another lesson learned, and that’s what matters most, people make mistakes and we learn from them. 
Plus I’ve been losing a ton of ships the past couple of weeks so I’m finally learning how to not care too much about losing a ship, yay!
Stay tuned o7