Meet Steve.

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , ,

Steve is the name of the drifter battleships that can sometimes make wormhole space a bigger pain than it already is. Not only does he put out about 2k DPS, he also neuts like crazy. And that’s the most annoying part of him really. The DPS is something most people are able to handle fairly well, but the neuts, my god the neuts.

Steve is here

I’m not sure where the name Steve came from. I just know that we’ve been using it for a while now, and supposedly the guys in corp that started using it had it from someone else they flew with. But his name is Steve now and I shall always know him as such.

Making ISK in wormholes can be done in multiple ways. There’s PI which is obviously the easiest one, there’s relic/data site hacking, there’s evicting people and stealing their stuff. And then there’s doing sites.

Which is what I’ve been trying to do in the past week or so. Sites can be done in multiple ways. You can do it with multiple people, or solo it (if you have two tinker rattlesnakes) Mostly when doing it with subcaps you’ll get roughly 300m per site. Without taking into account the fact that you need to close down incoming connections you’ll earn about 400m/hour, give or take a few.

At the end of the site, a structure will uncloak, and if you shoot it, Steve will spawn and he will try to fuck you up.

Luckily you can also use dreads for sites like this (if you are in a bear hole or if you have them in your own hole). Warping in a dread will “escalate” the site, spawning a few more battleships that are just a little bit harder to kill and drop a little bit more ISK in the end. But killing Steve with a dread is so easy. In the end you can make roughly 700 to 1b/hour per character doing it, IF you have this thing down. And that’s with just two dreadnaughts doing it.

I tend to forget about my speed from time to time. And bump things

I tend to forget about my speed from time to time. And bump things

I can’t even imagine what the income from this used to be. Supposedly it was a LOT better. Which kind of makes sense, most of the veteran wormholers don’t really have to worry about ISK at all.

With PI and doing sites. I might just make the ISK back that I put in this dread pilot. That makes me happy. I just hope I earn it back before the Naglfar dies. And it will die, I’m sure of it, I’ll probably do something stupid with it. That’s what normally happens when I let things die.

We’ll see

Stay tuned o7

 

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Bad at EVE

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , , ,

I can freely admit that I’m not the best player when it comes to EvE as a whole. I am at best “ok” in PvP, and when I do my trading I am well aware that I’m making stupid decisions from time to time.

There are times when I feel like I am better than some of the people I come across in the game. And times when I feel like the biggest noob out there. I’m sure that a lot of people have that same issue when they’re trying out something new.

This game can make you laugh and make you want to strangle whoever fucked something up in your fleet as you throw your headset down in frustration because it was once more the same person doing that to you.

That’s what’s so great about this game. I used to play other MMO’s, I still play World of Warcraft occasionally, and I have never felt the same string of emotions in any of them like I do in EVE.

And that’s because what you do in this game matters. Whether you’re the first tackle on a titan, or the person stocking a market (or crashing it) whatever you do, will have an effect on tens, if not hundreds of other players.
This is not something that happens in many other games. In general when playing another MMO it doesn’t really matter whether you’re there or not. They might care personally, but the game itself doesn’t get better or worse without you there.

 

I need to get myself a Naglfar

I need to get myself a Naglfar

The past few weeks has been spent trying to help some fellow wormholers defend their home against HardKnocks, scanning for new places to hunt in, doing some PvP both market PvP and otherwise. And trying to make ISK.

We failed saving them, but I have a few nice screenshots

We failed saving them, but I have a few nice screenshots

A few days ago while scanning I was in a C2, there were a lot of signatures to scan down and I saw an Astero pop up on d-scan every few minutes. I didn’t really bother myself with him, figuring that he was going through all the wormholes, I was in an Astero myself so he was spending is time not much unlike I was spending mine.

I had one more sig to scan, a relic site, when it disappeared from my overview. This Astero was hacking relics. That was my cue to try and kill him at last, I already had everything bookmarked and it was time for some other kind of content. I warped to a relic at range, lo and behold, only half a minute after getting there the guy popped up on grid. Now, keep in mind, I had been scanning this wormhole for the past 10 minutes, he must have seen my probes. But I guess he thought he was safe, going to the cans slowly. I was on coms with two of my corpmates and asked them if they could bring in fast tackle. I had a scram on my astero but no point. So they brought sabres. I made them hold on the wormhole into the C2 while I figured out the best spot for them to warp to.

Turns out there was a small asteroid I could bookmark right next to one of the last three cans he’d go to. So I did. After having them jump the hole and hold cloak I told them to wait, right up until the guy started hacking the can. As soon as that happened I had them warp to the bookmark I had just made.

A minute and one dead Astero later I could go on my merry way into finding a highsec in our little chain.

Despite this being a fairly standard procedure, it still gave me the so called “PvP-shakes” not because I would die or anything, but because I didn’t want this guy to figure out I was stalking him. To suddenly warp off and leave us with no kill.

I have literally never had any of those feelings in another game. When you PvP in EVE, there’s a kind of adrenaline rush, whether you win or lose, there’s always the thrill of the hunt.

Stay tuned o7

ISK makes New Eden go round

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

Making ISK is something everyone has to do. The way how you do it though, that’s different for every single one of the players out there. But it has to be done, how else are you going to afford the ships you lose? Or get into that Nyx you’ve been craving ever since you saw the ship model.

I used to make my ISK in three ways. Trading, industry and running missions. Half of the trading I did was to complement my industry and the other half was just me messing around on the market trying to find the stuff that could make me money.

Those that have read my blog in the previous years know that my industrial side existed of making T2 things. I used invention on BPC’s I had copied and turned those things into T2 products. All the goods needed to make those T2’s were bought off the market because I didn’t want to make everything in the whole process.

I made a LOT of ISK that way and I flooded the market countless times dropping the price of the things I made. Sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose. But unfortunately my industry character hasn’t been used at all in the past year. This due to the fact that the products I used to make are worth less than their materials combined. Supposedly this is due to the null-sec groups having their hand in it now. I wouldn’t know though, I have yet to start caring enough about null-sec to start looking into things.

As for trading, I haven’t done it either in the months since the citadel change. Partly because I’m lazy and don’t want to go do that one jump to put orders in a citadel, and partly because I no longer have a clue about what’s good on the market. Ok, mostly that second part ;).

Missioning, well I haven’t done that in years, I used to love running L4’s in my Machariel but ever since joining corporations and no longer being solo I just haven’t felt the need to do so anymore.

So how do I make my ISK now? PI and C5 sleeper loot. I absolutely love doing C5 sites with a small group of people. Doing it solo is boring, but I love having 7 rattlesnakes on the field, warping from one site to the next and just melting the targets.

Beautiful snakes, flying out to their next target

Beautiful snakes, flying out to their next target

A few weeks ago we had a little group of 4 snakes, two were mine, two were my corp-mate’s. In the three hours of farming we made a total of 2.4billion ISK. Which isn’t too bad. That’s about 200m/hour per character. And half of the time we weren’t even paying attention.

Due to my love of the Snakes, I made a third character, just to fly in one.
So last Saturday I had 3 on the field, along with two other corp-members we had a total of 7 rattlesnakes on the field.
We melted the sites and in one hour we made about 320m per person. Which could have been better but the sites weren’t the best out there.

Circling the MTU like there is no tomorrow.. For the rats

Circling the MTU like there is no tomorrow.. For the rats

That’s one way to make ISK in a wormhole though, my other one is PI and all of you probably know or have an inkling of a thought what it’s about.
If I pay attention to it I make about 1bn/month across two characters. Which isn’t bad but I tend to forget about it. Woops.

Got to get it out of the hole somehow

Got to get it out of the hole somehow

There’s a third one in the Yacht club that we introduced a while ago. Well it was already there but now more people know about it. Namely “Scout gets the loot”. Basically, when you’re in the chain and find targets, if we kill them, you get the loot. If you find an Astrahus to kill you get 50% of whatever drops out of it. Which is pretty damn good.

I have yet to find myself an offline POS with an SMA hanging around it (happened already) but it’s a nice incentive for people to find more targets. And more targets for us means more content. So it’s a win win.

Scanning can be a pain though. Spent a few hours doing it yesterday and I decided to keep it to a maximum of half an hour of non-stop scanning in the future.

Stay tuned o7

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First day in our hole

by In MMO Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Two nights ago (Thursday on Friday), we officially moved into our own little wormhole. It took a while to anchor and online the tower, to set up the guns etc, but we finished around 2am. So all in all, a good night.

So yesterday was our official first day in our own little hole in space, our own little C2. It was a good day, a fun day, and content was had.

Not only, did we get our first official Corporation kills in the hole, we laughed a bit, and we made some ISK doing sites.

My little PvE Tengu

My little PvE Tengu, she’s a beast

I’m not sure if we’re going to top yesterday, I’m pretty sure we hit a peak there somewhere. That was one of the jokes that was made on TeamSpeak.

It started out, when logging in, with seeing a little Cheetah on scan. Nothing special, I tried tracking him down and failed there. When I was checking out one of our statics I noticed him warping back to the wormhole and off he went.

That could have been our first target, but alas, that didn’t happen. A few minutes later I noticed a Venture on scan. The same guy, had reshipped to a Venture, he was coming to mine our gas! Targets!

I told my friend and we were getting ready, I’m 90% sure that he wasn’t checking out D-scan because he must have seen us reship into a bomber etc (Literally only cloaky ship I got in there atm that isn’t a scanner)

I tracked him to a gas site and I was slowlboating my way to him cloaked. However, my friend couldn’t curb his enthusiasm and he warped to me, in his Heretic, while I was still 40km off the venture. The plan was for me the scram him, so we could also catch his pod with the bubbler. Unfortunately, he uncloaked me and I guess the guy was paying a bit attention because warped off into the sunset, never to be seen again. We miserably failed on scoring our first target. I will not let him down for this.

Half an hour later, while we were scanning down our sites, I suddenly noticed an Astero on scan. This guy didn’t rename his ship to something else so I could check out his Zkillboard, he already lost an Astero once, maybe we could let him lose another one.

Queue me training to D-scan his position, only to realize he was in a signature that we hadn’t scanned down since it arrived about 5 minute earlier. Good job on us there.

My friend took out his combat probes, and well, the Astero wasn’t paying attention to d-scan because he could pin him down. We warped in our cloakies to the site, and 26km from the Astero….

My friend de-cloaked due to one of the collideable objects in the site. The Astero noticed us, and warped off. Talk about anti-climax right?

Again, will not let him live that one down.

As you can imagine, I thought that would be it, the Astero wouldn’t come back. I was wrong. Imagine my surprise when 10 minutes later the same guy popped up on D-scan. He was in a relic site, and this time, we did have it scanned down.

I warped to the site, stayed away from the collideable objects and when I was 20clicks off, I de-cloaked, scrammed him, and my friend de-cloaked his ship and then warped in his Herritic.

Turns out, bombers aren’t that good to kill frigates. It took us ages, but, we got him, and the bubble made sure his pod didn’t escape.

I’m 99% sure that if he took out his drones, he could have killed both our bombers. Those things had no tank. But I’m also pretty sure that he panicked and just wanted to try and get away from us.

First kill! Yay us!

We had a static not far from Jita, which we wanted to use to bring in some more ships. And while my friend activated the hole on his Occator, he had travel control happen to him, and after that a static close.

I warped to the hole to see if it was still there, it wasn’t. There was however, a Heron, which either just got in, or wanted to go back to high sec and had the wormhole collapse right in front of him.

I don’t think he saw it coming, he definitely didn’t see me coming. I scrammed him, told him I’d get him home and then let our newest hole-mate warp in on his drake to get in on the kill.

Turns out the pod was worth about 200m. In a 41m Heron, that was an odd choice.

But we got a few kills out of it, I’m super happy with this move, and definitely looking forward to what else might happen.

Stay tuned o7

Industry and Bombers

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’m getting better at scanning down the wormholes that connect our little hole to the rest of space. Which is nice, seeing as I used to hate scanning mainly because of how bad I was at it during the tutorial missions.

Which is really the one and only reason why I never decided to try again, despite knowing that back then my skills were not even close to being good enough for me to scan something “quickly”.. I’m relatively better at it, it only takes me about an hour and a half to get 13 sigs down, so that’s good… Right? Right?!

I’m slowly going through the BPC’s I have left from doing so much copying runs, I think I only have about 400-500 of them that I’ll try and turn into T2 ones. Or at least try to, I have an average succes rate of 75% inventions per 21 runs (I have 2 characters running inventions every day or so). After the invention process is done, I usually manufacture the T2’s, again, two characters so that means that every other day I have around 200-400 T2 items sitting in my headquarters ready to ship over to Jita. Which I do through courier contracts because I’m too lazy to go out there myself and it’s super cheap.

Once I have gone through my surplus of BPC’s I’ll have to check the market to try and figure out what’s needed, because right now I’m still working with a supply that started two years ago. As you can imagine, a lot changes in two years but I want that supply to be relatively gone before moving on to something else.
I do have a plan of what that something else might be, I just have to figure out if it’s a good one first before disclosing anything.

As for the other “adventures” I’m having, I’m enjoying W-space but am still checking for some other options, I currently own 3 combat characters, which gives me quite a few options.

What all three of my characters have in common though, is the fact that they can all fly covert ops ships, specifically bombers. I love bombers, the fact that you can sneak up on someone and drop a bomb or deliver a load of torpedoes on them is pretty awesome.

Which is why I finally did something yesterday that I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time. I joined a bombers bar run. Which I enjoyed, although I have to admit that it was rather boring at first.

I logged into the one character not in w-space only to be told that I needed to go to Thera, luckily I was only 12 jumps out from one of the high sec entrances so I burned towards it and someone in fleet was nice enough to give me a warp in to the wormhole.
After getting into Thera we were told to meet up somewhere and…Wait.

“Thera is pretty though”

Waiting is not something I enjoy, time spent waiting is time lost, while it is a precious commodity. But luckily the voice comms and the books I started reading a few weeks ago made sure that it wasn’t lost entirely, I was laughing along with the others and enjoying a good book until we were giving the go.

Which meant jumping through another wormhole where a black ops vessel was waiting for us to bridge us to our targets. Last night was a good night, I spend an hour or more “waiting” but those few kills that did happen were quite fun.
We first got a bridged right on top of a Legion, I was too late in getting there because the amount of bombers we had along with us meant that dmg was extremely high and it was down before most even knew it.

The second kill was a Legion too, another pilot that had no idea what was happening to him, a better kill too, he was worth a few more ISK and I did get to be on that killmail. After that we were told to ‘burn” back to our staging system. Once again we waited a bit before being dropped onto a Raven and Legion. We got the Raven but the Legion got away, and once more we burned back to the staging system.

During the burn a Paladin was spotted on one of the gates.

We were told to try and catch it, and catch it we did. I had nothing to do with the catch, but it was fun to watch. Burning to a Marauder that’s 100km away equiped with a microwarp drive is not something many people can do but it happened. After the point he was able to jump away again but our tackler had anticipated that move and was already 50km closer to the spot he was going to and was able to snare him immediately after.

The paladin did take a little while longer to kill (aprox 20-30 seconds) but he went down, and my pilot’s killboard went up by 2.8billion isk. Which means that right now, I’m sitting on a killboard of a few billion destroyed against nothing lost.

A good and fun night all in all. Missing those few hours of sleep was worth it, and I’ll definately do more of this.

“Another one today, Thanatos!”

Stay tuned! o7

Other pastures

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Last week, a friend I made in EvE told me that I should join the corporation he had joined. He’s been talking about it for a few weeks now ever since he moved into Wormhole space and he said that I should try it too. Seeing that it might give me an opportunity to come out with my combat character some more.

Fast forward to Monday and I am accepted into the corporation, all I had to do was get myself a few ships and move to the wormhole.
“Who needs a scout, I can handle this!”

Something that I did yesterday, I bought myself a few frigates, a destroyer and a battleship and spent about an hour and a half moving one ship after the other into the wormhole. It gave me something to do, it even had me thinking about fits. Although I have to admit that it didn’t help me in thinking too hard about them since once I figured I was settled I noticed I had forgotten dampeners and ammo (woops)
“I’m a pretty fly, with a nasty sting”
Joining a wormhole corporation is something that I talked about in the past, I even thought I had joined one before but turned out that they were actually high sec mission runners like myself who happened to have a POS in a hole that they went to from time to time. Which is cool, but not what I wanted. What I wanted was to live inside one, and not just alongside one.

Hopefully my move will allow me to experience this side of the game from close-by instead of just reading about it. It’s scary, because I can’t scan to save my life, but I guess that just means I’ll have to learn.
“Let’s get this show on the road!”

Other than the wormhole move and figuring out what’s next on my list in the new corporation, I will be using this weekend to run a few tests on my industrialist. I’ll be updating my way out of date spreadsheet, to check if I still make a profit (because who counts this stuff psh!) and whether or not it’s more profitable for me to stay in my POS, or if I should just tear it down and start working from a station.

If the prices aren’t too high for my manufacturing and invention I might just tear down my POS and just use the headquarters. Seeing that having a POS means spending 500m a month in fuel. So if the cost of working from station isn’t too high, I can just start doing that.

While creating T2 items I noticed a slight decrease in the market movement of some of the modules I make. Meaning that I’ve been scratching a few of the list in the past couple of days. I still have a few thousands blueprints that I’ll have to invent (holy crap why did I make so much copies of everything) but once those are all done, I’ll be checking which I liked creating the most and, of course, where most of my profits came from.

So plenty to do and figure out for me in the next couple of weeks!

Stay tuned o7

What about wormholes?

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , 4 Comments
Plans, you make them, you break them.

I have so many things in my mind that I’d like to do but I just don’t do them. So many things I want to try out but don’t have the time for them.

A few days ago I was asked if I was interested in joining a Wormhole corporation. Which made me start to think about living in one.

They intrigue me, I love the idea of wormholes, I like the fact that there are no stations and that you need to provide for yourself. And as I said in the past, I’ve actually had a bit of fun in a few already, both PvE and PvP wise.

The one big problem I have with them, is the fact that I’d need to be able to scan. Which is one of the many things in the game that I suck at. 

I have the correct skills, all at IV or better, and yet I can’t find anything even if it meant saving my own life.
A while ago I went into null with a cheetah just to check if I could train and get better at scanning. I knew there were sigs, I knew where to find them. 
And yet it still took me over an hour before I finally scanned down two of them. Two, out of (give or take) eight. While I know that there are people out there who can do it much, much faster. It’s safe to say that the idea of scanning even more quickly turned into disgust.

This, along with some things I hear about them, and the limited experience I have in wormholes, makes me think that I might not be put out for it.

I just don’t have the patience to scan down things, to wait at a wormhole for someone to pop up. Even to go out hunting for ours through different ones only to get stranded when it collapses behind me. Something we all know happens.

“Someday we’ll be together”

But if not wormholes, what am I going to do? I need to get out of high sec because it’s keeping me down, I’m not actually doing anything and haven’t done so in quite a while.

The answer? Low sec.
The new problem that came from this? “What corporation”

So now I’m going to go and search for a corporation, willing to take me on. Maybe one that’s noob friendly, because I know for a fact that if I go out for a kill solo. I’m going to get my ass kicked and my frozen corps handed to me on a platter.

Let’s see where this path I put myself on leads.

Stay tuned o7 

Prospecting and going out of my way to get killed

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , ,

Today marks the launch of a new release for EvE. New things happening, industry wise and others that I don’t really know much about.

Why’s that? Because I only cared about one thing, a new thing to invent. Namely the prospect. In a few hours when the patch goes live we will be able to invent a new T2 frigate from Ventures. I have prepared accordingly and have about 100 Venture BPC’s ready to put in my laboratories when I get home from work this evening. Hopefully I’ll be able to create a whole bunch of Prospects by the end of this week and sell them for a nice profit.

Because that’s what this is about, profit for me. I don’t use the Venture myself and am not planning on using it any time soon. Unless I suddenly feel like going out to get some gas in a wormhole.

Speaking of wormholes, let’s talk about my lack of doing anything that might destroy one of my ships.

Last night I was browsing Reddit like I usually do when I should be asleep and saw an image linked that was rather fitting to what I don’t do.

I would link it here but I forgot to give it an upvote and I can’t seem to find it again. It basically said something along the lines of “What use is having a ship if you don’t take it out for a spin”. Although I do take it for a spin, I never seem to leave station anymore.

So I need a reason to go out and get killed. I need to stop being a ‘pussy’ and go out to low sec in a frigate to get killed a few dozen times. Or do some killing myself but, let’s face it. I’m a noob, so I’ll more than likely lose ships instead of making others lose theirs.

Unfortunately that means actually taking the time to go out. And that might take a while before I can do this. Maybe I should try out a low sec corp, have people to talk to. People that give me a reason to log in on my combat alt, instead of me just logging in on my Indy alt to update a few queues and stuff on my POS.

Plus the fact that I was gifted a key to Wildstar in order to check it out isn’t helping either. I’m AFE (away from eve) too much for my characters good.

Let’s try and change it shall we?

Stay tuned o7

Revisiting on an old idea

by In Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , ,

One of the many reasons why I always told myself I didn’t want to go to null sec, was the Call to Arms.
I didn’t like the idea of having to be at the beck and call of an alliance or corporation, having to go defend a piece of space I didn’t really care much about.

Seeing that I always figured that Null is all about PvP, and I’m sure it is, somewhere.

But I decided to revisit on that idea, after talking to one of the people in one of the channels I frequent.

I’m thinking of trying out Null, not in a renter corp but in NPC null, no CTA’s to worry about, only the fun. Or that was the pitch.

We’ll know in a few days whether or not it’s true.

Stay tuned o7