What do you guys do in the game?

by In Games, MMO Tagged , , ,

The /r/eve subreddit gets a lot of these questions, more so in the past few weeks than I’ve seen in the past. Maybe because I just browse it more often these days, who knows.

But there’s always people wondering if EVE is still viable a game to play, is it fun? Is there much to do? How do I start playing this game?

I answer them from time to time, tell them that they need to figure out if they want to PvE or PvP or do both. Do they want to kill NPCs, do they want to do industry (or crafting as they know it in other games). If they want to PvP do they want to do it solo, do they want to do it in a big alliance where they’ll be a number for a long time until they can make themselves more known.

Do it in a small group but probably not getting the big blingy kills?

All questions that a person needs to ask themselves when going into EVE online. In many MMOs really, it all boils down to “What do you want to do with your time in the game”

I myself realised a long, long time ago that I liked being in wormhole space. All because of the things that have happened to me in wormhole space. And mostly because of me joining a corporation back in 2016 that invited me to an expenses paid trip to Prague the day after I joined them and me just going “why not”

That corporation no longer exists in the way it did but I made some really good friends there. One of which poked me months ago to join the current corporation I’m in.

What do I do in EVE though? I like to think of myself as someone who mostly PvPs and just trades to make himself ISK to pay for said PvP.

And I do need the ISK because I tend to lose expensive things.

I do sometimes escape in cheap stuff

Less than 12 hours ago I lost a Loki and pod that cost me around 2.5b. For those of you that don’t know the abbreviation that is billion. 2 500 000 000 isk, which equals exactly one month of gametime.

It was a painful loss for about 30 mins, where I was wondering why I was so damn stupid to go into that hole. But in the end, it’s what I enjoy doing, and the battle itself was quite fun.

What happened you ask?

Well, this all started when we found a few prospects huffing gas in a neighbouring wormhole, we were setting up a gank. Me in my sabre, the two other guys in a sabre and a proteus themselves.

Unfortunately, before we were even able to set up the gank correctly a few of our targets decided to go back home and saw us.

We still tried to go for it but the prospects escaped. The guys that saw us came back in 3 other ships, Gnosis, Deimos and Proteus. We had them bubbled and I figured that I should quickly reship in a ship that could easily tank them and then some.

They did get my sabre killed but I was able to go reship.

So I came back in a Loki. At this point their 3 people fleet turned into a 6 or 7 people fleet.

But whatever, I could probably tank this, let’s go!

And tank them I did. Although it was close for a while.

We were fighting on our home connection at zero. Meaning that if anyone was about to die they could easily jump in the wormhole and quickly try to make it out.

Which basically happened to all the guys that we were fighting except one unlucky Legion who I think was polarized.

But we were happy, we killed one of theirs. They were now in our home hole and we were on the connection they needed to get back. A little Mexican standoff.

This took a bit too long to our liking so what do we do? We go back into home and start pretending to roll the connection. This is what you do when you put a bunch of mass through a wormhole in order to make it collapse.

All of this, from when we saw the prospects to us doing this was about 40 minutes. Plenty of time for people to get pinged. Unfortunately for us, my corporation had nobody else online, and it turns out that theirs had a few more people online.

The guys went onto the connection about 2 minutes after I jumped back home with my Loki, my two Corp buddies went after them. I heard them go “oh shit that’s a bit more than before” but didn’t really think much of it. If they were in cruisers I’d be able to tank them for a bit longer and we might be able to at least kill one of them.

Some of them were not in cruisers.

I died at zero on the wormhole back home and got podded too. Why? Well, one was because they brought a big bad Paladin to kill us, and two, because I was polarized for about 20 more seconds when my ship died, and 10 more seconds when my pod died.

Polarisation happens when you go through a wormhole, if you were to go back through the same hole, you won’t be able to use it a second time to go back to where you come from for about 4 minutes. It’s a little countdown timer that was made to make things a bit more interesting in wormholes. And some groups know how to use it well, others do not. Especially when it’s late and they are on a pvp rush.

I died, ended up in Jita, and am currently waiting for a few buy orders to be filled for a new Loki and pod.

It’s a good thing I can easily afford these things, it would hurt a lot more if I couldn’t.

But I can’t imagine myself doing anything other than wormholes anymore. Every other space is just too boring.

Safety is relative, but in wormholes you have no idea who else is watching.

My very first ransom

by In Games, MMO Tagged , ,

Every time I write here, it’s because I want to tell a story. I want to entertain my reader(s) with the words I put down. I like to think that most of the time I succeed in doing so. Mostly because 99% of the time I feel like I’m the only one reading my own blog and it does entertain me somewhat!

And sometimes I want to show you pretty things

Despite the fact that I’ve been playing EVE Online for more than a decade, I have never ransomed anyone. Until a couple of days ago that is.

I shall now regale you with what happened.

It was a Tuesday like most Tuesdays, working from home and reading up on the news and discord. One of my corporation buddies found a reinforced POCO and decided that he wanted to be there for when the new owners of the system would turn up and bash it.

What he had failed to say was that it would take about 9 more hours, meaning that today we wouldn’t be using our static C3 much. Luckily, we had a random pop up and were able to use that for some other content.

It turned around midnight eve time and the poco came out of reinforcement. We had not seen anyone yet but suddenly someone logged onto the POS and then another and another.

The first thing they did was scan our hole down.

We were ready in Leshaks but the moment we saw the scanner we decided to quickly dock and log of our leshak pilots. I had a sabre cloaked on the hole, waiting in case they would decide to roll it.

And they did in fact decide to roll it. 2 praxi and an onyx came to the hole. Little did they know that we were watching them.

Seeing that at the time I was only in a sabre and my buddy was with his eyes on their side, I was only able to catch one praxis.

We killed it with the Leshaks that had logged back on and then just stayed on the hole for a little bit, only to then decide “Hey, let’s see if we can have them fight us, let’s go shoot the pos”

While doing this I kept the hole bubbled seeing that I also wanted to catch the praxis and onyx. Another one of my Corp mates then decided “I’m going to see if we can get him to pay to stop us”

At this point we thought that the pos might not have any strontium in it. Meaning that if we would get through the shield, it would not even get reinforced and we could just grab everything in there.

But we’re nice people at heart and offered him a ransom. He had a Kronos floating around in the POS so we told him that if he gave it to us we would stop shooting.

I did not think he would, but he told us that he was ok with that, he just needed the Onyx back in the hole because that pilot was the one able to fly the Kronos.

Just like you dear reader, at this point most of us thought “No way, he just wants to try and roll us out”

But no, once I released the Onyx pilot and let him warp, he went into the Kronos, flew it back to our home entrance and went out of it. Only for me to get in it and it up.

Now to sell or fit it

We stopped shooting the tower and went our merry way, One marauder richer. A badly fit one, but still.

The POS was more than likely not stronted at all, but I don’t mind, we could have left with a lot more loot, but we left with a marauder and someone new in wormhole space, who can now bat phone us if he needs help.

If we come across him somewhere we will still kill him, but if he needs help, we will be there for him.

That’s the wormhole life. We don’t really do politics, we just shoot each other, but we will be there for the friendly people that need help.

I’m enjoying my time in the C4 quite a bit, and I’m certain more good stories will come.

There’s content everywhere, we just have to find it.

Stay tuned o7

EVE Online Activity is picking up!

by In Games, MMO Tagged , ,

I’ve been rather active again on EVE the past couple of weeks, 14 days to be exact. Why’s that? Well I joined a new corporation with a few of my characters.

The past couple of years I’ve been part of a group of wormholers called “Dead Terrorists”, who when I joined them were living in a C2 with a Null/C5 static.

That was almost 2 years ago. Since then we’ve moved into Thera for both logistical reasons and to get more content on fleet nights.

The one thing I had a slight problem with, in my own time in EVE, is that I only seemed to be logging in for fleet nights. I never did log on any other day despite paying for three accounts.

The reason behind this is because I don’t really like doing things on my own. I’ve always enjoyed the social aspect of EVE and doing things solo is just not really my thing. I could always go out of the nullsec and find some content like that or join one of the many, many NPSI groups. But I want to fly with buddies, not alone.

And then CCP suddenly gives 7 days of Omega to people. For those of you reading who don’t know what that is, Omega is just EVE’s paid subscription. You can be an Alpha in the game which allows you to fly a limited amount of ships and train yourself up to about 5 million SP, after that you can’t really do more training until you pay.
Couple this with some amazing Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals

But the fact that CCP gave people the option to activate their accounts again for free during a certain time period has brought a lot of people back to the game. Couple this with some amazing Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and you have a lot of people suddenly resubbing.

Including a couple of friends I used to fly with. One of which joined a wormhole corporation that lives in a C4 with a C3/C5 static. He poked me and told me to come fly with him on one of my alts and I did.

Within the week I had been on EVE more than I had in the past 6 months all together and I was also having a lot of fun. At which point I decided that I also wanted to move my main here.

But I still wanted to fly with my buddies in DT. Luckily both groups understood what I wanted to do and there was no issue for me to switch around a bit and now I have my two high SP characters in the C4 and my “dread alt” in Thera. He’s only got 80m sp but I used to use him for Naglfar ratting in C5, which is why he’s called the dread alt.

I’m flying ships I haven’t flown before, I’m free flying more than I’m used to and I’m even making some ISK on the side by doing marauder ratting.

Got myself a Naglfar and a pretty skin
Don’t worry, this is perfectly safe

There’s a ton of content down the chain and all in all. Life in EVE right now, is pretty damn good.

Let’s hope that there’s more of this to come.

But when I see what the future holds for the game, I am seeing a ripple of sun through the clouds that have been hanging over it in the past years.

CCP is stepping up their game and taking a turn for the best.

Stay tuned o7
E’dyn

Being picky about things

by In MMO Tagged , , , , ,

It has been roughly, 8 months since I last posted a blog post. Damn, and here I promised I would try and do more of them. But I have been busy so let’s just blame it on that shall we?

Today, december 14th started with the realization of me once more going “I should spend more time playing EvE Online”
Why did I come to this realization? Well, because at exactly midnight today, so when it went from 23:59 to 00:00 to ring in the new day. I got an email from paypal and eveonline, that all three of my subbed accounts have been resubbed for the next year. Which is a whopping 131 euros per account.

Yes, yes, I have been told that I could have done it a lot cheaper, but that’s not the point. I had forgotten about this recurring sub. I play eve on a bi-weekly basis, I undock and join a fleet with the wormhole corporation I am with.

I enjoy these fleets for the banter and the occassional kill we get. Although I don’t enjoy them when we go and act we are part of a low-sec blob, I decided a few months ago not to join fleets when I knew we’d be joining those.

But other than logging in to fleet up, I don’t actually do anything in the game. I wait with a lot of the others for the hunters to catch something and then go. I used to scan, be active in jita, do some hauling, made isk doing silly missions, etc etc…

And what do I do now, fuck all. Or at least very close to fuck all.

This needs to change! I have three accounts, 6 alts and only one I use.

So today after having spend almost 400 euros resubbing all of them I shall try and do more in EvE.

Starting, with figuring out how the market works these days. Do people still fuck around in Jita? Is it Perimiter now? Both? I have about 40bill in liquid ISK that should have been used in the past 12 months on other things, that ISK now is worth less than it was a year ago. The joys of economics and all that. Just as in real life when you just have your money sitting in a savings account you actually lose money due to inflation, that’s also the case in this game.

So, let’s work on this! But…How.. If only there were some people going “Ok dude, this is my stuff in amarr how I make money, do it in Jita and make bank”

But unfortunately it isn’t that easy. Time to make a few choices.

Hopefully I will actually be more active again, I guess you, dear reader. Will find out sooner or later.

Stay tuned o7

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Wolves have a nasty bite

by In MMO Tagged ,

The problem about going on a bit of a holiday is that you forget about the things you are supposed to be doing. Or at least some of the things you were planning to write about.


The past few weeks I have joined in a few very fun roams with the rest of the corporation. All through our null static of course.
About a week ago I joined in on a new fleet they decided on which was to fly with Wolves instead of Nergals. Obviously because it is a cheaper option and it could be fun, despite losing out on a bunch of DPS.


As it happens we came into Brave space and caught an orca and some miners. It escalated from there. I am not sure how since I got there a bit late but by the time I was there they had a Fax on the field and we were keeping it tackled.


All the while they just kept flying more stuff in in order to try and get us off of their fax.


I had a lot of fun with that one, survived despite my own little fuckup.
They were mostly flying Caracals, which have a bit of an advantage if you fly em correctly. We were also on grid with a citadel at that point. Due to us free flying I got a bit side tracked and when we were told to fly back to the Fax we had tackled, I accidentally flew towards a fax that was tethered on their citadel.


Now, the Wolf is a fast ship, but I was alone there versus about 10 people, a Stiletto was able to get tackle on me and if not for the fact that I was able to quickly shoot him and slingshot away, I would have lost my ship and my pod there. But I did not.


By the end of the night I had about 66 new kills on my killboard and 0 deaths. Good fun!


Later today we are doing a new wolf roam, I am quite looking forward to it.
Stay tuned o7

The thrill of the hunt

by In MMO Tagged , ,

The thrill of the hunt

A few days ago I was getting familiar with scanning again. This because in the past few weeks I haven’t been doing it much while playing on the laptop.

During my mapping of the holes surrounding our home I came across a few people on my dscan. Nothing major, a Drek here, a scanner there. You know, the kind of traffic you expect in wormholes.

I jumped into a C5 wolf-rayet and my eyes lit up, my dscan showed five Nestors and a Leshak, along with their Mobile Tractor Unit.

Now, normally when people are out farming in space, they pay attention to d-scan and vamoose the moment someone pops up. I’m not sure if these guys were just pretty sure that nothing would happen or that they did not see me but they stayed there.

After messing around with dscan a bit I came to the conclusion that the site they were in was already despawned, this conclusion was made firmer once I noticed that they had the Sleeper spawned.

So what do you do in a situation like this?

Well, you decide to see if you still know how combat probes work.

They did

So I moved out of their dscan range, got my combat probes, and scanned them down. I think I took less than 2 seconds to grab the mtu to 100%

Normally, when I do C5 pvp, at this point I would have seen it happen, but I used to do it in dreads and I kept spamming dscan the whole time, mostly because a site didn’t take too long to clear in the first place.

These guys, did not see it. So I warped at 100 and now I had eyes on them. Slowly they were poking away at the sleeper.

Unfortunately, nobody was online, it was a slow day, almost evening, around the time when most people are eating etc etc. So all I could do was keep my eye on them.

I wanted to drop a saber on them and kill the mtu as they ran but unfortunately I did not have any sabers left.

I did try and kill their salvager, but this one did pay attention.

During all this, I had a bit of an adrenaline rush. For reasons that most of you know, even seeing your would be target is a rush. And I kept thinking I was uncloaked too so that didn’t help much 😉

Next time, I’ll try and actually have something to shoot at.

However we did kill a Rorqual the other day too with the corp fleet, so that’s always nice for the killboard.

Stay tuned o7

How to get into it?

by In MMO Tagged ,

A few days ago, someone I know asked me how to get into PvP. It took me by surprise and made me think long and hard about the how. In the end, I couldn’t really give him a good answer.

EvE is so much different than other games when it comes to PvP. If you go out there, you will lose your stuff, you will lose that shiny ship you worked so hard to get. It’s never the case of if, but when.

And that’s something a lot of the PvE players don’t understand quite yet, even when they are reading up on getting into the actual fun bit of EvE. Not that I’m saying pve can’t be fun, I just don’t enjoy it anymore.

But how do you get into it, how do you stop yourself from getting burnt out after being killed a few times in a row without a clue what the hell you’re doing.

Unfortunately, I have no answer to that one yet but I’m going to try and help him a little bit.

What di dit for me was to just do the same thing as I do in real life and just think to myself “Fuck it, let’s do this”
My first time PvP in eve was just a duel between corps buddies, then a little lowsec where I died too often, then getting ganked because I was hauling an Iteron mark V with 4bill in stuff towards Jita, and then I got to where it became fun. Which for me happened after joining my first wormhole corporation and going out with them.

So, I told the guy to look at a corporation to join that could maybe teach him some PvP. He joined RvB. Now, these guys have been around since forever, I know of them, I even joined them for a few weeks at one point. But back then you were just flung into things, nobody explained anything, you got the alliance mail that welcomes you, tells you where to go and that’s it. Nobody there that took you under their wings and was like “Ok this is how things will happen now”.

Which, isn’t great at all.

Unfortunately, I live in wormhole space which is a complete different can of worms to open. But maybe I can point him in the right direction. Just being cannon fodder isn’t good enough, you must enjoy the shooting too. We’ll see what happens.

I have been joining fleets on a regular basis and am feeling close to being confident enough again to try FCing once more.

It will more than likely happen in a few weeks, once I’m back at home and not playing from a laptop. Duo-boxing on one screen is a pain in the ass and I miss my little setup.

But at least I’m blowing things up, that’s always fun.

The beauty of space

Stay tuned o7

Kite or death

by In MMO Tagged , , , , ,

It took a few days but my old domain is FINALLY forwarding to the new one. Took ages.

But we’re off to a good start. Not only did I fuck up on the site installation a few times, I also had to mess around with the import a bit. But I feel like it’s doing what it needs to be doing so that’s good!

I’m not sure, but I think that yesterday I flew an Orthrus for the first time. It was fun but once more shows how bad I actually am at this game.

Because making screenshots is fun!

We were roaming a bit in our nullsec static and came across a group that wanted to fight us. Seeing that we were flying in nano stuff the whole idea was for us to just kite them around a bit and shoot them.

Now, little did I know, that my Orthrus does not like pointing things while the MWD is on. In the past few months of me actively playing again I’ve just been basically orbiting or following the anchor. So having the kite was a new experience. I did it in the past sure, but even then was I bad at it.

So here I am, shooting things, trying to make sure they don’t come in range to me, pointing/scramming when they do. Having a good time in general despite not having a clue where my fleet mates are.

And I suddenly start getting hit. Turns out that due to what I was doing, I was suddenly running out of cap, so my mwd decided to stop working. Meaning that instead of kiting, they could suddenly catch up to me and actually hit me with their guns and tracking.

Rip me.

But it’s fine! It’s another learning experience and I had a lot of fun doing this fight.

Next time I’ll just bring an orthrus with an active tank.

I also need to get myself a better overview. I’m currently abroad and forgot to export the one I really really liked using. So I’m using one from one of those overview channels. But I really, really don’t like it.

Guess I’ll need to mess around with my overview a bit.

Stay tuned o7

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Who do you fight for, exile?

by In MMO Tagged , ,

The past few weeks of playing EVE made me realise that I’m an idiot for waiting this long.

The joys of procrastination I guess. It took me forever of myself saying “I’m going to find myself a new eve corporation to join so I can have fun again” before it finally happened.

BUT we’re there! And I have just finished the trial, because I’m awesome. So I’m now a full fledged member, huzzah.

I have been scanning a LOT. And been wishing that I had better implants but I’m in a virtue pod already so, I don’t think I can get any better than this. It’s just picking up the whole scanning thing again.

I do think I should start doing it with combat probes instead of normal ones. Because at some point I’ll be going out hunting again instead of just being part of the fleet waiting for stuff to happen.

Which was something I did yesterday while we were doing an operation in Thera. Unfortunately nothing got caught but, there’s a new Path of Exile league so I’m also playing that one. Doing it in a slow pace I have just reached act 9. Righteous fire build is quite fun.

The one thing I didn’t miss about wormhole space is the logistics of it. There’s so many things that I have brought in, and so many I still need. I’m currently flying Omens in the kitchen sink fleets but want to have an Orthrus or Cynabaal on standby if needed. But in order to get them I need to bring them in, so that means I need to find a good high sec from Jita. Seeing that Amarr is basically dead.

Speaking of, I should probably put my second DST pilot there just in case I need it.

Having set up the PI means I have a slow but steady income. I think I’m bringing in a few hundred mill a week with it. It’s not much, but better than nothing.

At some point I will also bring myself an astero, so I can do some hacking. PvP fit obviously if someone drops a saber on me that I can fight back at least 😉

Despite the Thera fleet not really bringing anything to the table for us to dine upon, we did catch a rorqual mining last week. So that was fun. When he panicked we honestly tought he’d get friends of his to drop on us. But turns out it wasn’t the first rorq he lost in the past few weeks so I guess they didn’t want to help anymore.

“It’s fine, nobody is going to drop on us.. I hope”

Good for us, not so much for him https://zkillboard.com/kill/89866483/

Here’s hoping we catch a few more in the next few days/weeks, the war has made null feel emptier than it normally is.

I did see a Titan upclose a few days ago too. It’s been ages since I did any kind of bridging. I forgot what it was like to see these behemoths.

Stay tuned o7

Live, learn, die, do it all again

by In MMO Tagged , ,

War, huh, hah, what is it good for?

Well, I sure as hell don’t know other than Tidi.

It seems like I came back right around the time that Goons are at war with a bunch of New Eden once more. Nothing new here, happens every few years and provides content for the null blocs, good for them.

The only thing I know about it is that they dropped a LOT of titans on each other for the armor timer, and that when the hull timer arrived test was a bit late to the party and instead of jumping the whole fleet, there were a lot of issues with the servers and they just fed one titan after the other. Sucks for TEST but hey, that’s content for you.

I’ve lost one of my favorite ships to fly the other day, my good old Omen Navy Issue. Turns out I have no idea how to correctly fly this thing anymore and I got myself webbed and scrammed by a Praxis which had already killed a bifrost of one of my fleetmates a few seconds earlier.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/89767586/

Oh well, live and learn, I thought I could handle him, I didn’t.

The good thing however, is that we more than made up the loss later on in the evening. Including and not limited to this juicy, juicy pod. https://zkillboard.com/kill/89769609/

It’s fine girl, I still love you

I’m pretty sure the guy was accidentally still in the pod he was in when he lost his Hel. Either that or he has enough ISK to not give a damn that he’s flying a 5 bill pod in his Isthar, if that’s the case, good for him!

Another thing that happened where I was extremely lucky and taught a new lesson, was when trying to roll a hole.

Turns out that these days HICs have new modules that get their mass down, it no longer works with putting up all 4 bubbles, no you need the module now. I had a hole that was critical and decided to roll it with my good old trusty hic rolling fit. Lucky for me it didn’t collapse behind me in nullsec because as it turns out, my mass wasn’t anywhere near as low as I thought it was.

Lesson learned, time to bring the new modules in the hole too.

After not having played for so long it’s a bit confusing, there’s new ships, new fits, old fits that may or may not work. But it’s all fine, I know what to do.

Also, what happened to the captain’s quarter? I can’t find it anywhere!

I’m still a noob.

Stay tuned o7