Eviction target

For those of you that, like me, have been living under a rock the past few days. Here’s some news for you.

Hard Knocks is getting evicted by Goonswarm.

I don’t know much about how and why but from what I gather is that The Initiative has been planning to do this for the past couple of month.  

People are currently tuning in as the current biggest Wormhole corporation in EVE is getting evicted from their home hole. Something many people have thought impossible.

I have been in wormhole groups for the past couple of years and there’s always been a bit of a love/hate relationship when talking about HardKnocks. There’s no arguing that they did good, they were the first to build a keepstar in their home, are able to bring huge fleets and rent out C6 space.

Problem that most people have with it, is that there’s absolutely no way to fight a powerblock like that. None.

As a pilot that has always been in small wormhole corporations, the moment I rolled into rage I made sure that the whole chain got rolled. I never wanted anything to do with them being anywhere near me because it meant overwhelming numbers and losing my ships without ever having stood a chance. 

The fact that they rent out the C6 space also meant that other corporations never really had a chance to set it up themselves. They’re basically to wormholes what null sec alliances do to null sec. Something I’ve already talked about in the past that I hate.

It’s a shame that this is a null sec alliance pushing them out. But let’s be real, no way in hell would us wormholers been able to make this happen. We do not have the resources, logistics or people to do this. 

I’m curious what this means for the future of wormhole space. I just hope it won’t come and bite us all in the ass. I’d rather not have HK be replaced by a bunch of nullseccers. 

Especially seeing that I am starting to log in once more. 

Stay tuned o7

The way of life

A while back I told myself that if I ever decided to go check out K-space again, I would join up with Goonswarm. Not because I know much about null sec politics and because I think they’re “cool” and whatnot. But mostly because I thought that if I were to join a group, why not join the group everyone loves to hate.

So when the guys I flew with decided to go back to Stain for a while. I just went ‘Ok, let’s see if I can get into Goons’

At the time of writing this, I have literally been part of the Goonswarm for seven days.

In those seven days I have setup jabber, mumble coms, other authentication stuff like their forums etc etc. And joined in on a few fleets. I had a few problems with the fleets itself but that’s the way of life out here.

I killed a few Rorquals earlier today, so that’s nice. We did a two hour roam with a 100+ man fleet. Which was new for me, not really as exciting as doing the same thing with only 10 to 15 people.

But I did come to the conclusion that I really, really don’t like nullsec.

I hate local with a passion, I hate that they have programs like Vintel or TACO or whatever else that can scrape the chatlog and give you a literal warning sound when a neutral arrives because scouts told you.

I hate that you are literally safe from everything as long as you use those things. It’s just not for me. I like wormhole space and the fact that my home will randomly pop in your home from time to time.

That I can scan around and watch someone without them knowing I’m there.

Kspace is just not for me.

I am currently making a few new plans. I will be setting up in a wormhole once more. But this time I won’t be joining an old one, it’ll be a fully new set up. New citadels etc. New way of living.

This is giving me a new objective. And that’s what you need in this game. Objectives to aim for and succeed in.

I’m sure it’ll work out fine. I have a few things in mind that will happen in the next few weeks.

On a little ISK related notice. I have put a big part of my liquid ISK into PLEX. There have been a few rumors that make me think that we haven’t seen the end of the price inflation yet.

A few weeks ago I had bought a few dozen Machariel hulls, right after the announcement that in the near future alpha clones will be able to use them. Since then their price has gone up by almost 50% so that was fun to watch. I still have about 16 hulls left right now. Once the price starts to drop again I’ll probably sell them. Until then, I’m keeping them around. You never know.

Stay tuned o7

You win some, you lose some

From time to time when you hunt, you don’t get any kills. A perfect example for that was us rolling a bunch of holes during the week and not having any luck. Literally doing twenty different Null sec systems and only finding a VNI here and there that was at his keyboard. Not that we care about catching those.

Yesterday however, was a good day. We had a wormhole into Providence at first. And as most of you know. Providence is an amazing ground for hunting. They have their KOS list but even if you’re on it they tend to ignore you until it’s too late.

A perfect example was me being in a system, with my sabre, for over ten minutes and still being able to tackle three different VNI’s that were ratting. That was just for shits and giggles though. My fleet was too far out so I just tried soloing them see what happened. Unfortunately I couldn’t kill them but I wasn’t stupid enough to stay in my own bubbles so was able to get away every single time.
If not for that one interceptor I probably would have killed one of them.

A little later we had a few guys in local “laughing” at us. I say laughing because they just thought it was funny we had a Stork along. Figured it wouldn’t hurt. They were playing station games, undocking, docking. You know the drill.

Cue us going on a gate. And one of them coming to a ping on said gate. At which point I warped back to station at 100, put up a bubble, wondering if he’d be stupid enough to warp back.

He was.

So that was providence. The first part of our Sunday.

After that we enjoyed ourselves by rolling a few new holes. In one of them we hit the jackpot. Delve. Goons. Rorquals. Three of them in fact. We had them all tackled, had them all panicked. And right when their support fleet came over we killed one of them. One is better than none, three would have been better. But all in all, good fights were had and we had a lot of fun.

The joys of wormhole space though. One day you might not get anything, but eventually, you’ll get what you want.

Stay tuned o7

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I made a little deal

Wormhole space is a fickle mistress. And BoB a god that giveth and taketh.

The other day one of the guys on TeamSpeak was asking about someone docked up in one of our Citadels. A Russian, someone we had never seen before.

Seeing that we had bought this wormhole from someone, Astrahus included. I figured this was a previous occupant, logging onto EvE after being away for at least six months, only to log on and find him or herself in a citadel that they no longer owned.

So I decided to start a conversation with this person. And it turns out I was right. The guy (or girl I have no idea, for the sake of this story I’ll just go with him) was a member of a Russian corp that used to live here.

Now, the Russian part is pretty important in this. Since half the things that was said, was probably lost in translation somewhere. I basically offered him a way out to highsec and to buy his assets off of him. This was in my mind a pretty good deal. Since we could have easily just unanchored the citadel and taken all of the assets anyhow.

It took over 4 frustrating hours before he was finally able to show me his assets. Having never heard of EvePraisal, having never before used the fitting window to show his fits to people. It took a lot of screenshots on my end showing him which buttons to press etc etc.

I’m pretty sure he never even used a trade window before, since when the ISK I offered showed up as red for him he thought he was going to have to pay that.

But in the end I bought nearly 8bill in assets and ships off of him. Well, I paid him 8, it was worth quite a bit more but without a way for him to get it out, beggars can’t be choosers.

This has nothing to do with the post. I just like flying Panthers

After a while he logged on to another character on the account. I was ready to show him to highsec, so I warped to the first of three wormholes leading outside. He had undocked in a Kronos. Fine, he probably didn’t want to sell it to me and wanted it out. He warped to me. Only to warp away to one of the moons on which we put up a dead stick and then log off.

This confused me, I had no idea what he was doing.

After he logged on to his main again, this time undocking a Barghest and asking me to show him the way out.

Now, by this time, I decided that the way out for him, would be the pod express. The fact that he made me talk to him for hours on end to finally conclude our bargain had me frustrated. And I wanted some PvP action.

Knowing that he still had to move out the Kronos too, I decided that the Barghest could go. So I gave him a way out. Meanwhile, I asked a few of my guys to keep an eye on the tower. And I needed some tackle in order to catch him once he jumped the static.

After he was in highsec with the Barghest pilot, he logged off, and logged in the Kronos. Time for a proper goodbye.

He warped to the A3, thanked me again, and got bubbled as he jumped into our static C5.

It did not survive long. This was a marauder without a bastion module. I have no idea what it was used for, but it definitely was not made to survive too long.

I felt slightly bad about doing this afterwards. But, this is still EvE. And I did fulfil my end of the deal. He made it back to highsec.

Stay tuned

E’dyn

Null sec.. Why did I do this again

The past few weeks haven’t been too good for us. In order to fix this I decided to see if we can do some random stuff in nullsec. Seeing that we had people that came from nullsec around, and the guys we were joining were supposed to be pretty ok. I figured that maybe it could help us get some activity up again.

I was wrong, dead wrong. It did help in reminding me why I hate nullsec though. The guys we joined were blue with everyone within 20 jumps of them. The whole region and the region next to it were their friends. Which is just silly, no fun in that.

Not only that but when intel channels tell you where someone is, and another program literally sounds an alarm when you’re ratting. How on earth do people think this is fun? One of the guys just used our time in there to get his ISK up a bit more by literally watching Netflix while his Ishtars were AFK in Havens. Everytime a neutral came close an alarm would sound and he’d have plenty of time to get out.

Null-seccers are literally more risk averse than any other dweller in the game. Even people in High-sec take more risk.

But ok, that’s ratting, what about pvp? Well PvP wise it was pretty much dry too. With all those blue you have to travel a bit to kill someone. I joined a 250 man fleet and nothing happened. They were there to watch a Fortizar while PL was killing the shields off the M-O keepstar.

At that point I decided I wanted to get out of null again as soon as possible. Being risk averse and part of the big blop is fun for some people, but not for me. I hate local, I hate that people can just set up a program and have an alarm sound if someone’s too close. And I sure don’t like the fact that if you’re not outnumbering them 10 to 1 you won’t fight.

I’ll stick to wormhole space thank you very much. At least you need to put some effort in doing things there.

I admit it’s not always easy, especially if you’re one of the only ones doing it. But at least I feel pride in doing things.

Even something as silly as setting up an extra Citadel made me smile. Mostly because I was pretty sure Inner Hell had a fleet logged off in our hole to come shoot it once it unanchored. Glad I was wrong there. They’ve made one my guys pretty paranoid since they already dropped him a few times.

Which makes it a fun running joke on TS.

I’m leading a corp now. I should probably make some more rules for the guys to ignore.

Stay tuned o7

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Random act of kindness

Random act of kindness

EVE is a pretty cut throat game for the most part. Some people will scam you if they can, others will steal all your stuff if you trust them just a little too much. And most people will happily shoot your ship to spice up their zKillboard stats.

And then there are those that from time to time, decide to nice towards their fellow EVE players, and make them smile.

Today that happened to me. To sketch the situation a bit; I was rolling our static C5 in search for a decent one to do some stuff in. In general that means pushing a Megathron through a few times, usually 5 passes with Microwarpdrive on will do the trick into collapsing the hole (MWD gives you about 100mill more mass on the battleship).

Basically 10 jumps back and forth. On number 6 it went half. Normally on jump number 9 it would go critical and you’d close it in coming back.
This time it went critical coming back. Me having my numbers near me, figured that meant that I’d have about 250 000 000 mass left on the hole, plenty for another normal pass with the ship and then come back to close it.

I was wrong.

Stuck on the other side, a C5 that wasn’t scanned down, in a Megathron, fit with a probe launcher and normal probes.
Those of you who scan from time to time will know that it’s a huge pain in the ass to do so with normal probes, let alone from a battle ship.

But this C5 had a C3 static so I figured I might be able to scan that one down and then hopefully find a high-sec exit. There were six signatures to scan down, after doing two I was sick of it.
Two gas sites and that took me over ten minutes (this isn’t my scanning alt so his skills are even worse).

Seeing that I had the option to self-destruct or keep myself busy while grinding through the scanning part I decided to do “Mr. lonely” in local. Which got me a response from someone asking me why I was sitting there and if he could help me.

He told me he was sitting on a low sec exit and to invite him to fleet so I could get out of the hole. Due to the nature of the game I was a bit apprehensive about this but my only other option was to self-destruct.

So I took a leap of faith, invited the guy and warped to him. Him being true to his word, he was sitting on a low-sec exit.  I thanked him, gave him some ISK for his trouble (yay no scanning for me).
He then told me that if I wanted to he could bridge me to another low, closer to high-sec.
This guy already made part of my day by giving me an exit, I figured “Why not, if he jumps me with something at least I got some content out of it”

But nope, I had no reason whatsoever to be sceptical about his intentions.
Not only did he help me get out of the wormhole, in a system two jumps from where I was at, he logged in his Titan, and bridged me. One jump from highsec, 13 from Amarr.

Bridging me in a Titan? Damn man you're the best

Bridging me in a Titan? Damn man you’re the best

This is literally the sixth time I’ve seen a Titan in the game and it was because I did something random, and someone decided to be nice.

Thank you for your random act of kindness man.

Days like this, is why I love EVE.

Stay tuned o7

You win some, you lose some

The past week was a good one for us. We killed a bunch of people, harvested tears of those we killed and had fun in general. I enjoy this corporation because it’s the first time I actually like getting on TeamSpeak to talk to these guys and to form fleets with. The fact that my killboard stays in green most of the time is an added benefit.

The last 7 days started with our decision to go out and do more wormhole stuff instead of just dunking people through our nullsec. So the first thing we did when finding a citadel with a timer in our time zone was to park a scout in that hole and make sure people knew we’d go out to try and reinforce it when the time was there.

In the meantime we scanned our chain more than we usually did and found a few targets to kill. People rolling holes, people ratting in their hole with Domi’s and not having a scout on the hole.

One of the nights we had La Division Blue in our chain, they had two Myrmiddons parked on a hole and we knew they would have a fleet parked somewhere else. Because supposedly that’s what they do. We shipped into our T3 fleet and had an Armageddon go engage. They started to kill him so we jumped into the hole too to go and help him out, only to have a dozen remote-repping Stratios’ de-cloak on the other side. Time for a little fight. We had about 3 guardians with us and then the rest of the fleet. We did pretty well, keeping up the reps, they weren’t able to break us and we broke them slowly. But unfortunately they disengaged and fled with their tail between their legs. But they did lose one of the Myrmiddons so there’s that. It wasn’t a fight to the death but we did learn that our fleet composition was pretty solid so that was a good thing.

On the night of the citadel timer we went into our T3 fleet, Legions, Lokis, Tengus, Proteus’ and Guardians. All in all a very nice fleet. I was one of the guardians because I can’t fly the HAM Legion just yet.

2016-09-25-19-13-30

Repping train, choochoo

We started the bash and before you know it two Thanatos’ and a Ninazu land on grid. We obviously decided that this would be our new target. So we switched, and because we’re nice people we told our alliance we had a few carriers tackled and asked if they wanted to come whore on it.

Cue a “battle” in which we repaired the enemies, our own pilots AND kept shooting a citadel, only so that our friends could come whore on the kills.
Unfortunately I couldn’t whore on them myself because my drones got bombed by the citadel. I should have waited with taking them out until the fight was almost done but I was too eager.

Not only did we kill them and reinforce the citadel. But in the meantime the alliance was suiciding a few T3’s on a citadel to keep that timer from running out. It needed to be killed too.
So as soon as we were done it was time to move towards the other operation. It was funny to see the timer stuck on 2second. And in the end we killed an Astrahus which dropped a few nice ships. Albeit with bad fits.

Who doesn't love explosions

Who doesn’t love explosions

Unfortunately, all streaks come to an end and that’s what happened yesterday.

We decided on a new sort of fleet. Stratios’ + Legions to go wormhole diving. Due to me liking the legion but not having bought one yet, I decided to buy it. Only to lose it half an hour later. I have to admit that it stung. I lost that ship due to stupidity and it shouldn’t have died. But that’s life in EvE, you win some, you lose some. And with every loss, you learn something new. Luckily some of my salt washed away little under an hour later when we killed a few Gilas. They were badly fitted but still, a kill is a kill.

Goodbye little Legion, I hardly knew you

Goodbye little Legion, I hardly knew you

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

Ship ahoy, or something like it

“Ahoy mateys, we’ve got targets ahead.”

Or at least that’s what I was thinking when scanning the chain, seeing a bunch of retrievers on D-scan and jumping 100 off the only ore site, only to find them warping in.

It’s always fun when you have people warp in right when you get there, means you’ve got people to kill. Or to kill you I guess.

As soon as I saw the retrievers I logged onto E’dyn and grabbed my Sabre, while asking the few others online if they were up to killing them.

About twenty minutes later, we had a little fight going on. I did lose my Sabre but all in all, we came out ISK positive, and that’s what we like seeing.

2016.07.25.19.16.53

One of the miners we killed came back in a Cerberus and the other in a Stratios. Luckily we had a tanky hurricane with us that could take them on, if only for a while.

It was a first for me, seeing as I hadn’t killed someone in a wormhole for quite some time, and this was the first time I found the targets myself.

Yesterday was another first for me, the first time I played FC. Before starting I warned the others to go in ships that they wouldn’t mind losing. Seeing as I obviously have no idea what I’m doing.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get any kills other than an MTU (Yay us)! But it was good practise, and you have to start somewhere.

If any of you feel like joining us in our little adventures, join up the Y4CHT channel ingame, come and say hi. We’re friendly, I promise

Stay tuned o7

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Roaming nullsec

Tonight, is a good day to die..
Unless you go roam in Providence, because they don’t want to fight.

Or at least that’s how it felt the other day.

The evening started as any other, checking if the corporation or alliance were up to something. Just minutes after logging we were asked to get into one of our doctrines, a citadel was going to come out of reinforcement and we were going to come help and defend it, because supposedly people were going to come out and kill it.

After getting into our ships, moving out of the chain and into highsec, we burned to destination, where the rest of the fleet was waiting. We had about 50+ people in fleet so it was going to be a good fight.

But unfortunately nothing happened, the attackers supposedly saw our fleet and decided that they didn’t want a fair fight.

That was quite unfortunate but that’s the way EvE works, sometimes you get people to kill, other times you get blueballed.

So the next plan was going out on a little roam across Providence, we’re red to them, so we figured that we could get a fight out of them. But before doing this, we went a few jumps further.

Someone knew of a group that was helping a bunch of new players get their first steps in wormhole space. And it was agreed upon that we’d go drop on them. Our FC was going to reimburse the newbie’s ships but it would give them a feel of getting dropped on. Seeing that in w-space you’re supposed to be prepared to at all times have someone de-cloak on you.

We killed about 5 of them, and supposedly they loved it. They must have had a major adrenaline rush going on, I know I would have. It definitely made me smile, knowing that these guys loved the fact that we killed them, instead of being salty about it. Newbro’s are great like that.

I have killmarks!

I have killmarks!

After this, we lost a few people due to the fact that it was a bit late and a workday, I on the other hand took a day off so I could go on for a little while longer.

Ready to go

Ready to go

We decided to reship into remote repping battleships and go to Providence, we’d lose the ships but hopefully get a few good fights out of it.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, not even close. We jumped around providence for 2 or 3 hours, the only thing we were able to kill a Crane. Here we were, hoping to die, and Providence did absolutely nothing, I’m hoping that it was both due to the late hour and it being a weekday. But still.

These days null seems to not want to fight, either docking up and waiting until we leave, or logging off.

So for those of you in null-sec reading this. Please, please don’t dock up, get your friends, form a defence fleet, and have a brawl. It’s a lot more fun than ratting, I know, I’ve been on the other side.

Stay tuned o7