15/05/11 08:39 AM
| Arkonor | 285 |
| Bistot | 217 |
| Mercoxit | 192 |
| Crokite | 187 |
| Hedbergite | 171 |
| Hemorphite | 168 |
| Jaspet | 152 |
| Dark Ochre | 147 |
| Pyroxeres | 118 |
| Kernite | 106 |
| Veldspar | 99 |
| Scordite | 93 |
| Gneiss | 90 |
| Plagioclase | 88 |
| Spodumain | 82 |
| Omber | 81 |
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On Being Gone Without Leaving
Some of you may have noticed that I have been slightly less textually productive as of late. The reason stems from a decision to fly down to the surface and spend some time overseeing the latest colony action from the box seats. I chose one of my planets in the wormhole and got down to the surface to get a real hands on feel for working on a plasma farm.
With the exception of the environmental systems [which are a complete pain at the best of times], the time was a fruitful exploration of what is going on at the root level of the colony that I had set up on the planet’s surface. I worked at all the different levels that I had set up, from extracting raw ingredients to processing them as tier one materials and finally combining those into still newer tier two products. I learned a lot about what goes into keeping the colony running as well as being efficient with the use of materials, layout of facilities, storage logistics and import/export excises [can anyone explain how CONCORD is collecting the isk I pay to import/export from way out in the wormhole?].
The net result of all of this: I was pretty well distracted for the last couple of months and managed to let everything here slide. Things like alliance and corporate operations were delegated, payments and diplomacy were put on hold or handed off, other income and revenue streams were throttled back and general amount of time in a pod was only the barest minimum to cover my ongoing capsuleer licensure. I am especially grateful to the men and women of WHEN who stepped up and carried a lot of extra responsibility during my absence.
On Using PI In Our Wormhole
What seems like a sure-win situation with the planets we had available before the release has turned into an annoying state of affairs that will need a lot more work to make it a production reality. Whereas we initially had a fairly good spread of lava, gas, barren, ice, storm – we now have lava, barren, temperate, plasma, storm. This is coupled with the fact that it would appear that any two given resources needed on a planet to manufacture a specific tier 2 product are in fact separated by a fairly large distance. This requires a lot of CPU for links and reduces a given colony’s effectiveness.
After polling the other pilots who are setting up shop in the w’hole, it seems that they are needing about 2-3 million per planet set-up in extractor and refinery costs. This is assuming that you get it right and don’t have to move anything around later. We’re still in the exploratory phase and will likely end tearing down and rebuilding several times before we get it ‘right’. This is also coupled with the fact that we’ll need to start co-ordinating our productions once people have a better handle on the process.
On the plus side, we have more than enough enriched uranium to last out the decade. Too bad we can’t set up a shop out here in the nether world for pilots passing through to buy from us. Corporate Sales Array anyone?
The silence was unbearable. Millions of neurons screamed in absence of any sensory input. It was as if the whole universe had been ripped away like a free will of a Sansha or the salary of a Caldari merchant. Dark, echoless space surrounded me and sheer endless black stared back at my soul. Before was a relative concept that was beginning to lose its cohesive shape and after was as distant as a point singularity. There was only the faintest of amorphous sensation surrounding what should have been now. The weight of thousands of days training and tens of thousand experiences demanded that something, anything, happen.
It was time to make a change – to rip open the veil and tear back the sky.
Electrochemical connections surged with pain and relief as long dormant paths of study were pulled to the fore of consciousness. What was once routine seemed muffled and disconnected in light of more recent solitude and stillness. The energy needed and required was straining my systems to their very core – and it was good. Today was going to be a good day. Who knows? If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even get to die.
The first sensation is one of swaying stillness and the sound of a million silent voices. Suddenly there was a gut wrenching sliding and a visual influence and indication that an e-warp was underway and my ship was soon to be at its former location. I had only the faintest recollection of where that might be and was still busy checking my systems and their responsiveness. Or in my case the lack there of. Fully half of my ships modules were offline and the ones that were on seemed to be unwilling to respond. Why was everything still so slow.
Realisation dawned with the sickening force of a collapsing wormhole. I was finally jacked back into my ship and until I had finished the initial e-warp, the ships systems would be unable to comply. I quickly pulled up the camera feeds to try and get a bearing while simultaneously asking the computer for a quick and dirty 360˚ sweep of the local theater for anything remotely telling. Skills were like old friends that you hadn’t seen in years – you knew what they were then and it was going to take practice. Practice like time, was something that I might be out of.
Ships. Tens, hundreds, thousands of ships were cluttering up my inputs, demanding my attention and stealing my distracted mind to narrow alleys that would be less than profitable if traversed. As I neared the end of my warp bubble, I flipped to overview Gamma and started looking for exits. I threw as many distractions as I could quickly grab into the corner and tried as hard as I could to ignore the rest. My priorities were to get safe, get back online and get back to where I truly belonged. This was madness and I couldn’t be farther from the reality I understood and grasped.
Finally finding something that looked right I punched up the destination, diverted the cap to the drives and hoped the local group would just ignore my half functional ship and its limited cargo. As I landed on the gate, I realised I had miscalculated and was 15 km off the back of the gate and my propulsion was one of the stupid modules that wouldn’t respond. Pounding the interface didn’t seem to help make it active so I put the last remaining cap into the one remaining hardner and turned toward the gate. With blind luck I might make it before someone decided to liberate my conscious from my capsule… I don’t mind so much as I hate not being able to participate in the festivities. If I am going to die, I plan on at least leaving some ammo behind in their hull.
I hit the jump range and mash it, waiting for my systems to catch up with the trans-luminal displacement my ship has just experienced. As the scans loaded and I was able to get some rational data I realised I just jumped into…
On the Prevalence of Drakes in Alliance Tournaments
I have noticed that on more than one occasion, the commentators for the Alliance Tournament VIII and in previous year lament the presence of Drakes on combat teams. Reasoning varies from low DPS to just extending the inevitable. Over the years, one thing that has held fairly consistent is the appearance and usage of Drakes by teams in the Alliance Tournaments. There are always multiple teams that field multiple Drakes. They are in fact, one of the most often fielded ships and account for a whopping 44% of all battlecruisers and more isk was spent on Drakes than battleships. Whatever else they might be, they are certainly present on a large number of teams. In the Alliance Tournament VII they were the third most popular ship behind the Rook and Ishkur.
 Dead Duck As the general consensus is that Drakes are poorly suited for PVP combat, why then do they show up so much? The certainly aren’t a requirement for victory as multiple teams have finished well and strongly without any Drakes on the field. Losing teams that fielded Drakes lost every one of them. Winning teams that fielded them lost 2 with a 87.5% survival rate and those were lost in the first match of the tournament. There is a lot of Drake-hate across the board.
This animosity towards the Drake extends far beyond the tournament. If you show up in a Drake for non-Drake fleet roams, you likely face ridicule. If you post a fitting on Battleclinic for a Drake you will get flamed and the fitting locked [more of an endemic problem with using Battleclinic in the first place] and posting to Scrapheap Challenge often results in cries of “Ban 09′s” and now “Ban 10′s” [referring to the registration date of the poster]. People associate the Drake with low-skill, new players who want to run missions and without worrying about anything other than F1, F2, F3, F4, F5, F6, F7 [though now with grouping it has become even easier] and with Caldari Carebears who can’t be arsed to train for a real ship.
Maybe some of the FC’s with tournament experience can shed some light on this. I fully acknowledge the tournament doesn’t accurately reflect normal EVE PVP play. There are rules, there are boundaries, there are no Caps, there are relatively even numbers, there are no poddings…. Thus the expectations for what to bring may very well differ significantly than for a PVP conflict outside the tourney. In spite of all this, I think there are some valid reasons for their inclusion of the much maligned duck:
- Tank
- It will likely take more than one opponent shooting at it to be taken down.
- It can often stay on the field for a long, long time.
- It is not as cap unfriendly as the other tank options.
-
 Incoming! Damage
- It can still produce a fair amount of damage:
- Heavy Missiles can generate between 330 [EM/Exp/Therm]-400 [kinetic] DPS
- Heavy Assault Missiles can generate between 450 [EM/Exp/Therm]- 570 [kinetic] DPS
- It can apply it’s damage over +70 km range for the Heavy Missiles
- Alpha strikes exceed 2,500.
- Drones can add another 80-100 dps with good skills.
Combined, this tank/damage combination causes two things to happen.
- Opponent FC’s hesitate to primary Drakes for the relative difficulty in removing them.
- Drakes are able to apply their damage over a longer period of time than similar ships.
Unless something changes significantly to affect the Drake’s tank or its bonuses, we will continue to see a lot of them fielded in the Alliance Tournaments.
On Moving Slowly And Taking Notes
 Sisters of the Guardian We managed to scan out our static and a connecting class 5 wormhole with some nice gas and anomalies. The static was a class two, which no doubt affected the desirability of said wormhole. After some random dithering and discussion, we decided we had sufficient fleet strength and numbers to check out some of the combat opportunities. It helped to sway us that the system contained a Cataclysmic Variable spacial anomaly that works heavily in favour of our chose remote repair strategy. In fact, it means that the large remote armor repair modules mounted on our Guardian logistics ships are 85% more effective!
The Vital Core Reservoir is known to have a couple of Sleepless Keeper battleship sized drones in it and we haven’t faced this particular kind before. Our initial plan of attack involves a fleet of Mr.’s Maelstrom, Scorpion, Dominix and Rook, and finally the Sisters of the Guardian2 for the first encounter. Since the person who scanned down the site had warped to it previously, the enemy was right at hand and waiting to be studied and evaluated. The Guardians quickly set up their logistics lock while Mr.’s Scorpion and Rook began to jam the two battleship class ships. Someone somewhere was writing all this down and making notes about comparable lock times, ECM resistance levels and initial alpha strikes from the ships. Once the initial observations were made, first one and then both battleships were allowed to regain locks and incoming damage assessment began. We were pleasantly surprised with our results and proceeded to just pummel the poor ships after gaining our data.
After gathering some basic intelligence reports from this Ladar, we opted to do the same with a combat site. The results were similarly enlightening and led to some nice discussions about the prospects of future class 5 wormhole colonisation. One of the things we noticed was the slight change from a higher alpha strike to a more sustained DPS. Whereas when we moved from a class 3 to the first class 4 site was the noticeable increase in the first wave of incoming damage. This was probably due in part to our slightly lower skills, unknown expectations and difficult fleet composition. The intervening months have taught us a great deal about how to operate together more efficiently. We were later joined by our Ms. Abaddon pilot and Mr. Frigate Ganking Harbinger. The increased DPS mitigated some of the ECM needs, so Mr. Rook flew off to expedite the salvage operation.
While not an overall cake walk [buy ticket, listen to music, note number, pick up cake] it was certainly an enjoyable exploration of a possible future direction. Little Mr. Harbi took one in the chin as without an explosive armor hardner, even the 8 combined, staggered, drone-assisted, Cataclysmic Variable boosted remote repairs from the Sisters of G2 could help survive the incoming damage. He ping-ponged in and out of structure [full armor, then 95% structure, full armor, 80% structure, full armor, then still lower structure, full armor, 25% structure, full armor, 5% structure] until finally entertaining us with a nice puff of atmospherics and some light. It helped that it was a highly profitable evening with the combat portion of the exploration hovering around 1 billion in revenue for a couple hours work and research.
To cap off the night, a couple of ran back and harvested the 300 million isk gas cloud as there are some friends who would like those polymers. Good deeds and all.
On Friends Coming To Join Us
 Bandits In The Hole This last week or so has seen our good friends and alliance-mates the Fearless Bandits come out to play. They are mainly the Greater Realms’ highsec mission and PVE corporation but they are looking for some diversion and adventure so they have trundled out to the wormhole to set up shop. They have already proven their worth on multiple occasions previously, have been a part of the alliance planning and development from the beginning and we are thrilled to have them along for the ride. It is always a good thing to have more friends around.
While they are primarily focused on mission running in high security, Empire space, they have very quickly adapted to life out in the ‘holes. There are still questions to be considered and answers to deliver, but it’s still a pleasant addition. They now have their own tower up and happily living from it as they join us for several combined operations. Initially they packed light and so we’ve loaned out a few of our now standard fits for them to use. It has helped to know exactly what they are flying and how it should perform in integrating them into our “well-oiled machine” [insert laughter here].
In addition to FEARL coming out to play, we’ve added several new faces who are old faces come round again. Some former corp-mates from long before have finally rejoined us and really stepped out mining/refining game. Hats off to them for helping to capitalise on the resources we just had floating around for lack of more barge pilots.
On Being Angry With CCP and/or GMs
I’ve read a lot of rants in my life. Everything from cats eating neighbours’ birds, gimped drone bay on Rokh, dogs leaving their calling cards on the lawn, cans flipped, presidents sleeping with interns, GCC timers, GUI problems [or complete and utter failure at Human Interface Design 101] and letting people talk to Mr. G. Brown. But all in all, I’ve always assumed the majority of them are emotional responses to complex issue that don’t particularly affect me directly. So I smile, nod my head and move on.
Until Now.
 Banned Wagon I’m on the bandwagon. No, wait, I’m on the Banned Wagon. Persona non grata in EVE. I go to log in and I’m greeted with – “Login Data Incorrect” and no explanation. Huh, fair enough, I must have mistyped my passw… nope. 0/2 on login attempts. Quickly check SpaceBook, er, EVE Gate. It’s more informative, “This account has been banned.” To quote a corp-mate, “Bweh?” What is going on here. I quickly double check my email in case I missed something. Nothing I can find. I check the spam folder, nothing there. Check the servers spam que – AHA! A very generic message from a supposed Mr. GM Something or other indicating that my account had been hacked and as a security measure the account had been banned. Ok, fair enough, I’m all for them trying to run a tight ship and protect us from the evil account hackers and keyloggers.
As indicated in the email, I replied and asked for the account to be reset so that I could reset the password and survey the damage. As a corporate director, I was a bit fearful of the damage that could be wreaked on both our corporation’s wallet, our assets and those of our alliance mates. I quickly checked with them as well as the CEO. Interestingly enough, my character had not logged in since my own last activity. Additionally, the millions of isk in the corporate wallet were untouched. This is one very incompetent hacker…
24 hours pass… no reply to petition, no reply to email, no status indication at all. Additional petitions are made from other accounts to try and get some semblance of a response, acknowledgement, update. My last skill training ran out 20 hours ago [which was why I was trying to log in to begin with]. 36 hours. 48 hours, a reply to one of the players petitions, “Your account has been reset as per the email sent in response to your original petition on ….” First things first, reset the password and get to training again while surveying the damage to my personal wallet. Ok, skill set, wallets – Full. In point of fact, there was more isk in my wallet than when I logged off 2 days ago [several large contracts had cleared as well as personal donation from a very dear friend upon the loss of a close personal ship. What? Where's my 0 isk balance? Why are there still assets in my name? Why didn't the evil hackers strip my assets, post offensive pictures on the eve-o forum, offline all our towers and kick everyone out of the corp?
Hmm. Sure their must have been a reason they Fort Knox'd my account? The sheer paucity information released leads to my rampant speculation wherein I have then two broad scenarios that I can imagine [help me if I'm missing something]:
- My account was hacked in such a fashion as to easily alert prescient CCP/GMs to it’s compromised status and they reacted so quickly that no damage had been done while incompetent third world sweatshop hackers failed to capitalise on their access and steal the millions, nay, billions in ill-gotten gains from myself and corporation.
OR
- CCP/GMs are clicking buttons at random over there in New Hawaii and wouldn’t know a hacked account from a large cloud of volcanic dust if it blew up in their back yard.
If scenario one is correct, I encourage everyone to take a moment and give CCP/GMs a little golf clap for their supernatural ability to ferret out RMTs, hacked accounts and macro miners/ratters with ease. I would be momentarily happy to be a part of their Unholy Rage. If you’re right, everyone is happy and the experience gets better.
If scenario two is correct [and I'm more inclined to believe this given that I can just about find macro miners in every system with ice and macro ratters everytime our wormhole exit pops up in null-sec coupled with my own recent experience], then I am just sad. OK, angry and sad. I lost 48 hours of training time for someone else’s mistake? I missed out on 200-500m in revenue and cost my corp-mates the opportunities to do so as well, due to contributing to group activities? If you are wrong, admit you made a mistake and set things right.
On Running Out To High-Sec For Some Groceries
As I slip into my ship, I get an incoming com from one of our pilots. He’s actually the only other pilot right now. He mentions that there’s a four jump exit to high-sec and he’s going out to grab some Quafe as it’s getting dry here at home. I am also rather keen to grab a new book or two to read as I’m nearly finished with the current series I’m reading, Recon. It has been a really good series with lots of fun times and some new information along the way, but by the fifth one in the series, it was getting a bit long winded. I am usually patient about finishing the books I start, but for some reason Recon drug by. The Exhumer series seemed to go much faster and even finishing up reading the Astrometric Rangefinding series rather quickly, though it was published under another title.
 New Mini Game? As the other pilot hit the last system before k-space, he reports back that there is small bubble on the hole but poorly placed. Knowing that he’s intending to bring a ship back through, I volunteer to do some bubble popping. I decide that since it is not absolutely essential that I clear the bubble out quickly [other pilot has several jumps to get his ship picked up] and I do not really want to waste any ammo on the stupid thing [sig-rad is tiny on those things] I opt for a pulse Coercer. For those that maybe know some of the ships I usually fly, this is a fairly wide departure [not because it is Amarr] because I am exceptionally unskilled at laser turrets. This almost seems counter culture to flying ships in space, but the reality is, they just never appealed to me all that much. So I trundle the three jumps to the bubbled hole and jump through. Sure enough, a bubble greets me, but I am immune to its psychological effects and uncloak and lock it up. I start flying with the beams of light and watch as the shields on the bubble start to melt satisfyingly, albeit not too terribly fast.
Suddenly, there is a sound, a flash of light [or darkness], and there is a Tengu sitting 10 km off my stern and beginning to lock my ship. Ack, alas and alack, I am in a destroyer fit with racks of heat sinks and some cap rechargers. This is not going to be a fight, it’s going to be a little blip in the pond. Salvo 1 and the shields are gone. Salvo 2 and I am trying to remember if my clone was up-to-date. Salvo 3 and at 30% shields it dawns on me that I have not moved since I jumped into this system and the wormhole is still right there. I start spamming the jump button hoping that my poor ship [actually someone else's poor ship that I borrowed] will hold together until the session change starts. Lo, there is sound and light again and I’m sitting in a distinctly different location though with about 2% of my armor left and thankfully no structure damage.
Not waiting to see if Mr. Don’t Harsh My Bubble decides to follow for the kill, I immediately start heading back home to rethink my strategy in light of the change in situation. I update the pilot out on his shopping spree and he is easily swayed into agreeing that we should ‘defend’ ourselves [ignoring the fact that we may have, um, started things] and try and catch the sneaky, wormhole camping strategic cruiser.
 Strats on the Brain As a bit of an aside, I have been thinking a lot about the ‘strats’ both from the perspective of picking one up myself as well as their reputation. Though they deserve the kudos they get for being good at a lot of things and their ability to quickly specialise at something extremely well, they are still ships. They can and do die with increasing frequency. From this I have a couple of electrifying bolts of insight:
- There are a lot of really bad ship fittings in the universe.
- Everyone and their clone is buying ‘strats’.
- The sheer number of possible fittings is confusing to say the least.
- Someone is bound to get it wrong, sometime.
and
- How much of their reputation is based on fear.
So we decide to ship up in something suitably pointy and head back and ‘defend’ our right to fly through a system they are living in. The ship shopper contacts another pilot and he slips into our well crafted bait ship to draw the Tengu pilot into engaging. In this case it is a Harbinger that we managed to forget to refit before heading out. It has lasers… well, it has lasers. Ship shopper jumps in a Lachesis to get the long range point and damp the Tengu’s range. I waver between using the Pilgrim that I just finished studying up for or something else. In the end, my rather uncommon sense wins out and I opt for a Rook because the Tengu did not have any turrets when he attacked me. We move out, hoping that we can still catch him and that he does not have a scout on our side of his wormhole [we would have] or backup [we are not likely to think about having backup until we see structural damage].
At the wormhole, things seem quiet and so we engage in some tribal war calls and Bait is sent through to begin bubble burning and we sit in quiet contemplation of the swirling colours around us. In a few seconds we get the call, “Tengu uncloaked at 60km and locking,” to which we indecisively wonder if that is within our engagement range. Bait is ordered to try and kite him in the other direction for a few seconds and we prep to jump. As Bait’s shields finally disappear, we jump in and begin racing for the Tengu. He’s closed to within 50 of the hole and Ship Shopper is able to get a point. I’m able to lock but the first round of jams all fail which causes a bit of distress for Bait. About this time a fourth pilot joins us in his Curse. His neutralisers are welcome, but I’m unsure how effective. His drone on the other hand are very good at what they do.
In order to keep this from going too well, Tengu’s tango partner, Dr. Maelstrom lands 100km off an starts pinging at Bait as well. The ECM kicks in on round two and I try one on the Dr., and manage to get off a lucky strike [Caldari racial jammer on a Minmatar ship] which saves Bait who by now is flaming. Tengu has not been able to do anything since Ship Shopper and I got him damped and locked down and we begin to see his shields crumple. At about 10% shields the Maelstrom warps off just as Bait returns from the nearby planet to get in range of the wormhole [which was still bubbled, but remember, poorly]. The rest of the skirmish flashes by as the bubble-baitings, cloaky camping, terrible Tengu shatters in a sparkling shower of light and we fail to get a lock on the pod. Curse, Ship Shopper and I manage to loot the wreck on the way out of the system. Fearing a larger reprisal, we opt to not target the bubble and head back to our own home. Before we jump, the Tengu pilot lets fly with a ‘gf’ in local and we respond by thanking him for sticking the fight. As we’re warping through another system, Curse asks what a ‘Smokescreen’ Covert Ops Cloak is.
On Remembering Everything You Should Be Doing
So you are out roaming with your friend(s) hoping to find some juicy targets to jump on and clone them back home. What all do you need? Too many things pop into my head – match-up evaluation, situational awareness, environmental factors, meta-game factors, relationships, insurance, cost-benefit analysis [just say no]… and it all makes my head hurt. We’re primarily carebears, so our version of PVP usually involves something along the lines of [edit - fictional conversation following, names have been changed to protect the idiots and events have been altered for greater emphasis on the often humorous way we approach life in general]:
<pilot 1>: I got a <insert ship name> on d-scan in the C<number> two holes out.
<pilot 2>: At a tower?
<pilot 1>: Checking… Nope, want I should scan him down.
<pilot 3>: Reshipping to something pointy.
<pilot 2>: Get a warp-in and we’re on our way.
<pilot 1>: kk – can do.
<pilot 2>: ok, I got my Pilgrim – what are we doing again?
<pilot 1>: hunting wabbits – and get something more pointy as <insert different ship name> is a tough nut to crack
<pilot 3>: Huh? I thought we were going after a tower?
<pilot 2>: How about my Onyx?
<pilot 3>: How’s it fit?
<pilot 2>: HAMs and triple extenders, single WDFG.
<pilot 3>: Meh, won’t be much good against the tower.
<pilot 1>: oooh, you got a tower to shoot? I’m coming back to get the pulse ‘geddon.
<pilot 3>: I thought you had a tower to shoot?
<pilot 2>: I have an Imicus scrammed at our hole!
<pilot 1>: no, I was looking at a <insert still another different ship type>, but it’s unmanned at the tower.
<pilot 3>: Oh – I see, well time to go pick up the significant other at the airport, good luck with the killing.
<pilot 2>: no no no, omg, no – I’m dying to an imicus!
<pilot 1>: huh, you’re in an Onyx, how?
<pilot 2>: No, went back to the Pilgrim but forgot to online all my modules.
<pilot 2>: Gah – new implants for me… goodnight, see you all later.
<pilot 1>: Grah – newbs.
<pilot 4>: o/ Hello Pilot 1, how goes it.
<pilot 1>: you just missed 2 get waxed by an Imicus in his Pilgrim.
<pilot 4>: *snap*, anything else up?
<pilot 1>: got a couple of barges at a grav in c3, 2 jumps out, bms in the can, I’m manoeuvring in for a warp in.
<pilot 4>: cool – omw, HIC ok?
<pilot 1>: great. WH is off dscan so jump in and hold for warp in.
This doesn’t actually reflect any given conversation per se, but the contents are indicative of the great B-film classic, When Carebears Attack as seen somewhere dark and seedy, I am sure. We tend to do a lot of things to excess – too much discussion, too much consideration, too much talking, too much DPS or too much tank, too much flying around in circles, too much laughter and way too much fun. We tend to lack a good sense of: when to engage, when to run away, when to call it quits, what to fly at any given moment, what kind of wine goes good with the cafeteria’s mystery meat and how we managed to get along as well as we have without being utterly wiped out of the wormholes we live.
Mad props to our friends who help us along the way. Kudos to the people who are scanning stuff down faster than we can process them all. Congratulation to those pilots who’ve only managed to lose a couple of ships recently and even more to the ones who’ve taken their opponents down first.
Initially when we moved out into wormhole space, it was to explore, tap some of the untold riches and just see if we could survive. We managed to survive, so then we started practising getting better at “running away” and “not dying” as much. Lately we’ve moved from the running away [though we still do on occasion] to initiating conflict [sometimes at an alarming rate] and learning some lessons about how to actually have more ships than the enemy at the end of combat. At then end of the day, we’re happy when we live, resigned to the losses we incur and determined to carebear our way right through the next fleet we see.
On Being a Frog in Well Stocked Pond
The wormholes have been rolling by us at a rate of 2-3 a day. With our static Class 4 exit lasting at most 16 hours we usually have time more than enough time to harvest anything we roll across in the adjacent wormhole systems. If those systems are empty and their connections not holding any prospective targets to hunt down, we’re more than happy to roll the exit and see what else pops up. We’re easily running as many sites as we can possibly squeeze in between pilot availability, wormhole collapse and outside interference. It’s good on the wallet and fun for the participants – so who could want for anything more?
Time – as I posted above seems to be the limiting factor. Were there more of it in the right places, we’d accomplish even more. As it is, I’ve let the posts slide for the last two weeks. I’m behind on keeping up with not getting farther behind. The reasons are all good and I don’t regret them in any way. The first issue that demands more time is the burgeoning role of maintaining the new alliance. Hats off to Letrange on the way he’s managed to even stay sane let alone manage to get some play time in. And he even manages to post regularly. The second is some impending travel that is coming up for myself, and that means a lot of loose ends have to be tied up first. And finally, there are some issues with EVE and CCP that needed to be dealt with.
So, while having loads of fun, I’m a bit tired and looking for whoever it is stole my last billion isk. I’ll be coming for you…
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