EVE « Our EvE

The Reluctance of Time

On Scanning, Shooting, Salvaging, Harvesting, Hauling and Helping

In a whirlwind rush, the list of things to get done piles up and begins to look like a impending avalanche. There may be fields of ore just floating out in our system patiently waiting to hear from our barges. There are definitely wormholes that have yet to be found, surveyed, catalogued and stored. There are gases dispersing, hoping to be harvested and stored until processing. There planetary resources to extract, refine, process and export. There are reaction to be run, research to be installed, POS arrays to be unanchored, moved, anchored, onlined and utilised. There are resources to be exported, sold, contracted and traded. There are fuels, modules, ships, ammo and skills to be imported. There are possibly neighbours that would like us to alleviate their shields, scour their armour and generally remove their hulls from them.

And none of that even begins to include the number of people that need to be thanked, congratulated, hailed, ignored, watched, befriended, shot, reshipped, berated and/or bereaved. Throw in some ongoing conversations about the nature of the universe, whether ships really fly in space or swim through it, who did what to whom and where to go to get some good, hard spiked Quafe.

The world we live and fly and fight and engineer in is rich, deep and very, very personal. It takes more than just a passing interest in spaceships and spreadsheets to appreciate it fully. This is not to say it’s perfect. The interface confounds me on a regular basis, my ship seems to occasionally have a mind of its own, the drones only respond 100% correctly on the second Tuesday of each week and occasionally my overview tells me I’m somewhere else.

We are busy little Wormhole Engineers. We like our part and the jobs we do. If you are looking for a stable source of income and relaxed, arm-chair piloting – keep flying. There is none of that out here.

Not Always Shiny

On Making Stupid Mistakes & Learning

As I looked over the last year or two of posts, I realised that I very often only present the upside to the efforts and events that we go through. I don’t often mention some of the accidents, problems and outright stupid mistakes that my colleagues or I make on a seemingly regular basis. To further entertain you, I’ll try to recall some of them and tell you what we’ve learned in the process.

Hmmm…. Nope…. Can’t think of anything.

I’m quite sure I could come up with more examples of our incompetence, but would likely ruin our reputation for flawless execution.

Seriously?

On Waking Up After Being Deprived Of Your Pod

Ouch. Blinding pain. My ship … is, why can’t I feel my ship. And … um … I can’t … seem to focus … on the present. Station … docked? Sleepy … groggy … slow.

Not unlike post-election interviews with the runner-up, waking up after a binge, stepping in it in the park or waking up in a new clone, the process of recovery is sometimes short and sweet and more often filled with emotion, pain and suffering. How you handle losing it all speaks more volumes about you than the epitaphs shouted in comms, kill board statistics or isks spent on your last ride. From an early age people need to learn some important EVE life lessons.

1) It’s a ride. It does not have emotions. It doesn’t care if you are in, on, afk, logged, asleep at the pod, finger in your nose, smiling or frowning. It is quite oblivious to anything you care about. Pets, asteroids, spouses, corp-mates, local taxes, sovereignty fees – they are all irrelevant to the EVE Train.

2) It is independent. It goes where it will. You are able to affect its direction to some extent, but more than likely it is less Butterfly Effect and more akin to Clear Skies or Carebears Attack in the ability to affect the larger picture. You look out for you and yours and things go swimmingly.

3) You will die. You will lose a lot of ships if you are actually playing the game with any level of interaction. It doesn’t matter if you are in high security, low security, null security or wormhole space – you and your ship will soon be parted. Today’s Headlines: Death Coming. Tomorrow’s Forecast: Mostly ganky with an increasing chance of podding. The only unknowns are when, where and everything except how well you handle yourself.

This is not some HTFU rant about people who can’t hack the harsh, kill-or-be-killed world of New Eden. It’s a realistic gut check for pilots who think the worst thing that can happen is getting your current clone senselessly splattered on the nose-cone of a Terror Assault missile or perforated by Repulic EMP. It’s all senseless and it will continue to happen as long as there are people flying other ships. There is always someone bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, wealthier or prettier who is able to relieve you of your capacity to be in a ship.

I’m not saying don’t be upset about losing a ship. I cry over every last one. Most of them I built. I fit them, flew them, trained them, repaired them, crashed them. All of them I loved. My ships are my life and every last one of them is important to me, from the disposable frigates to the disposable battlecruisers. They surround me, they hold me, they give everything they have to me – could I give them less. And as for my pod – that rather frail hunk of metal filled with snot and keeping my clone from feeling the effects of strenuous accelerations and combat – it too serves its purpose and no more. I have bought several clones. I will buy several more. God willing, I will not forget to buy one when I die tomorrow.

So when an overwhelming force of pilots gank you, get up, get back in a ship and keep going. Or not. Either choice is valid. The people who shot you out of the sky won’t really care one way or the other. Ranting – not likely to get you much response. Wild and derogatory remarks – again not likely to help put implants back in your head. Best case scenario – ask if it was them in the reverse situation, what would they have done. They might offer useful suggestions. The worst case scenario is they might just laugh and say, “Die.” Either way, use it to get better at flying your spaceships.

To put this in more of a personal context – the Wormhole Engineers have been attacked, off and on, since they first started living in wormholes. Mining maulings, hauling hijacks, gratuitous ganks and overt overkills have been the norm and not the exception. We learned important lessons all along the way. We first learned how to hide better and then we learned how to run away better. We learned how to be better aware of the situation not just around us, but beyond our little corner of the world. We began to learn how to resist and tank and eventually even how to shoot back. We learned how to take ammunition from out tower and distribute it more effectively on the hulls of other pilots. We haven’t had a lot of kills and we’re still not afraid to back down. However; if we shoot you, it isn’t personal and we’re not out to bully the pilots we see around us.

One of the lessons we learned the hard way was there are no innocent people out here in the wormholes. Letting an unknown covops pilot buzz around in plain site is a sure way to buy a new clone and it is still worth getting an overwhelming force out to catch and pop them. Sending the pilot back to known space is the only way to assure they aren’t scouting for a larger party. The larger force may still be there, but they’ll have to survive with one less set of eyes. They may only be scanning for exits, but that’s what we were doing until we saw someone else’s probes.

Old Blood, Part 3

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2…

In an attempt at trying to remember things honestly, I will try to mention when things went well or failed miserably so as to present as clear a picture as possible of the reality of flying with a random collection of fruitcakes, nut cases and loony birds. We’ve pulled people in from all over the place and from time to time it has happened that they were of a lower quality than we would have preferred. It’s inevitable I imagine as there are all kinds of pilots looking to be all kinds of ship captains involved in all manner of endeavours. It would be extremely naive and a bit arrogant to assume they all thought like we thought, flew what we flew or were interested in the same thing via the same approaches. Oddly enough, just knowing that doesn’t seem to keep it from happening. Many corporations [ours included] often take far to little time to evaluate a potential employee and his fit with the organisation as a whole.

But more about that later, first I wanted to take a closer look at some of the potential recruiting methodologies and comment on their relative effectiveness. The first method we’ll dub the “Passive Method” and requires the least amount of effort and energy on the part of the recruiter. This can usually take several forms and can be a combinations of vectors. Some of the possible implementations include placing a note in your corporation’s information window to the effect, “We are recruiting,” or “Sign up now,” to let passer-bys know that you are open to members. Some slightly more involved passive recruiting efforts might be a forum post on EVE Online or some of the other frequently populated sites. And finally there is the recruiting advertisements within EVE itself.

All of these passive methods rely on the individuals seeing and responding to your information. The motivation and initial moves belong to the other pilots and are theirs to make or not.

The second type you might guess is the “Active Method” where you are going out of your way to target, engage and draw specific individuals into your corporation. This can be an intense and involved process with multiple personnel working to illicit a favourable move from an already known pilot. This involves ongoing conversations via both public and private channels; overt recruiting and posting in the forums; targeted EVE mails to the pilots in question; active referrals and contacts with other pilots of the corporation and alliance. This targeted, active recruiting is all about going after either a specific individual or a specific skill set that your organisation realises that it needs.

All long the spectrum from Passive to Active is any combination of the two. Often experience, necessity and effectiveness will require a combination of the two methodologies.

Finally, a quick word about making sure the “new prospects” and “potential recruits” are the people that you’ll want in your organisation long term. In addition to any thoughts and dreams you might have about a role and the people that will fill it, so to do the people who are possibly coming to work for you. They see themselves as gaining something out of the transaction and rightly so. If they can’t learn, grow, build wealth and generally prosper in the position and corporation, then they really need to be somewhere else. It’s not rude or arrogant to show someone the door, offer suggestions about other places they might flourish or generally pass them over and keep looking for the right person. It would however be wrong to stuff them into a role that was antithetical to who and what they were and where they were headed. And while it may temporarily solve a staffing issue, it isn’t going to help your corporation out in the long run either.

Happy Head Hunting.

Old Blood, Part 2

In continuation from the previous article…

Recently I found myself discussing the bygone era of naivete with regard to flying ever bigger, faster, deadlier, efficient, specialised and ultimately more expensive ships. We have all come a long way since our Ibises and Velators. The time since we’ve used civilian weapons [if ever] is far away and mostly gone are the days when the fittings and ships are limited by the skills we haven’t trained or isk we haven’t earned. We still flounder a bit on the first few times we do something new [ship fittings and how to effectively use a Stealth Bomber], but by now we know where to look for the information and make fairly educated choices and decisions based on that information.

Given that we are now what I would consider Intermediate level pilots, we are probably prime for various and sundry problems brought on by our decent into madness [Is linking to your own posts rather akin to talking to yourself? If so, I also have posts whereby I comment on my own posts thus creating a dialogue. Sadly, I'm probably going to end up posting a comment on one of my posts about a link to a post or comment of my own thus degenerating into complete insanity. I apologize to myself in advance.]. Having nearly gone off the deep end one too many times, it occurs to myself [and others, I'm far from unique or inspired], that fresh meat is needed to halt the rapidly encroaching madness. Either that, or we’d like to begin drafting some people so that we at least statistically reduce the number of insane pilot actions.

Actually, we’re debating bringing on a few newer members that we can ultimately train into effective capsuleers according to our own images while exploiting their current skills for our gain. We’re probably going to start with some dedicated salvage/mining personnel to help offset our tendency to let the mining sites in our wormholes degrade to uselessness as well as help accelerate the speed at which we can work over the various anomalies and signatures there-in. Having employed all manner of recruiting means in the past, I thought we might also benefit from some of the other blog readers/personalities out there who might like to take a chance on wormhole mining and salvaging.

I am hoping to wrap this up with a segment on some of the other recruiting methodologies and their relative effectiveness.

The Shiny is Sparkly

Ok, I admit it. I am in awe, struck dumb by the sheer enormity of what has transpired. In case any of you missed it:

Dominion has come.

And it is good. At least every little bit that I have seen from with in our little part of the unknown space we live in. With all the little things that have happened in the client, it really does feel a lot like EVE 3.0 instead of just an expansion. The marketers missed the opportunity to really push this as a major update to many of the parts that make EVE feel like EVE. With all of the updates to the UI as well as the actual graphics used for the systems, it is much more apparent that things have changed. And after one measly day in, I think it’s wonderful.

I’m sure there are a lot of little things going on around 0.0 involving sovereignty changes and support/logistics for them. There are some nitpicks, glitches and annoyances [hide windows?], but on the whole, I think it is a great update.

And finally – I can easily update this from inside my pod. Beware.

Posted from J130554, deep in the heart of nowhere and using the browser in EVE.

Along the Way

Now listen all you swingers, don’t you try to tag along
I know monkey see, but monkey’s dead, for you it would be wrong
Put a dime in my jukebox, you’ll only hear this song
And it won’t be fun for long -(TMBG)

The end is nigh!

The end has passed and off into the night we continue swimming past planets, moon and stars. Wormholes open and close and wars and rumors of wars are left in our wake. All and all, everything continues on as it did before, so what is different?

Training for the Damnation has been completed. Mostly. Sort of. There are few days left to fit the armored warfare links, but everything else is fit and fine. I should be jumping for joy, holding parties in low-sec pirate filled dens of iniquity and generally announcing it to every stray passer-by I meet. Instead I’m merely looking at the next couple of weeks of training and thinking, “Now What?”

The whole trip to Damnation has been a grand adventure. It marks the third, major, long training plan I’ve completed. The first plan was learning skills, which can be debated ad nauseam both on the forums and in various other postings. They were long, arduous and imminently debatable, however I have never once regretted doing it. The second was maximizing my asteroid warfare potential, including a few weeks on Exhumer V, Cybernetics V, and a host of ore specific refining skills to level IV for tech 2 crystals. Again, there were parts of it that I probably could have cut corners on, but I haven’t regretted being able to field a really sweet Hulk, that can mine about 27 m³ of ore per second without being in a gang and significantly more with a good Orca pilot boosting.

Finally, the trip to the Damnation, which has been a slightly longer journey than the others. Over all it was uneventful and all the skills that I have picked up in the interim have been useful across the board. In the beginning it started with the look for a decent armor tanked missile ship to swim alongside my remote armor repairing corp-mates. The Sacrilege was an option, but wasn’t really able to fit a decent remote rep fitting. The Damnation could do that, had enough tank to be able to use ballistic computer systems without sacrificing tank and could still theoretically fit a RR with it’s missiles. The DPS worked out to a similar end as the Drake with the added benefits of helping the whole fleet’s tank.

Now that I’ve reached the Damnation, I have to admit I’m feeling rather blasé about the whole thing. I love flying it. It corners like an Orca, tanks like a very large plated battleship and hits about like a Drake, but from slightly farther away. This is all well and good, but my eyes were taken by something else shiny that had cropped up along the way.

Somewhere along the way I realized that in and amongst the skills for a Damnation, was hidden the skills for a Guardian logistics ship. So on a whim I began to research them, ask questions and look at fittings for them. I got to looking at just how the efficiency of remote repair modules compared to their ‘local’ counterparts. What did it take to use them and or abuse them. Since the Guardian is also bonused for energy transfers, I threw that into the mix as well, looking at how that could be used to the best advantage. I began to develop a real sense of respect for 0.0 fleet logistics pilots and the work they do. Flying a logistics ship well takes a fair amount of capacitor savvy, shrewd targeting and really tight fittings. Tried and true skills like weapons upgrades and advanced weapons upgrades have no effect on RR’s and Xfers, so it’s down to rigs, reactors, PDU’s and CPUs to make it work.

[Editorial Aside]:

I tend to scoff when I see CPUs, PDUs and Reactors on a lot of fits. They are mostly used to compensate for a severe lack of real fitting skills or to ‘tide one over’ until their skills catch up to their hulls. [I still maintain it would be an interesting study to compare the number of killmails between the pilots having 'helper' modules like CPUs/PDUs/Reactors versus their opponents.] I fully understand that even given max skills and an expensive implant, occasionally you still run into a fit that just won’t. I myself have used these modules to great success in the past and will continue to do so in the future and even recommend some fittings that do so.

All of this to say, “Congratulations logistics pilots for making it all fit. Large remote modules on a cruiser hull with a tank that survives and makes things so much easier for the other pilots to just shoot things.”

How To Fail

Hip, hip, horrific are the words we sing
Hip, hip, horrific is our thing -(TMBG)

As I look around and back at the posts I’ve written for the last year or so, I am reminded how well things have gone, but also how spectacularly I’ve managed to fail. If you are looking for pitfalls to avoid – you’ve found them. If you want to see how not to train for something; look no further. If you would rather have less isk at the end of the day, then this is your lucky blog!

Seriously, the posts that inhabit these pages are filled with the heartache and misery of a pilot bashing her head against the same asteroid day after day after day. At the end of the day there is a hangar full of veldspar and tritanium, some trash modules and a ship that desperately needs a tune up. Along the way the pilot has learned that you shouldn’t trust another pilot but you have to trust the other pilots until they fail you. You can’t put 4000 m3 in a GSC and there’s no way to get a station container out of a station. Overheating missiles is not so effective and skilling up adequately for boosters is going to be very expensive.

There are a few bright spots along the way. Namely, the ships and modules that have been opened up through a varied training programme that includes tech 2 mining equipment, logistics cruisers and some command ships. This is easily countered by the fail combat skills that barely allow for named heavy missiles on a Drake and some lame, unsupported rails on a Moa. It’s rather comical sometimes to be able to fit a full Tech 2 tank on every ship in the game, but then realize you still only have the equivalent of light weapons for armaments. Fear the fail firepower of 150mm rails on a Ferox! My heavy missile Drake of Dewm causes fits of laughter when people can safely orbit at 55 km and pick off my drones and then me.

Other suggest that I should be proud of the fact that I can invent nearly anything possible on the market, but even that seems to fall flat. I have consistently managed to lose money or break even on Tech 2 invention and production. My volume approach is low and slow, so as to be moving backwards in appearance. I can train people to use the towers, labs, production facilities, but seem to fail in doing so myself. What was I thinking! Science is for smart people. Production is for people who are actually motivated.

So what have we learned from all of this:

Train all the skills you possibly can [let's start with 231]
Train a wide variety of skills to level 5 [53 is a good number]
Science skills help you store lot’s of SP [9.6 million and counting]
Collect ships [So you can collect dust]
Every 3-4 months spend everything you have on one ship setup and then poke a pirate.

And I think I’ve rambled on enough for all of us today. And that is how to fail.

Moving, Moving, Moving

Like some sharks, our gypsy base must keep moving to live. A constant stream of new anomalies and signatures flowing over its hangars is required to keep it alive. The task of dismantling the current location, loading up the wagon train and heading out for the new frontiers is quickly delegated and distributed. In quick succession, the tower falls and is exported. We’ve collectively decided to move on to something a bit more challenging for the future, so we shall have to see how that comes out.

The medium Amarr tower has performed amazingly well for us and we’re proud of it. It has become a sort of second home for many of us and each time we set up, we give someone new the chance to give it a name. We have had some really good suggestions so far, including Slight Doom, and Event Horizon. The only real problem is on my end with the need to move stuff between the two holes for mfg or back to our high-sec base. The logistics behind it all haven’t been difficult, but I would be guilty of withholding the truth if I didn’t say they were time consuming.

As an aside, I want to put in my two bits in support of a corporate bookmark facility. If we can share corporate fittings, why not corporate bookmarks. Throwing a system of bookmarks in a can everyday for the crew is needlessly time consuming and a bit of logistical nightmare in and of itself. Surely it’s redundant and resource intensive for all of us to have a bookmark for the tower, the current wormhole or 3, the 10-12 anomalies and signatures. For the 3-4 people who happen to read this, pass the information on and see if you can get any action out of this too.

And so now the search for a new home for the mobile assault base continues with a couple of quick possibilities opening themselves up. Sadly we can find places faster than we can get to them and full utilize them. Perhaps with a larger contingent or a wider alliance we could manage them all, but I am still a bit skeptical of our participation in an alliance.

Finally, we’ve put some finishing touches on our rules of engagement and its application in wormhole systems. We are trying to balance our own carebear tendencies with the ever present need for defense and deterrence.

The Long Dark Hall

I ‘m staring down a long dark hallway that is only dimly lit with some bioluminescent globes that are spaced much too far apart to give any sort of definition to the length or features of the corridor. I cannot see the end, nor can I see any distinguishable openings or portals either. My choices now are to turn around and abandon this path or proceed onward to see what will become of it. Where will it lead…? What have I begun…? What have I become…?

And so my thoughts on beginning the journey towards my current skill objective come to the fore. I’ve had long training plans before. They got me into my Covetor and my Hulk and have helped me max out most of my core skills [AWU - I love/hate you]. They are not pleasant to watch, but they are fun to achieve. Kirith Kodachi has kept many people entertained with his own regales of routines passed on his way to the Ninveah and later a ill-fated Nighthawk.

My own plans are much more modest. I am working toward the skill set needed for the Amarrian Fleet Command Ship, Damnation. The die has been cast and the decision made. Currently I’m just getting rolling on my Battlecruiser V training. Then it’s a relatively shorter time to Amarr Cruiser V, Warfare Link Specialist IV, and Logistics IV. I’m already excited, but trying to temper that elation with the knowledge that it will still be awhile. I’m also trying really hard to ignore the results of my rather Scientific Background which includes such minor details as having pants for offensive skills. I’ll need to pick up some more training in heavy missiles and heavy assault missiles to be an effective fleet member.

The impetus for this impulse is the desire for our fleet to be able to run sleeper sites more quickly and efficiently. With the added range for HAM’s, I think it might even be useful to fit them. With a couple cheap [it's all relative right?] rigs I can fling a HAM out to 40 km for approximately 260 DPS and just a smidge over 1,000 alpha strike volley. This is modest damage, but coupled with the ability to be cap stable while running both RR and links is too hard to ignore. In the meantime, I’m an entertaining myself by pasting pictures of my new ship all over the inside of my pod. [In case you hadn't noticed them all over this post by now. I'm also playing around with fittings for Al Abd [the name I've already chosen].

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