Rage Quit FTW

Ok, so it seems not everyone is cool with the Null sec move and when a carebear gets angry they get REALLY angry and quit the corp. I would like to share a long winded set of tears that one of our, now ex, corp members decided to send to the entire corp instead of just the person they were angry with. I honestly felt bad for the guy until this mail and think this is quite humorous. I hope you enjoy it as well. For what it is worth this earned a 50mil bounty on his head with an additional 25m for a hulk kill.

Gentlemen,

It is with the utmost regret that I must tender my resignation from our Corp, as it has been made very clear to me that I am no longer welcome. You see I am not into a combat role in this game. At least not PVP combat. I very much enjoy the PVE stuff, but I am just not equipped for the PVP. I lack the needed hand eye coordination to react quickly enough, so I am instantly at a disadvantage in any PVP situation. Add to that, I am a new player, and lack the skills in game to run the equipment needed to be successful in a 1 on 1 fight. For these reasons, and several others I have mentioned over the past few weeks, I was just not interested in following the Corp into cursed space. All that being said, I have no desire to leave the Corp. I have been actively searching for another course that would allow me and one or two other members, to continue in ****, without needing to follow the rest of the Corp on their current adventure. Please allow me to be clear... I have no issue with the decision to move the Corp. I understand completely the desire of the more experienced players to look for more challenging areas of the game to explore. But I literally just got into the Wormhole, and I am just now getting used to the rules of this place, I simply don't feel I am ready to move into the more advanced areas of the game. In trying to explore other options for myself and others (who by the way we're much more vocal in their objections to this move, until only very recently) I seem to have pissed off the leadership of the corporation... Initially I wanted to find a C3 we could open up, and setup a temporary POS, but it was made clear to me, I would need more support than I had to make that a successful venture. So after giving it some thought, I came up with the idea to keep one of the C6 POS's open. I proposed the idea to Ace, via a private email, so as not to create open acrimony or disrespect Ace's right to make that decision on his own. I simply asked that the equipment still in the Player's POS be left online, and that I would volunteer to keep it up and running, paying for all the fuel myself, so as not to create more work for Ace, Larsol, and Jobewon, who were already consumed with the move. I asked for no help from anyone. I would have done all the work in this regard myself. I received the following reply:

"as it stands the c6 is being put into hibernation. when everyones shit is out, and the 2nd pos is torn down, we can discuss people staying, until then everybody needs to relocate their assets to empire. once our move is complete i will assess the situation in the c6 and make a decision. the 2nd pos is coming down within 48 hrs. a notice will be sent to corp regarding this. this topic is not up for further discussion atm, we have different priorities now, and diplomatic relations to work on. we possibly will have blue standing with one of the larger alliances in curse, meaning less enemies overall. phoenix will be coming back into the c6 to start dealing with the shut down procedures. i might be willing to let people stay but at this point in time theres no reason for people to be in there, its making things too complicated."

I accepted this answer, and sent Ace the following reply:

"Hey man, I'm not arguing, or trying to be a pain, but a Grav site and a Ladar have just popped up. It would be 48 hours before I have to be out after waiting 2 weeks for something... May I please have the time to clear these sites? I will move the ore, and everything man, I just need time please."

To which I received:

"i dont care what you do, but the pos is coming down as soon as i get a chance, so ensure you stuff is out, or it will be floating in space."

To which I replied:

"Dude, seriously?? You won't even give me a couple more days? It costs you nothing!"

And finally I received this reply:

"ok, seriously, i just said you have 48 hrs to move your shit. no more than that. i dont give a fuck what you have to do. running the pos costs money, and every minute i waste moving shit and doing transportation logisitcs costs my fucking wallet. i would rather be ratting and killing shit but i have to take care of corp shit, which you are getting in my of doing. i understand you have a need to mine rocks and shit, but im not stopping the bus just for you to do your carebear shit. i dont know how much more blunt i have to be with you. get your shit moved out of the wormhole."

Please allow me to be clear, at no time did I ask him to "stop the bus". I offered to cover any additional costs that may be involved in keeping the equipment running, and to do all of the remaining labor myself, with regard to shutting down. In fact I have repeatedly offered my assistance in whatever capacity I could be useful! I may be a "carebear", and I am sorry if this offends you, but that is the style of game I like to play. And that I will not apologize for. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be the kind of person who floats around screwing up other people’s day, for no other reason than to satisfy my male ego! I was told I was free to make my own decision with regard to the move, but I guess that isn't the case; As demonstrated, by the responses to my attempt to find a solution that worked for everyone. Apparently the leadership (Specifically Ace) don't really mean it when they say you are free to do what you want... apparently you are only free to do what you want to do, if what you want to do is what Ace says we are doing.

Please don't misunderstand me here... I have enjoyed playing the game with all of you (including Ace), and I will sincerely miss being able to do so, but after the disrespect I got last night, it would be impossible for me to continue. As requested I have moved all of my ships and equipment out of the C6, and I will never bother any of you again, but before I go, please allow me to extend my most sincere gratitude to everyone who has helped me get started in this game. You are all great people, and I wish you all the best in the game and in life.

On a private note to Ace; Seek help man! Your responses to my requests reveal serious flaws in your character sir. I recognize them, because I also suffer from similar flaws, however, I have gotten help, and I am working hard to be a better person! I may be a weak Carebear, but you have a mile wide mean streak in you sir, and a fundamental disrespect for people who are different. In short, you're a douche. I can always learn the other aspects of the game, but without serious help, you will always be a douche!

Good luck to all of you!

PS. I am sure some of this will earn me the ire of one or two people in the Corp, and that will likely have consequences for me moving forward in the game. Simply know that every time, you hunt me down, and destroy my shit, you are just proving my point. 

Please feel free to further prove my point, and post this for everyone to laugh at the carebear tears!

Sincerely,

Richard Brammer.

Moving To Null Sec

So the plan has been put into play and our CEO and directors have decided to move the corp to null sec from the wormhole. Now I am excited and worried at the same time with this. I am excited as I have always wanted to get into 0.0 sec space as I heard there is good money and it can be a lot of fun out there. I have not made the jump to null strictly for the worried reason.

I have always been worried about being able to have a steady income out there. Part of why I get worried is because I pay for my two accounts by using in game plex. Plex is something that someone else buys with real life money and then sells on the in game market. These have been running approximately 350 million isk currently so I need to make at the very least 700 million a month to be able to continue to play. Not knowing anything about Null sec has me worried due to possibly getting raided by people while ratting or doing anomalies.

So I have been doing some research and it seems that it really is not that often that things like that happen. I also have found out that we will be moving to NPC space so that we do not have to defend or live out of PoS's and can dock up in the NPC stations to get away from people. This is a huge difference even though we won't be able to upgrade systems to get better signatures / anomalies, or at least that is how I think it works.

So now comes the logistics part of getting down to where we need to stage our ships and equipment. I currently have a lot of ships in the wormhole so this is going to be a pain to move everything down there. But it is a necessary part of moving there and I plan to stick with this corporation and I have made some good friends here. Even now as I write this post I am becoming more comfortable with the idea of living down there and I really will work hard at getting my stuff out of the wormhole. I dragged my feet the last few nights on doing it partly because of my worries but I think I can get over that hump and get going on the move tonight.

In the next post I will write about the move and any problems I may run into during it.

Merry Christmas Eve Roam

So I jumped online Christmas eve to play Eve, ha just realized the pun there. Anyway I jumped on to say hello and give everyone a Merry Xmas wish and while on there were a ton of people sitting around doing nothing. Well since I had some xmas egg nog and brandy flowing I decided to ask if they wanted to do a roam. This seemed to get a pretty good amount interest and someone quickly decided to spice it up some.

What was decided was that we were going to take out a bunch of battlecruisers and name them all after Santa's reindeer. Well naturally everyone online jumped at the chance to be a reindeer and have some Christmas cheer in the ways of blowing things up. I quickly grabbed my pvp Drake and named her after Donner.

So in the fleet we had Donner, Dancer, Blitzen, Vixen, Prancer, Dasher, Comet, and Cupid. We jumped out of the wormhole and headed towards Hek. I was leading the charge and had decided we would go down the back pipe near Hek as I had always seen pirates and faction warfare people there during my faction warfare days.

The night started off slowly as we did not find anyone in a couple of the clusters of systems. However I was scouting ahead and landed on a Rapier and a Drake that were flashy red and immediately aggressed me. Well my fleet landed and we killed off the Rapier, but were unable to get the Drake. The Drake pilot complained in local how we were using "blob" tactics (when you get mass numbers and blob around on people) to kill them. We shrugged him off and moved on to more systems. Unfortunately unable to find more people to attack we started back the way we came.

I jumped back into the same system we had the fight in before and on the gate this time was 5 ships in waiting. We decided to take them on and jumped our merry reindeer into the frey. Well that would be our downfall and the crash and burn of the reindeer roam as we immediately were "blobbed" by another 6 ships. They brought quite a large force and began to pick us off one by one.

Once all reindeer had been disposed of we laughed our way back to the wormhole in our pods and made fun of ourselves in the reindeer ships. Overall it was a fun night and even though our fleet of deer had been obliterated we still could not help but have merry cheer.

So here is to all the fun times I have had with my crew and to more next year. Merry Christmas and happy new year!

Decided On Learning Direction

I also have decided that the direction I will be going the route of a carrier pilot with my main. Man I am excited to be in the Chimera in a couple of months. And then another 30 days to be worth anything with the fighters and Cap Shield reps.

Lately I have been only able to get online with one account as I have had a lot of real life stuff going on. But I have been able to run sites with my corpmates. Recently we have had a large turn out for these sites in the C6, which is actually great. The site takes less time and we get a lot of comradely out of this. The ops have been a blast and even though the split on isk is not as high I think it is actually better than only having 4-5 people online that are the same people all of the time.

In the next post I will explain how best to lose a Basilisk in a C6 site and why it is bad to have a carrier pilot be the tagger, lol.

If It Smells Like Bait, It Probably Is

So I come online the other night to my corp mates talking about a large amount of fail that they recently ran into. And by fail I mean they ended up getting all of their ships blown up including a couple of podded pilots (mostly the new pilots of the corp).

Basically from what I understand our cave had some active players and they put a T3 ship off the high sec wormhole. Well my corp mates decided to attack this with 2 T3 Loki's, a Stabber, a triple rep Myrm, and a Curse to start. All started off well as they found that there was another T3 ship there cloaked as well and they began to down that ship. What was not known was that a ton of other ships were in waiting to pounce. An Apoc, a Hyperion, a Harbi, 2 Drakes and smaller ships. Well my corp mates were able to take down the two tech 3 ships by bringing in alts in PVE ships. So we had a Rokh, Tengu and a Raven land.

This only helped add to the over all loss that the corp obtained. Pretty much all of the ships with the exception of the Tengu were destroyed.  We even had one of our new pilots make a newbie mistake with another Maelstrom pve ship.

We found that they brought a prober ship into our wormhole while we were running a C6 site. In which we had close to 12 battleships and a carrier with us. Well we quickly stopped all site attacking and kept one rat ECM'd so that it could not attack our salvagers while they cleaned up the site. We then quickly warped all battleships to the cave wormhole to show our presence. Well the prober immediately jumped out of our hole. While we were sitting there we noticed the WH was in a critical state and decided we would close the wormhole. Before we could grab a smaller ship to close the hole one of our newer pilots jumped through with their Maelstrom and the hole closed behind them. Well on the other side was the fleet from before and suffice it to say the pilot was then locked up and a convo ensued. Well it was not to to demand money it was the Proteus pilot from before stating that revenge was sweet as this pilot had gotten his death mail. They proceeded to kill down the battleship and pod the poor pilot.

Moral of the story is to sniff a little harder to determine if it is indeed bait. And to always listen on comms for instructions on what is being planned so that you do not make a fatal mistake.

Learning skills

So with the learning skills being removed tomorrow and us getting those skill points back in our pool I now have a chance to make a decision on what direction I want to take my main toon. I already know that I want to take the alt the direction of a Basilisk direction so that we have more of those available for ops.

The two directions I have planned that I need to decide on are either a carrier (the Chimera) or going for recon ships on the Amarr side (the Curse and Pilgrim). Which ever way I go I plan on going all the way to V with them and maximizing the supporting skills to be the best in them as I can. For the carrier I chose the Chimera for the shield rep bonuses and tank. This is because I would plan to put at least one carrier in the worm hole for escalations. A corp mate of mine was talking about how cool it would be to have nothing but carriers for sites. I think this would be a ton of fun and certainly be challenging. I also have always been interested in getting into a capital ship, the Revalation is one of my favorite looking ships in the game but the dread naught is not as useful as a carrier.

For one the carrier is used as a remote repair logistics ship so it fits the bill perfecting in the wormhole. Fighters that it can deploy also provide crazy dps. Another nice perk is that a carrier has a ton of space that you can use to transport large amounts of goodies around in low and null sec.Which is one possibility that I may be taking that plunge at some time with the direction in which the alliance is going. But we will see how all of that pans out in the near future.

On the other hand the Pilgrim is a perfect ship for the wormhole as well for a combat ship. You can sneak around in it and come up on unsuspecting site runners in other wormholes. I have found with my recent acquisition of covert ops cloaking how valuable this skill is in the wormhole as you can warp around unnoticed and wreak some havoc in small groups before your prey knows you are there. The Curse is also one of the more feared cruiser hulls and I plan on learning how to properly fly both of these ships so that I bring max benefit to the fleets I will be flying in with them.

In the next segment I will tell a story of how my would be corpmates decided to fail and become the baitees instead of the baiters.

Real Life

So I have not been able to play much the last couple of days due to real life. Man it can really get in the way sometimes. However I haven't missed much as people have been simply doing some mining and getting some of their ships in the wormhole and what not.

On my idea from before with the Rokh vs. a Logistics ship one of my corp mates really liked the idea and thinks it would work well. While discussing this another one of our corp members decided to look into his skill sets and found that he would be able to use a Scimitar logistics within 2 days all this time. So it looks like we will have another logi pilot now and no need for the Rokh. Ohh well maybe it will be needed someday. It does look like we will be doing a CA or 2 tonight to make some more iskies, I hope to be able to get in on those.

In the meantime I have some information that I have been meaning to pass on with regards to somethings our corp is doing and some directions that our directors/ceo have planned. Currently our corp is going to continue to recruit pilots for the wormhole. But our ceo plans on moving one of his toons out into another corp within the alliance that will be a corp that is dedicated to null sec (0.0 security status space) location where they plan to have some space to do plexing and some pvp.

Now this is very enticing to me in that null sec is somewhere I have never really been. So depending on how things pan out and how the pvp corp grows i may want to move my main toon there and leave the alt in the wormhole to make money with. I think this would be a lot of fun especially if we don't plan on going for sovereignty in the systems that we would be ratting it. Now I do not have all of the information on it yet but it sounds like we would be basing out of a NPC station and doing things from there.

On another note I recently have purchased a Noctis thanks to one of our corp mates that was able to get a blue print out of the craziness that was the Outer Ring. He made them and sold them to us corpies at a very reduced price. I have not yet accepted the contract yet due to not having a good route that did not have active corps along it. A couple of nights ago I did log in and scanned down a hisec hole in a c2 that was connected to our cave.

Now I just happened to have completed the Covert Ops skill that day so I was in my cloaky ship and I was lucky I had been. While scanning I noticed that there were a few Covert Ops/ Stealth bombers on scan that disappeared after getting my probes out. What happened was that I was able to scan down the HiSec wormhole in the system and decided against landing directly on the hole. Well I started warp and landed 50km off the hole.

Well there was a Pilgrim sitting 20km from me when I landed so I am glad I made the decision I did. I quickly pulled probes and wanted to warp back to the entrance hole from the cave but I forgot to bookmark it. So I warped to a planet off scan from the high sec hole and dropped probes again. Once I had the way out I warped to the hisec again at 100km and found that the Pilgrim had left or was cloaked. So I decided to create a 150km bookmark there and warped to 70km off from the entrance hole and sat watching for any of their other cloaky ships.

Part of all of my warping and changing of distances was from my faction warfare days where I learned to never land at the 0km or 100km off from things and to always be random. This saved me many-a-days back then so I always revert back to this when I might be chased or in a potential combat situation. Well after about 15 minutes of watching both of the holes I decided to make a run for it back through the cave. Which I was able to make it back to our hole without contact. So another day not being able to bring in the Noctis as who knows where the Pilgrim disappeared to.

I will get it in the wormhole one of these days.

Alternative Thinking Of Logistics

So recently we have been trying to recruit more logistics pilots so that we have more chances to run the C6 sites in our home wormhole. Well I have decided that instead of training for a Tengu with my alt once Caldari cruiser V is done that I will instead train him for a Basilisk logistics ship. However this is going to take some time. I have only 6 or so days left on cruiser V and about another 10 or so with the other Basi skills. So in the interim I have been thinking today on just how could we run sites with only 1 Basilisk.

Well what I have come up with is an alternative solution to logistics. And that is to use a battleship as a logi ship. I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I started playing around in EFT first with the Scorpion Navy Issue, which is one of my favorite ship modules in the game. It really astonished me that I came up with a feasible fit that could handle 4 remote shield reppers and 2 remote energy transfers. The stats came down to 111k effective hit points, 78/82/75/79 resists, a 2.9 second lock time and the ability to run everything with only one cap bounce (which we regularly do in our C6 ops anyway). I thought to myself that man this could really work but that is an expensive ship to use for this purpose.

I decided let's see what the Raven would look like as it is a much less expensive ship. The Raven weighed in with the same remote rep/ energy setup and was stable with the one cap bounce. The effective hit points ended up at 117k with resists of 76/64/73/77 and a 5.4 second lock time. So not too bad. I put these two into an evemail via Eve Gate and sent it off to one of our common op Fleet Commanders for critique.

While mulling this over it came to me that there may be one other option in the lower priced battleship for my alt (who can only fly Caldari BS's by the way). And this was the Rokh! This is not a very commonly flown ship and didn't dawn on me right away. Well I am glad that it did. Here is what I came up with, a 5(count them five!!!!)  remote shield reppers, 3 energy transfers, 107k effective hitpoints, resists of 79/69/77/81 and a 3.4 second lock time.This is also cap stable with 1 cap bounce and can run all but one energy transfer. I think this might be my new toy in the wormhole to help with ops when we are missing a Basil pilot, provided the corp thinks it is viable.

I think that the way this could work is to have this ship be the one that everyone orbits at 1000m. This way everyone stays within range of the remote rep range of 8.4km. With the quicker lock time and the ability to have almost all of the fleet locked ahead of time I really think this can work. But I would love to hear from anyone that might have an opinion on just such a think. I also just now decided to post this fit to BattleClinic and look forward to getting flamed for the idea, but it is worth a shot right? Below is the Rokh fit:


[Rokh, New Setup 1]
Damage Control II
Capacitor Power Relay II
Capacitor Power Relay II
Capacitor Power Relay II
Capacitor Power Relay II


F-90 Positional Sensor Subroutines, Scan Resolution
F-90 Positional Sensor Subroutines, Scan Resolution
Large Shield Extender II
Photon Scattering Field II
Invulnerability Field II
Invulnerability Field II


Large S95a Partial Shield Transporter
Large S95a Partial Shield Transporter
Large S95a Partial Shield Transporter
Large S95a Partial Shield Transporter
Large S95a Partial Shield Transporter
Large 'Regard' I Power Projector
Large 'Regard' I Power Projector
Large 'Regard' I Power Projector


Large Targeting System Subcontroller I
Large Core Defence Field Extender I
Large Core Defence Field Extender I


Hobgoblin I x5
Hobgoblin I x5

PoS Security

Two nights ago I logged in and there were not a lot of people online from the corp. Well me and one of my corp mates decided to run some sites in the cave. So we ran and we ran and ran some more until all sites were clear. In the end we each made 47 million isk and it did not take very long at all. Was fun as we were able to bullshit on teamspeak about a lot of stuff.

One of them being the corps new security policy. Basically the corp is going in a direction of recruiting a lot of new people. So to address some of the corps security concerns the ceo decided to have two PoS's in the wh. One PoS is used for the capital ships as well for the directors and our manufacturing portion. This PoS is off limits now for regular members and should provide more security to anyone with a capital ship and our valuable manufactoring business.

While the other PoS is now for all of the members with a seperate ship array and hangar for the sr. members which I have been promoted to. I am really glad that we have taken up this measure as you never know when you bring people into the wormhole because you live out of the PoS and in a wormhole you have to trust that other people are not going to be messing with your ships and gear. So with the new security it really made me feel much better about bringing in a lot of newer pilots.

I look forward to having more people to run sites in our home system with as it is difficult to run them without having the logistics or dps pilots on. I have decided that once my alt completes Caldari cruiser V in 6 days that I will instead of go for a Tengu to work him up as a Basilisk pilot instead. This way I could use him for our ops when we only have 1 Basilisk pilot online.

Recouping Iskies

So after the crazy PVP experience and possible loss of more I logged on last night not knowing what I would run into. Well turns out we had a couple people on the bigger corps K wormhole and have been watching whether pilots run in or out. Turns out they were jumping some people in from our cave hole over the period of a couple of hours. So I figured what the hell I need money and we have eyes on the whole so I decided to run some sites in the cave.

I started one and shortly after there was some added activity on the hostile hole. They were jumping in with Interdictors and then jumping back out. Looked like they were trying to close the hole as the Interdictors bubble would actually drop it's mass by quite a bit for when they jumped into our hole and then the full mass of the ship would remove some from the hole on the way back out. Soon enough the hole closed. Much rejoicing began and we were also in position to catch one of the ships trying to close the hole in case they got stuck on our side.

So with that said I had finished my first site and begun another while being on comms with everyone. We happened to have quite a few online including two of our logistics pilots. So we all talked one into sticking around and we decided to put a fleet together and run our site in the home wormhole. We ended up with 7 battleships and the 2 logistics. And we were even able to drop a couple of capital spawns to get a bit more money out of the site.

Which is good because I despritely needed the extra money since I lost close to 400 million the night before in our fight with the other corp. So after last night I believe I was able to amass $150-175 million iskies. A couple more nights of that and I will be able to buy a couple of new battleships. I think I am going to mix it up a little the next set of ships. I am still going to duse a Scorpion on my alt, although a Blackbird might not be a bad idea either for smaller or quicker fleets, maybe both who knows. But I am going to go for a Gank/Tank Armageddon for my main. They put out good dps with around 100k effective hit points, at a fraction of the cost of the Abaddon. Hell I may even be able to put a couple of faction items on it to boost the dps or tank. Although there was a great option for a neuting 'geddon as well which I think would be a good pvp fit as well since the Bhaalgorns seem to be so popular and effective I may just give that one a try.

I also finally broke down and purchased an Anathema last night as well with a sisters probe launcher and probes. This should make probing things down much easier. I will try it out tonight and see how things look.

Lesson Learned

Ok so last night I get online for a few minutes after doing some Christmas decorations outside in the freezing cold and we all decided it would be a good idea to do some CA's since we had our two logistics pilots available. Well I needed to go afk for an hour and when I got back there was a lot of chatter going on in both corp and alliance chat. What all the excitement was about was that we had a hostile force of about 5 Tech 3 ships with logistics that had killed and podded one of our newer players that was mining earlier.

Well it just so happens that the hostile force was part of one of the, if not "the", biggest wormhole corps in the game and they had a direct wormhole from their C6 into our home wormhole. So we all got on comms and started to gear up to try to thwart the hostiles as best we could. Now this is where everyone in our fleet knows this is a suicide mission and we were probably going to get pwned, but we needed to do something.

We figured that two things can happen. Either we turtle and the bigger corp decides that they can roll over us and begin to siege our home POS's or we fight. Now by fighting we could have provoked a larger attack, potentially won or lose and show them our hand in which they may still want to steam roll us. So we decided to fight.

I grabbed my Abaddon and put my alt in his Scorpion along with proper armor tank fits so that the alliance guardians would have an easier time repping us. It took us quite some time to get organized as we really needed to be sure of what we were going to do and in the end that may have been our downfall. The hostiles convo'd one of our pilots and was asking if we were going to be doing something soon or they were going to leave. Now we had no idea what that could possibly mean so we finally decided to put our plan into action.

In our fleet we had 2 Abaddons, Armageddon, Dominix, Megathron, 2 Scorpions, 2 Hurricanes,  3 Guardians and a few other battlecruisers. What we knew of for their fleet was a Zealot, 3 Loki's, 2 Legions, 2 Guardians, and an Oineros.

We warped in the Dominix to our Cave entrance where we knew they had a Loki sitting. The Loki did not aggress and instead the rest of their fleet warped in to 140K. It seemed that they had a cloaky ship that was getting them a warp in to the Domi.Suddenly a Legion burnt away from the Domi to 150km and then warped in and the battle began.

Well suddenly they had two Bhaalgorns on field an Arazu and a host of other ships that included 5 BS, 6 Tech 3's, 2 Guardians, and and 3-4 more Tech 2 Cruisers. All in all they had about 20 ships on field. Right off the bat our Guardians were capped out by the two Bhaalgorns. Man those ships are evil in combat and it seems that they are rapidly becoming either a "flavor of the month" or we just attract them. Well due to the Guardians being out of cap the Dominix went down almost instantly. With the Guardians dropping shortly after that. The other thing they did very effectively was to sensor dampen the two Scorpions that came in at range and basically became ineffective on field. Seeing that we were being torn apart we called for a retreat and only a couple of ships made it out.

My Scorpion had a Proteus and the Arazu on it and then a few other came over to finish it off. I was outside of the bubble that was created by their Onyx so was able to get my pod out. My Abaddon was the last remaining ship on the field for our fleet and it did not take them long to take me down. Being last I had already started to slow boat towards the outside of the bubble and was being capped out by the Bhaalgorn so my microwarp drive was totally incapacitated. I had thought I was outside of the bubble when one of my favorite ships was lost but alas I was not. This resulted in my pod being inside and an easy kill for the hostiles.

All tallied we lost 12 ships and about 2.1billion iskies. The hostiles then left our home hole but the wormhole remains open. They did give us "props" for bringing a force out, so no matter the losses I think we at least have some respect and I feel confident they are not going to siege us, but that remains to be seen.

With the wormhole to their home system still active in our own we will need to be on our toes for the next couple of days until it closes. And then we still will not know if they left an alt in system to continue to come back and assault us. Tonight will be an interesting evening to see how things have transpired since the ass-whoopin' we took last night. But as the title says we have learned a valuable lesson and that is to not let the other force build their forces by taking too long to make a move. I think we should also understand that showing our hand and what ships we had long before the battle began also led to our final downfall.

Ohh well, so is the life in a wormhole it seems. More to come tomorrow.

Bombs Away

So  I get online last night and begin the normal chatter of finding out if we have a route or not, etc. Well we did have a high sec route through the cave and judging from our kill boards the cave was active earlier because our alliance buddies had killed a couple of ships.

The intel from a corp mate was that there were a couple of active members of the corp living in the C2 online and about. We decided I would grab a Drake to go run a site and see if I could bait them into a fight for some fun. Well once I jumped into the cave I found a surprise on scan in that there were a couple of battleships and a battle cruiser showing. I immediately got onto comms and relayed this information.

Well one of my corp mates was in the cave and explained that it looked like they were using one of their retrievers and a Megathron to clear a Grav site, which included mining the site. So I thought if I could scan down the Grav site that we could maybe jump them and get a couple of easy kills. I went back and grabbed my Magnate to do the scanning.

While I was scanning this down the other corp logged in about 4 more people and began to warp to the high sec wormhole. What they were doing was closing the hole with mass being put through the hole. They managed to get the hole closed just before I found the Grav site and it seemed that they stopped mining. So since I was there anyway I started to scan down the new high sec hole. Upon finding it I warped to it and because I do not have Covert Ops Cloaking on the Magnate they were able to see my ship.

I jumped out and got the system that it spawned in so that one of our guys could bring in his new salvaging ship, the Noctis. When I jumped back in I held cloak and was going to sit on the hole for a bit to see what traffic goes through. Well just then I see on my overview a Nemesis and a BOMB!!! I quickly uncloaked and started a warp to our C6 wormhole. I was not quick enough and the bomb hit and took me all the way to 20% armor. WOW what a rush that was trying to not get insta-popped, lol. But I did manage to get out luckily and I still have my scanning ship. Of course had I lost it, I would have had an excuse to by an Anathema as I can now fly Covert Ops ships. In a couple of days I will be able to use the Covert Ops cloaking device which will really help me out in the wormholes as you can stay cloaked while warping.

Well this excited my corp mates that we could get some PVP out of these guys. So we quickly put a fleet together and I grabbed my Abaddon battleship and Scorpion as I wanted to test it out. One of my mates jumped in a Broadsword and warped to the high sec hole. Immediately a Drake landed and they began combat. Then another Drake landed and we all jumped in the hole. We had a decent sized fleet with a couple of Hurricanes and my BS's. We landed and destroyed one of the Drakes while the other managed to jumped out of the high sec hole. Totally expecting some of the other corps BS's to land we waited there with the Broadswords warp bubble up. Well the other Drake pilot made a fatal mistake of jumping back in only to find us waiting. He didn't last very long, nor did either of their pods.

Unfortunately no other pilots landed and after camping the hole for a while we decided to hang out at a planet that was off scan range. To no avail they didn't bite on this and we decided to close this hole as the carebears seemed to be logging off and not willing to fight.

The new cave that spawned had a Retriever and a Badger in space somewhere. This got everyone excited for some more carebear kills. So we all sat on the other side of the wh in our C6 waiting for our intel to find said ships. Ohh did they find them alright. The ships were sitting as bait in a bubble outside of the corps POS. This was so that anyone stupid enough to simply scan the ships down and warp to them that they would get caught in the bubble and blown up by the POS guns, scrams, and webs. So we figured we would ignore that and I decided to log for the night. Right before I logged one of our alliance buddies used a stealth bomber and destroyed the two ships with a bomb just to say he could. It was quite funny actually that there is always away around some traps.

Roaming in Low Sec

So I had planned on writing more about some more of my experiences in the past but I think it is time to bring the blog closer to the current time with what we did last night.

Logging in a usual I got onto my main and my alt and was warped into our POS. There were a couple of people logged in but no one active at the time so I decided to scan down the Cave and the route out into known space. At the same time one of our Alliance mates was doing the same and we happened upon the Cave at around the same time. We both jumped in and I began to scan after getting cloaked up. My alliance friend also cloaked up and just then a Vexor landed on our wormhole. Shortly afterwards he jumped into our wormhole and it seemed he didn't like what he saw because he didn't stay very long. All the while we were trying to get our alts in ships and position to attack him, but he bugged off long before we could get organized.

So I continued to scan down the high sec hole within the cave. We found that this hole came out in Amarr space, the Odin System to be exact. This route was especially good for me as I have modules and ships in the Amarr system and it was only 9 jumps from the hole exit. So I figured this was as good as time as any to sell off the sleeper loot that I had been holding onto for a while. At the same time I figured it would be a good idea to buy the skill books I needed for my alt to better his jamming skills for the pvp Scorpion that I recently had put together for him. At the same time I figured he really needed a smaller battle cruiser sized hull and so I bought and fit out a pvp fit Drake. This way I would have something that would be worth something in pvp situations rather than risking my pve fit ships on him.

While putting the ship together one of the afk pilots came back and started looking around in the cave. He found that two Cheetahs were online in a POS and we decided to use my mains Drake to start a site in the Cave to try to bait them out. Well this didn't work as they simply logged off and were quite boring! So I just finished up the site to make a little money. As I was about to finish salvaging the yummy sleeper parts a bunch of corp and alliance mates came online. We quickly decided since we had a hole close to Amarr/Minmatar faction warefare areas we would do a low sec roam.

Well we put together a decent sized fleet, a couple of Rifters, 3 nano Canes, a nano Harbi, and a triple rep mirm. We all met up in the Kourmonen system and it didn't take long for our alliance scout to find some red flashing Dominix's and Legion. I will mention that at this time I was kind of in a co-fleet commander role in which I was leading the charge to chase down our first prey of the night. We unfortunately only had one Rifter with us and he was very new to PVP so it took us quite a few systems before we were able to finally catch them.

Once we caught them we were able to knock off the two Domi's but I missed a point (where you can keep the ship from warping) on the Legion. So this was a good start to the night as we did not have to go flashy red (which means we are attacked by gate guns and anyone can attack us without recourse, this is called GCC).

Once we got into the system cluster that Vard connects to we started looking around for some people to shoot at. This is a fun time because you always have the chance to find someone on their own, but there is a chance that they have a fleet sitting on the other side of the gate and all we ended up taking was the bait. Well we found a solo Drake and decided to aggress it and go GCC. After making quick work of him we went a hiding by a planet in the system. After a short wait GCC was up and off to roaming we went again.

We decided it might be good to check the system of Amamake as the top asteroid belt typically has some sort of fight or bait set up. Unfortunately we were not able to find anyone that seemed like it would turn out well for our fleet.

This is where the night became interesting. We landed on the Auga gate in Vard just as another Drake landed. Well we went GCC and he began to play gate jump games where he would jump through and some of us could not due to aggression timers. Well we finally caught him and destroyed his well tanked ship while I managed to get put into 20% armor due to the gate guns.

So we all ended up in Auga flashy red. I quickly went to station and repaired. But this was an interesting plan on our part as Auga had a ton of Minmatar faction warfare militia members. Who were quite chatty in local and also decided to bring out a Bhaalgorn and Naval Armaggedon since they knew they had numbers on us.

Well they chased some of us around in system some and started to talk all sorts of smack how we didn't want the Bhaalgorn 1billion isk ship kill. Well the truth of the matter is that we did want it, just we were not dumb enough to get blobbed by everyone in system.

So what we ended up trying to do was setup with another very large fleet a plan that would allow us to get the Bhaalgorn. We ended up sending the triple rep Mirm out to an asteroid belt to see about getting the Bhaal pilot to take the bait. Well he chickened out and would not shoot due to his "sec status" being too low. Which was a total excuse.  Man I would like to have gotten that kill as he was very talkative in local. But we decided that it was late, and better to go out on top without any losses and a couple decent kills.

Back to the wormhole we went with the feeling of some accomplishment of one of the first alliance ops that I had been part of. I really enjoyed myself last night as I love to orchestrate fights as it is such a rush.

Anyway that does it for today. Hope for some more action tonight.

Epic Wormhole PVP

So about 2 weeks ago now we had an interesting PVP experience in our wormhole. What began like a normal day in the wormhole quickly became a lot of PVP fun. I started out by logging in and scanning our C6 for the Cave entrance (this is what we call our Static C2 wormhole). While online my corp mates started chattering in corp chat about an active C5 hole that had spawned an entrance into our home wormhole.

Apparently some traffic had begun of Buzzard ships (scanner ships) going back and forth between the C5 and our Cave hole. Well not too long after I logged on the Buzzard pilots shipped up to 2 Harbingers, a Heretic, 2 Mirmadons and one still in a Buzzard. They all seemed to have went into the Cave.

So the curious sort we are and always trying to keep tabs on them I jumped into the Cave. I quickly decloaked, dropped probes and then cloaked back up again. What I found on scan were all of the ships and they reacted quickly to try to catch me it seems. With 2 Harbi's and the Heretic warping to the exit hole back to our home WH and then beginning to orbit it. Well I maintained my cool and maintained eyes on them while I made some distance between the the hole and myself.

It took about 30 mins before they got bored and decided to change tactics. They all left the Cave and started to camp the other side of the hole, which we had someone else cloaked on who had eyes on them. Shortly after that they all warped to their C5 exit hole with all but 2 Harbi's leaving system, as well as any cloaked ships they might have had.

Well we all quickly decided with our Alliance mates who had just logged on to do an attack on the Harbinger on the C5 and see what happens. So I put my alt in his Drake and warped with a couple of battleships, a couple of Guardians (remote repair ships)  and a scorpion (a jamming ship) to the hole. We quickly dispatched the the Harbi only to find that the corp had a decent force on the other side of the hole.

A Bhaalgorn (quite expensive battleship), a neuting Dominix, several  battle cruisers and a couple of their own Guardians jumped through. This had an ensuing battle like I had not had in quite a while. I will tell you that in this game where you can actually lose your ship and stuff it is very exhilarating to get into combat.Well at that time I was able to grab my own Harbi on the field for the fight. Our fleet began to call primary targets and we began to deplete their fleet little by little until there was only the Bhaalgorn and the guardians left, which quickly jumped back through their hole. This was the first time I have ever seen a Bhaalgorn by the way which I think it a very cool looking ship.

Bhaalgorn Battleship

I quickly shipped up to one of my Ravens in my alt and stayed in my Harbi on my main. Well we soon found out that we stayed too long. As an Apoc kept jumping through and aggressing me but nothing else followed. We sent a cloaky ship through to scout and found that they had quite a number of ships on the other side including a Carrier class ship.

Well they soon all jumped through and happened to have 5 Guardians, a fair number of T2 ships, a Deimos (heavy assault ship) and the remaining force from before including the Apoc BS. We soon found that 5 guardians makes for a difficult time of killing something when they have so many reps, however we were able to change targets quick enough that we eventually killed off a couple smaller ships and the Deimos.

I give mad props to our Guardian and Scorpion pilots as they did a hell of a job keeping mostly shield tanked ships alive with the armor reppers and keeping the bad guys jammed out. We ended up getting most of our ships out, including my alts Raven, but alas my Harbi went down in flames but not without a fight. It has a hell of a good time and I commend those pilots in the enemy force for all of the fun.

All in all we felt we won with having killed more ships that were more expensive as well. But we did have a couple of new guys lose their ships and a couple get podded. Either way I would love to see that corp in the WH again and would definitely be down for some more good times like that.

Edit: Fixed Deimos as a heavy assault instead of command. Not sure what I was thinking there.

When in Rome, destroy their POS

So if you remember I mentioned previously about Player Owned Stations. What these can consist of is a main Control Tower, a force field, various ship/item/manufacturing arrays and a multitude of defensive types of ewar/resistance/gunnery. So there are many ways to design the POS according to budget and how well defended a corp would like their POS to be.

Well unfortunately for some people they do not always understand what is needed to truly defend the POS and over about a month we happened upon two such POS 's. So what we ended up doing to break away from any monotonic nature of killing sleepers in our C6 wormhole was to move one of our own smaller POSs into the neighboring wormholes that had undefended or poorly defended POSs along with a slew of battleships and ammo.

We then proceeded to siege the POS in which we would incapacitate any "lol" defenses they may have had and then attacked the Control Tower until it goes into a Reinforced state. This state means it cannot be attacked for a period of time until the POS's fuel for reinforcement runs out, usually a day or more. We then could continue to attack and destroy the tower in order to loot anything from inside that we could get from the various arrays.

The first POS that we sieged ended up only having a few ships left as the owners got quite a bit out the night it was in reinforced. However the second POS ended up yielding many different arrays, ships and modules due to us letting the 4-5 owners out of the system without a fight in exchange for anything they left. So that siege turned out to be quite profitable for the corp.

The only downfall is that POS sieging takes a lot of ammo and a lot of time to destroy the main tower. Which can be slightly boring if you do not have a lot of fire power with you. For the second POS we had both us and our alliance mates to take it down so it didn't take very long. It also was logistically a pain to get everything out of the WH.

We ended up moving everything into an adjacent C5 from the C2 that the POS was in and then was able to find a route to hisec. I ended up helping move 5-6 ships out as I could fly those types. Over all the POS siege is fun and can be profitable as the ones that are not well defended are typically due to the people not knowing much about the game and they end up crying about it a lot. Which is quite funny.

In the next post I will discuss some of my PVP experiences up until this time including the epic battle with CCRES corp.

Wormhole Life

After getting accepted into my current corp I was then able to move stuff into the C6 that we live in and share with our alliance mates (another corp allied with us). I mainly chose this particular corporation due to it being a US based corp and mainly based on the east coast for time zone purposes. This way I have people on everynight when I log on to play.

So far I have really enjoyed myself in the new corp. We have done a ton of Cosmic Anomoly sites (shooting at sleeper drone ships), assaulted other players Player Owned Stations (pos) in wormholes, went on camping trips and did some pvp. All of which I will explain and document shortly before getting into the today/ tomorrow stuff.

To begin with I have made some decent money doing sites with the corp. We do them in our own wormhole, in our static wormhole (this is an adjacent lower class hole that spawns a different hole each day) and also in a Class 5 wormhole. For our system and the C5 we use shield tanked (check http://eve-survival.com/ for more information on shield tanking) battleships. Which I had to cross train shield skills and Caldari BS skills to be able to fly the Scorpion Navy Issue that I use on my main toon and I had already leveled up the skills and owned a shield tanked Raven for my alt toon. Most of us have alts and we typically dual box most C6 sites as well as did C5 sites when we went on a camping trip. What this means is we took a medium pos of our own and moved into a C5 that spawned with a ton of CA's in it. We ran these for about a week and made quite a bit of money for ourselves and for the corp. Hopefully we will use the corp funds to do some roaming in pvp or something fun soon.

For our static lower class wormhole I typically use a couple of Drakes (battle cruiser size ship) and do that solo or with another corp mate on nights people are not online or when we do not have a good route to high security space.

History of my toon(s)

So I will start this off with where I have been in the game of Eve Online. I started this game as something to do outside of another game that I was playing earlier this year. When I started the game I first tried a couple of the different races over the 14 day trial period and finally settled on an Amarr character. I really liked the looks of the ships that it had, especially the Abaddon.

As I found out very quickly that getting into the shiny ships that I wanted to fly would take a fair amount of time. I also found out that the game had an extremely high learning curve to it. So it took a lot of research and asking in the "rookie" chat to figure out how to maneuver around in the game.

Once I got some of the basics down I found what is called a "Corporation" (corp), which is like a guild in the game. My first corp was a mining corp. What this meant was that most of the players in the corp were into the mining profession. I quickly found out that mining is kind of mindless and proceeded to help them out with hauling only. I decided then that being a combat pilot was more along my fancy. So I had planned to help the corp out as a pvp pilot to protect the miners from pirates (other players that perform piracy), etc. But I found that I was alone in that task in the corp and begun to look around for another corp as soon as it was announced that our CEO (the leader of the corp) will be stepping out for real life reasons and will be giving the corp over to someone else.

I then found the corp of  The Imperium of Lazy Nation that was rooted in what is called Faction Warfare. What this meant was that they were fighting for the Amarr Militia (navy for the most part) to attack and defend solar systems against the Minmatar and Gallente Federation. This meant that I could live in high security (hisec) space but go out into low security (low sec) space to pvp in gangs of fellow Amarr Militia corporations. I found this to be extremely enjoyable. Whenever I logged on there seemed to always be some form of fleet forming in which I would be able to shoot at and at least get some kills of sorts that night. Quite often I was getting many kills and also was suffering a fair amount of losses as I was still learning the pvp portion as well as my skills were still low and I could only fly cheapo tier one frigates and cruisers. That and I had low amounts of money as I never learned to mission to make money.

While this was very fun I then had some real life things come up that caused me to not be able to play for some time. When I finally came back 3-4 months later the corp that I had been in was in dire straights as it only had a few people active in it. This included me, the CEO and another good friend of mine from the corp. I was on most times alone and soon found no fun in going to fleets of people I knew nothing about alone was no fun for me. So I decided to learn some of the pve side of the game and began to do research on missioning as I enjoyed my couple of times missioning  with my friend Tim. Along the way I met another good friend MG and learned a lot of missioning tricks from him. He plays with multiple accounts and wrecks missions quickly. He is a ton of fun to mission with and I really was given a lot of help from him which I appreciate greatly. This also prompted me to create a second account that I now use in the wormhole nightly.

As I continued with my missioning and playing on my own a lot for a couple of months I finally decided that it was time to move on to something new. And I did a lot of research and browsing around for a wormhole corp as the pod cast Lost in Eve has really excited me about wormholes. If you want to find out what a wormhole is Google has a ton of information on the subject when related to Eve online, but to quickly summarize them up they are a part of space that has random entrances and exists as well no security to speak of so all things are free game in them.

So what's next? I plan to explain some of the things that have happened and what I have learned since joining my wormhole corp. I really have been enjoying myself as well have been making a ton of money that is allowing me to have a couple extra ships for pvp now, which I will get into in another blog.

Signing off - Fantym

First post

So I have decided to start this blog today after listening to a pod cast that I follow, Lost in Eve. I have decided to explain where I have come from in my Eve adventures and what is happening on a daily basis in my current life in the wormhole that I live in.

So keep an eye out as there is much more to come daily or every couple of days and thanks for stopping by.