Quiet In Null Sec

Well I have been logging in lately and been able to do a couple different things once all my stuff was moved over to our new home system. About that move, I think this was a great idea as we now have a ton of blues around at all times. I am also excited in having a possible opportunity to be able to get in on some of the larger engagements as the alliance that we have made friends with and live with have some fairly good size enemies as well as capital fleets.

We recently blued another large alliance as well and have been able to join their intel channel. This is exciting for me as it will give us a chance to join their fleets and get in on some combat ops. Which would be cool because I have been doing nothing but ratting (killing ships in asteroid belts) and started doing some Archangel level 1's. I have been able to just burn through these luckily with my assault frigate that I brought down, the Retribution. This is a very fun ship and it is enjoyable to be able to 1 shot the frigs in the missions. I think I may look into doing the Angel Epic arc at some point as I heard you get decent rewards and shouldn't be too difficult to do with the AF. So I will look into doing that at some point. The only downfall of missioning down in null is that it pits you against the empire factions and you can lose quite a bit of standing. Which currently my standings with Gallente and Minmatar is already in the shitter due to being part of faction warfare. But I don't necessarily care so much about those as I do my Amarr and Caldari standing. Either way I will continue to mission to get to level 4's so that I can make some better money than I currently am.

Now I have been 'OK' with running stuff on my own, but I really enjoy playing and fleeting up with my corp mates. I brought this up in conversation last night and with much hope we will start doing some more corp related stuff. Maybe some roams or doing missions together once some of us can do level 4's.

Speaking of roams I recently have been thinking about learning the electronic attack ship skill on my main toon and begin to put together a Sentinel for solo work. I have done some reading and the fact it has such a large drone bay and can drain another frigates cap dry so easily makes it very dangerous. It also sounds like a lot of fun to fly as it seems to take some learning and getting used to in order to be good with it. Either way as I do more solo stuff I will keep the blog updated.

Thanks for reading.

Next Null Move

Well since I last posted I have had a chance to do some ratting down in our new null sec home. So far I have found it to be a far less lucrative endeavor comparative to the wormhole income we were seeing before. We managed to do a complex with an Ishtar tanking while I was in a Basilisk and a Dominix doing the the dps. It took us a little over an hour and a half to complete and I think I only made 18-20mil isk. Way less than we would have made in a C3 for that matter doing it with the same setup.

We also seem to have a bunch of new enemies in the system we were trying to call home. So far we have one major alliance that has decided to continue to assault us in the surrounding systems as well ratt in the same systems we planned to ratt in. If you can recall we also had a fair number of neutrals in system that were friends with our old alliance mates. Well it turns out that our older alliance mates were booted from their corporation for losing a couple of carriers. They have since then joined the corp that has been giving us some grief. Well looks like we have a temporary cease fire and will only fire at them if they fire at us first. So we will see what comes of this.

Here is a small blurb of what our diplomatic director sent to the alliance lol:

So Im setting their corp to "ORANGE" standing. Think of this as a highly abusive relationship between a divorced couple who have still have feelings for each other. Sounds weird I know. But if it makes u feel any better, fear isnt looking to shoot us (unless he's ordered to)....This is a grey line we're walking here, so be careful guys, if going ratting, try to have scout alts or do it in a fleet. 

 It is a very interesting situation given our old friends being part of the corp but it does give us one less corp to defend ourselves against so I should say this is a good thing.

Now because we have had these hostiles growing in exponential numbers down where we were basing out of our directors managed to speak to the larger alliance that we have full blue status with. They own a part of space and protect it quite well and have offered for us to move into this space while we grow our corp and alliance. Now I have posed the question of why we are not just joining this larger alliance instead of trying to build our own and I am sure there are good reasons why they want to build up our own alliance. I know I am kinda excited to possibly have the chance to do some larger scale fights. It will also be nice to be in some space that is a little safer than where we are now as I need to get back to making some iskies. The more I can make the more ships I can get blown up in pvp combat.

Speaking of one of our pilots was doing  a couple of missions and happen to begin to get camped. I came online just in time to be able to get into fleet with my stealth bomber. We took a hand full of cloaky ships over to see about putting presence in the system so that we could get him out. Well he was able to undock and decided to try to finish the mission. It was not long after that a Dramiel and Cynabal undocked and warped to his mission. Well he managed to get out and we decided to force him to leave system. At which point we saw a local spike in their alliance so we all decided to scoot back to our home system as stealthily as possible.

I later was out and about in my two pvp Drakes sitting on the other side of the out going gate from our home system when a Proator jumped in. Well I was able to get him locked and started to fire / scram and web him as he made his way back to the gate. Unluckily for me I did not have enough dps to really do that much damage to him and he got away. Ohh well maybe next time I will sit with a couple of assault ships or maybe some HAC's once I have them trained up.

Thanks for reading.

Final Wormhole PVP, For Now

Well we had finally gotten a good route with no actives in the cave. Or so we thought. One of my now good friends and corp mates happen to find that their were two active pilots in the cave when we were about to start moving the remaining ships from the wormhole to hisec. Well he found a Dominix on our hole and it appeared to be attempting to close the hole out just as I had warped my pvp Harbinger to the hisec hole. While he had been sitting in his cloaky ship on the cave side of our exit hole in his alt he was grabbed one of the others Scorpion and had jumped into the cave.

Well I warped back to the exit hole with the Harbinger just in time for the Dominix to jump back into the cave. Now the Domi is a battleship versus my Harbinger and a Scorpion. My corpmate just happened to have Caldari battleship to 5 so when the Domi finally decloaked he turned on his jammers and I warp scrammed him and began to beat the hell out of the thing. I launched drones and the Domi began to go down at a steady pace. He didn't even have a chance to get a target off or launch drones. Well all of a sudden a Manticore stealth bomber appeared and shot a bomb at me and then warped away. It hit relatively hard but it killed all my drones.Well that down right was rude! lol. So as we finished off the Domi, but missed his pod I went and looted the wreck. I wasn't able to get it all and just then the Manitcore appeared again and shot a bomb, blowing up the last bits of the wreck. This time I was ready and immediately got a point on him. Well he didn't last long against my lasers and I managed to get a second kill. The pod warped off and a convo ensued between my corp mate and the actives. We decided to temp blue status them and started moving as many of the rest of the ships out of the wormhole as we could.

I managed to get all my mains ships out to hisec. This is where I decided that instead of moving 13 ships 22 jumps that I would sell off all my assets with the exception of my hauler, then I packaged up my smaller ships  and the fittings. Doing this I lost all the money in rigs but I could not be arced to move all those ships that distance. I moved the remaining ships down to our staging area. Once down there I decided to put together a few more ships. For one I put an assault ship, the Retribution, together to use in the Angel epic arc missions at some point. I also put together two pvp and two pve Drakes.

Now down in our Null sec home we had a couple of neutrals that were very hostile. One of them were recognized as being a former alliance mate of ours from the other corp that had left our alliance. Well out of curiosity two of us decided to get on the old alliance mates comms. Wouldn't you know it that they were there talking up a storm. Well we just kept quiet and got all the intel we could. It turned out that one of them absolutely hated any type of Blackbird or ECM boat. So naturally while I was in hisec I bought a Blackbird and fittings so that my alt would have one if we were going to be enjoying time tangling with them.So we found that they were just down there to rat. We found they knew we had a couple of capital ships in system, at least the one carrier and that they would just drop in their mothership if we brought caps out.

Well this was great information for the future as the alliance we have blued currently has a ton of super capitals and I am sure would love to get a couple of super cap kills. So we may just set something up for a little trap once we get more people and ships down to null. We are almost there and since then I have gotten all my smaller ships down as well as a couple of ratting ships.

So once we have some more numbers it will be time to start playing with our new found enemies. More updates on some of my day to day activities to come as I am sure there will be more combat coming my way shortly.

Thanks for reading.

First Null Combat - Carrier Sweet Carrier

So I have a couple of things to write about after this weekend but thought I would start with this. I get logged into my main, who was still in the wormhole with about 13 ships to move yet until yesterday. So anyway I log on and find that there is an easy way to get my alt down to our home in Curse. This was to pod myself after moving my clone down to the appropriate location in Curse. So I put my Drake in the staging area for it to be carrier jumped down while I podded my alt into our new home in null sec.

Not more than 30 minutes after getting down there was my Drake available. Now this Drake just happened to be my ratting Drake so I was not really prepared for what came next. Shortly after jumping in the ship I heard on comms and in our public channel that there was a neutral Brutix aggressing on the gate in our home system. So I quickly undocked and flew to the gate only to miss him warp away. Someone obviously didn't get a warp disruptor point on him and he got away. Well he happened to land on a station where one of my corpmates was sitting with a Cynabal. He quickly got point and they began to exchange fire.

I warped in and we began to dismantle the ship. He went down and we just missed getting his pod as well. Soon there came another ship into system, this time an Anathema which slipped past one of our guys on the gate with ease. I then warped back to gate as we assumed there would be more coming to the Brutix's aid, at which point a Falcon jumped in. Well I locked him up, target painted him and put up one volley to put him into armor, obviously no tank on the ship. He managed to warp away for one reason, the other ship on gate did not want to aggress as we both assumed he would burn to gate and jump through. So we missed him because I did not have a point. However during the Brutix encounter one of our pilots lost his Stiletto on the gate in which I quickly looted his stuff for him which included a warp disruptor II.

Well I immediately put this on with his go ahead and came back to gate. Just in time for the Brutix pilot to land on the other side with a Scorpion. Well he was met with one of our pilots who started attacking him and the Scorp jumped through the gate into us. Well it looked like he would try to play gate games as he started to burn back. We were putting some hurt on him as he was already going into armor and would be in structure shortly. I managed to get a bump on him with my Drake which gave us a little time, but not before he lit a cyno!!! In jumped a Nidhoggur carrier and it immediately aggressed us. Well we got point on it and began trying to kill off its fighters when it decided to sick the little bastards on me. I tried deaggressing and burning back to gate but it was too late and I went down as he had me warp scrambled.

Well he was then able to warp around and what does he do but land directly on top of my cloaked corpmate that lost his Stiletto earlier, only to lose a hound this time. Bad day right? Well we then contacted our alliance mates who had some carriers on standby. The plan was to get him to aggress on station so that he could not dock up and then bring in the caps. Well our Stiletto mate grabbed a cyno ship with another person in fleet having one as well. I was in my capsule in station listening to the rest as I had no other ships down there available to me.

They got the carrier to aggress and called for the cyno, well the bad day turned worse when the Stiletto mate failed to have enough fuel to light the cyno. Luckily the other pilot did light it and in jumped a couple of carriers as well as one of our pilots undocked his carrier. Here is where they failed once again to get a point on the Nid and he was able to warp away to the station I was located in. With people trying to get a bump on him to keep him from docking this is where it was time for me to just call it a night as it was very late at that point and it looked like he would be able to dock up. So long story short we did not get the carrier kill and hopefully the alliance has a good lesson in getting a point to warp scramble the prey.

I in the meantime was able to refit out a Drake and have been able to do some ratting as well as have this Drake ready to go for pvp. In the next post I will talk about our last wormhole pvp that I got to participate in as well as how OP a Dramiel is. Till next time, so long.

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!