Low Sec Lifestyle

I worked last new years Eve so I missed what it is like on Eve.  I worked this morning but I'm home an hour before the clock strikes 00:00 in Iceland. I've already been "Happy New Yeared" at by half a dozen people due to time zones. Time zones are something that we understand but sometimes I feel  that Eve emphasizes that drastic distance separation of the globe while emphasizing the easy of community and personal relationships regardless. I gave hugs to my boys in Europe even as they celebrate hours ahead of when the click would wind down in America.  In game, the new year is dictated by Eve's time.  People have logged in to celebrate in game instead of watching it on Television and toasts are had in chat channels all over. Some might say, "Go out!" but really, we are gamers and many of us are internet junkies because we are happy where we are.  For me, I don't go out on New Years Eve and nothing can make me take those risks. I don't party s

It was one of those moments when energy was high. We had finished fighting another fleet.  A fight that went well but not as well as hoped due to us not killing all of their ships.  But it left a lot of blood pumping and twenty people running around the system. It was not a good time to be a month old player in a drake, sitting at zero on the sun while the heron alt/friend dropped probes in a highly active low sec system and seemingly oblivious to what is going around. Large numbers in system tend to mean that it is a home system or something is going on.  I will give his age as the reason that he did not use dscan to see the fleet in space.  And we landed on him and tore him apart.  Nineteen people.  Just because he was there and we were out and we kill people.  We held damage and waited for the entire fleet to land before we killed him . And I looked at the killmail and saw that he was a month old and felt a bit bad.  He tried to fight back once he was locked down.  For some 

Eve gives me a particular desire to participate in things that I would otherwise ignore.  This is one of them.  Blog Banter 42 convinced me to scribble down a brief summary of major events in the year.  Now that the year is ending and people are doing the New Years thing and writing summaries and resolutions and such things. Because I participate in the community I wind up reading things that I might otherwise not.  Then I start thinking on the subjects and depending on that I may or may not write about them.  My first draft of this particular blog post was very grumpy and moody due to the fact that I am not a Holiday person and look forward to life settling back down to normal. But the future.  The future in Eve is always constant  It is not a 'This is a new year' type of thing because the game requires from many a significant amount of planning.  Skill plans, financial plans, character pathways, social interactions, various events, all of these things trail into the

 With the changes to cruisers they are ridiculously fun.  The cheapness encourages massive rampages across space.  The gategun changes have opened the field back up to frigates and assault frigates are amazing tackle with the new mechanics.  This was a fun night with explosions on all sides. Earlier today, I said that I'm going to be good and start grinding my sec status back up.  Do some ratting every day and let it trickle up.  So, now I'm down to -7.9 from -7.1.  After the second pod I went, "Damn it I said no more pods!" Oh well.  I never can remember at that exact instant. I doubt I'm the only one that sat in their hanger flipping through their ships to decide what to take out and play.  Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that.  As I idle I often do little maintenance things like check ammunition and drones.  I have several ships fit but I tend to fly the same ones over and over again until they explode, then I move to the next one.

Eve has some of the stupidest and most incompetent insurance companies ever convinced.  These people recklessly hand out insurance policies to Eve pilots and corporations who then run off and have the ships blown up hours after they receive coverage. Then the same people come back and do it again, only to receive another freshly minted policy that they immediately lose. Insurance is an ISK injector into Eve.  That makes it a hot topic.  What happens is you pick your insurance rate for your ship and pay a fee.  The insurance payout on the destruction of your ship is higher then the fee you paid. Considering that you have already transferred money for the cost of the ship the ISK from the insurance minus the cost of the policy is magical ISK injected into the system. What amuses me endlessly, is that there is also a basic insurance pay out for any ship lost.  If you do not insure your ship you still receive a payout.  It may be terrible but you will receive it anyway.  Here is a base

In Local: [16:30:00] Razor Z > obvious bait is obvious The obvious bait was an Armageddon Navy Issue hanging out on one of the gates to our home system. At the time there was Razor, Ren and I on.  Razor and Ren had just lost their ships to another fleet that was still hanging around two systems over.  Now, this sudden faction battleship is just hanging around asking for a fight. There are a lot of unspoken signals given.  Hanging around an occupied system, out in space is an invitation to the locals to undock and come play.  However, body language, or perhaps, space language is like normal body language   It gives away more then it means to if you know how to read it. Solo battleships in low sec are not normal.  I had to explain on the forums to one newer player that gate camps are not composed of Machariel's and carriers and that the ships one bumps into are most often battlecruiser hulls and down.  There are plenty of people who pull off solo battleships.

[And now for early morning, frustrated ramblings.] It is not the bad days or the explosions that irritate me.  It's the terrible, terrible decisions that make me sigh.   I have a problem of not thinking when someone tells me to do something.  I just do it.  Now, this problem does not extend to everyone. I promise, if you randomly just start giving my orders I won't follow them.  But, when anyone that I fleet with that has more experience than I do issues an order, I tend to blindly follow it up to and including my doom.  Their opinion is greater than my common sense.  Thusly, I have often struggled with content that I wasn't ready to deal with because people sometimes forget what it is like to be in the position of a lower skill point player.  Instead of questioning I just assume that I am terrible at things. The worst part is I often know better.  I'll sit there and go back and forth internally about following instructions when I really, really feel that I

I was teaching Hono about lighting cynos the other day and I realized that I forget that there are many players that do not interacted with capital ships on a normal basis.  I forget because my awkward path led me into a place where capital ships were a matter of course.  A day to day event where the proper care and management of them became another of many lessons consumed.  And it didn't really occur to me but recently that some players may not like capital ships being involved in a fight. Its a ship like any other.  It is big and it is expensive.  Properly training into one takes some time.  I also consider battleships to be big and expensive.  I consider pimped out pirate frigates to be small and expensive.  Expense can enter a small hull through modules or preexist in a large one through sheer volume.  There are many subcapital ships that cost more then capital ships that die every day.  Rarity matters.  Look at the price of an Alliance Tournament frigate one day.  Tiny and

Lesson learned. Trust myself more.  Even when I make a bad decisions I should run with it instead of mindlessly following instructions and sitting and letting myself be killed like an idiot when the instructions are not going to be a possibility.  Magic is not going to save me and I could have at least killed someone instead of just letting myself die in a fire. So.  Onward to next time.

While flipping through my salvage I noticed this particular little bit of market scamming in Rens and decided to write about it for those who have not actually seen these at work.  Rens is one of the five major high sec trade hubs.  Jita, most often heard and referenced is the main trade hub in the game.  However, each empire has its own hub and Minmatar space manages to have two.  Rens is a more solid hub then Hek.  Hek, due to its proximity to low sec manages to focus more in ships, fits and ammo while Rens tends to be an everything type of hub (or so I have found). So, Eve.  Eve is a terrible place full of terrible people that do terrible things to each other during their free time so that they can vent their psychopathic and sociopathic tendencies online instead of in real life where they would be evicted from their mother's basement and cast into a world where there is no chance that they will ever feel the touch of a woman much less be able to interact with another huma

My Legion is so ugly.  I can only cry over it and then shove my alts screaming kicking body into it and hook her in.  Poor thing. I feel bad for her but low sec was dead and its not like Sugar can derp around high sec anytime she feels like it.  But wow, I can't blame her for her tears.  I feel the same way. I worry sometimes it will eat me in my sleep. I really want to love it. But its so hideous. I could only wander around space.  Yet every time.. it was still there... So I did the only sensible thing and bumped something just as ugly until I felt better. So many tears that I cry...  But then I found a 4/10 DED Complex.  And I called for help cuz my DPS is soo bad in my cloaky nulified scanning Legion.  But a terrible, terrible Tengu entered the system and scanned down my complex!  It was a race!  Without guns! Except Sleipnir.  Poor Tengu.  He killed so many things in the first room and then we took the gate and blitzed the Faction spawn and asked him

I think it was the cyno frigates that did it.  They were a last step.  That moment when I went from standing, with my eyes above the surface of the water to sinking fully into the depths.  It was the point where I stopped looking at the surface, and back towards the land and instead looked into the rich depths around me and became a part of that world. Now I have a label.  Its not quite a tattoo but it has a lot of permanence to it.  I am pretty sure that I like it and won't have any regrets about it. My descent from miner to pirate has been a long, slow process.  My sec status dropped at a slow and steady rate.  I kept pushing it back up for the longest time.  I ratted regularly.  I let myself be swayed by others reasons.  I clung to it because it was security.  And at some point I let that go.  I let my fingers relax and slowly started to slide deeper into the fluid waters of PvP.   And then I stopped again and started to tread water.  A slow, measured tread but I hovered at

Rudolph the Red Nosed Cynabal says "Hello". Blog Banter 42 is about the year in Review: I'm not overly good at reviewing things by the year.  But this year, its a bit easier since my game has seen such a huge arc in what I do and what I understand.  I can't review Eve as a whole because I do not understand Eve as a whole.  Instead, I dip my hands into the pools that I have splashed around in and view what reflections sit upon their surfaces. While I might not have a review of Eve, I have a handful of thoughts focused on Low Sec and the changes over the last year in both Eve and my personal game.  In fact, I’d embroiled myself into public opinions of Low Sec and developed a little personal campaign to prove that we are a part of the game, not just boogeymen on the other side of the gate (no matter HOW much most of them enjoy that fact it can’t be our complete definition). I realized that I hadn't written about the changes that Retribution brought tha

I remember why I loved salvaging so much.  Sitting in Rens, flipping through the market and pricing out my items vs selling them directly to buy orders and watching my wallet flip over to the tune of hundreds of millions tickles me like few other things do. I had one of those really good mornings in game.  The type where you drop your probes and have nothing in the first system you check.  One jump over you get a half dozen hits.  One of them is a Radar site and that is always good.  The next is a 5/10 DED complex and it takes all your self control not to pull in the probes then and there and start the complex. The next and final signature is a 4/10 DED complex.  Someone likes you today.  Now its time to make ISK.  Considering that I have been spending and not making, I get excited. While many of my comrades are not into grinding for ISK, I do enjoy flying in Eve. I enjoy my time popping my red crosses (NPCs) and feeling my Sleipnir burn through things while Chella peacefully tos

In my hanger there is a container named, "Drugs". I have seeded my first market with drugs and it is not my fault.  I was only following suggestions.  To my great joy they are selling and I’m rather excited about this.  It hadn't occurred to me to seed the market in Molden Heath, so I have not.  Now I’m in the middle of restructuring my POS to work on this venture. In general, I am terrible at the Market.  I’ve tried to get into Market trading so that I could roll in ISK. I've read multiple guides.  I've met people.  I have people willing to hold my hand and walk me through it.  I am still, simply, terrible at it.  The adjustments the looking the spending to make things and having ISK as assets and then selling again and the lack of comfort about values and gains and losses and margins and the fact that my head just exploded… I’m not terrible at making ISK.  I’m not the greatest but I make a few billion a month which covers my needs and tends to leave a bit