Low Sec Lifestyle

With the quickness of Red-Fog Freight moving by stuffs through Black-Frog Logistics I put everyone into rookie ships and ran them across the game yesterday afternoon to settle into their new home. I've been flying around in the darkness, absorbing how different a place can feel from home. I'm even minorly homesick. Evemaps are my new, constant companion behind my game window. Normally, at 'home' I never needed to have it up until we ventured afield. Space is different here and no one knows me. It is amazing how comfortable familiarity is, even with those that will cause you explosions. Now each system is full of people I do not know and have never seen before. It's not been a fun time so far. My new home system has people in it already. I've not come into conflict with them yet, but I am sure it is coming. Most seem to be missioning. Interesting, that. I've been hunted and chased down most of the places that I have yet found something ...

I've often heard and answered the question, "How do I give someone stuff?" It is a truly deep question, deeper then the asker may realize the first time the question comes up. Eve is made of Stuff. Stuff runs our Eve life. In Eve, stuff matters. Stuff is tangible and stuff is destroyable. Stuff also has mass and size. Stuff has cost. Stuff needs to travel from one place to another. That early question of "How do I give someone stuff?" may have another form such as "How do I get stuff?" and "How do I move my stuff?" The last often brings up the question, "Can I mail my stuff?" No. You can not mail stuff. Eve does not have magical mail where you can place your battleship into an envelope and send it to where you want it to go. No. Eve has logistics. You want your stuff from Point A to Point B you have to figure out how to get your stuff there. Logistics matter. They matter a lot. Not all ships are made to transport ...

I love the Eve Online Forums. I love them with a simple, clean amusement that comes from the amount of chuckling I get from them. While they are filled with trolling and terrible ideas, the amount of wit, sarcasm and snappy responses that fill them make up for it. I came across this gem tonight and was amused by it for much of the evening. AFK Cloaking is botting. I've been reading AFK cloaking threads off and on. I realized, as I read this one today, that people really are under siege by this. I couldn't understand why. There are neutrals in the systems that I go into all of the time. I try to scout myself, avoid gatecamps and watch for combat probes as I do things. I understand that I may explode/will explode at any time. Its all part of daily life. I don't live in nullsec. I venture down there sometimes to rat and sometimes to roam. I don't pretend to understand how nullsec works for people, how the large alliances work, and etc. It just never oc...

I lost a covops the other day. My poor covops alt gets ganked about once a month. So far, each situation has been different. This time I undocked and got nailed on the undock. The covops frig is made of kisses and hope. I had a 'wtf' moment as her pod warped off. Then I saw red and undocked Sugar to beat some ass. However, they were gone and my wreck was unlooted. I pulled my sisters launcher out of the wreck and kissed it. The damn things are expensive to lose as often as I lose them. I hopped to my home system and sent my alt off to buy and fit herself another covops frig. I'd run out of them at home (paper, sneezes, etc). I then thought about why I'd gotten ganked and what I had done wrong. Or more, specifically, how I missed the dude that ganked me. As my alt made her way to buy her stuff her mailbox flashed. Puzzled, I looked at it. How cute. A survey from the people that had popped her asking me how my ganking went. Then I noticed the tag line at t...

Eve is not safe. Eve is harsh. Eve is cruel. Yet, all of these reasons are why I, and many others play. The frustrations, the irritations, and the moments of sheer splendid joy are all built from the fact that the game itself is not built around kindness. These are common, common terms that are tossed around about Eve Online. Yet, dispite them, people still fall prey to some in game scams for the simple reason that they would not be scams in any other game. What we have played often molds us to what we will play. While many people are told to flush other gameplay down the toilet when they come to Eve online, the simple fact is that habits are habits. The one that I have been watching for the last few weeks is a corp enrollment gank scam. The corperation is Missions and Logistics Incorporated . There are these threads: Do not join "Missions and Logistics Incorporated" Epic Fail in EVE First day of subscription and I got this..... I have personally watched tw...

Around an hour ago, I noticed a group hanging around in system that our alliances co-corp calls home. Most of them are off in high sec hunting war targets. Why high sec? I still don't understand the appeal. But none of them were around when I asked wtf was in their system. I think I planned to scan the system and then promptly forget. Its been a rough day. So, I wandered into the next system to hear one of my corpmates lose his thalos to a random gang he had decided to fight. Ender kinda asks him he if is willing to wait a few moments before he goes and tosses another ship at them. However, the wait was to long and they vanished. Which happens. Wormholes make for an interesting flow of people sometimes. I joined the fleet. I was floating around, scanning for some sites. While we sat on the gate I found and bookmarked a radar and mag site to do later. However, Ender noticed the group in the alliances home system and decided to go probe them down to see what he could s...

The other day I was feeling rather down. Stuff has happened, wars, pewpew, talking, more random war decs, a bit of WTF, some other stuff, whatever. I was debating running off to live in Derelik for a while. A change of scenery. But I doubt it will happen. Anyway, as I was rejecting an invite to a roaming fleet I heard a counter call from a corp mate that there was a battleship fleet floating around the other side of the Molden Heath Ring. While I can say no to a big (IE 10 ships) roaming fleet I can't say no to a corpie calling me to come shoot at some poeple. The roaming fleet reshipped a bit haphazardly into an armor battleship fleet. We normally roam in battle cruisers and cruisers. But for a local battleship fight all sorts of stuff comes popping out of the hangers. So that and some hurricanes (me being one of said hurricanes)and the obligatory drake went chasing after this 5 tempest, curse, falcon, claymore, something else x2 fleet. We moved with a slow, sluggish ...

I really don't get PvE. Its rather sad and a bit embarrassing that I am so absoutly terrible at it. To compensate for my vast inability, I normally avoid it and spend my time finding other ways to make ISK. Today, I decided to be bold and try to do some of the anomaly hanging around the system. I scanned one down that had no escalations. I pulled up the guide on it and it seemed like it was something I should be able to do with a battle cruiser and a logi. Frigs, cruisers, battle cruisers a few battleships. They were in 5 spawns. The spawns were triggered by killing the highest bounty/biggest ship. I figured with spawn management I'd be fine. It didn't work out that way for me. I landed in the anom, got aggro from the NPCs and landed my logi. I rolled my logi off of me to keep her out of the way of future spawns. With reps running I puttered about popping frigs -> cruisers -> battle cruisers and as I popped the 2nd to last battle cruiser with plans to cle...

I've said before that I rarely give away isk. Today must be a different day. I've dropped a few hundred mil on Somer blink and I had an interesting interaction with a new player. In a chat a new player said that he was scared to leave the station. "Why for?" he was asked. "There are pirates out there. They are -10 and they will kill me." It turns out that he had needed a skillbook for Heavy Missiles. He found it at a discount two jumps into lowsec. He decided to be brave and go for it. He made it to the station and had his skillbook. He was in his destroyer fit with everything he needed to mission. The only problem was that there were two people sitting outside the station, waiting for him. "If you die you die. Don't let yourself be held hostage." "This is three million worth of stuff! I know its not a lot to you but it is to me!" He was three days old. "Okay. Here." I deposited 5 mil into his ...

The other day I was puttering around seeing what there was to see. In the back of my mind I had ideas of finding something productive to do with my time and sec status. I had wandered afk, my attention span resembling that of a gnat. I wandered back and remembered that I was trying to be productive. There was only one other person in system with me. I was in a deep safe and scanned a few times. I was about to reposition myself when I noticed that there was a cyno beacon in my overview. Oh... hmm... I went to see. "Cyno Up," I told my corp mates as I warped to see what there was to see. With one ship in system, it had to be the cyno pilot and me. So I was brave and warped to zero. A Tristan sat upon the cyno. It was so tiny and brave looking, frozen in place. It was right off of a station but the chances of making it through an entire cycle are hit or miss. I stared at him for a bit. I had no desire to shoot him. I've sat atop my share of cynos, prote...

[I asked permission before I wrote about this] I got a private message from a corpmate. I was a bit surprised because we normally chat across our private channel and only a few other people were on. However, I answered it to have him beg me to get him out of a wormhole. "I forgot to bookmark the exit." I could only shake my head. I'm sure it has happened to many and will happen to me. I'm guessing he scanned it down, saved it, changed ships, and took two toons in both in combat ships and just forgot to bookmark. "What system were you in?" He told me. I logged on my scanning scout and headed over to scan him out. "Do you remember where it was?" "Somewhere near the middle of the system. There are only two wormholes there." Okay. Scan I did. I found one in the middle of the system, pulled my probes and jumped in. "Here?" "No. :(" "Okay." I hopped back out. Before I did, I glanced around and...

http://killfeed.eveuniversity.org/?a=kill_related&kll_id=36570 That is the end. Later, we collected all of the drones. We looted the wrecks that the Eve Uni members did not get. The cans were an idea by Hatchery it seems. It makes for an interesting dynamic around the field. Oh, we died... but so did they. Our side was cyclone, drake, drake, cane, drake, cane, cane, oracle, cane, cane, cane, cane, oracle,. The catalyst and punisher were from earlier things. Later, we added a drake and one cane reshipped to a stabber. When I jumped in, all I saw was ships and drones and cans and a mess. It took a second to clear everything up but from the battle reports it looked like they had Mega, Raven, Rapier, cane, drake x6, thrasher x3, naga, cormorant, moa, punisher, thorax, vexor, purifier, rifter x2, omen, incursus, tristan, rupture x2 and merlin x2. I think I have them all but I'm a bit tired now and typing. I used Eve Uni's killboard because the fight is sp...

Today, we took the Mediocre fleet out and tried to do the pewpew. One of my alliance mates had an interesting tangle today where he had a fleet of Eve Uni members attempt to take on his Maelstrom. It did not go that well for that fleet, although he said that two of them did make it off the field. For others of us, here we sit in a familiar scene. This is station camping I guess. It seems to be the inevitable outcome lately. We are sitting here. Now and then the station disgorges a frigate or cruiser. We try to kill it. Because we are terrible at station camping we don't have an instalock anything with our fleet. It is a rather hit or miss practice with lots of cheering and booing as we lock and miss. This is not how the mediocre fleet started or why it was formed. The fleet name was in fact given birth by a comment after it was formed. Before this moment, it was just us logging in and fleeting up to go visit the war front for a little while. Today, we are defined as ...

I reached a milestone in my young game life this weekend and crossed the 10 million skill point mark with Chella. It was unexpected. One moment I was at 9.8 and the next at 10.2. I'm sure some things passed between those points. Now I have a toon with 10 million SP. Sugar is close behind with 8.9. I'm a badass, yes indeed, lookie, lookie. One of the more amusing things is that 5 million is a mental hurdle for me. When introduced to things, you pick up the oddest points of refrence. When I was into my second or third day in the newbie systems, I came across an anchored can. That can was an advert for a corp. It said that they had a 5 million SP minimum. At the time I had around 600k and I remember thinking that I would never have 5 million. Somewhere along the line, the idea of 5 million as being my first point of being 'wantable' anchored in my head. Now I am double that and I am still absolutely terrible. Poor Chella's skills are cleaning up but they ...

[TL;DR Pirate players do not automatically equal terrible people and below is a long wandering meandering babble about it.] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~WARNING: WORDS BELOW~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (power of the tilde) I made cupcakes a few days ago. I'd been craving cupcakes for a bit. So, after a week I decided to hell with it and made a batch. Part of the recipie for cupcakes called for butter and another part called for water. Don't oil and water not go together? You can stir and stir and stir but they will still separate and reject each other. But, when you add eggs and flower, sugar and seasoning and continue to mix, suddenly everything starts to come together and form the base batter for a cupcake. Cupcakes are awesome. My weekend wound up mostly being about talking. I fielded a lot of conversations, many of them good. A few were in the middle. Now and then they were just puzzling. A consistent theme cropped up, time and time again. I tried to mold it into a concept but I'm no...

To my surprise, my CEO got a hold of my blog link and decided to finally read it. He then told me that "We have names". I told him that I had tried to dance around the name thing. Everyone then gave me permission to stop using vague references. Although, it was suggested that Ender be called 'Grumpy Bear'. We tried to play with Eve Uni. They all docked up. We sent one ship in again and kept the rest of our massive fleet (9 people) two systems away. One of our members was out of town but able to log in. He did not have coms. Therefor, myself and another did a chat to text translation to keep him up to date on fleet commands and general coms discussion. We sent in our bait ship, but everyone avoided him and docked up. He tried to do some bumps on a Raven but he was not successful. The entire time, we're sitting a bit back and we have a local corp smack talking our two backup drakes for our bait drake and asking them to come fight them. Irritating. Th...

I just wandered back from making dinner to find out that there were two Eve Uni pilots in system that the boys were engaging. I immediately joined fleet and undocked as one of the guys went down and the other was trying to hold onto the hurricane that they had been engaging but he was jammed to hell and losing the can. My second corpmate had gone down due to an orbit error that sent him into the face of a Myrms blasters. Whoops. Just as I landed the cane warped off to a safe. Damn it. We bounced to gate and stations to try to catch him. He moved from safes and stations, docked and undocked. However, there are two gates in the system and we had both covered. It tookk him a few minutes to make a run for it. He headed for the gate. I jumped before he landed and started to orbit the gate. My corpie, in a drake sat on the other side. When the cane jumped, he jumped into me. He was actually twenty away when he uncloaked. That was almost unfortunate for me. However, I had a lo...

Betrayal is a major fact of Eve gameplay. There is an entire forum discussion about a new player (see a month old) who accepted a random corp. He was turn blown up. It seems that this corp has been doing the same with others . He did not know that corp mates could kill each other since he had never been in a corp and I suspect he might not talk to others at all. He received the general dose of non-pity mixed with explanations about what happened and why. It reminds me of when I had to look up HTFU because I kept seeing it and had no idea what it meant... Corp theft, corp enrollment scams, corp scams , player scams, player theft , spys , lies and broken promises are all a part of Eve's gameplay. People who come from other games are often surprised. I have no idea why. So much of Eve's publicity is built off of the happenings of its world built by players. I'm continually surprised when someone idea that bad things happen in Eve. One of the latest bits of playe...

Also: I apologize to black frog for blowing up your cyno during this. We also are sorry that we may have terrified your Reha pilot who landed into the middle of that spar. We have only love for black/red/green/orange/taupe frog erryday.

Doing something I almost never do, I was on YouTube and found this: Fanfest Trailer from CCP. Unlike many of the other trailers that CCP has created, it focuses on the character customization process and entering the world. There are some pretty ship bits. As always, I'm amused when I see the Noctis shown. However, its a rather good introduction. The information screens were very pretty. I wonder if that is what they are going to from our pop up windows that we currently have. In some ways, their new Unified Inventory structure would work better in those overlayed, startrek-esque sci-fi information 'windows' then the current box thing we have. This dragged my wandering mind to the fact that CCP has also (accidently?) created the concept of assigned careers for new players. On their front page they have a section about the 'sandbox' and how you can find your path. While they explain that every action creates a reaction that affects the game as a whole,...

[TL;DR - Alliance War Decs Eve Uni. Third Molden Heath Pirate Corp to do so due to Massive Eve Uni Low Sec Camp in the area.] My wallet burns. CCP has changed the War Decliration system. It has had pros and cons on both sides. I, with my limited knowledge of the game, have considered the changes to be good. The main reason is because it removed dec shield. Large alliances no longer cost billions to declair war on. However, a down side is that the base cost of war raised from a few million isk to 50 million. Personally, I don't consider 50million to be much but many people have complained. The removal of dec shield was seen as CCP supporting people who wanted to PvP over people who wanted to PvE. People swore that the war decs would multiply beyond the numbers of stars in the sky and Eve would burn with the charred wrecks of high sec. So far, that has not happened. In fact, a loop hole in the new system is being closed. That loophole allowed the corporation that was wa...

I was being super lazy in station when someone from Eve Uni came in and asked, "Anyone wanna fight?" The boys were down in null ratting. I had worked my sec status back up to a -3.8. I say worked but I admit that the last handful of days have been random and crazy. I haven't had the time to play or the energy to do something like rat and make sure no one comes and kills me. I undocked a ship and almost fell asleep before I landed to launch probes the other night. I decided to stop trying to play Eve and go to sleep after that.. Anyway, its today and I'm kinda puttering around chatting with my peeps as they work on their sec status. Lots of fighting has driven several people flashy red. Tactically, its just a bad position to be in. That was when an Eve Uni roam fleet jumps into the system with 13 or 15 people and ask if we're looking for a fight. I suspect the answer is yes on our side. I'm not one to make assumptions. I decided to find out. ...