Low Sec Lifestyle

Phew! Serious posting is exhausting stuff. Time for a skip post.

I want my killboard to tell a story of the things that I can and have done. A story of adventure, A journey past a thousand suns. I want my story to tell people, of the places I have gone. The planets I have stared down upon, The dreams that I have known. I want the places where I have been, to map my story out. I want them to scream and shout, about all the things I've been going on about. I want my places to create a history, I can write about. One where all the learning, Is worth what it took to gain. I want my twisted, winding path to let everyone know what I once did. I want to laugh instead of sigh, I want the story to be mine. I want my killboard to be a journal of the things I've done. I want a record that I can hold close, to hold why I went and took that fight. I want all of this to be a part of my daily game, One that I can blame, all the good days on. Flying from dusk till dawn. What my killboard is to me is memories of each day,

On mornings, much like this one, I will curl up at my desk and sip tea as my mind crawls towards clarity. During those muzzy times when morning strangles my thoughts, I often give myself simple tasks. A lot of TCS work gets done during these times. The maintenance takes time and energy but it is not particularly complex. I pull of Eve Mentat, I roll through what has fulfilled, I buy it and ship it to Rens. Once my items hit Rens I pick them up in my own hauler. I then lug them to Teon. From there, I transfer them into my jump freighter, make sure I am fueled, and wait. I log on my account that will handle the cynos. She has a stock of rookie ships, cynos, and a stack of liquid ozone beside her. She has learned Cyno to IV so she does not need cargohold expanders. If local is calm, she makes a fleet with the jump freighter pilot, warps to a tactical, warps to the cyno spot and pops the cyno. The jump freighter jumps in, docks, and unloads. If I am moving a large volume of items, th

Rykki was slipping around in low sec looking for exploration sites and being nosy when she said, "An offline POS with a SMA, Corp Hangar, and labs." "Oh really? I have some Oracles for you." Because, never not Oracle. The spot was only a handful of systems away from Molden Heath. I started to deploy accounts and tell Rykki who to invite to fleet. Alt army activated. Off went a scout, then Sugar and Pixie for Oracles and Chella to haul things. Having an alt army is useful and a well trained alt army is even better. With full saturation I can fly most of the ships in the game. Chella can even nab Nyxs and Aeon's if such a chance ever were to happen. One can only dream. I had a bit of adrenaline as I moved all of my accounts. I am scared  of high sec. I have no kill rights. Yet, I've died so many times running through as an outlaw that moving Sugar around high sec feels weird and wrong. But the target system was snuggled up against high sec. My scou

There are things that In have never been able to get s hang of in Eve. One of them is station trading. That may sound odd to some. I run a market. I actively engage I. Market PvP at times. Why can't I station trade? Well, I have two problems. One is patience. I was liquidating things in Jita. Stuff accumulation starts to make you fear you are a hoarder. Liquidation is good for the wallet. I had stacks of things almost smothering me so it was time to send it to the wild to smother someone else. I believe in sharing. I listed my stuff a bit under the lowest sell and walked away for a week. After a week I came back to look at my orders. They were snuggled in a deep cacoon of non-movement about 100k ISK deep. I cut all my prices down to buy orders. Dumped my items and walked away. And I was happy. I don't care that I lose a few million ISK. The .1 ISK wars make me want to run the other way. So they win. Good game, etc, etc. I don't have the patience. My second problem

Oh, Sov Null. How the thought of thee lingers on the lips that speak into the wind. How the thought of thee sweeps like a fire across a droughted field. It is a ravenous thought that consumes with the greatest hunger. And from the depths doth this coalesce and rip the very life from all other thought. -Sugar Kyle, the Weight of Sov, Chapter III. On twitter, a conversation appeared. A bold player asked a question. Taz, of Stay Frosty started a twitter conversation that caught fire across #tweetfleet. Twitter is an interesting chatroom for Eve online. It is a twisted read that ranges across a myriad of thoughts, opinions, reactions, and belief. To break down to a very simple form, Taz asked why doesn't the rest of Eve rise up and overthrow the 'problem' groups of Eve. Taz made a simple point. The complete whole of the game is greater in numbers, assets, and ISK than the sum total of the largest groups. If people banded together they could storm the power holders and brea

A Look at the History of Expansions the Series Previous Entry: Revelations II The Summer of 2007 was a quiet one. Summer is vacation time in Iceland and the CCP offices filtered out various, media focused information for E-ON and  Eve TV. It was not until the second week of August before things picked up. Revelations II was part two of a three part expansion arc. The third part, Revelations III , would become known as Eve Online: Trinity. CCP is about to undertake a project of huge, internal magnitude. They are updating Eve's graphics to the Trinity Engine.

Crius is released. There are bugs. There is a list of problems . There are wormhole problems too . There have been daily patches . There will continue to be fixes. The new Thukker POS module is out in the wild, waiting to be found. Yes there is now a NPC Tax to use your POS. Several mails came in last weekend and even Monday as people read the patch notes and found out that there was going to be a POS tax. I personally saw it as an ISK sink. Then, CCP Fozzie wrote a detailed answer as to the meanings behind the NPC tax on POS manufacturing . Like or hate it, it is here to stay. I am not fond of having a tax in my POS. There are some new taxation options on the corporation POS as well. “I need access to a corporate wallet to build from my POS!” This came up immediately and I was embarrassed to have missed that particular problem. Like many people, I use an alt corporation to do my industry. My alt corporation is just me or it is me and someone else and we all have access t

I just sold the first Loki that I ever purchased. Memories are an odd thing in Eve. I'm not attached to this particular ship. However, it does have memories. When I made it, I made it to go ratting in null sec. I felt grown up and ready to have a cloaky, interdicted ship to slink around and work on my security status. I took it out twice and both times wound up being chased down in null sec. The same null sec that everyone told me was empty and no one ever went there. I docked it up and never took it out again. I let my security status go instead. I plunged into flashy red and eventually leveled out between -7 to -9. Then Tags4Sec were introduced . Now, I don't no longer need to rat if I want to work my status back up. No more long days out in null sec grinding away for doing PvP. No more need for that ship. Yet, I've dragged it around with me even though I have not touched it for a year and a half. What it did do is make me flip through some of my earlier blog posts

Complexity for the sake of complexity is fun to theorycraft and talk about but not as much fun to live. I live a lot of theorycrafting these days and often times fascinating solutions are created that are so complex that I discard them. It is that entire 'playing a video game' part of Eve that I like to think about. Today, I said that I'd love to have a personal savings wallet. I'd absolutely love one. I assumed that someone would say that having a personal savings wallet would make Eve to easy. It would make avoiding scams to easy. Anything that makes it easier for people to avoid harm is bad. My defense to that was that we already have personal savings wallets. We call them alts or alt corporations. I know very few people who keep the bulk of their income, if they have stacks of liquid ISK, in their primary wallet. I do know people who have and one misclick in Jita corrected that for them. It made me think of needless complexity. It is a current buzzword in the

(A partial thought) I was in a discussion where the question, "What did CCP plan for low sec when they made it?" cropped up. I chimed in and said, "I think that low sec just happened and we, the players, ran with it." Eve is split into four basic areas. High sec, low sec, null sec, and wormholes. However, only two of those areas were part of Eve's original layout. That would be Empire Space and Null Security space. Doing the history blogs has been fascinating. The original Eve had no COncord. That is well known. JUst as the fact that Concord was originally tankable. Before Concord there was faction police. Gate and station guns were put in later. The security status gradient was just that. A gradient. It seemed to affect resources and agents. Later exploration came along. It was somewhere around the development of things like Concord, criminal flags, and such during the end of the first year and into the second that low sec came into existence. I may be

For anyone following my saga, my husband got me back up and running tonight. He walked me through troubleshooting the rack. From there we did the servers and eventually reset the router and reconnected the house from that, bypassing the servers. I was told that I did a good job. Smartphones are amazing. We use gtalk. I took pictures through various steps and rearrangements allowing him to verify what he needed to. Fantastic stuff. Some of the goodies I am used to off of the home network are not available. I'll live and we'll work on it more this weekend when he gets some time off. He is bringing me chocolate. Dark chocolate. Lots of it. Back to business!

I came home from work today to half of my house not functioning. I had stopped at the grocery store and their power was out. I was not surprised when my own house power was wonky and my internet connection was down I live down the street from the grocery store. I had to reset the breaker for my washer and dryer. After a bit, the internet started to somewhat come back up. My computer, older and not as happy as it used to be does not always handle rapid change. I rebooted it and when it came back it couldn't see the internet. At the same time my phone could not switch over to the house WiFi. Irritated, I sent my husband a message to inform him that the house was down. He is in Sweden, building a data center site which is part of his job. He travels a lot. Onto trouble shooting the problems. I went and checked the server rack. I have one in my garage. It has three servers in it, a switch, a wireless router, and some more magical things. My husband is a DNS admin and the set

MoxNix wrote about how irritating he finds his 24 hour queue to be and how much he'd like a longer one. This is a common complaint. Why is it so short? Why can't I just set my skills? In the comments, someone mentions the time before there was a skill queue. This dev blog by CCP Eris was written on February 4th, 2009. He opens with the simple line, "We're developing a skill queue." The dev blog continues: While it´s cool that you can advance your character when you are offline, we did worry that if we introduced a skill queue some players might just set a queue for a year and become less active in EVE. That´s not what a massively multiplayer ONLINE game is about. EVE is a social game and we want you exposed to other players so you can start making legends out of you or corporation and strive for domination. A long abstinence from EVE would ruin this for us.  This caused CCP to introduce the 24 hour skill queue six years into Eve's existence. Now, anot

When I started running my market I spent a lot of time attempting to figure out how to predict the market. What I learned is that I cannot. The flavor of the month is the flavor of the week. To rely on one thing to heavily is to overstock and have items sit and delist after three months. Then, as soon as said item expires, buyers appear out of the woodwork for that item. It is a cycle only made worse by the moments I neglect the market. This last week, I have neglected things. I made a choice with my free time to spend it working on the last minute Crius input and with my newbie war dec. Bosena, which has a huge inventory, would have to suffer through the random shortages. With Crius deploying and my war dec over, I am trying to catch up to Bosena. That proves harder than expected. I have been invited to random fleets. I have been shipping items to Rens and moving them to Teon in an attempt to save money. Time seems to vanish faster and faster and I'm falling further and furthe

[ TL:DR: Leading people is a big responsibility and I am serious person when it comes to responsibility, even with games. No YOLOs here. ]

I asked Rykki to write a guest blog to summarize this last week. This is her post. -Sug Hi. I'm Rykki , and if you follow Sugar's blog you've been reading about my gang of kittens learning to defend ourselves . It's been quite a journey and I am nothing but pleased with the outcome so far. You see, I'm a self proclaimed carebear. It's not that I'm scared of PvP, it just doesn't get me excited. More than being a carebear, though, I'm an enabler. I started a corporation very early in my EVE career with the stated goal of “helping others achieve what they want to do.” Part of that involves finding players to help guide my newbies in things I'm not familiar with. Enter Sugar with all her lowsec and pvp know-how. Fitting Ships Ship fitting for newer players can be somewhat challenging. We all remember thinking at some point “If I put shield and armor modules I'll be even harder to kill.” It has taken us some work to get decent mission shi

As was reported by the Gallente Militia, we ended the war dec in a blob. The defiance fleet was named 'Kitten Squad' and we had a few new faces who were also new to everything. We did have a ten day old character in fleet. He is looking to join Rykki's corporation and we put him into a frigate and dragged him along. He did a good job and I do admit that he was tossed in the deep end. I logged in to a notification that the war would be ending in the morning Most adorable quote of the night: [23:27:39] Devin Tasker > We need to talk to the new guys about orbiting outgoing gates prejump and holding gate cloak after jump There were a few newer, newbies in the fleet. People who will be joining tomorrow after the war dec ends and one person who was using an alt. I think that there are few things as healthy for an Eve veteran as a dose of happy, intelligent newbies. They share their joy of Eve in great, spoonfuls of innocent excitement. I'm a selfish creature and I f

Crius is due on the 22nd. This marks the second release for CSM9 and the first of the new, six week cycles. The only difference is that Crius contains the other half of Kronos. That would be the industry changes. If you don’t have your reprocessing skills trained up for the new standards I suggest you spend some time reprocessing things you plan to reprocess before Tuesday. This week has been about Crius. It is crunch time and all of the last minute details are popping up and getting hammered in. There is one, gigantic angry topic and that is the change to the Material Efficiency skill. CCP Greyscale has been active in this thread and soliciting player feedback for it. This skill change is going to come in after Crius in one of the patches the following week or so. It is not going back to what it was. No one is getting skill point reimbursements.  Participate in the thread. Make your opinion on the topic and the future of this skill known. Why the last minute changes? This is a b

It was a pang of guilt that hit me as I decided not to run a fleet on Friday. I had things to do, chores, and some little odds and ends that will occupy most of my short evening leaving me unable to sit still at my computer for an extended period of time to run a fleet. It turned out almost everyone was a bit worn out from the pace we have kept up and were ready for a laid back evening. There are plans for tomorrow and I will scrape together something for Sunday. It all depends on how everything falls together. Spending the last, almost week in high sec has been a bit odd. I really, really do not know how to high sec. I'm constantly almost attacking things. I'm startled all of the time by the ships around me. Every time I see battleships land on gates I'm trying to figure out what is about to go down. I find it just a bit strange. Sugar has spent little time in high sec as well. I find myself in a combat ship and I just cannot quite realize that I am not where I think I

Tonight was guest FC night and the goal was kiting frigates and Wex volunteered to Fleet Command.  We're halfway through the war dec and things are going well in my opinion. Well enough that I accepted Wex's offer to give me a night off and run the roam. He spent enough time in the militia that he is well acquainted to newbies. I decided to trust in them and trust that I've given them the foundation that they need to not be utterly confused and learn new things. I also had some assistance. I had one volunteer who asked to come along on the roams and provide neutral logistics if we got into a high sec fight. I then had other members of Snuff overcome by curiosity on what was happening on coms dragged into the circle of helping newbies. You see, Wex didn't want to use Eve voice. It created an opportunity to use and discuss Teamspeak and Mumble and its uses for Eve corporations. Most of them have already become used to chatting to each other so now comes are exc

I realized, after I died earlier in the day that I am not used to the number of people in local that comes with being in high sec. My local window needs to be larger which means I have to restructure my screen real estate. There are normally twenty or more people in this system. I have a hard time dealing with all of the ship traffic and I thank CCP for the safety button for it has saved me more than once. Today, we were actually being watched. One of the younger members normally mines to make his ISK. I asked him to down ship to a Venture and use the opportunity to pay attending to his surroundings. About a load of ore in he was landed on by a war target and warped himself out as soon as he saw him land on him. Plus one for clear, easy to read overviews. Of course, I promptly died to the same person about ten minutes later. I decided to try out a Venture fleet as soon as we had a few people. They are fast, have inbuilt stabs, and they are quite agile. My idea is that they will inc

I managed to start my day by dying in a half fit ship simply because I had forgotten that I was in a half fit ship. Such is life. Yesterday, I had been in one ship, thought I was in another, and hit fit. It removed half of the mods, I realized what happened and switched. I never fixed my first ship. My inattention cost me. Therefore, when I got the sudden inspiration to make a random bookmark off a gate, I was in a perfect position to be pointed and killed. What I had expected to do and what did happen are quite different things. In the end, I made a mistake. Some would consider it unacceptable. A partially fit ship. Death to a war target. I have opened myself up to ridicule and mockery. In fact, Eve is quite filled with such ridicule and mockery. People read killboards simply to find people in bad situations and call them out on it. Odd kills, improper fits, mistakes, and errors are gathered up and chrishished. What is hard in Eve about making a mistake is that it is near imposs

Eve Hermit wrote about Winning Eve . Not the normal bitter post where people stop playing and 'win' at Eve because they have decided to compare themselves and the game to the movie War Games . I broke down his question to mean that when one no longer plays Eve will you look back at what you did and feel good about the time that you spent? As someone who has fond members and a firm foundation on the internet from their first online game, one that I played obsessively for a good six years of my life, my answer was yes. I have enjoyed my time in Eve. I plan to continue to enjoy my time in Eve. But in the comments,  Behnid Arcani asks : "Would you still play Eve if you couldn’t write a blog post about it afterwards?" The answer is "Yes." As someone who writes about my day to day and my thoughts in Eve I could see how one could consider my blogging to be deeply connected to my gameplay. It is not. I've been writing a blog or journal for the last fo

I managed to lead a group of people to their deaths while talking a mile of a minute and they thanked me for it. This fleet command thing is very, very odd. I got home and logged in to see if we had developed a sudden wave of war targets yet. So far, a known scout hangs around system but that is it. With the evening open to me but my energy level not very low I said that we'd go on a roam. I wanted to check on TCS and respond to some eve-mails before we went.  Rykki, their CEO has been amazing. She (yes she don't be like me and say he because you have terrible habits) has kept them organized doing PvE and practicing their fleet maneuvers. Yesterday sank in and stayed. Everyone is smoother and more organized and happy to get out in space. I decided on a very short roam, about 15 systems in both directions. We're still going through our paces and it will be very, very easy to move to quickly and leave people confused. I personally hated being confused when I was ju

It is a work night unfortunately. However, the start of the industrial defense is going well. I had some worries that the members would not want to fight. I got CC'd on the corpmail sent to them however and if I could blush I would and being mentioned so boldly. Such responsibility but I was excited too. Last night I moved my Orca to Dodixie to buy ships for myself. I sent Sugar to the new staging system in an interceptor. While I was at work today, I grinned to myself. When I got home I started my link alt to the new system as well. I figure, I've not needed her before but we might as well have all the tricks up our sleeve. Altaen agreed to enter 7-2 into the war as an ally. For tonight we started working on getting everyone into a position to achieve. We got out in space and started going through basics. Overviews. With overview packs and instructions on hand we got everyone basically sorted to a nice, clean overview. No fleet mates, no blues, no corp mates and excess j

I made the wildest, most random decision today. Someone came into my channel and asked for advice. They have been war deced, again, by a group that does not like them coming into their low sec area. They are going to fight back and asked for advice on how to fight back. Getting people out and about and focused was a problem. Vov said they needed a FC and that he was a bad one. I said I had no expierence as one. I was told they'd love me to FC for them even if I have no actual FC experience. Huh. I decided, why not? I spend a lot of time worrying about being good enough and capable enough and knowledgeable enough. I spend a lot of time not wanting to FC because I'm to embarrassed by everything I don't know. I, however, am familiar with basics and I am familiar with coaching new people into learning the basic fleet movements and developing spatial awareness. So, why not. Why not at all? Today, I am sick and tired of my own worries and insecurities. I dropped everything.

This has been an interesting week. My Open Q&A on Eve Uni Mumble is today. I have a session at 15:00 GMT and another at 22:00 GMT. These are simply open talks where we can sit down and engage each other. You don’t have to talk, you can type your questions. I try to drag other CSM members along. This is number two of my monthly chats. Download Mumble and log in following the directions on the links. You don’t have to register. I will tentatively schedule the next for August 11th. As always if another day is prefered I am happy to abuse the kindness of Eve Uni to your hearts’ content and use their comms freely for CSM outreach stuff. It looks like SiSi is down until Monday. Eventually the practice server will be up and CCP Fozzie has addressed that he will get that together as soon as he gets it together. Skype has been full of very interesting discussions. I learned not to type out deep thoughts while eating lunch at a restaurant with my mother. I wind up not finishing said t