Citadels: "Ain't nobody got time for that!"

I think that CCP's experiment with Citadels 1.0 is running it's course and should be wrapped up.

It was a great hypothesis. Rework the "exploitable" POS mechanics which were "stale" and didn't make for "great" content. Replace the cumbersome and dated POS's, with their dated and not too epic graphics of a giant space bauble, with cool new Citadels of epic scale and scope. Make a more dynamic reinforcement cycle. Etcetera.

Well, I think the verdict is in.

Citadels don't provide content. They discourage it, especially in wormholes. The vast, vast majority of Citadels dying are from coathangering upon anchoring. This is due to several reasons not really related to their defences. True, Fortizar defences can be formidable, and keepstars moreso if you don't bring 6,000 pilots, but by and large Astrahus are easily blappable for a group of 12 T1 cruisers, but they aren't really dying much.

The real issue is the timers. Not only are the initial invulnerability timers entirely suited to the defender, which destroys opportunistic content creation entirely, but you have to do 2 timers @ minimum 30 minutes each, to get to a timer people might be even remotely interested in defending.

As the meme says "Ain't nobody got time for that!"

However, that was all OK to some degree, until CCP made it take longer to swap ships in a Citadel. Which is fair enough I suppose, unless all you do is stay docked and fiddle with your vessels all day. But apparently, this small quality of life nerf is all it's taken to get people to hate on Citadels as they ought to be hated upon.

As the meme says "Ain't nobody got time for that!"

The other thing which is quite odd is that reinforcement is free. Free from requiring strontium, I mean. You can ping a Citadel every couple of days, and no one has to turn up to refuel the stront bay. this is weird, and stupid.

If the Citadel gets into armour, you should have to repair it during, or after, the fact. We were told that Citadels would have interesting fits, but that's bullshit. The fits are all the same - Standup AMSL missiles, neuts....actually, who fucking cares? It's all absolutely irrelevant. I haven't heard anyone say "Oh, wow, look at that Citadel repping through the damage!" or "Lol, this Citadel has uber webs."

What the fuck happened to dynamic citadel fits? Its all totally irrelevant. lame, unbonused fighters? Check. Irrelevant neuting? Check. A scram that cycles on you one time only when you atttack it? Check. Total lack of oversaturation in EWAR? Check and checkitty check. Some dumb bombs or w/e which can't even kill drones? Sure, knock yourself out Citadel owner.

Sure, Citadels are more deadly when piloted, but not by much at the lower end of the spectrum. The POSs were a challenge to take on and come up with a strategy to defeat when undefended. Citadels are a yawnfest.

I think the solution to these issues is:
1) Strontium consumption for RF timers should be reintroduced.
2) Citadels should not have three fucking timers. Make it a RF like the POS's, on a 7 day cycle. You fuck it up and don't fuel and refuel it, then your space castle dies. You get a week to respond.
3) Actually make the Citadel fit matter. Like, a shield rep, or armour reps. EWAR.
4) Increase, drastically, the vulnerability timers in wormhole space. To like, 30% of the week, at least.

Been there, done that

One of my ex-employees* now lives in a C4. He has now become the alternative man with the plan for his corporation, and we caught up recently. The kvetching was pretty much a timely reminder to me why I am not running and should not run a wormhole corp again.

• No one ever does anything. They just sit around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for someone else to do something for them.
• It's impossible to get them into anything because they don't train into the ships they need to train into or the fits they need to train into, instead concentrating on training up useless shit which won't help them do the content they can't currently do
• No one appreciates the effort that goes in to running the corp
• People who bring a completely useless ship to a bearing fleet somehow still expect an equal share. Like, one guy brings 2/3rds of the fleet and is expected to get 1/6th of the ISK?
• With nothing to do and no one making them do it, they get bored and unsub or move out.

Seem familiar? 

Me, I'm just recruiting Incursion neckbeards who just talk about the 1.3B they made today. One day, they'll wake up to find a 100% tax rate and all my problems will be gone.

Maggots coalition in a nutshell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqgIHatg5cY

It's so true it hurts.

Getting my money's worth.

So, yeah, I did train Empire Control 5 or whatever gay-ass shit you need to spawn alliances, and by gosh darn it, I am going to use it!

So, update your standings for Trigger Warnings [SJWAR]

Never Not Jump An EOL Hole

I don't understand why people don't jump EOL wormholes. I mean, there's 4 hours of EOL on a hole, who's to say it will collapse on you immediately?

And when it happens, it's not all bad. Take today for example.

I found my first wormhole in my home system, a C3 which was EOL. Jump through, ping a C008, Q003, a V301 and a K162 to C4. Jumped out to nullsec via the Q003 and immediately one of the locals warps an Onyx to it and bubbles up. So I organise a batphone of suicidal T3D's...jump Miskoranda through...and the hole promptly spits the rest of the gang back out to K-space.

"Fare thee well, TF"

So, Onyx docks up, and I probe my new lowsec - 24 to home.

Igo to the C008. It leads to a Y790, so i save that for later. The V301 is an N110 hole to Maurasi. I spot a Crucifier Navy jump in, followed by a heron, Raptor, Claw. They all go back to the C3 I was in. The heron starts a relic site, and the rest disapear into the C008 never to ne heard from again.

So I kill the Heron and (empty) pod him. I scoop the corpse.

I then go swap my Svipul for a bomber. Whilst probing through the Y790, I idly send my bomber to nullsec, and spot a Procurer in the ice belt. I proceed to solo him with the AB-fit bomber, after bombing his drones off. I (empty) pod him, and the Onyx lands, bubbling up as I cloak up and GTFO. I return for the corpse and the loot, which is surprisingly juicy with meta-level Frigoris Ice Harvester Upgrades worth a swanky 30M. Straight back to Maurasi, sell in Jita, bank made.

I then find my way back to the Y790, out to Dousivitte. I probe my way back toward Aralgrund, and get as far as Hek. Here, a C1 with 2 Kestrels and a Thrasher on the outside. They jump in, I follow.

I bomb them on the hole, failing to gank them. Instead of jumping out, they panic warp to an ore site. One of the locals warps to the hole in a Heretic and bubbles up, and begins anchoring a medium warp disruptor.

So I chase the Thrasher and 2 Kestrels around in my AB-fit bomber, killing the Thrasher and (empty) pod. I catch the 2 kestrels on a POCO, and engage. They get me to half shield before I force them off field (with no TP's, either, so application is shite). Once gets caught in the Heretic's medium dissy, so I kill him and (empty) pod him. The Heretic doesn't decloak.

That's 4 kills and 4 pods I wouldn't hav got if I hadn't got trapped in w-space.

This is what balls to the walls means - engaging a dessy and 2 frigs in an AB-fit bomber. and soloing a Procurer.

Young people these days

When I stumbled into lowsec and got instantly killed because I didn't even realise that people could attack you, I didn't even know there was a Local within which to rage and bitch. I did, however, rage quit for a day. That was one fucking expensive kestrel, yo. About 3 million ISKs I had no idea how to replace. I then even went further, vowing to hunt the guy down and avenge my kestrel upon him.

If only I had known about Local, I could have made a gigantic pillock of myself instantly, carrying on like a pork chop and calling people douches in Local.

eg;

Nao Chitogi Toyama > Douche
Manure Skord > plenty of high sec systems to mine in
Nao Chitogi Toyama > Plenty of real people to kill to, scrub Skord.
Manure Skord > bring the people in please
Nao Chitogi Toyama > To scared to go fight real people lol. Have to kill new people trying to complete missions. So sad a life you lead.
Manure Skord > you dont do missions in a belt
Nao Chitogi Toyama > Mining mission, You do.
Manure Skord > what do you need to mine?
Manure Skord > all mining missions i have done have sent me to a beacon
Manure Skord > good luck doing missions....
Nao Chitogi Toyama > Good luck being a douche.
Manure Skord > dont need luck
Nao Chitogi Toyama > No you don't, you are a big douce regardless.
Manure Skord > mmhmm
Hedo Johnson > well salted noobs today

That's the salt factor at 3 days for this guy. Imagine him at 1 week!

Tears and cheers

I love a good Reddit thread. Especially one where a Nyx kill devolves into nerd sperge about goons and cheap Bhaals

Example the First

The early bird gets the Nyx

So, the way it usually works in the lowsec "coalition" that I hang around with is that if TF is online, you don't get a Nyx kill. So, unusually today, I woke up at 5:15 a.m. Perth time, after not drinking enough bourbon last night to have a hangover, had a shower, made a coffee and logged in...

...and chatter on comms was all "HICs log-in. Dreads undock."

And then it was "Oh man, TF is here, we won't get a kill." because I am obviously a curse upon these things.

But not today. After the last Nyx kill, I think my hoodoo is broken.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/57597582/

What is this leadershit?

So, the wash-up from the changes to leadership and boosting is that the YUGE multiple tiers of leadership skills have been essentially compressed, resulting in the deprecation of about 3M skill points in leadership have disappeared.

Gone.

Not to put too fine a point on it, that's a couple of months of subscription that CCP just nuked the value of.

I would like my SP's back.

Newbro Doctrines

For wormhole space, newbros have always found it difficult to fit in to an organisation made up of veterans (bitter or otherwise) and elite players. The prime difficulties faced by newbros in w-space doctrines (PVE or otherwise) are ones of skill, ships and resources.

Newbros lack the skill points to fly everything, so you need an acceptable option for them to fly which isn't too skill intensive. This is especially true if, in 24 hours, you want to take alpha clones into your corporation. Sure, you can skill injest these days, but expecting everyone to skill inject just to fly a doctrine, you'd better have some pretty flush newbros or some fixed doctrines.

They also often lack the ISK to employ the "if you can't afford to lose it, don't fly it" dictum. So you need an option which is cost effective - not only cheap, but also not needlessly expensive. There's no point setting up a newbro doctrine if it includes B-type hardeners or faction propulsion because "it's just o effective" or you think it needs it.

Finally, often newbros just lack resources in-game. For someone with years of playing, this isn't just liquid ISK, but it extends to having spare hulls, so you can go from shield to armour doctrine at the drop of a hat. It extends to having a bearing setup, a PI chain, and the knowledge base to exploit whatever they can do to the utmost, in an effective manner. This extends to those who want to skill inject to bring their toons up to scratch but don't want to just lay out hundreds in hard-earnt and haven't devoted hundreds of hours to grinding ISK.

So, you have to devote a bit of time to developing a doctrine for your noobs. To my mind it needs several things.

Firstly, you need an SRP program for T1 hulls up to at least cruiser size. We used to run full SRP on assault frigs and logi cruisers, which allowed us to fly an Enyo - Exequror doctrine or Jag - Scythe. These days, i'd extend that to T1 cruisers, flat, and to all T2 frigs except Covops. If you are willing to drop several Gilas and a Scimi or two into a brawl, you are risking well over a billion. If you have 4 newbros in T1 EWAR cruisers, the total cost is 10% of the rest of your fleet, or less.

Secondly, you have to realise that newbros are most effective in bait, ECM and support roles. They make good tackle, if they are trained up, but tackling and surviving long enough to do the job properly is not the same as having a Crucifier and a no-fucks attitude. Often a skilled ceptor pilot can survive as tackle, scout well, and live. A disposable newbro tackler is just a wasted opportunity for a gay-making Maulus or a underutilised Vigil role.

EWAR is a huge force multiplier, especially damps versus logis or even, these days, a Vigil Fleet Issue with an 18km web, or a Arbitrator with properly scripted TD's. I've always encouraged my newbros to train ECM first, to a basic level, and provided them with appropriate cheap, nasty and SRP'd fits to fly.

Bait wise, you can consider op-specific SRP for, say, Procurers or ratting baits. so your newbros are comfortable losing bait for the sake of pew pew.

Separately, you should work on effective newbro friendly ratting setups. An organisation is only as good as its resilience, and that comes down to resources. Provide enough advice, training, and a magic playbook for the newbros to skill up, and ISK up, and you've got a better chance of them sticking around.

The thing about Ascension and Alpha Clones is, no longer do your guys need to strictly justify their gaming in terms of value for money. People won't necessarily quit playing just because the game isn't worth $15/mo. It's going to be more about value for their time invested. Whilst Alphas are restricted in terms of some high-end wormhole content (leaving aside C5 Wolf Rayet ratting, or high-end gassing), with a bit of help from experienced players, there's not a huge amount they can't realistically do in wormholes with some work-arounds and a structured environment.

The key will be to provide that structure, and content drivers, to keep people playing. Making a doctrine for them so they feel part of the war machine is a good first step.

never not take bait

Manufacturers of phoenixes and nags, take note.

On the positive side, you can neutralise an Aeon's fighter bombers with a Falcon and a Widow. So, that's a positive outcome.

Insurance Fraud

All content takes to create is a week's worth of finding absolutely nothing in wormholes, then finding a way out to Solar Fleet renter space, and someone's Thanatos coming off its third insurance contract. Oh, and a bottle of cheap but good shiraz. Mostly the latter, because then TF is all "Fuck it, you now what we should do, we should go tackle a ratting carrier and drop your carrier on it, we'll own them."

So it came to pass, kind of.

We got out to perrigen / Spire botlands and found evidence of a ratting HAW moros (because, you know, what else?) and in the midst of people stumbling about wondering if it was at POS or not, the inevitable "defense fleet" assembled.

So we dropped on that - a Sabre, a cyno Stiletto (died instantly), a thorax (we started it as a suicide T1 cruiser roam), and a Vagabond plus the aferementioned suicide thanny.

So we pwned our way through the enemy fleet. THe kill order was probably a bit wrong, because the Thanny killed the Rapier, then Dominix, then Phobos, Ishtar, onyx, cerbs, etc.

With hindsight, it should have been Rapier, HICs, then trash because there was perhaps 10 seconds there when the Thanny could have cynoed out or warped out before his cap got neuted down too far and points went on. Missed opportunity.

Then it was all Nyxes and hels and the ratting Moros landing on field...and the crafty bugger in the Vagabond doing what Vagabond DNA knows best - kiting off at the end and GTFOing.

https://zkillboard.com/br/84415/

Fortizar where art thou defences?

Roll up to a Fortizar with some bombers. No one dies, shit gets RFed because the owners aren't around.

Imagine industrial complexes. Less EHP, less defences, less time, and zero defence for absentee landlords / scrublords.

What a joke.

Excited!

The Dankmaster5000 is ready to sail by end November with the new mining fighter drones to make the dankest ISK in the quietest nullsec, lowsec and wormhole systems accessible via whatever dumbass S199, N944 or N432 I can find!

5.5 Magnitude Quake in Bogota Claims 1 Victim

So, stalking a few nestors, through a crit hole, this guy warps his helios to the entry to scout, and forgets to cloak, and starts orbiting. So I figure, jump in the Dick Virus and scrub him out with some smart bombs.

This fails, so I figure he's AFK and use the Stratios.

Helios. Pod.

Then, half an hour later or so, he convoes Miskoranda

Miskoranda > o/
Andres M Afanador > o7
Andres M Afanador > lol
Andres M Afanador > http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/otras-ciudades/temblor-en-huila/16738825
Andres M Afanador > i had no time to log off
Miskoranda > AFK?
Andres M Afanador > and earthqueke hot my city
Miskoranda > oh, lol
Andres M Afanador > lol
Miskoranda > jeez
Miskoranda > Is your house OK?
Andres M Afanador > yes
Andres M Afanador > i live in a 9th florr so i was downmstaris
Andres M Afanador > lol
Miskoranda > That's good. Space ships are easy to replace
Andres M Afanador > http://i.imgur.com/qNEZeyV.png
Miskoranda > I hope you can get that ship back!
Andres M Afanador > tje implants
Andres M Afanador > and dammit the killboard
Andres M Afanador > got lucky there m8
Miskoranda > Well, it's a good tale.
Andres M Afanador > fly safe!!
Andres M Afanador > hahah yes that why i contact you
Andres M Afanador > Zero Tears
Miskoranda > Yeah, I was hoping to get your mates in the Nestors but I tried for the Helios cause I figured you'd see anyone coming in.
Miskoranda > If only I had known you were AFK due to earthquake

RIP

Best loot drop ever

https://zkillboard.com/br/83904/

These Blood Gauntlet sites are dropping X-type loot out the wazoo!

Denial, Bargaining, Acceptance

[03:38:24] Margot Lee Orzolek > Trinkets friend i hear youve been reported in delve
[03:40:10] Trinkets friend > it wasn't me
[03:41:24] Trinkets friend > i know nothing about anything
[03:42:23] Trinkets friend > ok maybe its me
[03:46:05] Trinkets friend > Kill: Lord Bartuc (Proteus)

F1 to F6

https://zkillboard.com/br/83836/

Whoops.

Catbus

All I can explain is the need for more subcap pilots.

Baiting 101

There is a view, amongst some, that veteran pilots cannot be baited. This is not a universal truth; a lot of people are bored and gung ho enough to take bait they know is bait, which leaves people unable to figure out what is bait as the other type who do take bait. Veterans who don't take bait are just cowards.

However, there's a few pointers about how you deploy bait. 

Firstly, your bait ship is dead. So if you're going to deploy bait, deploying a screen of alts into literally every adjoining system (wormhole or otherwise) is pretty dumb. Well, it's smart if you are a fraidypants coward unable to even countenance the potential loss of your ship, but let's put it this way; if you expend 4 alts in Asteros, Cheetahs and Helii to jump through every single one of your connections, that's 4 derpy RR alts or ECM alts you've disposed of just to see if you can handle the shit you're baiting.

Secondly, if you're going to deploy pickets to give you advanced warning that what you're baiting might be enough to kill your bait ship, don't use someone from the same corp as your bait. Especially not if you're, hypothetically, from Exit Strategy, and your deploy your Exit Strategy alt to Roniko, a shithole end of nowhere system with an hourly average of about 0 pilots in it. If anyone is going to come at you from Roniko, in this scenario, you will see them, yes. But they have already been stalking your Raven and will see the sole person in Roniko, and use toddler level maths to put 2 &2 together and say "Hurr durr."

Thirdly, make your bait believable. Raven running anoms in a C2? Believable. Good bait because you get to fit a grappler and scram. Not so great if you're using RHML's. No one rats with RHML's, and it's a PVP weapon. Plus you're from Exit Strategy and every single one of your kills is 8 vs 1 (plus those 4 alts to ensure it's 8 vs 1 and not 8 vs 8).

Fourthly, if you are yours are so fond of alt abuse you deploy half your fleet in cloaky eyes, why can't you rat for a few days and sink skill injectors into an out of corp alt? I mean, you're all living from a third party alt corp Fortizar in a C4, you surely can work out how to run a bait alt who only dies and doesn't get too many kills in WH's associated with you. Quareschlager was great at this, and we took many a QS bait. 

As bait taker, you often want to just get point and maybe put enough DPS on field to threaten the bait, and see what jumps to its aid. Staged escalation of definite bait, it's a thing. learn to do it. Maybe you small-blob a genuine ratter, and a few people miss the killmail. But you never go full retard, because it means the rescue fleet goes all in. Better to escalate with a small gang, get a small gang response, then fully escalate. 

Finally, as bait-taker, you have a responsibility to actually take the bait. But even with the most YOLO and Derring Do attitude, you do require your bait to have commitment. 20 minutes before down time, you're happy to dump 4 nano cruisers and a ceptor onto bait Raven. I mean, it's a Raven, you don't take Raven bait hard, you come in at range maybe with a Maulus Navy to deal with Coward Drive, and you trigger that bait knowing that it's a 'pro1337' WH PVP group and they'll be bringing 4 DPS and 3 Guards and you just waltz away and maybe smack a Sabre. 

And this is TF's Bait Making and Bait Taking 101. In short, cowardice, KB efficiency angst, and lack of balls denied everyone a bit of fun just before down time. In the BUGRY days, we'd have had a shitty alt (or a Nereus) schlepping about completely solo, chain un-scouted, with 4 mains in gank Moas and 4 alts in Scythes and Blackbirds, or similar, and would just deal with whatever came. 

And we would get kills. And the odd Nereus would die when it was clear it was being blobbed to fuckery. Zero fucks were given.

Vale, Alarm Clock Ops

I think it's been long enough to say it definitively: Citadels are boring AF. They are crushing content creation. They are non-interactive and, especially in wormholes, discourage content.

Their effect on content creation is one of their "features", being that the defender gets a window of vulnerability in which it can be assaulted. The effect isn't that Citadels cannot and are not being destroyed, but that the effort of destruction isn't even going ahead. This is because the old dynamic of the 40 hour reinforcement is gone, replaced by predictable defender-friendly timers.

That's not all bad, I guess. EVE is a fairly antisocial game and not family friendly (ask my wife) and Citadels rebase the risk to times of the day and week that the defender can more usually be present to defend their shit, and not leave it vulnerable to off-hours attacks which can only be defended against via designing your POS to be boring, unfeasible, or too deadly for casual attack.

But this means that timers can't be gamed. You also have to face 3 of them, so the whole process drags out for such a inconveniently long period of time that it's essentially boredom defence in a way that can't be gamed (via Trashcats, diplomacy, or brute strength)

The DPS cap, meant to protect the weaker Astrahus and Fortizar from capital blobbing in lowsec and nullsec, basically means it's 30 minutes, flat, to achieve each stage. So there's a limited incentive for more people to get involved than is necessary.

The microscopic vulnerability windows, especially in w-space, also drastically reduces the opportunities for "fuck it why not" content creation. No more LOLfit POSs getting RFed and nubs learned.

Indeed, a properly installed Citadel which isn't coathangered on anchoring, is to all intensive porpoises invulnerable on a years-long timeline.

We still have POSs for moon goo and some capital build-outs. That's about the only alarm clock ops on offer, and the churn rate of moon goo POSs is very low. This is even with the lack of other opportunities for hotdrop o'clock content from Citadels anchoring. The alliances and coalitions which own the goo fountains maintain them as part of sov, or entrenched "ownership" of pockets of lowsec.

It will be a sad day when the moon goo POSs get swapped over to Citadels or Mining Platforms. The reality is that the only fights occurring on goo POSs are structures to take advantage of a percieved weakness in the TZ manpower of the owner, their logistical capacities eg; ability to bridge, cyno, reposition or wormhole back to the asset when it is attacked, and their batphone / blues list or reputation. Few get attacked by naive corporations just wandering in to lowsec and RFing a Cadmium moon for shits and giggles under Shadow Cartel's noses, and this gambit succeeding.

Citadelization of goo POSs will strangle the only realistic fifth column tactic available to a smaller organisation versus some of the absentee landlords, which is an alarm clock op that sees the attacker gain a benefit over the defender. If the timers and vulnerabilities of Mining Arrays are equivalent to Citadels, this will see these assets attackable only by people able to go head to head with the owners.

I'm sure the owners will sockpuppet themselves on the EVE-O feedback thread claiming that vulnerable goo POSs equals economic death and blah blah blah, but the reality is that no structure - POS or a vulnerable Citadel - can withstand a decent cap fleet, so why do Citadels need to be locked down for the vast majority of the TZ's and hours of the day? It's got nothing to do with the maths of siege; it's entirely to do with firewalling your shit behind artificial timer lockouts to prevent annoyance for you, and deny content to others.

This is something CCP needs to be wary of. And CCP needs to also add more danger to wormhole Citadels. Like, seriously, 8 hours a week?

30 Cerbs vs 1 Rag

The following video catches the last 10 minutes (minus a minute or so of us reshipping) of what began, as usual, with a S199 opening up in Heimatar and someone stumbling through to see a Chimera out ratting.

We burned the Chimera down just before his rescue squad arrived (RIP) for the loss of a Rattlesnake and a Stiletto (Deklein BR somewhat borked).

They followed us through the hole into lowsec, en masse, and, well....we facerolled them with carriers and a Rag. We lost the Machariel due to some good work on behalf of the Keres, who range damped out logi so hardcore it was ineffective.

Heimatar BR.

You can notice Miskoranda's Scythe Fleet Issue diving south in the second engagement, dogpiled by all the tackle and drones. This resulted in four kills for the Scythe Fleet and distracted my whoring efforts with my own carrier. I am also rather a nub at carriers so far, so I am still learning the ropes. I probably should have stayed in the Barghest, but it's hard to know if it wouldn't have been primed.

GF's all round.

Man-flu

Ugh. How to lose 2 days of your life in a sweaty manky tangle of sheets: man-flu.

The magnanimous hand of the free market

I love the internet. The internet economy (tm) connects customers and service providers all over the world.

For instance, there is a guy who can do some slick corporate advertising for you.

For example, Tengoo Uninstallation Service had a great advert.  It was so good you almost wanted to quit your corp and join Tengoo instantly.

So it's good to see that Tyrone (http://www.bigtyrone.com) is still working away providing videographic advertising services for EVE corporations, such as GECKO.

So, do yourselves a favour, recruiters, and step it up a notch and create the ultimate recruitment ad.

The Cleanest Toilets

Just some thoughts everyone's said.
"The Augoror Purity skin looks like a stormtrooper helmet."
"This is the KKK SKIN set, right? This is the Aeon Grand Wizard SKIN."

Command Bursts and the Diablo II Paladin Gang

Firstly-firstly, may I laud the death of the so-called Leet PVPer kitefag homofucking cock gargling shithole cowardfucks who have abused the God mode OGB link boats since the day CCP gone fucked their cousin's earhole by putting them in the game in the first place.

Good riddance you over entitled shitlords. Go fuck your sisters.

Bt anyway. I digress.

I used to do multiplayer Diablo II back in the day in co-op mode. The most hilarious high-level co-op group we rolled was four high-level Paladins running auras, like thorns. because the Thorns stacked fom each of your buddies when monsters attacked you they took 800% of their own damage back. It was kinda broked.

We will have to see what the new Command Bursts (CB) will do, but I can foresee that this kind of pulse boosting leading to small gangs of Command Ships or Combat Battlecruisers all glomming up within each other's AEO burst modules on grid to get max awesome. This will kinda be similar to the group of Paladins.

For example, a group of 2 Eos and 2 Damnations each loading 2 CB modules could cover 8 of the 9 available armour / skirmish / EWAR boosts. Plus of course, you'd have some kind of DPS.

Secondly, there's obviously a bit of LOLs to be had with CB effects sticking to ships like cooties. So lets say you have a group of ships around an Orca in uedama. Lets say Catalysts or something. Someone lets off a CB and the ships get a buff. Some ne'er do well clones board the ships and before the magic glow fades, they warp across system and #YOLO onto a freighter or something. Like, someone else's neutral logi, for argument's sakes.

There's also a JUGE change with the bursts giving actual nett tank. Like, 21.5% hitpoints sprayed onto your fleet? Lets say you jump a wormhole with your gang of AHACs and Guards and have a Damnation with an Armour Reinforceent CB. You all uncloak and the Damnation bursts and magically you all have 21.5% more EHP. That's pretty interesting.

Likewise the Skirmish boosts are going to be very interesting given it's no longer a permanent Ludicrous Speed mode off-grid bullshit factor. The need to be within range of the CB to get the buff means this will become less about kitefage4evar and more about, for instance, a burst to shoot out from your ball of doom in a burst of speed and land that long web on your kiting faggot foes. This is a much more intriguing and skillful use, and no doubt the Balance legion cancerboat pilots will bitch when they get secret CB keelhauled.

The least useful links, as usual, will be infolinks. The Sensor Integrity link is going to be useless for anyone actually under a jam cycle, and of limited use for anyone not. The only effect it will counter is damps, and it's useful for that. Second least useful is the sensor optimisation link. Like, OK, can't we just fit a Sensor Booster these days? And if you're fighting at range and need those links to target, when they go down it's....kinda balls. Third least useful is the Electronic Superiority link, mostly because while the effect is good the need to be in range of your jam boat is...well, who parks a Falcon near the booster? I guess we'll all have to learn new ways of flying Falcons.

The skill modifiers for Leadership, Wing and Fleet command are interesting. I have suddenly come into the market for Fleet Command skill where previously I had no need, because now it adds vital range (20% @ level 5) whereas previously it just let you add rainbows to up to 5 wings.

There's definitely now a distinct need for a well-rounded Battlecruiser, Command Ship and T3 pilot to train these up, because we should see some of the "G4 Paladins" BC gangs rolling about.

Consider, say, a group of Drakes. With a flapping free high slot to use, they could each fit a CB module and cast boosts at one another quite effectively. This would increase their gang's potency quite effectively, and in a different way than having a fifth alt just warping off to a safe spot and being a sly unprobable I Win button in the stars.

So, sure, the godly "solo" PVPers are going to be cutting along and not across, but they can at least rip some SP's out of their boosting toons and redeploy the gayness into a Drake or a Cyclone, Myrmidon or Prophecy.

it will be hilarious watching their ISK efficiency drop off a cliff for a month come November.

EVE Downunder 2016

Wish I could attend. But unlikely due to imminent spawning of a little TF in 2017. In a few years, i'll have my very own bot to run mackinaws in nullsec!

Alpha Clone thinky-thoughts

The new Alpha Clone free to play which is coming in November is, in my not too humble opinion, going to be good for the game overall.

I think, however, there's a few wrinkles to sort out.

Suicide Ganking
There's a LOT of people making the point about suicide ganking alts. If there's no limit to the number of instances of EVE you can start up (apart from, say, hardware and internet infrastructure) and its totally free to train up, and you have infinite skill queues to 5M SP (or whatever limit exists) then of course this is basically free gank alts.

This is being half brushed off by CCP. I think they have a half of a point - it's probably a risk, but it's not as severe as the panty-shredding and bodice-ripping hisec carebears are making out. I mean, yes, you could train a half dozen gank catalyst alts and people will, bbut the vast majority of people will only do it for a lark and get bored after a month, and EVE will settle back to a slightly more gank steady state equilibrium between lulsy freighter ganks and total boredom.

However, there's always going to be some neckbearded autist (probably from Hard Knocks farming community, tbh) whose life will magically transform into a factory for churning out free to play alts which he will trash and biomass when their security status drops.

Plus, there's economic disparity here as well. To date, you can be assured that you are losing your freighter by and large to people who are paying for the privilege of ganking you and are dedicated to the game as much as you are. Sure, they might be spooging into your eye and wiping their cock off on your cheeks, but they're in the same boat.

After november...you could be losing your freighter to the same dedicated uber nerd but he's putting literally zero on the line. You're paying $15 a month to fly a giant space brick about hauling Fortizars for your alliance, and some cunt just sets up 10 accounts for free, sets them training for 3 months to get gank thoraxes or something, and then comes and fucks you over. Fair? You decide.

Skills
I am undecided as to whether locking an Alpha Clone to one particular race of skill progression is the best way forward. Part of EVE's appeal is the overabundance of ship options. Another consequence of locking an Alpha to one race is that all the pirate faction frigates and cruisers will be locked out.

Another thing is that the skill list which appears available to Alphas might have a few quirks that eed ironing out. For instance, cloaking is impossible, but anchoring isn't. You need anchoring to use basic equipment like the mobile tractor and the depot, but by the same token you also get to anchor POSs, citadels and warp disruption bubbles, d-scan inhibitors, MJD beacons, etc. This makes almost no sense, and needs sorting out.

Not being able to cloak will restrict wormhole usage of Alphas. However, it's not all bad, really. You can still sit your Alpha in a citadel and keep it there to monitor the situation, even if you can't leave it cloaked on a connection. Plus, even T1 frigates and cruisers are plenty capable of doing wormhole site up to C6'swith W-R's, or at least C3 W-R's and Cats with RR and some minimum modcum of piloting skill.

Cloaking also cuts Alphas out of bombers, BLOPs, etc. But it doesn't stop you from using a mob of Alphas in a Titan bridge hotdrop. See suicide ganking, above, for why this could be a problem.


PVPenis
Other than that, most tier one, tier two skills in EWAR are open to Alphas, so there's plenty of progression available for Alpha clone pilots to get into PVP. However, a 5M SP limit on training will restrict you to meta equipment.

This Alpha clone stuff is basically free hisec neutral logi for everyone. I mean, why not? You lose absolutely nothing and it doesn't cost you a PLEX or $15 a month to be a risk averse coward hiding behind a dozen RR alts on Dodi undock.

This will no doubt cause a bunch of gayness in hisec wardecs. More than at the moment, I mean. Like...the pros will basically have to morph into bot herders with a cloud of Scythe or Oneiros alts and remote SeBo griffins hugging gates with Phoboses and Broadswords. Fighting them will be pointless malarkey unless you bring a cloud of DPS catalysts yourself.

PVE Mecca
For PVE, it's entirely possible you can run an successful mining alt cloud, gassing operation, or solo low/null/wh hacking toon as an Alpha clone. In fact, without any limit on Alpha subs, you could easily make billions of ISK with a cloud of totes not botted up IS-Boxer retty alts in nullsec or a wormhole or wherever.

The current yield rate in ISK/hr vs subscription cost or PLEX cost will cease to apply. This means that even if your Alpha accounts make 250M a month mining in nullsec nett of being ganked a dozen times (like, who fucking cares?) six of them in six months can afford half a super.

With ratting, being restricted to cruiser hulls and, essentially, T1 weapons and tank, will make higher-end PVE (aside from Wolf Rayets) pretty difficult for solo layers. Missions up to level 3 are doable, just, but the content is fairly low shelf life and gets stale. Nullsec ratting in anomalies might be OK, if you stick to the Dens and Hubs. Enough to PLEX every month? Not sure.

Corporations
I guess one change will be that with API's your recruiters won't be able, neccessarily, to weed out 'trial accounts' from other accounts. This is good and bad, of course; good for free-to-play Alpha players, bad for recruiters in corps that like to maintain 'active' members.

I think the best consequence of Free To play will, aside from the actual hypothetical boost in numbers, be the freeing of subscription from a recurrent fee. I'm happy to keep paying to play with the big toys, but certainly it will be good for people to be able to play with cheap ships for no money.

This suits, for instance, free public roams and Faction Warfare as much as it does nullsec alliance warfare or suicide ganking clubs of dick-grabbing reprobates. This is a cultural change more than anything; EVE needs to become less elitist, less exclusionary, to take advantage of FTP Alpha clones. That's well overdue IMO.

The problems and fixes
Realistically, EVE is a game that requires dual boxing. Going free-to-play is fine, and I welcome it, but the problems outlined above are all down to the current lack of a limit on the number of instances that can be opened by each IP address or real world human.

The larger problems of the past couple of years have also been related to this. Input multiplexing via IS Boxer or others, macro usage, etcetera, are all abused mostly by people who run up to 40 instances of the client.

Fixing this problem might require CCP to set an arbitrary cap. This might cause a few people grief who currently run, say, eight dread alts or something like that. Ten, twenty, fifty mackinaws, all subbed. They might spit the dummy that they can't faceroll 40 macks in a Collossal ore Cluster anymore, but the reality is there is a real risk that EVE won't grow actual player and payers, just that existing payers will exploit free DPS, RR and resource harvesting and destroy the game.

The fix to ganking might be as simple as Alpha clones can't set their safety red in highsec, full stop. This would block the use of Alphas for suicide gank mobbing.

Fixing the RR issue might be a bit different, but it could be as easy as Alpha clones not being able to train remote assistance skills, including RR drones. Harsh, but fair.

After all, if you are a genuine player trying out EVE now the pay wall has come down, you might see people doing all the hilarious and broken, frustrating gay shit...but unless you stump up a PLEX or $15, you don't get to use broken gay tactics. Simple.

Low Sec Scrubs - Titan #3

Alpha Clones?!?!

Yaaaas.

Pros:
- Free to play!
- You can PLEX yourself, theoretically, with T1 frigates and relic hunting and hisec anoms.
- Free PVP, in faction warfare or, really, wherever. Although, for wormholes, the lack of cloaking skills is going to be a hindrance
- Anchoring is still available for Alpha Clones, so you can anchor warp bubbles.

The inevitable Betrayal

We don't know why Care For Kids is anchoring a swathe of Astrahus citadels around Heimatar, but they are. We are not entirely happy about this, because they didn't ask, and if they dont get consent it's rape, and we are against rape culture. Or something.

Either way, midway through a short bash of an Astrahus in Bundindus, some randoms rolled in via a wormhole. Rather than, as we would have done, attempting to drop atop the oracles and mebbe gank one, they convoed our guy and asked if they could join.

Of course. Anything to make the interminable grind go faster. Except, it didn't help, of course; the DPS cap means a Citadel siege always takes at least half an hour.

At 10% hull, the inevitable happened.

I mean, it's fairly much inevitable that if you join a bunch of -10 guys, you're going to get betrayed once your utility is over. It's like bathing with sharks, or voting - it never ends well.

Is CCP gambling?

This is more something the Aussies will know about, but either way, here's a TL;DR on the background.

We have an Independent Senator, Nick Xenophon. he began his politican career as an anti-gambling advocate (gambling is a $12B per annum industry in Australia, alone, mostly horse and sports betting and poker machines / slot machines). So he did well harnessing outrage at impersonal multibillion dollar industries which exploit - without a doubt - the people in society who are addicted to gambling.

So now Xenophon, in an election stunt one would think (we just had one, you probably didn't notice because it was boring AF) has begun agitating to have online gaming brought under the umbrella of anti-gambling legislation.

What the fuck has this got to do with EVE, you ask? Money badger Coalition? IWANTISK? EveBet (run by Aussies, I believe)?

It's an interesting question whether,
a) the Australian government (which is in a tenuous position and needs to suck Xenophon's politicock to get anywhere) will
i) even entertain the proposed laws in any shape or form and if it does,
ii) will it even pass the laws?
b) Whether Australia has the jurisdiction to enforce anti-gambling legislation on foreign domiciled publishers or content providers,
c) if the government does have the laws and jurisdictions, will content providers remove lucrative as fuck revenue streams or
d) maybe they'll wall off Australians from this content in-game or, even worse, just refuse to provide service to Australia. Which we all know will just revolve around Aussies using VPN's and the like to work around geoblocking in all its forms

There's also a lot of wwork to be done in classifying gambling online in-game versus gambling online on the outcome of games.

And, in the EVE context, is gambling with in-game money (ISK) going to be covered? it's in a way a fig leaf to classify ISK as a non-asset; true you can't monetise it according to the EULA but that's irrelevant if the law is designed to stop gambling addicts (kids or otherwise) from taking their (or daddy's) credit cards and indulging a gambling addiction. it just means that instead of people winning big a la CSGO random jackpot loot crates and gambling, trading, speculating on it that way and making bank...people just pay CCP fully to convert money to PLEX, which means that their "winnings" are not even winnings as they can't be cashed out.

It's an interesting thing to consider that the way the EULA is set up, CCP is firstly profiting totally from all forms of in-game gambling with and on EVE. That includes the Alliance Tournaments and ISK gambling on sporting events (like the Olympics, lets say, or Euro 2016). The gamblers pay CCP, and that's it. The loss is total, and CCP has no interest in stopping people sinking thousands into PLEX to pay for ISK betting. In fact, erversely, the EULA really encourages CCP to support this form of gambling, because CCP makes dank bank.

Secondly, because you can't cash out winnings legally, the problem gamblers may get even more addicted because their money is lost anyway, and they may as well keep gambling away until its all gone.

I think Nick Xenophon has a very poor understanding of gaming, but a very keen understanding of gambling. E-sports and gambling are made for one another, and despite a few MMO's being runaway successes and a few games being runaway successes, the fact is CSGO is making bank on gambling because it has to, and can't afford to really cut it out. And the way the world works, if you cut it out the gambling providers will make a work-around, and take the gambling underground and take the mney out of the game developer's pockets.

it bears watching, because while Xenophon has his crusade, he isn't particularly religious. There's a hundred times as many puritans in America who could, once they're finished bricking up women's vajayjays and gay men's butts, turn their ire to other vices. Like gambling, and online gambling, and then make the connection that people treat computer games like SRS BSNS and make SRS DANK BANK from gambling on the SRS BSNS.

Let's Brag

http://imgur.com/a/JGEsA

Wormhole Town Hall - The village idiot's view

So, as usual, timezones made me miss it, but I caught a whiff of the politics and the problems being discussed.

One view is that numbers in wormholes are down (by one metric, capital kills in Anoikis are at a 12 month low) because of the changes to capital escalations. The view of one gentleman (names withheld) was that without the lure of dank escal ISK, and with the advent of Drifter escalations , his corporation was suffering a bleeding of care bear members who are now doing anoms in nullsec with carriers and Ishtars/VNI's.

I think his idea for growing a wormhole corporation relates entirely to providing your corporation members with such an unlimited pipeline of ISK that this overabundance of money and the need to take an infinitesimally small risk to get it (he quoted "being dropped by Blood Union after sealing the statics" which is like saying AIDS after condom) will entice people to playing the game the way you, the content creator, wants to play it, which is to find pew pew all the time and make money off pew pew that way.

I've been there, done that.

The problem with this line of thinking is, well, no offence to carebears because we all need ISK to fund extravagant or not so extravagant PVP or ship collection fetishes, but the problem is that in order to make a corporation which can field any number of members you are relying on living in the space with the most exploitable ISK faucet.

For a while, it was Incursions, and so people "ran Incursion alts" and got 150M ticks and flew dank Macha fleets about hisec. Then they nerfed Incursions slightly, and it came back to C5 space, and people piled their bears in there and faked being valuable corp members just to grind ISK. But hero dreading was a thing, too, and no one needs a corp for that, so C5 numbers started declning, and the HK and Lazerhawks model of farmsteading and C5 crofting took off, which allowed the solo bear to farm comfortably with hero dreads outside the structure of Quaserknocks and make dank ISK.

Maybe not quite as dank as some hoped, but lets e honest, for a limited number of C5's, this model has served the top tier C5 monoliths well, rentals or not aside; control the space, monopolise the dankest ISK faucets, and let the PVP sort itself out via a handful of yuge entities attracting the genuine PVPers to the genuine PVP content.

The nerf to capital escalations, realistically, is a major nerf to the Quaserknocks crofting model, not so much the second tier C5 corp which attracts the farmers when the going is good. The farmers and bears are probably leaving for nullsec because, being honest here, they are just gigantic fat spergy retards you don't acctually want in your corp, do absolutely nothing for your corp, and are better off elsewhere.

Maybe you nerds can't all hero dread anymore.but from what I've seen and heard, even numbnuts and second rate PVPers no one rates as "elite" (say Sacred Empire of Elysium, Jaded.) roll 4-5 man RR snake fleets around and are pulling in 650-750M ISK an hour for the gang. If that's 1-3 people, it's good ISK. hey are just doing it in the static (ohnoes!) and farming more sites externally than they have internally, and maybe they lose the odd snake to a hostile escalating Thanatos or something. this is still decent ISK, wormhole style. It's enough to keep you ticking along, and you can base out of a C2 with E545/N060 and get nullsec pew pew.

The bears? The worthless buttplugs shoved up the arse of wormhole corps to make their rosters look great? Let them sperge off to wheeze demands at nullsec renter slumlords and complain about space AIDS not bookmarking nomenclature. So what if the fucking cunts farm in carriers - more carriers to kill in nullsec!

And the crofting model? Well, not entirely dead, but it has its challenges. It's also, honestly, just as valid to chuck those farming alts into nullsec and croft in the company of idiots with carriers. If thats the dankest fucking ISK, then that's the dankest ISK.

Sperging in the Town Hall about it makes you look like the village idiot, a whiny Rain Man type fool, pining for days of yore. Days of yore are gone, you need to restructure your corp, your farming, your farmers expectations of unlimited ISk rains and bumper crops 23.75/7, and move the fuck on.

Oh, and less caps are dying in wormholes because less people are finding ways to YOLO them in to each other, not because there's less farmers to kill. And the lack of content we can sheet home exlusively to Citadels.

Recruiting?

Shopping about for a wormhole corp?

Besides applying to Empty Vessels ASAP, check out the monthly leaderboards.

Disconnections, Collapsed Connections

YOLO is all about finding two tengus in a C4 on the other side of a crit hole and saying "Fuck it, we're going in."

Thus it came to pass we took in upon a lone Tengu what was scooping his tractor, and used the time honored Critted Hole Gank Fleet
1 x Machariel of fatness
1 x Scimitar of Reppage
1 x Huginn of Webbishness
1 x Stratios called Jigglypuf's Vagina, for tackle
1 x Ashimmu +Infinity vs active tanked Tengus "Vorpal Capacitrix"

Add all the above to Tengu, and watch him die. Well, slowly.

We were betting his mate(s) might come back but it is claimed that his other clients disconnected. This may or may not be true, Bob's will is ineffable and effing stupid sometimes, but either way the Loot Fairy said "Here is 2 B-type invuls, have a great party". We got the corpse, too.

Personally, I doubt any tale of disconnection, because everyone else who disconnects doesn't swap targets nor lose pods that sit there long enough to be locked by a cruiser, but who am I to say? I also wouldn't have brought a second 1.7B ISk Tengu back to join the first, that just being a recipe for el disastro.

The entry hole still being up, we flew home and managed to get the Scimitar and the Huginn (with loot) out of the hole. The rest of us, being my two toons and the Macha, had to go out via the X877 (which rolled behind us), to another C4, to a C3 with hisec.

YOLOQuest V - Lif's Demise

Some friends were out doing a more or less suicidal frigate roam through Nullsec, creating content for themselves and a couple of rich bastards. This was your bog standard "just re-subbed let's fly around until we die to the new meta" kind of thing.

Then in JMH-PT they see a cyno go up, at a moon. They warp over and shoot it, as you do, and just before the cyno pops, a Lif appears on field. Alone. So they begin shooting it, not even realising what it really is, except it's just jumped in and the cyno is dead so you never know what's going to happen, but either way they can bug out if the cavalry arrives. If not, well, maybe killmail?

So they shoot and shoot and shoot, and the lif enters armour. The pilot them ejects a Phantasm, to shoot them, because of course that's what you do when your shiny hauling boat is tackled. This goes badly.

So there's 3 frigates, orbiting an unpiloted Lif, which is stuck miles and miles deep into the arse end of Scalding Pass. Better yet, none of them can fly the Lif.

So this is where I come in, burning 10 jumps through lowsec and 16 through nullsec, in my Garmur (not even a travel ceptor), and arrive.As promised, a Lif, unpiloted.

I board it, and there's more shit in the ship maintenance bay; an Arazu, a Stratios, and a Vargur. I drop all but the Vargur out and begin plotting my exit route. It's not good; 5 mids just to get back to lowsec. Or, I could boat the Lif 20 jumps through nullsec with an escort, and reduce this to 2. My jump out point is JPL-RA in great Wildlands - this is 11 jumps of hot null to null action.

So, we go down the route, and cross jump some guys in 504Z-V and F8k-WQ. A noob corp alt is in F8K-WQ, and follows to the CRXA gate; the forward scout calls out an onyx is anding on the gate as I'm in warp. Ruh roh.

Comms is something like:

"I'm boned."
"Yeah, you're boned. An Eris now as well."
"Doubly boned."
"LOL, so boned."
"Kill that Eris maybe....no, I'm bubbled."
"Cyno's up!"
(Nag, bunch of Redeemers, Tengus, etc)

SO I eject the Vargur from the Lif
"Where'd that Vargur come from?"
"Uh..." I say, trying not to mention I'd been thinking of holding onto it.
"Wait...did you not tell us? I hope you make it."
"Yeah, I'll make it." i say, noting my afterburner is a Gist X type. I think "Oh fuckballs, what the fuck is this thing fit with?" Keep in mind, I haven't even looked at the fit of the Vargur by this time, I'm just tunnel vision trying to dodge the fuck out of bumps and webs and all this other crap. So I open up the fitting window and drag it to the intel channel and, mid tunnel-vision, I hear someone say "HOLY FUCKING SHIT" and someone else mention "Mizuros, jeez."

Sweating bullets now.

I jump to CRXA-Y and bounce about safes for 11 minutes. But it's a small system, and the enemy probing Tengu lands closer and closer to my limited number of safe options. None of the Serpentis sites are off the ecliptic, so i can't really get any good angles for dumping safes in odd spots, so i eventually have to dump onto a POCO.

It goes south from there.

I share my fit in fleet now I'm tackled. Soon, it's shared with all of Battleclinic.

The Lif, thankfully, was stolen a second time, by Sholupen.

So. I lost a Garmur and a skull ful of implants I pulled (+3's), and a percent ISK efficiency. Tiger prince lost the Lif, a 4B ISK Vargur, an Arazu (see here) and a Stratios (c. 450M), plus his Phantasm. Say, 7.5B ISK, lost to a Worm, a Crow and a Catalyst.

Sure, i didn't make the Great Escape. My motorbike clipped the barbed wire fence and fell into the minefield. My second attempt to combat roll out of said minefield went a bit awry (oh for a 73 AU across system) but it was close. 4 minutes close.

Or, you know, if we'd had our cyno ships a couple of jumps closer and I had less YOLO and more FOMO, maybe the 4 of us would be rolling in dank spacebucks. Either way, that was some intense good craic.

Batterizas!

The changes to Capacitor Batteries which came in recently were certainly effective. Granted, this was the third or fourth crack of the whip by CCP, but for once CCP Fozzie et al. looked at the feedback thread, which for once wasn't full of spergertards wheeze-gloating bullshit, and it all came together in a joy of effective rebalancing.

Now you can spend 450M on a Tengu with a cap battery and a DG XL booster and get 1600 DPS worth of practically neut-proof PVP godliness. Or you can go 1.5B and get 1900 DPS tank, add boosts and pills and implants and get 2500 DPS+.

With the Svipul you can get what I call Terminal Cancer, which has a Republic Fleet medium cap battery and a medium shield booster, cap stable. Links, pills and LG Crystal implants is 711 DPS tank  You can get a Hurricane Fleet down to 5% hull before a lucky wrecking shot alphas through your hull. I lacked all the fruit, and I still nearly won.

The cap battery Sac is now a beast. T2 fit MAAR/MARII and LCBII it's 816 DPS tank and with a medium scoped nosferatu running, cap stable at 29% and that's with two T2 nanobot accelerator rigs. If you want less tank and more capacitor spare, go 2 x T2 Aux Nano pumps and it's 734 DPS tank @ 63% cap stable. For 326M that's good craic - almost Deimos level bullshit.

Battery fits are also very much viable with Marauders. You can make a bassically capacitor-passive Vargur fit with 2 x Thukker LCB's  and 3 x A-type medium nos, which realistically is all you need to PVP with as long as you can primary the neuts off the field and aren't getting hotdropped by 2 carriers. Links, pills, HG Crystals, 6100 DPS tank cap stable at 38% with effective 33% neut resists. Booyah.

With the new Asklepion implants, a LCB Kronos is now very much a thing. In fact, the new Asklepion implants are so OP it's kinda ridiculous.

Truly, the days of the cap battery being a garbage module are well and truly over.

Competence

There's some interesting games afoot in Verge Vendor with monopolies being sought in the provision of 0% tax or low-transaction market Citadels.

Basically, Archetype. alliance, being a typical rentboy highsec wardec corp, has decced the owners of citadels (Astrahus and Fortizar) around Dodixie, to force their competition out of the niche in freeport low-tax hubs. This has seen some quite disorganised carebear alliances come under attack.

One such group of disorganised yet somehow space-rich ingenues is Resonance Alliance, who has a Fortizar in Botane. It got RFed recently, prompting one of the members to begin batphoning for help in defending the 1620 GMT timer. I saw him bleating ineffectually in a public channel and started mustering some help, mostly because I like dropping a dozen catalysts on neutral logi in highsec.

It quickly became apparent this guy had zero idea. He wanted to keep it a Freeport even during the fight over the timer. This meant that, for instance, the Archetype. neutral logi could have docked at the Fortizar in question and taken advantage of the heat and remote repair facilities. Or, if they were really smart, docked a freighter full of gank catalysts and undocked right into the defence fleet at zero and ganked shit.

"Dude. You have to treat this like a serious situation. Treat it like you are, you know, actually at war. Fucking lock that shit down, right now, even for 2 hours, just in case. You have to block off all the douchey highsec faggotry that they can and will pull, to get an edge over you." I said.

"But people have stuff inside and won't be able to access it."

"Who gives a fuck? Your Fortizar is worth about 40 billion, and all their shit will get transferred to some other station if it blows up, and someone might miss a few minutes of marketing bullshit. Are you seriously not going to lock your Fortizar down during an attack, just because some randoms might be inconvenienced?"

In the end, Archetype. used their spais, alts and scouts to see the horribly disorganised hordes of noobs jumps before they got on field, and obviously didn't attack it yesterday evening. But I have no doubt they will be back, and I have no doubt they will succeed if only because if you have such little competence that you can't even treat a war dec like a war, you really don't deserve to keep your Fortizar.

That said, there's some good ganking of neutral logi around Dodixie to be had, no doubt about that. Maybe something for someone who can organise their shit just enough to get a bunch of catalysts and a combat prober into position.

The Eastern Front 2016

Whilst killing Desertcrypt Gengod's Occator alt, I had traversed J105700, an unremarkable C1 with 21 online towers which comprised a giant refinery farm owned by some Polish industrial corporation.

It seems my killing of Crypt interrupted his nefarious plans to assemble Scimitars and nagas to assault said C1, where in true nerd fashion he had calculated their monthly fuel bill at 8B ISk. In the Toby Macguire "Show me the money!" forensic accounting schtick, if you can afford 8B ISK/mo in fuel, you must therefore be making at least 8B ISK/mo in profit if not substantially more. Therefore, because people are lazy, and there was a CSAA and 34 CHA's and 16 SMA's and...etc...Crypt figured out that there was serious Pinata.

So the Eastern Front was opened up this weekend, with the two juiciest POSs RFed on Friday. This involved 20 Nagas, VNI's and Oracles and, after some not too subtle coaxing from myself and Jack haamilton, 27 tractor units in Trashcat Doctrine, to speed up and smooth the RFing.

The sieging and the camping contnued till tonight, where Trashcats again came to the fore. Sadly, some people were bad tractor daddies, and some losses were experienced.

However, the loot pinata was suitably juuge.

Some gudfites were apparently had, before the looting fleet dealt with reputedly "a whole planet's worth of PI".

The Polish are apparently quite angry that their farm hole is being plowed. More content on the Eastern Front is expected.

Looting Fail, Scamming Success

A couple of days ago, some guys from the SSS / TITF coalition found their way into a C3 off Gusandall and found an offline POS. They of course farmed the SMA for dank loots.

One of them, however, got into a module popping frenzy and accidentally popped the SMA wreck, and all its juicy, juicy contents. We LOLed on comms about this, even though the other guy involved in the loot pinata was fairly steamed up about it.

Anyway, time passes and the owner of said SMA probes his way out to lowsec and sees the perps in local. A conversation is struck up, wherein the guy swears on the grave of his cat or something that he put fuel in the POS this morning, CCPHax, etc etc.

Slick says he'll sell the loot back at a steep discount, because splitting it up is just causing too much friction between himself and Air Thruster. A price of 2.5 billion ISK is agreed upon. The guy docks up, and a trade window is opened, and Slick starts filling the trade window with crap, and says Air Thruster's wallet needs to flash, because Air Thruster doesn't trust Slick to split the money since Slick has the loot. So the guy transfers the money to Air Thruster, and Slick closes out of the trade window.

The Humble T2 Small Warp Dissy

I make a habit of packing a T2 Warp Disruption Field with my scout ships. There comes a time when, lets say, you have baited an ishtar off a wormhole using a Nereus. Just for argument's sakes. And you've got him tackled nine ways to sunday but you don't have a dictor. So you can anchor the bubble and punt him inside it, kill him, and get the pod.

It's cruel if you use T1 bubbles, see. They have such a long anchoring time.

Batteclinic, I miss you not.

Besides changing their site layout and making it a cuntiferous abortion to use, Battleclinic had its heyday as a repository of pre-API  and pre-CREST verified killmails.

It also had a juge following as a place to swap, rate and discuss fittings. I spent some time there, indeed, and had some well-rated Apocrypha era fits, all now RIP. These days, your alliance and corp will store their fits in the corp library, on alliance forums, or via third party apps like Fleet-up. These are for Doctrines, and there's a reason for Doctrines, but this is of no use to the soloer or a noob corp starting out and finding their way out there amongst the stars and boat violencing.

I think that Battleclinic was a good resource for fits that anyone could access and, if noobs came to the game and found out about Battleclinic, they could at least get a heads up. But, like any social media platform, you got a democracy of idiots, and cultish followings and a culture that developed.

One side effect of Battleclinic was its treatment of rigs, by the culture of reviewers and retards and cliques of douchefuck commenters. According to Battleclinic, rigs had 3 possible purposes:
- more tank
- more spank
- GTFO for nano

This culture kind of survives even to this day, amidst the doctrines which are developed and the way things are discussed and passed around by the old hands at the game, who are what would nowadays be known as the Influencers. Influencers are probably stil keeping on fitting tank rigs as a rule, when the game has to some extent moved on a bit since then.

Consider the hyperspatial rigs. They give your tackle ships a crucial few seconds less on d-scan as they warp in to local. Or a few seconds less travel time from wormhole or gate to the Haven or Hub to tackle the shiny ratting boat. They give your tackle ships more survivability if the logi moves that extra few AU/s faster, and your battleships kind of absolutely need it to get to the battle before it's decided.

It's not to say that, in the right role, the old tank, spank and GTFO rig choices aren't still valid. Especially for Doctrines in alliances, you have a logi wing and so on, you stick to the tried and true. But certainly, the breadth of rig choices available now as opposed to 2008-09 or earlier, really means that shit needs to get explored better to get a new edge on the foe.

Hyperspatials are common with the guys I play with in lowsec. This has been forcing me to ask, for al my old fits I find lying around, can I maybe do something a bit funkier with a few different rigs?

GODDAMIT LUNCH

First I missed this shit. But that's fair enough, 5:38 a.m. LOLnope.

But you fucking for for lunch....and....then shit happens.

So, no, the goddamn move to lowsec isn't working out as I hoped :(

Overtanking vs Blobbing

Consider the humble active tanked PVP Tengu. It can tank ike a truck, especially now there's cap batteries which reflect the majority of neuting. So you can go baws deep and get yourself tackled 50km off a wormhole and scrabble back to it under neuting pressure and a fair amount of DPS.

But the thing about these sorts of hero tanked ships is, unless you're pretty sure the enemy doesn't have logi, the equation isn't "is my tank > their DPS" it's "is my blob bigger than theirs?" and "is my DPS > their tank?"

if you don't have that worked out, then you are screwing yourself out of 1.2B ISK for no real point.

Still....that was a Cataclysmic C3. In the Pulsar he was trying to crawl back into, there's not a lot we could have done to dunk the Tengu without more neuts. RIP 250,000 damages taken.

Skiff Massacre

The humble hyperspatial rig is a key ingredient in the murder of Skiffs. chuck a couple on your everything, it makes skiff murder so much easier.

12.6B (mostly pods) dunked.

Limited playing opportunities

Ugh, 2 weeks in the scrub and 2 weeks off. Great roster. Not easy to keep up with EVE happenings, and not much opportunity to play, let alone blog.

Good technique, ballsy execution

We visited XGH-SX in FCON space via a wormhole in Mateber. We took in a small nanofag gang of 6 into 42 in Local hunting their ratting Ishtars, Skiffs et al.

I will surprise you, dear reader, by conveying the information that they all docked up immediately. Yes, it does happen from time to time and we were, sadly, the only ones around to witness this amazing coincidence because no one else was out roaming. Or something.

Nevertheless, we assembled a Vaga, Cyna, Oracle, Garmur, Stiletto and Scimi on the wormhole and awaited the mustering of the Blob. They figured out, finally, that we were coming via a wormhole and probed it down, jumping through and spotting us.

So we triggered the Blob by jumping the nearest gate (64 in Local, a small gang on gate) and they piled in, claiming our Stilly. This was OK, as our Oracle blapped a Maulus and Svipul before we had to go to range to avoid the 38km superpoint of the Broadsword. So we warped back to the hole and they landed at 70km.

Then they left. We aren't really sure why, but they left a Hurricane Fleet, a Svipul, Thorax and Falcon on the hole. So we jumped back into them, pointed the HFI, got jammed out by the Falcon (who promptly left even though no one went after him) and took the HFI down.

The Svipul warped in from rane and executed aa perfect gambit: run away from the slower cruisers and the Scimitar, to about 110km, and turn around onto the Garmur. This didn't so much as catch me by surprise, as get my Garmur tackled right outside of Scimi rep range but conveniently close to the Bifrost MJD range.

So I squealed like a girl on comms and the heated reps of the Scimitar, in deep falloff, preserved my Garmur's life by the narrowest of margins. The Svipul died of its wounds.

The Garmur looks quite boss, all shot up and flaming. 

My First Astrahus Siege, A Pictoral Story

Bex: Guise, look what I found.
Guise: ZOMG! Lets scoop and/or gank that shit!

23 hours later....

Fighters deployed!

Unanchoring timer finishes...

No it doesn't.

Wait, what timer was it?

Citadels. As intuitive as a brick to the crotch.

Boo!

is it just me, or is EVE quiet at the moment? Wormholes certainly seem to be. With Citadels, you warp to them faster (speeding up your d-scan hunt for POSs) and then look at it for 5 seconds and think "The fuck if I know if anyone;s there or active or AFK or whatever." and off you warp.

Thrilling gameplay.

Lowsec, only <1 month old noobs come through, or hauling toons in Viators, because instalock carriers are the go-to thing. I've even been running 5/10's in a Vargur recently, because it's 1-2 hours between neuts in local.

Thrilling gameplay, huh?

This is how you get ants

Yes indeed, stage 4 cancer.

I hate to be right, but carriers are super OP at the moment, as predicted.

Dread Meta

I don't really know what to say about dreads in the new capital meta except I can't see much of a space for them.

Like I said before, this all comes down o the uber damage projection of carriers, what with the 3500-5500km lock range and the ability to drive fighters across the grid (albeit maybe slow-ish-ly).

What this means is, yet again, dreads are stuck as a static weapon with yuge tanking capacity (I sometimes feel like Pyfa lies when it says the Phoenix has 120K DPS tank....really?) and asically the usual DPS as per yuzu berries.

The High Angle Weapons (I think this clunky term has been dropped? who knows?) like the Quad 800mm's, Rapid Torps, etc, provide a bit of variety for blap dreads. And of course, blap titans. The blapping is gud, but DPS is 3500 to 4500 and as per usual blap dreads, you ideally need some tackle and paints to really make these stand out. But that's also true of BS weapons anyway.

So I guess it's nice that you can get T2 weapons and get Barrage, Scorch, Javs and Null into your dreads, and project 60-90km at 2800-3900 DPS.

This is necessary because you're kind of stuck in place for ever. Unlike carriers. I mean, carriers used to be stuck in place more or less, slowboating about at sub-100m speeds, but now they get MWDs and ABs and can push fighters 5,500km. If your carrier can tank 5,000 DPS, it can boat out of dread range before it's tank fails.

So, I guess it doesn't really matter how you fit your Dreads. Wormhole brawl or not, you'll be leaving the Dreads at home.

I really think that, as I said before, the whole Siege/Triage module causing a static "stand your ground" fight is maybe now a bit obsoleted, even before you factor in the presence of Supers and Titans and the obvious advantages they get.

In a new era of mobile capital warfare, why would you maintain static lockdowns? Is there really anything wrng with capital ships moving about the field, dishing out atrocious DPS? I mean, caps besides carriers and supers. Dreads, in particular.

The same goes for the FAXs. Whilst everyone should, as before Citadel, be training to the Apostle (or Minokawa or maybe Ninazu) because armour capital supremacy has been handily maintained here, the FAX has also been lumbered with a frankly obsolescent gameplay "feature" that utterly destroys gameplay options for developing truly interesting capital meta.

I mean, OK, so you want to bring a FAX. A FAX can, absent decent neuts (and now with capital capacitor boosters and batteries, this is less a threat), tank 3-4 dreads for 3-5 minutes without much heat. Not too different than a pre-Citadel faction fit triage carrier, really. But it's stuck in place for 5 minutes and its major threats (carriers) can kite off (however slowly) and can also pack capital neuts (a threat). The friendly fleet has to stay within range of reps.

Dreads face the same issues, except they've basically become so amazingly unbalanced in tank vs gank (45-120,000 DPS active tanks vs 4-6K gank)that a dread fight is now a basically fruitless exercise, sans neuts. Thank goodness for capital neuts, right?

I think the Dreadnought meta is pretty out of whack. Aside from bringing Dreads in to monster subcaps, or maybe shoot a structure or two, there's nothing to really recommend them as more than a niche boat. Not that dreads ganking caps on undock won't still happen, but beyond that why get stuck in place when you could be driving fighters across the grid?

Fit 'em how you want, but my prediction is that they are unwieldy, compromised dinosaurs and we'll see them given up in favour of carriers.

Stellaris

Apparently there's been FC's who've complained their jabber/slack pings are going unanswered due to Stellaris. Can confirm, no one's playing EVE much at the moment due to this game.

New Capital Meta?

The Citadel patch's capital changes have been interesting. Theorycraft Wizards probably haven't settled their doctrines and tactics much. Certainly, the new DPS out of carriers and high-angle dreads has been a rude shock to all and sundry, at least the first time.

The objectives of the capital rebalance was to revitalise the meta, and provide a yuuge swathe of options with fits and flexibility - this has certainly been achieved. Whether or not this is better than the old two-part ( plus supers) meta is yet to be seen, but I'm thinking yes.

There's going to be a time soon when capital mdules will come down in price from the stratosphere, and the ancilliary versions are closer to 150M than 1 billion. This not too distant future will change things a bit, but for now, we have to get used to T1 fit capitals.

I've been tinkering away, and some of my initial thoughts are:

FAXs
The FAXs, especially the Lif, are pretty undersupplied with CPU. In fact, almost all capitals are undersupplied with CPU, which might be the only thing pegging a few of them back. But this is rather uneven. The phoenix, for instance, is fairly luxo-barge rich with fitting if you don't try anything too outre. Back to the FAXs.

The Lif in particular has a particularly odd niche compared to the solo Nid of old. I guess there's not a lot of leeway with triage ships, as usual, on capacitor: it's 3 minutes or nothing. But for a ship with one job, this is a Sam Tarly not a John Snow.

[Lif, Shield T1]

Power Diagnostic System II

Co-Processor II

Power Diagnostic System II

Power Diagnostic System II

Damage Control II

Capital Capacitor Booster I, Navy Cap Booster 3200

Shield Boost Amplifier II

Gist C-Type EM Ward Field

Gist C-Type Thermal Dissipation Field

Capital Shield Booster I

Capital Cap Battery I

[Empty High slot]

Capital Remote Shield Booster I

Capital Remote Shield Booster I

Triage Module II

Capital Remote Capacitor Transmitter I

[Empty High slot]

Capital Core Defense Capacitor Safeguard I

Capital Core Defense Operational Solidifier I

Capital Core Defense Capacitor Safeguard I

This does 1 outbound rep for 4, 41s with the cap booster running. It can tank for 8m 56s with the cap booster and the local rep, but only 2 mins with a rep and a single outbound rep. This means you are very compromised while under fire (and thank fuck for the cap battery's neut resistance). Not happy, Jan.

The Minokawa can be made into a buffer fit (6.35M EHP) and 3m 24s capacitor with 2 outbound RRs. That's respectable, if you can field a couple of them, so that one can rep the other. Active tanked, it's got massive capacitor and decent CPU, and you can fit it decently without a great deal of blood, sweat and tears. This, really, is the shield FAX.

[Minokawa, Active]

Damage Control II

Capacitor Power Relay II

Dark Blood Reactor Control Unit

Dark Blood Reactor Control Unit

Capital Shield Booster I

Dread Guristas Adaptive Invulnerability Field

Capital Cap Battery I

Capital Capacitor Booster I, Navy Cap Booster 3200

Capital Cap Battery I

Dread Guristas EM Ward Field

Cap Recharger II

Triage Module II

Capital Remote Shield Booster I

Capital Remote Shield Booster I

Capital Energy Nosferatu I

Large Proton Smartbomb II

Large Proton Smartbomb II

Capital Capacitor Control Circuit I

Capital Semiconductor Memory Cell I

Capital Semiconductor Memory Cell I

The Ninazu does well. 2 RR's, cap stable. 2 capital armour reps, cap stable, for 17K DPS tank. Neut or Nos, and a remote cap transmitter. Decent, well-rounded, and easy to fit.

[Ninazu, Ninja]

Capital Armor Repairer I

Capital Armor Repairer I

Damage Control II

Centus C-Type Armor Explosive Hardener

Imperial Navy Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane

Dark Blood Reactor Control Unit

Capital Capacitor Booster I, Navy Cap Booster 3200

Capital Cap Battery I

Cap Recharger II

Cap Recharger II

Cap Recharger II

Triage Module II

Capital Remote Armor Repairer I

Capital Remote Armor Repairer I

Capital Energy Neutralizer I

Capital Remote Capacitor Transmitter I

Large Proton Smartbomb II

Capital Remote Repair Augmentor I

Capital Remote Repair Augmentor I

Capital Auxiliary Nano Pump I

The Apostle, same deal. 2 x 2 RR/RCT's, twin local reps, 17K DPS tank, and capacitor out the wazoo (like, 28 mins). Cap booster and a cap battery.

[Apostle, Basic]

Capital Armor Repairer I
Capital Armor Repairer I
Dark Blood Armor Explosive Hardener
Dark Blood Armor Kinetic Hardener
Dark Blood Armor Thermal Hardener
Damage Control II
Reactor Control Unit II

Capital Capacitor Booster I, Navy Cap Booster 3200
Capital Cap Battery I
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II

Capital Remote Capacitor Transmitter I
Capital Remote Capacitor Transmitter I
Triage Module II
Capital Remote Armor Repairer I
Capital Remote Armor Repairer I
[Empty High slot]

Capital Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Capital Capacitor Control Circuit I
Capital Capacitor Control Circuit I

The CLEAR lame duck here is the Lif. It gets a mediocre local tank, but only as long as your cap boosters last. It can't rep while tanking, and it can't fit a full set of highs without giving up crucial low slots and rig slots. Not that low slots help shield capitals much, beyond the way it used to work, which was a swank blue midslot arrangement and a full rack of Dark Blood PDU's in the lows.

I'm open to suggestions at this point, but I seem to have 2 decent carriers and a letterbox of uselessness.

Citadel and the rise of the Slowtars

As they say in France: "plus ca change, plus ca inbound nerf."

I'm talking about capitals.

You know what's hilarious, but broken? Carriers.

What we are doing is, we've anchored an Astrahaus 3500km off a hisec gat in a lowsec system. We warp our carriers (3000 DPS gank Thannies, mostly) down to gate and vomit out a billion fighters. We then warp the carriers up to the Astrahaus.

The fighters have 1200 scan res, and if the instalock HIC or Ceptor/Griffin combo doesn't point the poor fucker, the fighters do. Then they hand out instablappage. If anyone even manages to hotdrop us...well, you can tank away and dock up.

It's everything that was wrong with EVE, rolled into one spot. Docking games faggotry with capitals. Skynetting. DPS carriers with ultra dumb tracking. Plus the added soupcon of POS gun style defences and structure RR for added insanity.

I mean, not broken. No.

Then there's the high-angle guns. Well, I shall admit there was a bit of a chance we all had misplaced angst that high-angle guns were going to turn out shit. It was misplaced. We all admit that now. But can confirm, tracking titans are back and blapping away happily. Happily for the titans not the victims, though.

So...when everyone stops gasping in shock about the cost of capital modules, and we start seeing people throwing their big ships around again in large numbers, we shall see the real whingeing beginning.

That's my prediction.

Also, 8.7M EHP Chimmy. Watch out.

Bad Reconnaisance

This last week has been a bad week for Miskoranda and recons.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/53493807/

https://zkillboard.com/kill/53452629/

https://zkillboard.com/kill/53430219/

https://zkillboard.com/kill/53429397/

I think the reason I've lost so many is that they are one of the few ships one can fly around highsec whilst decced by Marmites. I have also been trying to move my shit out of Shenda, having abandoned deepest dullest Aridia for Heimatar lowsec.

I've moved in to the Aralgrund area with the Maggots coalition (which isn't officially a coalition). The war dec has reduced the abilities to move shit around easily, and all my wormhole chains from lowsec to hisec have been into regions I generally have few assets. So my access to ships aside from recons has been minimal, hence the torrid week so far.

However, slowly I'm accumulating crap, and hopefully this weekend we'll go about the place in kitey crap destroying Provibloc idiots and scrublords again.

Philosoraptor

Hmmm, ponder this

Read the patch notes

You have to occasionally remind yourself some people play this game itinerantly and don't keep up to date with every little patch, tweak, nerf and new vessel. Some people just play the game to collect toys and explore.

Such a person came and anchored a depot 2km off the B274 connection into Shenda yesterday, refitting his Tengu from exploration to combat so he could go run a sleeper radar site and make dank ISK. He was sitting 2.6km off the hole.

I of course leapt through in a Pontifex and he scooped his depot and cloaked up as I burned for him. Then suddenly we were 90km away from the hole, he was uncloaked, and he dieded. 

As I was munching on his tasty, tasty hull hitpoints he said 

Utolana Yoga> Well fuck, I apparently drifted further off the hole than I thought.

No, buddy, it's called a Command Destroyer. 

These have been a huge force multiplier for small gangs fighting logi-heavy cowardblobs....or at least bad cowardblobs who anchor up their logistics and fall prey to CD's. 

They have also, apparently, done to death the AFK boosting alt of elitepro "Solo" PVP mega gods of lowsec, who used to leave their boosters hugging stations or gates. A few days of CD's kidnapping boosting T3's and command ships, and that's all come to an end. Now they swon upon their couches at having to put them at a safespot and fall prey, occasionally, to Virtue clone probers. Oh, the humanity.

There's also a good line of Ala Kachuu going on with boosters orbiting POSs in wormholes. Especially if it's an undefended POS or you can drop 3 CD's on the guy and get serial MJD's 300km off the POS.

People are also, for quad escalators, just abducting the webbing Loki away from the triage carrier, which can be an effective way of pissing in the pot if you aren't solo dread running. Can be expensive, but with a few T3D's to DPS the Loki down and GTFO, it's a cost effective way of threatening a bunch of capitals. 

Overpowered? It all depends. For ambush uses, maybe. There's not much you can do if you get caught by surprise. For larger fleets which run anti-tackle, and know to prime CD's, not really. And for logi wings who don't cluster up, the effectiveness of the CD's is low.