Operation Interruptus

This tales comes via a friend, an habitual abuser of the Dick Virus class of Proteus, domiciled in J233555. It seems J233555 is perhaps one of the deadliest wormholes in EVE for the humble Heron.

Anyway, this is the tale as related to me.

Delta Blues was out attending a friend's batphone when he noticed an Orca and a Prospect on d-scan in his home wormhole. He checked the static and other wormholes, assuming they were transiting,  and then finally found them both at an ore site. The supplied image is below.

Events transpired as below.

Apex Bex came back 14 jumps from the operation, jumped in the wormhole and went to POS. he hopped in his Proteus named Night Fever, and warped it to the belt. He let off a salvo of bombs, severely damaging the Prospect. The Prospect pilot immediately boarded the Orca before the second salvo (which, coincidentally, blew up the empty Prospect).

The Orca launched his EC-600's....which instantly vaporised from the smartbombs, preventing an escape. Delta Blues reshipped to a Drake, and began whaling on the Orca. He then decides he's fucked, and ejects his Probe, in order to GTFO; sadly this dies instantly to the smartbombs as well.

Whoops.

So that's how you get a free Orca.

"Buzzard Go Home"

First, the good news. Whilst on our way to Operation man Code, we called in some friends to provide a bit of logi and went down towards the target, via our chain, which included an entry in each of the four empires, with the Caldari exit in a C2 Wolf Rayet.

Our destination was a C4 Pulsar where we'd been stront checking idiots (more on this later), which explains our fits....mostly. We numbered 9 in fleet - 2 Rattlesnakes, a VNI, Onyx, Sleip, Naga, Jag, Basilisk and Osprey because "I thought it was too risky to bring a Basi", and the obligatory armour tanked Sacrilege piloted by Wraith "I don't have shield ships" 01. We were going in versus an entrenched enemy with 15 online confirmed, from 5 corps, so batphone was expected. not that my dudes knew, but let's be honest, a fight is a fight and we had stronk fleet and Rattlesnakes are dirt cheap. 

In scouting the C2 Wolf-Rayet the locals had a swing at my Buzzard as I went to highsec, with a Crow, Onyx, Myrmidon and Proteus. I guess the name of one of their Drakes, "Go Home Buzzard" clued me in to the fact I was interrupting their money making scheme. The locals were full of vim and vigor, so we deployed Procurer bait, which they didn't take. Time wore on for 10, 15 minutes and they assembled quite the gang on the highsec (plus we assumed, 20 lachesis we couldn't see on d-scan). Their fleet, to our knowledge, included 2 x Myrmidon, 2 x Sacrilege, Drake, Drake Navy issue, Oneiros, Eos, Onyx, Proteus.  They were happy to camp the highsec, so we had to go to them, so we recalled the procurer baits, uneaten, not even nibbled upon.

Instead of taking the bait, the guys in the C2 W-R sent Yousuck Younoob through to us in a Corax  about 30s before our Procurer reships were back on grid. He died, but they now had +/- 10%, our fleet comp.As soon as our VNI boated through our bubble, I called "#YOLO" and we jumped.

I wing warped us to the highsec, bubbled by the enemy Onyx, and we landed. I primed the Drakes, to remove ~800 DPS from the field ASAP, and knowing one Oneiros circling the B274 wasn't going to prop them up. The Drakes were pushed out in seconds once the Geckos from the Rattlers began aplhaing their shields. I was slightly distracted by our Naga blowing up, but the bleating on comms was almost nil. It wasn't to be saved anyway, being a sniper fit.

Then I noticed a Rook land at the edge of the bubble, and a Legion decloaked. Smesmod was reporting a significant amount of DPS from the Proteus, and eventually had to bail to highsec. I called the Oneiros prime, to rid us of his logi, and split my DPS; cruise on the Oneiros and Gecko on the Proteus. The former jumped, and the latter disappeared as the Rook landed a few jams before hoofing it, no one actually having shot at him. Next the Legion, to rid us of any potential neuting. I initially assumed he jumped because one minute he was there, the next he was not.

While I was searching for a new primary, Wraith reported a Sacrilege suffering heavily, so we called prime on that - it assploded. Next was the other Sac, Myrms (one jumped), then the Eos, as the Rook came back with an Ishtar. The Rook got aplha'd by our Sleipnir but we didn't get point on the Ishtar so he buggered off in deep structure, which left nothing on field bar the Onyx, which wasn't doing much at all.

The slaughter.

We found it odd that these guys didn't all manage to jump. perhaps our DPS was too stronk. They were mostly in active tanked ships. No doubt an element of confusion and some dualboxing erros. But at least they brought a fight.

Credit Card Damage

I am pretty sure that Ness Shaishi bought his Onyx with a PLEX. That is a juicy Onyx. in fact, it's juicier than a maiden's pussy after she stumbles out of the brambles, deep in the forest, to the side of a stream and finds Chris Hemsworth loofahing his six pack with a baby sloth.

I think that, based on evidence presented thus far, Ness Shaishi buys ships with PLEX. He exchanges his real-world time for money, and avoids wasting his game time grinding to afford in-game toys, and thus he is in essence exchanging mundane tasks in the real world for experiences in-game which would otherwise be unavailable to him with a toon that cannot even put a T2 hardener or missile launcher upon an Onyx.

Which is kind of bizarre, given the requirements for flying an Onyx reads like a laundry list of shit a noob wouldn't train to save his life, but hey - who are we to argue with the choices of someone playing the game and exploring all the many and varied ways of content creation, destruction and experiences available?

Certainly, the bulk of $15 bought Ness Shaishi a lesson in d-scan (not learned yet) and Protars. We must only hope that his thirst for exploration is undiminished by this setback.

Demise of the Skynet War Library

This tale is tangentially related to the upcoming changes to bomber and fighter bomber scan res nerf, aka the Skynet Nerf.

EVE is a game that, apparently, is played by risk-averse middle-aged men with cryptorchidism - you take the absolute least-risk way of doing something, and then take even less risks, resulting in limp-wristed game play such as Skynet carriers.

You don't see too many Skynet carriers deployed in low-class wormholes, but they are there. Care Park was the owner of one of these lame sissies who PVPs with 13 fighters assigned to a ceptor.

Admiral Synergy, of Awakened Ones, found his way in there and saw them flipping POCOs. He began fighting them on the B274, and got a cloaky scout deployed a few klicks off the Skynet carrier. Sleeper Social Club supplied the stunt cock Ishtar blob, and being an untanked fucktard wagon it went down quick smart.

The best part? The library of expensive skillbooks in the cargo hold would make many school stations jealous. We also all like to put our drake BPO's in our Skynet carriers. Even better, fly a 3.5 billion ISK pod.

All in all, 8 billion ISK is a good shot to the nonexistant undescended cojones for being a risk-averse douche tard. That's a lot of PI and humping C1 anomalies for that idiot.

So, as you complain about the nerf to fighter and fighter bomber scan res, just realise - it's to nerf Skynet supers and Skynet carriers. If it takes the assigned fighters four times as long to begin applying their DPS, then it means it is 25% as lame to fight a ceptor with assigned fighters.

Lachesis Will Blot Out Sun

The mooted changes to Combat Recons will usher in a new era of roaming wormholes, just like the original buff to HACs made it Ishtars Online inside of 2 weeks. But I think the combat recon changes will cause this to happen instantly, because the competitive advantage is instant and obvious.

CCP seems to have some pretty strong and steely resolve to make this happen. I can see why. Combat Recons have been a relatively underutilised solo ship, because they are relatively weak and have sissy DPS - especially at any range that they need to work at to keep themselves alive with their pissy tanks.

Solo Rook is like a strange sexual pecadillo. You're interested in it, you have a desire to do it deep down in your groinal regions, but if anyone found out you'd bought a Rook and kitted it out with an ASB or an AAR and were thinking of soloing....boy, instant pariah. The only recon which has historically gone solo is the Curse, really.

So they did need a buff, and considering the fantstic* job CCP did with buffing the HACs (*Ishtar), just adding more DPS and tank wasn't going to cut it.

The Recons needed a niche, and apparently that niche is d-scan immunity. I can see the concept - a fleet needs a scout to monitor the enemy's movement, like a float plane launched from a battleship was used in World War II. So you give Combat Recons d-scan immunity and they can fulfil that role almost as well as a cloaked ship! Kind of like the Force Recons, really...

There is nothing wrong, per se with d-scan immunity. The d-scan inhibitor deployable does the job in a spacky and clumsy way. The Combat Recons can still be combat probed down, CCP's way of saying "We are committed to not going full Ishtar twice in 12 months." Golf clap, guys. Golf clap.

Given EVE is compartmentalised, basically, into four PVP game styles based on security status, there's four arguments going on as to whether or not d-scan immunity is a Good Thind, or completely OP and imbalanced bullshit.

Highsec wars, the CR's will be fine. There will be a few gate camping assclown brigades, fisting each other like gay marionette troupes on the Niarja gate or Perimeter gate, fiddle dee dee how many cocks can one suck, waiting for the War Target to land, and then bam, it's Rooks and Curses everywhere, zomg. This I approve of.

Lowsec and especially faction warfare, as pointed ut in the forum, will be Medium complexes permacamped by Curses and Rooks. OMG, someone combat probes the medium installation, the game is up! Countermeasure works fine, mostly because you can stick your combats over the top of the pin in the solar system map and recon the situation ahead of time. You can of course just drive your own Rook or Curse into mediums and surprise buttsex people.

Nullsec, especially fleet fights, it's a little so-so on whether d-scan immunity really fits the floatplane meta. There is such a thing as a cloaky nullified Tengu to perform the recon capability for fleets, and guess what? it can pack combat probes and shiz, too! So the floatplanes of the nullsec fleets are never going to be CR's.

What CR d-scan immunity really allows is for a fleet to field EWAR which gets under-reported by scouts. As you bounce around system or pass through, they report only DPS and logi, not the CR's.  Again, it's already more or less a job done by existing hulls. Right now you can use a Falcon for that job, but you might get spotted jumping a gate. It will be the same deal with CR's - your fleet will just keep its aces up it's sleeve until you get on grid.

For small gang roaming in low or null, the CRs will be surprise additions on grid. If you field 20% CR's, your foe will see, for example, 10 guys blob into Local, and will see 6 Ishtars and 2 Scimi's on d-scan as you warp in, but wont see the 2 Huginns until you're on grid. Likewise, they won't see the Rooks you keep at your off-grid safe ready to pounce down to the gate for an engagement.

However, the big deal is w-space. Lachesis will be the go-to ship for tackling carebears. The advantage is instantly apparent to anyone with half a brain cell - you can pile through a newly minted wormhole and if the foe hasn't seen the sig pop, you can leisurely spend as long as you need scanning for him in his site, and warp in and get point. It just becomes a question of tanking the rats and the enemy long enough for the DPS and backup point (let's say a friction extension Proteus with 73km RF dissy and a ceptor).

Secondly, you can idle at POS in your Lachs and Curses, your Rooks and Huginns and interlopers will not even know you are there. True, you could do the same with your cloakies, but to reship for a fight you have to warp back to POS and would then show on d-scan. Therefore, as a scout checking a wormhole, you really do need to lay eyes on each POS. Remember, I'm selling my 1800 bookmarks for wormhole POSs once you all work this shit out. The price, however, just went up.

Of course, the cure for all of this is combat probes. People used to have to have a set of combats deployed at 64 AU across a system to monitor their surroundings while they ratted. Those days have returned - but also for scouts. You may have checked the POS's and the system may appear empty, bt you really do need to wash the system with combats, just to be sure. You'll never get a CR pilot. it's laughable to think that without d-scan to guide you to his position for a ninja probe effort, that you'll get him. CCP really has no idea.

The effects? Well, certainly the guys in my corp who rat C2's solo are going to lose ships. Our C4 ratting fleet is solid enough and nasty enough that I welcome a Lachesis dropping 50km off us. we'll see how the new tank goes on it. But there's going to be a massive rush for a month, and it could really severely impact on the PVE numbers. A 5 second decloak delay is all that saves quite a few people even now.

I just hope they give the d-scan immunity to EWAR frigates, too.

The Smell of Burning Ass

Polletjepikhaar. He is a phenomenon by himself, a renowned feature of Jita +/- 5 jumps wormhole space - nearly always in a bomber, circling a B274 or a N110 cloaked, waiting for a hapless foe to stumple through.

Someone like Junkstress Warden, my new newbro, with his badger full of Crucifier hulls.

Ordinarily I wouldn't really bother with dear brother Polletjepikhaar, knowing he will just jump to highsec and GTFO any real fight. I have tangled with him once or twice with the Nereus, but he isn't silly enough to take the bait off hole - why do you need to get >5km off a hole in a bomber, after all?

I also desperately need him to fuck off from that particular wormhole as we are expecting a Tayra and a Gila to be coming back - the former because we saw it leave, the latter because we saw his pod leave after we murdered his last Gila and some Covetors. 

Knowing he will be within 5km of the B274 and therefore vulnerable to the Dick Virus, I decide to take some measures to remove him from the equation. It's just a matter of luck, and we'd already sacrificed 6 corpses to Bob today, so we were due a bit, and Bob delivered.

It's not every day you get to nerd it up but that's a killmail I am sure quite a few people will appreciate. Almost a faux celebrity vs faux celebrity deathmatch of wormhole nerds. 

Poor Junkstress, down 20M of cheap throwaway frigates. That's after losing one shooting a Tengu earlier in the day. But his sacrifice was not in vain, and another trip to jita saw him in a Crucifier again for our next victim, in his oddly and unneccessarily expensive Stratios.

So we thank you, brother Polletjepikhaar, for fighting the good fight and wish you luck in the future.

Meet the Buggers Season 1

I think that any blog about a corporation in EVE is incomplete, perhaps, without a bit on an expose of its members. I will thus endeavour to bring to life some of the personalities of Sudden Buggery. We are after all playing an MMO; a corp is more than the sum of its parts or the personalities behind its leader or leaders. It is a collective of nerdy gentlemen with an interest in exploration, PVP and being douches. These are their very abridged stories.

First up, one of my newest recruits, Junkstress Warden. As of this date he's been in-game a week. He came into the corp public channel (Beggars Bowl, feel free to join, I only temp kick people during sensitive intel events) and said he was looking to join a corp. He was 4 days old.

I am one of the few CEOs of wormhole corps who hires (if that's the right word) utter noobs. But i don't just hire any noob; you have to show a certain mental attitude, a certain drive, and a certain rat-cunning to make it past the first interview as a <1 week old toon.

The first thing I noticed about junkstress was the age. The second thing was that he had, at the time, a 2M ISk bounty. That's an achievement at 4 days of age, make no mistake. So I asked him why and he said "I've been ninja salvaging since day 1 and some dude put a bounty on me."

I have a soft spot for ninja salvagers. Back in the day, as I transitioned out of PVE and ratting and just fumbling about the game dying to rats every week as my brother left me to it and gave me a few pointers here and there, one day I learned about d-scan. I hit d-scan in Gulfonodi and noticed a million wrecks. I wanted those wrecks, I knew there was a shitload of ISK, so i asked "How does I salvage everyone else's wrecks?" and the answer was probing, and ninja salvaging.

Within a week i'd killed 2 Navy megathrons in my Cyclone, and 3 months later people were warning each other when i came to Gulfonodi or Penirgman or Motsu, look ut for TF, he's going to come into your mission in a fucking Merlin, and he's going to steal your fucking shit, and if you shoot him, he'll fuck your shit up.

So, of course, I hired Junkstress. Like any good ball of putty, he's a malleable plaything I can teach how to be more evil, more douchey, more of a bastard and more profitable. From 20M a day, he's now at 20M an hour. He's scouting POSs, learning d-scan, learning probing, bookmarks, wormholes, laying aste to POCO's, sitting on a hisec for 5M an hour and saving everyone's bacon with timely intel that saves us from 15 Proteii. All in 3 days.

The thing is this. Being a noob, you are very, very useful. Its just up to your CEO and corpmates to find a use for a tool which is more a ball of dough than a finely honed dagger or a wicked war axe.