The TF Effect is strong. This mornings, woke up at 6 a.m. due to evil bladder, found someone had respawned our C3 static to a nullsec hole, and probed it down. Jumped out to Deklein into a nest of ratters, who all cleared out.
Hit d-scan: 6 POS, 4 forcefields. One, at the closest planet, had an SMA and no field.
Five minutes for a swap to a throwaway Ferox (which, I shall note here, was stolen), and I candified the sweet, sweet pinata. The candy which fell out?
A faction-fit Machariel, no less.
Not bad ISK/hour. 2 billion for 45 minutes work including mopping up the hardeners.
Sunday, 24 June 2012
Thursday, 7 June 2012
The Unknown Code
I have been in low-end wormholes since they came out in Apocrypha. I have seen the ups and downs of this segment of w-space, and watched third-hand the growth of the "big end of town" and the "pro" alliances and power blocs and seen their eliteness and, indeed, their elitism grow.
Today's w-space, as anyone who gets on to the EVE-O forum can discover, is dominated by a handful of corporations and alliance who are the undisputed tier one wormhole powers.The majority of these powers farm ISK in high-end w-space and get ridiculously rich via quad-cap escalating C5's, and seek out PVP with one another in what is known as a "Friendly Aggression Pact" or FAP, grown out of GF's on the Failheap Challenge community, and which is by default the inculcated culture of w-space. Or at least how they would like to see it. I'll call it the Unknown Code.
The way the Unknown Code goes, there are a few Commandments.
Thou Shalt Not Farm. You are making enough ISK to afford the shinies to risk in PVP and you should therefore not be risk-averse farmers of wormhole sites who POS up and don't bring the good fights. No one is against everyone getting space-rich, but as the -AAA- "control the C5/C3s constellation" push-back shows, wormholers don't like people presuming they can 'own' a system and extract rents.
Thou Shalt Fight. People may spawn into you and come poking for fights; the more you POS up and log off, the more you blueball your enemies, the more ikely it is that someone will force a fight on you, usually by sieging your POS.
Thou Shalt Not Blue. Given the power creep in high-end WH's where there are more caps per system than anywhere else in EVE (I shit you not) it is increasingly getting to the point where to force a fight, you need allies. But if everyone is an ally, you cannot fight. Hence the FAP; blue today, red tomorrow. See this thread for more infos on how Wormhole Coalitions are held by the community.
Thou Shalt Not (Really) Siege Out. This is less a hard rule than the others, but generally people seem to want to avoid crippling the other denizens of w-space with evictions, which can result in people ending back in k-space bankrupt, which results in people giving up w-space. Oddly, since you need a siege to start a serious fight, this is kinda a bit wishy-washy.
Today, someone's forum alt complained about the predominance of massive T3 gangs roaming w-space looking to roflstomp a couple of site-running drakes into the ground. This of course, comes into the whole power creep issue going on in wormhole space. Whereas when Zebracakes first went off 45 guys in fleet was unheard of before, now you top 250 a side engagements.
It used to be that you could roll around with 2-4 guys anywhere, finding people in sites, having a bit of a gank here, a fight there, baiting people out and occasionally bagging a Tengu or a shiny Noctis full of loot. You would then have an Operation; find some target to candify, reinforce the POS for a weekend's camping and toast your marshmallows over the flames of their selfdestructing ships. This is getting harder all the time.
Firstly, this is because everyone has a batphone, and as the wormhole community has matured (hah), the relationships have become more entrenched and spiderlike. Of the top tier organisations, there are but a handful we haven't tangled with or worked with in the past.
Secondly, and oddly, it seems that the Powers are still, somehow, interested in being wormhole mercs, after the Narwhals model. This of course ends up with ridiculous, sky-high and extortionate bills being foisted off on people to protect their POSs and farms, justified because the Powers are going to bring 40+ fleets of tech 3's, to shoot at some dudes. They want their risk covered, so nowadays contracts regularly top 10B ISK. It is getting fairly disproportionate and stupid, as Joes Bazooka rightly points out. It is also odd, because for elitist and elite PVPers, it is fairly tawdry to outnumber your foes 5:1 or more, and if you are worried about Siegeing Out as a Bad Thing, scalping multibillions of ISK is ridiculous. Fuck, they should pay BUGRY for generating the fucking content and events that keep them occupied.
Of course, this blobbing and power-creep drives further rounds of consolidation and convergence; it drives wormhle space into being like nullsec with shinier ships, no local, and a longer build-up than joining a roam on a friday night. The majority of the people joining the Powers these days are fame-seekers who get their jollies by joining the big boys to get in on the big, exciting fights...and while some of them certainly are...it now results in two things.
Firstly, the minimum buy-in for low-end w-space is rapidly approaching T3's for everyone, up from Drake minimum. Even BUGRY is having trouble avoiding this conclusion, and it isn't sitting comfortably with me, because it is going to chop out at least half the membership from even being able to think about participating, and certainly stops them from trying their own hand at PVP diving wormholes. More widely, it will soon flow on to detering anyone from flying anything else, and this will impact on noobs entering w-space.
Secondly, the minimum activity level and dedication required for even low-end w-space is swiftly rising. You can't any longer avoid having 6+ guys in fleet including Falcon alt, maybe a T3 booster alt. This means that, because everyone expects a minimum half dozen T3's to emerge from the shadows, no one in their right mind is going to come out of POS to fight unless they can guarantee their have batphone coverage or some advantage.
This then flows down into needing to force the issue with POS sieges and POCO trolling (a conclusion I came to a while ago, actually). Sadly, as the wormhole coalition thread shows, the way the Powers are going these days, the responses to this swiftly become disproportionate.
Don't get me wrong, the Unknown Code beats nullsec faggoty politics hands-down, as there's no mass embezzlement (except by Phil Exon on Temnava...a ransom they don't advertise in their pub channel), no stupid NAPs, no monopolisation of resources like tech moons. But there is unreasoning elitism and unreasonable expectations and less good fights - just bigger ganks.
My advice, if anyone's listening? Proportionality. If you enjoy PVP, as you all profess to doing, then take a leaf from BUGRY's playbook, and be proportionate. Roll RR AF gangs on lone Drakes; its still effectively a gank, but its a gank which takes effort. Troll POSs, get fights, then leave the residents alone with their smoking stront bays. Stop being mercs - you are the CFC or AAA of w-space - concentrate on the good fights, and leave the exploitative merc work to a new generation of risk-averse blobbers.
Today's w-space, as anyone who gets on to the EVE-O forum can discover, is dominated by a handful of corporations and alliance who are the undisputed tier one wormhole powers.The majority of these powers farm ISK in high-end w-space and get ridiculously rich via quad-cap escalating C5's, and seek out PVP with one another in what is known as a "Friendly Aggression Pact" or FAP, grown out of GF's on the Failheap Challenge community, and which is by default the inculcated culture of w-space. Or at least how they would like to see it. I'll call it the Unknown Code.
The way the Unknown Code goes, there are a few Commandments.
Thou Shalt Not Farm. You are making enough ISK to afford the shinies to risk in PVP and you should therefore not be risk-averse farmers of wormhole sites who POS up and don't bring the good fights. No one is against everyone getting space-rich, but as the -AAA- "control the C5/C3s constellation" push-back shows, wormholers don't like people presuming they can 'own' a system and extract rents.
Thou Shalt Fight. People may spawn into you and come poking for fights; the more you POS up and log off, the more you blueball your enemies, the more ikely it is that someone will force a fight on you, usually by sieging your POS.
Thou Shalt Not Blue. Given the power creep in high-end WH's where there are more caps per system than anywhere else in EVE (I shit you not) it is increasingly getting to the point where to force a fight, you need allies. But if everyone is an ally, you cannot fight. Hence the FAP; blue today, red tomorrow. See this thread for more infos on how Wormhole Coalitions are held by the community.
Thou Shalt Not (Really) Siege Out. This is less a hard rule than the others, but generally people seem to want to avoid crippling the other denizens of w-space with evictions, which can result in people ending back in k-space bankrupt, which results in people giving up w-space. Oddly, since you need a siege to start a serious fight, this is kinda a bit wishy-washy.
Today, someone's forum alt complained about the predominance of massive T3 gangs roaming w-space looking to roflstomp a couple of site-running drakes into the ground. This of course, comes into the whole power creep issue going on in wormhole space. Whereas when Zebracakes first went off 45 guys in fleet was unheard of before, now you top 250 a side engagements.
It used to be that you could roll around with 2-4 guys anywhere, finding people in sites, having a bit of a gank here, a fight there, baiting people out and occasionally bagging a Tengu or a shiny Noctis full of loot. You would then have an Operation; find some target to candify, reinforce the POS for a weekend's camping and toast your marshmallows over the flames of their selfdestructing ships. This is getting harder all the time.
Firstly, this is because everyone has a batphone, and as the wormhole community has matured (hah), the relationships have become more entrenched and spiderlike. Of the top tier organisations, there are but a handful we haven't tangled with or worked with in the past.
Secondly, and oddly, it seems that the Powers are still, somehow, interested in being wormhole mercs, after the Narwhals model. This of course ends up with ridiculous, sky-high and extortionate bills being foisted off on people to protect their POSs and farms, justified because the Powers are going to bring 40+ fleets of tech 3's, to shoot at some dudes. They want their risk covered, so nowadays contracts regularly top 10B ISK. It is getting fairly disproportionate and stupid, as Joes Bazooka rightly points out. It is also odd, because for elitist and elite PVPers, it is fairly tawdry to outnumber your foes 5:1 or more, and if you are worried about Siegeing Out as a Bad Thing, scalping multibillions of ISK is ridiculous. Fuck, they should pay BUGRY for generating the fucking content and events that keep them occupied.
Of course, this blobbing and power-creep drives further rounds of consolidation and convergence; it drives wormhle space into being like nullsec with shinier ships, no local, and a longer build-up than joining a roam on a friday night. The majority of the people joining the Powers these days are fame-seekers who get their jollies by joining the big boys to get in on the big, exciting fights...and while some of them certainly are...it now results in two things.
Firstly, the minimum buy-in for low-end w-space is rapidly approaching T3's for everyone, up from Drake minimum. Even BUGRY is having trouble avoiding this conclusion, and it isn't sitting comfortably with me, because it is going to chop out at least half the membership from even being able to think about participating, and certainly stops them from trying their own hand at PVP diving wormholes. More widely, it will soon flow on to detering anyone from flying anything else, and this will impact on noobs entering w-space.
Secondly, the minimum activity level and dedication required for even low-end w-space is swiftly rising. You can't any longer avoid having 6+ guys in fleet including Falcon alt, maybe a T3 booster alt. This means that, because everyone expects a minimum half dozen T3's to emerge from the shadows, no one in their right mind is going to come out of POS to fight unless they can guarantee their have batphone coverage or some advantage.
This then flows down into needing to force the issue with POS sieges and POCO trolling (a conclusion I came to a while ago, actually). Sadly, as the wormhole coalition thread shows, the way the Powers are going these days, the responses to this swiftly become disproportionate.
Don't get me wrong, the Unknown Code beats nullsec faggoty politics hands-down, as there's no mass embezzlement (except by Phil Exon on Temnava...a ransom they don't advertise in their pub channel), no stupid NAPs, no monopolisation of resources like tech moons. But there is unreasoning elitism and unreasonable expectations and less good fights - just bigger ganks.
My advice, if anyone's listening? Proportionality. If you enjoy PVP, as you all profess to doing, then take a leaf from BUGRY's playbook, and be proportionate. Roll RR AF gangs on lone Drakes; its still effectively a gank, but its a gank which takes effort. Troll POSs, get fights, then leave the residents alone with their smoking stront bays. Stop being mercs - you are the CFC or AAA of w-space - concentrate on the good fights, and leave the exploitative merc work to a new generation of risk-averse blobbers.
Monday, 4 June 2012
D-scan for fun and profit
The humble directional scanner is perhaps the least understood, least utilised, and far and away the greatest tool for PVP and moneymaking known to EVE. Well, it should be, but obviously 90% of people are shit at it, 9% are average, and there's the 1% like me who are guns at it and reap the rewards.
The directional scanner is a barely functional tool. The angle slider is clunky, the angles are arbitrary and can't be customised, you often have no idea in normal overview or solar system map exactly whre your cone of scanning is pointing, and the range is selectable only by typing a number in a dialog box. If CCP improved this part of the UI in any fashion, it would be a revelation for people in k-space as well as w-space. Nevertheless, if you have your shit down, you can get pew pew and bulk wads of ISK.
There are a couple of ways to get bulk ISK. This is only an incomplete list.
Firstly, you have to understand the little tickybox named "Use current overview settings". If you have set up your overview properly for PVP, you should have all the non-essential clutter of space filtered out. This should include a variety of things like POS modules, drones, wrecks, etcetera. Normally you won't see them and don't want them cluttering shit up because it makes it hard to spot threats inbound, such as combat probes or HICtors. No matter what the situation or where you are, always do a d-scan with overview settings off. You'd be amazed what you can find.
In nullsec, you will often find abandoned fighter drones. At 25-30M ISK a piece, if say a nyx has been scared out of a complex by some attack, and the drones don't warp back to the ship before he logs out, often they sit in space for ever. They can be found via combat probing (you have to set up a filter for drones to make this easy) and looted with a hauler. I scooped 12 Einherji last night; 250M ISK.
Nullsec areas where people have been fighting over sov can be awash with goodies aside from fighter drones. It is always worth checking for POS guns orphaned from POSs. Often what will happen is a sov-grind fleet bulldozers their way through a constellation, reinforcing POSs in ten minutes flat, and they ignore the guns entirely. The POS's RF timer is added to some embezzling nullsec warlord's gogledocs excell sheet, the fleet comes back, pops the stick, nd everyone fucks off to go ratting. Some die-hard idiots, being screamed at by the XO not to nick a fucking thing, then spend hours hauling orphaned POS guns. But someone didn't update their bookmarks. Enter the intrepid d-scan professional with a wormhole connection to nullsec; my best haul was 850M of faction guns.
Thirdly, you have to understand that there are several POS modules which are simply too big and too expensive to blow up. This generally includes jump bridges - you need a freighter to haul them around, or a T2 rigged orca at minimum. Because they can cost 150-200M for the module, and 50M in jump fuel to move, and a fuckload of effort and headaches, people generally pop the POS from beneath them and they get left sitting around in space. I know of five, so far, just chilling at moons; I lack the resources to steal them (T2 rigged orcas...ffff) but it's break-even for the first orca and after that, it's gravy. Cyno jammers, cyno beacons and so on are also often worth nicking.
Then of course, you have offline POSs. If you are ntending to be a salvage professional in nullsec, your best pickings will happen about 2-3 weeks after a major shift in sov. People, as I said, are notoriously bad at d-scan. You may have put your foot on 32 systems in 3 weeks, but no ne knows where the POSs are, and they'll de-fuel rapidly, leaving their tasty gizzards for the vultures. My best haul was 1.5Bn in moon goo, nicked literally under the nose of my XO who was ratting in system, then moved to hisec via a wormhole the next day.
So. How do you get 20B ISK in assets? In my case, not much via PVE.
The directional scanner is a barely functional tool. The angle slider is clunky, the angles are arbitrary and can't be customised, you often have no idea in normal overview or solar system map exactly whre your cone of scanning is pointing, and the range is selectable only by typing a number in a dialog box. If CCP improved this part of the UI in any fashion, it would be a revelation for people in k-space as well as w-space. Nevertheless, if you have your shit down, you can get pew pew and bulk wads of ISK.
There are a couple of ways to get bulk ISK. This is only an incomplete list.
Firstly, you have to understand the little tickybox named "Use current overview settings". If you have set up your overview properly for PVP, you should have all the non-essential clutter of space filtered out. This should include a variety of things like POS modules, drones, wrecks, etcetera. Normally you won't see them and don't want them cluttering shit up because it makes it hard to spot threats inbound, such as combat probes or HICtors. No matter what the situation or where you are, always do a d-scan with overview settings off. You'd be amazed what you can find.
In nullsec, you will often find abandoned fighter drones. At 25-30M ISK a piece, if say a nyx has been scared out of a complex by some attack, and the drones don't warp back to the ship before he logs out, often they sit in space for ever. They can be found via combat probing (you have to set up a filter for drones to make this easy) and looted with a hauler. I scooped 12 Einherji last night; 250M ISK.
Nullsec areas where people have been fighting over sov can be awash with goodies aside from fighter drones. It is always worth checking for POS guns orphaned from POSs. Often what will happen is a sov-grind fleet bulldozers their way through a constellation, reinforcing POSs in ten minutes flat, and they ignore the guns entirely. The POS's RF timer is added to some embezzling nullsec warlord's gogledocs excell sheet, the fleet comes back, pops the stick, nd everyone fucks off to go ratting. Some die-hard idiots, being screamed at by the XO not to nick a fucking thing, then spend hours hauling orphaned POS guns. But someone didn't update their bookmarks. Enter the intrepid d-scan professional with a wormhole connection to nullsec; my best haul was 850M of faction guns.
Thirdly, you have to understand that there are several POS modules which are simply too big and too expensive to blow up. This generally includes jump bridges - you need a freighter to haul them around, or a T2 rigged orca at minimum. Because they can cost 150-200M for the module, and 50M in jump fuel to move, and a fuckload of effort and headaches, people generally pop the POS from beneath them and they get left sitting around in space. I know of five, so far, just chilling at moons; I lack the resources to steal them (T2 rigged orcas...ffff) but it's break-even for the first orca and after that, it's gravy. Cyno jammers, cyno beacons and so on are also often worth nicking.
Then of course, you have offline POSs. If you are ntending to be a salvage professional in nullsec, your best pickings will happen about 2-3 weeks after a major shift in sov. People, as I said, are notoriously bad at d-scan. You may have put your foot on 32 systems in 3 weeks, but no ne knows where the POSs are, and they'll de-fuel rapidly, leaving their tasty gizzards for the vultures. My best haul was 1.5Bn in moon goo, nicked literally under the nose of my XO who was ratting in system, then moved to hisec via a wormhole the next day.
So. How do you get 20B ISK in assets? In my case, not much via PVE.
Friday, 1 June 2012
Culling The Herd
BUGRY went from 0 to 55 toons in 4 weeks - which obviously got us on the top 5 growth corps of eve-who and trollled us in a few obvious spais. These were rejected by our vetting process early on; Badubi being the only one who scored a kill, and even that was without actually joining corporation.
So, we settled in for a period of more steady growth, leaning on a few ex-members and friends to join up, and hiring the odd noob while we consolidated the new BUGRY 2.0 and settled in to the wormhole life again.
Inevitably, when you hire 30 meatbods, there's a few casualties you have to accept along the way. Even people joining a new corporation can be struck with family, IRL and work issues and go AFK. But that's fine, we have an IRL-first policy...provided you tell the management that IRL is eating your face.
Aside from that, we went through a bit of a cull of people (mostly ex-Soldiers of Industry toons brought on board by one guy) who just weren't fitting in with the corp, or displaying behaviour which was in keeping with what we actually need.
The main thing, to me, with members of a wormhole corp is that you have to want to work together as part of a team. This means that, for instance, if you are bored to death in the wormhole and too lazy to run sites, probe for ganks, or too stupid and lazy to organise with your corp-mates to force multiply, you will inevitably end up back in k-space doing k-space shit.
We had a few people like this. They ended up costing the corp 25 losses in a week in lowsec, welping ships and being terrible at PVP on average (a few kills were made), solo, in Tama of all places, because "the corp is boring"and "no one is online".
That's not an attitude which will get you far in wormholes. it certainly won't get you far anywhere except in RvB; so we booted these people, and the guys who were never on comms much, never signed in, never sent a mail saying "won't be on much for a month, busy with the 4 kids and the wife".
These are the things we really need to hear from people. IRL is fine; I often go out to the desert for weeks at a time, other guys do similar, but all of us communicate with each other either via mail, a forum post or on comms, and we all know what is happpening. if life eats your face, you need to go deal with shit, but it takes only 2 minutes to write a quick mail.
People who can't put in 2 minutes? They aren't going to do well in w-space. it also shows with who dies, gets trapped in far-off wormholes, and who logs on into rapecages.
So, we settled in for a period of more steady growth, leaning on a few ex-members and friends to join up, and hiring the odd noob while we consolidated the new BUGRY 2.0 and settled in to the wormhole life again.
Inevitably, when you hire 30 meatbods, there's a few casualties you have to accept along the way. Even people joining a new corporation can be struck with family, IRL and work issues and go AFK. But that's fine, we have an IRL-first policy...provided you tell the management that IRL is eating your face.
Aside from that, we went through a bit of a cull of people (mostly ex-Soldiers of Industry toons brought on board by one guy) who just weren't fitting in with the corp, or displaying behaviour which was in keeping with what we actually need.
The main thing, to me, with members of a wormhole corp is that you have to want to work together as part of a team. This means that, for instance, if you are bored to death in the wormhole and too lazy to run sites, probe for ganks, or too stupid and lazy to organise with your corp-mates to force multiply, you will inevitably end up back in k-space doing k-space shit.
We had a few people like this. They ended up costing the corp 25 losses in a week in lowsec, welping ships and being terrible at PVP on average (a few kills were made), solo, in Tama of all places, because "the corp is boring"and "no one is online".
That's not an attitude which will get you far in wormholes. it certainly won't get you far anywhere except in RvB; so we booted these people, and the guys who were never on comms much, never signed in, never sent a mail saying "won't be on much for a month, busy with the 4 kids and the wife".
These are the things we really need to hear from people. IRL is fine; I often go out to the desert for weeks at a time, other guys do similar, but all of us communicate with each other either via mail, a forum post or on comms, and we all know what is happpening. if life eats your face, you need to go deal with shit, but it takes only 2 minutes to write a quick mail.
People who can't put in 2 minutes? They aren't going to do well in w-space. it also shows with who dies, gets trapped in far-off wormholes, and who logs on into rapecages.
Tuesday, 29 May 2012
Operation Tuts My Barreh
Our plan, like any good plan, did not survive contact with the enemy.
I am an habitual checker of POS's, with a library of wormhole POS bookmarks entering the hundreds, so I get to look at quite a lot of POSs and know which ones are fit well, and which ones are a disaster waiting to happen. Occasionally, more occasionally than some people, I even find the odd POS which has no shields.
I had discovered a C2 with C1/Hisec statics, within which lived a collection of small nooby, alt-ish looking corporations. Some of the POS fits were laughable - hardeners outside shields, ECM only, no scrams. This by itself invites attack; but to see so many corporations living cheek-by-jowl in a wormhole when so many were clearly incapable of survivng? That's unusual, and piqued my interest.
Of further interest was that all the POCOs in the hole were owned by one of the corps, which was a 4 man corp. Generally, you would need to be OCD to pop the Interbus installations with a 4 man fleet. So again, unusual. Something didn't add up. I decided we would poke, and see what we could make happen - often the only way of getting fights in wormholes is to threaten people with losing assets. 8 POCOs, a bunch of shitfit POSs....there would be a fight. Depending on whose alts these were, maybe we'd make Exhale. or HAHA a bit richer, yet again.
Our plan, let it be recorded for posteriors, was to troll the residents with the POCO reinforcing, reinforce some POSs - mostly the smalls, because that's an hour with 10 BS's - and see what we could get. This started Friday night AEST and rolled through 2 days of sporadic tent-setting and quite a bit of Ishtars orbiting small POSs while permajammed, letting their sentries do the work.
Hindsight being 20/20 (and despite the egregious claims of this being "common knowledge" spewed onto the EVE-O forums), the fact Eve Uni turned up and bagged a Legion of ours who took the all-too-obvious bait, and a Sleeper Social Club scanner logged off in-system should have clued us in a bit quicker. But nevertheless, 4 hours before our timers were coming out, it became abundantly clear that this hive of hug-fiends had friends.
Credit where credit is due, they timed it well; I locked myself out in a collapse devoter, respawning the B274, and within 10 minutes it had been infested with 30-40 ships. Again, there's claim and counterclaim but I counted 9 Proteus, 8 Legion, 5 Guardians, 2 ECM armour Tengus, Damnation, 2 Lokis, Deimos, Astarte, Arazu on d-scan inside the hole, and more outside; the parties were Kill It With Fire, Sleeper Social Club, Future Corps, randoms.
We knew the operation had worked...it had sadly worked too well. We were clearly outmatched; we had a mixture of BS, Ishtars, tier-3 sniper BCs and nubs in Drakes and Caracals. Our alt-corp siege POS was going to be attacked, rapecaged, and bubbled. We decided to pull the pin. So we instigated warps to safe, loggoffski'd, and went to have a real life until people got bored. Of course, this being EVE, and BUGRY being spread across timezones, people hadn't read the liner notes or were just lazy, so this didn't all go 100% to plan.
However, it wasn't the slaughter you may think. We effected decent escapecage tactics, getting a dozen ships out of the rapecage and through the T2 large bubbles on the highsec. We even tried a few fights on the hisec, to show we were willing, and I now have grudging respect for the ECM Tengus, which realy rained on our parade. We lost a couple of things; a Tornado whose jump through the wormhole caught lag (meh), n orca who didn't understand the escapecage would work and fucked up the timing, and a nub in an honestly terribly fit Drake who didn't check his mail and doubtless got combat probed at a safespot and sent back to highsec.
So...Operation Tuts My Barreh, how did it go? Disappointing. It seems we had found a wormhole of proscribed space, defended by self-righteous white-knight tard-herders and hug-hoarders spoon feeding a "wormhole lite wormhole life" experience onto 'graduates' from EVE Uni. This artificial potted environment is preserved by the much more organised, dedicated wormholers whose e-peen and e-honour demands they defend people who could, if left to fend for themselves, learn quite a few valuable lessons. It is actually quite ironic.
For instance, if you toss your hardeners outside your shield, you are advertising you are a noob. You lose the POS, and ask the experienced mentors what went wrong, and the problem is swiftly described to you and you have gone through the experience with a chafed and raw arsehole, but you won't repeat the mistake. If you never lose the POS, if you in fact never sign in for the whole rapecaging experience, you won't learn anything - you only know how to properly escapecage if you've had a rapecage hapen to you.
This, sadly, is the extent that SSC/Red Circle/Future Corps/AHARM have not actually helped these guys out. Our nubs who turned up, well, I have made it abundantly clear what to do in the future. Only those who are too stupid to learn will make the mistake again - and they will be booted.
So. Life goes on, and the forum smacking gets direly boring.
I am an habitual checker of POS's, with a library of wormhole POS bookmarks entering the hundreds, so I get to look at quite a lot of POSs and know which ones are fit well, and which ones are a disaster waiting to happen. Occasionally, more occasionally than some people, I even find the odd POS which has no shields.
I had discovered a C2 with C1/Hisec statics, within which lived a collection of small nooby, alt-ish looking corporations. Some of the POS fits were laughable - hardeners outside shields, ECM only, no scrams. This by itself invites attack; but to see so many corporations living cheek-by-jowl in a wormhole when so many were clearly incapable of survivng? That's unusual, and piqued my interest.
Of further interest was that all the POCOs in the hole were owned by one of the corps, which was a 4 man corp. Generally, you would need to be OCD to pop the Interbus installations with a 4 man fleet. So again, unusual. Something didn't add up. I decided we would poke, and see what we could make happen - often the only way of getting fights in wormholes is to threaten people with losing assets. 8 POCOs, a bunch of shitfit POSs....there would be a fight. Depending on whose alts these were, maybe we'd make Exhale. or HAHA a bit richer, yet again.
Our plan, let it be recorded for posteriors, was to troll the residents with the POCO reinforcing, reinforce some POSs - mostly the smalls, because that's an hour with 10 BS's - and see what we could get. This started Friday night AEST and rolled through 2 days of sporadic tent-setting and quite a bit of Ishtars orbiting small POSs while permajammed, letting their sentries do the work.
Hindsight being 20/20 (and despite the egregious claims of this being "common knowledge" spewed onto the EVE-O forums), the fact Eve Uni turned up and bagged a Legion of ours who took the all-too-obvious bait, and a Sleeper Social Club scanner logged off in-system should have clued us in a bit quicker. But nevertheless, 4 hours before our timers were coming out, it became abundantly clear that this hive of hug-fiends had friends.
Credit where credit is due, they timed it well; I locked myself out in a collapse devoter, respawning the B274, and within 10 minutes it had been infested with 30-40 ships. Again, there's claim and counterclaim but I counted 9 Proteus, 8 Legion, 5 Guardians, 2 ECM armour Tengus, Damnation, 2 Lokis, Deimos, Astarte, Arazu on d-scan inside the hole, and more outside; the parties were Kill It With Fire, Sleeper Social Club, Future Corps, randoms.
We knew the operation had worked...it had sadly worked too well. We were clearly outmatched; we had a mixture of BS, Ishtars, tier-3 sniper BCs and nubs in Drakes and Caracals. Our alt-corp siege POS was going to be attacked, rapecaged, and bubbled. We decided to pull the pin. So we instigated warps to safe, loggoffski'd, and went to have a real life until people got bored. Of course, this being EVE, and BUGRY being spread across timezones, people hadn't read the liner notes or were just lazy, so this didn't all go 100% to plan.
However, it wasn't the slaughter you may think. We effected decent escapecage tactics, getting a dozen ships out of the rapecage and through the T2 large bubbles on the highsec. We even tried a few fights on the hisec, to show we were willing, and I now have grudging respect for the ECM Tengus, which realy rained on our parade. We lost a couple of things; a Tornado whose jump through the wormhole caught lag (meh), n orca who didn't understand the escapecage would work and fucked up the timing, and a nub in an honestly terribly fit Drake who didn't check his mail and doubtless got combat probed at a safespot and sent back to highsec.
So...Operation Tuts My Barreh, how did it go? Disappointing. It seems we had found a wormhole of proscribed space, defended by self-righteous white-knight tard-herders and hug-hoarders spoon feeding a "wormhole lite wormhole life" experience onto 'graduates' from EVE Uni. This artificial potted environment is preserved by the much more organised, dedicated wormholers whose e-peen and e-honour demands they defend people who could, if left to fend for themselves, learn quite a few valuable lessons. It is actually quite ironic.
For instance, if you toss your hardeners outside your shield, you are advertising you are a noob. You lose the POS, and ask the experienced mentors what went wrong, and the problem is swiftly described to you and you have gone through the experience with a chafed and raw arsehole, but you won't repeat the mistake. If you never lose the POS, if you in fact never sign in for the whole rapecaging experience, you won't learn anything - you only know how to properly escapecage if you've had a rapecage hapen to you.
This, sadly, is the extent that SSC/Red Circle/Future Corps/AHARM have not actually helped these guys out. Our nubs who turned up, well, I have made it abundantly clear what to do in the future. Only those who are too stupid to learn will make the mistake again - and they will be booted.
So. Life goes on, and the forum smacking gets direly boring.
Thursday, 24 May 2012
Small Blazes
Inferno has come upon us. I have been out in the desert, doing what I do (geology) for 2 weeks, so you kind of can see why I have been inactive. My impressions so far:
The inventory system is a total shamozzle. I know Khanh'rhh and others say it will take just a little bit of adaptation and it really is better and no going back...but that is ignoring the minute-long load times on our SMA's, the list of every single POS gun on our POS getting in the way of everything, and some frankly fucking useless options for filtering the piles of crap you have lying about. The shift-click wasn't mentioned in the dev notes, and on this alone, i find CCP failed on selling the whole new system to us. All I heard was "fucking japanese motherfuckers!" and then we got fucked.
Why change something when it isn't broken and everything is working just fine? I have no idea, but there is a llot of frustrating things in this latest dispansion (disaster/expansion) which I hope get fixed over the next few weeks and months, before we do it all again. But enough of the bad, on with the good:
Missile effects.
ZOMG. As a fan of the macross anime from way back in my childhood, the Drake now kinda looks a bit like this. Bombs are now pretty - even when you are the target. Especially when you are; how else do you get to see it so up close and personal? Torpedoes, sadly, are a bit of a letdown.
It is yet to be seen whether this will create lag in large Drake blob fights. I haven't been in one, and likely won't be in one soon.
The Tormentor
This shit is off the fucking wall now. It has gone from a crappy-ass, useless, unloved bucket of crap mining frigate into a seriously punchy, tanky Amarr death prawn. 127DPS, capstable with a neut, with 4890 EHP (in Pyfa)? Back the fuck up, girlfriends. You can even swap the neut for an RR and take these bad boys along on a RR roam. For the next couple of weeks, Rifter pilots will be making mistakes - serious, glaring mistakes - in spottingg these things idling in a belt.
I'm keen to see the other shitty mining frigates and the shitty mining cruisers get worked over. I just hope that in the process of tiercide CCP gives the races a bit of variety; there's not much point having 5 laser-bonused Amarr frigates. Especially when there should be a T1 Khanid missile frigate.
Adaptive armour hardener
I think people made an assumption that these are useless for PVP. The complaint has been that it changes too slowly to save your arse in PVP. However, in a situation, say, where you are being hit by a uniform damage type and you are recieving RR, this module will definitely swing your tank into favour. I'm thinking, for example, RR BS versus Tengu fleets. Assuming you can actually tank and not get alphaéd.
The new ECM module
I don't know this will help very much. Maybe it will break locks on a bunch of ships trying to alpha you - but will that be enough to save you? Given I killed a doubly-stabbed Mammoth loaded with 3 ECm modules with a Helios (bumping ftw) there is not too many situations where you will jam out all your foes instantly, and escape. Especially not if you face interceptors. It is just a glorified ECM burst.
The new shield boosters
I think these will revolutionise Minmatar active tanks; you won't need to give up so many midslots to tank + cap booster + shield booster. This will possibly result in people flying the Cyclone more, and it being effective without needing a faction booster. yet to try them out (fuck paying the prices nowadays). It will be interesting to see the results pan out.
That's my first impressions. Overall, minus the fucking UI, Inferno has some interesting things to toy with. Shame it released the same week as Diablo 3. But at least if i'm going to get SMA lag, its not in a single player game!
The inventory system is a total shamozzle. I know Khanh'rhh and others say it will take just a little bit of adaptation and it really is better and no going back...but that is ignoring the minute-long load times on our SMA's, the list of every single POS gun on our POS getting in the way of everything, and some frankly fucking useless options for filtering the piles of crap you have lying about. The shift-click wasn't mentioned in the dev notes, and on this alone, i find CCP failed on selling the whole new system to us. All I heard was "fucking japanese motherfuckers!" and then we got fucked.
Why change something when it isn't broken and everything is working just fine? I have no idea, but there is a llot of frustrating things in this latest dispansion (disaster/expansion) which I hope get fixed over the next few weeks and months, before we do it all again. But enough of the bad, on with the good:
Missile effects.
ZOMG. As a fan of the macross anime from way back in my childhood, the Drake now kinda looks a bit like this. Bombs are now pretty - even when you are the target. Especially when you are; how else do you get to see it so up close and personal? Torpedoes, sadly, are a bit of a letdown.
It is yet to be seen whether this will create lag in large Drake blob fights. I haven't been in one, and likely won't be in one soon.
The Tormentor
This shit is off the fucking wall now. It has gone from a crappy-ass, useless, unloved bucket of crap mining frigate into a seriously punchy, tanky Amarr death prawn. 127DPS, capstable with a neut, with 4890 EHP (in Pyfa)? Back the fuck up, girlfriends. You can even swap the neut for an RR and take these bad boys along on a RR roam. For the next couple of weeks, Rifter pilots will be making mistakes - serious, glaring mistakes - in spottingg these things idling in a belt.
I'm keen to see the other shitty mining frigates and the shitty mining cruisers get worked over. I just hope that in the process of tiercide CCP gives the races a bit of variety; there's not much point having 5 laser-bonused Amarr frigates. Especially when there should be a T1 Khanid missile frigate.
Adaptive armour hardener
I think people made an assumption that these are useless for PVP. The complaint has been that it changes too slowly to save your arse in PVP. However, in a situation, say, where you are being hit by a uniform damage type and you are recieving RR, this module will definitely swing your tank into favour. I'm thinking, for example, RR BS versus Tengu fleets. Assuming you can actually tank and not get alphaéd.
The new ECM module
I don't know this will help very much. Maybe it will break locks on a bunch of ships trying to alpha you - but will that be enough to save you? Given I killed a doubly-stabbed Mammoth loaded with 3 ECm modules with a Helios (bumping ftw) there is not too many situations where you will jam out all your foes instantly, and escape. Especially not if you face interceptors. It is just a glorified ECM burst.
The new shield boosters
I think these will revolutionise Minmatar active tanks; you won't need to give up so many midslots to tank + cap booster + shield booster. This will possibly result in people flying the Cyclone more, and it being effective without needing a faction booster. yet to try them out (fuck paying the prices nowadays). It will be interesting to see the results pan out.
That's my first impressions. Overall, minus the fucking UI, Inferno has some interesting things to toy with. Shame it released the same week as Diablo 3. But at least if i'm going to get SMA lag, its not in a single player game!
Thursday, 3 May 2012
The TF Effect
Luck, as much as anything, is a key ingredient of enjoying EVE Online. It could be finding the Officer rat in the belt and getting a 3Bn module, or escaping death by bomb with 2% of hull remaining; if you get a lucky break now and then you can feel justifiably exhilarated and this leads to an enjoyable game experience. Some games have nothing to do with luck, and can be dreadfully boring. Think tic-tac-toe; you can win this game every time if you start. Of course, luck can be bad too, and youcan get frustrated with outcomes in a game, but we won't dwell on that here.
When I play EVE, the guys I play with describe what is known as the Trinkets Friend Effect. Generaly this involves some bullshitly implausible event happening to or around me in game - and which almost never happens to anyone else. It also happens to me frequently enough that, well, it gets noticed.
For example, a few nights back I found a guy mining a C3 in a hulk. This isn't unusual, and others find them. It took a bit of skill and dedication to probe him out. Now, usually when we get a point on a hulk (or noctis, or gassing ship) we do it with a covops frigate. Often the guys are AFK and only wake up when the shield alarm goes off, and they call in the cavalry. Then, of course, we rock-paper-rapefleet their cavalry and there's vast amounts of chuckling and killmails.
This time, as I warped in my covops I screamed jihad (literally, I did, on comms) which someone interpreted to mean jump through and warp to Trinkets friend. Anyway, the gambit was blown. The hulk woke up to find an onyx, loki, legion, bomber, brutix and Ishkur around him. No way, absolutely no way anyone would reship into a 2 billion ISK Rattlesnake and warp at zero on the rapefleet. No way?
Cue the TF Effect.
But, that is but a small portion of improbability occurring regularly. Last night we were roaming around, and found some dudes doing a lowsec plex in a Cynabal and Drake. We lacked cloaky tackle so we warped our Legion and Loki in ASAP and barrelled through the gate. Missed them by a second. So as we are finishing their Angel Minor Annex and getting ass loot drops, I probe aound. I find a Z971 transient to C1. Its a C1 with Z060 to nullsec; this is about as horrible a wormhole to go roaming into as you could find. The Z971 has enough mass to let in and out about 7-8 cruisers before it collapses. But anyway, in goes the Cheetah of Doom (tm).
I find a shitfit small caldari POS and a dude in a Drake. 6 medium AC's, 6 small ACs, no dissys. So we try baiting him out with an Onyx (-15KT). Onyx warps to POS and pings the guns to generate a mail for the owner. Time passes. "Guns either have no ammo or the dude's fucked the settings up."
OK. The TF Effect is starting to bite. We begin a ransom convo, demanding 100M ISK to leave his utterly defenceless POS alone and tell himhow to set it up properly. He prevaricates and insists he's got ammo in the guns and is no doubt furiously fiddling with settings. We up the ante with a Loki, a Legion and a Tornado (64Kt through the hole, shit's getting dicey). He pays up the 100M ISK and we leave - its nearly midnight and we need to go to bed.
So, we jump the Loki and Legion out, and the hole is stage 2. I tell the Onyx pilot to go out light with his bubble up, and then the tornado can go out. He fails to do this, and the hole collapses. Ruh roh, we've got a Tornado with no probes and a Cheetah in a C1 with a nullsec exit we don't have probed out. I desperately need to get to bed, so I decide to give it a probe and see f I can ping an exit - if not, we'll have to try again tomorrow and risk a massive haul home from nullsec - we are up shit creek, sans paddle at this point.
I drop probes. 34 sigs. I set them at 4 AU round the sun, ping an Unknown to a wormhole first scan. I finish probing it out in under 30s. Warp to it. It's a K162 to hisec, leads to Nourvikaiken, 1 jump from Jita. It has a sig ID different from those present before downtime. I mention this to the local residents, who say, and I quote "I scanned the hole 15 minutes ago and it wasn't there. How lucky are you?"
The TF Effect. Getting me ot of shit creek since 2007.
When I play EVE, the guys I play with describe what is known as the Trinkets Friend Effect. Generaly this involves some bullshitly implausible event happening to or around me in game - and which almost never happens to anyone else. It also happens to me frequently enough that, well, it gets noticed.
For example, a few nights back I found a guy mining a C3 in a hulk. This isn't unusual, and others find them. It took a bit of skill and dedication to probe him out. Now, usually when we get a point on a hulk (or noctis, or gassing ship) we do it with a covops frigate. Often the guys are AFK and only wake up when the shield alarm goes off, and they call in the cavalry. Then, of course, we rock-paper-rapefleet their cavalry and there's vast amounts of chuckling and killmails.
This time, as I warped in my covops I screamed jihad (literally, I did, on comms) which someone interpreted to mean jump through and warp to Trinkets friend. Anyway, the gambit was blown. The hulk woke up to find an onyx, loki, legion, bomber, brutix and Ishkur around him. No way, absolutely no way anyone would reship into a 2 billion ISK Rattlesnake and warp at zero on the rapefleet. No way?
Cue the TF Effect.
But, that is but a small portion of improbability occurring regularly. Last night we were roaming around, and found some dudes doing a lowsec plex in a Cynabal and Drake. We lacked cloaky tackle so we warped our Legion and Loki in ASAP and barrelled through the gate. Missed them by a second. So as we are finishing their Angel Minor Annex and getting ass loot drops, I probe aound. I find a Z971 transient to C1. Its a C1 with Z060 to nullsec; this is about as horrible a wormhole to go roaming into as you could find. The Z971 has enough mass to let in and out about 7-8 cruisers before it collapses. But anyway, in goes the Cheetah of Doom (tm).
I find a shitfit small caldari POS and a dude in a Drake. 6 medium AC's, 6 small ACs, no dissys. So we try baiting him out with an Onyx (-15KT). Onyx warps to POS and pings the guns to generate a mail for the owner. Time passes. "Guns either have no ammo or the dude's fucked the settings up."
OK. The TF Effect is starting to bite. We begin a ransom convo, demanding 100M ISK to leave his utterly defenceless POS alone and tell himhow to set it up properly. He prevaricates and insists he's got ammo in the guns and is no doubt furiously fiddling with settings. We up the ante with a Loki, a Legion and a Tornado (64Kt through the hole, shit's getting dicey). He pays up the 100M ISK and we leave - its nearly midnight and we need to go to bed.
So, we jump the Loki and Legion out, and the hole is stage 2. I tell the Onyx pilot to go out light with his bubble up, and then the tornado can go out. He fails to do this, and the hole collapses. Ruh roh, we've got a Tornado with no probes and a Cheetah in a C1 with a nullsec exit we don't have probed out. I desperately need to get to bed, so I decide to give it a probe and see f I can ping an exit - if not, we'll have to try again tomorrow and risk a massive haul home from nullsec - we are up shit creek, sans paddle at this point.
I drop probes. 34 sigs. I set them at 4 AU round the sun, ping an Unknown to a wormhole first scan. I finish probing it out in under 30s. Warp to it. It's a K162 to hisec, leads to Nourvikaiken, 1 jump from Jita. It has a sig ID different from those present before downtime. I mention this to the local residents, who say, and I quote "I scanned the hole 15 minutes ago and it wasn't there. How lucky are you?"
The TF Effect. Getting me ot of shit creek since 2007.
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