Hi...

No, I'm not dead.

Yes, I'm still following what's going on.  I've just been engrossed by other games more than EVE recently.  Mind you I have kept skill flipping my main.  I seem to have fallen victim to EVE's notorious mid-life blahs.  Just posting to note the fact that my main character finally hit 90 million skill points.  Yay!  Getting close to maxing out my Matari leadership skills.  In 9 days I'll have Fleet command 4 which should suffice for a good long while.

I must admit I'm waiting on the winter release and it's updating of all T1 frigates thru cruisers.  As a non-pirate and ex-wormhole resident, I must admit that the changes to crimewatch and faction warfare leave me... Meh.  Especially since the FW stuff was mainly to fix some rather broken mechanics that have flooded EVE with isk in my absence.  Way to go CCP, your own internal economist tells you you've got too many faucets and what do you do? open up a big one with incursions and follow it with a bigger one in FW...  Brilliant.  And people wonder why the price of plexes shot sky high.

On the flip side - it does make the BPOs for Capital ships and stuff like that more affordable.  *shrug*, since I'm skill flipping atm it's kind of not impacting me much, oh well.

I must admit I'm kind of at a loss on which direction to go once I head back into the game.  Haven't had much luck in 0.0 so that's lost it's luster quite a bit.  The industrial changes are probably a good year away.  The most interesting thing will be fleet and squadron crafting with the tiericide going on in the ship balancing side of things.

All other things being equal, I'll probably start playing again more actively in November.  To get up to speed before the December patch.  The big question is going to be what direction to take myself in game in.  One thing is sure.  If I don't have a direction to plan for I'll probably delay any re-joining of EVE for some more months.  Ah well there's plenty of boring skilling up of long term skills to burn thru.  Getting serious with the carrier skills alone can burn up at least a year's worth of skilling up.

Ah well, Fly safe-ish all.

Gah!

Note to self: When you jump clone, remember to REACTIVATE THE SKILL QUEUE!!!

3 Days later I finally notice...

Darn jump clones...

Woopsed into the wrong jump clone last night.  I just picked up the Skirmish Mindlink.  So I decided to take one of my combat clones (i.e. one without implants) and make it my command clone.  9 days left until I get warfare link speciallist 5 then it's 28 days until command ships 5 and finally it'll be going after wing command 5.

Yes I know that this isn't immediately useful - just put it down as long term character development.  A fully bonus-ed Claymore/Loki pilot is never a bad thing to have available - especially if you're going to do a roam.

So, after some afk hauling ass back to base, I now have that clone setup.

Missioning to get my legs back under me.

The problem with EVE online (well one of them anyways) is that if you're away long enough you start to rust.  ATM I'm running missions in order to get the basics up and running again.  One of the advantages of doing this is that it permits me to try out the mining ships on mission roids.

In other good news I finally have 0% tax for refines on my main base.  If you think about it it's not surprising it's taken THIS LONG to get there.  Various breaks, trips to 0.0, wormhole space, incursions, faction warfare etc..  All these various things mean I haven't been able to do a lot of missions.  I also don't really have a proper L4 mission boat.  Interesting factoid:  I've gotten some of the standard L4 missions lately.  The Assault, Worlds Collide, things of the sort got spooled up.  Now most of these have decent roid belts.  So I got to fit out my Mak as a normal miner for the first time.  And you know what?  I still went into those mission belts with my alt in the Orca...  One VERY nice change about taking the Mak was with the larger roids.  I could get up and stretch without worrying that my hold would over-fill and I'd be back to lasers not working. 

Yes I realize that's more dangerous with gankers going around killing things in belts.  But then again it's a law of averages thing.  Going for mission roids is safer than belt mining.  Why you ask?  Simple.  Most gankers are lazy.  If they weren't they'd be in 0.0 doing something harder like helping their alliance take/defend space.  So they go for the easy kills (there are enough of those to keep em occupied).  Namely Hulks in normal asteroid belts...  Makinaws in a mission deadspace?  95% of the time it's not worth the effort:

1) he's behind an acceleration gate
2) he's probably 50+km from the gate - quite a few mission roids are.
3) he's probably paying more attention than your typical belt miner
4) ships that can travel 100km from a gate to a Mak before said Mak can warp off usually don't have the DPS to suicide gank the new Mak.  Especially if it's been tanked.
5) ANYONE randomly appearing in someone's deadspace intends something "nefarious".  So there's no hesitation - you see someone in your mission, you react.
6) even with a cloaky trying to get a warp in if it's over 150km away from the arrival point there are issues.  Most deadspaces don't permit warping....
7) Given the above, why waste the time scanning down mission miners and probably have them easily get away when you can simply go for the lazy Hulk miners in belts?

Sure some gankers are dedicated to their craft.  And will hunt someone down.  But they are much more rare than the typical suicide ganker.  Remember it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you...

Yep re-building the proper paranoid attitude is part of knocking off the rust.

Inferno 1.2 - bravo on the T1 frigate changes

No, not dead

Skill flipping and otherwise just lurking but still following EVE.

The Inferno 1.2 patch however is drawing me back in.  The inferno 1.0 and 1.1 patches didn't do it.  This one on the other hand...

And although you would think it would be the mining barge changes.  You'd be wrong.  The T1 frigate changes are what's REALLY got me interested.  The work CCP Ytterbium, CCP Tallest and CCP Fozzie have been doing is rather nice.

I just spent part of the evening playing around with pure T1 fits for the Slasher.  Arty armed diruptor/mwd.  Arty armed disruptor/dual prop  Arty armed AB.  They all works, they're all maneuverable they all FEELs like they are proper interceptors and they don't feel as underpowered as the previous incarnations.

Heck one of the mixes was - using pure T1 modules so even with rigs it wasn't more than 1.5mil - I had clocking at 4550 m/s and still ridiculously agile.  And it still had 2.5 pg and 41.8 cpu left over to play with the mix and match T2 and Meta.  Oh and perma mwd with perma tackle...  Obviously still vulnerable to neuts that are able to reach out to 18+km but otherwise... NICE

Yum.  I'll be rather curious to see what RvsB and the FW people think of them.  I have a feeling we'll be seeing some rather interesting fits.  Not to mention that you'll be wanting to fly these using exactly the same tactics as T2 interceptors.  This should lead to newbies graduating with better skills into the T2 interceptor roles since there won't be as great a difference in flying style if they cut their teeth with these ones.

Colour me impressed....

The barge whining on all sides I only find amusing.  Like what they've done but those changes, although excellent, do not grab me as much as the changes to the T1 inties.  I think we're going to see some surprised pilots out there who based on historical fits will rather underestimate the capabilities of the re-balanced frigates.  At any rate this should liven up the T1 frigate fleets rather nicely.

I can't wait for the next set of ships to be balanced by this team.  You do good work gentlemen.

Unit Leader Elite

Well I'm still skill flipping.  Other games are more interesting than EVE while I wait for skills to grind thru.  One of these days EVE is going to need to address that mid (70mil-100mil sp ) gap where shit is just boring as hell to skill through.

Meanwhile I managed to get "Unit Leader Elite" certification.  This means I'm 5/5/5/5 with wing command 4 atm.  Yay.  Getting all specs to 4 then it'll be Wing command 5, Warfare Link specialist 5, Cybernetics 5 and  Skirmish warfare 5 and possibly a few levels of fleet command.

Oh and CCP Ytterbium may just be my new favourite dev.  Can't wait for the barge change :)

Tower down (in a good way)

Over the last, oh say, 6 months or so I've been running my high sec research tower.  It finally got to the end of it's run.  I.e. Everything I wanted researched was researched to the levels I wanted them to be.  Mostly this means up to 20ME and 20PE unless "perfect" happens before those values.  The PE levels were more on the off chance CCP wakes up and notices that the manufacturing durations have very little effect on the price of any manufactured goods and decide "Oh, hey Dr. E was looking for more isk sinks".

Increasing the isk cost of high sec manufacturing/research/copy slots by a factor of 10 or so would do wonders to putting towers (aka targets) in space, not to mention balance risk and reward - you risk a tower - you get rewarded by reduced manufacturing costs and some other pilot(s) gets the isk for the fuel instead of the NPCs.

But would CCP do this?  I think not.  Call me a pessimist at the moment but that looks like a rather straight forward minor change (we're only changing the rates here - no art assets, no new mechanism) that would have a lot of the effects CCP purports to say they are looking for.  When something this obvious is being ignored - especially after devs have pointed out in the past that they would like to increase the impact of PE on cost (CCP Chronotis back in the day), it makes me question what exactly they are looking for instead of what they say they are looking for.

Disturbance in the force

I've been hearing disturbing rumors.  Apparently the revamp of the T1 frigates is not going well.  This saddens me as I was particularly looking forward to the "making relevant" of the T1 frigates, destroyers and cruisers.  I was looking forward to these changes in Inferno.  Bummer.

Honestly there's a few things we could REALY use in a T1 frigate revamp (not to mention a cruiser revamp).  The first element is roles.  All T1 frigates are supposed to be fairly generic.  And usable right away... BUT... I'm of the opinion that they need to give a hint of direction by their bonuses and their usage.  This means, for each faction, there needs to be:

1 T1 Interceptor Frigate
1 Mining/Cargo Frigate
1 Astrometrics/Drone Frigate
1 Missile/Skirmish Frigate (long range)
1 Main combat Frigate (short range)
1 EWAR Frigate

A few notes: 
1) separate the cargo from the astrometrics frigates and put it in the mining frigates.  Newbies should not have to deal with the issues of jet-can mining - they should graduate into that when they hit barges and exhumers.  All mining cruisers and frigates need a serious boost in cargo space.  These should be considered to be "entrance haulers" almost.  This has the advantage of removing a large part of the temptation to can flip in newbie systems (which is currently a ban-able offense).  The point is to change the ratio of mining to travel time at the frigate/cruiser level so it doesn't make sense to use a hauler - leave that complication for the miners who graduate into barges.  You'll get a lot less rage quits that way.

2) Make the astrometrics carriers into true drone carriers and get rid of most of their cargo space.

3) optimize the bonuses of the main combat frigate for short range and the main skirmish frigate for long range.  Side Note:  UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO SERIOUSLY BOOST WEAPONS BONUSES - NO FUCKING SPLIT WEAPONS SYSTEMS.

4) Newbie interceptors.  Bonus to MWD sig bloom, Bonus to scram range.  MORE SLOTS.  All of these need at least two-3 mids and 2-3 lows.  Propulsion/Tackle/Prop mods.  You don't need to bring em up to the T2 level but make em usable and make it so that it's not a refit of the e-war frigate that's considered the serious T1 interceptor variant (Vigil I'm looking at you)

5) EWAR balance between the factions is a perennial problem.  You seriously need to revamp the EWAR side of things before you can balance the ships involved.

What's missing is the logistics at the frigate level - due to the lack of destroyers and what not I'd seriously consider that class for the missing logistics branch on the frigate sized tree.  Logistics is a whole other problem but I won't go into in this post since it deals with frigates. 

Mind you all the above is strictly my own opinion and is what I'd like to see.  Don't expect to see any of that though.  Oh well.

Just a quick update.  Well, I'm still in "skill flip mode".  Honestly I'm more curious about the changes coming to the T1 frigates than the mineral nerfing of the drone regions.  Mining should be good, but I'm having too much fun in Minecraft compared to EVE today to really feel the bite to become active again.  I'm looking for the May Inferno update more than this Escalation update.

This means skill flipping.  I finally got my T2 LAZORZ to spec 4.  Which means there's other stuff to work on.  So as I approach my 80m point I decide it's time to get in a claymore.  At some point I'll probably take a break and work on the capital jump skills (range and fuel) and get them both to 5 but for now it's Claymore skillz.

Dessy roam!

So I'm still up in high sec doing the burn-out thing while my characters skill flip.  But it was a Saturday night.  And there was an EVE meet.  So I went and after the usual someone pipes up, "hey I've reactivated - we should get together for a dessy roam.  And it was agreed upon that the next day we would get together at 2:00pm local time and head out dessy in hand looking for a fight in low sec.  So there were 5 of us with a boosing Loki run by an alt.  I was in a close in gank Thrasher and the rest were using mid to long range Cormorants.

After the usual "wait for everyone to gather and get in an appropriate ship", we were off, dreams of mayhem in our hearts.  After some inconclusive puttering around we eventually found some Jaguars patrolling the Mannar area. Turns out these jags were not afraid to engage.  But were rather tricky to get any damage on.  The engagement finally happened in the Raeghoscon system.  And it was quite a swirling fight.  It started off in Lemireve with us engaging the flashy pirate of the pair.  What followed was a rather extended engagement where the jags would keep us at distance, the Jags and the Cormies would trade sniping shots and I kept trying to get a close warpin with the enemy trying to keep us at bay.

In the end one of the jag pilots made a serious mistake and stayed way too long in range of cartboard's Cormorant after breaking away from me and getting me into armor.  I had managed to get a scram on him but he was still way too fast.  I had assumed he was Microwarp Drive fit.  So I was rather confused when he pulled away so easily (horrible ammo choice on my part was a LARGE part of my problem in this fight - lesson learned).  We found out why after the fight.

But eventually the yellow Jag slipped up and we were able to finish him off (well Cartboard was, I was still trying in vain to get within range).  Hail just does not have the range unless you can get within something like 2km.  Which is rather easy against a cruiser - not so much against these jags.  And here is why.  Yep that's right.  A faction cruiser afterburner slapped on a frigate.

Much was explained.  There was no real way we were going to get the remaining pilot to engage and with the kill taking so long, the odds of "friends" showing up was increasing.  So we then repaired to Olide with the kill and no losses to show for our roam.  Good long fight though  3km/s AB jags are rather tricky to fight.  I'm going to assume that for the most part it was our lack of truly long range (at least on my part) that made it such a difficult fight.  On the flip side, the cormorants tracking disruptor and my medium shield extender kept both Cartboard's cormorant and my Thrasher alive when we otherwise would have died.

Also interesting was the "let them chase us" tactics the jags used.  Fighting outnumbered they were able to use the fact that since we outnumbered them we would be trying to take the fight to them to their advantage to reduce tracking issues for their artillery.  It also explains the lack of disengagement even if there was a lot of run and chase.

Moral of the story - I had the wrong fit for this type of fight.  Totally.  But it's not like it would have been totally useless under different circumstances.  I was much less vulnerable to larger ships on gates than the rest of my dessy pack mates, which meant I was designated heavy tackle for the roam.  My ship was setup properly for that.  And the rest of the dessies were setup for sniping so even if in this particular engagement I felt quite a bit like a 5th wheel for a good part of it, viewed from the point of view of the squadron - it was fine.

It does give me ideas for messing with one of my Loki's fits though...

*shrug*

o.O

Um... The Mittani is a goon... you know that Something Awful derived group...  The comments he expressed and attitude he demonstrated are in the finest tradition of that group.  I find it hard to be surprised.

*shrug*

Tempest ... meet the tea cup.

The only surprising thing is that the rest of you find this at all surprising or abnormal (for goons).  It demonstrates a level of naivety about what that group's philosophy and attitudes towards all persons not of that group really is.  And about the way CCP actively encourages the type to join EVE online and play in their game.  Yeash people.  There's a reason EVE will never grow beyond a certain point and will always remain a niche game.  Actively encouraging people who's core attitudes were amply demonstrated by The Mittani in that fanfest panel to play the game is the primary reason EVE's population will remain smaller than it's potential.  The problem with the "we encourage that behavior in game only" point of view is that it invites people who have those attitudes in real life to join and play your game.  It can not be surprising that eventually these types of people show their true colors in public.

To quote the oft used meme: HTFU people.

Dear soundwave - you're an idiot

I agree with you - formation IN COMBAT are a bad idea.... However...

WARP FORMATIONS would be a godsend!!!!

For example so that the logies land 30 km behind the battle line and the battle line lands as a plate instead of a ball about 2-3km from the warp in point...  And oh hey it would let you avoid the "warp in and mass collitions happen..." issues you run into.

Or wing 1 landing on the point, wing 2 landing 10km to the left and wing 3 landing 100km behind the warp in point....

Landing dispersed -10km ball instead of the 3km ball

Landing concentrated...

Fuck the bonuses - For good FC's the ability to customize the fleet warp profile would be bonus enough!!!

Show some imagination...

In the pasture

Yep, I'm ruminating...

Just haven't had the will power to dive in EVE these days...  So yep going thru another small burnout on EVE atm... I am still logging in to do the skill flip thing and other similar activities...  I'll be glad when my PI objectives have been met.  The more I look at that system the more I hate it.  VERY badly designed...  Possibly the cause of my lack of interest atm...

Voting done.

Just as controversy erupts.  Well not controversy, more tempest in a tea pot.  The balancing team realized what any intelligent being would realize about the ship scheme in EVE.  The current structure is a patch work of various add-ons and upgrades that have happened over the years result in a rather messy progression of skills to get in various ships.

I can see the desire to rework the skill dependency tree.  I don't necessarily agree that the exact direction they are taking is the correct way to do things.  But so long as I can keep flying what I currently am able to fly, I don't have too much of a problem with making changes.

A much bigger concern to me would be the eventual re-balancing of the ships themselves to make them work within their "line".  Don't get me wrong.  I can see how some people will freak at the changes to the skill requirements and the skills structure.  But a more critical issue is the eventual rebalancing of all the ships and the "bringing up to snuff" of the basic T1 ships.  The kerfuffle over the skills situation risks overshadowing more important changes.

Meanwhile - go vote.

Maintenance mode

Humm, I seem to be mentally waiting to see "what's next" out of CCP.  As such I've been doing quite a bit of non-EVE gaming lately (since this is an EVE blog you don't get to hear about it - sorry).  I'm very curious to see what the new direction will give as delivery come spring/summer - aka post fanfest update.

On the skill front, my main progresses and now has Medium Energy Weapons with both Beam and Pulse at spec-4 (short for Specialization xxx level 4).  So I've started the Large energy weapon trek to 5 with future plans on getting Large Spec 4 for both types.

Once that's done there's going to be some back fill.  Amarr frigate 5, and Frigate Construction 5 are kinda high on that list.  Then it'll probably be time to work on the evil carrier skills so that it's more than just a glorified taxi.  But that's a long term plan.

The "main alt" has got level 4 in a whole pile of skills and just completed Recon 5 (yay!).  Now I plan to get most of those skills that are at 4 and are needed to fly/use modules on the recon to 5.  This will allow my alt to be rather effective as a cyno 5 pilot.

My "primary research alt" is now working on getting all the racial research skills to 4.  Invention and manufacturing are in his future at this point.

Apart from that, I've mostly been doing PI.

And I get some incursions run

With most of my research tower worries handled, it was now time to work on that "getting iskies" thing.  One of the problems with when I went to 0.0 the most recent time was that I was hull rich but iskies poor.  So time to resolve that.

Was nice to get in a decent fleet.  Painful running against Ladytomohawk in the same system though.

Well, I was still in the area see...

So I log on last night.  I figure a quick scout of the ice system (since I hadn't gone back to base yet) and I'd probably head back and do something else.  The scout however was promising.  One other Mak/Orca combo mining.  Not a lot of trafic in the system.  So either the gankers have moved on or I was just being overly cautious the night before.  Either way, I decide "Well, since I'm already here and I do want a bit of a buffer...".

So I log in the alt, have him warp the Orca over to where I've positioned myself, swap to the Mak and get mining.  The mining is just the way I like it.  Uneventful.  By the end of the evening I've got a load full of Glacial Mass (178 blocks with my current setup) and I head towards a refinery.

This time I pick the correct refinery (0% loss + 0% tax) and my ice is converted into Hydrogen Topes and assorted other ice products for the trip home.  Switch the Orca to travel mode (translate this into: swap the Extended Cargoholds for some Inertia Stabilizers).  Then it's autopilot both the Claw and the Orca (with it's integral Mak) back to base.

Note to self - since the Orca itself is running with a tractor beam and a salvager (not to mention the drones necessary to take care of the rats involved) I really don't need to haul around a specific salvage vessel.  So next time I log the main and the alt in - swap the Thrasher for a Cheetah.

Humm, Might want to refit that Thrasher as an AC Thrasher since I'm rather beyond the needs of a salvaging destroyer.

I also did the old runaround with the main and the alts picking up the PI from my planets (I've been mostly remembering to re-start the extractors on a regular basis).  Got the stuff dropped down to the manufacturing planet (21 advanced 1 high tech and a launch pad).  Picked up the previous batch of T2/3 product and started a batch of fuel blocks.

This should bring my reserves for my research tower up to 2 months reserves.  (I still have 2 weeks burning away in the tower) and I should only need about oh 20-25 more days before I finish all current research and can take the tower down.  So the remaining Hydrotopes should be reserved for carrier operations and I can start building up reserves of that.  The rest of the Oxytopes (and I have a lot) I can start converting into fuel as my PI volumes allow.  This will eventually build up my reserves for my Gallente towers.

But all of that is PI and not ice mining for the most part.  So this should free me up to run after high sec incursions.

My spyder sense is tingling

I noticed a rather suspicious ice system yesterday night.  With the oft delayed start to Hulkageddon and general ass-hattery pilots like the goons prefer to engage in I decided rather than simply get down to ice mining in my chosen system (that is totally devoid of ice miners - that's usually a clue right there) I decide to do a bit of scouting first.

Note to self - yes a Claw is a rather convenient ship to bounce around high sec in - goes like stink and all - but for real scouting I might want to put a Cheetah in the Orca for those times where I simply want to scout out the area and lie dogo observing traffic patterns.

Humm, bunch of characters flying destroyers that are less than 20 days old and they are yellow sec status.  Along with other characters in random ships that could be used to acquire warp ins...  Humm their employment history is getting to be a bit repetitive (npc corp -> FW for a few hours ->player corp seems to be the usual pattern with variations).

*sigh*

This is EVE.  It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

I smells gankers.  Time to do something different for a bit.

Nice thing about being a Jack of all trades.  If I don't feel like dealing with ass hats when they have the advantage of mechanics on their sides - I simply go off and do something else.  Besides ass hats are usually part of the ADHD set.  Blueball them and they go away rather quickly.

CCP Devs - best devs

As usual the patch notes do not disappoint:

• The icon animations in the overview have been restored to their former constant-blinking goodness
• The Jukebox’s UI has been de-hosed.
• The input caret was sometimes missing from the chat window. We found it and put it back.
• Keeping your mouse still over the overview will now release the sort-locking. People interested in having the sorting remained locked are advised to either hold down a combat action key (lock or look at, for example) or strap a vibrating device to your mouse.

Mind you it was never really with the devs we had the issues last summer.  Head up ass executives - yes.  Devs - no.  Of course you realize that having mentioned the last option in point 4, I wonder how many of EVE's players will actually go out and try that...  I'm willing to bet large quantities of isk that there's at least more than one.

Apparently I'm in need of a break

I seem to be happy to just do some PI and skill flip and then do some other games for right now.  I'm not going to push it, I don't feel like shutting down, just taking it easy for a bit.  I'm going to go with my feelings on this one.  I've pushed in the past and had burn out issues, so older and wiser than before, I'll just take it easy.

Hunh.

I hook up with an old corp-mate

So Mord Fiddle (of Fiddler's Edge fame) and I get chatting in the pub R.H.I channel.  We're both up in high sec atm and he says he needs some ice for his tower.  Lookie there I'm all setup to mine ice lately.  So I figure we might as well hook up and mine some ice since I've got a full blown Orca booster.  Not to mention chatting in fleet makes the ice mining go faster.

So yesterday we agree on a system to work together in and after we log in, we meet up at the agreed upon system.  We then spend the time it takes me to fill up my Orca mining ice in system.  I do belive I scared the crap out of some locals mind you with my habit of using interceptors to find a likely spot in the ice belt then warp the Orca there and switch to a Mak using the ship maintenance array. 

Some advice for newer Ice miners:  If you're going to be going back and forth from the belt (i.e. you're not jet-canning and you're not transfer mining), then it's better to fit cargo rigs and expanded cargo-holds.  The reason is that the loss of cycle speed up by not using ice harvester upgrades is compensated by only flying to the station every 3 cycles instead of every 2 cycles.  Maks naturally take forever to get to warp.

Meanwhile my alts are all chugging away at the high sec PI.  We'll need to see if it drives me mad before I can get a decent amount of robotics out of it.

The plan for the weekend?  Get back in incursions.  I want to get back up above a billion in liquid isk before I go shopping for a new 0.0 corp/alliance.

Back to base

After two nights of ice mining - not much I know but I can always get back and carve off some more.  I headed back to base.  Most of the evening was spent kick starting my PI stuff again.  At least this time my main and my primary alt didn't have to re-seed the planets.  I hadn't bothered killing my high sec PI in order to do some 0.0 PI.  The situation was not optimal in 0.0 to get involved in that (nothing to do with 0.0 per see.  Everything to do with the alliance organization and operational patterns and requirements).

Most of the evening was spent chatting with various people. 

Tower

Good thing I started mining ice.  My research alt's tower started screaming for fuel.  So I went and ran some fuel out to it (nice I can fit a full 4 weeks of fuel in the tower now).  But this got me looking at the fuel reserves I have on hand.  Not actually bad for a gal tower but a bit low for a matari tower.

Which got me looking at my Robotics and other fuel component reserves...

Yikes PI going to be necessary.  So I spent the rest of the evening doing some more ice mining.  Then I refined the ice and it's only after I did so that I realized I was using the wrong station to do it (Doh!)... Stupid 32% stations in high sec.  The devil is in the details.

Plan for tomorrow (today): get my alts cranking the PI goo with an eye to making some fuel.  Man I wish that PI was not so carpal tunnel inducing.  We need to pick up the goods on a very regular basis in space, there's no need to make the configuration/extraction side of the mini game so click intensive.  Still one of the worst designed sub-systems of eve online.  I suspect most producers would use bots just because of the shier useless drudgery of it all.

Relaxing to the hum

So, what to do my first full session out of the alliance?  After the stress and unhappiness of the last few weeks, I figured a little bit of ice mining was called for.  Not that the tower or carrier needed a lot of isotopes at this point but it never hurts to have a bit in reserve.

So I picked a system that was out of the way and had the ice I wanted after checking with various and sundry to see whether Hulkaggeddon had kicked off.  Apparently it's waiting on Helicity and The Mittani getting their act together (oh goodie a goon sponsored Hulkaggeddon...).  That's when I found out my alt's clone with the Mining Foreman implant was just a bit far off (segue into much pod auto-piloting...).

Once myself and my alt were in the target system and were flying the right ships it was just a matter of setting myself up in a nice spot in the belt and proceed to chew away on some ice.  Yes I know, I can make more per hour running incursions and buy the ice/ice products after.  That wasn't the point - relaxing was the point.

I had barely started when I thought "hummm... weren't there T2 gang links available now???".  Sure enough 5 jumps away for 3. something mil...  Quick change of ship (Orca ship maintenance bay FTW) and a quick trip and I was able to get the alt to reduce my cycle times down to 212-3 seconds.  Soon after that a bot army appeared.  I presume they were a bot army due to the names of the ships and their behaviour.  They obviously had a POS in this non-station system and a booster at that POS in an Orca.  I didn't bother checking but it was obvious from their behaviour and the use of a stopwatch.  It's simple I was watching all 17 maks fly into the ice belt one at a time in very close succession.  Then after a few ice cycles they would squadron warp off.  Since they were not jetcan or Orca mining It was obvious they had been fit for volume and were warping back to a POS to drop things off.

Some use of EVE HQ allowed me to see that if they were using pilots of my and my alt's skill levels in ice mining/boosting and they fit their Maks for cargo space, they could get 12 blocks per Mak (3 cycles exactly) and with a T2 orca booster they should have a cycle time of 253-4 sec.  Sure enough they were warping off at just about exactly the right time to get a full 3 cycles at that length in.  I suspect that if I had gone to see the POS I'd have found a large ship assembly array (the traditional mineral storage spot of choice).

At any rate, with a full load of ice at the end of the session I trundled off to a 0% tax refinery and proceeded to refine the ice.  Isk/h not great but I needed the relaxation and the isotopes.  Figuring out how the bots were working was just icing on the cake (all 17 of em - the names where nicely normal so good camouflage and some were in the same corp and others were in npc corps, but the give away was the name of the Maks - each one was named "m xxx" where xxx corresponded to the first 3 letters of the pilot flying it.  So either a massive multiboxer - or two multiboxers working together or bots.

At any rate - expect a few days of just chilling in high sec before I make a decision about where to head.

Back in high-sec

Sorry for the lack of posts recently.  I was wrestling with not having fun in EVE lately.  As I hinted I'd do in my previous post, I've left Red Horizon this evening and I'm going to take a bit of a break in high sec for a while.  Recharge my batteries.  By break I mean a break from 0.0, not from EVE.

Short story: it just wasn't working out for me.  Mainly due to time zone issues and alliance policies.  I've made my views known to my (now ex-) CEO and that's all I'm going to say about it.  Going to take it easy for a bit and make some iskies.

Trying to find the fun in EVE.

Guardian

Well I can now fly a Guardian.  Theoretically the other Amarr Tech 2 cruisers as well but since my medium lazor skillz leave a bit to be desired (s'what I'm working on), it'll be a while before I set foot into a Zealot.  Or a Curse.  Either way though, Now I need to get a Guardian.

Mord's Maxim

We'll see.

Send some timers my way would you?

One problem with being in an alliance that seems to be predominantly euro time zone is that it seems a lot of timers happen in other time zones.  Like when I'm at work.  And strangely enough it often happens that RL takes over big chunks of my weekends.  So Friday came around and many POSes were put in reinforced.  At one point on Sunday I asked, "So, should we be doing X now?"  (X had gotten delayed by all the POS work).  And the HC replied "only once we deal with all these timers" and he gave me a link to the pos timer list.  So I check the link and every single one of the timers comes out while I'm at work or in bed...

Ironic...

So I started working on X since it was either that or rat or log off with nothing to do...

I used to know this stuff

EVE's learning cliff is alive and well.  I am re-scaling parts of it I had not seen in a while.  Case in point:  Bombs launch in the direction you approach, not the direction the camera is facing...

Bombing run #1 over in right field, bombing run #2: on target...

I didn't kill any blues, and I managed to return the ship I borrowed, but yea, it's been a learning experience.  Lucky I wasn't the only one channeling the god of dumb last night.  Someone forgot to fit a cyno on their ship and that did not end well...  "I'll cyno you in on them"...  "oh shit"...  "-.-;"...  Glad that particular incident was not me.  Also: "take fleet warp" when there's no one in fleet or wing position...  Let's just put that fleet behind us and try not to do it like that again.

So I was dangling over the cliff by my finger tips but all ended well, for most of us anyways.  The devil is in the details.  Like where to set the exact keep at distance value (i.e. on the button in the selection tool, not in a right menu in the overview....  or in space...  like I said, details...

Also, good thing I noticed my skills were 4 million above my medical clone BEFORE I ended up needing to re-upgrade a clone....

Those of you coming back to EVE after an extended stay away may want to brush up on those items.  I know there's more than 2 or 3 of you.

Back in fleet ops.

And I get back in fleet ops.  Was a station op and there was an actual attempt to oppose the fleet.  I was flying my Scimitar so I won't get on kill mails, but our kill to loss ratio on that op was nice and tasty and we (the logi group) kept people alive (at least those who brought the right ships and broadcasted for shields).   It felt nice to get in a proper fleet again.  I'd missed that.

Argh! The rust! and an uncharged headset!

Note to self:  Remember to plug in the headset.  I end up doing this about once a week.  So the headset has a short time to charge before I go online and it's inevitable that it dies right at the important part of an op.  Murphy is alive and kicking.  I'm probably going to have to get a spare wired headset for when that happens.

Screen #2 died as well, This weekend that will solve itself, but I'm down to 1 screen and DAMN do I miss screen #2.  Makes running dual accounts MUCH simpler, not to mention having maps and such open in the 2nd screen etc etc etc...

Figures all this stuff would go wrong right after xmass when ze budget needs to be watched like a hawk.   Come on 15th, move your ass.

Also:  I apologize to the alliance mates for all the noob moves.  Being away from the game for a few months really does rust things up.  Gonna need some virtual WD-40 (and duct tape, cant forget the duct tape as I'm Minmatar).  Hopefully I won't get too many ships killed while I un-rust.

Also, as a general rule in 0.0, DO NOT JUMP BETWEEN JUMP BRIDGE SYSTEMS WITHOUT CHECKING YOUR INTEL CHANNELS.  Bloody lemmings (and yes I include myself in the list - not so much because I didn't figure they would be there last week as because I'd forgotten how to "bust thru" a cloaky bubble camp - all that rust I need to knock off).  This has been a public service message brought to you by 90% of the alliance leaders in the game.

After an abortive attempt - back to 0.0

After a first abortive attempt to get to 0.0, my carrier is finally out of low sec and in the deep end of the pool on the 2nd try.  Just need to get it to the alliance staging system and I'll be able to get in fleet ops.  Bout *expletive of choice* time.

Meanwhile, I keep hoping for my DUST 514 beta application to come thru... Time will tell.

Back to FAIL and thoughts on Incursions

My corp is transitioning back to Cascade Imminent.  So I'm in the "24h" transition phase.  The good news is I'm pretty much ready to head back to 0.0.  The bad news is that as a space holding alliance [FAIL] suffers from the usual constant annoyance wardecs of people looking for cheap kills in Jita.  And since I don't have an incursion alt (defined as a character with enough skills to run in good incursion fleets), this will pretty much put paid to my ability to run incursions for the foreseeable future.  It says something about incursions that I had very serious thoughts about dropping corp and either running solo or forming an incursion focused corp.  Only the thought that my gut tells me they are due for a pretty significant nerf soon swayed the decision towards staying in a null sec corp.

The problem for all the Incursion haters is that the truth is most of the serious incursion fleets usually include a fair seasoning of 0.0 pilots.  Null sec alliance leaders probably hate the damn things since they seriously reduce the attraction of null sec as a whole.  Heck look at me.  I KNOW I can make more isk more easily by staying in high sec and running incursions.  Since I didn't have the ships the join PvP fleets after I unsubscribed my alts for the summer and returned after Crucible, I didn't have any problem justifying doing incursions.  And I was right.  I'm heading back to 0.0 with a carrier that can move my PvP ships from high sec to 0.0 bases and staging systems.  I would not be able to afford this by now had I stayed in 0.0 or gone back to it right after becoming active again.  And therein lies the quandary for null sec alliances.  Null sec alliances need bodies for the fleets they run to protect their space.  No bodies, and the fleets don't happen.  No fleets and pretty soon you don't have any space.  The alliances need this space for it's T2 moon goo and renters.  The grunt pilots though are just looking for better income than in high sec and possibly some fleet action.  Or vis versa, some fleet action with some better income than high sec to afford the shiny ships fleet actions call for. 

The call of "Fleet up to defend your space" rings rather hollow when "your" really means "the alliances" and from the income point of view it's rather shit compared to incursions especially since the sanctum nerf.  The worse thing from the point of view of the alliance leaders is that this affects the "mid level" grunts the most.  The guys senior enough to fly the fleet ships but not senior enough to have a vested interest in the alliance's space.

Couple that with the 0.0 alliance influence on the CSM and CCP's stated interest in getting people to move to 0.0 (It's like herding cat's isn't it?) and you get "incoming nerf".  When I don't know, but it's going to happen.  Heck I suspect we'll see them move most if not all the high sec incursions to low sec.  That'll make the pirates happy.

Incursions as they stand are probably a rather large failure of design.  What they should have done is designed high sec incursions aimed at a fleet of 10-20-40 2-4mil sp pilots with apropriate levels of rewards for those levels.  Aim the low sec ones to to need Logistics ship support and aim the 0.0 ones to need logistic support with serious dps.  Then there's the problem of targeting 0.0 incursions, I would have made them smaller but more spread out and they would concentrate on "developed" constellations (i.e. make them 3 systems only (VG-AS-HQ) and spread them out more and have more of em running simultaneously (have 6-10 of em run simultaneously) so that it's not a twice a year experience for null sec pilots (which it currently is for those run in null sec).  Seriously: as a null sec pilot how many times have you run a null sec incursion?  I think goons and russians get like half of them - if you're a smaller entity they're a once in a blue moon thing you can mostly ignore.  I'd have the 3 system null sec incursions run for half the time so that they bounce around null sec more.

That would be more balanced.  Is it going to happen like that?  Probably not.  Sad.

Back to work.

Well, I managed to survive the holidays once again.  I also managed to run some good incursions over the holidays.  Spent just about all of it already buying materials and fittings for the ships I'm preparing for 0.0 as well as fittings for my carrier (yikes, fitting out a carrier is not cheap).  By tonight I should be able to learn the skill that will let me fit the last module in place.  By no means does this imply I am ready to fly/fight with my carrier.  It remains a suitcase carrier for now.  I have about 6 months of skill training ahead of me on the carrier skills.  And that's after I can get in the Guardian.  A rarity of me, I'm actually cross training to Amarr cruiser 5 in order to get into the armor logistics ships.

On the PI front, I've slowed down since Incursions and preparations for the move to 0.0 are talking so much of my time.  My research alts are banging away relentlessly on the holes in my BPO collection.  All is prepared for the fuel switch over later this month.  So all is well on that front.

All this progress makes me wonder what wrench is about to be thrown in my plans.  There's sure to be one.  Come on, this is EVE.

Fly safe all and a happy new year!