Nothing to see, move along

Didn't have a lot of time last night.  So just a bit of light plexing to kill some time.

More rust shows

I ended up in a situation where I decided to engage pirates instead of fleeing or cloaking up.  Mainly because I got into situations where I was not in a plexing boat with a cloak.

Oh yea I'm still making mistakes.

a) when in a frigate with hail, don't forget to switch out of hail and into something a bit more effective against frigates after you've kill the NPC BC's...  loss number one attributed to this (Rifter).  Also to the fact that I engaged with a passive extended tank instead of an active tank (which rule 1v1s).

b) when engaging with a kiting Talwar vs a condor - running away will extend the engagement time and penalize his rockets by allowing you to hit him on his approach to you longer.  Don't maintain your orbit around the warp in point like a putz.... loss number two attributed to this (Talwar).

Note that both these losses could have been avoided by not engaging the pirate in question but both losses where eminently affordable and can be considered the price of re-learning how to fight.  So I'm annoyed at my mistakes, not at the losses.

After some relatively un-exciting plexing (other than those two items) I got a request for help from ...

ya know what? details are un-important compared to Opsec on items like this.  Let's just say that stuff was done and I got a Plex (the in game item, not the abbreviation for complex) in payment of a successful job 1.5h later.

Once I get either the LP converted to isk or the Plex sold, this will finish off the building back up of funds after the loss of the Guardian.

All in all, not a bad night in EVE.

Lack of action.

So I was doing some plexing last night (still recovering from the loss of the Guardian).  When I noticed what seemed to be someone forming up a frigate fleet for a roam.  Once the last plex in the system I was in capped I decided to join fleet and see what was what.

Seemed like a relatively newbie FC (you can tell when they say jump when they mean warp etc...).  After laying out the "built and ready to rock" choices for the FC he elected to have me in a Navitas (armor logi frigate).  We almost made it back to the carrier kill that went on last night but not quite.  Otherwise it was lack of tackle and nervous targets getting away from us all evening long.  The squids where elsewhere apparently.

So not a lot of action but at least it was a fleet.

Not a bad evening after burning my brain with Regex's all day.

Still in FW

Wellp, still not having lots of luck finding GalMil fleets.  The one major fleet I did find ended up -1 Guardian.  I have since been building back up.  Lots of plexes.  And yep, my Slasher now has a cloak.   Pirates are otherwise just too annoying.

I have to give the current plex design a D-.  Maybe a E+.  Hard to say.  They need to have LP per pilot bell-curve like it does in incursions to encourage small gangs to plex together instead of splitting the FW population between plexers and combat pilots.  So that right there is VERY BAD DESIGN.  But very CCP so *shrug*.  What I've come to expect from their design team.

Back to plexing and dodging pirates to make back what I lost with the Guardian.

Also: Post #700.  I do believe I sound like a proper bitter vet now :P.

Lots o pirates

Well,

You can't say I don't engage.  Screwed up my exit last night and got podded for it, but at least I do get into fights.  Still re-learning and all that fun, but it's starting to feel better.  Still can't do it when I'm tired but at least the pirates are giving us lots o practice at dodging and when the signs are right, engaging.

Still learning the pros and cons of the environment and the ships though, so all is good.

A tale of two claw (fights)

Humm, better bring things up to date first.

I'm back in EVE.  I intended to get back in FW (Faction Warfare) much sooner after Fanfest.  Stuff(tm) happened.  First of all I found out that Cathrianne wanted to divest himself of the AMC alliance.  After taking a 70bil asset hit mostly due to the way he was living in WH I offered to re-take the alliance for half a bil.  It'll help him get on his feet again.

So, then came all the shenanigans of dealing with the EVIL Corp UI and getting the alliance and corporations shuffled like I wanted them - new holding corp in charge of the alliance with alt in charge of that corp.  Main corp out of the alliance so I can join faction warfare.  Shuffle shuffle shuffle.

The end result is that I once again have control of AMC as an entity and it's parked and sleeping nicely with my alt holding corp.  My corp (Chaosstorm Corporation) is now in Gallente FW like I wanted.  This permitted the two friends who wanted in on some FW action to join the corp at the end of the weekend.  Yay!

So, early in the weekend, I decided to take my Claw out and test the waters.  No joining fleets yet until I can tell the trolls from the more serious FCs.  Ended up warping to a site and running into a Condor.  So I think: Claw vs Condor, should be do-able.  The fight ends up being inconclusive as I make a metric tonne of mistakes.  Gah! the rust, the rust!  Long story short - I'm failing horribly so I bail on the fight.  Lucky it was a kiting condor so it wasn't able to impede my exit.  Post fight analysis revealed that only once in the entire fight did my guns land a hit.  Note to self: Claws orbit too fast at scram range under full mwd to land hits.  I would have been better off charging straight in.  DOH! #1.

Then last night I was able to get together with Othon (one of the two aforementioned buddies) who was piloting an Executioner (think T1 interceptor) while I was in my Claw (T2 interceptor).  I manage to cap one site in a system we get into and we get to a second site.  Pirate Hawk on the warp in gate.  We both go in.  And I decide "Well it's 2v1 if he comes in, might as well go for it".  Turns out once again rather badly.  This time at the cost of the Claw.  This time it was probably more of an ammo choice issue.  I was definitely damaging the Hawk, just not enough, even with the help of the Executioner.

All in all, a good start to FW.  Not so much in the loss sense, more in the "Holy frig, I need to get back in the game" sense of things.  On the good news side of things, I was never really happy with that Claw fit and never really happy with the way to fly it.  So all in all I'm not as disappointed in it's loss as I otherwise would have been.  Lessons re-learned and on to ships better suited to how we're going to use them.

Alive!

And I crawl home after the epicness that was Fanfest 2013.  The announcements were I must admit, nice but nothing to write reams over.  Plus I missed the Friday keynotes (feeling under the weather at that point).  Didn't miss the pub-crawl after though.  And did get to the Saturday keynote.

I must admit that the big thing for this Fanfest was meeting people I had known for over 6 years in the flesh for once.

Shout out to Cerui and Arancia.  Nice to be able to put a face to the voice.

Congratz to Ripgard again.

And once again thanks to the Montreal crew that made it:  Louis, Jean-Louis and Jean-François.

Oh and of course a shoutout to Pub Crawl team 12 and the Ops guys.

(p.s. what is Anders's CCP name - anyone know?  I asked but I was drunk so memory spotty at this point)