Long op and rumours and what not

Although the 2011 fanfest was not chuck full of meaty new games or mega-heavy announcements, the active player base should be impressed by the restraint shown this year.  As usual people will miss-interpret EVERYTHING that was said at each and every one of the presentations.  But that's business as usual in EVE.  The willfully blind mixed in with the purposefully misleading (aka market manipulators).  CCP however was very restrained on what they promised.  The video was more of a statement of intent rather than an item for item promise.  Think of it as one of those corporate "mission statements" but with more visual elements than usual.  I'm waiting for the Youtube rollout of the various panel and presentation recordings to pick appart the things I missed.  People keep saying things like "Eyog said mining will go away" or "Melted Nanoribbons will get nerfed some more".  Which I figure are the usual miss-representation of what was actually said.

Apart from that it was a long grind of an op last night in support of dreadnaughts rendering various and assorted things incapacitated.  I did however get to bring out my shiny new Maelstrom, so that was good.  It even survived the evening.

A kill, ops and grid-fu

Saturday was a bit of a wash, between watching the live stream and being afk on a semi regular basis I couldn't justify being in a fleet and going afk every 20 min or so.  On the flip side there was a point in time where some neutrals were in system.  So I get in my Cloaky Loki and start a bit of stalking (cloaked up safes are nice when I had to go afk).  Eventually a nice neutral vagabond warps in to the ice belt at the warp to zero spot.  And starts motoring towards the sun at 2700+ m/s.  Eventually he turns around and starts re-approaching the belt.  Humm not headed at me but he IS getting closer.

So I pipe up on corp chat and let them know I may have a warp-in on the neutral Vaga - the neutral Rapier is probably cloaked in the belt though.  So one of the corpies gets in his carrier alt and a Rapier but unfortunately warps in from the wrong direction and a tackle is missed.  The Vaga warps off.  so the carrier and his Rapier head back to somewhere safe.  I'm surprised when the Vaga warps in behind me, pops drones and starts trolling for me (obviously he figured out I was providing a warp in even though he probably doesn't know what I'm flying.  I go "He's stupid enough that if I uncloak my Loki and tackle him, he'll go for me".  So I simply wait until he passes me then his drones get withing 5k of me I de-cloak and point him.  Sure enough he turns to attack.  But I'm not too worried as I have a carrier and a rapier coming back in.

While we were finishing him off - and the carrier kindly repaired my rather minimal shield damage, the neutral's corp mate uncloaks his rapier but he's too far away to help and besides what is he going to do at this point?  Rapier+Loki+Carrier vs Rapier+Almost dead Vaga.  About the only think he could realistically do is cyno in a black ops strike force.  That could have gotten messy but obviously these guys were either not willing to jump into us or didn't have the bomber forces ready to go.  So I get my 2nd true kill mail with R.A.G.E.  A nice sweet ambush of an ice belt raider.

The next evening was the all hands on deck in case the DRF come and mess with our station coming out of reinforced.  In the end they elected not to come (probably because it was Monday morning their time).  I ended up joining the bomber fleet when armor fleet turned out to want a different type of armor BS than I had in the operations area.  Things got a little funky when we discovered that the grid around the station we were defending was totally FUBAR. So we spent a few minutes getting bookmarks both in the main grid and in the 2nd grid to make sure that if someone warped/jumped in to this other close pocket that we'd know where they were.  Grid-fu was alive and well.  People who had never experienced the phenomenon were given links to the grid-fu manual so they could understand what was going on, and for the entire operation to repair the station and kill the SBUs we kept eyes on the pocket, just in case.  Very funky stuff.  One tactic is to bring snipers and fight at the border of the grid and we didn't want the enemy to be able to leverage that to their advantage, since it's like fighting at the edge of a pos shield.

Then it was stand down, Rep up the station some more (switch to my scimi) and then switch to a BS and go shoot at a station the DRF captured earlier in the day in Geminate.

Repping up

I finally got to use my Scimitar in an op.  Of course it was multiple POS coming out of reinforced op but oh well.  Those are less stressful - mostly - than battle where others are depending on you to keep them alive while you try to stay alive yourself.

The first one was a bit of a [insert favorite expletive here] as just after we started a DRF cyno appeared on top of us... while the BS fleet was reforming after an extended CTA...  3 carriers later the rest of us managed to get away.  The next op (also a CTA) went a weeeee bit better.  POS repped up and our repping fleet went home without incident this time.  Then it was time for some PI before bed.

So, how's everyone liking the EVE TV coverage so far?

Fanfest 2011

Fanfest 2011 is now underway.  Not much to say until after the main presentation on Saturday. I will, however, be paying attention to the information streaming out of Iceland by various means.  Blog reports, Youtube videos, live streams.

My predictions

By now the voting should be over.  I will admit to slight disappointment with the last CSM for their overly focused on low sec priorities but what can you do.  I love how The Mittani rages about dirty politics and vote buying as I judge him to be most likely to engage in such antics. As such I predict that the odds are good that the two following people will be part of the CSM:

The Mittani (hey, it's Goonswarm - of course he'll get in)
Selene (ex Selene, ex CCP Abatur)

For the rest, I really have no clue.  I must admit to being Meh on most of the candidates.  I believe the CSM is focusing too closely on nuts and bolts details.  There needs to be more idea discussions to try and work on some of the major problems we currently have with sov warfare, pvp, and the economy in EVE.  We all know CCP has some problems with execution but there are also problems at the grand design level that should probably be addressed.

We're well along enough where some clear principals of how EVE operates should be clear.  The problem comes when you have internal inconsistencies and what not.  There's also the problem of lack of follow through with established subsystems.

I think this CSM is going to have many more internal dissensions than the previous one.  We'll see.

VOTE!

The last day of voting is today.  If you haven't already voted for the CSM candidate of your choice (multiple times thanks to alts) this is to remind you to go do so.  If you don't like the choices - run next time.  My two active accounts have voted.  Have yours?

As an aside, were there any candidates from eastern block countries?  I know there's a large Russian gamer population in EVE.  Lord knows we're fighting them often enough in Geminate these days.  What's the problem? Don't care what happens to the game?  Afraid of all the US candidates?  Afraid you'll have the KGB knocking on your door for participating in a democratic process?  What's the story?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the fight for the 74IL-O constellation continues unabated.  We came at them the same old way and they came at us the same old way.  Comparisons to Stalingrad and World War I trenches can be made.

My first Rage KM

Yay, I finally get a non-meh kill mail.  As part of the action around O2O I was in 6YC guarding the out-gate for an element of the NC fleet during these operations.  As part of them, I finally managed to get my first "Final Blow" on something other than a POS module or pod.  So although I've been on other people's kill mails before in NC fleets, this marks my first real kill for R.A.G.E.

The night before was spent in a tower kill fleet that was in stark contrast to the fleet that put said towers into reinforced.  Not in a good way.  This was followed by much purchasing in Jita.  I was in my pod so was able to get in and out without The Orphanage messing with me.

Now just need to get all those war supplies (hulls and fits) out to 0.0.