No Country For Old Men

Posted: 2010-03-23 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, ships, wormhole | Tags: , , , , , | 9 Comments

He seems like a nice man.

It was a harrowing end of the week.

I awoke Friday morning to an email to the effect of:

The POS has been attacked, and is sitting in reinforced. Somebody said they have a plan?

As it so often happens, the full story is slightly more complex, but only slightly. While pulling some ore from one of our remaining grav sites, a couple of our miners had gotten surprised by a handful of hostiles. Both were melted pretty quickly and sent packing back to empire by way of a swift podding. The band of hostiles, who had entered the system though a new K162, proceeded then to our POS and after about 3 hours, sent it into reinforced mode.

Getting two pilots killed certainly left us down in terms of raw staff manning the WH, and at present I’m certainly not flying anything with firepower enough to repel anything save a starter frigate. We had no real eyes on the system, although the senior pilots had moved some of their ships to safe areas and logged the characters off. Blake and I, both still at work, started to muse about our possibilities via gChat. We decided that there were only a handful of viable scenarios.

Read the rest of this entry »

Intro To WSpace 101 (And Myself)

Posted: 2010-03-16 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, wormhole | Tags: , , , | 8 Comments

Well, it certainly has been an interesting couple of weeks for me in regards to online gaming.

Ahem, right. First things first. My name is JB, and I am a recent transplant into our humble corporation. To continue:

Yeah, that's the stuff.

I was, in the past, a huge PC gamer. I’m going to unfortunately date myself somewhat here, but my gaming beginnings as a kid (on the PC anyway, my console beginnings were on the old Atari 2600) were back in the Doom era, which I ran (a relative term) on a 33Mhz 486SX with a 4Mb RAM upgrade. It came with 2Mb. And I believe a 54Mb hard drive that chattered like a pair of wind up teeth when in use. A lovely 5.25″ drive (for which disks seemed to always be corrupt) and a 3.5″ drive rounded out the presentation, along with a blaring (certainly not blazing) 2800 baud modem and Prodigy pre-installed. Did I mention it was a Packard Bell?

I’ve always had an affinity for the science fiction genre, both in and outside of gaming. StarControl II was an obsession early on, moving to X-Wing, then TIE Fighter, Privateer, Wing Commander, and finally Freespace, where the spaceship-shooting-an-invading-force-in-the-face-repeatedly genre seemed to die. There, of course, has been Egosoft’s X series, with its fun(?) interface as well as hours and hours of repeated poor battle mechanics. But, as I’ve aged, I have, like the opposite of any good cheese, gotten mellower. The concept of a game where I could hop on for a few hours, do something that felt like useful progress, hop off, and not be too terribly concerned with it appealed to me. So, last year I tried EVE. Read the rest of this entry »

Kinux ain’t got shit on this.

Posted: 2010-03-08 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

You may have noticed CK making a post of his involving mining being serene and pretty and such.

COUNTERPOINT!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/47879785@N05/?saved=1

More straightforward than “Apocrypha”

Posted: 2010-03-05 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

Well, there’s been an interview w/ a dev on Tyrannis, so I thought I’d share my opinion and count that as a blog post, where in reality most of you have either read the interview, are currently reading the interview, or are stuck at work or in class reading this on capsuleer. For those of you wondering what the interview is, and/or my opinion on the statments confirmed by the devs, read on.

“We designed the game so that pretty much everyone who plays EVE can have a meaningful experience with the planets. We really want to get people into interacting with planets early. We want to allow them to have some sort of meaningful interaction on them. Although, you will need to be a fairly experienced player to fully utilize their potential.”

I run my C1 PoS farm right now with three alts, with about a mil SP involved. So far, it’s cost me about 3.8 bil. Because of Eve’s exponential training curve, there is very little that a new player is barricaded out from at all, time wise, so anyone with a brain and ISK can manage it. I’m gonna assume that ISK is gonna play a major role in anything planet-related, so a new player per se won’t be barred from meaningful interaction, just someone who’s flat broke. You know, like a new player.

” The actual mechanics of how many people can occupy a planet haven’t been ironed out, yet. But the general idea is that it is not a land grab. The problem is that the planets are going to have limited resources. So if too many people are harvesting a planet at the same time, there will be diminishing returns. “

So… My C1, an area of which no-one but me goes except by accident, had ten planets. I can instate myself as their lord and master? Awesome.

” And you can interact with each and every one of them. Including those that are in wormhole space, which can actually be quite challenging.”

Can I get a fuck yes from all my WH peeps out there inna yard, yo? However, if CCP pulls something like “WH planets make sleeper components while regular planets make PoS fuel”, then I’ll need to replace the window I throw my keyboard out of. Cmon, guys, I’m importing 50 mil of fuel per day. There’s a gas planet in my system. That’s like all the oxygen I could ever need.

“TTH: I’m guessing that different planets have different resources and that the harder a planet is to get to, the more rare its resources will be.

Torfi: Of course. “

How hard is a wormhole planet compared to a null planet compared to a lowsec planet compared to highsec?

“TTH: Right, right. Will there be a new set of skills that players will need to master?

Torfi: Yes. Absolutely. Your ability to master a planet, to manufacture, build up, and manage it, will be bound by skills. But again, the barrier of entry is really low”

If I have to train “Government management” and it has the prequisite Anchoring V or something funny, see previous comment regarding windows and keyboards. I had to train Anchoring 3 and a basic hauler on my C1 alts to run a PoS adequately, I’m assuming trends will continue and running a planet won’t be too bad.

“It doesn’t require you to sit and grind. You go and you build up infrastructure, but then you set up some manufacturing cycles and infrastructure, and that interacts while you are playing the game. But in general you can actually be playing and profiting from planetary interaction while doing all of the other interesting things that you can do in EVE.”

So…It’s moon mining 2.0? What are you manufacturing? Any more addition to the current t2 production line is probably gonna be a bit overkill.

“TTH: There’s been some talk on the forums about planetary interaction replacing NPC-seeded products on the market. The materials like skillbooks and so forth that players aren’t producing, but that show up on the market anyway. Can you quash those rumors?

Torfi: No, I can’t. Because that’s what we really want to do. But we are probably not going to change all that overnight. One of our goals with planetary interaction is to phase out these NPC created commodities, because we want to put the power into the hands of the players and make EVE even more sandbox-y than it is.”

Oh, so you’re aiming for skillbooks, PoS fuel and t1 BPOs? That’s..good, I guess. Throw in comet mining in WH, make us self-sufficient, and I will worship the ground on which you walk.

“Torfi: From a PvP perspective, in planetary interaction the conflict is more like too many people hogging the same resource. “

So dislodging someone is gonna be nigh impossible until DUST? fun fun. And you plan a 6 month waiting period after DUST is released before letting it interact with the Eve universe?

“We want to take these commodities and move them into the hands of the players.

We are not giving out publicly yet which commodities these are. Even once we put it on the public test server, you will not be able to see what these final commodities are going to be.”

So…stop people from basing their current business plans on what is produced until the day of release? I can roll with that, I guess.

“TTH: Any timeline on this? I know you said it was a summer expansion.

Torfi: The goal is to have it out on the test server in little more than a week. It’s going to be very embryonic”

AFK downloading test server. I’ma strip mine mah planet!

“TTH: So which is the best WH blog?

Torfi: K162space, of course. “

Duh.

They don’t make em like they used to.

Posted: 2010-03-04 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, wormhole | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Sometimes, you go into a situation and you know exactly what you’re doing. Don’t let the fact that I myself have never found myself in that scenario from the offset deter you, you’ll eventually find yourself warping into a fleet fight knowing exactly who to primary, why to do it and which board game to pull out once the lag hits.

More often, tho, you’ll enter a scenario that you honestly have no idea how to operate in. This will usually be made painfully obvious when someone who DOES know EXACTLY what the hell they’re doing comes along and tears you to pieces, possibly throwing a free trip back to empire in the process. Smart people learn from this process. Idiots complain.

I’d like to talk about one certain idiot given his explosive comupperance, and for the first time on this blog, it isn’t me. Also for the first time, I wasn’t involved at all except for offering assistance and cheering from the sidelines.

So, yesterday, it’s a typical day in my life:
Channel Name: WSpace Colonists
Listener: Indiego Montoya
Indiego Montoya > burnin fast, burin last, on the long distant road, through the lost mountians endless so far away from hooooooome
Indiego Montoya > de dedede dede dee de de do do do de de de do dedede de do
Indiego Montoya > dee de de de dede dee dee de do do do de dedede dede dededede doooo

When suddenly my perfect rendition of Dragonforce is interrupted by people wanting to talk.

[ 2010.03.01 15:11:53 ] Damark > haav i have serious business
[ 2010.03.01 15:11:59 ] Damark > stop muddying up the channel
[ 2010.03.01 15:12:02 ] Indiego Montoya > omg wai so srs.
[ 2010.03.01 15:12:15 ] Indiego Montoya > wht is ur srz bzns?
[ 2010.03.01 15:13:40 ] Damark > it actually is srs
[ 2010.03.01 15:13:43 ] Damark > so thats not funny
[ 2010.03.01 15:13:48 ] Damark > srs alliance
[ 2010.03.01 15:13:49 ] Indiego Montoya > well, crap on a stick.
[ 2010.03.01 15:13:56 ] Indiego Montoya > that’s not good.

Yes, apparently a serious-sounding alliance had found Damark, a dude who lives in a C3 w/ static highsec and laughs at most of my jokes. Damark came online to his corp’s small tower in reinforced, his true sansha large and other large untouched, and a caldari large not owned by him online in his system, owned by SRS business, some sort of alliance none of us had ever heard of, because we stopped caring about normal space a few months after each of us got into a WH. As per the non-agression pact we have, me and several other corps started informing corp mates, pressing Damark for info and offering ships, isk to hire Noir and gun modules.

It was at about this point that Damark announced that the dude operating the pos had anchored moon mining arrays.

He anchored moon mining arrays.

Moon mining arrays. In a area of space where, to keep nullsec alliances from gaining intrest and other stupid reasons, moon mining is impossible. This was, we had thought, fairly common knowledge. It gets better.

With that one statement, most of us went from talking to merc corps, panicky trying to get Noir(for all your overwhelming force needs!) on the horn, friends in high paces, friends in null places about any assistance they could offer to informing their friends that the dude had just anchored moon mining arrays and having a good laugh.

The dude then anchored cruise missile batteries.

The laughter continued. For the uninformed, cruise missile batteries provide dps on about cruiser level, are the only gun to stop firing once the pos goes into reinforced and can be speed tanked extremely effectively.

He then anchored hardeners, one of each, the first REASONABLE move to make all morning. Damark started checking the fitting on one of his BSs, an armageddon. After a few minutes, where the BS was clearly visible on the directional scanner, he offlines an EM hardener and onlines a second kinetic hardener. This sounds reasonable, until you know that towers have an inherent 25% resist to kinetic, and amarr ships deal EM/thermal.

At this point, we’ve stopped laughing and assume that there’s trickery afoot. No one could be this stupid. At some point, the follwing conversation takes place:
[ 2010.03.01 14:50:18 ] Corpmate > yea youre in my hole
[ 2010.03.01 14:53:39 ] Cpt Kabaal > it could be a good thing if ya were so hostile about it, i mean we are moving in, thats a fact, now we can work things out instead of the alternative
[ 2010.03.01 14:54:20 ] Bizmarcks > or we can destroy your pos and kick you out
[ 2010.03.01 14:54:57 ] Corpmate > yea thats a good alternative
[ 2010.03.01 14:55:16 ] Cpt Kabaal > Its your Choice lol
[ 2010.03.01 16:47:12 ] Bizmarcks > did you finally realise you cant moon mine in here ?
[ 2010.03.01 16:47:15 ] Bizmarcks > this aint null boy

Prompting more laughter, as the one thing WHers can’t stand, besides russians(most of them, can’t speak for everyone) is idiots. But the one thing above that, that will enrage a WH dweller to the point of scorched earth strategy, is when someone starts acting smug and claiming your home as his own.

The second reason that we apologized to our individual friends and that there wasn’t any threat that needed dealing with is that Damark is one of those peculiar paranoid people(90% of eve) that builds carriers in places that mass limitations on WHs forbid carriers from entering.

Thus, with advice from CCRES(thanks guys, you still scare the hell outta us) and SI radio, a Minmatar carrier and five BSs put all the guns into incapacitated, removing the laughable cruiser-sized dps, prompting this convo:

[ 2010.03.02 06:16:25 ] Cpt Kabaal > i sry my ceo hired the mercs to rape you
[ 2010.03.02 06:16:44 ] Damark > lol those were mercs?
[ 2010.03.02 06:16:48 ] Damark > i hope you didnt pay too much
[ 2010.03.02 06:16:59 ] Cpt Kabaal > didnt pay at all actually
[ 2010.03.02 06:18:07 ] Damark > well thanks for explaining this incredibly too easy to explain coincidence
[ 2010.03.02 06:19:34 ] Cpt Kabaal > its not over rest asured

See previous comments about smug idiots.

More bashing. Damark gets convo’ed by the alliance leader.

[ 2010.03.02 03:58:18 ] thebarry > so i’m carebearing in high sec, right?
[ 2010.03.02 03:58:36 ] Damark > and you start getting messages
[ 2010.03.02 03:58:40 ] Damark > saying a POS is under attack?
[ 2010.03.02 03:58:43 ] thebarry > and one of my alliance mates convos me like ‘um, i have a prob, my pos is being attacked’
[ 2010.03.02 03:58:48 ] thebarry > yes!
[ 2010.03.02 03:58:54 ] Damark > yea funny story
[ 2010.03.02 03:59:02 ] Damark > he moved into my hole
[ 2010.03.02 03:59:10 ] thebarry > and now i’ve discovered that the reason you are so motivated
[ 2010.03.02 03:59:13 ] thebarry > is that
[ 2010.03.02 03:59:14 ] thebarry > yes
[ 2010.03.02 03:59:18 ] thebarry > he is in your wh
[ 2010.03.02 03:59:23 ] Damark > yes he sure is
[ 2010.03.02 03:59:26 ] Damark > not for much longer tho

The CEO offers to remove the dude, and Damark requests 400 mil to let him leave peacefully, fully intending to steal the tower. SRS makes the first smart move all day and respectfully declined. Then make another stupid move.

[ 2010.03.02 04:02:46 ] thebarry > i’m sorry it took so long for me to realise it was your wh
[ 2010.03.02 04:02:48 ] thebarry > btw
[ 2010.03.02 04:03:02 ] thebarry > are you guyz interested in joining a new alliance?
[ 2010.03.02 04:03:08 ] thebarry > we could always use mroe help
[ 2010.03.02 04:03:14 ] thebarry > more too
[ 2010.03.02 04:03:57 ] Damark > not as of yet

What the hell are they smoking and can I have some?

An agreement is made and instantly collapses.

[ 2010.03.02 04:11:47 ] thebarry > ok buddy is going to get back to pos to start offlining and unachoring stuff
[ 2010.03.02 04:11:49 ] thebarry > plz dun shoot
[ 2010.03.02 04:12:01 ] Damark > if i have 400mil in my wallet in the next 27min i wont
[ 2010.03.02 04:14:10 ] thebarry > there will be no isk payments, sorry
[ 2010.03.02 04:14:28 ] thebarry > it’s not my pos, and tbh it would teach a valuable lesson
[ 2010.03.02 04:14:47 ] thebarry > i may be tempted to run a viator’s worth of stront to it, tho
[ 2010.03.02 04:14:57 ] thebarry > …just saying
[ 2010.03.02 04:15:12 ] Damark > lol so your saying it has no stront now?
[ 2010.03.02 04:15:14 ] Damark > ahahah
[ 2010.03.02 04:15:22 ] Damark > you shouldnt give this guy anchoring writes
[ 2010.03.02 04:15:50 ] thebarry > hahaha

For the record, it had one hour of strontium.

[ 2010.03.02 04:35:46 ] thebarry > man wtf are you having so many probs with that wh
[ 2010.03.02 04:35:49 ] thebarry > for?
[ 2010.03.02 04:35:54 ] Damark > it was just yesterday
[ 2010.03.02 04:36:01 ] Damark > otehr than yesterday and today its be awesome
[ 2010.03.02 04:36:02 ] Damark > lol
[ 2010.03.02 04:36:09 ] thebarry > haha
[ 2010.03.02 04:36:20 ] thebarry > well, sounds like you could use some alliance buddies to help
[ 2010.03.02 04:36:42 ] Damark > nah
[ 2010.03.02 04:36:53 ] thebarry > just htink, if you were in a alliance you wouldnt have lost the small pos!

You think I’m kidding? Whatever they’re smoking. I wanna have no intelligence whatsoever for the next few hours.

The alliance lead pulls the dude into the private chat.
[ 2010.03.02 06:29:07 ] thebarry > i think his ceo is still in the wh
[ 2010.03.02 06:29:09 ] thebarry > with ships
[ 2010.03.02 06:29:12 ] thebarry > or something
[ 2010.03.02 06:29:22 ] thebarry > he said he apologized to you
[ 2010.03.02 06:29:35 ] Damark > yea and then treatened me
[ 2010.03.02 06:29:39 ] thebarry > this is way too much dramarama for me
[ 2010.03.02 06:29:42 ] Damark > no shit
[ 2010.03.02 06:29:48 ] thebarry > i need to get back to spreadsheets
[ 2010.03.02 06:29:52 ] thebarry > don’t you understand?
[ 2010.03.02 06:30:00 ] Damark > yea man
[ 2010.03.02 06:30:09 ] Damark > and we need to get back to reacting sleeper shit
[ 2010.03.02 06:30:19 ] Damark > and captain needs to get back to moon goo in wh’s
[ 2010.03.02 06:30:26 ] Cpt Kabaal > sry bro
[ 2010.03.02 06:30:40 ] Cpt Kabaal > was just trying to mind my own buissness
[ 2010.03.02 06:30:48 ] Damark > by shitting on my lawn?
[ 2010.03.02 06:30:55 ] thebarry > hahaha
[ 2010.03.02 06:30:59 ] Damark > you dont anchor a pos in an occupied wh
[ 2010.03.02 06:31:02 ] thebarry > GET OFF HIS LAWN PLZ
[ 2010.03.02 06:31:05 ] Damark > unless you are looking for a fight
[ 2010.03.02 06:31:09 ] Damark > we brought one
[ 2010.03.02 06:31:14 ] Damark > and you cried to your alliance head
[ 2010.03.02 06:31:18 ] Damark > deal with it and gtfo

The CEO apologizes for blowing up the small tower, and offers another incentive to join his alliance.

[ 2010.03.02 06:39:21 ] thebarry > what did you lose?
[ 2010.03.02 06:40:25 ] Damark > every amar cruiser bpo and a majority of mislse bpos
[ 2010.03.02 06:40:43 ] Damark > i dunno tbh
[ 2010.03.02 06:40:47 ] Damark > it was a corpies project
[ 2010.03.02 06:40:50 ] Damark > hes rather angry
[ 2010.03.02 06:41:14 ] thebarry > i can imagine
[ 2010.03.02 06:41:23 ] thebarry > listen, we have research pos available

Is this standard alliance policy? Try to beat the crap out of someone, fail, and try to invite them into your alliance?

More threatening…

[ 2010.03.02 07:09:10 ] thebarry > haha
[ 2010.03.02 07:09:19 ] thebarry > i’m trying to save you damark
[ 2010.03.02 07:09:27 ] thebarry > i liek you
[ 2010.03.02 07:09:27 ] Damark > save me from what?
[ 2010.03.02 07:09:31 ] thebarry > you’re funny
[ 2010.03.02 07:09:39 ] thebarry > from nasty ppl
[ 2010.03.02 07:09:40 ] Damark > Noir is the best merc corp in the game
[ 2010.03.02 07:09:44 ] thebarry > i know
[ 2010.03.02 07:09:54 ] Damark > and i have a shit tonne of isk to throw
[ 2010.03.02 07:09:55 ] thebarry > but they arent the only one, just trust me
[ 2010.03.02 07:10:00 ] thebarry > i like you, trying to help

For the record, the two large poses were anchored less than five AU from where he put up his moon mining caldari large.

Damark and his corpies bash the heck outta the large tower, using

1 x Minmitar carrier (cant recall the name)
2x geddon
2x typhoon
1x raven
1x rohk
1x hurricane

Ten boring hours later, it explodes, Rigby Jess and Daedalic omitted cause they passed out a few hours earlier.
http://twinparadox.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=5957462

tldr, carrier n friends stomp a WH pos into the ground after failed takeover.

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