Epic tale of WH pain. And gank.

Posted: 2010-01-26 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Man…hoooo man… have I got a post today. It all started a few days ago….

We had run out of gravs n sites, so the idea to scan the neighboring C6s for a good move target came up and a’scannin we went.

First system sucked. Four ladars(It’s always #@*%ing ladars), our k162 and a static C6. Which went to a C5. Which went to ectera, ectera, ectera:
us->c6->c6->c5->c4->c5->c6->c5->c6->c5->c5
at which point I gave up and went to bed. Woke up, decided to try and close the static. Looked it up on WH thingy, says there’s 2.13 mil mass. Alright, I thought, that’s four orca passes and two BS passes. Easy!

Fitting a probe launcher to Blake’s domi, I jumped through and watched for 16 minutes as the orca went through n back, through n back. Finally getting to the last jump, I jumped the orca through….

And watched as the WH shrank to nothing, stranding me and Blakes t2 fit domi on the wrong side. Grumbling, I went to the last WH in the chain and started scanning. In a dominix. w/ tech one probes and launcher.

An hour later, I successfully pinned a nullsec. Not wanting to bear another hour of scanning, I hopped through. Setting destination, I got six jumps before getting the shit blown outta me.

Warping the pod out, I warped another four jumps before getting caught in an intricate warp bubble system and getting blown to bits, ruining my track record of three months in a WH with a full set of +3 implants.

Waking up in unfamiliar highsec, I made triply sure to update my clone and instructed the new guy on how to scan, and waited a few hours before he found the following route:
us->c6->c4->c3->highsec.
I made my way back in, we collapsed the WH without incident and scanned a new C6. I went through in my buzzard, and noticed that we had found a cataclysmic C6 WH, or as my reaction in corp chat was:

haav ->OMFG AWESOME 100% BOOST TO RR AND CAP!!!!

I then scanned, and found ->

haav -> OMFG TWO RARIFIED CORES AND FIVE OTHER GRAVS!

I then found the static.

haav -> oh boy, static C6. I love scanning an exit.

Well, two outta three is good enough for me.

Plans were made for a move. I went to the PoSes, unloaded all the reaction thingys, and started unanchoring.

Four hours later, one of the Poses was done being unanchored. I announced our plan to move by setting up the small tower first, then the two larges over the next two days. Our corp leader intervined:

corpleader11oneeleven –>umm…. dudes, I was gonna anchor a pos tomorrow.

I negotiated it to, we would set up one large tower today, he could set up his tomorrow, then we would setup the second the day after. So, I filled an itty w/ fuel, grabbed a dominix and gave the new guy a myrm of mine so we’d look intimidating, went into the C6, picked a nice looking moon and started anchoring.

The moment we started anchoring, scan probes appeared on scanner. “Shit” was the general thought.
Then two other scan ships showed up on the scanner over the next 20 minutes. With four minutes till the PoS was anchored, our dude watching the static C6 of our static C6 said, essentially:

Cheetapilotlollol –> my word, I believe these fellows do intend to assail us!
Cheetapilotlollol –> I do believe you good fellows should expedite your retirement from our large tower, less you be smited!
Cheetapilotlollol –> I do believe they have amassed a vaga, manticore, armageddon, an oneiros and phobos! How charming!
haav –> My word, the blighters have gone and disabled my warp drive! Come, my comrade, and let us see the blighters off!
myrmpilot –> My dear chum, how I would love to assist, but I do believe our attempt at flight has rendered me beyond our remote repair range! How disastrous! Fear not, I shall try to close the distance!
haav–> good show chap! Blake, what possible endeavor has blighted you from joining this rollocky amusement?
Blake –> no answer
haav –> My word Blake, you seem to have made a grave error! You appear to be in a Helios, a ship most unsuited for this rambunctious tomfoolery! My, but the blighters are tearing into you!
myrmpilot –> My word! Haav, despite your best efforts, it seems my armor cannot hold, despite your carefully well thought out tank and RR balance!
Haav –> Oh dear!
Blake –> Oh my, for what reason do I find myself inside yonder station? I merely left my console for more tea and crumpets, and return to discover loss?
Haav –> Blake, dear boy, your absence could not have come at more an unfortunate time, the day is lost.
Blake –> How terrible!

So, everyone in the new static got podded, the tower was anchored and was under fire, we lost a cheetah somehow, and went to bed expecting to wake up to our home system in reinforced.

Waking up the following morning, both PoSes were fine, but our connecting wormhole had been closed. Somehow.

I scripted a plan to activley collapse our static wormholes until we found the C6 again, this was met with agreement once we got an exit and got all the dead people back in w/ replacement ships.

Everyone was in, my orca pilot was moving through the WH chain to home system, being escorted by an alt of mine, when they found the c4-C6 link gone. Turning around, the c4-c2 link was also gone. After some extremly AMUSING hours of scanning, my alt with four probes and no scan skills managed to get the orca pilot out, at which point my main scanned another exit route and got the orca back in.

One hour before we were going to start collapsing wormholes. At 3:36 in the morning, my time. Set times for 3 hours and went to bed. Woke up six hours later, cursed, and logged on.

Apparently we had had several k162s before I came on, but nothing had come out. We scanned a c6, warped to it, looked for the tower, closed it if it wasn’t there, scanned a new one.

Eventually, we spotted scan probes. We figured that we were collapsing WHs fast enough that they couldn’t get a good scan (stupid, stupid, stupid!). We watched the incoming WH for a while, and after a cheetah went through, and came back, and went through the static of the moment, we decided to pull a dick move and trap him in the static hur hur.

We all warped to the WH, and found a tengu waiting for us. We panicked as a group and jumped through the WH. I then panicked as a person and jumped my orca and dominix through, starting a 4 minutes timer until i could jump back through the WH and giving me a 40 second cloak right next to a tengu and a mega specifically specced to keep large ships and others from running away.

My cry of “SHIIIIIT” could be heard for regions in several directions.

Still cursing, I relayed my idiocy to the rorq pilot, who promptly logoffskied. On the wrong side of the static. I uncloaked, launched drones, turned on my tank, targeted the tengu with hopes that if I scared him off, the two warp stabs on the orca that seemed silly a few minutes ago could save my 400 mil ship, which I had just realized had about 1-200 mil of reactants and pos modules in it because I had forgotten to empty it.

Another cry of shit followed.

Then another tengu and a falcon warped in.

“shitshitshittityshittiyfuckfuckcrapcrapfuck”

Too late to decloak, I tried to make my domi as attention-grabbing as possible, launching hammerheads, priming guns and targeting everything I could.

I was then locked down w/ ECM and scrammed.

Figuring this was as good as I was going to get, the orca decloaked just as the typhoon we had been using to close WHs.

“fuckshit R**** I’m an idiot for the love of god web me”

He was jammed, of course.

Hoping that the four experienced russian pvper(Did I mention they were Russian?) would simultaneously go blind from vodka poisoning, I toggled my AB for a cycle and started to warp to the PoS. Twenty seconds later, I watched amazed as the orca warped to safety, and with even more amazement as it didn’t get stuck in a warp bubble halfway there.

Tabbing back to the domi, went through shields, armor, hull uneventfully, didn’t put a scratch on the tengu, as my track record could’ve told you (0 kills 38 losses).

Annnd now I owe blake another new domi, because I was using his because mine got killed trying to sort the large tower up that we were currently trying to get. I popped, warped to a planet, warped to the PoS, grabbed my scan ship and tore through them into the WH in case they collapsed it and left the Rorq in a C6 without scan support.

Yes, it had a probe launcher but that would take forever.

Anyway, the rorq pilot runs his typhoon through the WH and gets himself to safety. After the tengu and mega show up and start taking potshots at our shields(all the guns were taken down in preparation for the move), I send my scan ship back through, the rorqual comes back through the static, collapsing it and I web the Rorq to a planet where it promptly logs off.

Whew.
*miningzen is now listening to: We built this City*
The dudes leave (presumably) and we start anchoring some guns again. Guns go up without incident.

R*** scans the new static, two cores, cataclysmic variable so we move right in, setting up everything else.

Fly paranoid. Cause they’re out there.

Crazy Genius!

Posted: 2010-01-11 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

is what I’d like to refer to myself to as, but with my current self-esteem issues the closest I can get is “Lucky Idiot” in that most of my incredibly stupid ideas work out in an awesome way. I think this is the result of my analytical mind complimented with Attention Deficit Disorder, so I think of crazy ideas, then make them plausable, then convey them in a humorous enough way that everyone is attracted enough to actually think about it and maybe do it, see my afterburner/orca and ECM hulk ideas.

Alright, the ECM hulk didn’t work out very well, but my idea to fit low-friction nozzles to help us run away faster instead of cargo optimizers was a great idea and now everyone in our WH has them >.>

My point is, most of these ideas are gems while a goodly percent turn out to be ridiculous. With that in mind, here is my latest silly idea:

Because all the gankers in hulkageddon need minerals to buy ships to kill us, let’s hold off on selling minerals for a week or two. This may actually help megacyte’s current price.

No, that isn’t actually my idea nor the idea I had in mind. THAT idea is, *drumroll*, Static WH mining.

People will say that WH space is completely random and silly, and use the analogy that K-space is an empty glass and WH space is a pile of BBs you just poured into the glass. And you enjoy shaking the glass every 24 hours and listening to the people living in the BBs curse.
Anyway, that’s not necessarily true. WH space is really like a three dimensional series of orbiting spheres interlocking, rotating at different speeds, which, if someone ever actually mapped that thing, would look insanely beautiful and would probably help a lot of WH miners and such.
Oh look, there goes my brain, feeling euphoric at the possibility of learning how to program something like that.
Anyway, what that analogy was talking about is that some/all WHs have static links, I.E. whenever you scan, you are guaranteed to find a WH leading to that type of exit. If the WH leading to that type closes through whatever means, a new link will be established to another WH of that type.

Another bit you need to understand is site despawning. Once you completely shoot/mine/explore the crap out of any specific site, it vanishes next downtime. As you do whatever to more and more sites in one specific WH, the sites spawn slower and slower until you’re stuck sitting there watching Stargate SG-1 reruns until a new grav spawns in a week or so.

Anyway, here’s my idea: Since we’re currently in a C5 with a static C6, why not mine the gravs in the static? That way, we’ll never run outta sites and have nigh infinite ore available. Here’s how I think this will play out:
We find a C6.
We move an orca and a few BSs into the WH, the Orca sets up a PoS with some guns while the BSs open a grav site.
The BS pilots go back to the pos in the C5 and get hulks(or Covetors) and mine in the C6, while the orca pickups and drops the ore in the small pos corp hangar, and once the op is done, the miners use T1 industrials to haul the ore out through the WH to preserve the integrity.
The orca has scan ships and/or a probe launcher fitted in case of the second worst case scenario or less:
Worst case scenario: we lose 6 Covetors and a fully insured Orca. Losses: not very much.
Second worst case scenario: we lose the mining ships and the orca gets locked down in the small pos, attackers wait it out and close the link to the C6 from the C5.
Counter: the orca warps to a safespot and cloaks/and or logoffskis. Logon/decloak later and scan an exit.
Note that this has to be done AS the hulks are being destroyed >.>

Stupid idea? Really stupid idea? Stopped reading halfway through because of the stupidity? Genius idea? Already thinking of ways to counter it? Tell me!

P.S. Orca with a scan ship fitted to it… hehe… that gave me an image of an Orca with a buzzard welded to the side…

Edit: corp mate gave me the idea of using a BC for boosting in hostile WHs, eliminating the need for a PoS and reducing losses, if an itty V, myrm and 6 covetors are use for mining, to…lessie…
6 covetors: 10 mil to fully insure
1 myrmadon: 30 mil.
1 rigged itty V: 30 mil
so 120 mil if we get completely screwed, compared to
6 hulks: 1.2 bil
rigged orca: 400 mil
so 120 mil minimum risk for obscene profits.

ninja! ninja! salvage!

Posted: 2009-12-28 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Well, xxDeath came into our WH again with covops and stealth bombers (this makes the third time), since we again have a nullsec connection to their space. It seems odd that we keep finding nullsec connections, and odder that every other connection is within 5 jumps of xxdeath territory. So, since there was no way in hell I was taking my 190 mil hulk out w/ dudes on the loose, I went to my alts.

Sergeant Scowlyface, the salvager alt, has completed his salvage training.(tech 2 afterburners, MWDs, salvagers, and destroyers). Unfortunately, morleena, my combat alt, had her skill training put on hold once I realized that my current Orca skills on herleena, another alt on the same account, gave me a grand total of 2 seconds off my cycle time. So, I’m training mining director to IV and picking up the warfare linking skillbook once we get an enterence.

Anyway, having a salvager in Dodixie, I asked politely in local if anyone needed their missions salvaged. After the missions runners and mission ninjas alike laughed at me, I started training astrometrics to learn about this ninja salvaging hoo-haa. Three hours later, I undocked with basic combat probes and an expanded launcher only to have a  covops frigate explode directly in front of me. Looting the wreck and docking immediately was exhilarating, and netted me a sister expanded probe launcher and five sister combat probes, among other things that I couldn’t use.

During the 15 minute wait time while the victim moaned about losing his ship and the killer moaned about losing the wreck and the pod, I fitted the scanner and probes to my imicus and watched a short video. Undocking, I warped to a safespot and launched probes, hit scan, and waited to see ships I could warp to.

Fifteen seconds later, the scanner gave me…no results at all. Rechecking the video, I was told to set my filter to battleships and command ships. So, I set my overview to just command ships and battleships. After a few more minutes of cursing, I asked in local for help and learned that I was supposed to set my scan filter, not my overview filter, to battleships and command ships. This done, I scanned down a Rattlesnake, got into my Catalyst, and warped to him.

I found myself at a warp gate, and went through. I found myself in a sea of yellow wrecks, and proceeded to salvage my heart out. By the tenth wreck, I was already irritated at how slow my catalyst was, so I docked, buying a tristan at the station I was docking in, along with three small salvage tackles, 3 overdrive injectors, an 1mn AB II, and two cap rechargers: total fitting cost: 6mil. Total ship cost: 200k.

I warped back to the gate to find the gate gone, so I redocked, got my imicus, and scanned a new dude down. BMed, warped to w/ tristan. The mission was Worlds Collide, and after I salvaged the initial room, I went to the second room and began salvaging.

Four wrecks later, a catalyst shows up and begins salvaging the wrecks. I immidiatley angle towards the wreck he’s tractoring, lock it, and arc past, salvaging it before he can. I was immidiatley awash with the feeling of out-manuvering someone with an extreme tactical advantage, and proceded to out-salvage him for the next five wrecks before leaving to help close some WHs in our home.

So, ninja salvaging. So easy, less than one mil SP chars can do it, assuming they know how to work the scanner and an afterburner. Not very profitable by WH standards (400 mil paycheck yesterday), but extremley profitable from a dude flying in a navitas’s standpoint.

The moral standard in Eve is somewhere below a toilet in a sewer in the mob-run part of Detroit, so don’t expect anything you don’t nail down to still be there in the morning. At heart, ninja salvaging is a pretty tame moral deviation, since half the time the runners don’t even care about the salvage and the other half, they’re so sick of ninja salvagers that they made a salvage alt. So, if I find a bunch of unattended wrecks, I’ll assume that they’re fair game.

No-one take me up on this, but it seems to me that if a jerk in a destroyer can kill a hulk, he should be able to kill a frigate before getting concorded. If people are really annoyed by salvagers, then using a destroyer to suicide gank them and getting paid, then using the salvage the ninja salvaged to pay for a new destroyer, seems like a niche someone could fill pretty easily.

No-one do that tho. It’s stressful enough when a BS rat starts shooting at my tankless frigate, someone in an anti-frigate ship shooting at me will ruin my  whole day.

Fly safe, as I probe you.

P.S. I’ve decided to name my third char on my main account “Indigo Montoya”, but have no idea what to have him do. My main is gallente BS and miner, I have a salvage alt and can’t think of a third role I want to pay right now.

Ooooo, shiny. Heere, shiny shiny shiny

Posted: 2009-12-20 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments

Don’t propel footwear at me, but I’m gonna reference another MMO. Most if not all of you were young at some point.

For those of you who have suddenly been transported to the hippie era, catch up to me when you can.

When I was in middle school, a friend told me about a new, free, exciting online game called Runescape. By Eve standards, a terrifyingly simple game where in your dps was determined by your strength and attack stats, your tank was your defense stat and whatever armor you happened to be wearing at the time, and that was it. The market would sell items and buy items from players at a price set by GMs, it was infested by L33tspeakers, ect, ect.

The reason I cornered you and started rambling about how online games stunted my childhood is because of one specific item in Runescape, called the Party hat. Way back in 2000 or some year before I started playing, Jagex (the makers of Runescape) released party crackers on new years eve. These things, when pulled, would make a small sparkle animation give one of the pullers a party hat, an equippable, tradable item that had no effect on anything at all, except to make the players around you think “Hey, that guy knows how to pull a party cracker”.

At time of last checking (six months ago), party hats are worth 30 million gold pieces. In Eve terms, that’s about two to three bil, and in comparison, the last thing I did before quitting Runescape was utilize the game’s only passive income mechanic and, after four or five months, buy a set of the best, coolest-looking armor there was, with a matching scimitar, battleaxe, longsword, 2-hander, and boots for 10 mil.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make somewhere was that, even in a carefully-controlled market, people want what can no longer be found. The Zephyr is an example of this, since the moment people got their hands on them for the first time, they were going for 50 mil in dodixie. The big difference from Runescape, tho, is that resentful people who want the Zephyr and don’t want to pay for it are going to blow you out of the sky faster than you can say “Hai guyz lookit mai cul ship”.

Functionality wise, it’s a scan ship without bonuses, slower than a shuttle. It’s only saving feature, that Sleepers won’t try to kill it, will lead to some nice screenshots but that’s about it. The lack of defensive, offensive, or cloaking capabilities means that you had best know how to avoid combat probes should someone else be in the WH with you, with an actual scan ship which, from past experience, has enough offensive capabilities to kill a frigate sized ship. Since the average new eve online player as of a few months ago doesn’t know what combat probes are, I’d say that as soon as killmails start accepting the new ship data, we’re gonna see lots of wrecks in wormholes.

Actually, it’s other saving feature, the fact that you can fly around pretending to be Count Dooku for a few brief, wonderful moments until the aforementioned blowing out of the sky shenanigans, makes it a nice ship IMO. The unique model and jerks(read again: players) destroying everyone else’s Zephyr will ensure that four to five years from now; you’ll probably be able to trade one for a Mothership. Sorry, super-carrier.

Hulkamania running wiiiiiild!

Posted: 2009-12-19 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Please don’t throw  something at me, but I’m going to draw a comparison to WoW and Eve. In WoW, each server has about 2-3 thousand people. The equivalent of our market is an auction house, of which there are three of. There is no “Want to buy” option, and you can only post auctions, with buyouts.

Here’s where I’m going with this: cornering the market is fairly easy. For those who enjoy shooting things instead of making spreadsheets, let me explain: cornering the market is basically where you feel like increasing your wealth by 30% or so, by making other people complain. The only requirement to do this is to have so much ISK or gold pieces or whatever that a new player would sell a kidney to get as much as you have. In Eve, by comparison, with fifty thousand players online on a good day, you need so much cash a new player would murder a small town for their organs before you can think about cornering. Add to that that the issue I’m griping about today cost 100 mil before the cornering, don’t wonder if you see 3-4 towns go off the map soon.

Where were all these rich players when I was mining in a navitas?

The base concept is simple: pick something that everybody wants, say, hulks, or something, and buy all of them on the market, and relist them at 120% of the price you paid. As regular people see your sell orders for 120 mil, they will either undercut you by a little or a lot. If it’s a lot, like, say, 105 mil, then buy their order and relist it at 120 mil. If it’s around 119.5 mil, either buy it or ignore it if you’re low on funds and might need to buy more of the ships at 100 mil. Anyway, what this does is make all the miners very upset because they still really, really badly want hulks but they have to pay more, and since you have all the hulks, they have to buy from you. eventually, your strategy makes critical mass and you either run out of money and the price goes back down, or the new price becomes the norm and you get rich and everyone poorer than you whines when you pour that money into cornering the exotic dancer market or whatever.

Anyway, according to marketeers who enjoy making spreadsheets and some normal people, the cost of hulks first rose to 140 mil because the moon rebalance made some new goo expensive and the old expensive goo cheap, but no-one wants to sell the old goo cheap, so the prices now include twice as many expensive components as before. The fact that hulks are now at 190 mil is because jerks (read: players) with lots and lots of isk want more isk for some reason so they are all cornering the market AT THE SAME TIME. As such, hulks are spiraling high.

Way, way back in my life, my dad told me a story about the zebra… tulip? I forget. Anyway, the story was that people sold the tulip to other people, and the other people would sell it to other people for more, and on and on and on until one dude said “Why the hell am I trading my house for a case of flowers”. And the price went back down, to the sadness of all the flower sellers.

Since I mine in WH space with several friends, all in hulks, we’re being more careful than usual with our scanning tomfoolery, since 200 mil to replace a hulk doesn’t sit well with any of us. A quick check of EFT shows hulk max yield at 1360, and my yield at 1166. Covetor max is 1234, and 1019 for me.

So, according to that, first:

My mining yield is really sub par, so I should stop training drone interfacing and get back to ABC IV refining skills.

and second:

A Covetor isn’t that big of a step back, and I can certainly weather using one until hulk prices balance back out. God, I hope they balance out. WH mining is stressful as it is without feeling like you’re flying a ming vase.

As a parting note, why the heck can’t I moon mine in WH space? Seems reasonable to me. I suppose the counter argument would be that no-one can attack your PoS without a goodly time investment and luck, but considering we’re limited to one system before the logistics increases exponentially while tied to a fuggin rocket ship, woudn’t that balance things out a bit?

Fly… very carefully.

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