Epic tale of WH pain. And gank.
Posted: 2010-01-26 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: c5, c6, capital, covertops, dominix, eve online, gank, industry, podded, pos, profit, pvp, ships, tower, WH, wormhole 7 CommentsMan…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.
Directional: How not to die
Posted: 2010-01-18 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: die, directional scanner, eve online, fight, hulk, mining, pvp 8 CommentsFor those of you who don’t know, in WH space local chat is delayed. This basically means that if someone is in system with you, you don’t know unless you tell a joke so good that they type “lol” in local out of habit, or they uncloak in a stealth bomber and launch a bomb at your unsuspecting self. Considering that, again, anyone and everyone can and will try to kill you, you need to have an alternate method to detecting other players before they sneak up on you and give you a prostate exam with an interdictor, hence your directional scanner.
Most miners, highsec and nullsec, don’t give two units of tritanium about the directional scanner. If there’s someone in local, and they’re red, run, if not, keep mining, or get in a battleship.
I can only assume that the other denizens of other places besides WH don’t care about the directional either.
Anyway, the directional scanner works like a local chat, if you bought said local chat secondhand at a flea market from a dude with a shotgun and basset hound. It can’t see cloaked ships, only has an effective range of 14 AU, and, most damning of all, has to manually be pinged for new information.
If you ping your directional with active overview turned on, you’ll see whatever ships, etcetera are within 14 km of you. If you turn off “active overview settings”, then you get EVERYTHING within 14 AU of you, including moons, planets, and every single PoS module your tower has.
You may be asking why you’d ever want to turn off active overview settings, which seems reasonable at first, but shrivels away into idiocy with two key points:
Point one: By the time you see a ship on the scanner, you’re already dead.
Point two: Unless you turn your active overview setting off, you can’t see scan probes.
Scan probes are a very, very important thing to see on the directional.
The only way for someone to find and kill you is by using scan probes, the directional can see scan probes, there’s no problem, right?
Nope.
Because of mining drone’s giant sig radius, and a hulks moderate sig radius, it’s fairly easy to find a hulk. This means that you, as a miner/sleeper killing dude, need to be very, very on the ball when it comes to scanning the directional. Or you die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not in a few days, but It’s almost guaranteed when you find yourself in a bubble you weren’t watching the scanner.
Of course, a jerk could, hypothetically, scan out a grav site, then come back in a combat ship a few hours later and gank whoever mining with no warning whatsoever, or have such good scan skills that he pins you w/ probes @ 16 AU or some way to counter the directional scanner.
The downside to having active overview settings turned off, which I’ve stated before, is that it picks up all the planets, moons, ectera nearby, making it hard to pick out probes. This is somewhat countered by a strategy I developed of watching the little scrolly bar on the right side of the directional box. If the thing changed, I scrolled through the box to see if scan probes had appeared. If the size didn’t change, I assumed I got to live another five seconds.
Orgres and Wardens and Gardes, oh my
Posted: 2010-01-03 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: dps, drones, pve, pvp, sleepers, wormhole 6 CommentsAs my skillbook would tell you, I fly gallente frigates, gallente cruisers, battlecruisers and gallente BS. Also caldari frigates, but that doesn’t really relate at the moment. Regardless, I have hull upgrades V and armor compensation at III across the board. The problem I have, tho, is offensive capability. As a Miner, I’m getting my ABC skills to IV but after that, I’m going over to improve my drone skills.
Bty, this has nothing to do with me getting completely outdpsed by the new guy with his shiny Ogre IIs last sleeper site.
I’ve got drone interfacing at IV, combat drone interfacing at IV, scout drone operation at IV, Sentry drone operation at II(facepalm) and Heavy drone operation at II(double facepalm). I’ve been told by various older players to train drone interfacing to V first, and the 20% damage bonus makes me agree. But what after that?
In the WH, sleepers target drones first, so having sentries seems better over ogres since you can recall them instantly as opposed to pressing recall and watching it explode 6km away from you, reducing your dps by a fifth.
But are sentries better in other applications? WHs are fun, but if CCP, I dunno, starts enforcing their “no WH long habitation” and make PoSes run out of fuel four times faster or make WHs show up on the overview or something, I’d like to have a fallback plan.
Anyway, which is better for missions, fleet fights and gang PvPing, sentries or heavys?
Oh those petty, petty moralities
Posted: 2010-01-01 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: eve online, moralities, psychology, pvp 7 CommentsI’m not a trusting person. When I’m in a room with someone, anyone and they’re holding a knife for whatever reason, I’ll keep finding reasons to stare at them until I’m reasonably certain that if I turn my back that I’ll hear them picking up the knife. With that in mind, you can imagine my Eve experience.
As I try to tempt fate as little as possible in life, I extend that principle to Eve, which wasn’t much of a leap, seeing as it seems that half the time Eve is trying to kill me and the other half is spent trying to scam me.
The scariest part of nature in man and animal is justification. I heard once that a respected psychologist had said that the only people able to consciously hurt themselves with intent to kill were insane. That’s stupid, all it takes is the right motivation. Being human myself, justification is an all too familiar subject. If someone told you to burn down an empty house, you’d probably refuse. But, if they offered enough money/or not to kill your family, your mind would probably tell you to burn that sucker.
My mind, and probably other people’s minds, work on a risk/gain principle. If it cost you a dollar to pick up and keep a ten dollar bill, most of us would pick up that bill faster than if they were in a restaurant after dinner with an attractive member of the opposite sex.
Building on that example, say that you had a 50/50 chance of getting the ten dollar bill. Some of us would take it, others wouldn’t. Here’s where I’m going with this:
If someone gave you ten dollars and told you to punch a starving kitten, most of us wouldn’t do it. Most of us also wouldn’t do it for twenty. Same for a hundred. But a thousand? a hundred thousand? Eventually, at some gain, be it enough money to live happily or the lives of your loved ones, you would punch the hell out of that starving kitten.
You sick bastard, you’ve just punched a starving kitten.
A fairly big factor in any risk/gain scenario is moralities. You would punch a brick wall in a heartbeat for ten thousand dollars, but a small animal would take some justifying that your gain would outweigh how bad the act would make you feel.
Drawing this back to Eve territory, you’re playing a game about internet spaceships. Taking something worth literally nothing from someone is so easily moralized that it’s simple. You can convince yourself that that Dominix is worth more to you than the dude who put the sell order up for 55k.
Another annoying bit about being human is sum wealth relation, a term I’ve just made up, which applies to this scenario:
If you’re driving far away from your house, thinking about how much you really want a lawn gnome, and see a house with fifty lawn gnomes outside it, justifying stealing one will be a hell of a lot easier than justifying stealing a lawn gnome from a homeless old lady trying to sell her one gnome to buy food.
Even though a home security system would probably be much harder than grabbing and running(the homeless are generally not very good sprinters), you’re gonna go to the house because your moralities would argue over how much the gnomes were worth to their respective owners.
Similarly, if I see a sell order for a domi from some dude for ten thousand and a thousand buy orders by the same guy for a thousand titans or something else that tells me he’s loaded, I’ll buy it in an instant. The sum wealth relation is essentially the bit of our moralities that reasons in how much whatever you’re doing will hurt someone compared to how much it will help you. In Internet spaceship land, it’s hard to hurt someone enough to feel bad about it, because you’re talking about bits of pixels.
The other way Evers avoid feeling bad about blowing up an Iteron V loaded with your proceeds from the last week of playing and now you’ve gotta do it all again……
Sorry, where was I?
Anyway, pretending that your character is someone else is a pretty easy way to skate around all the moral implications. Convincing yourself that you’re only role playing as a jerkwad pirate is one of the simpler ways to enjoy a guilt free experience.
Another way that I just remembered is convincing yourself that the victim deserves it. For example, if a 3 week old char in a CNR accidentally ejects, no-one within five systems will pause for a second to help him as everyone within seven systems tries to board the ship.
The last way Evers convince themselves that killing is awesome is ignoring. If you blow some dude up and then laugh at him, with a bit of thinking, you can suppress the guilt completely. I honestly can’t say much about this, because the only mental suppression I know about I made myself suppress in a cycle that…
Where was I?
Anyway, if anyone thinks there is another way people justify taking from another, I’d like to hear it. Happy new year, party was fun, piccys tomorrow.
k162space 