These Are Not the Freighters You Are Looking for, Just Move Along…

~or “EVE Needs a ‘Mayflower’ service…”

This is not a 'meta post', nor a 'what the hell is up with Fozziesov' post nor a 'the Svipple has tits?' post.... this is just yer run of the mill 'what the hell has been going on in Tur's verse' post...
We have moved… again.

This will be my fifth move in and/or out of an Anoikis system. We, meaning HBHI my home corp, originally lived in an Alliance owned and operated Large Amarr POS in the old Demsal Alliance C1 back many years ago now… but that wasn’t really ‘ours’ and cause we were not in the POS owning corp we therefore not only lived in our ships same as we do today but, we also had no POS access other than password-through-the-FF. 

What ships we had and other stuff had to be managed by the actual POS corp members, IE the worst possible way to live in a POS out of the wide range of unpleasant possible conditions that POS life has available. It was not long before we simply needed full access and that meant a POS of our own.

So we ended up anchoring, for the very first time, move #1, “Serenity Station”, a Large Matarii POS in the C2 owned by HELPeR, an Allied corp. This was our first real home in Anoikis. As these things go over time we decided we wanted not just our own POS but our own hole too, we had reached a point where the C2 sites n PI n raids didn’t provide us all with the levels of ISK to which we aspired, so we moved out and up to a C3, move #2.

This was our first real complete takedown, move out and setup in a new hole move. We lived in pretty happy with things for a long time until we got seriously camped by some guys from SYJ Alliance and all of that ended in us joining SYJ and once again doing a full move, move #3… this time out of the C3 and into Bastion, SYJ’s C6.

After most of a year there we left SYJ on good terms and moved out, move #4… temporarily living in Empire while we decided what to do next… which was going to be a C4, then we got wind that our old friends in HELPeR had left null and moved , move #4a, into a C3… we mothballed HBHI and our POS and POS mods and joined HELPeR, so not really a full-on ‘move’ for the HBHI guys as such this time.

Now, the corp has grown quite a bit over this past winter and we found were spending a lot of time scouting C5’s to run for ISK to feed the membership so basically, we needed to move up. So we have found... well purchased... a C4/C5-C3 with very good PI. This means a C4 wormhole with 2 statics, a C5 and a C3. So we will no longer have to scout for C5s… we will have a connection to some C5 23/7/365 and we will have a connection to some C3 which ‘should’ give us decent access to Empire most days… this is move #5.

And lemme tell you man, moving in Empire sucks, but changing wormholes can be a real logistical nightmare… you see moving between systems in Anoikis entails a few things even nullsecers don’t have to deal with…

(1) No gates. Daily you have to scan down the ever changing wormholes in and out of not only your old home home, but once you buy or find that perfect new hole with the great access to downtown and fantabulistic schools, you have to have all the holes there scanned down daily if not several times a day.

(2) Add to this is the moving of often large numbers of ships (I myself have over 43 personally owned ships in the POS…) multiple hauler runs loaded with equipment and everyone’s personal PvE/P ships out and in is dependent on the mass limits of the holes you find. Scanning down a hole that cuts 10’s or more Empire jumps down to a mere handful is met with raucous jubilation… but when it is noticed that it is a Frigs only hole… the scanning pilot has no other option but to leave fleet, cloak up and run for his life.

(3) No Red/Blue/Black Frog freighter pilot can help you at all… ‘cause at the VERY most your access to your new home system lasts just 24 hours, and C4 and down don’t take Freighters… and no self-respecting freighter pilot is gonna risk his ship inna wormhole… period. So the best you could hope for would be a pickup and drop off at the nearest station to your new home’s hole-of-the-day… but R/B/Black Frog doesn’t ‘guarantee’ delivery in under 24 hours… though you could possibly offer a bonus for that service.

Keep in mind, no matter where the holes put you, you HAVE to move ships out and stage them at the closest Empire station as fast as you can… hoping against hope that when you get time to move them in your new connection isn’t 45 hops away. We’ve had days where we get the dream… an exit from old home that is through an acceptable lowsec, not camped all to hell and rife with riff-raf… and like 9 or maybe even 5 jumps to the entrance hole to new home… and we’ve had days where we just can’t move crap cause old home is 5 low jumps to hisec and 2 are hard camped and new home has a pipe through null and an active C6… cripes.

Multiply all of this by the number of chars who have ships in the POS and, well… tempers between players who have never had a bad word to say ‘bout each other can get very short… and them as aren’t BFFs to begin with… well, it can get unpleasant, but… there is nothing to it but to do it.

Now the C4 is a trade-off… a compromise hole. Better home sites, vastly better PI than the old C3 and easy daily access to C5’s for sites and C3’s… the downsides? Easy daily access to C5’s and no static Empire holes... this means not only do we get the possibility of a C5 loaded with sites… we also have the same chance of a C5 loaded with players… eek. Plus the connection to ‘a’ C3 does not mean that we WILL have an Empire connection… just means we ‘should’ have one most of the time but still it will mean scanning down a ‘pipe’ to Empire instead of a direct connection, granted it will normally be a short pipe.

Still an all, the vastly better PI means greatly enhanced passive income for all and for the corp, plus the C5 static means over all better opportunities for enhanced ISK making in both home and adjoining holes… so the compromise is just that, some good some not so much.

Lastly there is the new hole to consider… choose a moon for the POS, get it all setup and deathstarry… get ervybody’s ships n shit in and now we get to settle in start runnin sites and setup PI… or, er, no. POCOs.

Planetary Orbital Customs Offices… (Player Owned Customs Offices)… all of the POCO’s are owned by other corps with various tax rates… which means… POCO Bash Fleet! Oh joy… 13 planets… Thirteen POCOs to bash down, and that aint fun shooting I dunt care who ya are.

Anyway we started in on it, as many as could joined in but I must say Joran, our member who is the most involved or at least the most interested in PI and Industry, was of course, the guy who put in the most time and DPS on this little project. To which we all owe some debt of gratitude as bashing POCOs just plain sucks.

Anyhoo, it is all now done and we are getting PI setup and final alts from the old home hole are now trickling in… and people are simply not loggin in as much. Huh…. Seems for many of us there has been a general feeling of being just kinda tired of the game as the last few weeks have not been about ‘fun’… they have been about work.

The ‘move out’… ‘moving ships n shit all over hell n creation’… the ‘move in’… ‘POCO bashing’… add to this that a few of our prime ‘content creators’ have had more on their plates than usual and the end of the move has also coincided with some RL>EVE stuff cropping up in some of our lives.

In the end you get people poking their noses in TS and not seeing anyone active so they log off and so… only a few of us are on together at any given time, and not enough to really ‘do’ anything. Not enough for sites or a raid or a roam or more than scanning all the things… and even that is not nearly as up to date as we used to keep it.

For me personally… I’m sitting on almost 2 bil ISK and so my inner drive to run sites or to even get PI setup is not as strong as it has been in the past when I was used to a much much leaner wallet… plus I am one of the ones who have been slapped by some of that RL>EVE stuff and so I am guilty of not loggin on as much nor for as long as usual.

This needs to change, hell… everything else has.  =]

Fly reckless and see you in the Sky =/|)=

He was, and always will be… our friend.

~or “Words cannot express…”

As all of you know by now, Leonard Nimoy has died. The facts are, he was 83, he died at his home in Los Angeles of end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

I was hard hit by this news. You see, I am 54 and have recently, as those of us over 50 do, begun realizing I may have more years behind me than ahead… and I have begun to lose people who I never realized I would lose.

My youngest brother was taken from us by a drunk driver at 24, all of my grandparents are long gone, both my parents have passed… so many who were prominent in the news and in my youth are gone… but learning of the passing of Leonard Nimoy was different for me, as it is for so many of my generation… You see I watched Star Trek when it first aired… I watched Neil Armstrong, live, the night he first set foot on the moon and I watched every episode of Star Trek and every second of all the moon landings.

I grew up in a world where we WERE going to the moon and we WERE going to go to Mars and build space stations and have colonies on the moon and Mars and Titan and Europa and… and… and then I watched the politicians and the greedy and the shortsighted take it all away and leave me and my whole generation with bills and debts and the Cold War and the Vietnam War and many of those politicians going to jail leaving a trail of broken promises and shattered, stolen dreams.

Leonard Nimoy, through the character of Lt. Cmdr. Spock stood for everything GOOD in the hopes and dreams I and my generation grew up believing in… and lost. And now we have lost him. And I have cried deep inside every minute as I made my way through work today… as I drove home and met with my wife and daughter and we went shopping for her upcoming 12th birthday party this Saturday… Oh I smiled and joked and did the father and husband thing… but inside, deep inside, the 8 year old me, the boy lying on that rug in that living room raptly watching Neil Armstrong step off that lander on a black and white TV… the boy sitting cross legged leaning against the sofa raptly watching Capt Kirk and Mr. Spock win out against impossible odds in deep space…

That little boy cries still for the loss of a mentor and a friend he never really knew… but loved as though he did.

May we all… Live as long and Prosper as well.

NOVA EVE Meet...

~or “Internet Spaceships is Serious Fun…”

I finally made one of the EVE Meets that are taking place world-wide. This one was CSM Sugar Kyle’s meetup in Northern Virginia (NOVA) at the Dogfish Head pub in Falls Church. I have been looking forward to finally getting to one of these for some time, but RL>EVE has always gotten in the way… until last Saturday, Feb 7th. I made the 2 hour trip north from my home deep in the woods outside of Ashland Va. And once inside the beltway I was immediately reminded of why, even though I am southern by the grace of god and I love my home state dearly… I was reminded of why I hate NOVA so very much.

Seething Masses of People... Once you cross some undefined border as you wend your way northwards you reach the land of hives. In northern Va., in the suburbs of DC, they pack themselves in like termites. There is no where you can even cross a street with ANY modicum of safety… the traffic lights, head and tail light of the cars are an endless glowing stream on every road, major and minor… gives me the creeps it does.

You see I’m a country boy by birth and at heart… and while I live on what is considered a main roadway back home traffic levels are such that you could, relative to NOVA, safely lie down and take a nap in the middle of the road. Heck my dirt road driveway is almost a half mile long and you can’t even hear what cars and trucks and tractors as do pass by from my house…

This is just one more affirmation of my life in Anoikis… Wormhole space is the back country of New Eden… the wide open spaces with no damn people and no damn Po-po… just the way we like it…   =]

Anyhoo, I finally arrive at the Dogfish Head pub and on entering, there is Sugar Kyle doing the CSM and Host thing, hence she is up to her ears busy with everyone wanting attention and goody bags and CCP/EVE swag. I get my goody bag and she tells me to look for a number in the bag… I empty it and… no number… sadface, no swag for old Tur.

So I get a beer and I’m standing there watching people, tryin to pick out the players from the dinner guests and guys cruising for gurls… I say Hi to a random someone and he immediately asks, “Who are you with?” at first I thought, ‘Uh I’m here alone’ but then I realized he was asking what corp/Alliance am I in… ohhhh… Uh… I think for a sec and say, “HELPeR, but you wouldn’t have heard if us… I live inna wormhole.” The look I got in return was precious… and a second affirmation of my life in Anoikis… tell ‘em you live inna hole and they ALL look at you funny. LOL

Needless to say the night was a blast. I met many players, discussed matters of grave import and pure nonsense, many beers were drank and toasts were made. I finally met... 

Epigene, he who Journey’s Through The Mind… (he’s like really TALL and German…. who knew?)

I met Grimmash (Narwhals!!), he of the Games… seen here assisting the musician who was trying out the Oculus Gear VR Innovator Edition portable VR headset a Goon brought along… which was extremely cool!

Here we see Grimmash partaking of a tasty beverage while one of the Dogfish staff watches narwhals swim past…

I met a young lady Brave, here seen losing her mind over the Gear VR…

She was also slapping Brave tattoos on anyone and everyone!

And of course, the right honorable CSM, Sugar Kyle… seen here as she was all night, listening to her constituents and others and discussing our great game…

As I understand it approximately 50 EVE players made it to the event. I had a really great time and was among the last to leave at 11ish. When the last of us were getting our coats and such together, Sugar came over to me and handed me a rolled up poster… she told me the person who got the #3 Swag ticket never came forward to claim his prize, and so she handed it to me… I opened it and it was a Valkyrie poster! Schweet!

I discovered something on my way home though… I was going through the goody bag and looking at the buttons one Matarii and one Quafe and the trading card pack I got, when I saw, tucked inside the back of the Quafe button was a folded piece of paper… guess what was on it?  LOL

Yup… silly me

 The Swag!!

Fly reckless and see you at the Meetup! =/|)=

BB62: Boots on the Ground…

~or "Why We Actually Lost Walking in Stations …"
"…and Why We Should Have it."

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 62nd edition and first of 2015! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.

Niden (@niden_GMVA) tweeted this:  “It's not cool to want walking in stations, right?”

That tweet got a few positive agreements, but on the other side of the coin we have Xander Phoena of Crossing Zebras and current CSM member being mentioned in the winter summit minutes: 

Xander said that he would officially like to be documented as protesting any art time going to avatars instead of spaceships.

What is and/or should be the future for walking in stations?

==================================================

The old grey haired Matarii steps out of the crowd. Looking around he watches the crowds passing by… hundreds, thousands of people going busily about their jobs and lives. The sound of a thousand voices and sound of thousands of boots and shoes and even bare feet on the steel floor was a palpable background in this, the main central square in the middle of the cavernous station concourse…

He stands, head bowed in quiet contemplation for a minute, then he sighs… sets the soap box down, and climbs up… "People... my fellow Empyreans of New Eden... hear me, hear me now…"  Rixx Javix has said, that new players “…curiosity (about WiS) is, and should be, a little uncomfortable for us older players. Frankly, we have some explaining to do.”  Yes, we are why it was shelved…. Not CCP, explain that to the new players… WE, the vets, are why they can’t get out of their ships and explore New Eden on foot also.

“We were never given a clear vision for what part WiS would play in the daily lives of our Capsuleers, or what (if any) point there would be for walking in a station.” Wrong… it would have added new CONTENT, new places/spaces to fight and explore and more importantly, new WAYS to do that… in both PvE and PvP…

According to Rixx, “It happened for good reason, CCP had failed to share their vision with us.” I disagree… in the strongest terms. No, this video shows us what their vision was…Please really watch this… and let your imagination run with the possibilities… the potential... and what was lost, what WE threw away... For it was WE who broke faith with CCP and the mob followed the loudmouthed knuckle dragging FiStards who can’t see beyond the end of their wittle spasships…

“They (CCP) were stung by the reaction to Incarna… This was clearly the lesson they learned from that Summer of Anger. It is, after all, what we wanted them to learn.”  What CCP learned was to fear their own customers… their own playerbase… because that playerbase is fickle and many, tooo damn many, are self-righteous entitled children who, instead of backing the company that CREATED EVE… threw a temper tantrum the likes of which has never been seen before in the gaming world… Was this what we wanted them to learn? To fear us?  

I quote CCP Seagull from her address in the 2014 CSM Summer Minutes, ‘Veteran Player Retention’ section, pg 120…
”I, as the executive producer, am in a risk taking mode. … We need to be bolder. We should be able to get over our trauma of Incarna. We need to own our game and be courageous with it. I think our players want that of us.”

“It's time to get over Incarna and start taking risks again, educated and calculated risks of course, but we need to make sure that we deliver solid content to veteran players.

We have trained players to be afraid of us doing big things. It meant we put something big out that was half done and it never got touched again. Us doing something big, such as industry, means CCP is going to mess it up again and we will have to pick up the mess.

We, internally, have become scared in a sense of making bolder changes to the game so that we know we can control the outcome. Because we do not want to be perceived as messing up again. We can predict what is going on. That predictability is boring everyone to death now. … We need to turn up the volume.”

“… get over our trauma of Incarna”
“We need to own our game and be courageous with it.”
“…It's time to get over Incarna and start taking risks again.”
“We have trained players to be afraid of us doing big things.”
“We, internally, have become scared in a sense…”

Scared of who? Us that's who. Their customers, their playerbase… We did that… we are responsible for not supporting CCP, for screaming at them like children, armed, nasty, self-indulgent children. Us and no one else… we broke faith with CCP and forced them to back away from the potential that was, IS, inherent in FPS gameplay inside of EVE.

“There is still no compelling reason for walking in stations.” and “There is nothing inside the station that I can do that I can't do without WiS.” … says Capt. Javix… Yes, as of now there isn’t… and what’s more, he doesn’t want it… but if WiS was implemented with content, which was CCPs major fail the first time, there are a great many players who would love this type of gameplay… and you don’t have to do a thing Capt. Javix… you don’t ever need to crawl out of your slimey pod, and avert your atrophied eyes from the light of day… but gods dammit man, don’t get in the way of those of us who DO!! 

And I’ll give you just 2 compelling reasons…

(1) once more, everything that the idea's in THIS simple demo video could have brought to us all…

(2) and a whole damned new playerbase for EVE…

Increased PCU, increased income for CCP, increased monies CCP can spend on ALL the playstyles EVE can support… oh, and one last thing… increased immersion in the grandest virtual verse ever invented by man…

YOU may not like or want it Capt. Javix, but I damn well do… and many, very many of us out here in the black, we want it too.

Before I close I must tell you I can’t help but wonder… if we did have WiS, and Rixx reined in his quaking fear of crowds of goons running around in stations acting the fool… if he tried his hand at exploring, on foot, inna Sleeper Station… just how would ol Rixx react when he ran into another player, quickly drew and at point blank range, fired his T2 “Spidey” Personal Webifier MkII…

And then watched in horror as the other player shrugged off the effects of the plasma web and ran away laughing with his Sleeper Riches… all because of the T1 “Freedom” Web Core Slicers module he had fitted onto his “Indiana” class Exploration ExoArmor DropSuit…? Oh the tears!”

Turamarth sighs… watching the parade of players walk by with but a very few listening or paying any heed at all… but he holds hope… that one day, one damn day… CCP will give us what they promised and stop listening to the naysayers and the shortsighted… and fulfill the dream that could be EVE.

The old grey haired Matarii steps down, picks up his worn, battered soap box… and walks quietly away into the crowd…

the What…

Exploring Sleeper Stations… 

the Why… 
On The EvE of Contention… 
On The Bone of Contention… 
On Getting Back in Contention…  

and the Dream… 
Worlds and Stations

CCP Seagull, Fly reckless lady... AND OPEN THIS GODS DAMNED DOOR!  =/|)=

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way Home from the Ganking…

~or “Look Before You Jump...”

We had a really good holiday weekend… we ran a ton of sites, made a pile of ISK, got a nice set of kills and had one hilarious ‘incident’…

We live inna C3 wormhole and like most wormholers we used to live off our home sites and the sites we raided from the normal random connecting holes… well, we don’t do that anymore. Nowadays we prefer to scan down all-the-things and actively seek out C5s with decent pipes to/from home, preferably uninhabited or with inactive occupants and… loaded with C5 Sleeper sites.

One reason is our corp has grown quite a bit in the past few months, there are a couple of RL friends of Sov and Tsra that have joined who are basically newbies. One of our newbros is a veteran player I met through my blog, he was on a ‘break’ from EVE and decided to come back and also joined us in the hole… and added to that is the completely unexpected and unplanned EVE takeover of my IT Dept IRL…

So far one of my coworkers has joined us in the hole, one is mining and doing the std. noob in Hisec thing, one has just joined and is testing the waters so-to-speak and one has purchased EVE via Steam and is going to give it a go sometime soon… plus one guy, in another section of the IT Dept, is going to rejoin… he used to play back some years ago and his son is one of the guys in my dept who has joined us so he’s considering trying it again… sheesh.

Now those who don’t live in Anoikis need to understand that any given wormhole system can support only so many players… C1’s can support soloists and very small groups, say 2 to 3 guys max… as you go up the class chain, C2, C3, C4… each hole produces more ISK then the last and therefor can support more players… C5’s and 6s can support quite large groups. When we were in SYJ an appreciable portion of the ISK the Alliance and its membership made was from shares of the ISK we got from Merc Ops in addition to the very lucrative C6 Sleeper site Capitol escalations we ran. But there is a upper limit even then…

Now keep in mind I’m talking about PI and the sites in your home hole… Combat, Gas & Ore and Data & Relic sites… of course most if not all Anoikis corps and groups do not limit themselves to just their home sites, they readily and normally raid adjoining holes for ISK, be it running combat sites or ninja gas mining… keep in mind also there are no taxes levied in Anoikis (other than at POCOs and many don’t charge their membership, we don’t at least) so for many corps ‘taxes’ are paid to the corp in PI for POS fuel. I personally make Robotics and Supercomputers in equal amounts with my PI… and I ‘donate’ all my Robos to the corp and sell the Supercomps for myself.

But, as I said, we have grown quite a lot and we now have more people than a C3 can properly support if we limited ourselves to our home sites and normal raids… The second reason we actively seek C5s is that the vets in our group are capable of fielding ships that can effectively run C5s. We now primarily run an Ishtar/Basi/whatever comp for C5 Sleeper sites but we just don’t trigger the Capitol escalations. C5’s make us all enough ISK to support a larger membership than our home hole normally would. This means we are doing even more scanning than before ‘cause we have to scan down not just everything in home but also in our adjoining holes and in the local lowsec group our static has connected to.

OK, so over the weekend we had an opportunity… Sov was out deep scouting the lowsec and connected systems and he found a group of 4 Procurors, a Retriever and a Miasmos hauler on a mining op inna wormhole four hops over from our stat low… sweet. To get there we have go out to our static lowsec (1) then through a wormhole (2) into another hole system that leads to a hole (3) to another lowsec… the mining op is taking place inside another wormhole (4) inside that lowsec system… We ship up… Ishtar, Lachesis, Moa, Prophecy, Prophecy, Vexor and I’m inna Onyx HICtor because, bubble.

We warp to the hole and run the pipe and the fleet lands on the hole they are mining in… Sov has Endy in the Lach’ go in first… dscan immunity FTW… and make initial point, as Endy is in warp Sov calls the rest of us to jump the hole and warp to Endy when he lands… Endy calls landed and initial point, we go to warp… as I enter grid I see one of the target ships warp out, on landing I pop my bubble trapping the remaining 3 Covetors, the Retriever and the Miasmos… I set my inifini-point on one of the Covetors, call point and start the missiles... we all set to work and…

Pop, Pop, Pop, Pop and Pop… as the ships are assploding we get all pods locked and then…  pop, pop, pop, pop and pop… And, being the civic minded souls that we are, we loot what's worth looting, pop the wrecks and even clean up the MTU... pop.

So, we head back home… now we are all clapping each other on the back and in a great mood as you can well expect, we jump the hole out to lowsec, warp to the hole we have to transit back to our static low and on jumping in… we land right in the middle of a bright RED fleet sitting on the other side of the hole.

Oh fuck...

Now I say bright RED I don’t mean Russians… I mean every ship in that fleet, at a guess easily 10 or more ships, I say guess ‘cause I was a wee bit freaked out (you should have heard comms LOL!!)… they were all flashy red… -10 sec status… and our gang of seven is easily outgunned… Sov calls out “Hold cloak!”… thinks for a second, then orders us all to try for the hole and jump out if we can… we all turn and burn hard for the hole praying we don’t lose too many ships… I did get lit up, saw some red creep up in my shields as I burned to the hole… but I hit 5000m and spammed jump so hard I was worried I would break the mouse. I jumped through and Sov was calling for everyone to dock up if possible, then he asked who died… no answer… he asked again… no answer. We had all made it out!!  LOL

The chatter on comms… well, I wish to the gods I had been recording… you had to be there, I’m glad I was, it was hilarious. Initially we assumed they had a scout and had either seen us doing the op and were waiting for us… or saw us land and jump in so they were at least somewhat ready for us… but their reaction was so disorganized that in the end we felt mebbe we were as much as surprise to them as they were to us…

If so, that means quite possibly their comms may have been something like this…  =]

Fly reckless and see you in the Sky... =/|)=

Hey Newb!!

~or “OMG This!”

Over on The Daily Welp, the Hero Coalition’s new site,there is this simple yet moving music parody…

I think it speaks for itself, so…

Personally, I feel this should be linked so it plays right after the "This is EVE" trailer... everytime!


Fly Wreckless and see you in the Sky  =/|)=

EVE is… Fun. =]

~or “Viam EVE…”

What is EVE? I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked that simple three word question… and it always left me standing there, waiting for the flies to just land in my open mouth… I never had a good short, to the point answer. Because EVE is not simple, short or to the point... whateverthehell it is.

It’s a game, right? Oh it’s a game alright… and it’s an MMO and an MMORPG too for some… it’s a persistent virtual world and a personal virtual life… it’s a gankers paradise and the haunt of risk adverse OCD miners and Industry spreadsheet geeks and Market mavens… It’s an experience that simply MUST be shared with friends and thousands more and a Hermit’s dream, it’s a single shard universe, and a lonely desolate wormhole system… it’s a Harsh Mistress and a Gentle Beauty… an exotic sheer bikini clad Lover, and a triple 1600mm Tritanium plated Bitch.

It is all this and so much more… but it is NOT easy nor is it simple… to play, to live in, to fly in and to die in, to define or to explain.

But, over the last few weeks, I have found my personal short-simple-to-the-point answer…
EVE is Fun… and as far as I am concerned, if it’s not fun for you… yer doing it wrong.

You see defining and or explaining EVE for many stems from a desire for our friends and family to understand this our collective hobby. We who enjoy it get so much out of it… partly because EVE IS horrendously complex and hard to learn. It is hard to explain a ‘game’ that can be so very extremely harsh and unforgiving. Those of us who love it do so BECAUSE it is ALL of the above… and one other thing… we have FUN doing all of it, even the boring, painful, shitty stuff.

This thought has been gelling in me since I read Wilhelm Arcturus’s post, This is EVE and EVE is Different over on The Ancient Gaming Noob. I don’t really follow TAGN ‘closely’ because he is a nullsec player and I could not care less about nullsuc, and his blog also covers a lot of WoW and such and so I have to pick and choose what to read over there… Please understand I’m not dissin’ his blog or playstyle, I’m just picky and I don’t play WoW so a lot of it means Na-da to me is all. But he is also an EVE player and very often has insights and a depth to our game that I would sorely hate to miss… so I do keep up with him.

Anyhoo… in this post which was his BB#61 - Origin State, post… he says a few things that really hit home with me… 

“EVE Online will not meet your expectations.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you’re going to come charging in with some ideas in mind and EVE just isn’t going to line up with them."

And…

“If you look at blogs from people playing EVE Online… …things can be quite different.  Sure, some days we are all talking about the same thing, like the latest expansion.  But there are times when we clearly aren’t just playing in different areas of the game, but it seems like we might be playing totally different games.”

In no other MMO I know of or have heard of is this more true. … it seems like we might be playing totally different games…  because… we are and yet, we are all still playing EVE. This is the Dichotomy and the Duality, the Yin and Yang, the Male and Female, the Creation and Destruction that is EVE and that is a huge part of the human experience.

When all is said and done, I enjoy my time in EVE more than any other hobby I have ever had. I fly in EVE with my sons… we have a corp that is our own. We are currently flying with friends we have had for almost 4 years… and some we just met last week. I have my bad days… and sometimes I am the bad day others’ have… but everyday, bad to best, I look forward to it more, and have more sheer fun doing it, on par with anything else I have ever had as a hobby. Seeing the guys on TS, and in the POS… Endy, and ‘nipples’… Sov and his “About your fit…”, Tsra and his “Damn, I’m outta arsenic…”, AI and his ”….” (he’s kinda quiet…), Strigon and his “I just push F1…”… and all the other guys…

Over the last few weeks I have had wonderful wins! And amazing losses… we have run sites like Real Pros and we have run sites like we were drunken retards… we have had GFs and terribad fights, but always post ‘GF’ in local as we warp off… I have made a mountain of ISK… and spent damn near all of it… and I have had an absolute blast during all of it… Yea, EVE is a lot of things… but first and foremost it HAS to be…

All For the Fun…

When all is said and done,
the war over,
the battle lost or won,
when your ship has gone nova,
you understand then…

When you turn ponderously for home,
your Hulks laden with ore,
like a citizen of old Rome,
sweat and blood for the corp,
you understand then…

When the smoke clears,
and you’re back in the hole,
you see your greatest fears,
are not loss of control,
you understand then…

When you were scared and shaking,
webbed and pointed as you tried to run,
when you realized YOU weren’t breaking,
you understand now…

...that it is all for the fun.

Fly Reckless and see you in the Sky  =/|)=

A Really REALLY Great Bad Idea…

~or “And a Spanking Ensued…”

Last night was about as good as EVE gets for me.  =]

OK, first off the last 2 weeks or so have been dull… deadly, gods damned dull. I have logged on most ervy day as usual, I have done PI, or not… and when in the mood scanned all-the-things, or not… and usually no one on but me. Oh occasionally we’d have a guy or two on TS… mebbe playing Warframe or some such… and a few times had some of our newer members on, but in Empire boofing around. I did get into a few nice TS sessions where I got to put on the Sensei robes and teach, or at least knowledgeably answer questions. I prefer to try to not just share info but to also encourage and share some of the wonder and love I have for our game.

Something personally fun, day afore yesterday I found my first Shattered Planet hole connecting to ours, N-Space or S-Space or whatevertehfuk it’s called… one of the New 101 (Anoikis like) systems… At first I was all WTF? While scanning and scouting I was also in Sensei mode teach PI… so after jumping in, BMing the return hole and spamming Dscan, I tried to do a quick scan of a planet to answer a current PI question and I was all ‘why in the hells can’t I look at a planet??’ Then I saw ‘no moons’… Hrm, lots of Sleeper Sites… no FF (Force Fields) which means no POSes… OH Hey!! I’m inna Shattered Planet Hole!!! Schweet!

Warped to see my first real shattered planet and…   it wasn’t. It was a nice clean round planet… with a huge amount of (untargetable) asteroids(?) in close orbit (IE at ‘0’ on the planet)… Well, disappointing to say the least. Also these new systems are not available to our mapping tool… huh.

But the point is I was on pretty much solo when I was for the last 2ish weeks… I did PI, scanned… and usually logged after a bit… EVE has become, for me, more a social game as I get older. Oh I still am ‘ok’ with being on solo, just vastly prefer company is all. Anyhoo, so last night there was a stirring on TS and corpmates were loggin on… some were playing Warframe but we all decided to actually try and run sites together.

Earlier in the day I had soloed 3 sites in my Vargur… scary as I had no backup if jumped, but it is Anoikis… and some days the scary for others is me so I just kept spammin Dscan and nom nommed the sites for 180m ISK… nice. Then people started loggin on and… we suddenly had hostiles in the hole. We made a stab at killing a ‘Stero that was running a data site… and missed. In the end there was enough neut/hostile activity to make us feel sites were not on safely the agenda for the evening… <sigh>…

Then Sov, out scanning and scouting as usual says… “Hey guys…” “I have an idea… a really, really BAD idea.” “I’m sure it is just a terrible idea…” and you can just hear him grinning… OH HELLS YES!!! Both Endy and I were all like “Cool, say no more, say no more…” and “What ship should I be in?” and “What? Where? How? Can we keel it? them?” Seems in the C2/Hi right next door we have a POS… defended by 6 Cruise Missile Batteries and… nothing else. Nothing? Nothing, no other defenses at all, huh, really? And an Orca, Itty, ‘Stero, Probe are just floating inside… and while the Orca is manned, it seems to be AFK.

Hmm. We discuss the potential DPS and such of 6 BS sized Cruise Missiles inna hole and decide to try it. First off Sov has me get a Med T2 bubble for the Hisec hole in the C2… At the hole, I align to the target POS and anchor it as close to the hole as bubble mechanics will allow… and the hole is nicely covered. So we have a cloaky scout, x2 DPS Ishtars and me inna Scimmy for logi. We jump in warp to and land, I start reps and the guys start in on the CM Batteries… and the CM Batteries start in on us… and… huh, nothing. I mean the barest, faintest scratch of red appears in shield, then gone to reps… after a minute Sov says, “Tur, drop reps.” So I do… that bare, faint scratch of red becomes a slightly more bold, faint scratch of red… and that’s it.

I reship to a Prophesy and we go to work on taking down the missile batteries and even though I get focus fire a few times, I never go deeper than 50% shields, and I’m armor fit… needless to say, the CM Batteries are incapped in relatively short order. With the meager LOLable defenses down, we go to work on the POS itself because Sov is of a mind that this thing (1) may have been just setup and (2) may have been setup by guys who just possibly may not have stronted it… we decide to shewtz it enough to see if it goes into reinforced and in the meantime see if we can get some kills or a fight outta these guys.

We continue ops… and the Probe suddenly warps out directly to the hisec hole, which is not in dscan range of the POS BTW… and he get caught in the bubble and Sov deals with it, killed and podded out. We continue ops. A few more guys join us over the course. After a while a Tengu logs in, lands in the POS… boofs around a bit and eventually warps off directly to the Hisec and like the Probe, gets trapped in the bubble, killed and podded out.

Now Sov calls for a bubble on the POS, I go get another Med T2 and drop in in line with the hisec hole and just behind our guys, the edge of the bubble was like 20km off the POS. Ok so the guy in the Orca wakes up and jumps into a Gnosis and eventually tries to escape with what could potentially be a neat trick. He warps off in the direction of the hisec hole and we follow… he lands 100km high from the bubble, drops a Mobile Warp Unit and starts anchoring…

Hmmm… we wonder if this will work, can the MWU warp him into the bubble deep enough to jump before we kill him? Or will he get stopped at the edge as any ship in warp does? Sov sends Endy to burn hard and sic his droans on it and kill the MWU before it can be activated… done and the Gnosis warps off… and gets trapped in the bubble back at the POS… we get tackle, those of us on the hole warp back and… he is killed and podded out.

The op continues and we finally hit reinforced. OK, so they did have stront and enough to give it a one day plus 17 hour timer… Now we are deciding whether or not to make it an actual op, not just a ToO (Target of Opportunity) and stay for the timer to see if (1) we get a fight and (b) if we take down the POS, what might drop… So we're going back n forth on this when...

Sov finally gets into a convo with these guys… seems they are Lithuanian… and no one present speaks Engrish. So Sov is doing a Google Translate convo in Lithuanian to poor English to incomprehensible Lithuanian… (gentle reader just imagine the hilarity…). To make a longish and LOL filled story short… we end up offering a 1.5b ISK ransom… and they accept… and they pay. OMG!!  And it is at this point that Endy says… “Now I feel dirty.” LOL!

So once we have the ISK, I start taking down the bubbles and we group up on our home hole and when Sov says we're good, we jump back, warp to the POS and start winding down. A little bit later we are all sitting around laughing and discussing the op when Endy calls out, “Astero on scan.” Sov replies that it’s one of the guys from the corp we just spanked… He gets the guy in TS and is talking him through what went wrong and why and how to avoid it in the future, and he invited them to come see our POS setup, all deathstarry n all (inna cloaky) and is sharing with them the Tao of Holes… this is how we roll.

So, why did we attack them? Well, one answer would be the EVE standard… “They was home.” The other would be, and is, because they needed it, and better us than some other group who would not have respected the ransom and who would not have stayed and helped them learn how to make their way, find their fortune and live and die in Anoikis.

My beloved Anoikis is a place of very high risk and equally high reward, a place of imminent danger where sometimes I have a really bad day… and sometimes… I am the really bad day that others have… =]

Fly Safe and see you in the Sky  =/|)=