Stand Your Post, While The Wormhole Burns...

~or, I’m an Anoikis Mercenary… and Business is Good.

(TL;DR: SYJ Alliance Sacks TLCs Executor Corps Fleet Storage Hole to the tune of 500+ Billion ISK lost... This is the story from the point of view of one Starship Captain... There's a video at the bottom of this rather long post.)

Something stirred me awake, I swung my legs out and sat up blinking the RL outta my eyes… I then saw that Secure Corp Comms was blinking… It was my CEO ordering me to reship to a HIC and get my ass down the pipe to Empire.

Huh… ok, a little unusual but, “SARA give me the bridge.” My Exec answers and I order my stealthed Loki to warp to the docking point at our new CSMA (Capitol Ship Maintenance Array) in “Serenity Station” then I ask in Corp Comms, “What’s up?” his terse and cryptic response is, “Secret Op, join fleet and make best time to Hisec, BMs have been transmitted.” Huh…

OK, we dock and I have the crew transfer and prep the Devoter, an Amarr Heavy Interdictor Cruiser, or HIC. We undock and run the pipe to Hisec. On the way I get the system we are to stage from and I am ordered to go to Planet 1 and logoff. We make our way in good time and I stop off in Hek, 3 hops out, to take care of some business.

Much sooner than I expected the FC calls over the Fleet general freak, “Login, login, login.” So we undock and burn hard for the staging system landing in the fleet just minutes before we warp to the system with the Hisec hole leading to the hole we are going to raid.

I still haven’t found out any details except what I can pick up in comms chatter… we have some non allied scouts… not unusual… they seem to be possibly, yes definitely, members of the corp/Alliance who’s hole we are raiding…  they are… damn, yup, they are traitors. They are discussing if they have roles and access to turn off defenses and or offline POSes… Traitors. Damn.

I have never actually worked on an Op with or for insiders before. I consider myself an honorable man. Not E-honor or E-bushido, but actual honor, morals, a code of conduct if you will. Whether at the helm of a starship or at home with my family, I believe in honor and trust and decency. I know New Eden is full of scammers and gankers, spais and corporate thieves...

There is one of them I know personally, and we used to be good friends. He corp thefted and very badly hurt a null corp I used to be in… a corp full of guys I know and think quite highly of… and the ‘thief’, well… he was my mentor back when I was in the old C1.

He introduced us to wormholes… The very first time I jumped through the crazy marble, it was on his command, “Jump, jump!” The very first real kill I ever got, was as his wingman… He taught us all in HBHI the Tao of Holes… the Way of Anoikis… even before I knew that was its name.

He took them for something in the range of well over 50bISK in ISK, BPOs, BPCs, ships, etc. He didn’t take them down, that was not his stated goal, he just wanted to do it because:

(1) he could, it being on his EvE “Bucket List”;

(2) RL needs had significantly reduced his online time and he wanted to be Space Rich so he could ‘afford’ to lose ships and still fly;

(3) and the saddest truth of all, the corp he robbed blind was stagnating… badly.

People were not logging on, losing interest, getting bored… and he felt this would force them to either stand up to it and regroup with a renewed purpose or force them to failscade completely… either way he felt a change needed to be forced on them, believe it or not, because he actually cared… and, as he saw it, this punched all three tickets in one shot.

Well, it made him some lifelong enemies and pissed off, and hurt, some really good people… but, it did shake them up and it did revitalize that corp. They did not failscade but rose to the challenge and are active and involved again… and that fact hurts. I hate traitors and liars and cheats. No matter what ‘verse they’re in. But, dammit all… he was right even if what he did was soooo very gods damned wrong.

So… here I was, warping my ship and crew into a situation where we were going to assist two guys to do the same thing, only without the caring part… they just wanted to set the hole on fire and take the ISK and run. I do not know the details or the background of the who and the why…I realize that they may have good reasons, or just feel they do... and that they may not see themselves as traitors...

But all I knew for sure is that for whatever reasons, they were turning on their CEO, corp and Alliance and we, an Anoikis Merc Alliance who will work for anyone for any reason as long as their ‘coin’ is good… we were going to help them realize their goal… huh.

On the way to the staging system, to be perfectly honest, I struggled for a bit. I was not sure I was OK, on a personal level, with backing this action. I mean, if I help them, does that not paint me with the same brush? No, I would not be a ‘traitor’ to ‘my’ corp or Alliance, quite the reverse there, but I would be ASSISTING and PROFITING from traitors and traitorous acts… and that sorta stuck in my craw a bit…

Then, on comms, “The hole closed.” “What??” said the FC, “Confirm, the Hisec hole has closed.” responded our Alliance scouts, “OK, Fleet regroup in Amarr.” Then to the guys inside the hole, “You need to get us another pipe.”… “Roger.” came the reply… I sighed in relief and ordered a reset of our course and headed, on Autopilot, slowly towards Amarr then I sat back and thought through all of this.

I live in Anoikis. I permanently reside in the deadliest space in all of EVE… Negative Security Space, says so right on the label… The rules there are simple, there are no rules. No CONCORD, no Massive Null Sec Alliances to keep you safer than carebear’s wet dream.

Pure space… clean space… OUR space… space in which right and wrong are determined solely on the basis of firepower and the will and skill to wield it. In Anoikis each man determines his own fate. In this lawless space I live and am happiest.

So why am I troubled by this? It’s the 'insider' thing and that alone. If it was another corp who wanted that hole for their own, I would not hesitate. If it was a corp requesting help because they were being invaded, I would not hesitate. Hell, if it was some random guy who happened to find a hole with some POSes and just wanted to take them down for a price and a cut of the loot… I would not hesitate.

I am an Anoikis Mercenary… I chose this path and I have to face the consequences of that choice and … adjust… my moral compass to guide me in that ‘reality’. Traitors, justified or not, exist, if we dint help them, someone else would… and I can use the ISK. It boiled down to as simple as that.

I cannot account for the actions of others. I know I will never break my trust with my co-Directors, corpmates or Allies, that just aint how I am. But what others do is their business… my business is to profit off of them, and business, as they say, is good. I’m an Anoikis Mercenary… and I like it that way.

Interestingly enough in true HoloV space drama style ‘just’ as I passed over the hump of that particular moral dilemma and long before we arrived in Amarr we get reports that a new hole has been scanned down. And it is even closer than the old one… The FC is pleased “Set course and BURN!” he calls out… and this time, I calmly give the order to do so without reservation. What “I” am doing I do FOR my corp and my Alliance, my conscience is clear and my Lasers are charged.

We reach the new staging system, warp to and group up on the Hisec hole. Scouts do the scouting thing, our FC is as always inna Cloaky Loki and as usual right in the thick of it… He finally orders us in and we run the pipe to the raid hole.

No one in the hole owning corp/Alliance is online… except the insiders of course. I am ordered in with the fleet to the first POS, an Amarr Lrg Tower… We all sit just on the edge of the Force Field and watched as one of the insiders launched every ship from a Capitol SMA… it was… stunning.

I have seen videos of wormhole corps doing this very thing… and I have lived in fear of it for the last 2 years… until we joined SYJ. One, HBHI is small corp and we are a very, very tight group, and the ONLY Directors are me and my sons, and Two, SYJ is a very large Alliance… our homehole has more POSes anchored than any wormhole I have ever seen… this does provide a certain level of ‘security’ in Anoikis… but to watch that cloud of Carriers bloom from that CSMA was simply stunning…

Here I was, taking part the very thing I had feared most in EvE. It’s one thing to have hostiles raid your hole, burn your house and barn, kill your livestock and steal your horses… it’s something completely different and far far worse when a trusted friend or a family member, opens the gate and unbars the front door in the dead of the night then stands aside as the bad men come in…

So, the Op starts for real now. As I am in a HICtor I am, of course, ordered to safeguard the hole. I warp to, then burn until I am at ‘0’ and bubble up… and that was about it for me. That was basically what I did for the next oh so many hours… under GeneralOrder #2… I Stood my Post.

The insider’s offlined all the defense mods on the towers and reset the Passwords, and pulled all the Stront… (why pull out the Stontuim? ‘cause without Stront, a POS does cannot go into reinforced… it just DIES…)

Our Capitol pilots were busy… they had to jump in and warp a capitol ship to a safe, then come back and do it again and again each time scooping and jamming as many ships and as much loot as they could pack into the carriers holds, they grabbed an Obelisk and loaded it to bursting with mods & loot of all kinds… It reached a point where the FC was ordering people to pick and choose loot to grab by value… as there was simply too damn much… and we had MANY Carriers and an Obelisk for the gods sake!!

I spent practically the whole op acting as a doorman… Actually, I played a very important role, similar to scouts and Logi in that I was in a guarding support role, but one without which things can go very very wrong really really fast. I kept the static hole bubbled unless I had a friendly in or outbound.

The point being that my dictor bubble covers 19km (20km at L5 skills) and when you jump a hole you ‘land’ within 15km of the hole, so if we had anyone pop in on us he would land inside my bubble no matter what. And the only ships in New Eden that are unaffected by warp disruption bubbles are T3 Interdictor Nullified Strategic Criusers… so yes, a whole fleet of them would get past me, but it would have taken a large fleet of T3’s to counter us… a very large fleet.

But nearly anything else that might pop in was as good as dead… you see my HICtors are dual bubble and Sebo fit. One bubbler runs in standard mode creating that 19km radius warp bubble centered on my ship… the other is loaded with a point script… and this turns it into an Infinity Long Point.

Both bubble and Infinity Point have +100 strength, they cannot be countered by any number of warp stabs and the Infinity Point has a range of 24km (30km at L5 skills). The Sebo, a Sensor Booster II loaded with a scan res script, means I can lock cruisers and larger ships extremely fast and smaller ships decently fast… So unless you are in a very fast very small and cloaky ship, like a CovOps, your chances are practically zero of getting out of the bubble alive, as long as I am on my game.

And that was my biggest issue during the whole Op. Standing Guard on the hole may be an important job, it may be a specialists job (which I like) but it is a damn boring job no matter who you are…

But I was lucky on this Op unlike many where the Gate Guard doesn’t get any activity, and on most Ops you don’t WANT activity on the hole… it usually means things are going to shit… on this Op it was quite the reverse. We had so much loot that we ended up running the Anoikis version of the Red Ball Express... Once things really got rolling we had a stream of Hvy Indies coming and going for a good part of the Op.

Only once did I get called off the hole to do the ‘dictor thing on an actual target. We had a Hurricane land on but not ‘in’ one of the POSes (due I assume to the PW change) and the FC called me in as they webbed and pointed the ‘Cane… I landed, bubbled up we popped the ‘Cane and the POD was trapped in the bubble. We all pointed and webbed him then send him back to Hisec.

I was told to stick around, JIC… so I fired on a bunch of structures to get in on the KMs until the FC ordered me back to stand my post on the hole as it seemed the ‘Cane was not a presage to any real response.

When word finally leaked out about the Op, there was of course much confusion and such on the targets side in their Comms and chat… they eventually figured out what was happening, and who was involved… and the rage & drama began…

For me, that was the not fun part I ignored. I am not some drooling mindless Goon who wants to ‘ruin YOUR game’ or a wanna-be-bully griefer who gets off on the sophomoric ‘Harvesting Tears’ or someone who in any way feels that making real people upset is somehow ‘fun’ (or that getting upset over losing ‘stuff’ inna ‘game’ is silly, because Loss in Eve can be as real as losing at poker, and people have committed murder IRL over that), but, that is not why I was there. As the man said, “I’m just doing a job. You did something to cause me to be here, look to yourself for the reasons why.”

So the night progresses… I am not too bored as I am constantly on comms and actively working with them as are coming and going… “Bubble down Tur, I’m ready.”… “Bubbles down, warp.”… ”Thanx.”… “Yup, bubbles up.” which keeps my head in the game and I am constantly trying to decipher the chatter on comms  so I can have an idea of what’s happening… chatter which, if you are not on grid, can be a little cryptic.

But, in the end we basically ransacked and burned two Lrg Towers, one Amarr and a Dread Guristas Faction spike.  We hauled out an AMAZING amount of loot and a huge number of ships… then we started rolling the holes to get the Capitols out. Carriers can only jump though C5/6 holes and then ONLY into Losec or Null. So we had some real rage rolling to do…

Thankfully we had stolen more than enough of the ships needed to do it right and we start in… With a bunch of ships off at safes and several Freight Containers anchored in a safe with the Obelisk… we keep the subcaps and the Holy Rollers together, rollin’, rollin’, rollin’… scouting and a’ warping to each hole in turn until we find a hole we can push three Carriers out of.

The scouts have to determine where do we come out? If Hisec, ROLL! If Lo or Null, is it any good for our needs to get prize ships safely to market, or possibly back into Bastion, if no, ROLL! If yes and a station is present, they have to get the ships docked ASAP or, if no station setup safes, logoff or a cyno, etc., etc.

And I am still doing my job… Hole Control. I land each time, fly to ‘0’ and watch and wait with my finger on the bubble trigger as ‘twere… and so things went as the night wore on… hole after hole after hole until I woke up... OH CRAP!

Yup, asleep at the trigger… it was damned late and one of the last things I remembered was the FC talking about “…this is the last one, if it’s no good we pick back up tomorrow…”  ZZzzz zzzzzzzzzz zzzz… So, I am all alone, the hole we were on is gone, I consider it a safe now and I am out of it, so I BM and safelog for the night...

The next night I am up and ready to log on when ordered to. I check comms, no one says a word about me crashing (I am not sure they even realized I did and this is not the kinda group that will let trollable actions go untrolled…) so it’s back business as usual. Scouts do the scouting thing and we are clear and ordered to log on, There is still a bunch of Carriers that Obelisk and of course, the rest of us, to get out and we need to begin rage rolling again except…

The hole we are on needs to be mass closed but it is an older hole and we are not ‘sure’ of the mass and prefer not to get anyone stuck out unless no other choice. So the FC orders me to unscript the infinity Point, put up both bubbles, jump through then come back bubbles down and ‘hot.’

For them as dunt know it a Warp Disruption Field Generator (bubble genny) onna ‘dictor has one very cool side effect… it reduces your mass by a helluva lot… -80.0%, with the Devoter that takes it from 15,200,000 kg base to 3,040,000 kg with one and running two bubblers (if stacking penalties don’t  apply, I can’t find any data on that…) it may further reduce it to 608,000 kg. Which greatly reduces the chance that your HIC will close the hole when jumping out… then, once landed on the other side, you break jump cloak, turning on your MWD, IE going ‘hot’ (I fit a 10MN Micro Warp Drive II) this increases your mass by an additional 5,000,000 kg boosting mine up to 20,200,000 kg… and jump back through in the hope that you will close the hole…

OK, so I do so and… no joy, great. Now, having jumped through a wormhole twice in under 5 minutes my ship is now polarized… or, is it…

Being polarized means I cannot jump the hole again for 5 minutes… but, and this is weird… if “I” eject into my POD and someone else jumps into my ship… he can bubblejump and come back ‘hot’ no problem, then ‘he’ is polarized… weird huh? I mean according to the warning, my ‘secondary coils’ are polarized… But I did not know my secondary coils were implanted inside ‘ME.

That explains why Scotty always drinks me under the table when there is a work order on the secondary warp coils… and he told me the scars were ‘cause “You were fallin’ down drunk again me boyo!”… liar.   =\

Anyhoo… so the FC has done one out-n-back, no joy… then when my coils are all unpolarized, I do so again, no joy… sheesh… then he goes again and POOF! Yea! Next! Now we start rage rolling in earnest and get a series of sweet holes in very decent locations and push through 3 carriers at a time… Finally we are down to the last carrier, the Obelisk and the subcaps. We find a decent lowsec and the FC and his tactical team do the hole-math and give us our jump orders.

He orders “Plates OFF, plates OFF.” Then the carrier, then subcaps, then the Obi all jump in turn… We all make it out and I, being just that kinda mate, wait at the hole to webwarp first the carrier, then the Obi… garnering a Suspect timer for each kind act.

Great, I can’t dock and my plates are off greatly reducing my effective armor HP. Oh well, I’ll just warp around until I can do… What? There’s a Loki on the other side of the gate? Alone? COOL!! SPAI!! BAIT!! KEEL IT! The FC calls undock, I advise “I am bouncing as I could not dock due to suspect timer from webwarps so my plates are still off.” I join fleet at the station and we all warp to the gate, The FC is ecstatic, “Tur, as you are suspect you are perfect bait!” “Jump the gate and report on the Loki.” Which I do…

Now there are them out there who will see immediately where this is gonna go… and it aint a good warm snuggly place for ol' Tur…

I land and break cloak… the Loki just sits there. I advise such and am told to aggress… I order the DCU2 and SeBo fired up, I engage my Infinity Point and tap his icon… targeting cycles quickly and

“He is Infinity pointed.”

“He is yellow boxing me.”

“He is not red boxing.”

I start taking gate gun fire, and then two RED Condors land on grid and aggress me…

“Taking gate gun fire.”

“Two ships have landed and are aggressing me.”

“I am going into armor.”

The FC orders the fleet to jump and in the same breath orders Logi to lock and rep me. Multiple gate fire, they start landing and purples start popping up all around me…

Now… you have to understand my mind set at this moment to fully appreciate what happened next.

I was in a fight, I had a much larger fleet backing me up, I had Logi pilots who KNOW THEIR STUFF backing me up, the LAST thought on my mind was that I was gonna die. I assumed (remember that word) that reps would land, my armor would bounce up and we would take down one or more of the three ship gang on grid… well, that aint how it went.

The FC calls out “Tur! Deaggress, deaggress, jump back if you can.” “Nope, yer gonna die…” my armor is going down like the Titanic’s last plunge… what? I am not getting reps… why am I not getting reps??? The quickest way to deaggress is to unlock your target, this interrupts all weapon cycle timers and shuts them down… too late… I assplode… and due to the total confusion of dying while my head was in fight not flight mode, I fumbled getting my POD out and … pop, I woke all confused and gooey in our Empire offices in Eglenaert…  crap.

Well… we, or I should say, they, did get some kills, but the KB record is weird, as ‘tis sometimes, and TBH… I wasn’t there so meh.

Anyhoo… so ended one moar Great Wormhole Adventure for me… After all we did and all we stole and all we destroyed… I lost a HIC to being overeager and to sheer ignorance.

(1) Overeager, I should have made it clear that my plates were still OFFLINE, hence I was not the best possible ‘bait’… and get CAP reps and online plates THEN jump and bait or something…

(B) I had absolutely no knowledge that an active ‘dictor bubble, even scripted and acting as a regular if somewhat longer ranged and stronger point interferes with receiving remote reps…

IE you cannot remote rep an active ‘dictor. THAT little tidbit was something I should have known about in advance… go me.  =\

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

The upshot? Over 500+ billion in ISK was destroyed or looted from The Merchants Trade Consortium [MTCU], Executors of, The Last Chancers Alliance [TLC]...

My ‘dictor loss took place after we had ‘left the building’ and was not related to the raid in any way… we were just taking advantage of being in lowsec and just being the overaggressive little a-holes we normally are… gods bless us, every one!

Battle Summary for J135220

And Sai Talos, He of The Videomastery has put up a ROCKING Vid of the Op...

"If you're going to strip a director's roles and lock him out of his possessions, be sure to know who all of his alts are..."

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

The Bitter Taste of Success...

~or, Noob to Bittervet in 2 and 1/2 Years...

I have never understood what people like Ripard Teg meant when they used the term, Bittervet. Ripard even has it in his Bio at the top of his blog, Jester's Trek;

“I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about five years. One of my three mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure. ;-)”

I have read about bittervets. The term comes up with older players occasionally and there are many references to players who have come and gone and then come back to EvE, and the ‘leaving’ times are mostly attributed to bittervettedness… but I simply never understood what they were talking about… until recently, and last night and this morning’s blog readings have sorta gelled in my mind to where I feel I may have caught the Bittervet disease, or at least a bittervet headcold. And I now think what ‘bittervet’ means is, the Thrill in PvP is gone. I used to HATE/LOVE/FEAR/WANT PvP.

I hated and feared  it because I sukked at it and lost ships I could ill afford to lose… because I got yelled at by corpmates and Allies when I got lossmails on our killboards… because I would get all confused and mentally overamped… I would get the shakes so bad I couldn’t use the mouse… and I was… afraid. I was afraid of pissing off my corpmates and Allies, I was afraid of losing a ship that would take me weeks, or months to make the ISK back for… but most of all I felt ‘fear’ during the fight. Real gut wrenching fear… in a game.

But I also loved and wanted it badly because the few times I had been on the winning side were such an incredible adrenaline filled RUSH! There was nothing that felt like winning at PvP in EvE pure and simple.

But, because I did suck at PvP I avoided it when possible and I often just caved to it when I couldn’t. There were, a few fights, that first year… when I actually took my hands off the keyboard and mouse before it was over and just let it all go… because I knew I was dead, I knew I couldn’t win, I sucked too bad and did not know how to effectively fight back and “he” (whoever) was soo effin good, orbiting me and scramming, webbing, neuting me and tearing my defenses off like tissue paper… and all the while laughing in local… at me. I’d never be that good. I’d never learn how to keep it together and not lose my shit and actually somehow ‘think’ of all the things you are supposed to think about while in a fight.

Then I got past the hump… a little. I joined RvB as Tur for a while and I have had an alt in there for over a year. That was where I learned how to get a grip on the shakes. I was flying cheap T1 frigs and Tur could afford, every now and again, to shove a few mil ISK to Hiril’s wallet and buy 10 or 20 pre-fit Rifters on ‘tract from Blue Rep. So the losses were not hard on me and being in fleet and one of 20 or 30 frigs, well, you were guaranteed not to be ‘primary’ every time, or even a lot… simply too many lemmings on the beach… so you could get in on kills and start to learn how to fly your ship in a fight. If you are not even targeted and yet flying and targeting and pointing and webbing and firing on ships… many many ships… you eventually learn how to think in the heat of battle.

And when you do get targeted and start taking heat, as you are in control of yourself already and the loss of one T1 fit Rifter (when you have 9 more sitting ready to go 2, 3 hops away) is nothing to you, then you learn how to respond with your head, not your adrenal glands, and even if you die (and once primaried in an RvB Frig Fest you usually do) the experience is not overwhelming. You find yourself planning on which gate to warp to when your ship pops… because that gate leads back to your station and mebbe, if you burn hard, you can reship and rejoin the fight before it is over.

So losing Rifters was not the ISK belly blow that losing my Loki was when we brought Mab into the hole that first time. Oh I was the one who decided to Leroy in, I dint have to. But, once again I just went in straight for the hostile, no thinking, no tactics, no working out what he was flying and its capabilities as compared to my Loki’s… I just went straight in and died. I still didn’t KNOW how to PvP and it was months before I was back in a Loki again.

But, I had learned that I could keep my self control and I had learned how to ‘think’, at least a little, during a fight. But as a corp, we still weren’t really a PvP ‘centered’ corp. We did live in Anoikis, and we did get PvP… but we focused more on running sites and making ISK and skilling up and keeping the POS going… than actively seeking out PvP. We sorta just let it come to us… and when you do that, you are always on the defensive and always at a disadvantage. When you let the PvP come to you they have scouted you and know your ships and fits and your online times and playstyle… and you know NOTHING about them… until they uncloak or warp in, and by then, it is hours or days wayyy too late… like when SYJ camped us.

And being actively, effectively and quite professionally camped by SYJ was why we asked to join them. We knew we had to be on the side that brings the fight, not the side that gets ambushed. And so we joined SYJ and it has been the (second) BEST thing that has ever happened to Tur, or HBHI (First was creating HBHI with my sons).

Now I am one of the reasons Anoikis is “deadly space”… I am one of ‘them’, the Orange (neut) then Flashing RED (killing you) icons streaming into the middle of your Sites Running Fleet and orbiting, scramming, webbing, neuting you and tearing your defenses off like tissue paper… I no longer get the shakes, ever. I no longer worry about losing ships, any ships… I have many. I have several of each type I regularly fly already fitted and in not just our POS but a full set in Empire too. Losing a Faction fitted Loki is now just a logistics issue of when can I bring in one from Empire and as for replacing the hull… I have that already in the wallet, or I will in a day or two at most.

I can’t remember the last time my hands shook during PvP… I have lost my fear… and in doing so, I have lost the Thrill. Yes, it is still ‘fun’… but the difference between Thrilling and just fun is really huge. I don’t like that difference… and I am somewhat, bitter, about it… and I guess, at two and a half years ingame, I can lay claim to the title Veteran… so, am I too, now a bittervet?

SYJ is a damn good PvP Alliance. We are a successful Anoikis Merc Alliance and in my time, limited though it is, we have yet to default or bail on a contract, and as Mal, said, “I do the job, then I get paid.” and we do. But this has meant, I feel, that our reputation may precede us a bit. It did for HBHI when SYJ camped us in our old C3. When we saw who we were up against, we made the decision to ransom, instead of fight, due to SYJ’s killboard and reputation.

So now I am a salted PvPer. When anything ‘happens’ I ship up asking what to bring, I am getting a rep for hero tackle, Hvy. and Lt. ‘Dictors… Devoters, Sabres, and tackle Loki’s, and I fleet up with some excitement, the hope of PvP, but, it is not like it used to be… I used to fear losing ships I could not afford… no longer, I used to fear getting killed and PODed… no longer, I used to fear being embarrassed, no longer… my only fear now is that they won’t be ‘there’ or they will be smart and have a cloaky scout and they will POS up or run or log off when he calls out…

“Ships landing on the hole!”

“Loki, Loki, Loki, Devoter, Tengu, Tengu, Sabre, Oracle times 4, Guardian times 5…”

“Surely You’re Joking Alliance.”

“Warp to POS, warp to POS.”

Of course, anytime a ‘Fleet’ lands on your hole, it doesn’t have to be SYJ to get that response… But there are them as know us… and seeing one of us in local or on grid is enough to get the same response…. because they know the other 15 or so ships are out there… somewhere.

I miss the hand-shaking-rush and the pit-of-your-stomach-fear… I miss playing my game our way only, even if that meant we got hot dropped occasionally. Instead now I often, not always, but often… (mebbe just a little too often for my taste…) find myself sitting on Mumble, listening as my Alliance mates shoot the shit or play DotA.

So I sit and listen, being a good little soldier, all safed up or docked up or cloaked up or even logged off … waiting… waiting… waiting… for that moment of opportunity when the ‘targets’ are open to attack. When our chances of winning are optimal and our appearance in local or on grid won’t end with them all slipping out of our grasp and leaving us with… the bitter taste of our success.

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

A Mistake of Mammoth Proportions...

~or, Don’t Hate Her ‘Cause She’s Fugly…

Ahhh… The Matarii and their butt fugly, bailingwire and ducktape, rustbucket ships… you just gotta love em. Uh… well, unless you work for CCP, in the Art Dept. … the guys (ok, maybe not the SAME guys) who brought you the Mammoth in the first place.

My blog is not a Newz Blog, or a Metagame Blog (well, not usually) so I am jumping on this one a tad late in the day as twere. But, for them as dunt know it seems that part and parcel of the ongoing ship rebalancing act CCP is doing was this gem from CCP Rise in this thread, in which the Mammoth, the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat Fukker) and the backbone of the Minmatar Heavy Haulers was on the chopping block.

The original idea was to totally revamp the Minmatar haulers… remove both and replace them with new ships… then the idea was to upgrade the lowly Whoredur (Hoarder but I vastly prefer the prior spelling…)… really? Uh may one ask WHY? Well, it seems the genesis of this line of thought in the rebalancing discussions was the Art Dept., the ART Dept… really? May one ask what they have to do with the coded mechanics of our ships? I mean these are the guys who gave us that Wonder of The Age, the POS Ship Maintenance Array that is SMALLER than a single Mammoth and yet it can hold, internally, 78 of the damn things!! Forgive me but I am very much of the opinion their concerns are not based on ‘balanced mechanics’.

So it seems the Art Dept., when CCP Rise asked why, responded thusly:

“I just checked in with Art briefly and they confirmed that they simply don't like the way the Mammoth looks."

OK, I get it to a degree. I mean they are graphics artists. I started my tech career as one. Like in any profession you spend a helluva lotta time doing whatever it is you do and that colors your attitudes about that thing. As a tech I often have joked when working with people who aren’t technically inclined, “Look it’s not like its computer science… uh, OK, so mebbe it IS computer science, but that’s not the point!

You see the art dept guys spend all their time LOOKING at the ‘stuff’ in EvE. Their focus is not on how it works but on how it LOOKS. And let’s face it, the Minnie haulers are just damn ugly. They look like rusted out abandoned freight containers that have been hobbled together with a massive number of ion drives just stuck on the ass end to get them moving…

If you fly them ingame at all, when you give the order to go to warp and she suddenly makes a hard port or starboard banking turn, you can actually find yourself unconsciously gripping the arms of your lazyboy in fear and anticipation that she just might break in half from the forces bearing on the bailing wire and ductape holding her together… and you silently tell yourself when you next dock up to have Scotty add another roll, or two… hundred, to the midsection… as, well you know, you can never have enough ductape on a Matarii hauler…

So, we are to lose one of, if not the Queen of Fugly in Space? Well, some would think this a good thing. I mean EvE is a beautiful game… a wondrous space full of awe inspiring nebulae, magnificent pulsars stars, mysterious black hole suns, glistening Golden Amarrian ships, gleaming blue-black Caldari ships sliding silently through the black… and… (WTF!) a Mammoth chugs past… a cloud of rust flakes and bits of… (was that a Primary Buffer Panel?) uh, bits of ‘ship’ silently break away and drift through the void in the wake of the massive hauler like red Minnie dandruff…

And some see removing her as a good thing? May I ask, how? I mean unless where CCP is heading is to open The Eve Gate to STO (Star Trek Online) and we are all suddenly to become peaceful and evolved and lovely and handsome and all our ships will be WHITE as WHITE can BE!!! And there will be no trash or clutter and even our toilets will use transporter tech to instantly whisk away anything smelly or unpleasant… uh, oh dear Gods please NO!

The Mammoth has a beauty all her own. You have only to fly her long enough and you will find, one day, that you have fallen deeply for this wallowing big old ugly ship… and the idea of flyin in New Eden, or on the other side of the sky… without her is simply not something you will even want to truly contemplate.

I can fly almost all the racial Hvy Haulers… and I know the Itty V is the Queen of T1 haulers… but you know what? I have 4 Mammoths and a Mastodon and as long as they exist in EvE, they will be my hauler of choice. Ye gods man! Getting rid of the Mammoth would be like… like… like… getting rid of Drunken Roams! or Griefing! or Scam artists! or even Jita local spammers… EvE has a gritty, dirty, smelly underbelly… and like RL, that underbelly is right out there with all of us every day.

The Mammoth is a reminder that even in the future, man may still be man… we will not be ‘perfect’ and ‘transcended’ and ‘godlike’… we will be just exactly who we are. There will be those among us who can afford gold-plated ships, and gold-plated toilets and slaves to wipe their asses, and there will be hedonists who’s only goal in life is the next high (and they will fly ships that look like they have already had too much) and there will be mindless droans bowing willingly to Authority and creating a society that is utilitarian and ships that reflect that culture… and then there will those who scrape by…

Proud, his head held high as he watches his crew slap on one more thin coat of rust inhibitor (that won’t work)… he breaks open one more case of Duvolle Labs 'ductape'…He wonders once again what in Bobs 'Verse that name stands for as he turns an experienced eye as to where it will do the most good in holding together his pride and joy. A Matarii Heavy Hauler, a Mammoth… Carrying him, his family, crew and cargo once more out into the deep black… and hopefully, safely back again.

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

At 9:40 06/20/14 CCP Rise tweeted…

“Art happy to allow us to leave the Mammoth as the largest hauler based on feedback. I feel kind of sad for the Hoarder, but oh well =)”

A good day indeed…  =]

To Boldly Go... to the Back of the Queue for the Next Site...

~or, To Seek Out New Content and New ISK Faucets...

The most recent Expansion to EVE Online is called Odyssey. It is touted as an Exploration themed Expansion… but, what is Exploration?

This thought occurred to me as I was reading a comment from helenakhan on Nosy Gamers blog in response to the post, “Odyssey - Living Up To The Name”. Helena dint say anything specific that kicked off this idea, it was moar general. You see a lot of the comments on bogs and the forums and such about Exploration in Odyssey have been quite negative, seems to me roughly half n half. I myself have written on how I believe Probing was badly nerfed in my first really negative CCP post, “Slowest Kid in the Class FTW!!” I have weighed in on this subject in comments on ”Jester’s Trek”, “Low Sec Lifestyle” and on “A Scientist Life in EVE” in which I summed up my feelings about as well as I can thusly: 

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

“I just had a revelation, I was responding to Scientist re his post "It’s the little things you miss" when it hit me... After Odyssey dropped I felt something was missing… now I know what it is...

I miss the little things…

I miss the fear, pressure and risk involved in the possibility of not recalling my probes in time…

I also miss the immediacy and the need to keep your head in the game that imminent probe loss forced on us… you looked away from your screen on pain of death… now you can watch whole episodes of Mad Men and your probes just take care of themselves…

I miss the trepidation, pressure and risk inherent in needing to be decloaked long enough to launch all 7 probes…

I miss working out the best probe configuration on my own… not having one that is just ‘meh’ good enough so that I no longer ‘waste’ time setting up my own patterns… and I fear for our poor noobs, who will believe that the one insta-launch 8 probe configuration is the BESTEST configuration ’cause CCP wouldn’t have put it in there if it wasn’t… right?

I miss launching just the number of probes “I” want to launch, and no more.

But most of all, most of all... I miss undocking, logging on or jumping a gate or a hole into a deep black forbidding mysterious sky… and NOT immediately KNOWING EVERYTHING around me without trying...

I miss exploring...

Strange to feel this way after an ‘Exploration’ based expansion drops huh? “ 

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

The root of that feeling, of missing Exploration, dint ‘gell’ until I was reading Helena’s comment… What is Exploration I asked myself? Several things came together at once for me…

(1) Exploration is journeying into the “unknown” to SEEK and FIND out what is out there;
(2) Exploration is dangerous; it has very high Risks, often for great Rewards… but not always.
(3) Exploration can be done solo, but some types of exploration cannot be successful without support;
(4) Exploration is endless; it does not ‘run out’ of content (there is ALWAYS something NEW to find);

Now I dint get these from a book or a google search, these are just my personal understanding or ‘take’ on what Exploration is. So, how does Odyssey’s “Exploration” stack up against my 4 point list?

(1) Exploration is journeying into the “unknown” to SEEK and FIND out what is out there;

Exploration in Odyssey is simplified right at the undock, there is no ‘SEEKING’, and you no longer have to “Open Scanner > select System Scan > Hit Scan” then wait a few seconds for a list of intriguing possibilities...

Now, you undock and there is it, all laid out in front of you. The Discovery Scanner sweeps and shows you all Anomalies and Signatures in the system, all right there on the main screen. Anomalies are just one simple click away from ‘warpto’ or ‘BM’ and Signatures show what celestial they are near, their scan ID, etc. It’s all just handed to you onna plate and forcefed right into your brain… whether you want it or not.

This is not seeking to find out, this is NOT ‘Exploration’. This is a Quest and the Dungeon Master (CCP) is doing ALL the work for you.

Score: -1

(2) Exploration is dangerous; it has very high Risks, often for great Rewards… but not always;

We all, I think, agree that Exploration is dangerous, but what are the dangers of Exploration? Well, you are most often out on your own, solo without backup or rescue nearby. Not necessarily true in EvE, but OK, this is still sorta there.

Back in the day if someone wanted to hunt down players in Anoms & Sigs he had to want to find you bad enough to learn the High Skill and Fine Art of The Probening… Now you can get attacked or ambushed in any of the new Insta-scanned Anoms (basically Anomalies are now the same as any celestial, they just don’t show up in the OV list is all and all Sigs can be scanned down in minutes) because ANY ID10T inna Catalyst can look at his screen and BM or warpto the same Anomalies just as easily as you now. So did the danger level go up? Yes… but in making it so, the competency and dedication required of the attacker has been lowered significantly.

So, with increased Risk did we get increased Reward? Well, IMHO no… but I live in a special place, not Empire, so going by the NoizyGamer (Nosy Gamer blog) my impression is yes but not great and now he says CCP is making noises about how “…the payout is too great…” so mebbe the Reward is there and it did sound like Noizy enjoyed it and felt he was getting his ISK worth outta it (“Odyssey - Living Up To The Name”) so I will take his word on it as I am not an Empire dweller and my ISK per hour expectations are Anoikis based.

Score: +1

(3) Exploration can be done solo, but some types of exploration cannot be successful without support;

The Data Sites seem to be a nod in this direction as the Lewt Piñata Minigame spews its treats out at a fair clip designed to be just fast enough, and the collection mechanic (a tractor beam none one knew was there on ALL ships regardless of class or fit) can only be (1) activated on one lewt can at a time and (2) only frees up after the can has been dumped in your hold, add this to the spreading out of the cans as they fly away into space and this pretty much assures that the solo player will not be able to capture 100% of the lewt hence flying with bros is recommended…

So you can either accept some loss of lewtz (though there are indications that you can scan and select the most valuable cans to go after, and I assume that means the cans you Hack not the cans you chase down… as I don’t know how you’d do that what with the clickfest that is part and parcel of the Lewt Spew… or you can get into the whole “Yea!, We got everything!” “So, split X ways, what’s that come to?” and again accept reduced profits… Six of one, half dozen of the other to me (I guess this would be dependent on your perception of the Reward level).

Score: 0

(4) Exploration is endless; it does not ‘run out’ of content (there is ALWAYS something NEW to find);

Exploration content in New Eden is finite… and, in truth, somewhat limited as the total number of sites by type, there are basically 6 site types and of those, only 2 are ‘really’ exploration (IE Hacking for ISK) centric:

PvE: (instant)
1 - Combat sites – Anomaly; NPC Combat -
Bounties/Loot & Salvage
2 - Ore sites – Anomaly; Mine - Ice or Asteroids

PvE: (probed)
3 - Gas sites – Signature; Mine -Gas
4 - Data sites – Signature; Hack w/ Data Analyzer – Loot (Anoikis only - NPC Combat – Loot & Salvage)
5 - Relic sites – Signature; Hack w/ Relic Analyzer – Loot (Anoikis only - NPC Combat – Loot & Salvage)

Travel: (probed)
6 - Wormholes; Signature; access to Anoikis systems; Anoms & Sigs; NPC Combat – Loot & Salvage; PI; Colonization.

Score: -1.

Overall score of the Exploration ideal behind Odyssey: -1.

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

Again I will turn to Noizy who plays a solo carebear Empire based game and Exploration is a solo(ish) carebear (ISK making not destroying) mechanic, he says, I feel quite tellingly:

“…the system (scan + on screen Anoms & Sigs) is less exploration and more shopping.  I now think of the exploration sites as data and relic stores.  When I jump into a system, I automatically see the billboards for all the stores tempting me to visit.”

Now, as he can immediately see all of the Discovery Scanner returns on screen he is more likely to drop probes and see what he can find. I agree that this sounds moar like shopping than Exploration (IE think roadside billboards) which means the “Hidden Stuff HERE! -->” Marketing Campaign is Working As Intended. Before Odyssey he probably would have just warped on through to his destination… and I will admit I too have popped through a hole or a gate and seen a sky full of ‘stuff’ and thought, “”Hmmmm, wonder what all that is?” a nanosecond later I remember and get all grouchy about CCP cluttering up the sky and ruining my roadside view…

So in this regard yes, the system scan changes may have made Exploration moar in-your-face as you have Big Loud Billboards that shout out that this system has hidden ‘stuff’ in it… (not really hidden though due to the Big Loud Billboard thing…) IE if you ‘see’ it, you might wanna go inside and buy the coolaid. So while I dunt like it much I dunt see it as quite as bad as the Magic Probes and from Noizy at least we have an upvote.

But, here is what I want to ask for/rant about…  Content. We have, in EvE, a very limited list of ALL the available sites, Anoms or Sigs, in or outside of New Eden and that aint Exploration. Hell once players start going to a new site, the highly detailed Reports & Guides start getting posted along with much of the details about how they spawn, work, what and how much drops, how to fit and hack/fight them, and how to ‘blitz’ them if need be, is all made available, etc., etc., etc… starting before the Expansion even drops onto TQ. It’s like IRL if I hear a sound like a Jet airliner, and I see a HUGE sign over the place I hear the noise at and I go there and I see airplanes landing and taking off… seriously, did I just ‘Explore’ and  ‘Discover’ the Airport? oh please…

Combat, Ore and Ice sites are kinda static ISK gathering situations. What I feel we need are truly ‘unknown’ NEW Signatures to spawn. We need Sigs that CHANGE over time, we need new Sigs added WITHOUT prior notice or documentation of “Hey get over on Sisi and try this out!” giving the players a chance to write up detailed EvE-Survival Reports before anything hits TQ. We need moar things, not BIG things… but small things, new things, unknown things…  We need Neverending Content.

Just Imagine…

You login and a patch drops, no biggie, skim the notes and nothing ‘verse shaking really catches your eye… Hey, they fixed that bug I hated in the thing I liked… sweet. You undock, the Discovery Scanner sweeps and you see a nice big red ‘TVY-725’ sig wayy out past the last planet… you drop probes, scan it down… scanning, scanning, Aura chimes in, “I am sorry Captain, I cannot resolve that signature, may I suggest Combat Probes?” uh… what? So, you drop Combats… scanning, scanning, scanning… Got it! You BM and warpto to 100km…

And what you see… you have never seen before… EVER.  WTF??

You go back to the Patch Notes… and there, kinda added as an afterthought, near the bottom it says, “Oh and a number of new Signatures have been added, but we’re ashamed to say, we lost the dev notes… please let us know what you find.” ZOMG!!!

Exploration should not be a ‘job’ with a steady if slightly fluctuating income… it should be a sweepstakes, a lottery, a spin of the Roulette Wheel… a turn of the cards… Day to day you should make just enough to keep it interesting with the ‘carrot’ of the very real chance, at low odds but real, of hitting it really BIG. Instead of a nice balanced drop, why not lotsa crap, or mediocre loot w/ a few nuggets of ‘real’ GOLD? I mean set a really random drop and have it pick from a table of 90% crap… carbon, scraps, mebbe some halfway decent stuff but that last 10% would be loot (single drop only) worth upwards of 20 to 100mISK each. Like a Faction POS BPC type items… just have the Nuggets drop only often enough to make it really worth checking under that next rock one moar time, JIC… enough that a ‘dedicated’ Explorer can make a decent living and rare enough to keep out the riff-raff, the immediate gratification types… To make a living as an Explorer you have to be willing to gamble your time for that Big Strike.

A few suggestions:

Randomize Exploration Sites:

New sites not in the current list… and not introduced with a parade and fanfare, just slipped in along with a normal patch with only the very slightest of mentions in the patch notes, and not mentioned AT ALL in the Dev Blogs…  until after…  =]

These would not be big sites like current Data & Relic, but smaller iterations on that theme…

Such as…

You scan down a Sig… on warping in you find a still smoking Abaddon, broken in half and drifting lifeless in space in a cloud of debris and corpses… Your Discovery Scanner shows there is a hackable sig in the forward section, Aura tells you that this is an Amarr Imperial Navy ship, last reported as heavily damaged and presumed lost. She was in the fleet that took part in the battle at the Core Freedom colony on the planet 'Pikes Landing'… the battle fought over the Imperial Templar technology… the tech behind the DUSTers… she must have somehow escaped from the battlespace but was unable to survive her massive damage… You gaze in wonder at what secrets she might hold... will the Relic Analyzer make you rich or barely pay the bills?

You scan down a Sig… on warping in you find an abandoned True Sansha POS Control Tower. After a quick scan Aura informs you that this one was used by Sansha Koveki himself… The forcefield is down, several mods are anchored, a few defense mods are incapped… and there, in several of the modules are hackable sigs… On hacking them you get the Lewt Piñata but… all you get is a few almost totally worthless items, mostly carbon and metal scraps that won’t even pay for your fuel… but wait... when you hacked the last can a new can appeared inside the tower itself… could the Data Analyzer possibly give you access to unanchor that several billion ISK Faction Control Tower!?!

You scan down a Sig… on warping in you find a small Asteroid outpost… it is heavily damaged and Aura reports that is old, very old and, of unknown origin… there are hackable sigs in the outpost itself and in a few orbiting Modules… on breaching their computer defenses you get… what is this? Even Aura does not know… you will have to wait until you dock at a station but Aura says you will have to find a Duvolle Labs Research Station in order to determine what you have found… and its value…

All of the above could be based on current ingame mission sets with the necessary changes and  tweaks, yes, still a bit of work, and yes, over time the players would have them all written up, total available loot drops, etc., etc. would be measured and weighed and spreadsheeted… loled, whined over and praised… it’s what we do, so?

And while CCP cannot add new items every single patch and expansion they could add a few new items every 2 or 3 Expansions included in a batch of new sites (again existing, or new, small sites heavily & creatively revamped) and drop them in, unannounced as usual, replacing some of the older ones… creating new content we would not even know existed until we ‘discovered’ it on our own (<- EXPLORATION), and losing content we would know was gone until we realized no one was finding them anymore… thereby creating the illusion of… Neverending Exploration.

Imagine heading back to dock with a 3 billion ISK Faction Control Tower in your hold… and when you undocked, you couldn’t afford the Itty V (you had to borrow) to get it home. Now, if you can only get it there in one piece...

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