Friday 29 June 2012

Lack of sleep brings out the derp

Lack of sleep really brings out the derp in people last night saw me make multiple derp's because I was too tired to realise how retarded I was being!

I spent the day chilling out ran a plex nothing sexy dropped apart from a 100mn After burner which I'll use for my Tengu later on down the line! There were lots of people on which made a nice change I had someone call eyes on a small gang in D87 consisting of a Hurricane, Vexor, Raptor, Myrmidon. I decided I'd engage in my dual web ham drake, I undocked in "Cuban Missile Crisis" and poked Intel to let people know what was about to go down and back up would be really nice. Having experienced before trying to set up a fleet and give a plan was time consuming so I warped in on the assumption someone would arrive. I landed at 0m and only the Vexor and Hurricane were on gate so I lit up the Hurricane and he jumped out which confused me considering what happened next. The Vexor went red so I poured my missiles into his hull until the Hurricane and Myrm jumped in. The Raptor came at 0m so I webbed him down and started beating on him till he ran away, switching back to the Hurricane I had Intel lighting up asking for Intel on the brawl so I just called for DPS Ships to warp to 0 on the OSHT gate and I'd call primary's at this point the hurricane was in half armor and I was in about a quarter shields they had switched their guns to Operi wolf which didn't make sense as he was no direct threat to them, however it left me valuable time to pile on the DPS leaving me to eliminate the hurricane with the help of Anderon who had blindly followed my lead an came to my aid shortly after the Hurricane died more friends landed on field the Vexor went down next to eliminate a good 490DPS from the field as I was now in armour as luck would have it the Myrm switched scram to our second drake allowing me to overheat my midslots while keeping the Myrm double webbed and burn away as I was entering structure the Myrmidon's Gallant drones were to slow to keep up so the damage stopped and the Myrm popped with y drake breezing by in 89% structure! It was a close fight for me but I had many friends arrive practically an entire fleet turned up to whore away on the free kill mails I had provided. That fight was when I was awake and was just to put in perspective how I play when not being a retard I generally don't get people killed apart from Operi who had coasted to close and got scrammed. Later on we chased a Local Down gang nothing big 4 players one in a Jaguar two Talos and a Huggin a gang that had some range control and good DPS at the time I was flying my Cynabal and we had a BC heavy fleet with some fast tackle. We chased them around a little until I finally got eyes on where they were going Anderon landed on gate at 0m with them and they jumped thinking my gang was still in system I called for everyone to warp to the 5E gate and Anderon to get tackle on something. Mistake number one. What I hadn't realised was that we had a slow gang in comparison to there's and that our gang was actually in PO4 so all we had to bear was a Drake, Hurricane and Cynabal I jumped in and burned for the Huggin taking a lot of Damage in the process as our gang jumped in I hadn’t realised our Hurricane had died and I had burnt about 70km from hate In the end my brain fired up and I pulled range surviving just barely under the reps of our Scimmy pilot. Sad face.

Derp number two was me chasing after a Taranis that had reproached gate so I jumped after him and pointed him in my Dramiel now instead of keeping my range I ended up at 0m on him that's really really bad. Our guys jumped in I overheated guns and died just as he popped. Stupid Rand! Get some sleep! What I should have done once the Rapier had tackle was overheated my afterburner and pulled out to about 10km instead I sat there like a moron and died I was so tired I didn't even realise till too late!

But alas in the grand scheme of things I had fun and that's all that matters, I learnt to accept my losses long ago so the occasional derp keeps me on my toes and stops me being complacent in my ability to lead gangs and such. I have had sleep now, and am ready to tackle EVE again, like I said in my previous post long ago. Sometimes you get the bear... But sometimes the bear gets you. This time he got me. GF

Randy o/

Plexs and a Jump Freighter

Forgot to post this it's been sat in drafts for a few days! Going up anyway ^_^

Yesterday morning I didn't start work till lunch time so I had a couple of hours to kill before heading out, I decided to go and drop probes and see what I could find.

The first couple of systems were completely void of signatures not even a lowly gravimetric site! However I finally found where they had all gone. Probes showed 3 sigs so I started scanning and had two wormholes pop up one to high security space nine jumps from Jita! ( I went and bought a claymore later on ) And one to scalding pass ( where we killed a Hurricane later on as well ) however the third signature looked promising as I had a hard time tracking it down till finally it gave me the sweet response I was after "Angel Prisoner Retention Facility" this complex is a 8 out of 10 rating for difficulty which to be honest is pretty easy. The plex drops B-Type loot and a Machariel BPC along with Overseers Effects although this isn't guaranteed, normally I make between 1.2b and 2.1b depending on what drops I get.

I decided to try a Different set up to run it this time usually I roll Macherial, Vargur and Scimitar this time I went with a nano shield buffer Dominix and the Vargur and Scimitar just incase. The Domi cap transferred my Vargur allowing me to perma run my shield booster and it was also sporting Berserker II and Bouncer II aswell for DPS and I swear it's insane with sentry rigs and drone damage amps on it I expect it to out perform all expectations on the next run. I managed to get a Mach BPC so that was ok I guess. On another note I've bought my Jump Freighter! The Caldari Rhea! Aptly named the U.K.S Scotteh another couple of days and I'll be bouncing round null sec delivering presents to all the good boys and girls.

Fly Safe!

Randy o/

Monday 25 June 2012

ROL raiding and Bubble Sniping

So home from work Sunday afternoon I jump onto Eve, it's about 3.30pm and locals buzzing with my Eve buddy's from NI4NI. I decide to go out scanning first, not finding much of interest apart from a class three wormhole in D87 I decide to go run some sites as it’s inevitably dull and the wormholes void of life with three dead towers scattering round the system. Me and Izi ship up to Drakes and my alt in a Scimitar and we proceed to run sites being interrupted by probes we decide it's best we leave so we finish up the second site and bugger off. Scooping about 70m iskies so not a total loss to be honest and it defiantly beat the monotony of ratting belts. Shortly after arriving home the guys decide a sniping gate camp would be a laugh so we hop into our snipers and bubble up a couple gates. Some Raiden guys seem to be trying to get somewhere with three Helios a Manticore, Rapier and Hurricane all entering KB within about 20 minutes we kill one Helios ( my decloak skills ) the Rapier burns for gate and so does the Manticore pilot.

Said Raiden Manticore pilot proceeds to shout to every new local in KB that we have a camp set up now I realise why Raiden failed so hard people like him. A new target not of Raiden faggotry appears! An Omen Navy Issue is making its way to us when to no surprise the Raiden guy once again solidifies his place among the fail pilots of eve and starts shouting in local again, the wise Omen pilot heads his warning and reroutes. However our eyes are everywhere! We move gates as the Omen has appeared in 5E after a few minutes he lands on gate being pushed through by one of our hurricanes as he sheds his cloak my web and scram reach there long fingers out slowing him to a dead stop teamed with our Rapier this pilot is going nowhere.

The fleet proceeds to melt him down to scrap in a few moments, a bubble is deployed and his Pod snatched victory is ours! Meanwhile back in the dark depths of wormhole space Mika has been scanning finding a null sec wormhole to ROL space and an entrance to a C5 while exploring the C5 a Domi ninja closes the entrance and poor old Mika is stuck! But do not fret because our brave adventurer scans his way out and makes it back to us in D87! We get a few more people in fleet and decide that fucking with ROL would be fun! So we head into the wormhole only to be greeted by a Loki decloaking from the ROL infidels! We move quickly jumping into their system and leaving via our exit gate, landing on the second gate has a Noctis land with us, he jumps and we jump and then he goes boom! Along with his pod. Expensive Noctis! Over 300m including his pod. We move on hearing that five Drakes and a Heretic are chasing us! Two more jumps and realising that we could kill them we stop and re approach gate. The drakes slowly trickle in and the brawl begins, Losing two of our Talos (how? ) we kill all five of their Drakes and the Heretic we linger too long afterwards relishing the success when another Drake jumps in we aggress and then an entire fleet arrives... Whoops! Everyone Deaggress's with several of us making it out but losing our Eos and Daredevil and Scimitar! And some other stuff but I forgot what! Either way with our kills and losses we came out on top considering all the pods where implanted and one of our late to the party guys popped a cloaky and a hurricane 1 jump out from us. It was a Epically fun fight for all apart from Counter the ROL Fc who was sad he couldn't whore my kill mail <3 With my pod safely docked back up in D87 after running the gauntlet back to the wormhole I logged off for the night. With nearly 100 kills under my belt for this month it's turning out to be a good June after all!

I should really care bear some more tomorrow and get some isk! Till then have fun and fly reckless!

Randy o/

Friday 15 June 2012

Eve - Brothers in arms.

Thursday saw a new addition to the Eve community, My little bro ( he's 19 so not so little ).

After chilling with him for the day while I was playing Eve I made the suggestion that he should sign up for the trial and one month game time. ( I got a plex for it ) and see what he thought of the game, so he did just that creating himself a minmatar toon because after consideration I decided that would be the best starting point, minmatar rule after all.

He got through the character creator easily enough and I gave him a quick one on one about what certain stuff did , just the basics so his head wouldn't explode and off he went to do the tutorial missions. Having him sat next to me on his laptop proved useful as I was able to provide more accurate guidance and help set up the initial skill training queue for him I told him to grab evemon as it would help plan out a skill queue for future ships and also keep a eye on his skill queue and without my help he downloaded, installed and set it up with the API key. He has almost finished with all the tutorial missions despite losing a couple slashers at first he was abit perturbed about losing his first ship but after that he just thought it was funny I explained that losing lots now would help him to not lose a lot in the future and also get him used to losing stuff.

I helped fit out his ship with basic mods and lent him some ISK to keep himself afloat I explained the basics of ship fitting and transversal and soon enough his ships losses declined as he was able to orbit the NPCs and warp out if things got bad, he has been making use of the tactical overlay to help gauge when he can do DPS and when he can't, in one mission he got webbed and scrambled and couldn't warp out or catch the other ship so he went back fit an afterburner and a web of his own went back and tackled the pirate NPC and killed him, he surmised that if he got in his face before he got slowed down he could do some damage and hopefully win. In two days he's learnt what a lot of people take a long time to figure out so I'm impressed. At one point he burst out laughing as one mission apparently told him to kill NPCs and then leg it when the "charges where set" he sat orbiting the facility in the mission only to have it explode and take his ship with it. Made me chuckle!

Don't get me wrong he still asked noob questions like wheres the undock button and why he kept dieing in a reaper etc but he has leant a lot already especially where modules are concerned if he can't use it he'll buy the skill book train it to level one and continue and with the skill plan I set up.

It'll be interesting to see how things go and how well he gets on with the game in the next few months, he may well be my own case study on the learning curve in Eve, I may even have him join some of my Eve info for noob videos as he can provide genuine questions about game mechanics and how to do certain things that a veteran player could not ( unless he was a eBay toon ) so here's to family flying in space! I hope to see him grow into a capable PVP pilot and one day flew together pillaging other people's ship hulls!

Fly safe

Randy o/

Thursday 14 June 2012

Wardec changes again?!

I've seen a few posts now about the star fraction vs goon "forever war" I won't go in to any details as people already know it all. I have only one thought on this subject and that is why is CCP changing how things are now? The idea that you could bring in as many friends as you could was a great thing for the war system it more accurately depicted how real life wars went. We used to bat phone anyone and everyone when a war started just as star fraction effectively did. The only reason I can see this being changed is because CCP is pandering to the goons or some hidden reason they have yet to disclose. So once again the war system is broken with small corps not being able to defend themselves with friends and making the whole ally system pointless. Why CCP did you change it so that massive alliances can once again continue with impunity while at war with smaller entity's? I think it has a lot to do with the 10,000 or so accounts active in GSF alone that could go dormant. That's nearly 150,000 euros a month a considerable amount if they paid cash for them it's only a thought but if by chance that threat was made then I could understand CCP stance... I guess. This is all just speculation unless anyone has any other ideas? I'd really welcome a chat with one of the involved Devs to get a better more rounded view! So if your reading this CCP I'd love to hear from ya!

Love Rand

Friday 8 June 2012

Remote Repping POS?

I was having a debate with a friend of mine on the usefulness of POS towers and there obvious downfalls.

While they can be packed with useful things such as standard labs, drug production, moon miners, T3 production labs and reverse engineering labs among other things! They can also boast an impressive array of weaponry dealing fairly significant damage to a small opposing force and have a large amount of shield and armor hit points. But that's where the good stuff ends. They cost around 400m a month to fuel a large one. Even with hardener’s it's killable in under an hour with an average sized fleet of BS and guardians and even if a friendly fleet arrives it's hard to save the tower or even themselves if supers are on the field! In the age of super capitals POS stats mean little outside of wormhole space, there isn't much of a solution to this apart from drastically redesigning mother ships DPS ability or buffing the control towers with better base resists and HP in general. However I came up with a plausible solution and also one that is just plain stupid.

Ok so let's say we have a large POS under attack by about 50 Abaddon's and 10 guardians. The POS guns aren't breaking any tanks and your fleet of 40 BS only has 3 guardians. No way you'll out rep there DPS and you will all probably die. But here's where my solution comes in rather than buffing HP give the POS the ability to fit POS size remote reps! They'd have considerable resists and HP but not enough to stop them being killed by a good sized fleet and only allow say 4 anchored on a POS. Reps would be the equivalent to say 4 carriers with dual reps out of triage. This would provide a substantial increase in POs fleets survivability while not completely over powering them it would also allow some protection from super caps to your capitals if any and again without making it to OP!

The second idea was insane and stupid but we had a chuckle over it. Give the POS manoeuvring thruster's to allow it to move from its current anchored orbit point to another near the same moon allowing the POS to be off the warp in of the moon itself and possibly even off grid. This wouldn't be OP in itself because there easy to scan down! Second part would be to allow the POS shields to extend their power to aid another ship and only one! The POS itself would take 80% of the incoming damage while the damage it does receive would be increased 25% so its shields would go down faster than the actual DPS being applied! This would allow a little more safety to capitals jump freighters and super capitals while outside the POS shields while cyno ships would still be at risk seeing as 10 tornados hitting for 10k each would still hit for 2k damage more than your average cyno has!

I'll run numbers and better refine the ideas but I think as far as POS defence goes this would be epic without being OP!

Thursday 7 June 2012

Celebrating 100 post's - Competition Time!

 Ok guy's to celebrate my 100th post! <3 I will be doing a small competition! Send me in the most hilarious engagement you have over the next 7 days and the winner will receive a Cynabal and runner up a Dramiel!



 What am I looking for?

Well let's say you get into a hilarious engagement win or lose and you end up in tears over it laughing drunken roams, kitchen sink fleets that kind of thing! All you have to do is write up an after action report being as accurate as possible include links the kills in the report kind of like mine! I will only accept verified Eve kill links in the reports! And Eve mail them to me! It's that simple you'll have 7 days so plenty of time to find that perfect fight! The one that cracks me up the best wins it's that simple! Including a fraps of the fight wins you bonus points and if you did include fraps I'll even fit the ship for you! If you manage to get your comm's recording on as well then even better! Hell get me the enemy’s comms recording and if that gives me the giggles I may even drop a couple faction mods on too! Your entry will also be posted on the blog along with any fraps and/or copies of tears from local!

I look forward to seeing what you guys have! And good luck!

Oops we accidentally your Fleet! Twice!


Logging into Eve yesterday saw Kai begging for PvP and not being one disappoint I shipped up into my Cynabal and we went and camped a gate in D87 then moved on to V7D and 5E looking for some kills when bluespy joined us after about half a hour of not a lot of stuff to destroy the gods of EVE heard our plea and sent forth a bounty of pilots with whom we would meet head on in the field of battle!

My scout reported a small 5 man gang coming from KB- of 3 drakes and. Harbinger with only myself, Kai, blue Spy and ICUwarrior we contemplated our options! With Kai being in a stealth bomber and ICU in a flycatcher along with Spy's drake I decided to test out my abaddon! I put on insurance as I was going in balls to the wall and expected to die! The gang jumped in and warped to OSHT- our flycatcher jumped through and grabbed them as my Abaddon lumbered out of warp jumping found them just popping the flycatcher but they had burnt to gate to get him for some reason landing me 5km from them I tackled the first drake I could and they all aggressed I called primary's and we burned down the first drake then another drake by this point I'm in low armor and happy with the upcoming third kill I overheat everything and melt him to scrap the harbinger pops easily into a pool of metal chunks! The forth drake try's to run away but ICU in all his glory hero tackles it with his scouts Helios! And we kill the last drake as a Manticore drops a bomb on me trying to finish me off! Last drake pops and I warp to my bounce spot as the guys start looting the field. I am now in 35% structure! By the time the forth drake pops were in hysterics on comms mainly because we just whelped there fleet and because my Abaddon survived! I make it back to
D87 and dock up switching to the vagabond to go and pick up loot as I'm scooping a Gypsy Band gang come through so I hit my pounce as they pass by leaving the wrecks ladened with loot untouched I finish scooping everything and head home! Was one of the most fun fights I've had in a long time although I will never understand why the fit there ships the way they did! I have a feeling they were going to do a escalation but who knows. They returned later on in slightly better ships... So we chased them and camped them into OSHT- few minutes later another one of them in a lone drake jumped into my Cynabal and Titans Maelstrom and died.. Really fast! And then I hero tackled a drake in my Cynabal as the rest of there fleet ran away! The drake died pretty quick and again it was terribly fit albeit a little better then the last one! I made the mistake of not carrying any scorch or conflagration otherwise the fight would have been a lot quicker! All in all it was pretty epic. We continued to camp D87 and ran around chasing Local Down who ran away, and took a small break, coming back found an initiative gang of a couple drakes and Lachesis we decided to engage with what we had as people warped off field to ship up to BC our guys left on gate tackled and aggroed I returned in a hurricane as our sabre died after keeping point on the Lachesis! We burned there entire fleet to the ground losing only a sabre and hurricane! Small gang PvP is where it's at totally fun and no blobs! We only had a couple more then the opposing fleets and in the first instance we were out gunned and the second we were a good match up but with our hurricanes we had a lot more DPS fielded! They did have a Hugginn on field but it ran away when we started welping them!

Battle report for the first fight is here! Eve kill counted both engagements which sucks but check the killmails to confirm what was there! And the second is here!

Enjoy!

And if you wanna join eHarm for some Lols were taking on dedicated and self sufficient Eu and USTZ players so drop myself or Pollycrhest a line ingame!

Fly reckless! ( In Abaddon's )

Wednesday 6 June 2012

Rands Eve Info For Noobs

Hi guy's! This is going to be my first of many installments designed to help new players with the first 6 months or so of there Eve career! This video is merely a basic video to start with and I will be using FRAPS or other recording software for future episodes! Enjoy it :)

Please give me some feedback ect which will help improve future episodes and also any topics you want covered feel free to ask!

Tuesday 5 June 2012

The long road to the jump freighter

The jump freighter arguably the third most expensive ship hull in the game clocking in at around 7.2 billion isk! Half of what a Nyx or Wyvern would set you back. I've been wanting one for awhile as moving 500,000m3 of stuff with a carrier is a pain in the ass it took me 6 hours last time. Considering the amount of stuff I have floating in the depths of space station hangars I figured getting one would be beneficial to me it's Also a ship that holds its value.

The Jump freighter can hold around 350,000m3 it can also make use of the capital ships Jump drive allowing it to traverse great distances without the need for gates. The good thing about this is that I'm able to launch from my highsec drop point and move it down to my base of ops! Two trips and I'd be done, where as at the moment I'm reduced to hauling stuff to the lowsec where my carrier is, which is tedious and time consuming. I'm currently at about 4 billion isk so only another 3.2billion to go or there about's but as per normal I have to dip into the fund to buy the plexs! Luckily I have more cynabals to see! My alt character is training up jump freighters as we speak and it's going to be at least 24 days before I can use one efficiently so I have 24 days to make nearly 4b in isk! So lets see if i can make it! Any donations would be welcome ;)

Love y'all
Randunip out! O/

Monday 4 June 2012

Harsh Worlds Fiction - Serenity

I unplugged from the curse, letting the pod's fluid drain down I opened the hatch and stepped out onto the bridge. Ye crew had already disembarked from the ship leaving it deserted apart from the low hum of the ships main computing systems keeping her afloat and life support running while we were docked. I dried myself off and threw on my captains uniform, it was nothing special a close fitted jump suit with a few commendation badges attached to it and the captains insignia on it along with my corporations logo and motto embroidered onto the arm reading "Fly Reckless, Die Drunk!" I had yet to embrace the second part of this odd motto. I took the grav lift to the disembarkation area and left the ship to go and see Scotty the docking manager.

Scotty poured me a coffee as we went over the release forms for Serenity. "Trouble brewing Randy?" he asked while Typing into the computer system.
"Aye you could say that, Make sure you put all of my acquisitions on her... Im going to need as much tank and fire power as she can bring to bear" I glanced at the screen the drone cameras showed hundreds of crew ferrying parts onto my beloved Serenity. I'd never taken her out in her warfare fitting before most of her current fit was stripped while larger armour plates were fused on along with some of the officer modules I had acquired through the destruction of high ranking pirate ships. Serenity was aptly named because the ship always instilled a sense of Serenity in me the way she glided through the cosmos like a angel, granted an angel of death but still she was elegant and powerful but with this fit she would be unstoppable. I smiled as I watched the crew finish fitting out the membranes.

I stopped off at my quarters and opened up a small box inside was 6 little implants. They were named Slaves, for what reason I have no idea but they have a special purpose while plugged into my neural network they sent signal pulses to any ship I was connected to and increased its armor value considerably how it managed I have no idea but these would come in handy in the coming war.

I slumped into the hard graphite coloured bench that was apparently my couch... Caldari weren't known for there comfort this was emphasised by the entire room being about fifty shades of grey only broken up by the almost luminous green plant on a shelf.

Im coming for you, I won't stop till I've wiped you and your fleet off the map.
I thought to myself while slowly dozing off... "we shall see.... " echoed a reply.

I ignored it and slowly crept into the shadows of my mind to recoup from the last few days....


Enjoy all :)