Jita Is Burning

The goons pulled a fast one on all of us.  We all knew that Jita was going to burn in celebration of The Mittani getting 10,000 votes in the CSM elections.  It then kind of quasi changed to be as a way to get back at care bears for Mittens getting banned for his drunken comments (It doesn't have to make sense, their Goons).

What they did though was in my opinion brilliant.  This is just information I read so it might not be true, but if it is, well done Goons, well done.  The Goons knew that the smart care bear would make his final freighter runs a day or two before the official start date and then steer clear of Jita.  The CFC then leaked that they would start a day early to catch these bears that were smarter than the average ones; they then proceeded to give the entire care bear population a giant phallic middle finger and did it a day earlier than that.

Love the Goons, hate the Goons, care bears, PvP gods.  It doesn't matter who you are, this is why we play Eve.  I've seen a few people in certain chats and on forums saying that the CFC are ruining the game and CCP should step in and make this kind of activity against the EULA.  To those of you saying that, I say, grow a pair, understand the game you're playing, and stop bitching.

THIS is why I play Eve, not to suicide gake, but because people can organize something of this scale.  If CCP stepped in and said "no more", there game would lose its interest and die overnight.  In a game where your actions matter, things like this are going to happen and I say bring on more of it.

So don't be a baby and don't be stupid and fly your freighter into Jita this weekend.  Instead, why not join the fight against the Goons and try to save those helpless care bears?  Or join the side of the Goons and help suicide all those evil little bears.  Or go make an alliance and take over the CFC's sovereignty while they're distracted.  Or go into one of the other thousands of systems the game offers.  Point it, stop bitching and go play eve.

A quick guide on how to Killmail Whore

Is your K:D ratio on BattleClinic suffering?  Does this make you sad?  Do you think of suicide...for others...so murder (all in spaceships of course)?  Well come on over to Jita and my 8 step program is sure to ease your woes.

1. Get into a clean clone.
2. Get the highest Scan Resolution you can (Sensor Boosters, Interceptor or cheap T1 Frig)
3. Put a couple guns on.
4. When ships go flashy due to GCC, target and shoot.
5. Repeat
6. There is no 6.
7. ????
8. Profit

A couple notes.  I'd keep the ship cheap in case you get ganked (a 200m isk Tornado ganked my 2 million isk Slasher), same reasoning behind the clean clone.  There is also a bug where if you shoot at a GCC player you will also get a GCC and get Concorded, if this happens (which it did to me), just petition and hope they answer and fix it in a timely manner.

Agony PvP Basic Class

Agony held their PvP Basic class today, so I grabbed my backpack, dusted off my calculator, and went back to school.  First off let me say that nothing in the class is world breaking, if you've played Eve for any length of time you've probably heard most of what they cover.  That being said there's a difference between having read something, and understanding it, and being good at it.  For that reason, I highly recommend that anyone interested in PvP sign up for their next class.

The Hydra Principle

We all know that the Hydra was a mythological beast with multiple heads; if you killed one head than two more would grow in its place.  The goal of the Hydra fleet is to mimic this behavior through its e-war use.  By flying a well organized, mobile force, and effectively spreading electronic warfare, the Hydra fleet is able to dictate the terms of an engagement in way a blob, even in more expensive and powerful ships, can not.

More information about a Hydra fleet is available on the Agony website, but the bullet points are:

• Liberal use of all types of mid slot e-war, including: Webs, Points, Scrams, Damps, Weapon Disruption, and ECM.
• Highly mobile.  Due to the speed of frigates a Hydra fleet is able to move quickly to respond to targets or escape from danger.
• Cheap:  Though the entire force can be powerful, each individual ship is cheap and disposable, thus individual loses are of little consequence to the fleet as a whole, or to the pilot who's ship was lost.
• Flexibility & Redundancy. If one pilot goes down and loses point on a target, there are usually other pilots who still have the target pinned down; same goes for other types of e-war.  By carrying a refit of e-war modules it is also possible to quickly dock up and refit to cover holes left by fallen fleet members.

D-Scan, spiraling, fleet movements, voice coms, recon reports, safe spots

All of these topics are covered during the class as well.  They are pretty self explanatory but the practical application of them with teachers who are very experienced in the use of it is very beneficial.

Overall I highly recommend this class to anyone who flys in New Eden. It is beginner level stuff for sure, but this class will create the foundation needed to further your knowledge and abilities in PvP.

the Agony website is: http://www.agony-unleashed.com/

Mentors, Kills, Things I've Learned, and Inferno Escalation

I've finally been assigned a mentor, Magnus Ambers.  It's his job to change me from a cuddly kitten to a murderous tiger.  I figure with his teaching I'll be at least this good at running a gatecamp:

I've been setting up as many tacs and safes as I can stomach at any given time, seriously is there a less entertaining part of eve?  But I've finally got at least our home system pretty much covered, and I'm completely moved in with enough ships to last a little while, and I'm ready to get going.

It took me a few days due to having to get settled but I finally got in on my first kill (in null) yesterday, though I did lose my ship in the process.  I was flying my skirmish Rifter and paper tank doesn't even begin to cover it.  We took out a Hawk and I thought my speed would keep me safe, but alas it didn't.

My first mistake was not orbiting at 500m, I realized as soon as I was dead that my orbit was set to 1900m, so my transversel wasn't as high as it could and should have been.  Then in my haste to warp my pod out I clicked on a stargate instead of a planet, 0.o, my pod saver tab clearly wasn't set properly and has since been fixed.  Thankfully though the gate was empty and no further mishaps ensued, but I clearly need to go over all my overview tabs and make sure their set up properly, I can't be letting mistakes happen simply because of an overview that isn't set up properly.

I was able to get the initial point on the target and stay alive long enough for the rest to finish off the target, so it wasn't a total waste.  I'll take only losing a Rifter for contributing on a Hawk my first day.

Other things I knew but now I've learned:

• Don't warp to 0 on a gate - I got caught on an abandoned bubble doing just that, thankfully it was abandoned so I was fine, but that could have ended badly.
• Tacs are of vital importance - I learned this because of the above, can't let that happen again.
• D-Scan is more important that it was in HighSec - I need to do a better job of keeping track of what ships are where, I missed out on a couple of kills because I didn't know they were coming.  This will take some practice.
• Know the map - In HighSec I haven't really needed to know the map very well.  The auotpilot route has always worked for me, I need to get The Syndicate map down like the back of my hand.

One last note: the Inferno Escalation patch deploys tonight, make sure you're ready with a fairly long skill to train in case something goes wrong.  The highlights are:

• No more T1 Meta 0 module drops from NPCs.
• Titan tracking is being lowered.
• Drone alloys are being removed.
• Incursion rewards are being lowered.
• Active effects will now display above/below the HUD.
• We can now make our toons look like smurfs (hopefully...), or at least bi-racial.

Moving Day

Moving day.  Time to sell all the shit I don't need.  Anyone need 100 Rifters or so?  I bought them for RvB but I don't want to carry them all around creation so I'll be selling them before I make the final move to null.  I think I have too much ammo too...

On another note, I'm seriously shocked that I got accepted into Agony.  I talked to Deran Francks in their public channel just to ask a couple questions, hoping that sometime soon I would be ready to apply, and he suggested that I apply right now.  I figured they'd see my app and say I needed some more experience and to try and apply later.  Toterra did my interview and said I was ready!  I seriously haven't been this excited ever while playing Eve.  I can't wait to get out there full time.

I know I'll learn a ton and have a great time doing so.  I'll keep this updated a few times a week with anything interesting that comes up.  I'm sure you'll all have a good laugh with me as I prove I don't have a clue with what I'm doing.

0.0

I'm finally moving out to 0.0 now that I've been accepted into Agony Unleashed, and I figured what better time to start a blog to chronicle my misadventures.  Expect lots of failures, a few successes, and maybe you can even learn a thing or two along with me.

I'll mostly talk about my experiences in shedding my carebear self, but I may branch into other topics as well.