Everyday Eve

Ok so I have spent the last couple of weeks running around looking for trouble.  There is plenty of trouble to be had in Eve and it has been a blast.  I could go through the stories and the tales but I haven’t got time right now as real life is pressing me and I will be offline for a few weeks with work. More details on some of those stories later.

All I can say right now is that PvP in Eve is all it is cracked up to be and more, there is nothing like the rush that comes when you engage someone for a fight.  I have had a lot of fun spending the ISK I made salvaging. A lot of fun. I have not killed one ship solo!

Eve surpasses most other MMO’s.  I have to tell you Eve peeps though Dark Age of Camelot would still give Eve a run for its money in terms of technical PvP content.  Where Eve pips DaoC is because you lose your shit and it should remain like this.  This means that people choose their fights much more carefully and you don’t get the same level of griefing.  Yes I said that.  The level of griefing in Eve PvP especially at the level I have been playing it is miniscule compared to other MMO’s like DaoC. Shocking isn’t it?

That might need some clarification.  In DaoC there are no penalties for dying.  Apart from a period of sickness after you die which reduces your stats.  As a result everyone moshes it up in a big mass on a bridge or at a tower or a keep.  If you try to learn anything about your character and how it is working you won’t often get a chance.  Plus the usual internet mentality kicks in and the usual dicks like to go around killing solo characters, rude spamming and laughing at them.  Combine this behaviour with a relatively small arena and it can often be very frustrating.  To avoid it you get a stealth character only to discover there are 8-10 people in groups stealthing and ass jamming you.  Whilst it can obviously be the case in Eve there is a lot more space and you can choose your fights – especially in small ships.  Of course griefing will be happening but it is not an epidemic like in DaoC.

In addition to lower levels of griefing, especially when you have a small nimble ship,  there is much less of a massive zerg than other MMO’s.  In my travels in Low Sec there are tons of small gangs and lots of small scale PvP going on.  There is in fact more room for solo than in other MMO’s and that is a very good thing.  But the thing is that the fights themselves are amazing.

Watching your shields being stripped away as you frantically try to get the right range and at the same time do damage. Whilst your being killed by drones, missiles, guns and most of all – your own stupidity!  It is adrenaline pumping, much much more than other games.  I love it.

Anyway, first things first these are the people I have very much enjoyed fighting over the last two weeks:

• Bischopt
• Jev North
• Karl Planck
• Kollron

I have lost 10 Rifters with various fits to the tune of 0.13 billion ISK which isn’t too bad to be frank given the amount of fun I have had!  Special props goes to both Bischopt and Karl Planck for different reasons.

First of all Bischopt.  This is one guy who rips me a new ass each time I fight him.  He could probably kill me blindfold.  Anyway just to give you a sense of why I think he deserves a mention apart from his obvious knowledge of PvP.  Last Sunday night I stumbled across the Eve TV Lemmings group and decided to join them.  We had a real laugh roaming and dying in Low Sec.  It was my first experience in a gang and it was a lot of fun even if I was a bit jittery – having never fought in front of gate guns before. In that roam we came across Bischopt in a Brutix, a Taranis, and an Enyo.  That bloke was so crazy he engaged the Lemmings on gates just for the giggles.  It was funny to watch.

I felt bad that we had this nubbins gang and were mobbing him – in DaoC people would never forgive you for this kind of change from solo to group.  But here was a bloke who just laughed it off.  His view was that it was not very often that he got a chance to blow crap up so easily.  So even though he lost a considerable amount of ISK it didn’t seem to bother him.  Plus he must have blew me up about three times that night.  For me that says it all – a total stand up bloke.

Whilst the lemmings group was a lot of fun the truth is I have  enjoyed the solo roaming more. Some nights I didn’t find much to fight. Being at the bottom of the food chain is like that!  Still I am honing my scanning skills.

Whilst solo my ass has been handed to me on a plate lots of times.  In fact I was losing so badly it was worrying.  Frequently I would not manage to get whomever I was fighting out of shield.  I discovered I was using the wrong ammo, was at the wrong range and so on.  However, there was something much more serious. Reading my game logs didn’t give me many hints about what was going wrong other than my DPS was bloodly awful.  I was only hitting for like 20-40 with 200mm auto cannons.  I might as well fart in their general direction for all the good these auto cannons were doing.  Then a few nights ago I fought a bloke called Karl Planck who very kindly convoed me after to talk through the fight.

He offered to help me out so I went and got another Rifter.  After discussing skills and ammo (I had used the wrong ammo yet again). He asked me “Whats your angular velocity?”

“Err….” I had no clue what he was talking about.  He got me to use my afterburner’s and fly around him whilst he was stationary when we had figured out my tracking it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to hit anything with my 200mm auto cannons.  Basically my angular velocity was going over the tracking speed of my guns so frequently that I was not going to hit shit.

We then had another fight but this time rather than travel around him in circles at speed I flew in a straight line and lo and behold the damage went up significantly.  I had spent all this time using guns that were too good for my poor level of skills, even though I have spent weeks ploughing time into the support skills in Gunnery.  I wasn’t good enough for those guns.  Even better I found out you can get your angular velocity and speed onto the overview!!  Like WTF.  So now I have modified my fit and have a lot more of an understanding of PvP.  Thanks to these veterans I have been really enjoying myself.  My only niggling worry is ISK.  I am not sure I will be able to do much as a solo Pirate.

But stuff worrying about that for now! The moral of this story, well its not really a moral because it has no moral content whatsoever, but meh.

If you are gonna fight with gunz in Eve don’t forget your angularities!

Moriarity on Battle clinic – bring on the pain!

One of the reasons why I haven’t posted for a while is that I have been preparing diligently for PvP.  I made the decision a couple of weeks back.  For me most of PvE in eve is too predictable, repetitive and a bit boring.  Its not my bag.  I know there will be tons of others who love it but at the end of the day you can remove and eliminate your risks by out of game mechanics and most people do.

The removal or minimisation of risk is the minimisation of what makes a game a game.  All games involve chance.  Its one of the key features of Eve.  So for me experiencing the game is about experiencing a better risk reward benefit.

Ok so what have I been doing?

The first thing I did was say farewell to Pro Synergy.  They were a great bunch of people and some of the things they were achieving on salvage was just incredible.  In fact if there was a proper stock exchange in Eve I would buy into them heavily. They were amazing, very well organised with a very simple concept that worked beautifully for all parties.  I don’t want to give away their secrets but you can do your own maths.  If each mission nets around 4million isk for the Mission Runner and the Salvager and you do 40 a week you get 160million ISK.  It works really well and I admire them totally.  Its the kind of corporation you can make a lot of ISK in fast.

The problem was of course that because this was their main activity they were not that interested in PvP and they operated a policy that basically ruled out the old “wee dorty” low sec roam.  In that respect, rather than inevitably come into conflict with them, it was time to leave.  I hated leaving actually. I should not have joined if I wasn’t going to be there for the long run.  But I know they didn’t mind me leaving either.  In many ways their business model thrives off people like me coming and going as we please.  The feeling that I ought not have joined remains however and so I have resolved myself to make sure that my next corp move is much more permanent.

So what have I done – I have spent the last two weeks working on distribution agents for the Sisters of Eve.  This has taken me down to Arnon where I have spent my time boring the hell out of my crew members hauling homeless people and marines.  I have also completed several top secret mission to get Omber for the Servant Sisters of Eve and their secret war preparations – you cannot trust anyone in Eve not even a bunch of nuns!  Behind it all they are actually gun toting Nuns with attitude.

Why do this?

Well and this is the problem.  Having looked at all the stuff I have looked at I have accumulated a lot of skills that are totally useless for PvP.  I even thought of doing planetary management but that made my eyes bleed.  The whole idea of being tethered to my computer constantly looking after virtual installations is not my idea of fun.  However to my shame I trained up a couple of those skills.  I know I know.  It is shameful!

So rather than rush off into PvP with Industrial V  I decided to work on skills that would enable me to have a fighting chance in low sec.  The two weeks have been spent getting those into a respectable shape.  There is some way to go but I am more or less happy with where I am at.  So much so that two nights ago I finally trained up to be able to roam with a decent PvP spec Thrasher.  I will tell you the tale of “Easy Target” in my next post.

The skills I have trained for this escapade are lengthy:

Gunnery 1,013,884 Skill points (so far)