Archive for May, 2012


That First Solo Kill

Filed under: Day to Day Blog — 8 Comments
May 16, 2012

So after losing 15 Rifters and 3 Thrashers I finally managed to find some poor sod young enough for me to solo kill.  I got so excited that I forgot about all morality and bagged the pod as well.  It was a case of the usual roam around low sec when a Punisher was spotted on scan in Arzad.  After narrowing the ship down to a belt it was a case of warping in at range to get a look at the pilot.  Andros Acami, four days into the game.  Yes! Finally, someone to shoot at that one had a reasonable  chance to kill! The problem was getting to him before some other git did.

😉

Then, frustration, burning towards him and he warped off to the next belt. Damn!  Why oh why didn’t I have a 74km Warp Scrambler!  Doesn’t he know that I haven’t killed shit for months?  All I need is for the we fecker to stay still long enough for me to bag the kill.  I was after him, we warped around the system from belt to belt.  I knew that he didn’t know much because he kept warping in at zero.  Then I lost him.  Nooooooo!  How the feck could I lose a four day old noob!

The search for Spock continued for the next five minutes.  I warped around the system, checking my scanner, he was moving around.  After ten minutes I narrowed him down to another belt.  Warped in, locked and this time got my web and scrambler up and running.  Then my Rifter “Rubber Donkey” (a tad juvenile I know) was onto him, the autocannons tearing through his shields, into his armour.  By the time he started shooting back he was deep into armour and a few seconds more into structure.

Booom!

What a pretty sight the explosion was.  I couldn’t stop myself locked up his pod and pop.  He was gone.  Then it occurred to me, I am supposed to be trying to earn ISK by ransoming.  “Bugger”.  I warped into a safe spot to wait for the GCC to pass.  Maybe I should convo him?  After all his ship had an awful fit and the fight was so uneven, he might pay me for advice, now I was all leet and shit. I also noted that podding someone means you don’t get that ‘gf’ thing in local, hmmm a bit disappointing.  GF is something we all have to do even if we just had our assess handed to us on a plate for the eighth time in a row.  I felt a bit bad. Like that time when I was a teenager and I knocked an ice cream out of a kids hand just to watch them cry.

The feeling lasted about a minute, I used distraction tactics. In order to make myself feel better I let AUTOZ know I had finally bagged that first solo kill in a ‘cat that got the cream kind of way’.  I posted the kill mails and sat and thought about it.  Now I know what people were thinking when I first started flying around low sec a few months ago.  There is no doubt that all the people I have fought cut through me in the same way that I had cut through Andros. It was a sobering thought.  Checking the combat logs confirmed this.  I managed to hit him for between 150-340 damage he was hitting for 28-34, this is exactly the same damage I was doing back then. I went through 10 rifters before I figured out what was wrong.  Damn I am a slow learner.  I was also a gift wrapped kill back then.

It was an easy kill but it is small first step.  My first step into PvP with a small dash of moral depravity to go with it.  The bad feelings will go away eventually.  Andros Acami has gone away too.  :-/

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On Inferno: do CCP go far enough?

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May 14, 2012

With the release of Inferno incoming and the latest Development Blogs I have finally got something I think I can actually comment on.  Most of the previous in game events such as ‘Burn Jita’ and ‘Hulkageddon’ I don’t think I really know enough about the game to be able to say anything meaningful.  These events seemed to me to be amazing and even more amazing that CCP encourages them.  Its the flexibility and hard headedness of the way this company thinks that I like.  It is also the way in which it listens to its playerbase.

Finally with Inferno I think we are going to see some real incentives to PvP.  First of all the rewards to capture plexes makes them something worth doing.  Both in terms of the loyalty points (LPs) you get for doing so and also for the potential gains that will come as a result of capturing systems.  Here are the figures taken from the Dev blog:

  • Minor sites: 10,000 LPs
  • Standard sites: 17,500 LPs
  • Major sites: 25,000 LPs
  • Major Stronghold or Major Compound sites: 30,000 LPs
  • Infrastructure Hub: 40,000 LPs

With this also comes changes to the LP reward for killing ships:

  • Destroying an Abaddon fitted with tech 2 mods: gained LP = ( 196m ISK – 161m ISK + 46m ISK + 0 ) / 10000 = 8100 LP (previous system would have paid 500 LP)
  • Destroying a Machariel fitted with tech 2 mods: gained LP = (1.170m ISK – 95m ISK + 40m ISK + 0 ) / 10000 = 111500 LP (previous system would have paid 750 LP)
  • Destroying a Providence with 1 b full of cargo: gained LP = (1115m ISK – 839m ISK + 0 + 1000m ISK ) / 10000 = 127600 LP (previous system would have paid 2000 LP)
  • Destroying a Punisher with tech 1 fitting: gained LP = (450k ISK – 312k ISK + 100k ISK + 0) / 10000 = around 24 LP (previous system would have paid 25 LP)
  • Destroying a Punisher with tech 2 fitting: gained LP = (450k ISK – 312k ISK + 7.8m ISK +) / 10000 = around 794 LP (previous system would have paid 25 LP)

CCP have really shone with these changes in my view.  As far as I can see they are excellent.  The following comments are not meant to be negative but are rather aimed at being constructively critical.  The main question I have about the changes are do they go far enough?  Here are a couple of thoughts:

The first thing I think that CCP could think about is rolling out LP rewards for other PvP kills.  One of the things about PvP is that apart from the loot there is not a lot of reward.  It is all about the ISK value and you don’t get LP’s from say a pirate faction that roams in the area where you are operating.  So whilst the system is good for Factional Warfare it might also be rolled out to other areas of the game.

The second thing I would like to suggest is that perhaps CCP could generate solo PvP plexes?  Such plexes might be where you can only have one ship type of a certain class from each faction?  In this way CCP could place within Factional Warfare a way to have pure solo PvP fights.  The rewards for these might be given in a similar way but also perhaps they might think of generating a solo fighter league table for those who are specialists at solo PvP?  There is a niche of players who are into this playstyle in every game I have ever seen on the internet.  What would be nice is if a company would listen to them.  Of all the companys I have seen so far CCP is the one that is most likely to listen.

One final point.  What happens if the mechanics result in one side becoming so demoralised they stop playing?  That has to be a major concern.  We don’t want the Amarr quitting.

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Living and dying by the autocannon: Week 1

Filed under: Day to Day Blog — 2 Comments
May 13, 2012

The odyssey of living and dying in low sec has been a pretty successful.  Although there are mixed results waiting for those who might choose to go down this route in Eve.  Remember my objectives have been to make enough ISK to be able to continue to freely roam around low sec and PvP as I go.  I am not interested in making loads of ISK, just enough to help me live and survive where I am.  As I do that I can maximise my skills for the Frigates that I am flying rather than get myself into bigger and bigger ships where I need to have more and more ISK to sustain my losses.

The first thing to note about this approach is that a decent corporation which is active in the same field that you want to fly in seems to me to be essential.  Whilst flying around solo meant that there was a lot of targets around. Joining Autocannons Anonymous in the Minmatar Militia has effectively halved those targets.  However, by doing so this has given me a bit of breathing space in low sec, there are now blues around who ‘in theory’ won’t shoot me!  This is really useful because it has given me access to a group of like minded individuals that I can fly with should I choose to.

The breathing space that having friendly’s around is very important because when you fly around in Factional Warfare there are not that many solo targets you can shoot.  People tend to be in small gangs roaming and plexing –  they may pop open a bunker and then either hold it or attack it in order to swing control of the system in the direction of their faction.  Defending these bunkers has already given me some really decent fights.  I got my first kill in factional warfare in one last night.  In the next patch “Inferno” CCP are bringing some amazing changes to Factional Warfare which is really going to make this aspect of the game fascinating and a lot of fun.  I am going to write about these proposed changes in my next post.

Anyway what has been happening?  The approach I have adopted is as follows:

1) Join corporation ops – we have had to engage in a bit of PvP with the corporation and this has involved popping a few POCO’s.  The ops have been good sport mostly because it has involved scouting Amamake.

2) Roam through low sec to different locations and scout for targets of opportunity.  By this I am looking for solo fights with ships I can have a good fight with.

3) If there is an open Factional Warfare fleet join it and participate.  This has been the source of a lot of amusement and mayhem.

4) Kill ‘Rats’ this involves looking for decent pirate targets on asteriod belts whilst looking for people to fight.  Finding these can easily make enough ISK to cover frigate losses and this combined with PvP loot has enabled me to break even this week.

The results so far:

These figures look like not a lot has been happening.  But the truth is there has been a lot of action, we have been involved in a three evenings working on clearing and defending POCOs in Bosboger.  In those ops I have been scouting and watching the threats we might have been facing.  This has left a further three evenings and an afternoon of roaming and factional warfare.

In the operation where the first loss happened we were in a factional warfare fleet defending Kourmonen when we chased an Amarr fleet into Kamela.  I was shooting at what must have been 3 to four targets, not one of whom got destroyed, then my ickle Rifter was blown to bits within seconds.  The Amarr held the gate, with Kamela being their home system they could easily reinforce from their station.  I felt a bit sick to have got in there, to follow the FC’s orders and not get anything for the loss.  But that is how the cookie crumbles.  From this point forward I focused on raising ISK by ratting and roaming solo.  This worked quite well and in one evening I had made back the ISk from my loss.

Then came this loss.  I have a good few scan points around Bosboger and so can locate targets quite quickly.  I found Octavian Bruti alone at one of the belts and started to burn towards him.  He wasn’t that old as a character so I figured this would be the closest thing I could get to test out how I had been developing.  I started to burn towards him when Kado Tuss appeared on the scene.  Well to be frank at this point I knew the chances of killing one of them was going to be small.  But hey “feck it” I thought lets give this a go.  So I continued to burn towards them.  Octavian agressed first and I started to chew into his shield.  When I had him down to armour Kado then started to shoot me.  I had Octavian into structure and going down really quickly when my Rifter exploded.  Damn!  I was so close.  I was overheating my guns and burning around him like crazy.

This was a useful learning experience.  First of all did I choose the right target?  The Tristan was chucking out the right amount of dps and it probably had a big shield tank but would the Rifter have been a quicker kill?  What if I had used combat boosters?  I suspect I will have killed one of these guys but the problem is that these boosters cost twice as much as the ship.  The fact I lost another Rifter did piss me off but the thing is I can see that I am improving as the skills develop coupled with the knowledge developed off the people I have fought with in low sec.  But what about my fit?  Maybe a different fit would have been better?

Here is the fit I had:

[Rifter, Efilant]

Gyrostabilizer II
Adaptive Nano Plating II
200mm Reinforced Steel Plates II

Fleeting Progressive Warp Scrambler I1MN Afterburner II
‘Langour’ Drive Disruptor I

Small ‘Gremlin’ Power Core Disruptor I
150mm Light AutoCannon II, BARRAGE S
150mm Light AutoCannon II, BARRAGE S
150mm Light AutoCannon II, BARRAGE S

Small Projectile Ambit Extension I
Small Projectile Collision Accelerator I
Small Projectile Metastasis Adjuster I

Would this have been any better?

[Rifter, Rifter rifta docs]

Damage Control II
200mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
Small Armor Repairer II

1MN Afterburner II
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I

150mm Light AutoCannon II, EMP S
150mm Light AutoCannon II, EMP S
150mm Light AutoCannon II, EMP S
E5 Prototype Energy Vampire

Small Projectile Ambit Extension I
Small Projectile Ambit Extension I
Small Projectile Burst Aerator I

In the second fit I would have sacrificed some DPS (about 15%) for better resists and a better tank.  I suspect against the two people I was fighting that I might have been able to kill them?

What do you think?

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In search of the Holy Grail: living and dying by the autocannon

Filed under: Day to Day Blog — 4 Comments
May 6, 2012

Right so this is the question for those of us interested in PvP.

How does someone survive in Eve by living only in one character, playing almost totally in a PvP environment?

This discussion needs one very important qualification and that is that you should NOT be using a second character.  Purely living and dying by the autocannon (missile launcher, hybrid turret or whatever).

Plenty of people are doing it, at least that is how it appears.  There are those who are amazing at PvP and clearly those people make their ISK by killing nubs like me who are still skilling up and learning the game whilst spending their ISK.  But what about this path for a new player?

It is certainly true that the solo route is certainly not viable for a new player. Not if you want to sustain yourself ISK wise and maintain a decent income whilst PvPing.  The advice of all those veterans I met at the start of my career was very true. Get into some good company and work in groups.  Someone on this blog way back at the start told me to go to a big 0.0 alliance “everyone needs a hero tackler.”

Personally I have spent around 200 million ISK learning how PvP works solo.  It has been a blast, I have absolutely no regrets but what really started to bite was the reality of Eve.  My wallet is getting worryingly low.  However lets look at the plus side, I think I am now pretty good with a directional scanner and made some good ‘friends’ even if they all seem quite keen to blow my ship out from under me every time I see them!

In the end I got chatting to Vordak Kallager the CEO of Autocannons Anonymous Corp slogan “Don’t worry, we’re incompetent” (what better home for meh?).  We had a bit of a laugh about PvP and had a chat about getting the right source of ISK.  In the middle of the chat there was an offer of a trial membership to Autocannons Anonymous.  So rather than piddle around any longer solo I signed up.  I have seen them about in Low Sec so they are in the right place for me.  I have fought some of their members solo when out and about as well and they seem pretty chilled out about it.

Anyway back to the point of this post.  The first thing someone like me, who is into PvP needs is learn how to survive long enough to be able to kill something.  They also need a source income whilst they continue to specialise their skills for PvP.  So this means low sec roaming looking for Factional warfare targets.  Some of my old corp mates from Pro Synergy Lucy Royal had invited me into FW a while back unfortunately she was fighting for the Amarr which kind of didn’t fit my character.

Anyway, like many before me the best thing for a PvP interested player seems to be to get into the high risk low sec environment and at the same time to minimise your risks by being in a faction where you can have mega mates to help you.  Bingo – Autocannons Anonymous and the Minmatar Faction looks like a good bet.

So far this line of thinking has cost me a Thrasher without any return…. ok so the next few posts will focus on giving this some serious attention.

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Back Story: any load out for a noob?

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May 4, 2012

“I explained to you before that we should have bought a Rifter but you wouldn’t listen.” Fletcher glared at Moriarity across the table.  Moriarity stared down at his glass. It looked half empty, it didn’t seem to matter much either way. Fletcher was always moaning, it was a complete mystery why he remained with the ship.

The situation was desperate.  They had just failed to turn in their latest commission and would have to sell everything to be able to pay for this Rifter.  They had some parts from the scrap they had looted from the wrecks in previous missions but altogether it was not looking good.

“Okay Fletcher we will buy a Rifter.  Do you have any suggestions about how to fit it?”

Fletcher looked up his data pad and handed it over to Moriarity.  “This is the cookie cutter fit.  They rave about it – you can even do level II’s in this boat.”

Moriarity took the pad, he knew before he looked much further than the Tech II guns that the fit was not going to work.  “Well for a start we can’t afford it, and secondly it will be impossible with my skills.  We would be waiting three months for the training.”

“Ahh  I forgot we are flying with a noob!”

“Yes and that means you might, for a change, try thinking out of the box.”  Moriarity hated it when Fletcher got to him.

Fletcher looked at Moriarity “OK then the way I see it we should go for artillery, you have a shit tank and the best thing we can do is keep the RATS at range.”

“We will not be able to fit the full range of guns and our DPS is going to be poor.”

“Then you better keep us at range or we are gonna be toast!”

“We can do that at least.”

“Lets drink to that then!” Fletcher got up and walked off to the bar.  Moriarity’s eyes followed him across the smoke filled room.

“Don’t worry about him, he is wound up a bit tight.” Cerbus smiled.  “Mind you I have never seen a wrench bounce so far off a pod before!  That was some funny shit.”

“He certainly knows his stuff when it comes to ship loadouts. But he hasn’t got a clue how it ‘feels’ to try and control it.”

Cerbus just smiled and did not commit to anything, like there was more to be said but she was avoiding some sort of issue.

“What I am trying to say is that it is really difficult to squeeze that extra juice out of a boat.  Sure it looks like it can take this or that loadout but when you put it all together it just doesn’t work.”

“I know, look its alright. Fletcher will sort us out once he gets a feel for what you can handle.”

Fletcher returned with three drinks in his hands.  “That bitch at the bar is a bit crabby.  All I said was she looked a bit fat and she refused to serve me til everyone else was served.”

Cerbus groaned. “I see you are inflicting your charms on the locals again.”

“I do my best.” He grinned.

“Well we might as well settle in at this station folks because we could be here for a while.”  Moriarity smiled.

“I’ll get busy with the spare parts and we will see what we can fit to a Rifter chassis with your current skills Mori. Don’t worry lad we will have something workable in the next day or so.  Then we can start earning some real ISK.”

“I can drink to that.” Moriarity raised his glass.

It took less than six seconds for three glasses  to clink.  That was three seconds more than it took to agree a deal that would see ‘The Intrepid’ repackaged and sold for a fraction of its price. What price is history?

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