The BoM Eviction

Many of you have probably already read all about the Band of Magnus (BoM) eviction that took place last weekend. I'll go ahead and add my 2 cents as a HRDKX line member. You can see our main FC's AAR at reddit and news coverage at EVE News 24 and The Mittani (really great tears in the comments of both articles).

Our bosses had explained why we were evicting BoM, a Slovak and Czech outfit, but I wasn't particularly interested in the whys. I don't usually require justification for shooting shit - this is a shooty spaceship game, after all. My only concern was BoM wouldn't fight for their system and that I was going to seed my main into a WH for the weekend and just F1 structures.

RvB Ganked 150: Golden Shower

The RvB Ganked NPSI community has been in operation for 150 roams, and its anniversary fleet coincided perfectly with an Iwantisk event culminating with a titan death in lowsec. Mangala Solaris declared that the fleet would be using the Golden Fleet battleship doctrine, comprised primarily of apocs and navy apocs supported by geddons, vindis, and bhaals. The Golden Fleet is expensive, but extremely durable, and the long neut range of the geddons makes pointing and brawling very dangerous for its opponents. Spectre Fleet came along with a remote rep-heavy pantheon carrier contingent.

Bumbaclot

How frig holes work for most ships

Since the release of Hyperion in August 2014, w-space has been populated with tiny little frigate holes. Frig holes are common but aren't taking over; they make up about 10-15% of the chain at any given time. As their name would suggest, they can fit only small ships such as frigs, destroyers, and hictors with multiple bubbles fitted. They also regenerate mass, which makes them just about impossible to close. Their qualities give them a very limited engagement profile, but with the right numbers and fleet comp, anything can happen.

String of pearls

Some days in EVE you just have one of those days. In a good way. You log on, find a bunch of cool shit, asplode some people, and maybe not even die. On this particular day I found a pinata, killed two carriers, some BSs, and a marauder, and I survived everything. Maybe for you that's not a big deal, but I was quite tickled about it.

Ukraine vs Russia Spaceship Fights

I spent my first few days in Thera just observing and trying not to die, with mixed results. Pizza, Goons, UHURT, Camel, and many others have been flitting around from station to station, killing with reckless abandon, bless their hearts. Despite the carnage and the camps, a respectable market has flourished in the system, although docking and undocking to trade in these goods can be perilous. A few Theran-focused corps and communities have begun to spring up, and I decided to jump into some pubfleets to see what they were up to. The first one was a bomber gang with a terribad FC whose name I can't remember, and I ditched them quickly. The second one was led by a much more knowledgeable and less risk-averse Ukrainian named Shtuka, who happens to be the CEO of Revenge of the Liquidators, which until very recently was part of the Marmite highsec merc outfit. (On an unrelated note, the CEO of Marmite, Tora Bushido, is running for CSM 10 on a "safer highsec" platform. Please do not vote for him. Highsec is plenty safe enough as it is.)

Rhea Review

This is Rhea

Rhea has been out for over a week now and therefore I feel expertly qualified to wax poetic on its merits and flaws. I'm a blogger right? That's what we do. We're experts on everything. Rhea added a bunch of shit to EVE, and I'll discuss each one in turn.

Sacrificial Muninn

Look at this piece of crap

Today's Spectre was a collection of Ruptures and Muninns. Having trained t2 medium projectiles recently for something else that I have since forgotten, I put together a Muninn. I have precious little experience with gunnery in general, having flown mostly EWAR, missile, or tackle ships for much of my pvp career. Missiles are easy - for each class of missile, there is one ammo type that corresponds to each of the four damage types. T2 missiles add only a small wrinkle in that there is a long- and short-range option for each damage type. Missiles always hit when the target is in range, although damage application might be poor if there is a size mismatch between the missile and the target. Gunnery on the other hand is hard. There are so many ammo types, each with slight permutations in damage, tracking, optimal range, etc. Hybrids and lasers use cap (sometimes a great deal of it), which can provide fitting challenges that missile boats don't deal with, and of course a missile ship that is neuted out can still hurt ships until destroyed. Gun damage is applied instantly, while missiles take time to hit their target. And so on and so forth.

RvB Ganked 146: Oh My Gods

Work has been naggy this week, but I managed to sneak out of Thera for a few hours to run with RvB. This week's roam was Gods of War, a collection of hurricanes, faction canes, and sleipnirs. I hadn't flown in a GoW before (or sat in a sleipnir for that matter), but it works best when the high alpha and long range of projectile BCs combine to volley targets off the field before their logi can land reps. The cycle time of the guns is rather slow, so the GoWs have only one, maybe two volleys before the reps land and the target needs to be changed. Because of this, the battlecruisers have no prop mods and in this regard the composition is not completely unlike line infantry of the 18th century. Opposing forces would stand up tall and just shoot each other until one side couldn't shoot anymore - no moving around, no flanking, no special tricks. The fleet was led by Apex Aubaris, after organizer Rebecca Neresh apparently flaked at the last minute.

First day in Thera

After Rhea landed yesterday morning, the search began for Thera in earnest. As advertised, it was chock full of w- and k-space connections, and was discovered barely a half hour after the servers came up. A few CCP devs sat in station in the system, taunting us in the Thera intel channels. The first few scanners to find it kept their mouths shut for another half hour, after which Peter Moonlight released his siggy map and the floodgates opened. There was a mad dash for all of the highsec entrances, so I slipped in quietly through a low and began to creep around.

RvB Ganked 145: Enyo Face

It's been months since I've flown with RvB Ganked, and they're one of my favorite pubfleets. This weekend's roam was called The Last Joust, as the enyo assault frig is supposed to lose its jousty thing with Rhea this week (even though in this video preview, the new enyo still has an antenna thing on it).

In defense of the Freeport

Today I jumped into the largest Spectre fleet I've ever seen - at least 230 pilots. We headed towards CT8K-0 to help the Phoebe Freeport Republic defend their station against the Russians. The Freeport is a collection of pilots who banded together after the Phoebe update in November and started taking sov. One of the most significant changes to EVE with Phoebe was the nerfing of jump distances. This was done by reducing base range and adding a new mechanic called fatigue that hinders cap ships that want to make successive jumps. After these changes, the nascent Freeport community wagered that some systems on the edge of space would be easy to conquer and occupy, as their owners wouldn't be interested in the hassle of defending them.

Down to the wire

I haven't been too active in EVE lately, as it's the fall and I have a lot of RL shit during the fall. But I do log in every now and then and putz around a bit. Last night I was creeping around, scanning and not talking on TS like usual, when a call went out for a tackled carrier in null (where else would it be tackled I guess). I hustled back to grab an interceptor, then changed my mind enroute and switched to an ishtar. We had enough tackle, but not enough dps. So we all zip out to some shithole in the Drone Regions, with about an hour on the clock before downtime.

All roads lead to Thera

In case you have not read CCP's new dev blog, for the first time since Apocrypha was released in 2009 there will be new wormhole systems in EVE. One hundred and one new systems to be exact. They are called "shattered wormholes," and none of them will have moons (ergo, none will have any starbases). All planets will be unavailable for PI, but ice will be available. All systems will have at least two statics, and at least one of those two statics will lead to k-space. Twenty-five of the 101 systems will only be accessible for small-mass ships - frigs, dessies, and hictors using the hict trick. And, one of the systems will be Thera.

Morning glory

Finding a pinata party

Pinatas are relatively uncommon in w-space. In several years (of varying levels of activity, admittedly) of living in wormholes, I've only come across two. A pinata in this context is a tower whose force field has dropped and there are several arrays left behind, hopefully with oodles of goodies inside. Cashing in on a pinata is uncommon for two reasons: with fuel blocks, PI, corp fuel notifications, and most recently buffs to haulers, it has never been easier to keep your tower fueled. The second reason is that some other w-space d-bag will likely find the pinata before you can capitalize on it, leaving you with naught but a dead tower and maybe some pos mods to shoot for free KMs. My last pinata was over two years ago, but was quite lucrative.

And they say WH mining is dead

The other day we were just during our normal thing; creeping around null and harassing the residents there. We were near a Bovril mining hub in Catch and were trying very hard to get a fight out of BRAVE by molesting their miners, who all seemed to be bait-fit. Eventually we succeeded in this endeavor and were engaged on a gate by a much larger BRAVE gang. Unable to fight toe-to-toe, we did our best to peel off trigger-happy pilots from the main group and take them down one by one. We were successful at this and blew up a lot of cheap atrons and such, with the most expensive ship we caught probably being a ferox. They continued to escalate until we could no longer feasibly remain on grid, and so we departed. Inexplicably, one of their barges immediately resumed mining in the same system, and we briefly returned to asplode him.

First week in HRDKX, part 2

The first few days of my first week in Hard Knocks were very eventful. The next few didn't have quite the same breakneck pace (for me anyways - the corp as a whole stayed extremely busy).

NOTE: The dates may be borked, as I am nocturnal and therefore look at days and nights a bit differently than normal people.

Renter's Delight

Today I logged on for what I thought would be a nice relaxing null roam. As I was gently caressing my shiny new Keres and putting my headset on, I heard the familiar "Carrier tackled in null". Unsure of how many inties we had on field, and not really having anything more useful anyways, I grabbed my trusty mal and zipped out to the target system along with a few other tacklers. As I was moving, I heard one of the scouts mention that a second carrier was in warp to the site. Oh goody! I thought. Two quick carrier smashes before the roam.

First week in HRDKX, part 1

Since closing down my last wormhole, I've been looking for a larger w-space corp to fly with. I've mostly been with very small, inactive corps over the last few years, and I wanted something with more content available. I spent a few weeks in highsec (I know), absentmindedly carebearing in between public fleets like Spectre, RvB Ganked, and the Tuskers.

My acceptance into Hard Knocks Inc. (HRDKX) happened to coincide perfectly with a 4-day weekend, so I finally had some time to actually play EVE instead of just logging in to skill between work marathons. And play I did. The content train that is HRDKX was chugging at full speed all weekend, and I logged on as much as I could to take advantage of the action.

NOTE: The dates may be borked, as I am nocturnal and therefore look at days and nights a bit differently than normal people.

Night of the living yolo

A few hours after we went up against SSC, I was exploring the WH chain with my new corpies in Hard Knocks. There were a lot of wormholes and not a huge amount of explorers, so we were just slowly kind of making our way down the pipe, looking for whatever content we could find that was tucked away in the nooks and crannies of w-space. All was quiet until someone said, excitedly, "Orca is yoloing a C3!"

The Battle for Haras/RvB Ganked 118 BR

It's been two and a half weeks since Haras, but who cares. Better late than never. RvB Ganked 118 was described, innocently enough, as the rare two-part public roam: the first segment would be the fleet's entry into the Battle of Haras, and the second segment would be an arranged fight with militia forces at a plex.