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.

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.

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.

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!"