Wars and Dirty Devs

Well these two topics seem to have generated some heat on the forums over the last week or two. The thing about wars in EVE is that they tend to become forum based rather than actually fighting in the game itself. I suppose if you have 70% of all the alliance members holed up in stations scared to undock they need somewhere to accuse the other side of playing dirty. For the rest of us non-alliance people is great, EVE lag drops off, more ships are sold, salvage loot is more readily available on the market, so bring on the war. Both sides will scream things like n00b, cheat0rz, exploit, lame, pwn etc etc from deep within their own territory. It tends to be the people who wont actually go risk their own ass that do all this yelling while the serious pvp people just get on with it as normal.
I am sure both sides will be claiming that the other side has x number of Devs on their side dishing out free titans to anyone that can pilot one. Personaly I don’t think any CCP employee should be able to have any live/public account in EVE. Rather than trust them to play by the rules, which never works, EVER just have a simple blanket ban due to conflicts of interest. Also the people who knowingly benefited from these Devs outrageous behaviour should also have their accounts wiped. It may sound a little harsh, but there are rules for a reason….

Newbie Killing Spree

Now this isnt what you might think its gonna be, its not a post about some l33t pywats going on a killing spree in a newbie system. This is more of a tale of a well planned newbie alt with less than a days training under his belt.
I shall not mention any names to keep the assasins identity a secret and to save the shame it would bring to his victims.
Our newb was created with one thing in mind, to pvp from day 1, and to win. So a Minmatar character was born with an intensive milliatry and combat background he was ready for action as soon as he got his pod pilots license. A quick trip to an educational station and he had some more skills to help him despatch rivals. A cheap frigate was required, and quickly purchased, along with the best fitting that could be afforded and that skills allowed. Once this was all done it was time to challenge some pilots to a not so friendly 1v1, man on man fight to the death. Its not hard to find people willing to go 1 on 1 in neatral teritory.
His first victim must have been laughing when he accepted the duel, as he had 2 whole years more skill training under his belt than our newbie alt.
To make things fair and more sporting both pilots agreed to fly the same ships, again at this point the older character was probably laughing his socks off. So the duel was set and pilots met at the agreed location. As soon as the duel started it was apparent who was going to win the fight, as the first volleys of fire were exchanged you newbie's ship hardly took a scratch while the 'old hand' was halfway thru his shields allready. I think it was about then he stoped laughing.... The battle only lasted a couple of minutes and was serriously one sided, our newb was hardly damaged while Mr Laughypants (not his real name) was warping to a station in his pod.
Since this 1st battle our brave newb pilot has gone on to bag many more prizes, still with very little training. It just go's to show what can be achived with very few skill points placed in the right places. The last I heard our newbie is now aiming tech 2 artillery at people, which comes as a shock to them from one so young....

Google Ads

Thanks to anyone who has clicked thru on my google links, I never thought they would work, but I have amassed a few dollars just from this crappy blog site. Nothing thats gonna be life changing, hell I dont have enough for one months broadband bill in there yet.
If you do click thru on the ads and bump into me ingame just say you love my naff blog site and who know I might bung you some ISK. I wont give you ISK to click, but I might gift you some ISK for liking my blog.

Back again

Hopefully the changes in the last patch will relieve the boredom somewhat, or at least the cost of being bored. Scanning had become an expensive hobby to find very little, in Empire at least. With the reduction in build costs for probes people can now afford to throw far more probes at finding a location. Also with more NPCs dropping salvage loot it should be easier to build rigs, and hopefully the prices will become a little more realistic. The economy seems to stabilise more and more after each patch becoming more and more player driven, which is great, but as with real life, the latest toys always cost you shit loads, and you can buy them for half price a few months later.

Probe rant

The patch came and went without too many hitches, for me at least anyway. There were, as always a few annoying ‘new features’ added, like the ability to make all your bookmarks invisible to the IGB. There were of course the usual changes to the odd module and ship tweaks, but this time they really hurt a lot of production corps. After the introduction of the new scan probes, a lot of people invested in the blueprint and the materials to supply the market, some of which weren’t the cheapest around. Now after the last patch we find all these probes now only require standard minerals to build and thus have has their build cost slashed. There are now a lot of people with 1000’s of probes that are now only worth 50% of their build cost. Now this may just sound like a bitter probe manufacturer out of pocket, but it has wider consequences. When these probes were discovered they lead to a great demand for Strontium Clatherates and the price of these went thru the roof. Maybe there removal from probe build requirements was an attempt to balance this sudden shift in demand, who knows, but it would have been nice to be warned in advance. Its good that interdictor sphere probes still have the expensive build costs, us carebears wouldn’t want to see too many of those around 0.4 system gates.


POS News

Since my last entry we have set up, taken down, moved and re-established a little POS of our own. All I can say is you learn from your mistakes, its amazing how off putting a gate camp can be when all you want to do is take some fuel to your POS system. Anyway we moved our shinny new POS from a 0.5 system surrounded by 0.4’s to a safer system a little closer to HQ. The main aim of the POS was to provide the corp with available lab slots for research, we now have 9 mineral and 9 time research slots, plus 3 copy slots; all of which have been pretty much full since going online. All that time training Scientific Networking is now finally paying off, 9 jobs on the go all from the comfort of my Raven.
Keeping the POS in fuel has proved easy so far, and doesn’t require too many hours ice mining, I think roughly, 5 Mackinaws with Tech2 mining equipment can mine enough ice to keep our POS running for a week in about an hour and a half. (Oddman did the math on that if it wrong)