Fail Dec

So my corp, and thus my alliance was wardecced yesterday by an 11 member highsec wardec Corp called Deaths Right Hand and run by a fellow named BravoFoxtrot and has perhaps 3 truly active war fighters.

Guy, do your homework. We live in lowsec. 1) chances of ever running into one of us again is rather slim 2) we live where everyone and their whole families are trying to blow us up every chance they get.

Do you really think we care about you?

With utter disregard,
Escoce
United Trade Syndicate


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

I Am Escoce

Welcome to the eighteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the
monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by none other than
me, CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of
gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a
week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting
articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead
serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the
EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out
other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!


On May 6th 2010, EVE Online celebrated its 7th Anniversary. Quite a
milestone in MMO history, especially considering that it is one of the
few virtual worlds out there to see its population continually grow
year after year. For some of you who've been here since the very
beginning, EVE has evolved quite a lot since its creation. With the
expansion rolling out roughly twice a year, New Eden gets renewed and
improved regularly. But, how about you the player? How has you gaming
style evolved through the years or months since you've started
playing? Have you always been a carebear, or roleplayer? Have you only
focused on PvP or have you given other aspects of the game a chance -
say manufacturing. Let's hear your story!



I am Escoce. I have always been Escoce. I do not have alternate identies and Escoce grows and deals with the consequences of all my actions, whether that is doing well on the markets, mining asteroids, busting gate camps with more vocal bravado than normally recommended or not. That is who I am and who I will always be within New Eden.

If one wishes to read all the details of my history they can start at te beginning of this blog with post #1, because I have kept a loosely organized journal of my goings on. However, I'll try to sum it up briefly with what I think the greatest changes are that I have made.

I started out very timid, mining asteroids in the cistuvaert system. I was afraid of getting lost and didn't even jump out of the system for at least several days. I had no idea how detached one really is from their home system. I think I made my first excursion out of Cistuvaert when there was no asteroids left to mine. I had no choice but try another system. I found one next door called Aidert. I minted for a bit there, and learned about NPC pirates and I got my little frigate blowed up if I recall and I became scared of 0.6 security systems. I tried to stay in cistuvaert as much as possible since I didn't know of any other 1.0 systems near by (remember I was a newb who had no idea how small geographically or astrometrically the game actually is to a more experienced player). I ran into my first player pirate can flipper from Whiskey Pete's Dry Cleaning, and got my butt handed to me. Later when I could fly a vexor, which I used for mining I also started carrying flights of drones and I ventured out into aidert once again and let the drone take care of the rats while I ignored them.

The same can flipper showed up, flipped my can. And I went ahead and sicked my drones on him. I actually almost had him, he was deep into hull before I went pop. Ah well I felt pretty good for the try, but I was still mostly broke as new miners typically are. So I started again with the frigates. I graduated to industrial ships and when I didn't have time to mine with 1 minute cycles into cans, inwiuld park my uterine of various grades over time next to the asteroids and jus let the laser fill the cargo bay before thenroids went pop. It was still really slow progress. I could barely afford new skills let alone ships.

Anyway I kept in mining until I could fly and mastered mining with the hulk. I went into debt to get the hulk sooner, but had to work hard to pay it off. All that work soured me to mining. I was so sick of mining.

I figured i could still deal with minerals since I know what they are worth and I sold my hulk and used the capital to start buying minerals in Arnon and its neigbors and selling them in Oursulaert and Jita if the price warrented the longer trip. As I could afford rigs, I fitted them (this was when they were still one size and ultra expensive). My Iteron V was gradually become more costly than an obelisk, but it was a little at a time. After about six weeks of all night back and forth, I was about halfway togetting a freighter.

I ended up borrowing a billion isk from a total stranger (believe it or not), and I bought my freighter, realizing after the fact that I still had 4 days to go to complete Spaceship Command that I needed to train Advanced Spaceship Command so I could fly the darned thing. So anyway started hauling with the freighter and the ISK started to flow. Over a period of a few weeks, I started carrying mining equipment to Arnon to sell as a loss leader to get the miners working in Arnon and neighbors to stay put and mine more rocks for me. It worked. I started pulling 3-5 freighter loads of tritanium out of that constellation every single day since people don’t like hauling Trit. It takes more time to haul the Trit to Oursulaert than it does to mine an equivalent amount of ore for the other minerals.. After some time it dawned on me that the names of the people dumping minerals on my buy orders were rather random looking and I realized I was buying Macrod minerals. I filed a petition saying that look, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I think I am buying illegal minerals in a legitimate manner. The GM told me so long as I procured them in good faith at a fair price and I wasn’t buying them for something like 0.01 ISK, that I was safe and thanks for the notice. Well that combined with my internet connection going out for 10 days or so, the whole market collapsed. I tried to restore the mineral market, but my steam was gone, and it was no fun and a constant trade war with the other people who moved in while I was gone. So I changed everything and became a low sec trader.

I had trained for bigger and better ships, and I started flying occators through low sec to pickup minerals I bought with region wide orders than I could get cheaper than staying in high sec. I hauled those minerals for cheap out of low sec (for a fair price, just a better price for me). I did just fine with that and the extra margin made up for the loss of volume. I stopped trading tritanium because now it wasn’t worth it for me to haul it anymore since I couldn’t use my freighter to pick up minerals in low sec, and I started hauling the higher valued minerals (Pyrite was never good for trade for me). With the fit I had with the Occator, I was pretty much invincible with the shield extended up the wazoo and I carried WCS in my cargo hold in case I found a heavy gate camp to bust. I did just fine with ammo bouncing off of my shields until I went to warp until I ran into my first Heavy Interdictor in low sec. I didn’t know they could use their Warp Distruptors in low sec with a special script, but I learned it that day. All low sec operations halted while I figured out how to make this work again. I finally developed the Invulnerable MWD/Cloak/Warp for the Deep Space Transports. I haven’t lost another Occator since.

Every since then, I have been figuring out how I can draw more people out to low sec to reap the benefits of low sec, and increasing available space for all pilots by spreading out a little and all the other benefits that go with that…more targets for pirates, better targets that are harder to catch and so more fun to hunt, safer grounds for the industrialists that aren’t too carebear-ish for low sec. I began developing “safest” fits for industrial ships like mining frigates, mining barges and exhumers. I started an alliance meant to foster this education and use of low sec (which is still very much in development due to lots of spring time outdoors AFK from many alliance members, but mostly me).

Finally, the piece de resistance, the low sec Orca fit I recently developed and wrote about. I have been using it to bust camps with great confidence and non-chalance since, moving tons more stuff through low sec than ever before possible without a jump frieighter (requires alts or cyno team mate and 5 billion isk for just the ship). It can be flown solo, and carries roughly half the stuff the jump freighters can carry. Good shit!!! My mission is to continue to help develop low sec, write an article for E-ON magazine describing how to fit, fly and behave as an industrial based character in low sec in order to survive and thrive. I will continue to be very vocal about the benefits of being in low sec and how one can fly there safely if one follows the basic rules of low sec piloting. One might even be safer in low sec than in high sec if one considers that they let their guard down in high sec. I honestly can say that since I have lived in low sec that I have lost more ships in high sec than I have in low sec…all because I drop my guard.

That’s who was a timid miner afraid of leaving his home system to become, low sec trader, low sec developer, low sec industrial educator and crazy ass pilot finding ways to make the big ships safe to bust camps.

I am … Escoce



Participants:
CrazyKinux's Musing: The Heroes with a Thousand Faces
StarFleet Comms: Life. Evolved.
A Carebear's Journeu: This Carebear Thinks He Is Developing Teeth
The Elitist: Our ventures in EVE
A Mule in EVE: From a guppy predator
Travels of the Ronin: Evolution and Adaptation
The Ralpha Dogs: The Past Through Tomorrow
Where the frack is my ship: A journey, not a destination
I am Keith Neilson: 7 Year Itch?
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: Evolution Me
EVE Opportunist: A long history of a short time
Roc's Ramblings: Things Change
Guns Ablaze: Onwards and Upwards
EVE On Real Life: Haven't you grown up yet?
More as they get published...

[Delicious Tag: eveblogbanter18]


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Reverse petitions and hulkageddon

I know CCP has ways of detecting macro-mining pattern in the logs if they are made aware by a player that points out the potential offender in a petition.

Well I have a good though unlikely to be implemented way to wreak worse havoc on macros.

The reverse petition in conjunction with hulkageddon. A police force of volunteers who roam the belts in search of baddie-bad micro miners. When a potential macro is found, a special type of petition is filed, which grants immediate immunity for what would ordinarily involve CONCORD intervention. The macro hunter would reap the rewards of the drop, and gain a sec-status boost just like they were ratting. Now of course mistakes will happen, and there is a way to deal with that too.

The reverse petition filed will flag the pilot with something like a convo request popup, but clearly a warning of impending doom with a countdown. If they do not acknowledge the accusation within say 15 minutes, the accused is criminally flagged with a standard counter and anyone may freely dispatch their ship (but not pod). Alternatively, the accused could be flagged only to the petitioner.

The method to avoid abuse (macro spamming), would be to limit the number of petitions each pilot may send between down times, as well as limit the number of petitions a pilot may receive. If either number is exceeded, then the petition fails and the miner is safe from both explosion and safe from macro spam.

Also, the same pilot cannot petition the same accused more that once per down time regardless of how many petitions either has left.

So this still opens doors to problems of abuse. There are ingame ways to prevent this. Firstly, a faction should be setup, one lime CONCORD but specifically for combating macro miners. Individuals or corporations would have to join this faction in a similar way to the militia for faction warfare. Trial accounts would be ineligeble, and there should be a security standing minimum requirement.

If the pilot makes a mistake and the accused was not using macros which a review of the pilot logs will reveal, and the pilot just had to go afk for some legitimate reason ( which he doesn't have to validate, he wasn't macroing after all), and files a petition, the the macro hunter would be forced to pay the replacement cost of the ship and all it's mods and cargo contents (crystals for instance). As well the macro hunter would suffer a security status just as if he killed a pilot under ordinary circumstances. If the security status falls steeply enough due to repeat mistakes, the pilot is unable to file the macro hunter petition until sec status is returned to acceptible levels or enough decay time occurs to nomalize the sec status they have now, say measured in days or weeks. If sec status falls below minimum entry requirements, the member (or Corp if it's a Corp membership) gets booted from the faction. So corps would be very careful to monitor their members or risk Corp expulsion.

This system would help improve the proposed goal, by ensuring only legitimate macro hunters would be interested and that they would be careful of who they mark as macros.

I know there are still holes, but in general what do you think?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Low Sec Orca Fitting

UPDATE: In the fittings, I changed T2 Covert Ops Cloak to T2 Improved Cloak. My mistake.

Ok I have been researching fits for the Orca, and I have dramatically improved flying safely in an Orca for Low sec. I feel as comfortable flying my Orca through low sec as I am now with my Occator. You too can fly an Orca safely through low sec. That is if you have a few billion ISK to spend.

Implants in your head: Full Set of 6 Nomad implants, Alpha through Omega

Faction implants have secondary effects in addition to the attribute boosting effects most people are accustomed to. The Nomad faction implants give you +2 to each attribute, but in addition to that primary effect, they also grant a boost to your agility. With a full set of 5 implants, you get a raw 15% agility bonus, plus 10% bonus for the set of 5 implants granting a total of 16.5% agility boost. If you have the sixth Omega implant, you get a further 25% boost to the bonus giving up to a little more than a 20% bonus to agility. Better agility lets your ships turn and accelerate faster. These cost approx 2 billion isk at time of writing, though haggling can get them for less though. I got mine for 1.5 billion ISK by haggling with people who had contracts up for 2.1 billion ISK. That’s a 600 million ISK savings. Of course if you have 400,000 loyalty points or so with the right corporations, you can buy them from the NPC corporations that sell them. Phoetec Pharm makes them; I don’t know who else sells them for loyalty points.

Ok so you are asking, “Why would you spend 1.5 to 2.1 billion ISK for 20% boost to agility? You can get that with a T2 I-Stab”. Well mate, yes you are right, but consider this. My low slots are ALREADY filled with T2 I-Stabs and I still need the extra agility. “So why don’t you just use Low Friction Nozzle Rigs?”. Answer, I did that, but it still wasn’t quite enough. Plus I _discovered_ Engine Thermal Shielding, which boosts my MWD duration by 20%. Two of those and my MWD cycle is 14.4 seconds rather than 10 seconds. That’s 144% duration to my MWD cycle, the length of the MWD cycle means I have more time to align to warp WHILE CLOAKED. Which means I stand a MUCH better chance of being in warp before my cloak has dropped. So…..implants, these give me that extra sliver of agility that guarantees that I am in warp before my cloak drops instead of _almost_ in warp. Being _almost_ in warp, means you are going to eventually be _not almost, but actually and really_ dead.

That 1.5 billion ISK has let me fly my Orca in low sec with exactly the same confidence I have flying my Occator through low sec. What does that mean? That means, with my skills, I am able to fly a transport style ship through low sec that can carry 34,500m3 in the main cargo hold, 40,000m3 in the Corp Hanger, 50,000m3 in the Ore Cargo Bay (if I carry ore, which makes sense to carry some ore instead of minerals for this purpose). Plus several assembled (depending on size) ships in the Maintenance Hangar. My Occator could carry a little more than 38,000m3 which is pretty big, but this is MUCH bigger. No it’s not a freighter, and it’s a bit smaller than a jump freighter too, but I don’t need a Cyno team member, nor an alt…e-gad…and I fly normally carrying a lot more than the largest regular industrial ships you see flying around.

What are the drawback? The cost obviously…I have a lot of ISK in my head right now, so that really means I have to stop auto piloting around…even in high sec…unless I am flying a ship that can take a beating while waiting for CONCORD to come and clear the area for me. Last night, on my way to picking up the implants, my Helios was destroyed and I was sitting in Jita in my POD. On the way back I Auto piloted again (dumb mistake), and when I got back, my ship’s armor was gone and half the hull was gone, but my shield had fully recharged. CONCORD successfully intervened just moments before my ship was destroyed. I shouldn’t have been auto piloting a little light ship like that anyway, but it was REALLY stupid of me to do it with so much ISK on the line now. Never again. If you are going to autopilot through hisec, make sure you are flying a ship with enough raw hit points and resistances to take a good beating until CONCORD shows up.

Ok so the fitting:

Implants:

Nomad, full set of 6

Rigs:

2x Engine Thermal Shielding, for a 44% increase of MWD cycle time.

1x Ancillary Circuit Router (gives extra Grid so you can fit an MWD)

High Slots:

1x T2 Improved Cloak

2x of whatever else you want(I fit tractor beam and salvager)

Medium Slots:

1x Meta 4 MWD (You can’t fit a T2)

1x T2 ECM Burst, so you get another roll of the dice to get away if you do get caught.

1x Large Regolith Shield Extender for extra hit points to your shield so you last longer while trying to break target locks with WCM Burst and ECM Drones. Invulnerability Shield Hardener for Resistance Boosting (Giving you even more effective hit point on the shield)

Low Slots:

2x T2 I-Stabs, for more agility…i.e. faster align and acceleration times

Drone Bay: 5x Medium ECM Vespas (to gain more dice rolls to let you escape if you get caught…If you are doing mining support in low sec, launch these drone ahead of time so they automatically lock an aggressor, also keep your distance from the belt and stay cloaked until you need to tractor a can in, your tractor beam can pull from MUCH farther away with ship role bonuses.)




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Orca 1 : Pirates 0

So I have been busy and mostly away from both Eve and therefore by extension haven’t had anything really to write about. In March, I spent a week in the desert speaking at the 3rd annual organic beekeeping conference. Being out in nature and away from all thing internet for a week really changed my perspective a bit, plus spring has arrived and all the outdoor work that is involved in that, including beekeeping stuff, like building beehives and managing the colonies that survived winter, etc. Anyway, so much in Eve for me hasn’t happened except to log on to manage my skill queue and ensure I am still training something useful.

Well I have been spending some time in low sec as you all know, and in fact I hadn’t been back in high sec in several months, except for a few weeks ago I did take a few loads of minerals purchased in lowsec over those months to sell in high sec for some quick cash.

Last week however I decided to bring my industrial gear deeper into lowsec where I planned to operate most of my industry related stuff, so I did a brief scouting of the route in my Helios checking for local activity along the route (not just kills). I returned and hopped in my Orca full of working ships, and headed out along the way. Immediately someone popped into local, and we apparently arrived together at the same gate along my path, and of course my heart skipped a beat before I realized it was a Bestower. Ok no big deal, so we went along on our business following mostly the same path, and nothing else exciting happened.

I hadn’t flown the orca through low sec in a while, so I was being as careful as I could be to hone my gate camp busting skills at each gate even though I didn’t need to use them. It’s a good idea really to do it in low sec anyway. You have no idea how quickly you can get targeted and HIC scrambled compared with how long it takes to align an uncloaked Orca. As I approach the last gate to my final destination, I discovered the blood rush pounding in my ears could get louder than it ever had before, or rather at least as loud and hard as the last time it happened. I flew right into a big cloud of pirates.

For the sake of disclosure, I cannot purely say I have never lost an Orca in low sec, but at least I can say I haven’t lost one due to a lack of skill or negligence or poor piloting. I lost one many months ago when I first skilled up and learned how to fit and make safe an Orca for low sec use. I can legitimately say I lost my ship due to my client locking up. You see I run LINUX on my computer which then in turn requires I use WINE to run windows applications on my LINUX system. This ordinarily works perfectly, however the release of WINE during that encounter had a known bug (which I didn’t know about), that caused a Fatal Exception Error to occur during certain types of graphics glitches (such as shading and texturing of models) which are common but barely noticeable for Eve-on-WINE users. Anyway, as soon as I got shot, the graphic representation of the Orca has or had one of those glitchy graphics and being hit caused my client to crash. I had to work fast to kill all the EVE and WINE related processes running and stuck, so I could restart Eve to hopefully find I had warped to a logoff safe spot. Well, when I finally logged back in, I found myself in my backup clone with about 3.5 billion to spend to replace what I had lost. That was the first time the blood rushing in my ears pounded this loudly. But look, I am not a carebear. It hurt, and it wasn’t my fault and not fair, but it was part of my choice to live life this way and the only thing to do is file a petition, and hope and just move on forward. I don’t recall getting even a response for the petition…I don’t even remember if I filed one…ah well besides the point.

So here I am in space, in an Orca, just flown into a gate camp, and they were 5 or 6 sensor boosted HICs waiting at the gate for my arrival. This isn’t the time to think about what to do, either your training takes over and you just do what you are supposed to, or you die. I am glad I spent months training all my navigation skills to max out my agility and align times and fit all the modules and rigs to bring my ship to bear quickly on my warp out point. I spent weeks perfecting the timing involved, because the operation is slightly different than the Occator which I am as comfortable in as my own skin, but that slight difference in operation is the difference between life and death here and now.

I jump through the gate. There is one pirate on the other side scouting that side of the gate. Again, there is no time to let them to regroup and get ready, I must act instantly. Within the bat or two of an eye, I align to station, hit my MWD and cloak. Pirate ships are jumping in all around. Boy the ship sure does turn quickly when she’s at stop, agility boosted, and with the MWD going, and the cloak running. Yes the cloak helps your turning speed by slowing down forward acceleration. This helps the ship turn faster since a moving ship turns much slower a ship that is stopped. I turn off the MWD and wait for the cycle to reach that critical moment to shut off the cloak and hit warp. More ships jumping into local, four, five then six of them all trying to find me. There, I do it, and I am sitting there waiting for the Orca to lurch forward. It sure seems like I am visible and vulnerable for a long time. Then finally she accelerates to warp speed.



To sum up what followed:

The very next thing I see in local from some girl toon is:

 /me jaw drops to the floor
Next thing I see from someone else is:

 ^#%^W cheater


The girl said something like, “Hey, you’re the guy that does ”

I said, “Yea, you read my blog then?”

She, “sometimes”

Me, “Well now you know I wasn’t bullshitting”

She, “That was really impressive”

In private convo shortly later with the gang leader who didn’t want his guy to start swearing angry again so made it private told me when I asked that my ship was totally invulnerable to target locking during that episode. I thought that was pretty awesome to have feedback from someone genuinely trying to kill me.

All in all they ended up being a really straight up gang, and I think I made some friends, though I am certain they’ll continue to try and kill me. I’ll update this blog post with their names, but I am writing this at work and don’t have the chat logs with me. I’ll also post the edited for brevity chat logs in another post tomorrow or the next day after I can clean them up a bit.


Anyway, I thought you might like to read about my first TRUE gate camp busting episode with an Orca.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.