Friday, August 29, 2008

Damn boxes...

Hi there!

This is quite an event, 2 posts in the same month. Bring out the champagne! Yes, Real Life has been keeping me busy this summer but now that the back-to-school period is arriving things will slowly come back to normal, and before we know it we'll be neck-deep in White Stuff *shudder*. Snow is fine and dandy on a ski hill but ni town, ugh!

Well, as the title suggests, there was another alliance move lately to... haha sorry! Let's just say we're still in Curse and closer to various fires. At the moment it's extremely risky for ratting, but on the other hand there are targets galore! We can have perfectly good ops without having to tour 2 or 3 regions, and more often than not we end up fighting decently big pitched battles instead of running and gunning a few stray pilots. The fights aren't always successful but it's a totally diferent way of PvPing and the fun lasts a few minutes instead of a few seconds. My vehicule of choice for those ops is a Hurricane battlecruiser; I still have to work on some tanking skills but I think I have an idea where I'm going. For faster moving gangs I'm sticking to either Tech 2 fitted Rifters or interceptors; I'm having a bit of a slump with cruisers lately and as in most other games I've played, I seem to be at my best when I'm going extremely fast. Enter the so-called "Nano-Nerf"...

For about a month now CCP has been testing some pretty drastic modifications to the speed and mass (or lack thereof) that ships in EVE can attain. I haven't tested the modifications when they were on the test server but according to those who have, they are quite drastic. At the time of this writing the modifications have been taken off the test server for further tweaking, and some time this fall the changes will appear on the Tranquility server. The changes may put a twist to my EVE career; I was planning on flying a Vagabond HAC but apparently (all according to the tests on Singularity) it will be receiving a heavy set of reins to hold it back from it's current speed. So much so that some people have even started to post Vagabond setups with armor plating! As we say over here, "Pas de panique, Tabarnak !!!". According to EVE lore, the Vaga is known to be the fastest cruiser ever built and somehow I don't think CCP will re-write the entire lore just for a speed balancing issue. I don't expect Vagas to go as fast as interceptors as they do now though, but something tells me it will remain a very nasty ship and that a lot of people are panicking way in advance. EVE and paranoids... *rolls eyes*

In the meantime I'm training some back-up skills, and still got just that much closer to the Vagas as I now can fly Assault Frigates. But before I go on to bigger ships I will make sure that the backing skills are up to snuff; I want my battlecruisers to be as lethal as my frigates are fast, and believe me, they're FAST !!!

So until next time, fly with a knife between your teeth !!!

o7

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Told ya I'd kick myself :)

Better short updates than no updates at all I guess ;)

So, in the last post I was talking about a certain T1 cruiser tournament match I was about to take part in. Well, I can happily announce that the plan succeeded and victory was obtained by my team! The way the tourney works is like this: 2 on 2 T1 cruisers, with T1 or Meta 1 modules, drones and ammo. The teams are made up of 1 high SP player and one low SP. The team we went up against was comprised of a recon pilot and an electronics/logistics specialist. The latter pilot also has pretty much all leadership skills to 5, giving Mr Recon all sorts of fun bonuses. It also dictated what our strategy for this particular match was to be: High SP Player has to die, and FAST !!! And die she did, a millisecond before I did. So the only pilots left were MY high SP partner versus their low SP guy, and though he was slightly tanked he was just no match. So in tourney, DPS FTW !!! :)

Now the downside of the tourney: because we are in the middle of summer a lot of players are playing a lot less than usual, so getting the matches done is kind of hard. As I write this we are the only match that has been played out of the 8 of the first brackets. So we may have to ditch the bracket system and maybe go to a ladder system where a team can challenge another one, higher placed in the ladder. At least that's how I'd do it because that was what I was used to in Quake3. We'll see where it goes. I doubt we will just let it die because our match did attract some people and a tourney is a very good teamwork tool. Oh well, we'll see what happens.

In other news it seems everybody in EVE is redirecting their skills and modifying their hangar composition in light of the coming "Speed Nerf". It seems my original reasons to find my way into the Vagabond HACs will go the way of the dodo because it will stop being the speed demon it is right now. The support skills for the HACs are still very useful but I will push back my piloting of them for a while, so when I'm not in interceptors I'll probably be flying battlecruisers a lot more, even nano versions before the nerf hits. I won't start panicking until the actual update is made though.

And finally in real life news, I'm hard at work listening to 2 tunes in particular in preparation for my drum audition next Monday and Tuesday nights. It will be a competition of a different sort, but I LOVE competition so I will give it my all. I have no idea how it will affect my gamer lifestyle if I'm the lucky drummer chosen but it will affect it. I guess I'll buy an agenda and start making schedules :))

Until next time, fly safe or dangerous, but FLY !!!!

o7