Friday, January 28, 2011

Friday's Electric Lunch Hour - 2011/01/28



If this video doesn't give you the urge to throw yourself into a mosh pit, I don't know what will. Watch until the end to see the guitar player's spectacular stage dive.... with guitar !!!

On the EVE front: the war we were in pettered out without a single kill on either side. The main corporation left the alliance and for the last 24 hours AMC was at war with only one guy. This is the fail-est war in the history of forever. Oh well, back to replenishing the ISK basket a bit :))

Fly hard

o7

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Monday, January 24, 2011

Station humpin' wardeccers

Among all the types of The PvP that I absolutely hate in EVE, station humpin' (I'm trying to stay polite here... believe me, it's hard) is pretty much on top of the list. But when an alliance goes so far as to dump 50 million ISK to be at war and all it does is loll around in their little 1-station Low-sec system ganking singletons off the station and not engaging if there is the slightest hint of a challenge, it goes beyond hate and turns it into contempt. Add to that the fact that barely anyone in that alliance logs in, and that their idea of "fun" is to wardec big alliances like Br1ck Squad and Wildly Inappropriate just to catch people heading to or from the shit-hole called Jita, and what you have is a good idea of the nature of our current war targets.

To make a long story short, one of their players joined an AMC corporation in the hopes of going to W-space. Before that happened he got together with some corpmates for a few missions, but did something that smelled fishy (don't exactly know what, it's not my corp!) and that got him kicked out. He threw a hissy fit and his real alliance wardecced. The only word that comes to mind is this: wow. Now, wardeccing corporations and alliances to get some fun all over EVE is one thing, but spending 50 million for nothing, I don't get it. We even brought the fight to them in the form of a Hurricane fleet, but the only targets we saw were a Vindicator and a Fleet Stabber but nothing came of it. Oh yeah I forgot to mention, they like faction ships. A lot. But they barely leave their station. And if they do and smell trouble they make themselves scarce real quick. I'm not trying to be whiny or anything but I just don't understand what kind of fun, if you can call it that, 4-5 year old veterans can get from being in an alliance that's ready to wardec anything that moves and just stays put waiting for a kill to land on their lap. If someone has an answer, please comment (though I will still think your balls are about the size of grains of rice).


Because of Falcon

After leaving the area where our war targets have funky sex with their station, I stuck around what we call our PvP HQ because there's no way in Hell I'll fly my Orca as the war is going on; the enemy may like station sex but I'm not that stupid! So yesterday when I noticed that the PCU record was going through the roof I did the unusual thing and logged in with my 2 boys as co-pilots, hoping to catch some pew-pew. I first went to the Mya system where some long-time opponents seemed to be out in force. I was alone so I passed. I then went to the Gallente-Amarr pipe and it wasn't long that I had something on scan. The same Vagabond as a few weeks ago flew the same way as a few weeks ago, which was to stay the hell away from my 'Cane. I will have to throw down the gauntlet with my own Vaga at some point, maybe then we'll have some fun. So I proceeded to "rat" a little to attract attention, until a Cynabal appeared on scan...

At first I checked all the gates and random belts just in case I was dealing with a misguided carebear (it's EVE... you never know!) but after a few trips here and there he was nowhere to be found. I went back to "ratting" where I quickly dispatched a Serpentis battleship and just as the NPC explodes the Cynabal arrives at about 50 clicks from me. Yeah baby, it's on! We start our Dance of Death around each other, both of us looking to hit just a bit harder. We both wait to deploy the drones and sometimes the Cynabal even leaves my warp disruptor's range but never warps out. I'm thinking that this will be an epic fight, but unfortunately that was not to be; just as I had decided to launch my drones and overheat my guns a bit, a Falcon decloaks and hits me with the Mother of All Raspberry Jams. I LOL at 'em in Local as I wait for the inevitable, and finally warp my pod off with a salute when it happens. I won't do the "nerf ECM!" thing because I've been on the ECM-using side before, but yes, I see where people can really hate it. In my case it turned what could've been an amazing fight even if I lost into a one-sided affair forgotten as soon as I mounted another ship. Oh well, what can you do. Still, it was fun to at least get some action in the 15-20 minutes I was logged in. And I found it ironic I that found better action with random targets in Low-sec than I did from war targets !!!

Keep The PvP away from stations; it's more fun that way!

o7

Friday, January 21, 2011

Friday's Electric Supper - 2011/01/21



Once again RL and wardec happened and I couldn't get the FELH up on time. In line with this week's wardec, I couldn't think of a better tune to post but Black Sabbath's "War Pigs".

On the wardec: not much has happened so far but I'll say this: the enemy is flying nice ships, and they would look awesome on our killboard >:))

Fly hard and smart

o7

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Three years, a new look and a wardec

Yep, today is the day that Cozmik R5 turns 3 years old, and to celebrate the event we have just received a wardec! At 1909 EST we should find out what kind of an enemy we are dealing with. Are we going to plow through them like we did with Genesis Alliance? Are we going to lose 3-4 ships to 1 to station humping the way we did in the last war? Well, according to current intel our enemy fights in two places: Cloud Ring and Jita. Impressed I am not. I did send a call to an op that may backfire on me though; I sent an alliance mail inviting whoever felt like hunting to gather up "somewhere", only to be told afterwards that the guy who got all pissy at being found to be a spy and kicked from one of our W-space dwelling corps was still in the process of having roles expiring. Neat. At least he never even got close to our wormhole colonies or their respective channels.

So tonight one of 3 things will happen. 1- They will come with a blob to camp us in, get bored after an hour and log, leaving stragglers to get WTFBBQ'd. 2- Their 0.0 elements will stay in 0.0 and not care about the wardec, and their Jita gankers will hope to catch one of us there; it shouldn't happen but if one of our guys loses a hauler like this I'm gonna laugh at him so hard he'll ragequit. 3- They will come with an even sized fleet and we will have a nice respectable skirmish. I really hope for this, but this is EVE so anything can and will happen!

But about the 3 years in EVE. Every January since 2009 I am amazed at how far I've come in the past year, but even if it has now been 3 years with only very short breaks sometimes I still feel like a complete noob. If I lead a fight there's always something that I overlook. If I fly solo I still tend to bite off more than I can chew. I'll freely admit that the quest for more ISK has kept me away from the much more fun but ISK-draining PvP, and in doing that one can get a bit rusty, but now that I have a few jump clones, a good ISK base and a decent agent to help me replenish the wallet I should be able to spend more time looking for trouble. I know there could be other ways to make ISK; I have a very hot trade alt I can use to buy low/sell high, but that's about it. When I play EVE I am the epitome of Lazy Bastards and I hate working. But money is needed so I have to work a bit. In truth, EVE is not the perfect space game for me, but no game out there even comes close, and those that could are turning into vaporware. Oh well, what can you do.

So what are Cozmik's plans for the next year? These days I'm into buffing up my drone skills, and I won't stop until I have both T2 heavies and sentries. Only then will I be justified in buying an Ishtar. After that I will probably start training T2 lazors and Amarr ships, with the obligatory tracking disrupting and cap sucking skills of course. Nothing fancy, just up to cruiser sized ships. I'm very much of a killmail whore so I've always steered away from logistics ships, but some time this year I think I will bite the bullet and train it up, along with the remote repairing and cap transfering skills. But I very much prefer to be on the killing side than on the repping side; same as above, EVE is not perfect for me. And after that? I'll just train up every sub-capital skills. Even 3 years down the road, when a lot of players are already in Null-sec cap blobs, I still have zero interest in capital ships. The Orca is as big as I'll ever get. I can very well see myself a few years from now and having Cozmik quit training altogether and have an alt start training. But know this: if some game company ever comes out with a single-shard sandbox space game where more effort is put on the actual piloting and PvP aspects than on economy and industry, and ships are flown by a flight control system instead of a keyboard and mouse, I will have a lot of stuff to hand out! But for now, EVE is it and there's only one thing I want from it: get better at flying what I already fly.

Fly dangerous, and if your corp ticker is D-X-M, let's dance!

o7

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The menagerie

The Coz

Trade babe Cassy Winds

Hauler/cyno-man Outofplace Lamb




There you have 'em, the trio of account #1. The second account is still in cryo for the foreseeable future, but maybe this summer if I have a bit of a break I may revive Demonia Gardens, Muguette G and Noknok Whosdeyr.

To CCP: wtb tattoos...

o7

New ship on the "Gimme!" list

I've spent quite a bit of time on Sisi over the past weekend cuz the TQ Cozmik was waiting patiently for BMTHOKK to arrive after scouting out the entire Teshkat system and making tons of bookmarks. So I updated the client, loaded up Sisi and for the first time seriously played with the character editor until I had a good idea what my characters would look like. So Coz will be slightly different but more defined, the hauler alt is almost identical to his TQ self, but Cassy... damn do Vherokiors look different. For now Cassy is wearing what looks for all the world like biker gear and kind of has a ressemblance to Ghost in the Shell's Motoko Kusanagi; a far cry from her lacy and jeweled self on TQ. It will be really interesting to see what extra options we will get tomorrow. I'm hoping for much more clothing, tattoos, jewelry and hair-dos!

Once I was done playing with my faces it was time to play with some ships. The latest mirror put me in our Harerget offices with my freshly equiped Orca. Quite funny cuz I was there with the Orca for maybe 48 hours! As I was about 15 jumps from FD-MLJ I didn't bother with the "moveme" channel and just grabbed my Vagabond and travelled on my own. Upon arrival I did the usual and bought the guns and modules I normally use by the ton (stuff at 100 ISK is beautiful!), but since one of the recent changes that Incursion brought there was something that I needed to check: now that Faction ships can be put on the regular market, will they be seeded on Sisi? Well I don't know if was only in FD-MLJ or if it was temporary but they were, so for the LOLZ I bought 10 Cynabals and 10 Machariels; great way to spend 2000 ISK!

I knew where I was going with the Cynabal so I set about to fit it like a slightly tankier Vagabond with bigger guns and bigger drones, T2 everything. I would basically fly it the same way a Vaga is flown, that is orbiting a target at the edge of disruptor range and bursting the MWD once in a while. I'm not very much into pre-arranged 1v1's even though they can be fun because when you ask for a duel sometimes the forces get lopsided, and I prefer the "closer to TQ" feel of the FFA arenas so off to "Cruisers and smaller" I went. There was only one ship there, a Rook. "Oh sweet, I'm gonna get jammed to shit!" I thought. But this was going to be a good test so I went for it anyway. Approached at an angle, floored the MWD, targetted, laid my point, got a volley off... and got covered in raspberries. Time to launch my 5 little Hammerhead minions!

Now, jamming is a chance-based affair and once in a while the Rook would skip a cycle or two and I could send a few volleys, while his drones and missiles were doing much less damage than I was expecting; decent tank + good resists = win. So I took a gamble and went right up to him in scram range. Sure I wouldn't be able to use the MWD, but my guns would sing their painful song much louder. A third party in the form of an Arbitrator arrived on the scene and he decided I was the tastier target, but at about the same time the Rook lost jams on me, and his shields were about to fail. Time to turn on the overheat and sure enough I had just enough time to reduce him to atoms before he could get more jams on me. I was even able to recover the 3 drones I had left before the Arbitrator thought about putting a point on me, unless he didn't have one.

For a few seconds I was actually sitting in station repping my overheated guns thinking "Did I really just solo a Rook? Outgunned 2:1 and neuted?". The next thought that entered my brain was "I GOTTA GET A CYNABAL !!!". Now, the slight problem with the Cynabal is that on TQ it costs 2.5 million times its price on Sisi. But now, having seen what it can do with close to max skills, the price is justified. Of course all encounters will surely not always go the same way as this one, but in a decently sized cruiser fleet this ship can do wonders. To have an idea of what groups of these can do just look at the last Alliance Tournament where a few teams fielded Angel fleets to much success. So what I have to do now is scrape some ISK; I do have enough but I bought a couple PLEX's lately in case of a real-life financial snafu. but I will probably have my account topped off for a few months soon, and besides I have a few Hurricanes to get popped :)) But who knows, maybe I'll treat myself a little because in two days Cozmik will be 3 years old!

Fly hard, fast and nasty

o7

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

BMTHOKK aftermath

What a crazy night of fireworks that was! Before I go into my view of the event let's summerize it: blogger Kirith Kodachi was celebrating 6 years of blogging and 2000 blog posts, so he put on a live event where he would sit at a planet in the Teshkat system for 30 minutes accompanied with some of his corpmates from M3 corp. In a great show of solidarity, and expecting super capitals to wreck the party, Noir Mercenary Group decided to celebrate their 3rd anniversary by being Kirith's honor guard. Some other corps went to Kirith's defence so there was no doubt about it, he was gonna be a tough nut to crack.

The way it worked was like this. Two channels had been made for attackers and defenders respectively, so when someone got to Teshkat all he had to do was join one of the two channels and X up for fleet the old fashioned way. A few guys from Morsus Mihi had taken the reins of the attacker fleet but one thing was certain: there were A LOT MORE defenders than attackers. And to make things even more interesting, just a few minutes before the kick-off a Goonswarm gang arrived in Local and smacked like mad; for the record, the BOZOs were much better smackers. All told there was about 300 people in Local when the festivities started.

My mighty Rifter was among the first ones to arrive on the scene, and for starters my job was to maybe get rid of a few frigates. First mistake: I aggro'd on arrival so when I would inevitably lose my ship I would have to wait out the damn GCC... I cannot hate the GCC more than I hated it yesterday. Second mistake, I didn't take into account the awesome amount of logistics ships on the field. Popping a single frigate at the main battle site was pretty much impossible unless you had a ship that could insta-pop them. So for the time being the attacker fleet broke off and spread out to all the other planets to pick off followers, and this worked awesomely. But at least one guy had remained on the main battle field, and he was to become one of the heroes of the night.

After my GCC had expired I rejoined the fray in a harder hitting Thorax and started hunting GCC-afflicted enemies with my fleet-mates. At some point the comms were full of excitement when someone called that the Chimera's shield were going down. As the 30 minutes were close to being done I bee-lined for Kirith and tackled him so he couldn't fly off, but it was in vain as he was repaired almost instantly. So we broke off again, this time taking a lot less losses and returned to hunt GCC's. At least this insured that I would be on the killmail! The 30 minutes finally expired and everyone was wondering how Kirith would break the status quo. My corpmate Felix Dcat, who had stayed with the carrier for the entire time and for some reason remained ignored by the defender fleet, called again that the carrier's shields were going down. Everyone thought that this was another case of bait-tanking as we called it, but suddenly Felix called "he's into armor, and dropping fast!". Soon after he confirmed that Noir had turned its guns on Kirith's Chimera and if we wanted to be on the field went it blew up we had to boogie, so boogie we did. Mere seconds after we landed, the Ninveah's sister ship was turned into a ball of flames. We all checked our combat logs frantically but the answers soon came: I can't remember who got the final blow or who podded Kirith (much less who got the most kills during the op) but Felix Dcat, who managed to stay right on top of the Chimera for the entire length of the op, delivered over 107000 damage and earned the prize for top damage, a Guristas' Gila cruiser. There couldn't have been a better end to this event!

All in all this was an awesome event to be a part of. Many congratulations are in order: To Kirith Kodachi for his 6 years of blogging, his hosting and organizing of the event and for being an awesome sport. To Alekseyev Kaarde and Noir Mercenary Group for 3 years of operation and living up to the name of "honor guard". To my corpmate Felix Dcat for putting AMC and MAPU right on top of the damage board. To all the other winners which I don't remember right now and can't check because my work's firewall is too stupid (no worries, I will edit the post as soon as I get home). To Goonswarm for not disappointing in being your crazy selves. And finally to everyone who showed up from all over New Eden, sometimes leaving far-away Null-sec homes just to get a crack at Kirith. Both fleets had people who are usually enemies flying together and generally having an awesome time. I would also like to personally thank the guy who stepped up as FC on the attacker side; I may not like huge fleets and 0.0 blobs but when stuff needed to get done he got it done faster than I've seen in some 10-man fleets.

Thanx everyone for an awesome night in EVE !!!

o7

Monday, January 17, 2011

The old me, immortalized


Just before turning 3 years old, the first Cozmik R5 is signing off. See you on the flip-side!

Sunday, January 16, 2011

The new me, Singularity version


The Trigger Happy Speed Freak himself. Granted, this is not the final version as there will probably be a lot more design options when Incursion Part III goes live later this week. Coz is missing his face tattoos, and I'd like his dreads to be more dread-like, but the basics are there and he shouldn't be too different when Tuesday night comes. I've also worked on my alts a bit; Cassy looks a lot more asian than she currently does on TQ (I didn't know that Vherokior were chinese) and my almost unused hauler alt has a massive implant on top of his head instead of the good ol' Viziam crown of white hair. We'll see what can be done later this week, and I will be posting my entire menagerie of characters once they're all done.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Friday's Electric Supper - 2011/01/14



Sorry about the lateness, I was out of town taking it easy today. But I'm back home now so better late than never! Here's another Quebec band covering a Pink Floyd classic so worries, you won't have to try to understand french lyrics :)

On the EVE front: in preparation of Kirith's Monday night carrier bash, I will settle in comfortably and get to know Tash-Murkon a bit, as I've only travelled it real quick when I was living in W-space. This time I'm gonna scout around, make bookmarks, check out the local wild life in various Low-sec systems, but generally try not to hurt my Sec Status too much; I'm probably gonna take quite a hit on Monday so If I want to still be able to travel freely I must be careful.

Fly dangerous and enjoy the weekend !!!

o7

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Blog Banter #24: I am me

I very rarely do the banter thing because I do try to spent more time playing the game than talking about it, but this one here is interesting:


Welcome to the twenty-fourth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week or so 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 for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month's Banter topic comes to us from the ever helpful Eelis Kiy, capsuleer behind the "Where the frack is my ship" blog. She asks: How does your real life personality compare to who you are as a character in EVE? Does a good leader of people in the real world make a good leader of pilots in game? Or vice-versa? Do your real-life skills help you with the roles you fulfill in your corporation or alliance? Or do you behave completely differently? Does the anonymity of the Internet allow you to thrive on the tears of others in New Eden whilst you work as a good Samaritan away from your keyboard? Or are you as mean outside of your pod as you are inside it? Have experiences in EVE Online affected your behavior, skills or attitudes outside of the game?


It's very simple. Cozmik R5 is r3dfiv3 is Benoit Gauthier. I have attacked all video games that attracted me with the same intensity that I attacked jumps in my BMX days, or with the same intensity that I attack my drum kit. The thing that really attracted me to multiplayer gaming was the camaraderie and friendly competition. When I started playing Red Planet I was as much hooked on the people I was hanging out and flying with as I was with the game itself. A few years later the same happened with the Quake3 community; how many people ride a bus a thousand clicks just to go to a LAN party? Well, I'm one of those crazies.

Do my real-life skills help me in anyway? Hell yeah! I come from games where real-life skills are everything, and I will never forget how rough I found my beginnings when I had not even 2 million skill points with a wall of skills on my seamingly never-ending EVEmon plans, and where every cruiser lost was like a scar on my wallet. But one thing I know I'm good at is piloting, be it planes, cars, 'mechs or just a guy on a Quake map. So even though I was short on in-game skills and ISK, I knew that in a short time I'd be able to make my mark at least in some way. It's also the reason why I hate capital ships so much; I just don't consider flying those fat boats "piloting" (to all cap pilots who don't agree, rage on... I don't give a fuck). For the record, I have piloted two planes in real life, and I have a license to rent 125cc racing karts. Yeah, I can pilot.

My thoughts on anonymity: let's just say they are very bad. If I feel like being an asshole it's cuz I feel like being an asshole. Do I take advantage of that fact that I can be an asshole in a virtual context? Of course, I mean, I'm not exactly into ramming cars and stealing stuff in real life, but it's great to be in a game where one second you can help some guy by giving him a ship, and the next second you can blow him up. If some people rage about stuff like this, they just don't understand the nature of the beast that is EVE.

List of participants:

TBD (I'll try but don't make any bets)

QNS Grand Antonio's baptism of fire

It's no big secret that next Monday night something big will be happening in the Tash-Murkon region, and though I have no idea how many pilots of my alliance will be attending (if any), I will be attending. And because I live mostly in Heimatar space, this means I got to use my Orca for its intended purpose for the first time. I probably won't win anything with the ships I brought, but if there was a prize for "Most wrecks left by a single pilot" I would probably win it. There is a slight chance that could I win the final blow or pod if I play my cards right, because I will probably have some of the smallest ships on the field, and all of 'em have a very high rate of fire. Now if only people will stop promising Kirith that they will protect him and promise they will attack him instead... :)

So how many ships did I manage to cram into Antonio? For obvious reasons I won't go into the details of each one but because this is for pure fun I will give the ship sizes: 1 battlecruiser, 6 cruisers and 11 frigates. 18 ships, some of which were already fit and ready to go, the others packaged but with all the necessary modules, and enough ammunition and drones for every ship for about... 10 ops, maybe more. THIS is why I spent about 45 days training all the industrial bullshit I will never use. And it's also why I believe that a combat version should be made that does not require all the mining and industrial skills and does not have a 50k m3 ore bay; for shits and giggles I actually put it to use by putting in exactly 1 unit of every kind of ore in the game, my salute to the 1 unit of tritanium that comes with a noob ship :)

But seriously, my dream field deployment ship would skip the ore bay in favor of a ship maintenance array big enough for a Tier 3 battleship and a few extra ships (say 1 BS 1 BC, 1 BS 2 CR, 20 assorted frigs... etc), and maybe a slightly bigger cargo hold. That way the fitting slots could actually be used for a tank, which I would put somewhere between a fully tanked Orca and a semi fail-fit carrier. And what would I call such a ship? To keep in line with ORE's whale theme I would probably call it the "Cachalot"; this is french for "sperm whale" but it sounds better. It's also a carnivore whale; it wouldn't do to call a PvP ship hauler a "Beluga" or something. And in size this whale is just about halfway between an orca and a rorqual, so it fits perfectly. To actually be used on the field it would need some command capabilities. Maybe not as much as a Claymore, Damnation or command-fit T3 but better that the average battlecruiser. I would also give it more offensive capabilities than the current ORE ships. A tracking bonus? A capacitor bonus for smartbombs? Some testing would be needed to find the right balance. Because in theory such a ship would follow its corporation in an op, and because it's made for combat by design, it would have to move a bit faster than the current Orca, but nothing that could be called fast. Maybe a warp speed bonus, or agility... more testing.

And now, how would I see my Cachalot in action. Well, basically the same way Orca's are used but instead of mining asteroids the corp members are mining ship wrecks. If I had such a ship I would have it cloaked at a safespot, and pilots who just lost their ship in an engagement could re-ship right away and return to the fight in something better than a noob ship. It could be much more flexible than a cloaked carrier in black op space interdiction tactics, though it would carry less ships and mods. If caught alone it would be tanky enough for help to arrive, creating yet more opportunities for small to mid scale battles, but of course if the Cachalot pilot is flying stupidly he could be in a world of hurt and lose a lot of either his own or his corp's assets, which would encourage people to fly it smarter.

I don't know, I could be dreaming awake but I've been thinking of such a ship ever since the Orca came out because I didn't want to train all the industry stuff. But now I have trained it and in the short time I've had the Orca it has been really useful in carrying my ships to my prefered hot spots, and I can easily go to a new hot spot if only for one event. And EVE being what it is I'm sure the opportunity to find new hot spots in places I rarely go to will come up again.

May the Ninveah's sister ship crash and burn !!!

o7

Monday, January 10, 2011

Off with his head !!!

To CCP: you have a date and time. It might be a good idea to reinforce the node for this one...

The Event: Bring Me The Head Of Kirith Kodachi

So Kirith and some of his M3 corpmates will land at a planet in the Teshkat system, Tash-Murkon region, and are hoping to survive 30 minutes of sustained fire from pretty much whoever in EVE cares to show up. It was supposed to be Kirith alone but of course, this is EVE. Surprises were to be expected. But one thing is for sure: I will find my way in there, alone or with corpmates and/or alliancemates and at the very least I will send one volley at Kirith's Chimera.

What to expect: total, complete and utter mayhem. Kirith is a well-known figure in the EVE blogosphere and apart from Sovereignty warfare in the ass-end of nowhere, capital ship kills are few and far between so I expect a lot of people to come out of the wood work to bring as much fire power as they can muster, from frigs and destroyers on drone killing duty all the way up to Titans. Hell, I'm sure a lot of people have carriers and dreadnoughts but never get to use them in every day EVE life; this will be the perfect opportunity to test their mettle (provided they can afford to lose 'em of course!). I have a feeling that we, as in all of us trying to kill Kirith and his little helpers, will be facing one nasty tough circle jerk of triage carriers. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone had the cojones to bring a super-carrier. All I know for sure is this: I am NOT missing this event for all the ISK in New Eden! I now have a week to set up shop somewhere in Amarr space (damn I love my Orca !!!) and hype the event to get as many AMC pilots as possible. Sure most of 'em are hardcore industrialists, but an event like this doesn't come around too often.

Fly hard and down with Kirith Kodachi !!!

o7

Friday, January 7, 2011

Friday's Electric Lunch Hour - 2011/01/07



I open the year with one of the tunes that move me the most. In my vkgoeswild post I talked about how awesome her piano version of this tune is, but here's the live version of it at a place I'd love to visit at least once before I die, Wacken Open Air festival in Germany.

Fly deep

o7

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Post Holiday Zombieness

They were fun. They were busy. They were flooded in alcohol and left a trail of hang-overs. But at some point the holidays had to end and we would have to get back to the grind of Real Life *sigh*. As is standard procedure in my family, the New Year party is much much MUCH more fun as it is mostly a crowd of Gen X'ers partying it up until 8am, not quite succeeding in sleeping, and having a group breakfast in the "morning", around Noon. New Year with our crazy bunch of family and friends is an extreme sport :))

Because I haven't had a holiday season this lively in such a long time let's just say that gaming in general got pushed to the back burner, though I did do a couple missions, and give a nasty brown mark to a noobish Vexor pilot. I was on my way out of the Mya system after an uneventful tour of the 2-star constellation's asteroid belts looking for the first AMC kill of the year, and as I land on the gate the Vexor jumps thru, right in my lap. It was quite the one-way fight against my Hurricane. Upon checking the character's age I did feel bad, so I sent him a bit of ISK to get a new ship and told him to be more careful; hey what can I say, I was in a festive mood :) Well, now he knows that Low-Sec can be interesting. After waiting out the obligatory GCC (yo, vikings... 15 minutes is TOO GODDAMN LONG !!!!) I get back to the gate lead to Hi-Sec when this time a 2-day old Velator jumps in; wtf, am I a noob magnet ?!?! I told him in Local that I wouldn't even bother wasting ammo on him, but I do advise him to be careful in these waters.

When I finally leave the dead-end constellation I head towards the Gallente-Amarr border in search of more trouble, but somehow everyone I came across was too skittish about engaging my 'Cane. I even followed an Armageddon all the way up to the Bleak Lands, but at some point he rejoined his Faction Warfare buddies, and a 12-man gang was not something I wanted to tackle solo so I pulled a U-turn and headed back to HQ. But as I land on the Altanins gate in Elarel, a lone Vagabond is camping. Unfortunately he warps off to the star just as I exit warp. I follow him thinking that maybe he wants a fight away from the gate guns, which is understandable, but he warps off again. It appeared to be towards the Altanins gate but when I land there he's nowhere to be seen, although he's still on scan. So I camped the gate a bit in case he finally decides to let me aggro (thus getting the sentries on me), or in case something worthy comes thru, but at some point I decide I've had enough of this waiting game and call it a night. Maybe next time I'll go back there with my own Vaga!

But apart from that tiny bit of The PvP, skill flipping and a few missions, it's been awfully quiet in EVE for me. Maybe even too quiet. I don't know how busy my corpmates have been over the holidays, but it seems that instead of having more time to log in, they've had less. And looking at MAPU's member list, it's easy to notice that only a small handful of us have been playing regularly. And even I am guilty of not logging in sometimes as Real Life has a tendency to become a complete bitch. So I have the feeling that soon I will have to ask myself some serious questions about staying in MAPU or not. It's not that I don't like the guys; most of 'em are from my area and we have a great time together at our EVE pilot meets. But I'm more into small-gang PvP than solo PvP. I like shooting the shit, smacking Local and picking fights. What I DO NOT want is 50+ man blobs and orders to play the game a certain way. And I admit it, I miss NPC 0.0. If I can find a corp that doesn't mind having a player that gets busy in real life, flies dangerously, and sometimes does stupid shit just because he can, then I may very well move. I want EVE to stay a game, but I understand that when shit needs to get done, it needs to get done. But I will not fly a ship under threat. Anyway, 2011 is very young, we'll see what fun it brings!

2010 is dead, long live 2011 !!!

o7