Pata-flafla

To anyone who is not a drummer this title will probably sound like my brain has lost its connection to my mouth, or that I'm trying to imitate the sound of someone falling down a few flights of stairs. It is neither. The Pata-flafla is one of the 40 basic rudiments every good drummer should know, or at least know of. Translated in a sticking pattern (with flams looking like so: r-L,the little letter being the grace note and the big letter the main one, L for left and R for right) a couple bars of Pata-flafla played in basic 4/4 and the main notes being 16ths should look like this:

l-R L R r-L, l-R L R r-L...

Yeah, trickier than it looks especially when trying to play it fast. As with all drum rudiments, start slow and learn to play it clean and comfortably and gradually speed up. And yeah, use a metronome. And why am I all psyched about talking drum shop on this fine Halloween day? If you've been reading my blog you may have heard me talk about getting together with some drum corps drum line people and having a total blast. Enough that for my Friday music video I just HAD to post more drum corps love. And yesterday I got some great news from the Wishmaster drum line: there is rumor that another show is in the works, and this time I want in. And because I want to get on snare line, I have to practice my ass off like I haven't done in a very long time. So far I'm looking at 1 to 2 hours a day with the fat snare sticks, my practice pad and an Android metronome app, more as I get closer to an eventual audition. Not especially exciting in and of itself but the ultimate goal sure is. And if I can't make it on this particular line-up I'll just offer my services as a roadie; God knows I can changes drum heads and carry gear! Here's to hoping I can make an impression and land myself a spot anywhere on that drum line :)

And on to the EVE front now. Last week I've had one of those "what the fuck was I thinking" moments. Now that my buddy si Gong has some decent BC skills I thought we could tackle the epic arc mission I had left hanging for about a year: The Cost of Preservation, 2nd mission from the Brutor Tribe L4 epic agent dude. The mission is pretty simple: kill this one guy, loot the guy and GTFO. Killing the guy isn't too much trouble, but the stuff that spawns when you start shooting... yeah. So si Gong and I warp in and I start approaching Mr Target. He's in a rather tanky cruiser but together we managed to kill him, but as soon as he died all hell broke lose. The new spawn had 4-5 frigs that point and web on sight, and I was literally fucked. because we couldn't kill 'em fast enough. I asked si Gong if he was pointed and with the negative answer, GTFO. So the cost of preservation was one unit of nicely fit Sleipnir. I was later told that another of the Montreal crew, ex-capsuleer Suletsap III, had lost a faction-fit Navythron to one of those epic arc missions... I'm guessing that this is what CCP would call an ISK sink XD. So because my Slippy was nicely fit (5 faction modules) and because I treated myself so nicely before taking my summer break (Absolution and Cynabal). I couldn't replace it right away. But I don't care. I did get a Maelstrom but after flying a command ship for so long a battleship feels like shit. So much for L4's until I can get a replacement Sleipnir, and to Hell with that so-called epic bullshit.

Not that I'm very interested in missions anyway. When my subscription renewal arrives I will not only get my 3 months but will also buy a GTC or two and dump 'em on the market. Grinding sucks too much in this game. I'd rather grind my drum skills, and if I do get that drum line gig, it's drums I'll be playing, not MMO's. We will see what the future holds...

Fly it hard even if it's not cheap

o7

Old tech FTL

No, I'm not talking about the revamped EVE client with its return to the good old "ship spinning" hangar. Everything is working as intended; hell I even went to bed a lot too late! But that's my problem. My "old tech" problem isn't related to the fact that my gaming machine is now over 3.5 years old, but with the fact that posting blog entries and reading other people's blogs from work is an issue because the city of Montreal, particularly the LaSalle borrough, uses a 5-year old browser in the form of Internet Explorer 7 (yes, seven!) and slowly I'm losing access to some websites because of the browser's old age, as if having the most restrictive firewall this side of the Great Wall of China wasn't bad enough.

Therefore my lunch hour posting hobby is suffering, and I hates it. I would post stuff before I leave for work but having to get out of the house at 6AM... yeah, I'm not usually in a writing mood at this early hour. So my Wednesday of Fail post will become a Wednesday evening thing. By the way I have a couple of uber goodies to post but new killmails are always welcome so keep 'em coming, either by evemail to Cozmik R5 in-game, or to r3dfiv3@hotmail.com by regular e-mail.

In Dock 94 news, yesterday our pure noob Ricky Boys did the classic noob error of buying a book at the WRONG Pator Tech School, the one in Amamake! At the gate were a small gang of bored Pandemic Legion players so of course he got popped and podded. At least it's not as if he was a total virgin! And later si Gong and I did a few missions that were giving him a few headaches. He doesn't have too much problems tanking, but DPS is an issue. My Sleipnir fixes this nicely! si Gong also had the last part of a storyline L3, The Kidnappers starring Sansha's Nation. For an L3, this mission is pretty damn tough, tougher than most regular L4's even. but the reward was nice.

Aight, that's it for this morning... now I have to find a way to convince the "techs" here to get with the times. This is harder than you might think *sigh*

Fly fun

o7

Fail-est Loki pilot evar !!!

You want more proof that carebearing dulls the brain? Here goes: last Friday night I was taking things easy in EVE after a big work week full of weird events (including an intern who got fired... good fucking riddance!), a big drum session after replacing my snare head, and a huge well-deserved supper accompanied by some of Quebec's finest beer. So feeling mellow and lazy I didn't feel like hunting so I said to myself "just to a few missions before doing the couch potato", so I did. I was also testing a new Loki setup which now had some newly-trained HAM IIs and a pretty big drone bay. Sure it wasn't a DPS machine the way my Sleipnir is, but flying circles around ships that can't hit you can be quite funny and now with the drones I could easily take care of those pesky frigate rats. Until the fail happened.

My agent gave me the "go get my cans of Quafe" mission. If you're not familiar with it, you have to loot a can sitting about 40 km from the warp-in point in the middle of a Blood Raider camp, and when you loot the can a whole bunch of cruiser and battleship Bloods spawn on top of you. So the tactic is go in, loot and GTFO. But in my misguided lazy comfort I had forgotten one little but important detail. Among the initial spawn are a few frigates that have to be dealt with, and in my almost-sleepy state I completely forgot that little fact and proceeded to warp in and fly straight to the can, loot it, and click warp. Now the can is in the middle of a whole bunch of structures and in my dazed state it took me a while to realise that my Loki was going nowhere and had to be re-aligned, so I cut the warp and did so. But when I clicked warp a second time take a wild guess what message Aura gave me. Yeah, that message. But even then my numb and slightly drunk brains were too slow in realising it. By the time I woke up to the fact that the Blood Raiders were going to kill me I had no cap left, therefore no tank left, and didn't have enough time to kill the scramming frigate. A few seconds later, Hellbringer II went bye-bye. And to prove yet again that my brains were too slow to play EVE I had completely forgotten about the "loss of SP" part of flying T3's. Yeah.... bravo champion (insert ovation here) !!!

Oh well, at least I'll look at the positive point of my loss: the Loki wasn't pinata-fit with a bunch of faction and complex modules. But still, it's an expensive loss. EVE is a harsh mistress and if you think you may be a bit tired to play it, better stay away and do something else! Now, I'm not as financially poor as I used to be and if I wanted to I could buy two replacements right away. But do I really need one? Not really. Just like with the one that was lost in W-space my Sleipnir will do just as good, if not better. Hell, I think I'll train Command Ship V before I re-train Minmatar Engineering Subsystem IV, the skill that was lost in the explosion. And of course if things go according to plan I will be doing a bit more The PvP in the near future and this will inevitably have me replacing interceptors, AFs, cruisers, BCs, and maybe even some HACs and Recons. Lokis are nice, but my luck with them so far has been nothing short of disastrous. One was lost in a well-staged gank by a Titan-skilled Hall&Oates fan, but the loss that's purely my own fault is the suckiest, even if financially it doesn't hurt as much. But it was nothing that a quick game of Quake couldn't fix :)

Fly awake, especially in T3's!

o7

Blizzard morning

No, I'm not talking about World of Warcraft. And I'm not talking about Diablo III either, though I can't wait to get some news about this. I'm talking about the massive storm that hit most of North America and that is now dumping its load of white stuff on Montreal, mostly horizontally. Yeah, it's been a shitty walk to work this morning. Can I haz a taun-taun?

As Letrange pointed out in his last blog post, last Sunday we got a small RRBS gang to give a shot at the Sansha incursions. And also as he noted, this hit the limit of my patience when it comes to all things PvE in EVE. You see, if I do any sort of PvE it's because I have to more than I want to. ISK is needed in order to buy ships, mods, ammo, etc., and because I have no interest in all things industrial my choices are limited. And no, I don't have the luxury of being able to buy GTCs for ISK; I would if I could.

Exploration can be fun but you have to fly around a lot in order to get even slightly lucky, and with the better sites being in dangerous space doing PvE is basically asking for a gang-rape. Missions are boring and repetitive as hell but at least it keeps ISK rolling in. But yeah, you can only save the damsel so many times before getting sick of her, and if your agent goes into "courrier" mode because you refused some Faction Navy mission, things can get boring real quick as you have to haul around miners, garbage, scientists and exotic dancers. W-space sleeper sites, while they can be great fun and challenging (not to mention lucrative) require that one lives in a POS that needs a regular logistical train. But once the sleepers are dead things can go quiet quick, too quick for my taste. And now the incursions, where a small RRBS gang is overkill for the smallest sites, and way underpowered for only the next step up. And you're not even sure IF you've going to make ISK if there's competition out in space. And this is where my already short PvE patience fuse ends.

If there's one thing that's absolutely needed to get anywhere in EVE it's patience. Patience to wait for big skills to train up. Patience to make all the calculations needed to maximize productivity and profit. Patience to scan every cosmic signature in order to find the proverbial needle in the hay stack. Patience to hunt just the right target to maximize challenge and/or tears. Patience to lead a gang firmly but calmly. And patience to deal with all the curve balls this humongous game can throw. As the long-time twitch gamer that I am, patience is something that I know about more than something I use in every gaming session. The patience needed to learn a Quake map, learn a race track or fly a particular aircraft is nothing compared to the vast patience needed to populate the regular EVE session. Well, to me at least.

So where does that leave me in EVE? Frankly, I don't know. I have told my corpmates and fleetmates that as of last Sunday I will retire from PvE, but I realise that I will need ISK if I want to do the PvP lifestyle. I will keep from joining PvE gangs though because the last thing I want is to sour the gaming experience of corpmates, fleetmates, and ultimately friends. I do wish them luck in their endeavour because I know they will go at it again (I think). And as for my future in-game projects, I will have to do some deep thinking because lately with the fail wars and fail ops I've been less inclined to click the little "E" icon in my quick launch bar. Maybe losing a BC or two in glorious balls of fire will fix this. We shall see.

Fly because you want to

o7

The Great Unblocking

Alright, I think I'm cured. Let the electronic ink flow and let's talk about stuff! A few things have been happening lately and much fun was had so here goes, in no particular order.


Chaos Central

As my great buddy and corpmate Letrange has mentioned, ChaosStorm has colonized a W-space system and after the necessary hauling of ships and setting up of POS modules, we can now call this place home. And yes as Letrange has posted on his blog our tower is a sight to behold. This is actually my second stint as a W-space resident. The first time I had left the PvP-hungry Clown Punchers to go help my real-life buddy at the start of Apocrypha, and also to play EVE at a slower rate because I was on a bit of a burn-out. Well burn-out or not, the switch from all-out PvP action to a much quieter alliance proved to be a bit too radical and I was still too interested by The PvP to get settled in W-space to make ISK by the freighter load. It took me getting back to BOZO and a second burn-out to start seeing EVE under a different light. When I left BOZO the second time I started making ISK at a much faster rate because of missioning and exploration, but I still did some PvP, mostly solo roaming in either Low-sec or 0.0, and of course I didn't answer to can-flippers the way most mission runners do by crying and whining in Local; I answered by cramming a Vaga down their throat!

So now here I am back in W-space and I see the experience much differently this time. Doing Sleeper sites is much MUCH more interesting than doing missions not only because of the ISK involved but because it is much more exciting. With the right ship (more on that later) C1 and C2 sites aren't really hard but you have to remember that W-space is a 0.0 environment, and anything can and will happen. To someone like me who thrives on flying dangerously, there is great fun to be had in doing sites in another inhabited system, under the nose of the owners sometimes. Of course flying dangerous does not mean flying stupid, so when enemy probes appear on scan we drop what we're doing and try our best to snuff the prober out of existence. Letrange documented this weekend's kill of a Probe frigate. The funny thing was the cry in Local: "Dude, why?". My answer was short: "Cuz." I don't care if the intruder, or landlord if we're the ones intruding, is a noob or completely peaceful, but I'm NBSI to the core in 0.0 space and if I see it on my overview it goes down or I go down trying.


Inca Roads

No, I'm not talking about the awesome song by maestro Frank Zappa. The song did inspire me for the name of my second Sleipnir. As most people know, spending an appreciable amount of time in W-space gets you rich. Fast. I didn't have quite enough money or skills after only one week to get myself a Loki but I was easily able to buy and fit a second Sleipnir for Sleeper extermination. The first one is still in its mission hub and is basically my trophy for acheivements in EVE, therefore it is fit accordingly with all sorts of faction modules. The new one is much cheaper (OK... a Domination AB and a T2 CCC rig are not!) but let's take the C1 site "Perimeter Camp" for example: by using the Sleipnir I can get the site AND the salvaging done in less time than just killing the Sleepers using the dual-repping Hurricane. Tank is even less of an issue because of the resists, and I use a lot less bullets to get the job done. If I can buy and fit a new command ship after only one week, I guess ISK will no longer be an issue for the foreseeable future.


The tournament

This past weekend was the start of Alliance Tournament VIII, and it's clear that this year the stars of the show are the Pirate Factions' ships. Many teams have fielded a Dramiel or two, some Daredevils, some Gilas (pronounced "Hila" apprently; I did not know that!), some Rattlesnakes, etc. This year the teams also had to make a flagship whose fit would be made public, and the most popular choice by far is the Bhaalgorn, the Blood Raider battleship. And yes the flagships are ridiculously expensive. So far only three teams have fielded their flagships, one of which in a losing cause so ouch wallet! But THE most impressive match so far was the last match of Day One opposing Erebus Alliance and Red Overlord. Erebus was fielding a PL-type bomber squad while ROL brought The Angel Fleet, in the form of 3 Machariels, 3 Dramiels, 3 Daredevils and a Scimitar. The match started and then all Hell broke loose. The bombs shot at the Angel tacklers blew up in empty space because the frigates were too fast, and 137 seconds later it was all over. Pandemic Legion's Minmatar fleet last year was impressive, but ROL's Angel fleet was far beyond impressive.

This is the fourth tournament I have the chance of witnessing and it seems that CCP are getting better and better at delivering a quality event, both in sportsmanship and in media coverage. At one point on Day Two over 20000 people were watching the tournament video stream, and during the North American afternoon the PCU record got shattered when at one point 60453 accounts were logged in. To think that when I started playing anything over 35000 was considered a Big Deal... EVE has really come a long way!


So that's pretty much it with the update. I can't wait for the tournament to pick up again, and for once the finals will be happening while I'm not on parental duty. Maybe we should make it an event with the other Montreal players!

Fly like you own the place, even when you don't

o7

Two years in EVE

Yesterday, on January 20th 2010, Cozmik celebrated his two years since his graduation from the Republic Military School. Yep, 2 years already. Damn time flies! It seems only like yesterday that I was playing on a Classic Graphics client, that I had to find a stargate around my screen in order to manually align to it, that interceptors were going 7000+ meters per second without a single implant or faction module, and that Nano-anything ships were "I win" buttons that were extremely difficult to catch unless you had 10 webs on the guy. Oh, and warp scramblers didn't do dick all to MWDs and assault ships in general were barely flown because it was awkward to fit them successfully. And the price of rigs and salvage... one of the things that allowed me to start the PvP lifestyle at such a young age was the ISK made from ratting and salvaging Angels and Sanshas; Alloyed Tritanium Bars were priced around 450000 ISK apiece, and Melted Capacitors around 300000. Rigging my own ships was unthinkable though. One time I did rig my ratting Thrasher with "affordable" shield and projectile rigs (4-5 million each) and of course, me being me, I got cocky enough to go ratting in Low-sec and the inevitable happened. I felt stupid for taking such a chance but in the end there were worse things and I moved on.

At the time I had my sights set on flying a Vagabond but I had no clue as to how I would pay the exhorbitive price for the ship and all its modules and rigs. Today, a scant few million ISK buys you multiple Medium Polycarbon Engine Housing rigs. Around the time of Empyrean Age, there were no different sizes and 60 million ISK was the price of a single Polycarb rig. When Quantum Rise arrived their prices dropped a bit, but they were still more expensive than the average interceptor. That was when assault ships came of age though, and the sized rigs in mid-Apocrypha turned them from good to great.

So here I am, 2 years after diving into EVE for the long haul, and here I am again asking myself the ever present question: what now?

I've done the full-time PvP thing and I found it great fun when done loosely, but too seriously and I lose interest; I'm not a military type guy and if someone barks at me I'm gonna bark right back, 10 times louder, which would make the whole thing suck for everyone.

I've done the wormhole thing which is very up and down in terms of action; combat sites in W-space are more interesting than anything the NPCs can deliver in K-space, intruders have to be hunted down down be they scanning frigs all the way up to a full-on POS bash, but on the flip side when all the combat sites are done and there's only mining to do... that's when EVE gets turned off and I either go fly fast in FS9, beat the shit out of my drums, etc.

I've done the exploration thing once in a while, but I admit I've not been very lucky with the things I scan down, and the amount of travel involved can sometimes play tricks on my short patience fuse. But still I do get lucky once in a blue moon and find something worthwhile.

It would also be worth looking at the things I absolutely refuse to do in EVE before I decide where to aim my ship:

I refuse to mine. Last time I did was because a mission required it to initiate the spawn and I felt dirty doing it.

I refuse to do the industrial production thing. When a game becomes a job people burn out. And I've seen it happen too many times lately. Yes, industry needs to happen in order for me to buy stuff to blow up and get blown up. And yes I have built stuff from time to time, especially in my starting months when I had access to tons of minerals from just casual ratting and I could built Rifters to get blown up in without consequence. But building stuff while following a spreadsheet, and dealing with production costs, profit margins, and so on... Yow! I have enough problems with real-life finances as it is that I don't need a whole new set of finances to melt my brain.

I refuse to play a game with an alarm clock. This is the full-on PvP experience brought to the extreme, and in my book it's over the limit of sanity. I play EVE because I want to, not because I have to.

And finally I refuse blobfests. When I read about people bitching about lag, and how Dominion broke fleet fights, I just shake my head and wonder why the fuck people keep doing it. "Because it's epic" they'd say. Yeah, epic but people bitch about it and not just since Dominion. People have been bitching about lag in fleet fights since the first day I've been in the game (probably more since Day One) and yet people still cram as many people in some far-away system in Querious as they do in Jita, only the bunch in Querious as got drones out, fighters out, missiles and ammo flying, remote-reps going, cap-transfering and more, all in one single spot in space. At least the 1000+ in Jita are docked up and only busy with price mark-ups and scams; I'd love to see what would happen if everyone undocked from Jita 4-4 at the same instant. To read people saying "WAAAAA LAAAG!" is really ironic because the ones bitching about lag are the ones creating it. Good job! This is what blobfests are to me and I will not participate.

So where does this leave me in EVE? Am I about to give away my stuff? Nah, not yet anyway! EVE is really harsh when things go wrong or start sucking a chunk out of real life, but when the stars are aligned and things go right there's simply just no game like it. And no matter how others will try to be like it they will continue to fail for a long time to come I think. And hey, I still need to train a lot stuff, and I better train because I didn't just get a full set of +4 implants for nothing! Yes, it took just short of forever but I finally understood the mechanics of jump clones. Don't ask, I'm just extremely dense :) So I still want to do some solo or smallish-gang PvP, but I also need the flexibility to do my own thing when I want; it doesn't mean that because I'm online I'm automatically available for PvP or a big complex or something. Anyway, we'll see what the future brings. Being in my own little 2-man corp is fun but I'm starting to miss some action once in a while. I've already asked my corpmate how he felt about moving to 0.0 because it's looking very much like this will happen sooner or later, but I don't want to do the move at any price. I've been in here for 2 years and I hope I stay in here for a lot longer.

Fly with your heart

o7