It is coming...

Alliance Tournament VIII

Looks like there are only a few changes from the last one, namely some point changes on HACs, T1 cruisers and Faction cruisers. Also, people need to be part of a competing alliance 60 days prior to the tournament.

A fun twist to the tourney will be the nomination of a Flagship for each team, and that ship will have a name... can't wait to see what people come up with!

Fly ftw

07

The pilot's seat

Here it is, about a week late but better late than never. My driving/flying/fragging/tackling setup. No, the X52 isn't on the desk all the time, but I don't know what I'd give to have the ability to fly my Vaga with it :) The Wingman FF wheel has seen better days and needs replacement though.

My corp haz a what ?!?!

Hey there people of New Eden, bloggers, scoundrels and carebears! It's been a while since my last blog post, not because of burn out or some such reason, but more because frankly, nothing really special has been happening for me in EVE. I guess such things can happen when training for a long time for something big and expensive; just before spring hits I will be plying the space lanes in a brand spankin' new Sleipnir, and because it will become my pride and joy money-making boat I will fit it accordingly, which is, hrm, NOT CHEAP! So lately I've been doing the slightly boring... what am I saying, boring as fuck job of missioning for ISK. These days I'm using a Maelstrom that's basically a practice fit for the Sleipnir, and let's just say it is Tanky with a capital T. When I step into the command ship things will only get better because the tank will be a bit better due to bonuses and faction modules, but the resistances will be just awesome, the signature radius will be much smaller than a battleship, and the tracking and speed will be pretty much doubled, all while retaining the same DPS. Estimated expenditure: 500 million ISK. I know it's not much for some of you older players flying capitals and such, but for me, who before November had never really had a solid ISK income, it's a Big Fucking Deal. So far I'm just over 400 million ISK in my wallet; in normal times this would be more than enough to say "OK, enough of the carebear shit and start fraggin'" but I want the Slippy bad enough to rough it through the boredom. On the flip side, I'm feeling much more comfortable flying around in HACs, and I need to get a Rapier just after the Sleipnir. Yes, things are getting fun just before I hit 30 million skill points... only 2 million to go :)

But the main reason for the blog update happened yesterday night as my corpmate and I were casually carebearin' around and listening to Adragon Technochrist on EVE Radio. Adragon is one of the most colorful of the ER DJs and always has some contests or draws with nifty prizes in ISK, ships, faction stuff, etc. And I must say that before yesterday we already had a good average at-bat because a few weeks ago I won an Apocalypse battleship (promptly sold to fellow Montrealer Cartboard Box cuz I'm nowhere near Amarr BSes) and corpmate Si Gong won 150 million ISK. For a long time now Adragon had been playing his own version of "Deal or No Deal" for prizes ranging from packs of cigarettes all the way up to an Orca. Well yesterday as I logged in one of the first things I heard was that the Orca was going to be given away that night, and if donations were good he was also giving away a billion ISK in another prize. How much more win can you get! So of course I bought a bunch of tickets and so did Si Gong, who logged in about 15 minutes before the ticket booth closed. After that we had to wait until DJ Erkenfresh's show to find out who the winners were because Adragon ran out of time with his crazy/funny antics but the wait was more than worth it: some guy named Derdlim (sp?) won the billion ISK prize.... and God-Damned Lucky Mother-Fucker corpmate Si Gong won the fucking Orca !!!!

Now of course after the dust settled and Si came back down to Earth, I pop open EVEmon to see just how far I am from flying that baby: 38 days, 15 hours and change. Si Gong checks.... about the same. The ship's location... 26 jumps from Rens, in the middle of Amarr space. Over this weekend we'll think about what our options are. The easy way out would be for Si to put it on contracts, but as I told him an Orca is too good an asset even if you don't use it for mining ops. Option #2 would be to train for it, which would kill a month and a half of either us' training for more interesting stuff. Option #3 would be to get an industrial character, but neither of us has the ISK needed for a character transaction. And option #4 would be to have an Orca pilot (/me waves in the general direction of Letrange...) travel to the ship's location and fly it to D94's HQ. Anyway, we'll see what we'll do.

Quick news out of EVE now, last monday I had the privilege of attending the Eric Clapton / Jeff Beck concert at Montreal's Bell Centre... zomg the guitar awesomeness. I'm not Clapton's biggest fan but Jeff Beck... DAMN !!! Add to that the sound quality that was just amazing and the fact that I was on the floor's 20th row, front center, and what a show !!! Thanks to my buddy Andre for inviting me to such an event!

And back to EVE but still in the nightlife topic, this Saturday, the 27th of February, will not only be a Montreal EVE Pilots' Meet, but it will also be "La Nuit Blanche à Montréal", the Montreal all-nighter where various clubs, museums, restaurants, and public transit will be open all night long. Yes, all night long! I don't expect to go to bed before the sun rises :) If you're in or around the greater Montreal area, please come have a chat with us in the EVE MTL channel, and/or post on the EVE-O forums in the Events & Gatherings section, we have a stickied thread there. Meet time is 7PM EST at Brutopia, 1215 Crescent st., between Ste-Catherine and René-Lévesque. Look for us in the basement, paying no attention whatsoever to the Olympics :)

Until next time, fly like Willy the orca :))

o7

Salute to a speedster

Nodar Kumaritashvili

1988-2010

Here is a true pilot who dared to be bold. I salute you Nodar.

o7

And more rust comes off!

As I wrote in my last post, I'm starting to get back to the habit of flying around in 0.0 space in a semi-safe sort of way. As I'm mostly flying solo for now I'm sticking to small/fast ships because while I'm not as poor as I used to be, a T2-fit battlecruiser is still a nice chunk of ISK, and I don't have any spare HACs to burn yet. So my ships of choice for this little scouting endeavour: Rifter (T2/named solo fit) and Taranis (forced oral sex fit). Now that I have the entrance constellation nicely bookmarked I'll probably use my special "Yay for small rigs" Jaguar a bit more, and to go deeper I'll use the speed-fit Claw and make bookmarks till my Great Wildlands folder bursts at the seams.

Unlike last weekend I didn't bother to bring some warp bubbles with me; I need time to practice anchoring them at the right spots, time that I didn't get anyway, and I'll do this on Sisi where I can spam 0.0 space with bubbles with little to no risk. This time I concentrated on making as many bookmarks as possible. The entire entrance constellation is now fully bookmarked with multiple safespots per system, and both on and off grid tacticals on each gate. The only thing missing is some deep safes, but for now I've got plenty of escape vectors and I can make more bookmarks on the fly easily.

Great Wildlands is special as far as 0.0 regions go. It's not heavily populated the way Curse or Syndicate are because there aren't tons of stations in every system. There's only three systems with stations and in the rest of the space sovereignty cannot be claimed. But it does a have a few things going for it: it's the springboard region towards sovereignty space and also has a connection to Curse, so there's always a bit of traffic, but at the same time there are a lot of dead-end constellations that see little traffic so it would be easy to feel safe there. Add to that the fact that the entrance is only 8 jumps away from one of EVE's major market systems, and you suddenly have some target-rich space. So of course after doing a whole bunch of bookmarks and seeing what kind of traffic was out and about, I decided to fly more aggressively and maybe get a kill or two... or four!

This happened in two acts: the afternoon roam with the Rifter and the evening roam with the 'Ranis. To start the first act, I parked my Rifter at a tactical on the EO2 gate in 8YC, and watched what traffic may come out of the station system going up towards Empire. When a lone Rifter jumped through I warped to the gate but the pilot was just fast enough to evade my attack. Of course I smacked in Local a bit in order to maybe get him to fight. I was surprised by his response though: "I have much respect for Clown Punchers, and I'm even thinking of applying"... Ohkay! I've been out of BOZO for a few months now but somehow I still have a red stain on my nose :) Sure, all he had to do was "show info" but I still found it funny to be told that as I'm smacking him! But as this is happening a second Rifter jumps through, and clearly seeing me at my on-grid tactical he just stood there. I waited a bit to see if he wasn't the lead for a bigger gang, but after about a minute I decided he wasn't so I warped to the gate and started dancing. Apparently my solo fit was better than his maneuvering fit because I tore him up despite having smaller guns. The pod warped out so we saluted each other and I went to the wreck to loot it. Funnily enough his stuff is still halfway towards my cargo hold when the gate flashes. I brace myself for what may uncloak but I'm relieved to see a Punisher exactly in scram range, and he goes down like a ton of bricks. W00T! Two kills under two minutes, a first in solo flight for me :))

Act Two got under way after I put my boys in bed; I still had 12 hours to go before the possibility to get back in my learning implants so might as well keep doing fun stuff! Wanting a bit more speed and more damage I undocked the Taranis and headed out. Being in something faster allowed me to complete my bookmarking much faster and better, And I even paid a visit to the station systems of EO2 and M-M. There was more traffic about than during the afternoon so I had to fly carefully if I didn't want to get blobbed, but after a while I discovered that I wasn't dealing with a 12-man fleet, but with 3 small gangs. But at some point Luck shined on me, when two unrelated T1 frigs got to the M-M gate in EO2 just as I finished getting my tactical bookmark. I warp in and jump through, and just as I get on gate ready to tackle the first frigate, another Rifter, the gate activates and the fun starts. I hurt him so bad that I don't even have to pull out my drones! And what followed is still striking me with disbelief. After the Rifter died I'm able to tackle and kill the pod in front of the Merlin who was a bit late in helping his buddy. I then tackle him, kill him even faster than the Rifter, and again I'm able to send him on a one-way trip to his home station! YAY! Two kills plus pods under 2 minutes, even better than in the afternoon! Tip for PvP beginners: a pod will warp off as soon as you click "warp". When you know you're about to get wtfpwnd all you have to do is select a celestial (avoid moons as they can have POSes) and spam the warp button. Theoretically I shouldn't have been able to pod these two guys but then again I think their experience in pod safety was a tad lacking.

After docking back in Dock 94 HQ I really felt like a big chunk of rust had come off. It was all the more satisfying as my play time in EVE had started painfully. In case you didn't know, the Epic mission arcs are epic. So epic in fact that I came really close to loosing my Maelstrom (9.6mil ISK repair bill) and lost a Jaguar when I tried the blitz approach. Do these guys have Sleeper AI? It sure seemed like it, and maybe worse. But even before I went out to Great Wildlands I did something that was extremely satisfying, and even made my young boys laugh: I suicide-ganked a scammer in Rens! My time in EVE started getting better all of a sudden :)))

Fly dangerous but plz warp your pod out

o7