The Wormhole Logistics

I recently joined Fatal Ascension, Clan Shadow Wolf, to be exact, and apparently nobody scans in FA. That's a bit of a tangent, and I'll probably write about that later, or maybe I won't, it might not be worth a blog post. Anyway, since Fountain is out fairly far from hisec, wormholes that lead to or near hisec are very helpful. Ones that go through C5/6s are really nice, because you can put freighters through them. Because of these factors, I've been looking for wormholes more than I did in Providence. Providence is right next to hisec, so logistics is much easier, and faster.

In my corp, KwarK, who is apparently mildly space-famous, said to let him know if I found any wormholes that lead to hisec, especially ones you can put freighters through. So I was scanning out a C5 one day and came across a hisec hole. Cool. I poked KwarK in corp and he said he was going to load up some freighters to move through said hole. I noticed that the mass on the hisec hole was below 50%, and I told him that. I said that he could put two freighters through at maximum. So he loaded up two freighters and enlisted the help of another corpmate to web him into warp. The actual wormhole chain was Nullsec->C5a->C5b->Hisec. So there were two points of danger, jumping into C5a from hisec, and into C5b, which is what the webber was for.

I was scouting the second wormhole, because there were ships on scan that weren't at a POS, and I wanted to know what they were doing. The first wormhole was totally clear as far as I could see. After a bit of d-scanning around I finally located the hostiles in C5b, they were on a nullsec exit of their hole in T3s and some other assorted ships, I believe there was about 6 or so in total. This wasn't a huge deal, since they were off scan from the C5a entrance, it probably wouldn't be hard to get the freighters into warp from that wormhole to the hisec hole, and after that things would be fine.

Freighters, ready to jump in.

After about half an hour or so of KwarK apparently furiously multiboxing and managing to lose a few frigates (not quite sure how that happened) he was ready to move out. He moved his freighters to the system with the wormhole entrance and jumped into C5a, after which he was webbed into warp to C5b. No trouble so far. At this point, a mistake was made. I was expecting him to leave one freighter on the C5a->C5b hole and warp one to the hisec hole and jump through, making sure it didn't collapse after one freighter. My mistake was not saying this directly. KwarK didn't keep one freighter in C5a, though. He jumped both freighters through and got them into warp. By the time I asked for clarification on how many freighters were in warp, well, they were already in warp.

Freighters warp extremely slowly. Apparently there were some active people d-scanning (they are wormholers, after all.) They saw the freighters warping, and deduced where they were headed: their hisec hole. By the time the freighters landed the residents of the wormhole already had a hictor on the hole with a bubble up. Obviously, as the freighters entered warp before the bubble was put up, the freighters landed at 0 on the hisec hole. KwarK issued the jump commands to his freighters, and I was praying that there was enough mass left on the hole to get them both out. One freighter jumped through, which we knew was a certainty. Then, as EVE's servers can be a bit slow at times, we sat there for probably 20 seconds waiting to see if the second freighter was able to get through the wormhole. Then KwarK said the fateful words, the wormhole closed, with his most expensive freighter sitting in a hostile wormhole in a bubble. He tried to get the residents to ransom the freighter, but they were having none of it and blew it up, along with his pod. Down a 15 bil freighter.

Sad day.

I felt partly responsible, as I was the one who found the wormhole chain originally, but I took away a lot from the entire thing. Firstly, when you're dealing with a wormhole with people in it, you have to be extra careful about things. Secondly, and this ties into the first somewhat, if you are dealing with a wormhole that might collapse after the first ship, do not send both freighters to the hole at the same time. We should have left one behind, then waited to see if the wormhole collapsed after the first ship, and also if the locals noticed what we were doing. Had we left a freighter in C5a, as soon as I saw the locals landing on the hisec hole I would have had KwarK get his second freighter out and back into null, hopefully escaping anything the locals would have thrown at us. Third, KwarK didn't jump his most expensive freighter first, which was a grave mistake. One freighter was guaranteed to get through, and it absolutely should have been the most expensive one. Minimize possible losses where ever possible.

While I was thinking about the entire encounter a thought came to me. They put everyone they had onto the hisec hole, but was that just on the chance that it would collapse, or we would do something wrong? Or did they already know how much mass had passed through the wormhole? If they already knew exactly how much mass could pass correctly and that the first freighter would collapse the hole, I am extremely impressed with that FC. If he did realize that as quickly as the calls had to have been made he deserves the kills he gets. Although, I find it considerably more likely that they saw freighters warping and were like, they're going here, everybody go there too and try to catch them! I doubt, although it is possible, that they knew how much mass the hole could still sustain and factored that into their response.

A Red Letter Day

Saturday was quite the interesting day.

It started out being quite normal. I've moved to Fountain since last I wrote, I did live in Providence in the 4th alliance, but now I'm in Clan Shadow Wolf of Fatal Ascension. So I'm up there scanning around because that's what I do when I get bored. Yay probes! Anyway. I was scanning out wormholes to see if I could find an easy to to hisec for one of my corpmates (more on that in a different post) and I came across a C5 wormhole. I wasn't really paying attention to the wormhole information beyond that it was a C5 so I just jumped right in. I d-scanned first, as always and saw quite a few caps on scan. Of course, this doesn't mean a whole lot, because it's easy to have capital ships unpiloted at POSes, and many people do. I'm not quite sure what prompted me to do it, but I switched to my salvaging overview and scanned to see if anyone was running sites. Lo and behold: sleeper large wrecks.
My pulse started to increase. Could they be doing capital escalations with an open hole? I double checked the hole information again, and realized that I had initialized it, which means they didn't know it was here yet, if I was lucky. I probably didn't have long before someone stroked their discovery scanner, so I set about trying to find the anom they were in. I started out by binary searching space by scanning at different ranges to try and find the anom they were in. I narrowed it down to 4 anoms within 6 and 7 AU. I warped to the first. A single sleeper battleship; no dice. Warp to the second (at 100 as always) and oh, look, a fleet.
I had found their running fleet. Even remembered to take a screenshot.

Catch 'em with their pants down!

I posted the intel in alliance chat, and got a few people expressing their surprise that I had found them in such a vulnerable position. I asked if there was a high enough level FC that would be able to put a fleet together to try and take them out, but nobody got back to me. One of my corpmates pinged a FC and was talking to him, but by this point their site running fleet had finished the site and was warping off. I tracked them as they left and saw they weren't going to a new site. Drat. Probably noticed the new signature and decided to safe up after one site rather than risk it. I let me corpmate know and left the hole. You got lucky this time, wormholers! *shake fist*

A few hours later a ping went out for a quick black ops fleet to try and drop some of the people in Fountain Core. I hopped in because I like blops fleets, always have. Plus killing people. We were sitting around for a while when the FC said that CCP Mimic was going to stop by our staging system to say hi. He said he had asked her and she'd said yes, surprising him.
Sure enough, about five minutes later CCP Mimic showed up in local. She warped to the undock and a solid 40 people undocked to see her Polaris Legatius frigate. She was the first dev I'd ever seen in space, so that was really cool to have happen. I took quite a few screenshots myself, as well.

Ooh, shiny.

Following that we dropped a Daredevil and killed it. Beyond that there were not a lot of kills to be had that night.

That concludes what was probably one of my more interesting days. Catching a wormhole group with their pants down doesn't happen often, and seeing a dev and a dev ship in space happens even less often than that.

The C4 Gambit: Writeup

I was reminded that this blog actually exists yesterday, so I figured that I should actually conclude my posts about my C4 project, which I did finish a few months ago.

This is back before the Hyperion wormhole changes, so the C4 only had a C4 static, instead of a dual static as it now does.
It took me a few days to get moved in and get all the ships I wanted in the wormhole, but once I did I was ready to do whatever it was wormhole people did. My primary reason for wanting to live in a wormhole was the money. I'd heard that they were really good money and all of that fun stuff. So I ran some sites in my Vargur. And it's true, the money in wormholes is pretty darn good. I was making about 100 million ISK per site, which I could run in about half an hour, which is 200m an hour running sites. That's pretty good money.

The problems started arising when I wasn't running sites, or really doing anything. It turns out it's a lot harder to idle in a POS than a station, for some reason. Because of that, and because I was alone in my hole, I found myself logging in less and less as time went on. In total, I think I stayed in the hole for about a month and a half. I'm quite sure I made money on the excursion, but probably not as much as I would have anticipated.

Another reason I wanted to try wormhole life was the PVP. I'd heard of glorious small-gang PVP in wormholes and while I knew I was going to be solo, I thought that I might find some people to fight at some time. But nope. I think I came across about a dozen actual people in space in my travels through w-space. And 99% of them were in cloaky scanny ships. So there was no PVP to be had for me in that time. I'm also in USTZ, so a large portion of EVE is asleep or at work when I'm on, which I'm sure didn't help.

I had elected not to do PI in the hole, so I can't really talk about C4 PI, although I did set my alts up in a C1 to do PI at one point, but I've written about that experience before.

The biggest thing that I took away from the entire experience was that doing EVE alone is really, really hard. And I was still in my corporation while this was going on, I just had nobody around me in space, which apparently makes a huge difference in morale. It's very hard to keep your own inspiration and morale up when it's only you and your alts to face the dangerous landscape that is New Eden.

The C4 Gambit

I have just recently moved into a C4-C4 wormhole.
It's something I've been planning for probably a few months. There were a few preliminary things I needed, firstly I needed to get into a Vargur so I could run sites. Secondly I needed to get my alt into an Orca so I could roll holes if I needed, and thirdly I needed to finish my POS reactions I was doing down in null. Of course, all this hinged on me finding a good hole to move into.

Since the first thing I needed to do was find a suitable hole, I took two of my characters that weren't doing anything and put them in C4-C4s or C5-C4s, so I could scan down the static C4 every day and look for abandoned ones. I was wanting a no effect hole, as they're usually less desired and easier to find. It was either that or a black hole, but eventually I realized that I didn't want to deal with that hassle, so a C4 no effect was what I was looking for.

It took me a solid two months to find a suitable candidate: a normal C4, the only catch being the system was too large to d-scan across easily. But I can deal with that, so I put the alt that found it in there to wait until everything else was in order.

Following that, it took me a few weeks to move stuff up from nullsec and conclude my business down there. About four or five days ago I moved into the hole, bringing most of the POS equipment in with the Orca. Now it's time to get used to wormhole life, and all the scanning and uncertainty that comes with it.

EVE Cycles

Wow, it's been a while since I've had anything to write about.

A large part of the reason for that is I've recently got addicted to Minecraft again, but this time with the Feed the Beast launcher and modpack stuff. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself at this point. Of course, it doesn't leave much room for EVE, but I am also at one of my low points in EVE.

For myself I've noticed that my interest in EVE goes in cycles. There are times that all I want to do is play EVE, and other times that I just log in and update my skill queue. A lot of that has to do with how much new stuff I'm doing, and if I feel like I'm just waiting for stuff to finish before I do new things. That's where I'm at at the moment. I'm waiting for some things to finish up before I start my next project, so I'm really just killing time until then. Thankfully, most of the things I've been waiting for are almost done. In just a week or so I should be able to start the project and write about it.

But the cycles of EVE are something I've noticed with most people in my corp, especially the ones who aren't extremely involved with large-scale PVP, or don't have things to entertain themselves all the time. I fall victim to it occasionally as well, but it's not practical to play EVE all the time, that's a good way to get burnt out, and taking EVE in cycles gives time to recharge and not get burnt out.

Cloaky Mechanics

The mechanics of covert ops cloaks are a daily part of nullsec in general. We use them as some of the safest ways to travel considering bubbles and gatecamps. We also have to deal with the possibility of a covert ops ship tackling us in our anomalies and hotdropping on us. This is normal part of nullsec, and not what I want to talk about. I believe that covert ops cloaks and cloaking in general is in a good place right now, I don't think it's too overpowered or underpowered. But I do have a problem with it.

I suppose you could say that I think cloaks are overpowered, but that's not how I would phrase it. Let me give an example that illustrates my problem with the mechanics currently. Say you're in your home system, just chilling and minding your own business. Then one day your home system and every system near you have reds in it. And not just any reds, these reds are in stealth bombers and cloaky T3s. Suddenly you can't do what you normally would. You can't jump to your cyno generators, you can't rat at all, and you have to be wary what you undock and what you do. For the first few days you just adjust, thinking they'll get bored before too long and move on, that's how these campers usually work. But as the end of the first week of being camped nears, you start to wonder how long they will be there. The military indexes in your systems drop as time goes on. It's been a month and you haven't done more ratting than just a few DEDs, because your corpmates are scared to do even those. You are at the mercy of someone who may or may not even be at their keyboard, and it's been that way for a month.

Such a pretty ship.

This is my problem. We've had cloaky campers in and around my home system for a month now, and it's really quite frustrating. Not that I disagree with cloaky camping. If you want to put your character in a cloaky ship and do nothing else 23/7 then you should be free to do that and capitalize on other peoples' stupidity. What I do have a problem with is that you don't have to be at your keyboard to do it.

Currently, there is nothing at all that prevents you from just cloaking up and leaving your ship in space for hours. It has been discussed extensively in corp chat, and I've heard everything from removing covert ops cloaking devices to making them use large amounts of cap so you can only stay cloaked for so long. Both of those ideas are completely silly, because they remove content and change the way things currently work, and cloaky ships are in a pretty good place, as far as I can see. But my corpmates are looking at the problem from the wrong angle. There isn't anything wrong with covert ops ships themselves, it is the lack of a counter to them that makes them a problem.

But there are counters to them! Just move to the next system over, or don't be a risk-averse scrub and fight whoever drops you. Or so I've heard people say. Yet, while they aren't wrong they are also not right. Moving to the next system is a viable option for dealing with cloaky campers, unless that system is camped as well, and so is the next and the next. It's also not a counter, it's dealing with a problem instead of solving it. Counter-dropping, or getting a fleet together to kill whoever drops you is an excellent idea, and it has been used for forever to great effect. That is a counter, yes. The problem there arises that in order to counter a cloaky you need to have a fleet logged in and formed up at all times, and the cloaky can just decide to not drop or completely ignore you if s/he feels like it. And in this case, you have at least 5 people waiting on 1 person to make a mistake so they can do something about it. Counterdropping is a counter to the specific act of hotdropping, not the mechanic of covert ops cloaks.

Hopefully it is obvious that there is a problem here. Not a problem with covert ops ships, but something wrong in the balance of EVE. Covops need a counter, and we don't have one. They don't need to be nerfed into the ground, or even changed at all. But whatever counter is implemented needs to be easy enough to counter itself that suddenly covert ops ships won't be immediately destroyed when they cloak up.

Sneaky, sneaky. BOOM.

My current suggestion for this counter is to have a new kind of ship, most likely a T2 destroyer (we don't have enough of those) that can fit a special type of probe launcher. This probe launcher is the only one of it's kind that can launch the Covert Reconfigured Combat Scanner Probes. No, they're not probes that cloak, they are probes that can scan cloaked ships. These probes are like normal ones for everything except their scan time. It takes at least 15 seconds for them to scan (it's much harder to find ships that are actively trying to avoid being found by cloaking.) This long scan time allows cloaky ships more than enough time to see the probes on d-scan--if they're actually at their keyboard--and warp off to another safe. If they are not at their keyboard, it shouldn't take a scanner more than a minute to locate them and get a warp in, and pop goes the covert ops ship.

Obviously this is not the only possible solution, but it is my idea and I'm preferential to it, although open to criticisms. It doesn't punish people who are actively at their keyboard from camping, if they so choose, while giving the people being camped a way of countering that doesn't involve waiting for the cloaky to drop them.

Abandoned C5s

I live in nullsec, and I do a lot of scanning around my home, so naturally I find wormholes. There's usually at least one if not more wormholes active around my ring on a daily basis. Very frequently these are N432s, which are holes departing nullsec going into C5 space. So I've visited a lot of C5 systems. Usually I don't do anything except poke my head in and see what is happening, but occasionally I will ninja mine some gas, or gank some silly miners. Even more rarely will I get a fleet together of spider-tanking Dominixes to run the sites in abandoned C5s.

You never know what's going to be on the other side.

Since I do find quite a few C5s, I also find abandoned C5s pretty often. I'll jump into the system and check the discovery scanner, and sometimes see upwards of 20 signatures and 50 anomalies with no active towers. That's a pretty abandoned hole if I do say so myself. And oddly enough, these abandoned C5s feel old and very lonely to me. I feel like I'm visiting space that has been relatively untouched by players for quite a while.

I've always liked abandoned things, like buildings or what have you that people have created and abandoned. These uninhabited C5s have the same feel to me as visiting an old, decrepit house does. Although there isn't as much to see in C5s, unfortunately.

Wormhole Procurers

When I logged in I was informed there was a C3 wormhole in our home system. Not that the information was all that pressing, it was only really mentioned in passing. But I decided to go check it out.

I jumped into the hole in my scanny Buzzard that I usually use when I go out scanning. I immediately saw two Procurers and two Epithals on scan, along with a active tower. I figured I'd take a look around and see if I could get any kills, since I wouldn't be able to run any of the sites. So I set about trying to find the tower, when halfway through locating it the thought struck me that maybe those Procurers were actually mining, so I warped at 100 to one of the two ore anoms in the hole. Lo and behold, there were the two ships, happily mining away 80 kilometers from each other.

That's a bit of odd positioning, but whatever. I dropped a message and fleet advert in corp to see if anyone wanted to kill these with me, as I do like to share the kills with my corpies. Aivlis replied almost immediately, saying he wanted in. But other than him apparently none of my corp actually wanted to kill anything. But two people and their alts are more than enough to take out two Procurers.

Von Keigai had a similar experience.

Both me and Aivlis quickly refitted our cloaky Tengus to be able to actually do damage and tank at least a little damage. I undocked first, but then realized I had forgotten to fit a point and redocked, feeling a bit silly. After fixing that little oversight I jumped back into the hole and warped to the tactical I made while in my Buzzard. I hung out for a few minutes waiting for Aivlis, keeping eyes on the miners. They sat there and did absolutely nothing, so that was invigorating.

Aivlis finished fitting his Tengu and joined me at the tactical. We decided who was going to go after what, since they were so far from each other we couldn't attack both at the same time. We also brought our alts, mine in a Vexor and his in a Naga. Our alts were to warp to the Procurer our mains weren't attacking, to attain maximum whoreage.

Aivlis warped to 10 off his miner, and I warped to zero on mine, telling him to engage. We decloaked and got our systems running, scramming them at pretty much the same time. My miner was apparently AFK or something, because he just sat there while I shot him. Once our points were well attached we brought in our alts. Then the Procurers really started dying faster. Cloaky Tengus really don't do all that much damage. When Aivlis uncloaked to begin with, his miner deployed some drones. Specifically 3 T1 Hobgoblins and 2 T1 Acolytes. Because T1 drones do all the damage. Needless to say he got Aivlis to 97% shield before he died.

My Procurer popped first, with Aivlis' alt actually getting the kill. Shortly after Aivlis' miner popped with my alt getting that kill. We found that coincidence quite humorous. Even more humor was found from looking at the miners' fits. One had a web and the other had a scram, which we presumed their original intention was to be able to web and scram anyone who attacked them, except the problem being that they were 80km away from each other, rendering the web pretty useless.

And once again, I am very thankful that wormholes are NBSI to Providence. Provides many funny kills.

Freighter Rebalance

The freighter rebalance was announced at Fanfest 2014, and we recently got details on what exactly that rebalance was going to be. Originally the freighters and jump freighters were going to get rigs. Now, that sounds cool at first, but then you have to realize what Fozzie was going to do to the base stats to make it work, and it really felt like a big nerf, mainly because capital rigs are really expensive and get destroyed when you remove them. This would create a situation where people would have needed multiple freighters to do different tasks, or one freighter to do one task well and the rest suboptimally. Thankfully, Fozzie heard these complaints and agreed. Now freighters and jump freighters are going to have low slots.

This is better for two reasons, although they're pretty much the same. Firstly, it doesn't feel like as hard of a nerf because the expense of getting a freighter or JF up to where it was pre-Kronos would have been upwards of 700m on the current market, and with low slots the same effect is around 1.5m with T2 cargo extenders. Secondly, there is much more flexibility for the freighters with low slots, obviously because they're very easy to switch out, being modules. Also, it's less of a purely numerical nerf. Freighters are going to be able to carry more and have a lot more base hp than pre-patch, which personally I'm in favor of. I don't think freighters and JFs need to be nerfed into the ground to encourage industry out in nullsec. Negative reinforcement is always less helpful than positive.

Premature Explosions

I was out doing my normal evening scanning run around our systems, I found a C5 wormhole (N432, they're everywhere) that had only 4 sigs. Usually the C5s I find have upwards of 15 or more, so when I'm feeling lazier I don't scan them down because that's a lot of work and I can only really ninja the gas sites for money, so doing other stuff is usually better. Anyway, I scanned down the four signatures, there was one gas site and two wormholes. The not-static hole lead to Pure Blind. I bookmarked it and mentioned it in comms and didn't think anything more of it. I left the wormhole and continued my scanning run. A little bit later one of my corpmates asked me if we were going to poke around Pure Blind to see if we could kill something. I hadn't thought about it, so I said sure and threw up a fleet. Turns out not a lot of people wanted to do anything, so there were only four people in fleet including myself: Haloform, NINX, and XJaws. Originally I was going to go out in cruisers, but with just two people could could bring them I decided to use destroyers and frigates instead.

NINX was in a Malediction and our scout. He jumped into system while the rest of us waited inside the wormhole. He spotted an Oracle and Exequror on D-scan, which I told him to warp around and try to find them. My reasoning there was that our destroyers and frigates could easily stay under the Oracle's guns and should be able to out-damage the Exequror's reps. It didn't take NINX too long to find them, they were sitting on one of the gates. So I told him to lock up the Oracle and bump him to try and get him to aggress. NINX locked him up and tried to innefectualy bump him, and the Oracle locked him up and did start shooting him. I called for the rest of the fleet to jump in and warp to NINX. It was a medium-length warp, but when we landed I saw the Oracle was around 50km off of me, and the Exequror about 15km away from me. That's not what I wanted. At this point I made a mistake. I should have called for us to warp out to something close and to tell NINX to get right on top of the Oracle (he was actually orbiting at 10km he later told me.) Unfortunately I didn't make that call and instead told the rest of the fleet to target the Exequror, who had webbed and scrammed me by this point. Of course the Oracle locked me up (I was in a Thrasher, Halo in a Dragoon and XJaws in a Navy Slicer) and dropped 90% of my shield in his first shot. I realized that I was going to die, and should have told everyone else to warp out, but I didn't. So I died and then Halo got popped in the same way. Thankfully NINX and XJaws got out just fine, so we only lost ~17 mil. But that wasn't exactly how I wanted that roam to go, heh.

At that point I told them to stand down, once we got back home, as I had homework I needed to do, but otherwise I would have taken them back out and maybe not died so quickly. I think the whole roam took about 15 minutes. Shortest death evar.

The Capital Fight

This one isn't about me. I like to hang out in other people's comms when my alliances' are slow and/or boring at times. Because of that I occasionally hear interesting or funny stories. This story is one of those.

I was hanging around someone's comms (I won't name names so people don't yell at me about opsec and shit) and someone called that there was a Phoenix and Thanatos warping to a wormhole, which they jumped through. Suddenly everyone on their comms exploded with what do I need to bring, etc, etc. They were told to get in shit to tackle the caps with, so they did and were able to lock down the caps for a little while. During this time the CEO of this particular alliance hopped in his Phoenix to go and kill them. I was a bit confused at first, because I thought the Phoenix didn't do enough damage against things that move, but apparently I was wrong.

It took him a while, but eventually the CEO was able to take down the Phoenix, and the Thanatos warped away. By this point the Thanatos had killed a lot of the subcap support that was on field, and the wormhole back into my friends' home had collapsed (three caps is a lot of mass.) So the members had exited to lowsec to reship as fast as they could. Given that there was no tackle on the Thanatos, who took that opportunity to warp away. The CEO decided to warp to the lowsec hole in case he needed to leave in a hurry. The Thanatos was spotted warping to that hole, so the CEO jumped out into lowsec so he wouldn't get rolled into the enemy wormhole.

Boom boom.

The Thanatos jumped into lowsec with him. So once again the fight was on, in a manner of speaking. Small-scale capital fights, like the one that happened here, tend to take a really long time, because capitals have a lot of EHP, and one dreadnought only does so much DPS, even in siege. The entire fight, as I recall, took around 10-15 minutes to get up to this point, and then lasted another 10 minutes after. Not a short fight for the few kills that did happen, by any means. Now that everyone was in lowsec, the Thanatos called in subcap reinforcements. A Hawk, Stiletto, and two Ishtars jumped in to help keep the dread tackled and keep the field clear of hostiles for them. Had out corp actually had ships near this lowsec system, or a more direct connection back to their home, they might have been able to put up more of a fight. As it was they trickled onto the field piecemeal and died as such. They brought like two or three Blackbirds in to try and get the Phoenix un-tackled and away, but they all got killed before it could happen.

The DPS of the enemies on field apparently wasn't all that great, and the CEO decided he had had enough of being shot at. So he announced in comms that he was tired of this shit and was going to eject. There was a moment of stunned silence, given exactly how many ships the corp members had lost to try and get the capital kills and to get his Phoenix out of danger. The FC told him not to just yet, that they were still trying to get him out and whatnot. So he didn't eject. At least not for five more minutes. Apparently being shot at for long periods of time wasn't this guy's idea of a good time, so he decided to eject anyway. So he did, bitching the entire time about how he didn't have time for this shit and how his corpmates were bad and should have been able to do a better job of PVPing and all that fun, derogatory stuff. The enemies blew up his Phoenix, he said he knew because he got the insurance for it. And the fleet kind of had the sails cut out from under them. They dropped fleet and went back to doing whatever it was they were doing before the call to form up had happened.
A sincerely lackluster end to what could have been a very sterling fight.

Exactly How Rich We Are

I've been reading the EVE novels recently. So far I've finished The Empyrean Age and I'm about halfway through Templar One, but what I want to talk about mainly appears in Empyrean, so it's not as important that I haven't finished Templar.

Capsuleers are immortal, we know this. It's been advertised to us for a very long time. Something that we don't see in game pretty much at all is what non-capsuleers live like. There are NPCs that we get missions from, and that we kill, but that's it. Never are the crews of our ships mentioned, or do we have to pay our crews. The lore and novels give us some insight into how other people live.

Normal people are extremely varied. The book switches from people who can't rub three credits together (literally, they don't have 3 ISK) and CEOs of corporations that throw around capsuleer-level amount of ISK. Because of that it's a tiny bit confusing trying to get a sense of scale in terms of ISK, but it gets better as the book goes on. Turns out, for most people ISK is worth a lot. I haven't been able to figure out an exact amount or correlation for ISK to something we can relate to, but I've found references that CCP said 1 ISK would be enough to feed a family of 4 on a planet for a year. So that's a lot of money. You can probably figure it at around $50,000. Obviously, ISK is intended as a capsuleer unit of currency, the other planet-side currency is probably some smaller denomination of ISK depending on the faction and planet.

But back to the original question: how rich are we? Well, if we assume 1 ISK is worth $50k, then my lower-space-middleclass worth of 4b liquid is worth $200,000,000,000,000 (200 trillion USD.)

Well then. That's a hell of a lot of money. Obviously the numbers are rough, but they're probably in the right order of magnitude, which is close enough for my purposes.
Just for funsies, let's see how much a titan is worth. At around 120b, it equates to $6,000,000,000,000,000. That's 6 quadrillion dollars, which, according to what I can find, is about 6 times more than the US is worth. As for the entire world, I think a single titan might be worth more than the entire world and assets, but I doubt it, if only barely.

Obviously, the market and economy of New Eden is very different from Earth, considerably larger and worth a lot more. But that is how rich we are. We hold the wealth of worlds in our hands, beyond that we hold the wealth of galaxies in our alliances.

That's pretty damn awesome.

Players, Start Your War-Machines!

Looks like Nulli Secunda is 'invading' Providence. They reinforced R3-K7K on Tuesday night of this week, coming back for the I-Hub and station timers yesterday and today, respectively.
I'll do a write up on the station shield timer here before too long, but opsec and all that.

It's time to go to war!

About Me

I had the realization that I've been writing posts for a little while and chances are very few of the people who read my posts have any idea who I am. Which, to be perfectly honest, is probably fine and I doubt anybody cares.
But! I need something to write, so I might as well make this a post.

My in game name is Raltera Muvila. I am, last I checked, the only Raltera in the game. So that's a tiny brag I have. I am in the Ubuntu Inc. corporation, which is a part of the The Fourth District alliance. The entire alliance lives in Providence, and actually owns some sov there too.

Ubuntu is a new player focused corp, also with a focus on training players for PVP. We're a moderately small corporation, with around 100 players or so, including alts, but it is a nice place to be, has a lot of very helpful and generous people in corp.

Myself. In game, of course.

The Fourth District (4th) is a Caldari Roleplaying alliance, primarily. The executor corp, Caldari Navy Reserve (CAIN) does a lot of roleplay events, whereas Ubuntu and most of the other corps don't so much.

Most of my personal interests and things I do I've written about to some extent on here. I do PVE, mainly running DEDs that spawn around our space. I also like doing PVP, be that solo or fleet-based. I have two of my alts that live in a wormhole doing PI, which is starting to be fairly profitable.

On a more personal level, I'm 19 years old, a freshman in community college in the Los Angeles area, in California. I am a computer programmer (as can be seen by looking at my programming posts), along with a photographer, theatre lighting designer, and a few other hobbies I putter around with.

That's a small snapshot of me, hope you enjoyed my autobiography.

Black Ops

I have been able to fly covert ops ships for quite a while. I think the first T2 ship I ever got into was the Manticore, and I've always loved flying them. There's something very rewarding to skillfully maneuvering around an enemy while cloaked, knowing that if you get too close to anything at all you'll die in a fire.
The natural extension of covert ops ships are black ops battleships. I think those things are pretty damn awesome. They have no speed penalty while cloaked (assuming your skills don't suck) and can jump and bridge to covert cynos. They make moving through space quickly and quietly very easy. They're also the only non-capital to have jump drives, which is really sexy.

I'm not able to fly a black ops battleship yet, but I have been a part of a fair few covert ops fleets in my Manticore. Most recently there was a known hotdropper logged off in our system, and I saw a fleet advert up, so I hopped in because I didn't have anything else to do. Turned out we were going to try and counterdrop the reds. So we formed up and sat around for a little while, as is normal.

Sneaky

When we finally got formed up and everything, I think we had like three or four bombers and three black ops sitting at a POS, a pretty small fleet. The FC asked for bait, so I brought out my alt's dominix and started ratting in the system next to where the red was logged off. I had warped to the Forsaken Hub, but it turned out someone else had already started running it. I mentioned this to the FC, but he said fuck 'em and just finish the site. So I did, and right as the red logged on I finished the site, and it despawned from the menu. I called this out and started to warp to a Forsaken Rally Point. I had barely landed on grid and dropped drones when a Hound warped in on top of me and lit his cyno. I was actually quite surprised that everything had played out so well at this point. I warped to the top rally point, hoping that would be where the red would warp as well. The reds bridged in on me and I overheated my stuff, just to be on the safe side. By this point our recon tackle had landed and started grabbing things, and our cyno went up and in came my main character and our blops and bombers.

In all, a successful counter. We killed I believe one or two bombers, a Falcon and a Redeemer. Then we got bombed, which popped the wrecks. Thankfully we had already grabbed the loot. Our FC was screaming at us to do so, actually.

That's just one of the covert ops I've been on, and I find them quite invigorating. It's a very different feel than a roam, or a conventional fleet. Much more limited in scope than a conventional hotdrop.

The Critical Wormhole

I was doing my normal scanning around my home to see if I could find anything to make money off when I found this C3 wormhole. I popped in to see if there was anything interesting inside. On d-scan there was an Orca and a Retriever. Well, no way in hell the Orca is gonna be outside the POS, and chances are the retty isn't either, but it can't hurt to check. So I bookmarked the exit and started prancing around the system.

I first tried to locate the POS where the Orca--and probably Retriever--was at. I got down to fairly close on d-scan when I realized they were not at the same location. It didn't look like the Retriever was actually in a POS. So I immediately warped to the first of three ore anoms and lo and behold, there was not one Retriever, but two Covetors. What luck! I warped to the other two ore anoms as well, and found the retty in the last one.

So I threw up a fleet advert in corp, and told people to get on Teamspeak. It was a good time on Sunday, so there I got around 8 characters in fleet and 5 in comms almost immediately (I was quite impressed at the response time.)

I told everyone to get on the wormhole entrance as I burned towards the two Covetors. My original plan was to get a dictor to bubble up on the two Covetors and an interceptor to go catch the retriever. Of course, plans have a way of not working out the way you intend them to. It just so happened I hadn't checked the mass of the wormhole before I came in, because apparently the dwellers had put their Orca through it once or twice, and the hole was at critical mass. So when I gave the order for the fleet to jump in, only two people made it in before the hole collapsed. Oops.

Of the people who were trying to get in, only two did. Paul, Atreyu, CrzyChkn, Thorstein, NINX3, and my alt were attempting to get into the hole, but only Crzy and NINX actually made it in. Ah well.
Crzy had a Caracal and NINX a 'ceptor, so that would work. I told them to warp to me and tackle the Covetors. At this point one of the Covetors actually warped out, and I was a bit disappointed at that. But they landed and made short work of the first Covetor and his pod. Then, Bob being the generous god he is, decided to send the Covetor pilot back in a Miasmos for some reason. Of course, he didn't warp his pod out either. I went ahead and told Crzy and NINX to pop the cans they were jetcan mining to as well. Are we terrible people? Absolutely.

By this point the Retriever had already warped out, so if there was only one person in the hole, he wasn't completely mentally deficient. Then he started yelling at us in local in Russian. We got our best translators on it (i.e. Google Translate) and he was crying.

Cheburashka bonus > герой
Cheburashka bonus > молодец
Cheburashka bonus > целого индуса и коветора убил
Cheburashka bonus > медальку тебе надо
Cheburashka bonus > супер ПвП
Crzychkn > Yes I would like a medal.
Cheburashka bonus > нет медали, могу награду дать
Cheburashka bonus > перечислил

Which Google says translates to

Cheburashka bonus> hero
Cheburashka bonus> done
Cheburashka bonus> whole Hindu and killed Covetor
Cheburashka bonus> do you want a medal
Cheburashka bonus> super PvP
Crzychkn> Yes I would like a medal.
Cheburashka bonus> no medals can give reward
Cheburashka bonus> listed

So that was quite entertaining.

The moral of this story is to always close your holes! They had criticaled the nullsec hole, but hadn't closed it. Their lowsec static hadn't been initialized, so if they had actually closed our hole they would have been able to mine in peace for at least a little while. But they didn't, so they died.

Praise Bob.

You Spend What You Make

There was an interesting conversation that happened on comms a few days ago. Coredun and I had just finished running a 10/10, and had gotten a very nice drop, around 1.4b. I commented that that money would keep us running for a month at least, and I had the realization that just like in real life, you spend what you make in EVE.

When I was a newbie, I remember salvaging around 6 Forsaken Hubs after Evil had finished running them in his Legion, and Evil even let me keep all the salvage, so that netted me around 100 mil. I was so happy, I think I lived off of that money for a month. Now, 100 mil is still good money, but put in perspective with the rest of my liquid ISK, it's just a drop in the bucket.

I also spend more money now that I used to, by a long shot. I have many more bills to pay, as it were. I have to pay for my wormhole POS fuel, corp freighter costs to ship my loot up to hisec, isotopes for my carrier, and ammo for my ships, which is usually T2 now. I'm sure there are other things I've forgotten as well. With money comes increased costs, because we can, and we like luxury and new toys. Most of these costs aren't because I'm being bored and buying new ships every day or something, they're just my normal expenses, like buying dinner when I work late in real life. They're the normal, and really aren't much of my total income, but compared to when I was a newbie, I spend a ludicrous amount of ISK on random, banal things.

This concept of spending what you make is present even more strongly in real life. When we have money, we tend to do more things that require it. Eating out, going to movies, buying more expensive presents, more toys, any number of things. Probably the largest money-sink is the place of living. When you have more money, chances are you have a nicer house, or apartment. Because you can afford it, and rarely for any other reason. There are times when a larger house is needed, like if you have a child or something of that nature, but if you're living by yourself, you can get away with a much smaller and cheaper place of living. Cutting down on the largest of costs will allow you to save a lot more money, as well. I know Dave Ramsey recommends living in just what you can stand when trying to pay off debt, then once you're debt-free, upgrading living arrangements, but paying cash for whatever big purchase you get.

It's an interesting thought, comparing your expenses now to what they were when you were a newbie.

Enter: Wormholers

It was an average day in nullsec. I undocked in my buzzard to go scan around and I saw two signatures in my system. Scanned them down, and lo and behold they're both N432s. If you're not familiar with wormhole tags, N432 is a nullsec to C5 wormhole. So I hopped into the first one and started poking around. I saw one active POS, which happened to be a small POS. In a C5. That's just asking to be killed, but anyhow. This wormhole was pretty empty, and there were some sites hanging around, so I made a note of that, in case one of my corpmates wanted to put up a fleet to run them later. I scanned around and found some other random stuff and a wormhole to a C4.
Hopping out of that wormhole, I went over to C5a and looked around in there. There was a POS in this wormhole too, but this one was a large POS instead of a small, so they weren't stupid. It also apparently had an X-Large SAA, so they had caps in there, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

That guy. In the middle.

After poking around in there and finding nothing special I left the wormhole and went to go eat dinner. Soon after I got back a red popped into local. Myself, Luna, Coredun, and Thorstein all got eyes around the system, on both wormholes and the gates. We waited around for a little while, I was in a cloaky Buzzard, Luna in a Stratios, Thorstein was a Rifter and Coredun in a Malediction. Of course, the stratios that was cloaked up in our system would go after the Malediction. The Astero uncloaked and tackled Coredun. Who died. Obviously. Luckily he did get his pod out, though I don't think he had anything special in his head.
Since I was already en route to reship to try and help Coredun when he died, I just kept going and got myself in to one of my trusty thrashers, and I told Coredun to reship into a destroyer. Thorstein apparently didn't have one, so he stayed in his Rifter. After a few minutes he had reshipped, and I told them to undock and warp to the hole, we were going to try and take down that Stratios. I didn't really think we were going to have enough DPS, but I wasn't sure because I'd never fought a Stratios before. We landed on the wormhole, and started shooting at the Stratios. We got him into armor almost immediately, and started working our way through his armor. He had started shooting me in the mean time, ignoring Coredun who was in a Corax. I had my guns overheated from the start, and had to turn that off when he was around 1/3 of the way into armor, of course by this point my shields were down and my armor was about as tanked as a paper airplane. Oh, did I forget to mention, his friends came through when we landed on him: a Pilgrim (luckily capless guns!) and a Navy Hurricane. By the time I hit armor I was already spamming warp out to get my pod out. Unfortunately we did not have enough DPS to break the Stratios. Nice to know. But there went one of my disposable Thrashers I have lying around to go blow up in. After I made a nice explosion, they switched to Coredun. He didn't last much longer, but instead of just dying peacefully, he jumped through the wormhole and immediately warped away. Unfortunately, I hadn't bookmarked the exist of that wormhole when I was in it previously, and he forgot to do it before he warped. So he was now stuck. Sort of.

Thorstein volunteered to warp into the wormhole and give Coredun the warpout, and I told him he should go in his pod because they align almost instantly. He warped to the hole in his pod, and jumped through. Coredun initiated warp to him at whatever range he did, probably not zero. Then a Broadsword popped out of the hole. Soo that's exciting. Thorstein had already jumped back through and warped away right before the Broadsword's bubble went up. But now Coredun was well and truly stuck. At this point, they had a Broadsword, Stratios, a cloaked Pilgrim and Astero on the hole in nullsec, along with a Navy Cane back in their hole. We wanted to kill them if we could, but we didn't really have the ships to do it. So we posted in intel channels there were some reds chilling in our system, and they should be killed or something, y'know.

This picture has nothing to do with anything, but it's pretty.

A few minutes later, a fleet advert popped up, saying they were going after the reds in our system. So we switched over to that fleet, which had a member of APOC and two people who were neutral to us in it. Turns out those neutrals were from People's Capitalist Liberation Front, a wormhole corp that was friendly to Provi. We got their comms info and got into their Teamspeak. It took us considerably longer to form up than I thought the reds would hang around, but they stayed with their bubbled Broadsword for at least 10 or 15 minutes, kindly waiting for us to form up our fleet. Our FC, Lucius, wanted just DPS, preferably battlecruiser or so. I grabbed my Drake, and my alt's Scythe to provide some T1 logi. Dex, the CEO of Lai Dai, was in a Naga. We also had a Vexor, Gnosis, Maller, and Corax. Lucius was in his Pilgrim.

Lucius gave the order to warp to the hole at zero, and we all zoomed off. I told my alt to warp at range, but, you know, bubbles. When we got there, the Stratios and Broadsword were uncloaked. Lucius told us to target the Stratios, because Broadswords are bricks. We started taking him down, but he jumped back through the wormhole. I believe the Pilgrim also went back, or he warped off or something. I don't remember shooting at him. But we surrounded the wormhole and waited. Then, suddenly, the Navy Hurricane jumped through. He got a pretty unlucky jump in point, because he was out of range of getting back into the wormhole. And we webbed and scrammed him and he went nowhere until he blew up. He got his pod out because we didn't have any kind of bubbler.

So that was exciting, and was worth more ISK than all of our other losses combined. Lucius told me to reship into an Onyx in case any of the came back through the hole. Unfortunately nobody did. They all safed up in their POS and went about doing whatever it was they did.

In conclusion, it was a lot of fun flying with CAPLF, they were good people and quite friendly.
Hope Bob treats you well, spacebros. o7

My Wormhole Adventure

This is a story about a bit of a wormhole adventure I had some three months ago at the time of writing. I originally posted it on Reddit, and I even got a few responses from the wormholers talked about in the story.

----

This is a story of gudfights and spacebros.

There was a C5 wormhole that opened in our nullsec home. It seemed a normal wormhole, but little did it know that it was soon going to be closed, quite violently.
Not too long after the wormhole opened, there was a red scout that popped into local. We had of course already scanned down the wormhole entrance, so we went to go have a look, and turns out that scout was in an Enyo. We fenced with each other for a few minutes, then the wormholers started jumping a Thanatos in and out of the entrance. While they were destabilizing the wormhole we formed up in a small Domi blob, with about 5 Domis with bouncers.

We warped to 100 off of the wormhole, but they jumped back through, the wormhole entrance now at critical mass. We sat there waiting for like 20 minutes, while I orbited the wormhole entrance in my Crow. After a little while a Devoter jumped through, and we tried to kill it but he was able to burn back and jump in, and apparently didn't have any guns fit. So he refit to guns and came back, and stayed for longer. He got my crow down to armor and I jumped through the wormhole, and I had planned to jump back and be fine, but before I could he jumped through, and the wormhole went 'sloop' and disappeared.

This guy..

There was a moment of silence on comms, then everyone exploded, laughing and saying the same thing, 'You got stuck!'
So there I was, sitting in a hostile wormhole, with a Devoter, Enyo and a Tornado on where the entrance to my home used to be. The Devoter bubbled up, but I, being in an interceptor, ignored the bubble and warped off to the sun, making a safe along the way.
While I warped back to my safe the wormholers laughed in local that I got stuck, and we started talking. One of them challenged me to a interceptor 1v1, which I accepted. I told him I had 70% shields, so we waited for my shields to regen. While we waited, I asked if I could get my pod out after the fight. (He was in a Taranis.) And they said that they could get me out.

My shields now at full, me and the wormholer started to fight. He started out dealing a lot more damage than I, but I got some transversal and started to deal more damage. I saw my shield getting low and overheated my missile launchers--which I usually forget to do--and my damage increased even more. He was now in armor, and I was at about 75% armor. My missiles continued to get hotter, and he hit 50% armor when I hit structure. As my flaming hull kept valiantly shooting missiles, he hit 30% armor and my brave ship exploded into a million pieces.

GFs were exchanged, and they invited me to their fleet, and told me to warp to them. I warped and jumped out of their wormhole into nullsec, Vale of the Silent to be precise. I then made my long way back to my home in my capsule, stopping by Amarr to refit to a new interceptor.

So I salute you, spacebros of the wormhole. Fly safe.

Bhaalgorns Are Cool

Provibloc is not known for it's capital fleets, and there's a reason for that. We don't run them pretty much at all. Not that we don't have capitals, we do, but we don't run capital ops often, so we are not very good at using them in combat. So, one of our capital FCs decided to run a capital training op, apparently the second one we've done recently.
Now, my alt can fly an Archon, but by fly I really mean she can sit in it and jump and use fighters, and that's it. So as an actual carrier she's fairly useless, but I figured I should attend the training op for the information, even if I couldn't fly in the fleet.

Obviously the op was on Sisi, because if we were going to have major screwups we didn't want them to be on the actual server. Plus you can't duke it out with capitals on the normal server, so there's that.

I listened in on the op, and learned a fair bit about flying capitals and suchlike, all of this while my Sisi was patching--which took like an hour and a half because Sisi. My client finally finished patching right as they were calling for people to undock and get into the two different fleets to have a fight to get the feel of capital warfare. Given the mirror hadn't occurred recently enough to even let my alt sit in a carrier, I decided to fit up a Bhaalgorn on my main really quickly and join in that way, I figured that I'd never flown a Bhaalgorn, so I might as well try it out and die horribly on the test server instead of the main server.

This guy is pretty awesome.

I jumped online and grabbed a fit for a fleet Bhaalgorn, which means 7 full heavy neuts and armor tank. Wait, I can't use T2 armor tank on my main? Bah, okay, T1 it is. I fit up my ship and undock, and the FC of the 'armor' capital fleet (they started out by dividing up by armor/shield, but there weren't even numbers, so people just spread out until it was mostly even) sends me a fleet invite, apparently they were down a member and me joining was quite conveinent. The fleet was warping off as I accepted the invite, and I heard from the FC that some of the members of the opposing fleet had DCd--apparently this build of Sisi was quite unstable--so we were told to wait until they got back online and on grid. I landed, and started to try and figure out how to work my Bhaalgorn. I discovered why the fit called for a ship scanner: it shows me the cap of any ship I scan, which I didn't know. I always wondered how those Rooks and Kings guys knew what the enemy's cap level was at, and now I do.

After a few minutes all the opposing capital pilots had relogged and gotten back on field, and the call was given to start shooting at things. I probably would have been able to pay more attention to the actual tactics that were going on had I not been learning how to fly a Bhaalgorn on the fly. As it was, I had my hands full with the order my FC had given me: jam this Moros (who happened to be my CEO, ironically.) I had a cap booster fit, and very quickly realized why I had it. Those heavy neuts are very, very cap hungry. Thankfully, I got one of the carriers to put a capital capacitor transfer on me, which kept me full and able to run all 7 of my neuts with no cap problems. Apparently, had I joined earlier, I would have been included in the cap chain of capitals so I could be kept fed.

As it stood, I believed that our reps were holding fairly well, and I was finally capping out the Moros. I called it in comms when he hit empty, and the FC told me to keep just a few neuts on him to keep him capped out, and then told me to switch to a new target, a Revelation. My CEO's Moros was then called primary and he died fairly quickly, given that he could probably barely keep his hardeners on. He later said that I was an annoyance that eventually turned fatal, which made me quite happy. Around this time we had killed enough of the enemy dreads and carriers that the other fleet started warping off. Congratulations were had all around, and our fleet rejoined the other in comms.

I took away quite a bit from the training op. I learned quite a bit about capitals that I didn't know. For example, if you need 250 stront to go into triage, if you have a stack of 249 and a stack of 1 in your fuel bay, triage won't activate (that is what I understood it to mean, I could be wrong, and they might have been talking about having the fuel in two different hangers, but I don't think so.) Aside from capital knowledge, I also realized that flying a Bhaalgorn in a cap fight was a hell of a lot of fun. I had never really done ECM/neuting before and I quite enjoyed it. Of course, as I was looking into the Bhaalgorn after the fight I realized that my Amarr Battleships skill was at 1, which meant my neuts weren't doing nearly as much as they could have been, but something to fix for next time.

I'll probably be picking up a Bhaalgorn here before too long.