Author: Morphisat

Cat and Mouse

It was an interesting evening in our wormhole last night. A corporation in our Static C4 was moving out their stuff through our hole into hisec. Unfortunately they already killed one of our pilgrims. It seemed to be a corporation with relatively new pilots. Slowly people on our side started to log  on, as it was about the time we were supposed to get ready for our C4 excursion into the C4, but it turned out to be a pvp night.

We had some kind of plan to lure them out. I can’t remember the exact details, but it worked as a (new) pilgrim engaged them on our side of the C4. But coms were somewhat confusing, and people weren’t in the right place at the right time. Furthermore they suddenly had a few new ships on the field we didn’t expect, and that added to the confusing. Only the before mentioned fresh pilgrim died.

After this we reorganized a little better and set up on the hisec hole. Three more engagements followed, but they stayed on the hole and jumped back, a few times it was pretty close and ships jumped backed into hisec well into armor. Including mine, as I was being called primary in the second engagement. We did kill an executioner and a slasher, unfortunately the rest got away, the wormhole collapsed a little later.

In their C4 there was only the tower left (with it’s forcefields still turned on) and the ship hangar. We switched to battleships and decided to take some shots at the tower, just to see what would happen. Well nothing much happened, they managed to get some more stuff out using a Crane and a few other cloaky ships. One really weird thing though, one guy started self destructing his ships. Apparently he thought their pos would be destroyed any minute and started to blow up all of his own ships. Two brutixes, two Thalos, and an assortment of smaller stuff. Even a CovOps cloaky that he could have easily used to scan himself out. Rather odd behavior indeed ! Once the shields were at 90% we called it a day.

All in all an entertaining evening. I never shot at a POS before so that’s one more thing I can scratch off the list :). A C2 with a hisec exit is convenient, and it does bring in some interestting traffic at times. I wouldn’t pick a weekend to move stuff through a hole though, chances are a lot higher that people will notice you and want to shoot at you.

Eve Is Pretty

There was some Eve News this week, most notably the blogpost on the new flag / aggression system aka. Crime Watch. It already has a 37 page thread (as I write this) of comments on the forums, with some sensible and some not so sensible feedback ! A nice article on these changes is on the Mittani’s website.

At the moment I don’t have that much to blog about, everything is going well in our hole (and my small industrial endeavors outside) ! So I’ll just post these pretty shots :). Can’t go wrong with screen shots !

Drakes prior to the missile nerf

Mining some sweet Arkanor
One of the prettiest ships in all of Eve (imho) the Legion

Economics of video games

There is  a very interesting article on the economics of video games in the Washington Post.

For all intents and purposes, this is an economy that has activity equal to a small country in real life,” Guðmundsson says. “There’s nothing ‘virtual’ about this world.

Nothing really new, but it’s a nice read anyway.

Mining Revisited

Ever since the Mining barges were revamped, I have been (afk) mining quite a bit. There is something tranquil about mining and later on, selling ships you have build with rocks you mined yourself is quite satisfying. Not to mention the fact you can catch up with tv episodes you missed while doing so.

With rocks like these, I cannot NOT mine them !

Shame the iceprices took such a dive. But I am using the ice to produce fuel blocks with PI farmed from the wormhole. If you sell these at places where you don’t have that many competitors, you can ask a bit more than Jita prices, but sales are a little slower.

Ice Fields can be beautiful !

Since there are quite a few miners about now, you have to study dot.lan a bit to find decent belts. It’s not uncommon to only see a few pieces of plag and veld left in a belt these days.

Happy mining all :).

Sad, Sad, Sad

Just like almost every EveBlogger, I have to express the sadness I feel over the death of Sean Smith aka. Vile Rat. I never met him, but knew him as CSM 6 member and Goon diplomat. He had a big hand in shaping Eve, as it is now.

And the circumstances under which he died makes his death all the more tragic. I hadn’t expected to feel so sad as I do now, I got this weird ‘One of us died‘ feeling that I didn’t expect to have.

TheMittany obituary

May he rest in Peace and may his family and loved ones find the strength to carry on.

There is a fundraiser at youcaring.com to support Sean’s family.

Ship balancing winter update

A big devblog was posted today on the upcoming winter balance update ! It’s too much to go through all of these, all I am saying is, the new Stabber and Vagabond models look awesome :). Oh and will the new Griffin be overpowered ? It looks very strong especially compared to it’s tier brethren. Also logi frigs will be fun, though they’ll always be the 1st to go down in a fight.

Anyway, the Eve opportunist did a nice write-up, check it out !

News From Unknown Space

Time flies when you’re having fun ! It’s a little less than 2 months since I joined the 20 minuters and started moving into a wormhole. It’s got it’s pros and cons, but so far, it has certainly revived my Eve-Play ! There is so much more to do, more sites to run, more jumping around (think our exit has been in all 4 corners of hisec now) etc etc..

Anyway, this weekend I discovered a new way (well for me anyway) to make isk in a wormhole. I wanted to run a few sites this weekend in the hole and when I started scanning I noticed some activity near our C4 entrance. I saw an iteron V and a hoarder jumping through. They were using our hole to pass through to hisec ! I scanned down the hisec exit, and sat there cloaked. Another industrial jumped back into our hole, I uncloaked and took a pot-shot at it, but it warped off before I hit anything. I logged on an alt who was in a ship with a point and planted her near the entrance.

You would think that the one pilot that was shot at warned his corp mates, but strangely enough not short there after an Itty V entered the system. This time I could tackle it, and it of course jumped back to hisec. Suddenly in local, a guy with a similar name appeared, obviously a cloaky alt who asked for a deal to pass through since they had some stuff ‘of no value to you‘ to pass through our system to their C4. Needless to say I responded with ‘make me an offer I can’t refuse’. Well he did and we even had a nice chat while they were transporting their stuff through our hole. I made more than what I would have made had I run a few sites.

As I mentioned earlier we also have do excursions into other holes. Last night we entered a C5 for the first time. It was definitely doable with 3 outstanding Basilisk pilots, a few battleships and a handful of drakes. The C5 had a lot of active POSes in it, but the inhabitants were probably from the US timezone also indicated by http://www.wormhol.es (great intel site btw). Only saw a legion briefly on scan, but that was about it. This morning I checked the wormhole system again on dotlan and apparently there had been some brawl in that very hole later that night. Glad we didn’t run into that merry band of T3 cruisers :).

BB39 – It’s not a house, it’s a home

Blog Banter 39: Home

“Some say a man’s home is his castle. For others it is wherever they lay their hat. The concept is just as nebulous in the New Eden sandbox.

In EVE Online, what does the concept of “home” mean to you?”

In my Eve life there are a few spots I have considered my home over the past almost seven years. First the system I started in, close to Sobaseki. But when you start out you don’t really have a lot of stuff yet, though you think you do ;).

I can’t quite remember what we based out of when I was in Eve Uni, but I don’t think it mattered much. You just moved your frig and cruiser somewhere and that was that. When I joined Rakeriku, we were based out of Kaunokka. This was the first place I would consider my home in Eve. We did missions and mining ops from here (although dot.lan claims it has no belts ?). We build our very first freighter there. And I think we had our first war there as well.

Old school mining op – Kaunokka (?)

Later on we moved to Sivala, it wasn’t busy there at the time, and there was an excellent level 4 mission agent for Sukuuvestaa Corporation down there. Years later there would be at least 100 people in local at peak times ! And most of ships and gear is still there after all these years, and using the station / lab / production facilities next door in Uedama, which you might know for it’s infamous gankers at the Sivala gate.

The few months I lived in 0.0 we rented out in Wicked Creek. It never felt like home though, was overrun way too many times.

Lightning up a cyno in Wicked Creek

When I joined Hidden Agenda, there wasn’t really a need to move all my stuff. Their HQ for events was not that far off, and mining ops and mission running and other activities weren’t always at the same spot, so I had just some gear scattered around.

And now since about a month I also live in a wormhole ! It’s amazing how fast that started to feel like home. I am liking it more than I had expected. But I still have the need every now and then to truck back to Uedama, do some industry stuff, and head back into our little hole. It’s nice to have two homes actually !

Freebooted, the home of BB 39.

Ice Prices

Inferno 1.2 was released about 2 weeks ago and we can see the huge impact the revamped mining barges have had on Ice prices. Apparently this is a much ‘faster’ market as the price of Trit and other ore has not moved much.

As you can see, Caldari Ice is especially tanking, with some Ice Belt systems have over 250 in local. Everybody and their uncle seems to have an alt in the icebelts now ;). Our enthusiastic iceminers and / or consumers are also trying to use the isotopes to build fuel blocks. Most POS fuel related PI products are steadily climbing in price.

The machinaw is now the miner’s choice of ship. Of course the Hulks that are out in the game won’t instantly disappear, but people are keen on getting a flying 35 m2 ore bay !

It’ll take some time before the markets settle, and the other ores will start dropping as well. Unless something happens that will make the demand for trit and the lower ores go up.

Thanks to www.eve-markets.net and http://www.evemarketeer.com/ for the nice charts :).

Roaming a drone region

Regular readers of this blog probably wonder ‘wtf is Morph doing in the Drone Regions !‘. Well it just so happens it was an involuntary roam through 2 wormholes and we ended up in Perrigen Falls.

Perrigan Falls I

But let me start at the beginning. The alliance does wormhole ops, usually sites in a neighboring C4 on Sunday nights. I have been participating for over a month now, and these usually go by uneventfully, except maybe a probe or two on dscan, or someone sitting at a POS in an Iteron III. But last night we saw some activity before the op went down. Two cov ops scanning ships and a scan frig. But we decided to give it a try anyway and then once we hit the third site, a Dominix, Scorpion and an Apocalypse popped up on the directional scanner. My first instinct was to immediately warp towards our exit hole, but our FC shouted ‘STAY STAY’, so I managed to stop my warp just in time. Which was a good thing, as it turned out, they were collapsing our exit hole to our home system !

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