Minmatar Warfare Update

As I wrote earlier I dusted off an old Minmatar Character to participate in the Factional Warfare. So far it’s often been fun, when we’re chasing wartargets and / or getting ready for big fights. But also sometime boring, taking a few complexes in a system and waiting out the timers isn’t really the most exciting thing Eve has to offer. A patch a few days back also decreased the standings gain for each takeover quite abit. Furthermore you get less standings gain the higher your rank is. I am now around 6.9 with the factional warfare corp. The minmatar standing will come in handy though, they have some very nice (regular) Mission Agents, and the offers from their LP store are a lot more interesting than those from the Caldari corporations.
2008.06.29.16.26.55
Anyway, I was in a few nice battles the past week or so. Last friday CVA came to aid the Amarr cause. After a lot of cat and mouse, our scouts had found out they brought a BS fleet assisted by Guardians. The names of the guardians were notted down as primaries, and after a pretty long battle we won ! Several of their Battleships and a command ship went down, while we didn’t suffer as much losses.

A few days ago, there was a similar fight, but in that one I was totally lagged out. We warped into thirty or more amarr ships at a gate. They almost all had their drones out, which didn’t help much. My screen simply froze as my Rupture entered the grid, and by the time I was back I was halfway thru my armor. I managed to release my drones somehow, and they got me on two killmails, dissing out over 1000 dmg ;). But a few seconds later I was totally in hull and my ship about to explode. And I was in that state for more than two minutes i think. Then all of a sudden my pod was in a belt (i had frantically been clicking the warp button). So I missed most of the fight, but I think they lost several heavier ships and we lost mainly frigs and cruisers. There sure were a truckload of wrecks at the gate. Earlier that day that same fleet had decimated the minmatar rag tag fleet of rifters and ruptures, so it was a nice revenge. Unfortunately I missed that one.

I haven’t suffered many losses, just a bunch of ruptures and few rifters. especially to pirates I must say. Last night just wasn’t my evening though. I flew back to Rens in my Cyclone (already had that one for quite a while) to refit and get some extra ammo, while a fleet was forming to get rid of some pirates in Dal. Unfortunately no one had mentioned they were sitting on the Amamake gate, and i was pretty stupid for not asking their specific location. So I just jumped through that gate and almost got away, but someone locked me and scrambled, almost when I was warping out. I popped a short time later.

But that wasn’t all. I had already parked a few ships in Dal, so I picked up a rifter and proceeded to Huola. I had seen enough of Dal for the moment so I wanted to join another fleet there. A few jumps away I noticed a Trasher that was battling another soldier of the Minmatar, so I tried to help out, but wasn’t the smartest idea. The guy’s T2 artillery (amarr flying a Minnie ship :(), dealt a lot of dmg to my lone rifter and there I was in a pod again.

I ended the evening by flying back to Rens and setting up two additional Ruptures to be blown up later ;). I noticed the Cyclones are only 20mil now in Rens, so I might be keeping one on standby as well, if we ever need something a bit bigger. I can also fly a Typhoon, but not sure I want to throw that out there at the moment :).

Scary Avatars

Do you have people in your corp that have an avatar that makes you think you don’t want to meet them in a dark alley ? Or they just creep you out ? I know Rakeriku has at least one ;).

Scary Avatar Eve Online

Make a similar blogpost on your blog, or if you haven’t gotten one, link a pic on flickr or a similar service to round em all up ;).

Old Man Star

By this time Darieux was an old man, his gaunt body in a bad state due to too much time in zero gravity. Yet his spirit was still strong and he was unwilling to give up now that he’d managed to reach his destination. Satisfying though it was to be in the Ouperia system his situation was still dire as the prospects for any kind of rescue were absolutely none at all. His fate lay entirely in his own hands and the only option was to try to construct the stargate all by himself.

Recently I read some Factional Warfare reports on squirmishes and fleet battles between Gallente and Caldari in a system called Old Man Star. I wondered why this system has such an odd name, and my question was answered by this excellent story on the Eve-O site. If you’re even remotely interested in Eve’s Lore, I’d suggest you read it, it’s a great story :). I am wondering though when it was written. The url has july01-01 in it, though I doubt it’s from 2001.

The overall quality of the stories lately has gone up considerably, and so have the fun newsarticles. I am anxiously waiting the arrival of the Eve Novel that has been shipped by Amazon, if it’s as good as the Eve Chronicles lately, it should be a good read !

BTW another favorite of mine is ‘a boy and his slaver‘, very nice artwork on that one as well. You can find that also on the Eve Chronicles archive.

Factional Warfare So Far

QanatasTo the left is my Minmatar freedom fighter that has enlisted in the Factional Warfare. Especially the first few days were a lot of fun. I roamed around in a few smaller gangs and some bigger fleets. The bigger fleets were a new experience for me. There were some good FC’s, and only one mediocre one. The mediocre one was bad, because his orders weren’t clear, his mic didn’t work properly so fleet chat was all ‘Uh what are we warping to ?‘ ‘what system are we in ?‘ etc ;).

In the first few days I lost a few ships, three ruptures and a stabber. Only one was actually lost in a gang battle. Got picked off the gate while catching up with a gang by an Abbaddon, and two ships were lost to pirates.

But the last few days the war has gone a bit stale. We have mainly been capturing a lot of complexes and the Amarr seem to have given up. Which is understable as their morale must have hit rock bottom. Minmatar gangs all over their low sec space, we have more numbers and also seem to be a bit better experienced at pvp. Think a lot of alts signed up for the Minnie fleet. While capturing plexes, make sure to have a magazine or books at hand, or catch up on some blogs, as it takes up to 20mins to capture one and it can be very boring. The standing boosts and the titles are nice, so I hope it’s worth it.

I tried a few missions as well, but they’re not worth it, unless you’re in a gang of a few similar ships. They’re very hard to solo, especially in a pvp fit. The rewards are awful at the moment, they might get a bit better over time, as I assume a lot of them fail, raising the reward. It’s just a shame you don’t get any loyalty points for capturing or defending structures, that would make the loyalty store a lot more interesting. At the moment I can’t see the general population grinding 80k lp for a faction frig, with this mission system in place.

Anyway so far I think FW is a moderate succes. There is a lot more going on in Lowsec than usual. Whether things will stay this way over time, we’ll have to see…

Factional Warfare

Is a-coming ! The servers will go down in the night and might be up on wednesday, but don’t hold your breath. Already tried some FW on the testserver, and it was fun, but that’s also because of the cost of all modules being 100isk ;). I am thinking of dusting off an old account, I haven’t used since 2006 that holds my Minmatar freedom fighter and enlist him in the Minnie fleet. Otherwise, as both my characters are in an alliance and not willing to leave it, FW is not for me. Which is a shame as it would have been a fun sidegame.

Anyway, I have been busy in game, nothing very spectacular. Mainly ratting and a little mining in Wicked Creek. I build a Raven from recycled loot and some mining, which makes live somewhat easier. Jumped back to empire friday when it was a little hostile in WC and got some business done there. Flying around collecting datacores and selling them off.

I saved a few for my own invention stuff, and managed a 3 out of 3 attempt of an Invulnerability II Shield. If only I would have know (well I could have checked) that this thing needs quite a few expensive parts. Still hope to make a profit on them, they sell for around 2.2mil around Sivala. My stack of Ballistic Controls II is almost sold out now, and I am all out of Hammerheads II and HobGobs II. I even sold too many, when I needed a few I couldn’t find any anymore and had to invent a few BPCs for own use ;).

Met a few suicide camps on my travels around empire for the best deals, as you can see by this screenshot :).
Concorde Much ?
!!! DONT FORGET TO SET A LONG SKILL !!!

Settling in 0.0

We have have been out here in Wicked Creek for six weeks or so and now that we’re more familiar with the area and it’s inhabitants, it’s getting a bit more comfortable. Having a few more ships to fly helps as well, my hulk is here now, and I got a cheap iteron IV to haul my stuff around. I also have been mining a bit, and the Arkanor, Dark Ochre and Gneiss is very nice. Combined with the recycled loot I almost have enough minerals for a Raven ! That will speed up the ratting a bit. The ratting is nice, as you can see in my wallet pic ;).

Eve Wallet

I have been mainly flying my Cerberus, and a Domi as well, but my skills arent geared towards that Domi so it was only a bit faster than the Cerb. Having a tractor beam is convenient though, the salvage is good. You get tritbars from the Angels, and I have been able to produce one Cargo Optimisation rig, and I am almost ready to make another one.

Ratting

All in all, 0.0 is certainly growing on me, it has got me playing quite a lot more, though it’s getting a bit busy in our region now, so I am going to have to find a few more backwater systems for the ratting. Also there are still roaming gangs about. As I am writing this we have a DOOM gang outside the station :).

Warp Drive Active #37

When I am writing this it’s not yet published on Virginworlds, so I thought I’d mention it here. Episode #37 of the great Eve Podcast Warpdrive Active is now available for download. It’s a very long one, almost 3hrs and 80Mb epsiodes, to celebrate Eve’s fifth anniversary, but it’s well worth it. Besides the usual banter of the two hosts, you also get a bunch of interviews with people from Eve’s past and current times.

Eve-O Forum Thread

With EVE now five years (and 2 weeks) old we decided to put out a special show to celebrate the event and too look back to the dark days in 2003 when the game first launched.

Episode 37: download

# First up we have an interview with Valerie “Pann” Massey. Blinky should really turn his phone off in interviews though.
# Pann really liked the Little Bee’s movie
# Back in the early days of the game, the game was published by Simon & Schuster Interactive who had some weird ideas about marketing the game
# They thought making the box look like this was a good idea. They then filled it with garishly colored crap like the manual and finally put out some horrible movies like this one.
# Even though SSI has now shut down, we manage to snag Mike “Campion” Wallis to hear his side of things. He was the man who brought EVE to SSI and he also was EVE’s first producer. He is now the boss of Colony Studio.
# We then move onto talking to some of the important players in the early days of the game. First up we talked to Trey Ratcliff from John Galt Games. Old school players may remember him as Ragnar, the first boss of Taggart Transdimensional Inc.
# Just to remind you that Trey is the man in over-all charge of the Web Wars EVE Project.
# Sadly we can’t get him to talk about Ragnar’s Magic Hat, but its OK, Urban remembers!
# We then welcome two of the m0o veterans Stavros for about the 9 millionth time on the show and Vegeta.
# Incidentally, the background music we have used for the interview segments is “the shadow of the sun” by Alienhand. Thanks very much for letting us use the tune sir!

Empyrean Age on the Horizon

CCP had a huge surprise this week for us Eve Players. This weekend this upcoming expansion will be on the test server. It will mainly focus on factional warfare. I didn’t realise it was this close already to being released. Together with the expansion, the first eve novel will be out. There is a new page that includes wallpaper and a trailer over at http://www.eveonline.com/empyreanage/index.html.

Looking forward to even more stuff to do in Eve :).

Update: Oops forgot to include the Devblog !