Askgar

It was a perfectly ordinary day in eve, me and a corp mate were scanning down sites, hoping to find either a grav or Class 1 wormhole (all we could handle  as the 2 of us) and eventually I found a grav in my mining home system (where I keep my hauler and barge) and we went in and started on it.

We noticed a pilot who kept jumping in and out in various ship, first it was the same as mine, then he came out in a missile boat, then he jumped in and out a couple of times before eventually striking up a conversation with the other corp member.

[ 2010.07.24 14:02:35 ] Corp Mate > Hello.
[ 2010.07.24 14:02:46 ] Triestiono > Hi

Pretty standard opening of the convo, nice and polite, although we didn’t know what he wanted at this point, we’d have been happy sharing the site.

[ 2010.07.24 14:02:54 ] Triestiono > When did you discover this deposit?
[ 2010.07.24 14:03:45 ] Corp Mate > Not sure. About 30-60 minutes ago. Nice tree branch formation it has too!

My corp mate was purposefully playing dumb here btw, the tree branch formation comment was just made to make himself look less knowledgeable than he was.  Next, it takes a turn neither of us expect.

[ 2010.07.24 14:04:39 ] Triestiono > is it worth 5 mill ISK to you guys to keep this all to yourself?
[ 2010.07.24 14:05:02 ] Corp Mate > huh? I’m a noob, you have to spell it out for me.
[ 2010.07.24 14:06:02 ] Triestiono > I’m requesting “protection” money. 5 mill isk in order to leave you guys alone.
[ 2010.07.24 14:06:30 ] Corp Mate > Ah. Let me confer with my partner.

5 million for him to leave us alone… in Hi-Sec where the  most he could do was steal some ore (more on that later).

We talked here (well, laughed really) and decided, he’s an idiot and we both know how NOT to get killed in hisec so ignored him.

[ 2010.07.24 14:11:25 ] Triestiono > well?
[ 2010.07.24 14:11:40 ] Corp Mate > Oh. You still here?
[ 2010.07.24 14:12:22 ] Corp Mate > You’ll have to wait a bit. My partner is still laughing.

I loved this reply, didn’t see it until I got the chat log sent to me but absolute genius, if this happens again I might get my corp mate to invite me into the chat, could be much more fun.  Then, well he isn’t happy so he threatens us and then steals from one of our cans (he didn’t steal much at all though, we didn’t notice the dent in the piles anyway) in the hopes of provoking us into attacking him.

Rule 1 of mining, if someone goes red from stealing from your can, collect the loot in then go.

Rule 2, if a yellow can shows up, ignore it and don’t take/put into it, you’ll go red for them.

[ 2010.07.24 14:14:50 ] Triestiono > wrong choice
[ 2010.07.24 14:15:22 ] Corp Mate > An extortionist AND a thief. your mother must be so proud.

I had to laugh, he’s so confident something will happen and my corp mate (only just off his trial) listened  to everything me and another person in our chat channel were telling him, and then added insult to injury of the failed extortion by making a comment like that.

Once this had happened I decided I HAD to strike up a convo with him, see if he could explain his motivation for trying to extort money from us.

[ 2010.07.24 14:19:37 ] Me > So you really think we’re stupid enough to attack you for stealing our ore
[ 2010.07.24 14:19:40 ] Triestiono > what’s up?
[ 2010.07.24 14:20:00 ] Triestiono > you look like you might be.
[ 2010.07.24 14:21:00 ] Me > Not at all, good try though, especially picking out the new player over the experienced one
[ 2010.07.24 14:22:43 ] Triestiono > yeah, well, I spent 30mins scanning to find this deposit, I feel like I have first rights to it.
[ 2010.07.24 14:23:10 ] Me > It took you 30 mins to scan a site?

So it turned out he was annoyed because he spent ages scanning to find a site then we just strolled in and started mining the site, so he decided to try getting some money out of us.  (Oh, and he left the chat as soon as I made the last comment, I don’t think he appreciated being insulted… again).

Anyway, this was the first decent test of my barge (other than a quick veld trip the other night), it was very entertaining to see how quickly I filled the can and bringing a survey scanner along REALLY helped to prioritise which of the many roids I should mine first.  Also, having my hauler in system really helped for getting the ore back at the end of the day.

Anyway, from being extorted to ransoming, while we were in a worm hole with our big gang on Wednesday some random jumped in on the wormhole, completely ignoring us and going off to try clearing a site on his own, I was on archeology/scanning duty (with a little dps thrown in when I wasn’t doing those) at the time so stayed behind clearing up when they jumped him but they got in, pointed, webbed (etc.) him, got him down to 1/2 armour then… stopped attacking and made sure the npcs didn’t attack him.

Someone opened a chat and asked him how much his ship was worth to him, turns out he hadn’t even bookmarked the entrance wormhole so we offered him 15 million to let him out alive, including the exit wormhole (I was trying to get them to let me give him an exit to null sec we found earlier but they wouldn’t let me ).  I think we all agreed that was very cheap for  his ship AND the exit but as a first attempt, it was fun.  We let him out then went back to our typical Wednesday outing.

After last  weeks POS kill, this weeks ransoming, we’re turning quite malicious in WH space… although with a NBSI corp policy why not?

I’ve been a bit lax in writing up the past 2 weeks wormhole outings, partly because I have been busy but mainly because they were pretty uneventful. I’m going to do a quick roundup of the highlights of each evening and explain, for the second especially, why there isn’t much to talk about.

7th July:

One of our members has been out and scanned down a class 3 wormhole, however it is through another wormhole (class 2 I think, anyone else in the group please correct me if wrong). We had all of the sites already scanned down for us so it was simply a case of grabbing a can full of bookmarks and whizzing, clearing out sites.
We work through some radar and mag sites, with me on unlocking duty, getting all of the containers for analysing or code breaking. We did a few in the c2 wormhole before moving forward to the c3. After a couple of sites in c3 we noticed a couple of random ships occasionally showing up on directional and a few of our more experienced members noticed combat probes out, obviously out to find us.
It was now a race against time, how long do we give them to find us, we decide that I’ll finish unlocking all the cans at this site, grab the loot and then run.
At this point I wish I could write some epic story about our escape, barely making it out alive, etc. But actually all that happened as we went through the 2 wormholes and got out safely, we even had a backup route out of the first wormhole to hisec in case something had gone wrong.
It was a very uneventful escape but because of the number of radar and mag sites we hit we had a good amount if loot to sell, making it quite profitable.

14th July:

The call went out, our scanner had found a pos that had run out of fuel! This meant that we had basically found an undefended space piñata! It was 2 deep in wormholes so we race across, blow up a command centre, with a huge amount of crokite and othe assorted things I missed because I didn’t have a large enough cargo hold. There was also a hanger, can’t remember the name, but when it went pop, 4 ships popped out.
Me and another member stayed behind to protect the site while the others left and dumped there ships and came back in pods to pick up the other ships, among them were a frigate, a drake, I think, and a mining barge, which wouldn’t fit through the wormholes so in an act of pure evil, we made it go pop for the 40% base insurance payout. And even more evil, but following the corp policy of nbsi (not blue shoot it), any loot we couldn’t carry was destroyed, the cargo container it was in was blown up.
The rest of the evening was rather uneventful, we spent a while searching down a new wormhole and all we could find was c2s, and c2s in c2s. We eventually went into a relatively quiet one, clearing a couple of sites but then, the inhabitants stirred. Every so often one of them would jump into one of the sites we were in, the jump out again, we kept trying to jump them but unfortunately they were warping in too far out for us to web and scram them and they kept getting away.
After this happened a couple of times one of our member went and found their hangout and monitored it from a distance, we didn’t really know what to expect from them and even with some extra research carried out on external sites we couldn’t get much information about them so decided in the end that we would get out before anything too bad happened.
We jumped out, transferred the loot to one person, and kept the earlier acquired drake for the ship replacement fund, as a number of people use them. The take for this night is probably not much different to last weeks, but most of that will have come from the pos destruction, where we found a lot of what we would usually get simply from doing sites. I did acquire most of a barge fit from the exploded barge which I will use once I’ve trained up the remaining skills I need to fly the middle barge!

A good bit of fun the last 2 weeks however this week was a little bit of a letdown, we only had a c2 to work in and, despite being entertaining, the giant space piñata felt very underwhelming, despite it’s good payout.

Oh, and most of these recent posts have been written on an iPhone so if there are any oddities please let me know and I’ll correct them.

A few nights ago our new player discovered a gravimetric site in eve and went in to mine it, however his ship had no defences at all and couldn’t cope with the rats that were present at the site. I checked with him and I was only a few jumps out so I jumped across and started protecting him.

It started off as me transporting the loot back and forwards while he was mining into a can, this worked well for a while, however I decided that it would go a bit quicker if I grabbed a mining laser and did a bit of mining as well.

I noticed I could use miner 2s so ended up picking up 4 of them, as well as replacing all of my low slots to make a bigger cargo hold. Back I go to the grav site and start mining. We do this for a while, dumping into cans, until we both have to go, the trouble is there is quite a lot of ore in cans now so I look and see my hoarder only a couple of jumps away. I dump my cane and do a 6 jump roundtrip to get my hoarder to get all the ore, a couple of roundtrips and it’s all in and we’re done.

I had a lot of fun doing this and decided to have a look into getting a more dedicated mining ship, I look at the barges and decide to go for the middle one, forgotten the name, as the difference between that and the basic one was a day or 2s training, but for the max one it was an extra week or 2.

Since this mini excursion I have gone out another couple of times, mainly solo, but only for a small period so I don’t get too bored of it.  I tend to take a couple of autocannons for defense, however I usually end up using combat drones to defend from rats as my medium autocannons can barely hit them.

Another thing I am getting more into is the scanning side, I have gotten my scanning tactics to a very reliable point and can now scan down most sites in much less than 5 minutes.  I’ve had a couple of good radar sites as well, netting me 4-5 million per site.

The thing that continues drawing me into eve, is the fact there is such a variety of stuff to do, I can go out, all guns blazing for a fight, or I can sit back and casually mine, or I can do some scanning for something a bit different from most games entirely.

Just a quick forward on this post, I have been planning to write it for quite a while, it has been rattling around in my head for at least a month but I’ve finally had a “push”, so to speak, to finish it! It is not just due to one or 2 events but more of an observation I have noticed over the past 6-12 months since my life situation has changed.

Just some background, I play in a few static groups a week, all starting at around 8pm uk time, this also happens to coincide with the bed time of my step child, relying in the need for silence in the house until asleep.  This is where the problem lies, I join in with the static group, log into voice chat an listen in but can’t speak myself, meaning if I do want to reply to anything I have to do it in the in game text chat.

With a greater and greater reliance on voice in my static groups, and less and less attention paid to the text chat it starts to feel more and more like I’m partly invisible and almost completely like I’m being ignored.  I know it can be a pain to keep an eye on the ingame chat when you’re chatting away in voice but personally I always have an eye on the ingame chat, incase someone isn’t in voice, or someone can’t speak for a min and has needed to say something.

My solution to this is that I think from now on I either won’t start playing until I can get into voice and speak, or at the least I won’t join the voice server until I can speak, it just leads to frustration on my end.  Also, I think in future especially when I can’t speak in voice chat I won’t try advising people where to go or what to do because they tend to notice it 5 mins later and by that point its irelevant.

Once again, just to reiterate, this isn’t because of any particular situation, just a general problem I’ve been thinking about for a while and finally decided to actually write.

I have a couple of eve related articles I plan on writing soon, one a writeup of wed and the other about my “rediscovery” in eve from last night.

Last night was the unofficial beginning of the @vanhemlock WAR group, a week early because they turned on the new servers in time (just!) Here’s a rundown of how the evening went for me.

1930: I get home from work, look at twitter and I see a tweet saying that there is a patch and the new servers are online. It seems to be patching 10gb of files but actually it is doing a full file check and only a small amount of data is downloaded.
2000: All downloaded and I’m in game, logging into the server and I see my character from last weeks warm up all my items from my ce and preorder still exist and all is good. One of the guildies, or to be guildies as the guild was not set up at this point. We form up and I head to the inevitable city to try getting our 6 people together to form the guild. I get given the details for the new mumble server and hop in to discover another couple of people still patching.
2030: We have 5 people and are waiting for a 6th to create the guild when I get a whisper from someone asking if the guild was set up yet, I find out he has a full account so I get him into the group and we get him to come across to the city so that we can set up the guild.
2045: The guild is up and running and we all head back to the chaos chapter 2 town to start forming up the warband and inviting people to the guild, I walk into someone who’s name I recognise and I then get a tell essentially saying, yes its me so off another invite goes.
2100: We charge into the nearest pq, it involves killing things a few times, there was probably something more to it but tbh it was so chaotic I couldn’t keep track. We do this a couple of times, completely ruin the pq for anyone else by clearing all of the spawns very quickly and waiting around for more spawns to finish the pq. After a couple of these we head back to the town, hand in a couple of quests and we head off to the hard pq in the area.
2115: This was much more suitable for us in that it was designed for around 10 people, the size of our warband at this point and was more of a challenge, although the tanking squig almost despawned the boss at one point, causing a few problems but a lot of hilarity!
This pq had 3 stages, the first was the standard kill x mobs, nice and easy with as many people as we had. The second was more challenging, we had to light houses on fire while also preventing people with buckets putting the fires out, 2 champions came per fire to be exact. Our tactic was to split into 2 groups of 5 and go a different way around the zone, ignoring any other people doing it and getting on with out own thing, this worked very efficiently with us sorting out the problems that the randoms running around made.
The final stage involved killing a man, probably important in some way but in the carnage I didn’t see what. After that we celebrated, until a massive chaos demon spawned with loads of adds. The squig seemed to get most of the adds and we just beat on the demon. This worked well and we got the demon down however once the squig decided to take aggro then run away, and he ran outside the PQ and just to the boundry of the boss despawning (which would have meant restarting the kill). Luckily we killed the boss still but there was much cursing the squigs name.
Between doing this PQ we had a quick run over to the easy PQ here but we were so over powered we didn’t even work out what was going on so left again rapidly after completing it once.
2145: We head back to the chapter 2 town after maxing our inf bars, get our loot then head over to the joint t3 and open rvr towns. Upon getting there we decide to try some o-rvr so we all ran into the zone, unfortunately the server had only just come back up so the destro population massively outnumbered order and there was very little fighting, however the fights that did happen were excellent and we did get to renown rank 4 or 5. Out we pop and get our renown rewards and renown abilities!
2215: We head off for some cave to kill an epic monster, some weird puzzle to get in and it was empty, off we head back to town.
2230: We queue up for scenarios to have a go, although they don’t seem to pop much, so we also head off to do pqs, we do the normal difficulty one a couple of times, which consists of killing various mobs, and then we move on to the easy pq, for completion sake so that we can get them ticked off.
2245: The scenario pops for both groups while we’re in the middle of the easy PQ and so off we go, there are 11 of us and 1 random (who was apparently insulting us during the match for being useless but I wasn’t paying attention).  Gates of Ekrund consists of 3 capture points on a fortress, with teams coming from each side.  We captured 2 of the points initially while they captured 1, it went back and forwards a bit but was very close in the end, with our crazy group just winning it.  Instead of running head first into all the battles I tended to sneak around capturing the points which were unguarded and even when the points went neutral they never sent more than one person to clear me off the point.
2300: We come out of the scenario and probably confuse a random doing the PQ when 11 people suddenly appear out of nowhere to finish the PQ.  We race through the easy PQ and then move over to the harder PQ, and here it becomes a LOT more interesting.  In this PQ we first had to do the kill x mobs, nice and easy, the second wave however had us disarming “bear” traps as far as I could tell.  However upon touching a trap a champion level mob spawned, which was quite powerful and took a while to take down, we only had 5 minutes to disarm 20 traps and because of the lack of knowing what was coming, and organisation, we failed.  This seemed to require much more practise and organisation than the previous PQs and I think with maybe a level or 2 more, and proper organisation (teams of 3 maybe, 1 to tank the trapper, 1 to DPS it down and 1 to activate the trap while the tank/dps are keeping the trapper busy).  I actually died during this because I ran to a trap but bought 3 or 4 other mobs, and had the trapper on me and I’d ran out of healer range, which was entirely my own fault.
2315: We call it a night on our first WAR outing, its getting late and its been almost 3 hours of pretty non-stop killing of different varieties.

I’d like to say a personal thank you to everyone that joined in last night, I personally had a great time and from looking at twitter and the forums it seemed like everyone else did as well, we made a good start on the game and got people set up in the guild and into mumble, everyone seemed to get on and there were lots of laughs to be had.  I personally can’t wait for next week when we can continue with the rampage and hopefully get near to T2 and have some more RvR fun.

2030: I log in after the GW Dragon Festival, mainly to sort out my PI, as it had just ran out. I do this then decide to go scanning, to kill some time and make some isk. I found a combat site and cleared it out quickly. At the same time I was advising the newest member of our motley crew on scanning in general.
2100: I scan down my next anomaly and get a wormhole, excellent, I put out a shout to our group and we start forming up however upon investigation I appear to have found an occupied class 2 wormhole. I found a couple of wrecks in it which disappeared but didn’t see any ships. We decided we didn’t have the manpower to cope if people were there so we left it.
2115: Our newest member had discovered a wormhole and I was dispatched to check it out, however he warped in and found a wormhole that I could identify remotely, it went straight into a class 1, perfect for us. We all grouped up and warped to the system and met up with our new player, who really seems to be getting the hang of scanning.
2130: I go in first to scout it out, I warp in, almost forget my exit bookmark, then go to a planet and scan. No occupants, just a mobile warp disruptor and control tower (burger king). I scan with my probes and… Whoa, probably 20-30 scanning sites and even more combat sites.
The rest of the fleet warp in, we set up various bookmarks and prepare to scan down our first site…
2200: A cane has come in behind is, he doesn’t do anything an leaves, however we did not expect what happened next, on voice I hear, “the wormholes collapsed.” None of us could believe it and a little bit of panic ensued, has it really gone, how do we get out… What now?
We formed a plan, we leave our cloaked scanning salvager and new player in a safespot, trying to find an exit, while the rest of us carry on as usual, clearing out combat sites and if some of our scanners find radar/other non mining sites we’ll tackle them as well.
2230: Still combatting and still scanning, quite slow as we only had 2 dps fits, but we found a few bits and also hacked our way through a radar site.
2300: We get a call from our primary scanning ship, he’d found a wormhole but couldn’t quite pinpoint it. We completed the current site and while I was salvaging the wrecks, anyone else who could scan got involved with tracking down the wh. Eventually we tracked it down and it was back to null-sec, not quite what we were hoping for.
2315: We sent through our cloaked scanner to find out where we would emerge, it turned out to be about 8 jumps out from the nearest hi-sec system, through some IT alliance space, former BOB space.
We regroup back in the wh and have a discussion about what to do, it’s getting late and most of us need to get going, having early starts the next day. Eventually after evaluating the route we decide it’s a quiet section of space at a quiet time of night so we’ll go for it, a quick briefing on aligning, staying in cloak for as long as possible, etc. And most importantly, keeping an eye on local to see other pilots in system and we’re off.
2330: We head off and in the most organised display of voice chat I have ever heard from us, barely anything said other than aligning, aligned and warping we go, system to system. We see about 6 or 7 people in about 3 of the systems on the way so we go via planets in those, avoiding possible bubbles. The final jump, the only lo-sec one was very anxious, expecting gankers, but we saw noone and got out safely.
0000: We’re out, everyone is exhausted ad we’re almost ready to call it a night. But first we get to the nearest station, dump the loot with our fc and leave it at that. I set my autopilot to my home system, about 30 jumps away, check the systems, only hi-sec and I let my autopilot guide me home while I sleep.
0715: I awake to find me floating in space at my home system, I dock up and end the ordeal.

Thanks to all the people who were on the trip, especially the fc who got us back in one piece through null-sec, which I had never experienced before and kept is calm during the ordeal. Our new member, who scanned down the wormhole and performed amazingly given it was only his 4th day in game I believe. The cloaked scanner who found the way home and the pair of ships who bend time and space, just to keep us supplied with cap and armour.

And the lesson I learnt from this, pay attention to the mass that a wh can handle, we didn’t and that cane that closed the wormhole on us did us a favour, if it hadn’t been for him we would have probably closed it while leaving and left behind some of our members in wh space, making it even more difficult to scan a way home.

One final request, if you read the whole story and like what you read please leave a comment, I enjoyed writing it and if people enjoyed reading it then it might cause me to be less lazy and write more!