A Helpful Tip

I’m not anywhere near being done with a guide on any one subject yet, but one tidbit I’ve picked up that I’ve noticed pilots with more experience with me still didn’t know about was the use of mining lasers and stip miners.

Miners are the only component I know of that all you to have partial success of an activation.

That is to say, if you turn your miner off and on, it does not pulse the same way an armor repair module or ECM does.  When you turn a mining module on, it begins to collect at the rate displayed under “Show Info” – and if you turn it off at any point during the cycle, it will give you a percentage load based on how much of the cycle it has been active for.

This is why I fit my Retriever with a scanner rather than an afterburner.  The afterburner is only useful once – getting to the roid cluster.  So it might save you some small time with that.  A scanner however, can save you minute after minute after minute.  Since strip miners have a long 3 minute cycle with a larger pull capacity, often you can turn off the miners halfway through their cycle and  save a minute or a minute and a half.

Example:  Veldspar has a volume of 1.0 0.1 and that makes our calculations simple, so lets do that.  Lets say you have a roid of Veldspar.  Lets say you have a Retriever, and you can haul in 1800 m3 per cycle of 180 seconds.  You start on a roid that has 44,000 units of Veldspar in it.

Knowing about partial lodes and armed with a scanner, you would need (44000/1800) x180 = 4400 seconds or 73.333 7.333 minutes.  If you had a burner and n knowledge, since strip miners have a 3 minute cycle, we have to round that up to the nearest 3 minute multiple, which is…75 9 minutes.

So we saved 1.67 minutes or 100 seconds on that one roid.  How many roids do you gobble up each night?  Saves some time doesn’t it?

One more thing – since partial loads work, when mining in low and null sec, don’t forget to  turn off your mining lasers before you warp out when hostiles enter the system.   If you dont turn them off, when you warp out, you will get nothing!  Being able to take a partial cycle with you eases some of the pain of having to leave! 

PS – Apologies for the lack of posting.  I have a partially free weekend – no kids, no wife, and little work.  You might think that would mean more posting, but what it really means is more time in game and thus…less time writing.  (-:

Massive PvP Texas Steel Cage Fleet Death Match, Part II

So, I’ve not heard a whole lot from our leadership about what to keep under wraps, so as of  today, until I hear otherwise, you get the whole story.  My corp, Origin Systems, is the executor corp for Shadows of Light, and we’ve been working for awhile to get in with the ED-IRC alliance.  In part because the Russians aka Reds (are they really russian? srsly?) in our neck of the woods are super annoying, and in part because the three longest term vets in our corp and alliance have old ties with ED.   When they finally called us up to help out, we were ecstatic, and ready to make every effort and sacrifice for the opportunity to play with the big boys.

It would take too long to detail the entire two and a half hour op, so I am doing it in truncated timeline form from my handwritten notes that night, for your reading ease and enjoyment.  All times game local.

***

06:25  -  Young pilot in training Acer Tinkari (um, me!) awakens from snooze, graps refreshment and cough drops, and logs in.

06:35  -  I arrive at the assigned gathering system.  Vent and Chat both are alive, apparently some people started to move early and had some sort of trouble doing so.  I would soon learn that they had been told they could use Ethereal Dawn’s system of jump bridges to cut the 26 jump haul to the assault location down to 4 jumps.  As soon as they warped into location though, ED’s POS opened up on them.  In the chaos that followed, we lost two battleships and a battlecruiser.  The FC and our ranking Diplomat are trying to get ED on the horn to figure out what’s going on.

07:10  -  We are still waiting and trying to get someone to talk to us.

07:17  -  We finally get an ED navigator in Fleet Chat with us.  He grants us some of the coordinates and passwords necessary but apparently not all, since our capships, moved earlier, still can’t take refuge in their POS shields.  Still no word from ED’s FC about the op itself, but we think perhaps the show has already started without us.  Our FC orders all of us still at the original gathering point to head to a different system 7 jumps away.  With growns and some dissapointment at realizing we still have a long night ahead, we lose two pilots to sleep, including another battleship pilot, who is the head of our PvP wing in the alliance.  Neither the alliance CEO nor the 2IC are anywhere to be found.  But the FC is a longtime vet, and we feel confident in his abilities, esp. since he has a freaking cool European accent.

07:25  -  I come through a low sec gate to a pair of blinking red’s.  Oh crap…I call out warning on Vent, knowing there’s at least one ship behind me, a battleship carrying my best friend in the corp, who has already lost a battleship to the earlier friendly fire incident.  Its too late, and we know it.  He starts to align, trying to buy me time in my nimbler cruiser to get out.  But its not the pirates night either.  Somehow there’s a targeting mishap or he’s half asleep – and he forgets to scram the Megathron.  It jets out of system with me, both us howling with relief and laughter.  We taunt the pirates in local, and he blames it on the poor design of Minmatar gates….um…yeah.

07:37  -  We arrive in the new gathering point.  We’re still waiting for the rest of the passwords from ED.  No word on the Op.

07:42  -  We finally get the caps parked, and the rest of the fleet, including their alts, is in the jump process.  My wing commander yells at me for not aligning before warp and getting left behind, and I gently point out that he has me in the 2nd squad and not in his.  Awkward silence follows.

07:57  -  We arrive in low sec and dock up at a station to install jump clones.  Turns out you need Informorph Psychology for that.  Which I don’t have.  Oi.  We defleet and wait for our ED fleet invite.

08:02  -  We refleet after the ED FC decides he doesn’t trust us and won’t let us in on their comms or fleet.  And then a warning pops on screen – Aprocrypha update, server shutdown in one hour.  We learn almost simultanously that the battle we thought had been raging for over an hour has not even started.

08:19  -  ED is apparently waiting on…something.  Local us up to 137 pilots, and by eyeball its about half and half.  Which means the dozen of so pilots we have brought along will be valuable after all.  A friend of a friend whos uncle’s sister has an alt somewhere and we hear word that there are 20 or so dreadnoughts hovering around the enemy POS which is being set up.  We don’t know if we are outgunned or what the deal is, since ED shuttled us to an alternate POS and gathering site so that we are not with their main fleet.  Someone on Vent only half jokingly suggests opening up on the random blue that passes our wait point.

08:30  -  Our FC receives intel from another alternative source that the POS has now “gone up” whatever that means (finished construction?).  He tells us basically that to attack now would be foolish and he expects there will be no battle.  He’s still trying to get ahold of the main FC, who outside of telling us where to wait, is apparently not talking to us, and another corp doing much like ours, who altogether are about 20% of his in system fleet.  My buddy suggests that if we want to make it home before server shut down, now would be a good time to start heading back.

08:45  -  Unable to wait any longer, and worried of getting stranded in 0.0 with a less than helpful ally, we began the trek home.  I had apparently forgotten to bookmark one of the bridges, and my buddy, bless his heart, turns his Mega around comes to my rescue.  We race to make it back to high sec before server shut down.

09:00  -  I make it!  My buddy just clears the last gate into hi-sec before the server shuts down.

24 hours later - My buddy gets 50 mil in reperation for his lost Dominix.  Not enough to cover even the cost of the rigs, but at least its something.  He tries to head back, but gets podded trying to put a jump clone in back in null sec for whenever the next battle call comes.  All passwords have been changed, and the POS once again has us set to KOS.

***

Are you frustrated having read this?  Are you upset that there was no pew-pew to be had?  Are you despondent that you waited 24 hours for this blog post and it holds…nothing?  Then I would say – great!  You now have some small inkling of the way I felt that night, and even now.  We are now more than 36 hours post op, and I have no idea what happened, who screwed who, or whats going on.  I know zilch.  So, please if you can add any words of wisdom, fill in some blanks, or let me know what I am missing, leave a comment.   My EVE subscription is up in 3 days, and I need to decide if I’m going to renew it or not. 

(Okay, well maybe that last is a little melodramatic.  But still…)

Meme III: COMPELLED

Don’t worry, Part 2 will be out later this morning/lunchtime.  But until then KK compells me to display my noobishness for all to contemplate.

note in my noobishness, I can't even turn off the interface or the you-are-here button for clarity.

So far I’ve visited the regions of Molden Heath and Tutorial Starting Area. (-;

Massive PvP Texas Steel Cage Fleet Death Match, Part I

It was finally on!  Our Alliance Leader, our CEO posted up a mail – the Super Powerful Alliance that we wanted to get in with had sent word – if we wanted a chance to prove ourselves, they needed a hand on a PvP op in 0.0 space.  It was short notice, but that was to be expected I suppose.  We would have a few hours to prepare before we needed to convoy in.  In we would have exactly…6 hours?!  Geez, it was late already…a few years ago maybe, but these days I have a 7 month old, a 4 year old, and a 6 year old.  And I get the 6 year old ready for school quite early.

But this is IT.  The Opportunity.  We have to show them we are capable and loyal.  We have to bring our best ship, even if we can’t afford to lose it.  Its time to man up.  A few of us are in the same boat, so we decide to go ahead and log, get some sleep, and then wake up and do the op.  We’re talking a POS assault here, and we expect to be dead or kicking tail – either way it shouldn’t go more than an hour we think.  Plenty of time for sleep later.

And personally – just to see the battle with my own eyes, to experience it, and take the screenshots…would I see my first dreadnought?  A titan?  A mothership?  How would I die?  How quickly would I die?  My Vexor wasn’t exactly a high priority target, but it wasn’t a hard one to clear from the overview either…well I would learn soon enough.  Oh!  And 0.0 space, for the first time!  Ooooh, the giddiness.  This was the core of EVE, and I was going to sample it…

I did a few things, noted the gathering time and location for the convoy, set the alarm, and crashed.  I slept easily, despite my excitement, and when I awoke, I grabbed a glass of water to go with my bag of cough drops (allergies/drainage – need my best mic voice for Vent!), and logged in  right when I was supposed to.

Its time...

It was time to chew gum and open up a can of woopin’, and we were all out of gum…

Great Posts IV: Why Alliances Fail

Of course this also covers why guilds fail too, but it was written very well and without alot of the bitterness that creeps into other posts of a similar nature.  Have a read:

Securitas Protector, EVE – Mag

The only thing I’m not sure about it punishing people for not doing alliance fleet ops. Of course I’ve never been involved in the wholesale takoever or defense of a region.  We can’t even seem to lock down a long system by ourselves, so Liberty’s stakes were obviously much higher.

But I do think this is where assigning people roles in the corp or alliance can be helpful.  Or perhaps a schedule – Alliance members commit to patrol in fleet one night a week, etc.   I have a feeling long term players of EVE are people who have to take some initiative on their own to continue to advance and enjoy the game.  So I am loathe to punish people who might be out doing just that.  But if you can harness those players who are still looking for direction by giving them some plans or corporate/alliance goals to be working towards…well.

Example:  I was mining last night.  I know my alliance wants to really crank industry up to help with PvP ship losses.  I’m happy to give to the cause…if I know what I should be giving and what its going for.   I could turn over a blanket amount, but I’m not to that point of trust in our leadership yet.  However, to hear: “hey we’re trying to crank out a line of battlecruisers to improve our pvp wing, please donate 10% of your refined ore to the corp hanger” or something along those lines…well that draws the alliance in closer and gives me a purpose and a warm fuzzy about my help.  Which in turn equates to me sticking around longer.

Anyway, enough rambling.  I expect to start some industry this week, so expect a post soon about my first industrial cash influx…or lack thereof.  (-:

Gah! It Burns…

Named after one of my favorite guitarists...even kinda looks like 'im.

I shouldn’t have done it.  I should have trusted my inner instincts!  I hate mini games – you can get thousands of them for free elsewhere that don’t involve chalkboard clawingingly bad design interfaces to navigate from one to the other.  But no, its so cool and everyone’s doing it, even adults!

Its amazing I even got in, since this was the screen I got when trying to, you know, activate this game for kids:

Behold! Options galore!

My first two options:  Cooking and Fighting!  This is great, this is what I do in every MMO I play, so I’m down with that.  To get ingrediants I have to…play a mini game.  To cook I have to…play a mini game.  To kill things I have to…mash one button – ONE BUTTON – repeatedly.  I haven’t done that since Rune forced me to do it for 12 hours straight, and *like* it.

And, Cthulhu as my witness, you can move with WASD or by – clicking anywhere on your screen!  Like right next to your backpack!  Or a millimeter off from where your Career Change button is.  Or…well, the possibilities are endless.

Oi Vey…Enjoy the suger-coated high kiddos, I’m headed back to EVE.  Turns out FR *was* a great break, just not in the way I thought it would be…

The Weekend…

Just a heads up that I have a busy weekend and probably won’t post again until Monday.  Its just as well,  I logged in last night and had that uncomfortable feeling of frustration.  So a couple of days break will do me good.

I might pick up some Wizard 101 or even (*gasp*) try Free Realms at some point….we’ll see.   Have a great weekend, all of you.

Space Madness

We’ve all heard about it of course – the possibility that the rigors of prolonged travel in space might be enough to make someone come unhinged.  Might distort their perception of reality.

Suggestions include paranoia, dissociation, psychosis, and a list of other things that is so long, you know that all its really telling you is that They don’t know what will happen, only that it will.

Last night, I saw it with my own eyes.

Space - its big, its heavy, its wood...

We were clearing out a rat complex in low sec, a Raven, a Drake, a Tempest, a Ferox, my Vexor, and a Catalyst salvaging for us.

We had splashed the last Angel General and were picking up loot and chatting, deciding what to do next, when all of a sudden the Raven locked on to the Ferox and launched a volley of missles.  Chuckles were immediate and of course the Ferox pilot half heartedly returned sporadic fire. 

But the missles kept coming.   Our fleet commander (FC) called out a warning to back down, the Ferox pilot complained that his shields were about to be down, and then to top it of, the Raven started a target lock on me as well!  And then all of a sudden, he went red…he had left fleet.

For a few moments, all hell broke loose.  The FC was not on Vent, but there was confused chatter there and in the chat channel as well, as he ordered the Ferox to warp out.  The lingering image of the Ferox trailing flames as it leapt out of the complex was still burned in my retinas when the first volley of missles from the Raven blew my shields apart.  Somehow, in instinct or reflex, either way a moment I was proud of, I found that I had already aligned to the gate back into our home system, and so I was gone before he could hit my armor.  I sat tight there, hearing the battle report over the intercom.

Our FC was furious, and his Drake and the Tempest were lighting the Raven up pretty good.  He finally warped to me at the gate, and I jumped through to head for home…and then on impulse, waited and stayed cloaked…he jumped through a second later and headed for our corp offices.  Oh boy…

By this time, alliance chat was alive with scrambling ships and questions.  We realized that none of the officers were on – which meant he could clear out whatever he wanted from the recruit hanger, and see our intel on him.  We also realized he had been playing the game less than a month (seriously, again, how do people get that kind of cash?  I’m nowhere near buying a Raven and I’ve been in for almost two months!) and he might be a traitor.

And then he came onto the Alliance chat channel with one devastating line:

“This game is f—ing boring.”

A second later, he left his corp, our alliance, and logged out of the game.  

In the stunned, silent aftermath, I think we all almost wished he had been a traitor.  EVE Online apparently breeds all the things I mentioned in my last post – but it can also breed other things as well.  So tonight…tonight we will all probably laugh a little louder than normal and try to reassure ourselves that all is well, that we are on the same team, and that we trust each other to cover our butts on our next op…but in the back of our heads…

We will have to learn to let this go as well, or we might find out that space madness…is contagious.

Learning to Let It Go

First of all, a public and hearty thank you to The Ancient Gaming Noob for completely blowing up my blog yesterday.  There were actually little WordPress Gnomes leaping from my laptop with their hair on fire, screaming “WTH!”  In what turned out to be a momentous day, I’ve also been added to the blogrolls of the Eve Bloggers, Eve Pictures, and Stylish Corpse.  Thank you all and welcome all you new people.

Last night I got a good lesson in what it means to take a deep breath and say “shit happens.”  Last night I watch a corp lose two capital ships on behalf of a neutral corp gettig ganked by pirates, that neutral corp losing several battleships and battlecruisers standing side by side with that corp when the pirates dropped a  cyno and brought it a host of caps.  And I saw that same “pirate fleet” issuing diplomatic communiques afterwards because it had all been precipitated by the two pronged risk of a Not Blue (Friendly) Shoot It (or NBSI) policy and not updating their standings with other corps like ours in a timely manner – or apparently, in their case, at all.

I should have been dead.  Course the only thing I would have lost would be my little cruiser, and the only thing I did lose was ISK for a repair and one of my combat drones.  Some people there lost in excess of a billion ISK in caps and modules!

When the dust settled, the neutral corp apologized to us for our losses, and our FC, with aplomb replied, “shit happens.”  And in turn apologized that they had sustained cap losses on behalf of us, not their favorite people in the world.  Their reply?  “Shit happens.”  Because we had a guy who was able to let go of the night and say, its just a game, and because we had displayed loyalty and guts by sticking around with them, we earned new friends.

In a game like EVE, letting go is doubly hard, since you can put a real world price on your losses through the advent of the PLEX and its soft cap of 300 million ISK.  And because many of the veteran players have, at this point, years of their life and hundreds of dollars invested.  And its a game that breeds frustration with its pacing and focus on PvP.

And yet, there are apparently significant numbers of players for whom honor is important, loyalty is treasured, and for whom diplomacy is always an option.  Does that happen in Darkfall?  Shadowbane?  Other PvP games?  The one time in Shadowbane I stuck around to help a teammate, all I got was hosed followed by the generally accepted advice never to stick my neck out for anyone, even a guildmate…We’ve all seen the videos of FPS players throwing keyboards, monitors, and even CPU’s at other people.

What is it about EVE that is different? 

So me, I just learned to let it go, to give it my all, and to stick to my guns.  I like that this game seems to, so far, reward that.

Carrier Strike Group

Yesterdays advice was fantastic, and I’ve started the process of putting together my first guide for EVE, though this is difficult since as a new player, I don’t have alot of insight into many of the games areas.  Still, I’ve found myself answering more questions than I’m asking on our Vent server these days, so I’m sure I can come up with something.

But first, I have been thinking about this one since my last fleet op.  My dad spent his entire career (and now his semi-retirement as a contractor) as a civilian doing R&D for the US Navy. (Sidenote: Its awesome to have a Dad who has worked on things we can all be proud of.)  And so thats in the back of my head during EVE.  And when we were out the other night, the image of our ships was vaguely….

Look familiar?

 

Yeah, like that.  And I know that in EVE, alot of capital ships require support, especially those that cannot dock.  So I got to wondering if one could recreate in EVE the same protective fleet group that the US Navy uses, and whether or not it would be beneficial in EVE.  In the modern US CSG, there are alot of components that would be easy to translate over in to the game:

• A Capital Ship:  Whether it was a Carrier, or back when we had then, a Battleship, escort was needed.  In EVE of course, this would probably be a true cap ship:  Mothership, Dreadnought, or Titan.  I exclude carriers because whether its typical or not, my experience is that every veteran player can manage to lay hold of a carrier on their own at some point.  The rest require help from corpmates and thus are shared resources and thus will have at least some escort like the type Navy CSG’s use.
• A Carrier Air Wing:  Of course this one is hard to duplicate in EVE, unless its a Mothership you’ve got, which provides its own “air wing” in the form of Fighters.  But even then its not the same.  And lets face it: frigates = fighters in the world of New Eden.  So really this role is filled by your scouts and tacklers – in a large fleet op, probably Covert Ops ships, Stealth Bombers, and Interceptors, and if you’re large enough, some noobs in throwaway frigates to help tackle.
• A Destroyer Squadron:  Heh, yeah, probably don’t need any destroyers in the group in EVE.  Unless they are interdictors.  Which is basically what this group does – screen the carrier.  Interdictors could (if I understand them right) put up bubbles in a defensive manner around the cap ship.  This might also be your midrange pilots with cruisers that help tackle and dps enemy ships.  Thoraxes, Stabbers, etc.  This might be the area for a neutralize ship as well.
• Guided Missle Cruisers:  The CSG has only 1-2 of these, but in EVE you might want more.  This is your pure hard hitting DPS group.  This would probably be your offensive punch in the form of battlecruisers and battleships.  For RP points, Drakes work well here.  (-;
• Guided Missle Destroyers:  These are DPS, but of a specialized nature – AAA/ASW – take out aircraft and subs, the lurking and far ranging threats.  In EVE, this might actually be destroyers, to get a handle on groups of tacklers.  It might also be hybrid EWAR target painter/sensor booster ships that also carry high tracking weapons.  Or Assault Ships.  Or, in one tactic I learned the other night, high volume drone carriers who drop drones like a poor man’s version of active sonar – anything that bumps a cloaked ship can get it visible from what I understand, and if a cloaked ship has to navigate around a few dozen moving drones…well, god help them.
• Attack Submarines:  This is where the invaluable Combat and Force Recon ships earn their money.  Their job is to scout ahead and bring the CSG down on the head of opposing fleets.  And its why I really want to lear to fly a Curse.  Really sick and elite corps might be using Black Ops ships here as well.
• Logistics:  This is where your Triage Carriers, T2 Logistics Cruisers, Command Ships, and other specialized ships of a group nature come in.  Their job is support and, if you will “healing.”

Like I said, I’ve not been around in EVE long enough to know if that would be viable.  Heck, as far as I know, this *is* the way such fleets are built in EVE.  Either way, its a fun mental exercise, isn’t it?

And you never know, maybe one day I’ll be a fleet commander (FC)…that’s the cool thing about EVE.