Want To Buy

I really need to find somewhere I can buy a backbone. Really I do.

 

I activated plex on my accounts last night for another 30 days of playing other games. Really I know I shouldn't have but I could not leave them at a mid-point with cargo that needs to be in a trade hub plus I need to maintain towers and well all kinds of other shit that I really, really should be able to ignore.

 

Still no response to my petition but I'm not bothered, really not at all...

 

So, anyone know where I can buy a backbone, ideally one made of steel or something that won't break.

 

Going, Going, Gong.

That was a terrible pun, I'm sorry but it had to be done and yes, EVE does indeed have sound.

The patch notes for the latest release on Tuesday 8th March don't make mention of the change but introduced was a noise, categorized as a "dong", when a target lock is lost. Check the patch notes and you'll see nothing for the sound but there is mention of a graphical change:

The UI bracket is now animated when an enemy target is destroyed.

It's been mentioned a lot on Reddit and I'd agree it is a most annoying and distracting noise and there has been something of a current to get it changed, added as specific sound option or just plain removed.

Seems CCP is in a phase of listening to feedback and this appeared (overnight for me) on the Official Forums:

All Hail The Mob.... Community!

Hunkering Down and PROFIT!

Last night was hauling night.

 

Two freighters made short work of the moving of product to Jita for sale. The Amarr->Jita pipe was full of reds and I made sure I used my scout to watch them and keep an eye for bumping Mach's on gates before I entered warp.

 

The journey was not really eventful but I did manage to pick up a war dec from PIRAT for my troubles. Interestingly the Jump Freighter pilot got the war dec whereas the freighter pilot, in a totally unrelated corp but who jumped through gates at the same time, did not.

 

I was tempted to send a mail to the PIRAT pilots laughing at their stupid war dec but I decided against it. A one week, stay in null sec doing profitable things could turn into a couple of weeks quite easily if I offended them.

 

So I remained quiet, finished my jumps and got home in time for a cup of tea and to drop off some courier packages.

I Knew I Forgot Something

Periodically I change the force-field password on my Towers and I did this just the other day I notified the people I knew used my towers to idle in when in space.

Except I missed one person and a couple of days later I received an evemail from my CEO with a link to a kill mail.

Ah Fudge

It was only a couple of hundred million ISK and I had totally forgotten this person friend was using it as a staging post as he ratted up his security status.

I could blame my memory, lack of notification from the pilot that he still used this tower but that's not right. I fucked up and changed the password without checking with everyone whom I knew had used the tower.

Restitution

I'm sure we'll laugh about this in a week or two but right now I'm embarrassed about this screw up on my part.

I haven't spoken to the person, I think time-zones are very much against us at the moment, but I have already purchased a new ship and fittings and it should be in his hands in the next 24 hours.

What Ever Will I Do Now?

The last couple of days I've been idling in Jita primarily because I'm watching for new scams but also because, occasionally, I can read some interesting conversations or have a laugh.

I've also been posting a link to my Know Your Scams index page when I see an obvious scam appear in local. A couple of people commented with sarcasm or the following image:

This image simply awesome and I've now added to to my Know Your Scams Index page because it's funny.

War!

Someone in the Alliance Archtype. obviously was annoyed with my posting or was looking for corporations to declare war on so at 0015 hours EVE Time today i received a war declaration:

and I then spent the next 15 minutes laughing my head off at the stupidity of this declaration and again at the game mechanics. 

Back around 2011/2012 the war mechanic was to be feared and could be a cause of problems but I've grown wiser. It seems a group of 19 people (according to EVE Who) with a killboard full of cheap and skill-less kills, in only high sec locations or trade hubs, is wasting their time on me.

My Response

It's a wasted war declaration, only two of the characters in my corporation are active and the one I use most has not left a station (except via Jump Clones) since the 30th May 2013.

I shall continue with my daily activities, I shall continue to make money buying and selling whilst using 3rd party services to move assets.

Still at safe distance...

It's been three weeks since I advertised a 250m ISK bounty on Cloaky Bastard.

 

Still it remains unclaimed.

Reading his blog he's had a close encounter but no-one has come forward to claim the bounty or at least try to claim it.

 

I believe this is why Prolapse was unable to provide Viking Funerals for the two Archons last weekend and his ire is why I almost lost a Jump Freighter in high sec.

 

Bob is unhappy at the level of bounty.

 

So I'm increasing it to 500m ISK (same restrictions apply as in my original post for claiming), for a kill mail AND a corpse of Zosius or one of this Domi alts (read his blog for details of his "fleet").

 

Bob demands sacrifice. Corpses for the Bob God.

Entertainment

I'm currently sitting in a wormhole, with three characters, getting ready for Operation Midway.

Operation Midway is an operation this weekend to see the glorious death of Bex's Archons that reside in his wormhole. We have quite a nice fleet assembled and it should be fun, of course being pre-arranged it could all fail badly and Maythorn could bring a very strong T3 fleet or faction battleship/mauraders.

It's gonna be gud. So they say.

Laughter, the best Fleet Advert

We've had two funny things happen this morning so far with Operation Midway, first a comment was made as we were assembling that "wouldn't it be funny if a random came into the wormhole as we're assembling to run sites/mine gas".

Would you believe, a character did arrive and try to setup to mine gas. We watched him, scanned him down but could not get tackle in place in time and he left system. Obviously spooked by our efforts.

And now we've found out that as Maythorn are passing through high sec to join us they had a member lose their ship in Jita to a duel. 

I don't know the full details but it was relayed that the pilot was travelling through Jita when they received a duel request that they accepted.

Oh dear. Not an auspicious start for Maythorn but it has provided some amusement for us.

Light blue touch paper and retire to safe distance...

Safe in this case may actually be a different Galaxy or Universe...

 

I read many EVE Online blogs, not as many as I used to but I've pruned those that I do to a list that has people I like to read. Some are friends, others are more arms length or I'm just too scared to say hello to.

 

Cloaky Bastard is one of those that I enjoy reading and his stories of kills and how he goes about them show a mind that is very dangerous. I was reading today and he commented on how "life between ganks":

 

                   Well, it's been pretty slow.

                                              - Cloaky Bastard

 

Slow eh, let's see if we can liven things up.  Seeing as Zosius is a kindred wormhole dweller I'm sure Bob will smile upon what I'm about to offer...

 

Challenge

 

The new (wormhole) home I'll be moving into this weekend is in need of consecration to Bob. My fellow Alliance members will no doubt be doing their own consecration but I feel I need to get into the spirit of things and a special corpse needs to be placed upon the Altar of Bob.

 

 

Between the 4th August 2015 and midnight GMT on the 31st August 2015 whomever can deliver me the frozen corpse, along with the associated kill mail of both ship and pod, between those dates will receive a bounty of 250m ISK from me.

 

I may even add extra ISK should the kill mail be particularly shiny or awesome :)

 

Small Print

 

This is all for fun, to bring some content to such a fine pilot and I'll get a wonderful donation to Bob. Sure he may have a Dominix fleet supporting him but that just provides more targets...

 

Zosius is of course unable to claim his own bounty in any way, shape or form. I'd really like him to be hunted as he hunts others but a kill is a kill.

 

What are you waiting for, hunt the man down...

 

 

Fun Times Ahead

After the delights of POS Bashing today I've had to return to the somewhat more mundane task of collecting ships that have been spread about New Eden.

I have put this off for too long and now that my WH character has moved all his assets to high sec I need to move them to their new home but before I can do that I need to collect them from their various locations.

Two characters have just left my home system and have this to look forward to:

I'm going to need caffeine, lots and lots of caffeine and something to do whilst I fly these ships.

Thank Bob for multiple monitors...

Quote of the Day

I was lowering my IQ earlier today reading the Eve Online forums
                                                                       - EVE Hermit

I don't know any EVE Online player that does not admit that the EVE Online forums are a "hive of scum and villainy". There are far too many trollers, people who don't know how to search or those that just don't know when to shut up.

I do visit the forums but I rarely actually read any topics, a browse through the subjects is usually enough to make me shake my head and close the window. That said I do read the Features & Ideas sub-forum as it, occasionally, has well thought out and good ideas.

A better place to visit would be the r/Eve Reddit page, this usually has good links to funny images, good discussions and information for new players. 

Trolling with POCOs

I've never really had much interaction with POCOs or other structures aside from POS'es. I know my way around a POS, most of the permissions (and pain associated with that) and how to do most POS related things.

I learnt something new today thanks to Trinkets Friend.

Have a read of the story, it explains much of the background and more importantly the hilarious trolling to that has gone on. Sure the eve-mails have flown but I've never, ever, heard of using POCOs as a method to troll someone.

Genius.

PSA: Refuelling your Jump Freighter

I've had to make a few jumps this weekend to move a lot of things to high sec and it is only as I return to my home for the final time that I realised how close I was to being stuck in the middle of nowhere.

This is the fuel bay of my Jump Freighter after I finished my final jump, damn good thing I don't have any more to do right now.

Remember people, refuel your capital ship AFTER every jump and keep those tanks topped up.

Failure of a Torpedo Delivery Service

I've been a little too busy recently and I have neglected my wormhole alt, I will be addressing that but I have kept up to date with goings on and it appears that a group have decided to camp our wormhole and "inflict suffering and loss" upon us.

In reality it seems to be a camp by a dozen or so bombers with light/medium cloaky tackle and much failure. Don't get me wrong, they have gotten a kill or two but these have been as much failures on our part as success on theirs.

Trolling Level V Completed

Today however they failed whilst attacking one of our members and lost a ~200m ISK Bomber which resulted in the following missive being sent:

Dear Solvenaria Azionchenkov, 

Thank you for your attempt to deliver torpedoes to me. Sadly for you, the quality of your service is sub-par and your torpedoes are wholly inferior in quality, clearly made by illiterate children in some broke-ass third world country. Therefore I am exercising my consumer rights by returning your torpedoes, with interest.  

In future I will take my munitions delivery via Danoz Direct, because they come with a free set of steak knives.  

Regards, 

Miskoranda

I have corrected a few, minor, spelling mistakes but otherwise this is as sent and is just brilliant. 

I will be logging in more often now my work load has reduced and this type of humour just makes me think I've found a corp that I can be myself in.

The All Powerful EVE Community

CCP Surge posted on the forums thanking the community for feedback regarding changes to the in-game icons. 

The changes are pretty big and the idea was to get them into the game in the next patch (Scylla) but they've decided due to the constructive feedback that this will not be happening and they will continue to iterate over the changes and seek further community input until they are ready to be released.

I'm still shocked over this, using the words constructive and feedback in the same sentence as eve community is something that I never thought I'd see and ... oh look, I see they've finally implemented the flying pigs as a player flyable ship.

Wow, EVE never ceases to me.

The Freighter Escapes

I previously wrote how my freighter pilot got caught by a ganker in Niarja and I logged off in order to evade any attempt at ransom or ship loss.

I'm happy to report that extraction of my freighter was successful a couple of days ago and in a reasonably humourous manner.

It was suggested in the comments (by Catalin C) that I could use the Duel mechanics to allow a neutral party to web my freighter for quick escape. 

A Cunning Plan

In preparation for the extraction I watch listed various gankers and people whom I'd determined might be related to Machariel pilot. They all appeared to be active primarily outside of my time zone and would randomly login/logout in neighbouring systems.

So I devised a plan to login a few alts ready to extract at a time just after downtime. I also needed a catchy codename for the operation. The best I could come up with, after spending far longer than I did coming up with the plan, was Operation Runaway.

Avengers They Are Not

Assembled in neighbouring systems and moved in prior to the operation:

• Boosting Alt in a Damnation with Republic Fleet Mindlink
• Combat (PvP) Alt in Rapier with Faction Webs
• Second Combat (PvP) Alt in Falcon with Rainbow ECM setup
• Industry Alt in a Covert Ops ship, cloaked and at a deep safe in system

Multi-boxing WAS a bitch to setup but I managed to do it thanks to ALT-TAB, a heavily caffeinated drinks and a couple of bacon rolls.

Go Go Go

EVE is starting up...

EVE is STILL starting up...

Characters ready to go at the launcher screen.

EVE is CONTINUING TO start up...

Triple check that the launchers are in the right order

SERVER STATUS IS OK

I ALT-TAB through each launcher clicking the Login button, carefully avoiding the Freighter pilots launcher

Select the character as each Selection screen appears

There is a delay of about 2 minutes as each client fully loads and I see my ship in space.

Fleet is created, invites sent, accepted

LOCAL IS EMPTY

Everyone is out of warp and ready, make sure I cloak the covert ops and move him in a random direction

Login the Freighter pilot, invite to fleet

CRAP! LOCAL HAS JUMPED TO FIVE PEOPLE, WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

Takes me a few seconds to realise they are all my characters.

PANIC ATTACK AVERTED

It takes a long time to warp the 1,000,000km.

Out of warp, boosts are active and the EHP of the Providence is a nice ~382,000

Start warping to my covert ops pilots. 

DAMMIT, ACCELERATE FASTER

Wait until ~30% warp speed before initiating a duel and activating my webs

Freighter warps off into the sun (quite literally)

Success and an Oversight

Operation Runaway was a total success. I (internally) let off a cheer and finish off my energy drink and a bacon roll. 

Take that fake internet game pixels and person in their parents basement*

It is only as I write this that I realised my big mistake, I forgot to bring a neutral logi to rep my freighter should it have gone badly. Fortunately it didn't...

My wife asks me what I'm so happy about, I tell her what I expertly did, and she rolls her eyes and calls me an idiot.

* - it may be true, I can't prove it is nor can I disprove it.

Woot.... Urm... Yay for Me!

I can recall a couple of years ago reading a blog (a pirate/ninja salvager from memory but the name escapes) who showed a screenshot of his pilot finishing all of the skills to V in the navigation tree. 

It's a great achievement to complete all skills to V in a tree, some are going to take a very long time (and a lot of ISK) whereas others don't need completion to V (i.e. they only lower capacitor usage). 

One of those trees that does deserve the effort is Navigation and it is with great pleasure I awoke this morning to see High Speed Maneauving V completed on my null sec pilot:

Pretty.

There is one skill missing but I don't use Micro Jump Drives (at this time) so as far as I'm concerned the tree is complete. The Jump skills were the longest and most painful but, consequently, the most rewarding to complete.

The character moves on to Int/Mem skills before finally starting on Gunnery, 4 years overdue I'd say. All he has is Gunnery III in that branch but when he's finished it's going to be Level V's all over the place!

About EVE

I've never really had a look at the About EVE tab of Settings within the game. There are some very unpronounceable names there and its a shame that they don't list what peoples CCP name is against their real name. 

Anyway I was reading down (waiting for the server to come online) and I noticed that about three quarters of the way down is all the people who work in the background that we don't know. Financial staff, HR and such but it was one section that took me by surprise just under the Office IT DBA:

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you and I haven't manipulated the image in any way. 

As it shows CCP employs four chefs and two assistant cooks at their Headquarters to cater for their staff and they get credit in the game.

Rightly so I think, for keeping the Dev's, GM's and other staff fed and watered so they can concentrate on the important tasks. Perhaps a future devblog or community featurette could give us more information on these six phantoms who keep the wheels at CCP rolling. :)

Goonswarm Secret Santa

A friend of mine, in Goonswarm, just posted that he had gotten a Secret Santa gift from another player in-game.

He received a small faction battleship fleet:

1 x Bhaalgorn

1 x Machariel

1 x Nightmare

1 x Vindicator

Just under two billion in value from someone whom he doesn't know. Goon or not, it was a nice thing to do and in return, for his Secret Santa, he gave a gift of some Faction Webs, Gyrostabilizers and a Loki (plus a few other odds and ends) to someone who needed these modules to pimp out their dreadnought.

I still told my friend because he's a "goon" I automatically have to hate him but this was pretty cool and props to the 'swarm for doing this,. 

Even Scams should be spell checked

This is a couple of days old but I blocked the character so I don't know if its still like this but whilst in Jita the night that Rhea was deployed I saw the following appearing in Local:

Theta requires armor tanked ships! Typhoon Fleet Issue with Missile Rigs for only 410 million ISK! Save 10 million isk off current market value! Show some love to the Minmatar!

Can you see the error?

Seems like a deal but I cannot get past the first word without cringing, Thera is the name of the new wormhole system NOT Theta.

Sure its a simple typo, T is next to the R on a QWERTY keyboard but it just shows a lack of professionalism from a scammer.

They want our ISK but are too lazy to do a basic spell check, scammers today eh. Back in my day it was different ;)

Edit: Thanks to commenter Chinana who pointed out my own spell check failure.

It's been a long day, perhaps time to retire

My monitoring program has told me that I need to empty a number of silos in my towers because they will be full in less than 22 hours. The 22 hours finishing when I'll be at work and unable to do anything.

I've put it off since I got the notification around 2pm today because I've been having much fun "learning to scan properly" with a character in a WH (lots of signatures mean lots of practice). I also had to move a cyno toon to a station in Outer Ring in prepartion for moving a couple of characters there to try to (oh lol) harvest High Grade Harvest implants via LP missions. The 14 jumps from high sec to the station were eventual, and I finally used what my CEO has been teaching me when moving around unknown systems, and I'll probably do a post on that tomorrow.

Anyway, I've been emptying silos and I think its time to go to bed. I've emptied the same silo FOUR times now, warping to the tower, offlining the silo and then well I was sure I moved the contents to my cargohold but it appears I didn't.

I'm off to bed afer a shit of a day in RL but a positively fun one in-game.