Don't take it personally
So, just to put it out there, there's been a change. Not to get into detail, but let's just say that there was a difference of opinion and some of the individuals in my corp decided it was best to go our separate ways. I'm just posting this as an official 'Sorry it didn't work out' post. While we may not have seen eye to eye in the end, it was a pleasure to fly with most of you and I wish you all well. Fly safe and good luck! o7
Don't take it personally 2
Related to the above post, I'd like to welcome a whole new kind of hell into Eve online. My friend and the many Me's have been welcomed into what most of you probably consider to be the biggest bunch of bastards in the entire game (other than the goons i mean), yes them. This is right up our alley! Just when you thought it was okay to feel safe in high sec... But as the title indicates, please don't take it personally, think of it as our way of making your day more interesting, not our way of blowing up all of your ships and taking all of your stuff! Good luck out there, fly safe, and I'll be seeing you soon!
How I've come to be separated from my ISK, my ships, my dignity, and the remainder of my sanity.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
The Art of War (or the longest blog post you will EVER read!)
...Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move...
Welcome back! It's been a while. I've been off of eve for a bit, but I'm getting back into it slowly but surely. Wouldn't you know it, on one of my first nights back I managed to learn a very important lesson about assumptions...
So, some corpmates and I are rolling around wormhole space. They had just opened a new C2 wormhole and were exploring. I jumped in to assist. The residents of this wormhole didn't appear to be at home so we started scanning for connections. We identified the high sec wormhole, the static C3, and I was told that they had found a K162 into Unknown (Which was End of Life BTW). Because there were 3 of us in the wormhole we were going to split up to investigate the other wormholes. I was assigned the K162. I'm flying a Buzzard so this is fine as I'm pretty well suited to this type of thing. Just as I am entering the K162 one of my corpmates spot a cloaky Tengu entering the C2 from High sec. I am a bit surprised when I appear inside the K162 as I am inside a warp bubble (Crap!) After a second, I realize that it is a mobile disruptor and not a HIC, there are no ships on the wormhole (That I can see ;p) and I breathe a little easier. I immediately set to the task of gathering intel on this new wormhole. I notice something right away. I hop on comms and laughingly report that I am in a wormhole that is apparently home to morons as they have for some reason anchored a Territorial Claim Unit (which has no effect in wormhole space). As I am still giggling to myself I'm told to hold position in case the cloaky Tengu was heading my way. I agree. Less than 10 seconds later the wormhole that I had just jumped in from less than a minute ago disappears right before my eyes. (Sigh) Well, that sucks. It's wicked inconvenient, but I live in a wormhole so I can get by even if the wormholes that I am in isn't mine. I'll just have to scan my way out.
My corp has some great fellows in it, so great in fact, that they were nice enough to throw together what we call 'the wormhole app'. This app is basically a web application that we use in the in-game browser that we use to gather and record information about wormholes that we are in. It has some very convenient features, like a link to dotlan and IPS for the wormhole that you are in.
So, now that I'm locked out of home and in some stranger's wormhole, I want to check IPS to see what the static exits are. I load up the wormhole app, and it comes up with an error. Gyah! I try again, and again it gives me an error. This time I actually read what it says. "You are not currently in a wormhole". (... what?) I have almost never been so shocked by any piece of data in this game. The question, then, would be that if I wasn't in a wormhole, then where the hell am I? Remember the Territorial Claim Unit that I thought was so funny? Yeah, not so funny now is it? 'Cause I'm not in a wormhole full of dumb-asses, as it turns out, I am the dumb-ass and I've just managed to get myself locked out of home deep DEEP in Null Sec. (Son of a Bitch!) When I mean deep, I am at the end of the map in Cobalt Edge. Specifically, X-41DA. Find it on the map here.
Let me take this time to document every last piece of data that I know about 0.0:
It's dangerous.
People are VERY protective of their homes.
Beware of gate camps.
(And the biggest difference between Wormhole space and Null Sec) You show up in local.
That is it. I know nothing else about it. All I ever needed to know about 0.0 is that I should stay out. (Way to go me!)
...If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame...
Now that I have completely stepped in it I take time to reflect, how did this happen? Remember when my corp mate said it was a K162 into Unknown? well, it wasn't (Obviously) it was a K162 into Null Sec. I didn't verify that when I jumped through, I just took his word for it...
*Lesson Learned* Don't make assumptions! No matter what it is about, assumptions are bad. In fact, make this a life lessin and not just an eve lesson.
Moving on...
So, now I'm stranded deep in enemy territory (~50 jumps), now what? I didn't actually 'DO' a whole lot at first. Most of the fight against this situation took place in my head. I'm going to try to crack it open for you so that you can get an idea of what to do, and what NOT to do if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.
I think that wormhole space is the best possible place to hone your eve online skills. I know there are a lot of people out there that have their favorites, and wormhole space is mine. It is the harshest environment in Eve. If you know how to get by in WH space, you can get by anywhere. Specifically in situations like I found myself in. For those of you not entirely familiar with wormhole space please allow my to paint a picture for you. Imagine you find yourself in an enormous space the size of a football field or so that is completely enclosed and pitch black. That is a wormhole system. Now, if you are lucky, you came in through a door (wormhole) and you are either standing right next to it or you bookmarked it on the way through. That door is the only 'fact' that you know about the system. If you have scanner probes, you can send them out into the darkness to find you another door, however, this represents a possible hazard. This is because everything in Eve has a small bell tied to it (like on a pet cat) everyone withing a certain distance of that entity can hear it's bell. This is the D-scan system.Now we are lucky enough that the bells sounds can tell us a lot about the entity that it is attached to. Now, if I have a cloaking device, it gives me the ability to silence my bell. (Great) There are only three 'Senses' in wormhole space: Sight (what you can see on grid with you), Hearing (D-scan), and Echolocation (Probes). Who cares about all of this? You will, trust me, but the reason I'm explaining this is because if you picture yourself in this pitch black space, how do you know if you are alone? What if someone else is in here with you and you don't know it? What if they are watching you? If you can't find something using any of these three senses, that doesn't mean that it isn't there. Now, imagine that the roles are reversed, this is my situation. I need to make sure that I can control the 'senses' of anyone else in this system because it is the only way to survive. Luckily for me that task is fairly easy as I am in a covop I can easily remove my presence from all three of their senses using my cloak. The problem is that you simply can't be cloaked all of the time. Got the picture? Good, let's move on.
So, knowing that, what should one do in this type of situation? Information is the single most vital resource in this situation. I need to get as much of it as I can without giving any of it away to the opposition. This works well in wormhole space because the only information to be gained is the information that you give away. In 0.0 it's a little different. Specifically the fact that I show up in local lets everyone else in system know that I am there. Not just that I am there, but one's identity should be their most closely guarded secret in Eve, but local just throws it out there for all to see. From my identity alone the opposition should be taking that and throwing it into kill boards to find out all about me, my corp, my kill history, from which they would know that I am a wormhole resident, also, what ships I like to fly, either from kills or losses. And my stats would clearly mark me as a pvp'er (98%+ ISK Efficiency and Enemy Survival Chance < 14%). So with all of that potential information at ones finger tips, they would be foolish not to look it up. So, as far as information gathering goes, I need to determine my options, so what do I need to know? How many gates are there? (One, that's gonna be camp-tastic!) I need to get a look at it to see if it is camped.
*Lesson* DO NOT warp directly to a gate! Find a nearby celestial and D-scan the gate. If there is a camp or a static bubble on it you will see it BEFORE getting caught.
...He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious...
In my case there was nothing at the gate at all. So that means one of two things, there is nothing at the gate, OR there are only cloakers on THIS side of the gate. The problems with gate (and wormholes) is that you cannot know what is on the other side. (Tricky) So, that all the info on the gate that I can possibly gather at this time. Could there be another way out? Like, say... a wormhole? To answer that question, I'd have to do some scanning. Unfortunately, to drop probes, I need to drop my cloak which puts me at risk. This means that I have to minimize this risk as best as I can. First, the chance of them being close enough to actually see me is virtually impossible since I created a number of safe spots already. I need to know if they have combat probes out that might see me, none, good. Lastly, I will show up on dscan if they ping while I'm decloaked, so I decide to use one of my safe spots that appears to be out of dscan range. I move to that safe spot, drop probes and scan for another wormhole. None, of course.(Sigh).That leaves me only one other option right? Try the gate of doom? No, there is actually another option that most people in this position don't take into consideration. Simply logging off. I've not aggressed anyone or anything, my logoff will be basically instantaneous. So I choose that method for now...
...If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected...
Something I haven't brought up yet is that fact that as I am in this system full of potential hostiles, it is only a matter of time before they are going to attempt to communicate with me. And of course they send me a convo request, and I accepted. Now, in this phase, you have to remember the potential price of information. They are going to want more of it, and I do too, but I want to limit what I give them as much as possible. However, the other key point to keep in mind is that I want to do everything that I can to appear as non-threatening as possible. Threats to the homeland must be eliminated, but inconveniences might be allowed to leave. It's a slim chance, but it's better than no chance at all. While I was doing the above tasks, I was also taking with the system residents. After the entire conversation was over and done with, I can say that I believe that they were being as truthful and straightforward as possible. But of course, there was quite a bit of tension. They wanted me gone, and I wanted to be gone, but with the lack of wormholes, the gate was my only other option at the time. I needed more info. If I had a null sec system with only a single gate acting as the perfect choke point, I would camp it. For some reason, it seemed like this side wasn't camped, therefore I decided that the other side must be camped. This put us at an impasse. They wanted me to leave, but doing so would put me at risk. My greatest weapon was the fact that no matter how badly they might have wanted to find me, they simply could not. The only way for them to strike at me would be for me to go somewhere that they dictated. That, I must not do. Once I pumped them for as much information as I could and gathered all of the information possible to me at the time, I had to decide, try the gate, or wait. I chose wait. One of the advantages to logging off is that it allows me to dictate the pace of the game. In order to effectively catch / kill me it is very unlikely that a single ship could manage it unless they were well prepared, therefore it was more likely that the more time I spent in that system, the more resources that they could be amassing on the other side of that gate. To defuse this, all I need to do is give them a reason to stop trying, thus logging off was the best answer at the time.
...Speed is the essence of war...
Now, the next day (early morning) I am going to log on quickly to my safe spot in dscan range of the gate. As I am warping in I cloak up immediately, when I land at my safe, I dscan the gate, nothing. I warp to it at zero. I'm doing this all so quickly because i want to hit the gate as quickly as possible in order to keep the element of surprise on my side. I hit the gate without incident and jump, holding my breath. No camp on this side, in fact, noone in local at all (sweet!). Since I know that I am alone, I move to within dscan of the two gates in this system and I see that noone is watching those gates either. Now, I can fly for those gates towards home, or danger, or I can use my head. Instead of attempting to run the gates I take a step back and decide to use this alone time to myself. I drop probes and begin scanning this system for a wormhole. No luck! and on top of that, I've been joined by two more in local, I dscan and now there is an interceptor on either gate. Now, I pretty much know that the gate i cam in was safe, so I could go back that way, or i can try to charge past an interceptor in a covop (yeah right). So again, I choose to wait. I log off again. I wait 2-4 hours and try it again. I am alone when I land but am soon joined again by an interceptor and i believe an assault frigate. I'm already busy scanning again, so I ignore them. And against all odds, I find myself a brand new wormhole (Yay!).I warp to it and I jump in...
...Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate...
While it might sound like I just made it home, that is of course not the case. I could be another 30 wormholes away from home or high sec depending on what I just jumped into, not to mention the fact that more than likely each one is filled to the brim with people that want to kill me. But, for the most part, it's almost impossible to find / kill a covop in a wormhole. Only if you manage to catch it at the wormhole will you have about 2 seconds to grab it before it slips away, so I feel 95% safe. I use my fancy wormhole app to get me to ips for this wormhole and find that this class 3 is a low sec static (bleh). But I guess that's a lot better than 0.0. I manage to use my super stealthy skills to scan down the low sec static without waking the residents. Once in low sec I look to see where I am, and rejoice. I have a high sec gate in system! I warp to it and make it back home without incident (Yay!).
So, that is my great adventure in null sec. It may seem like a lot of words to describe something that seemed simple in the end to solve, but the extra words (hopefully) won't be wasted. If I were to put most of you 50 jumps into a hostile part of 0.0 very very few of you would make it back unless it was directly to a cloning facility. I was hoping to give you a break down of how you have to look at every situation objectively and not panic. If you have a cool head, and some patience you can usually make it out alive.
At the time that this happened I had managed to go over 5 months without losing a ship and more than making a run for it, I was tempted to pod myself back to high sec so that i wouldn't take the kill board hit. But in the end, it may have taken me a couple of days, but I did manage to make it out alive and unharmed. And my deathless streak continued on...
Until the very next day when I jumped into a K162 into deadly unknown space (C6) right into the arms of a flycatcher and a Dramiel. (Sigh)
Welcome back! It's been a while. I've been off of eve for a bit, but I'm getting back into it slowly but surely. Wouldn't you know it, on one of my first nights back I managed to learn a very important lesson about assumptions...
So, some corpmates and I are rolling around wormhole space. They had just opened a new C2 wormhole and were exploring. I jumped in to assist. The residents of this wormhole didn't appear to be at home so we started scanning for connections. We identified the high sec wormhole, the static C3, and I was told that they had found a K162 into Unknown (Which was End of Life BTW). Because there were 3 of us in the wormhole we were going to split up to investigate the other wormholes. I was assigned the K162. I'm flying a Buzzard so this is fine as I'm pretty well suited to this type of thing. Just as I am entering the K162 one of my corpmates spot a cloaky Tengu entering the C2 from High sec. I am a bit surprised when I appear inside the K162 as I am inside a warp bubble (Crap!) After a second, I realize that it is a mobile disruptor and not a HIC, there are no ships on the wormhole (That I can see ;p) and I breathe a little easier. I immediately set to the task of gathering intel on this new wormhole. I notice something right away. I hop on comms and laughingly report that I am in a wormhole that is apparently home to morons as they have for some reason anchored a Territorial Claim Unit (which has no effect in wormhole space). As I am still giggling to myself I'm told to hold position in case the cloaky Tengu was heading my way. I agree. Less than 10 seconds later the wormhole that I had just jumped in from less than a minute ago disappears right before my eyes. (Sigh) Well, that sucks. It's wicked inconvenient, but I live in a wormhole so I can get by even if the wormholes that I am in isn't mine. I'll just have to scan my way out.
My corp has some great fellows in it, so great in fact, that they were nice enough to throw together what we call 'the wormhole app'. This app is basically a web application that we use in the in-game browser that we use to gather and record information about wormholes that we are in. It has some very convenient features, like a link to dotlan and IPS for the wormhole that you are in.
...He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious...
So, now that I'm locked out of home and in some stranger's wormhole, I want to check IPS to see what the static exits are. I load up the wormhole app, and it comes up with an error. Gyah! I try again, and again it gives me an error. This time I actually read what it says. "You are not currently in a wormhole". (... what?) I have almost never been so shocked by any piece of data in this game. The question, then, would be that if I wasn't in a wormhole, then where the hell am I? Remember the Territorial Claim Unit that I thought was so funny? Yeah, not so funny now is it? 'Cause I'm not in a wormhole full of dumb-asses, as it turns out, I am the dumb-ass and I've just managed to get myself locked out of home deep DEEP in Null Sec. (Son of a Bitch!) When I mean deep, I am at the end of the map in Cobalt Edge. Specifically, X-41DA. Find it on the map here.
Let me take this time to document every last piece of data that I know about 0.0:
It's dangerous.
People are VERY protective of their homes.
Beware of gate camps.
(And the biggest difference between Wormhole space and Null Sec) You show up in local.
That is it. I know nothing else about it. All I ever needed to know about 0.0 is that I should stay out. (Way to go me!)
...If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame...
Now that I have completely stepped in it I take time to reflect, how did this happen? Remember when my corp mate said it was a K162 into Unknown? well, it wasn't (Obviously) it was a K162 into Null Sec. I didn't verify that when I jumped through, I just took his word for it...
*Lesson Learned* Don't make assumptions! No matter what it is about, assumptions are bad. In fact, make this a life lessin and not just an eve lesson.
Moving on...
...Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy's fate...
So, now I'm stranded deep in enemy territory (~50 jumps), now what? I didn't actually 'DO' a whole lot at first. Most of the fight against this situation took place in my head. I'm going to try to crack it open for you so that you can get an idea of what to do, and what NOT to do if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.
I think that wormhole space is the best possible place to hone your eve online skills. I know there are a lot of people out there that have their favorites, and wormhole space is mine. It is the harshest environment in Eve. If you know how to get by in WH space, you can get by anywhere. Specifically in situations like I found myself in. For those of you not entirely familiar with wormhole space please allow my to paint a picture for you. Imagine you find yourself in an enormous space the size of a football field or so that is completely enclosed and pitch black. That is a wormhole system. Now, if you are lucky, you came in through a door (wormhole) and you are either standing right next to it or you bookmarked it on the way through. That door is the only 'fact' that you know about the system. If you have scanner probes, you can send them out into the darkness to find you another door, however, this represents a possible hazard. This is because everything in Eve has a small bell tied to it (like on a pet cat) everyone withing a certain distance of that entity can hear it's bell. This is the D-scan system.Now we are lucky enough that the bells sounds can tell us a lot about the entity that it is attached to. Now, if I have a cloaking device, it gives me the ability to silence my bell. (Great) There are only three 'Senses' in wormhole space: Sight (what you can see on grid with you), Hearing (D-scan), and Echolocation (Probes). Who cares about all of this? You will, trust me, but the reason I'm explaining this is because if you picture yourself in this pitch black space, how do you know if you are alone? What if someone else is in here with you and you don't know it? What if they are watching you? If you can't find something using any of these three senses, that doesn't mean that it isn't there. Now, imagine that the roles are reversed, this is my situation. I need to make sure that I can control the 'senses' of anyone else in this system because it is the only way to survive. Luckily for me that task is fairly easy as I am in a covop I can easily remove my presence from all three of their senses using my cloak. The problem is that you simply can't be cloaked all of the time. Got the picture? Good, let's move on.
...The more you read and learn, the less your adversary will know...
So, knowing that, what should one do in this type of situation? Information is the single most vital resource in this situation. I need to get as much of it as I can without giving any of it away to the opposition. This works well in wormhole space because the only information to be gained is the information that you give away. In 0.0 it's a little different. Specifically the fact that I show up in local lets everyone else in system know that I am there. Not just that I am there, but one's identity should be their most closely guarded secret in Eve, but local just throws it out there for all to see. From my identity alone the opposition should be taking that and throwing it into kill boards to find out all about me, my corp, my kill history, from which they would know that I am a wormhole resident, also, what ships I like to fly, either from kills or losses. And my stats would clearly mark me as a pvp'er (98%+ ISK Efficiency and Enemy Survival Chance < 14%). So with all of that potential information at ones finger tips, they would be foolish not to look it up. So, as far as information gathering goes, I need to determine my options, so what do I need to know? How many gates are there? (One, that's gonna be camp-tastic!) I need to get a look at it to see if it is camped.
*Lesson* DO NOT warp directly to a gate! Find a nearby celestial and D-scan the gate. If there is a camp or a static bubble on it you will see it BEFORE getting caught.
...He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious...
In my case there was nothing at the gate at all. So that means one of two things, there is nothing at the gate, OR there are only cloakers on THIS side of the gate. The problems with gate (and wormholes) is that you cannot know what is on the other side. (Tricky) So, that all the info on the gate that I can possibly gather at this time. Could there be another way out? Like, say... a wormhole? To answer that question, I'd have to do some scanning. Unfortunately, to drop probes, I need to drop my cloak which puts me at risk. This means that I have to minimize this risk as best as I can. First, the chance of them being close enough to actually see me is virtually impossible since I created a number of safe spots already. I need to know if they have combat probes out that might see me, none, good. Lastly, I will show up on dscan if they ping while I'm decloaked, so I decide to use one of my safe spots that appears to be out of dscan range. I move to that safe spot, drop probes and scan for another wormhole. None, of course.(Sigh).That leaves me only one other option right? Try the gate of doom? No, there is actually another option that most people in this position don't take into consideration. Simply logging off. I've not aggressed anyone or anything, my logoff will be basically instantaneous. So I choose that method for now...
...If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected...
Something I haven't brought up yet is that fact that as I am in this system full of potential hostiles, it is only a matter of time before they are going to attempt to communicate with me. And of course they send me a convo request, and I accepted. Now, in this phase, you have to remember the potential price of information. They are going to want more of it, and I do too, but I want to limit what I give them as much as possible. However, the other key point to keep in mind is that I want to do everything that I can to appear as non-threatening as possible. Threats to the homeland must be eliminated, but inconveniences might be allowed to leave. It's a slim chance, but it's better than no chance at all. While I was doing the above tasks, I was also taking with the system residents. After the entire conversation was over and done with, I can say that I believe that they were being as truthful and straightforward as possible. But of course, there was quite a bit of tension. They wanted me gone, and I wanted to be gone, but with the lack of wormholes, the gate was my only other option at the time. I needed more info. If I had a null sec system with only a single gate acting as the perfect choke point, I would camp it. For some reason, it seemed like this side wasn't camped, therefore I decided that the other side must be camped. This put us at an impasse. They wanted me to leave, but doing so would put me at risk. My greatest weapon was the fact that no matter how badly they might have wanted to find me, they simply could not. The only way for them to strike at me would be for me to go somewhere that they dictated. That, I must not do. Once I pumped them for as much information as I could and gathered all of the information possible to me at the time, I had to decide, try the gate, or wait. I chose wait. One of the advantages to logging off is that it allows me to dictate the pace of the game. In order to effectively catch / kill me it is very unlikely that a single ship could manage it unless they were well prepared, therefore it was more likely that the more time I spent in that system, the more resources that they could be amassing on the other side of that gate. To defuse this, all I need to do is give them a reason to stop trying, thus logging off was the best answer at the time.
...Speed is the essence of war...
Now, the next day (early morning) I am going to log on quickly to my safe spot in dscan range of the gate. As I am warping in I cloak up immediately, when I land at my safe, I dscan the gate, nothing. I warp to it at zero. I'm doing this all so quickly because i want to hit the gate as quickly as possible in order to keep the element of surprise on my side. I hit the gate without incident and jump, holding my breath. No camp on this side, in fact, noone in local at all (sweet!). Since I know that I am alone, I move to within dscan of the two gates in this system and I see that noone is watching those gates either. Now, I can fly for those gates towards home, or danger, or I can use my head. Instead of attempting to run the gates I take a step back and decide to use this alone time to myself. I drop probes and begin scanning this system for a wormhole. No luck! and on top of that, I've been joined by two more in local, I dscan and now there is an interceptor on either gate. Now, I pretty much know that the gate i cam in was safe, so I could go back that way, or i can try to charge past an interceptor in a covop (yeah right). So again, I choose to wait. I log off again. I wait 2-4 hours and try it again. I am alone when I land but am soon joined again by an interceptor and i believe an assault frigate. I'm already busy scanning again, so I ignore them. And against all odds, I find myself a brand new wormhole (Yay!).I warp to it and I jump in...
...Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate...
While it might sound like I just made it home, that is of course not the case. I could be another 30 wormholes away from home or high sec depending on what I just jumped into, not to mention the fact that more than likely each one is filled to the brim with people that want to kill me. But, for the most part, it's almost impossible to find / kill a covop in a wormhole. Only if you manage to catch it at the wormhole will you have about 2 seconds to grab it before it slips away, so I feel 95% safe. I use my fancy wormhole app to get me to ips for this wormhole and find that this class 3 is a low sec static (bleh). But I guess that's a lot better than 0.0. I manage to use my super stealthy skills to scan down the low sec static without waking the residents. Once in low sec I look to see where I am, and rejoice. I have a high sec gate in system! I warp to it and make it back home without incident (Yay!).
So, that is my great adventure in null sec. It may seem like a lot of words to describe something that seemed simple in the end to solve, but the extra words (hopefully) won't be wasted. If I were to put most of you 50 jumps into a hostile part of 0.0 very very few of you would make it back unless it was directly to a cloning facility. I was hoping to give you a break down of how you have to look at every situation objectively and not panic. If you have a cool head, and some patience you can usually make it out alive.
...If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight, even though the ruler forbid it; if fighting will not result in victory, then you must not fight even at the ruler's bidding...
At the time that this happened I had managed to go over 5 months without losing a ship and more than making a run for it, I was tempted to pod myself back to high sec so that i wouldn't take the kill board hit. But in the end, it may have taken me a couple of days, but I did manage to make it out alive and unharmed. And my deathless streak continued on...
Until the very next day when I jumped into a K162 into deadly unknown space (C6) right into the arms of a flycatcher and a Dramiel. (Sigh)
...In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace...
\0 Fly Safe...
\0 Fly Safe...
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Another two for Tuesday, YAY!!
Since I missed you all last week I thought that I would throw up another two-for-one special. So WHY did I miss you all last week? Well, that is the subject of my posts for this week, the market. So, I was reading one of my very favorite Eve blogs, K162 Space, when i came across a post that made my jaw drop. This. Now, go change your underwear,come on back, and we will get started.
American Psycho: Eve Edition
Ever seen this movie? It's about a mega rich high-society investment banker that absolutely snaps one day and decides to take up the hobby of chopping people up in the most creative and brutal ways that he can think of. Absurd right? I would have said yes a couple of weeks ago. Today? No not at all.
Why the change of heart? There was a 'situation' on the market the other day...
Let me paint you a picture. At some point in the last couple of days the market ran out of Hornet EC-300 drones.Whether this was natural, or if someone bought them all out, I cannot say. For anyone out there that does any kind of trading, this is a really big deal. When this happens, it's like hitting the reset button on the price history of an item. It allows you to re-balance the value of said item based on supply and demand. Meaning, in this case, prices on these drones are going to go through the roof. Why? Because now the power to set prices no longer rests with the consumer (at least for the short term). If I want you to pay 75k each for these you have to make a decision, is it worth that to me or not. As long as the demand for that item stays strong, the price will stay where it is. Think of why you pay $3+ for a gallon of gas. You need it and I have it if YOU want it you need to give me $X. Now, being the enterprising fellow that I am, I took the opportunity to capitalize (pun intended) on this occasion. One of the first things that I did was to buy out most of the other ec-300 drones in the region to make it that much harder for the consumer to leverage the price down. What we as traders are trying to do here is build a foundation for economic tyranny. Now, that sounds bad, but it's just how the market works. To better tell this story, I need to let you know that the pre-event pricing on this particular drone was: Buy @ 5500isk, Sell @ 8500isk. Approximately a 54% profit, not bad at all. Once the event occurred, we re-established the Sell price @ 50,000isk. There was a lot that went into determining that price point, but there it is. Taking into account the new sell price and the cost of buying out all of the other drone orders the potential profit percent moves to a little over 400% (w00t!). In my particular case I would have been looking at ~50M in profit over what I laid out for the drones, not a ton, but a respectable haul all the same. Also, don't forget, I'm not the only one on the market. Therein lies the problem...
At this point in time a phrase comes to mind "Honor among thieves". The question is, is there, or is there not honor among thieves? Think of the real world airline industry. They collude amongst themselves to maintain the highest possible profit margins as a group. If one introduces a new charge and you are dumb enough to pay it, then the rest will roll it out in kind. While they compete to profit individually, they work to make sure that they do not impair profit collectively. Example, there is a pot of $10 billion for the industry to share. They compete to see how big a slice of that $10B they can get. But if one of them was too greedy, then it would potentially wreck the profits of the whole, I.E. now they only have a $6 billion dollar pot to fight over. Such is the case of EC-300 drones.
While we traders as a whole were positioned to split a significantly large profit, one of us was the weakest link. One of us decided that instead of exercising a little patience waiting for the profit to come to him, he decided to undercut the rest of us by 20k cutting the potential profit of this venture almost in half! You might say 'but hey that's still over 200% profit!' and you would be right, but this issue is that when someone makes that kind of sprint for profit, the race is on, and everyone might follow suit. Now in most cases, if this happens in my daily trading, i would just buy out his stock and take his potential profit and add it to my own, but in this case, he had just too much to buy (19,000+ drones @ 30kisk = 570Misk + taxes and brokers fees). In hind sight I should have just bought him out to protect everyone's profit, but I waited to see what the rest of the traders would do. Unfortunately after many long minutes of holding our collective breath my other trading comrades decided to join the race. A few days later I came out of it ok. I was able to move my entire stock at about a 100% profit over the course 0f the price war for a total profit of a little over 20M. A far cry from the original 50M I was looking for, but profit is profit and I will take it, but if we had acted together as one, this would not have happened. All that's left to do now is buy a drone or two off of the douchebag that screwed us all, wardec his corp and slaughter every last one of those dogs, their bitch mothers, and anyone/thing else that they have ever loved...
Not too shabby for a n00b...
Just wanted to make like our friends over at K162space and post my numbers. This reflects the last two weeks and is 100% of everything I've ever traded. I went from having 500M isk in my pocket and knowing nothing about the market to the numbers you see below. They are in the following order: Money Out | Money In | Pending Sales | Total Profit | Average Profit Percent Per Item.
American Psycho: Eve Edition
Ever seen this movie? It's about a mega rich high-society investment banker that absolutely snaps one day and decides to take up the hobby of chopping people up in the most creative and brutal ways that he can think of. Absurd right? I would have said yes a couple of weeks ago. Today? No not at all.
Why the change of heart? There was a 'situation' on the market the other day...
Let me paint you a picture. At some point in the last couple of days the market ran out of Hornet EC-300 drones.Whether this was natural, or if someone bought them all out, I cannot say. For anyone out there that does any kind of trading, this is a really big deal. When this happens, it's like hitting the reset button on the price history of an item. It allows you to re-balance the value of said item based on supply and demand. Meaning, in this case, prices on these drones are going to go through the roof. Why? Because now the power to set prices no longer rests with the consumer (at least for the short term). If I want you to pay 75k each for these you have to make a decision, is it worth that to me or not. As long as the demand for that item stays strong, the price will stay where it is. Think of why you pay $3+ for a gallon of gas. You need it and I have it if YOU want it you need to give me $X. Now, being the enterprising fellow that I am, I took the opportunity to capitalize (pun intended) on this occasion. One of the first things that I did was to buy out most of the other ec-300 drones in the region to make it that much harder for the consumer to leverage the price down. What we as traders are trying to do here is build a foundation for economic tyranny. Now, that sounds bad, but it's just how the market works. To better tell this story, I need to let you know that the pre-event pricing on this particular drone was: Buy @ 5500isk, Sell @ 8500isk. Approximately a 54% profit, not bad at all. Once the event occurred, we re-established the Sell price @ 50,000isk. There was a lot that went into determining that price point, but there it is. Taking into account the new sell price and the cost of buying out all of the other drone orders the potential profit percent moves to a little over 400% (w00t!). In my particular case I would have been looking at ~50M in profit over what I laid out for the drones, not a ton, but a respectable haul all the same. Also, don't forget, I'm not the only one on the market. Therein lies the problem...
At this point in time a phrase comes to mind "Honor among thieves". The question is, is there, or is there not honor among thieves? Think of the real world airline industry. They collude amongst themselves to maintain the highest possible profit margins as a group. If one introduces a new charge and you are dumb enough to pay it, then the rest will roll it out in kind. While they compete to profit individually, they work to make sure that they do not impair profit collectively. Example, there is a pot of $10 billion for the industry to share. They compete to see how big a slice of that $10B they can get. But if one of them was too greedy, then it would potentially wreck the profits of the whole, I.E. now they only have a $6 billion dollar pot to fight over. Such is the case of EC-300 drones.
While we traders as a whole were positioned to split a significantly large profit, one of us was the weakest link. One of us decided that instead of exercising a little patience waiting for the profit to come to him, he decided to undercut the rest of us by 20k cutting the potential profit of this venture almost in half! You might say 'but hey that's still over 200% profit!' and you would be right, but this issue is that when someone makes that kind of sprint for profit, the race is on, and everyone might follow suit. Now in most cases, if this happens in my daily trading, i would just buy out his stock and take his potential profit and add it to my own, but in this case, he had just too much to buy (19,000+ drones @ 30kisk = 570Misk + taxes and brokers fees). In hind sight I should have just bought him out to protect everyone's profit, but I waited to see what the rest of the traders would do. Unfortunately after many long minutes of holding our collective breath my other trading comrades decided to join the race. A few days later I came out of it ok. I was able to move my entire stock at about a 100% profit over the course 0f the price war for a total profit of a little over 20M. A far cry from the original 50M I was looking for, but profit is profit and I will take it, but if we had acted together as one, this would not have happened. All that's left to do now is buy a drone or two off of the douchebag that screwed us all, wardec his corp and slaughter every last one of those dogs, their bitch mothers, and anyone/thing else that they have ever loved...
Not too shabby for a n00b...
Just wanted to make like our friends over at K162space and post my numbers. This reflects the last two weeks and is 100% of everything I've ever traded. I went from having 500M isk in my pocket and knowing nothing about the market to the numbers you see below. They are in the following order: Money Out | Money In | Pending Sales | Total Profit | Average Profit Percent Per Item.
| Total: | 1,631,189,064 | Total: | 2,573,079,786 | Total: | 39,142,093 | Total: | 981,032,815 | _77.4 % | ||
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Irony
[ahy-ruh-nee] -noun
Definition:
a technique of indicating, as through character or plot development, an intention or attitude opposite to that which is actually or ostensibly stated.Example: An eve pilot who runs a blog expressly devoted to educating other pilots in hopes that those other pilots will not repeat his mistakes, who managed to somehow completely disregard his own advice, and in doing so, loses a ship AND kills a corpmate. (wow long sentence)
Perhaps a flashback is in order...
(p00f)
Back when I was running my own C1 wormhole there was and incident and a learning experience.
I had just scanned down my high sec exit, and I had warped to it at 30km where I was sitting cloaked. While my main sat there, I was on my alt doing some logistical tasks to get ready to do a market trip to sell some gases I had mined. Out of nowhere I hear the locking sound come up and I quickly switch to my main only to find that he is being warp scrambled by another Buzzard. My Buzzard has no guns or anything on it so he is basically stuck. Using my quick thinking skills, I jump my alt into a nearby PVP rifter and warp him to my main. Once I have my alt in route, I flip back to my main and I see that things have gone from bad to much, much worse. Where I expected to see two Buzzards, I now see two Buzzards, a broadsword, and three battle cruisers (this is going to hurt). Not only is my main completely screwed, but I've just warped my alt into the fires of hell as well.
My alt lands moments before the HIC gets in range and puts the bubble up. I manage to engage the buzzard with the Rifter, but it doesn't do much good as both of my ships disintegrate in moments. Luckily I had learned a valuable lesson earlier in life (Read:Where it all began... or 'Beware the Heron of Doom' ) and I decided that when you have two pods stuck in a bubble that you need to burn them in opposite directions. Somehow I manage to get one of my pods free of the bubble and back to my POS. I lose the other.
From this engagement I was able to gain a couple of lessons learned:
*Lesson Learned: Don't loiter near a celestial. And if you really want to, move off of the zero plane or you might get decloaked while afk*
*Lesson Learned: If an offense-less Covop warp scrambles you, it's not because he is trying to kill you. It's usually because he is trying to hold you for his friends...*
*Lesson Learned: Never ever, EVER fight next to a wormhole! You never know what is waiting to kill you on the other side*
Fast forward to the other night...
I'm back in my corp's C5 wormhole. We have a number of K162's open into our system all of which I had scouted out earlier in the day. The only wormhole of intrest is another C5 that is absolutely full of Russian POS'. Somehow though, we manage to see nothing out of this wormhole for over 12 hours. Then as I am doing my rounds to check the status of these 3 K162's, I warp to this wormhole at 20, and what do I find? A Helios dropping probes. It cloaks and (presumably) warps off to scan. Next comes a buzzard. He moves about 15km off of the wormhole and cloaks up. I am in a stealth bomber so I move out to bombing range to watch events unfold. I also bring my alt over in his bomber as well, just in case. One of my corp mates is interested in the situation and asks if he can bring his drake over. I first tell him no, but when he asks again I concede on the condition that he fits a protocloak. I also warn him to sit about 30k off of the wormhole in case I start chucking bombs. He chooses to warp to 20k. It is when this corpmate arrives that things all go to hell.
The unfortunate thing about protocloaks is the 90% reduction to max velocity. Our Russian friends know this too. Moments after he lands and cloaks I see a buzzard uncloak and he uncloaks (the buzzard flew to his position cloaked and uncloaked him). The Buzzard burns to the wormhole. I throw a bomb at the wormhole hoping to hit it before he crosses the 15k to jump. He beats the bomb. I recloak. Out pops a Sleipnir and engages my corpmates Drake. As I am providing the play by play over voice comms my CEO starts calling for me to engage the Sleipnir and I know that this is probably a bad idea, but I do it anyway. Unfortunately I'm firing at the (highly EM resistant) Sleipnir using a purely EM Purifier. While we are engaging the enemy, I make sure to use my 'Keep at range 30km' button to make sure that I don't get too close. This puts me roughly 10k + 30k off of the wormhole. As I get out to that range, in jumps two Hurricanes and a Cymbal (p00p) as I am 40k away, I am not crapping my pants just yet as I am well out of warp disruptor range and those ships are almost always PVP outfitted with 220 or 425 autocannons. I should have plenty of time to turn and warp out... (not so) I somehow get locked and two-shotted from approx 35k away by 425mm ACII's. Now I use Barrage too, but even then I'd count myself pretty lucky to make two back to back hits like that at that range, but it is what it is. I find myself in my pod and I take it back to the POS and switch back to my main.
Now my corpmate's Drake is making a valiant go of it and is (somehow) not space dust yet with all of these boats on him. For whatever reason they decide to converge on him and they all fly to within 5k of him. I have two options, 1 warp away and leave him to die, or 2 go for firey vengence. I choose firey vengance. I call a heads up to my corpmate and I left a bomb rip and warp back to the POS. about 20 seconds later, he limps back to the POS in his pod.
What has two thumbs and is now leading the corp KB by points for getting the final blow on a corpmate's Drake?.... >This guy<
Oh well, I called it a mercy killing, we laughed and moved on.
So, back to the matter at hand...
*Lesson Learned??? Never ever, EVER fight next to a wormhole! You never know what is waiting to kill you on the other side*
\o
Fly safe
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Tuesday's Two-for-one!
Welcome back! I have a treat for you today, a double helping of hard earned wisdom!
My first and only dive into contract scamming...
You have read in my last post that I had a run-in with the courier contract system and lost four ships because of a clerical error. Back when that had happened, it got me thinking. 'Surely I'm not the only dummy in this game, right?' Perhaps I could try to turn the tables on some other poor sod and hopefully make myself feel a little better (misery loves company). Well, if I wanted to do such a thing, what would I look for? You can't see what's being moved in the contract, so I would have to find a way to make an educated guess at what that shipment would be worth. I would have to determine a minimum volume / cost threshold that I could use to identify potential ... er victims...
A threshold, right, how would I determine that? For whatever reason, my mind immediately went to Tritanium as it is basically the one of the cheapest and most worthless items in the game (that people might want to move at least). Okay, so lets assume whatever I wanted to snipe would, at the worst, be a load full of tritanium. How much would that be worth? In my case used a very low price for the trit to calculate what a frieghter full of it might be worth. 1.75 (ISK per piece) x 90,000,000 (rounded amount of trit that you can fit in a frieghter) = 157.5M. Alright, so that means if I see a contract up where the collateral is set up to be a drastically lower ration of mass to ISK, I should potentially consider it. Anything is more valueable than Tritanium, right? So I should have no problem.
Great, so let's do this. I look through the availible contracts in search of something that exceeds my threshold. It takes a while, but I find one eventually. It's a good sign that there is only one, because if there were a bunch of them then I probably miscalculated something somewhere and should start over. In this case, it's a contract for over 900,000m3 with a collateral of 50M. That's about 3 times my threshold so I am very interested. Something else of note, this is the first time I've ever tried to accept a courier contract. All that I know about them, I've read online on evelopedia. From what I had gathered there, as long as I didn't take any of what was in the contract, I would keep my collateral. Also of note, there was mention of a marchariel in the description...
Now for the punchline. So I accept this contract and I crack open the crate to see what's inside. Whatever it is, I'm pretty much guarenteed to make money because even if it is a load of trit, I got it for a good price, right? Wrong. Oh Karma, you cruel bitch. Apparently, some jerk has invented something called a 'General Frieght Container' and I just bought 8 of those (which are valued at approx 200,000 ISK each), a noob ship, and a single piece if scordite... Estimated cost of items in the box = ~ 1.6M ISK. Bah, what the heck is up with that? Oh well, I'll just let the contract time out and since I didn't take any of this... crap, I'll get my 50M back and we can call it square. Nope. Apparently the collateral is tied to contract completion, not only to item theft, as I had believed. Que the QQ. I, apparently, have just been contract scammed (AGAIN) while trying to scam other peoples contracts... I really suck at this game.
Lets look at some of my mistakes and get some lessons learned:
*Lesson Learned: Don't accept a courier contract for 900,000m3 of goods is you can't even fly a freighter*
*Lesson Learned: Tritanium is, apparently, NOT the most worthless item by volume in the EVE universe*
*Lesson Learned: Don't make assumptions about what you know. You WILL be wrong especially if you put ISK on the line*
*Lesson Learned: If someone puts an enticing description on thier contract, do not take the bait. That's all it is, bait. Just like if you see a single drake 100km off of a wormhole, don't move out to engage it. Recognize bait for what it is and move on*
*Lesson Learned: If you are not a personal accountant, email spammer, lawyer, investment banker, insurance salesman, or other form of career criminal, don't bother with trying to run contract scams. There are already way too many people smarter than you that have been running this game far longer, doing a far better job of it than you will likely ever do*
*Lesson Learned: Stick to what you know*
Concussion bombs, great for enemies, not so great for friends...
Just a quick one to round out the posts for today. Myself and a few corp members were in another guy's wormhole attempting to hunt him down. We had a HIC on his high sec exit along with our covop that was attempting to combat scanner him down and one other ship. (Note: this is not normally how we handle this type of engagement, but this mark was acting very oddly. He, too, was in a covop and he was warping around uncloaked apparently ignoring us, and after about 20 minutes of watching this we decided to just probe him down and be done with it.) He had been sitting uncloaked at a safe spot away from his POS for a number of minutes. We had pretty much assumed him to be afk so we threw out combats to nail him. On our first pass, we had him at over 90% which is very good, but not good enough. We prepare for another pass when he apparently wakes up and warps off... apparently directly to the high sec we are camping (Yay). I warp to it as well hoping to land on him. He gets there first and cloaks when he hits the bubble. Now he can do one of two things: 1. Remain cloaked and try to make the exit wormhole to jump out, or 2. try to manually fly out of the bubble and warp off without getting uncloaked. As I land, I decide that he just might be dumb enough to try to do option one. As soon as I land I'm going to turn on my burner and head for the exit so that I can hopefully bump him and we can kill him before he gets to the exit. This is the plan at least.
The moment I land I go to click on my afterburner... and I mistakenly hit my bomb launcher...(CRAP!!) Everyone around me sees that i have just chucked a bomb directly between two of my corpmates near the wormhole. Now, if this bomb hits the wormhole and goes off, ALL of us are within the blast radius. The HIC and the BC will live, but the mark, my corpmate in the covops, and myself in the bomber might have a very bad day... lucky for us all, after the bomb had sailed between my corpmates it had also managed to miss the wormhole and exploded the full distance away. It was a very tense couple of seconds. Everyone froze, and when we finally realized that we weren't all dead we let out a long sigh of relief and changed our, now freshly soiled, underwear.
*Lesson Learned: You probably might want to move that bomb launcher button over a few slots so that you don't, you know, kill everyone next time*
My first and only dive into contract scamming...
You have read in my last post that I had a run-in with the courier contract system and lost four ships because of a clerical error. Back when that had happened, it got me thinking. 'Surely I'm not the only dummy in this game, right?' Perhaps I could try to turn the tables on some other poor sod and hopefully make myself feel a little better (misery loves company). Well, if I wanted to do such a thing, what would I look for? You can't see what's being moved in the contract, so I would have to find a way to make an educated guess at what that shipment would be worth. I would have to determine a minimum volume / cost threshold that I could use to identify potential ... er victims...
A threshold, right, how would I determine that? For whatever reason, my mind immediately went to Tritanium as it is basically the one of the cheapest and most worthless items in the game (that people might want to move at least). Okay, so lets assume whatever I wanted to snipe would, at the worst, be a load full of tritanium. How much would that be worth? In my case used a very low price for the trit to calculate what a frieghter full of it might be worth. 1.75 (ISK per piece) x 90,000,000 (rounded amount of trit that you can fit in a frieghter) = 157.5M. Alright, so that means if I see a contract up where the collateral is set up to be a drastically lower ration of mass to ISK, I should potentially consider it. Anything is more valueable than Tritanium, right? So I should have no problem.
Great, so let's do this. I look through the availible contracts in search of something that exceeds my threshold. It takes a while, but I find one eventually. It's a good sign that there is only one, because if there were a bunch of them then I probably miscalculated something somewhere and should start over. In this case, it's a contract for over 900,000m3 with a collateral of 50M. That's about 3 times my threshold so I am very interested. Something else of note, this is the first time I've ever tried to accept a courier contract. All that I know about them, I've read online on evelopedia. From what I had gathered there, as long as I didn't take any of what was in the contract, I would keep my collateral. Also of note, there was mention of a marchariel in the description...
Now for the punchline. So I accept this contract and I crack open the crate to see what's inside. Whatever it is, I'm pretty much guarenteed to make money because even if it is a load of trit, I got it for a good price, right? Wrong. Oh Karma, you cruel bitch. Apparently, some jerk has invented something called a 'General Frieght Container' and I just bought 8 of those (which are valued at approx 200,000 ISK each), a noob ship, and a single piece if scordite... Estimated cost of items in the box = ~ 1.6M ISK. Bah, what the heck is up with that? Oh well, I'll just let the contract time out and since I didn't take any of this... crap, I'll get my 50M back and we can call it square. Nope. Apparently the collateral is tied to contract completion, not only to item theft, as I had believed. Que the QQ. I, apparently, have just been contract scammed (AGAIN) while trying to scam other peoples contracts... I really suck at this game.
Lets look at some of my mistakes and get some lessons learned:
*Lesson Learned: Don't accept a courier contract for 900,000m3 of goods is you can't even fly a freighter*
*Lesson Learned: Tritanium is, apparently, NOT the most worthless item by volume in the EVE universe*
*Lesson Learned: Don't make assumptions about what you know. You WILL be wrong especially if you put ISK on the line*
*Lesson Learned: If someone puts an enticing description on thier contract, do not take the bait. That's all it is, bait. Just like if you see a single drake 100km off of a wormhole, don't move out to engage it. Recognize bait for what it is and move on*
*Lesson Learned: If you are not a personal accountant, email spammer, lawyer, investment banker, insurance salesman, or other form of career criminal, don't bother with trying to run contract scams. There are already way too many people smarter than you that have been running this game far longer, doing a far better job of it than you will likely ever do*
*Lesson Learned: Stick to what you know*
Concussion bombs, great for enemies, not so great for friends...
Just a quick one to round out the posts for today. Myself and a few corp members were in another guy's wormhole attempting to hunt him down. We had a HIC on his high sec exit along with our covop that was attempting to combat scanner him down and one other ship. (Note: this is not normally how we handle this type of engagement, but this mark was acting very oddly. He, too, was in a covop and he was warping around uncloaked apparently ignoring us, and after about 20 minutes of watching this we decided to just probe him down and be done with it.) He had been sitting uncloaked at a safe spot away from his POS for a number of minutes. We had pretty much assumed him to be afk so we threw out combats to nail him. On our first pass, we had him at over 90% which is very good, but not good enough. We prepare for another pass when he apparently wakes up and warps off... apparently directly to the high sec we are camping (Yay). I warp to it as well hoping to land on him. He gets there first and cloaks when he hits the bubble. Now he can do one of two things: 1. Remain cloaked and try to make the exit wormhole to jump out, or 2. try to manually fly out of the bubble and warp off without getting uncloaked. As I land, I decide that he just might be dumb enough to try to do option one. As soon as I land I'm going to turn on my burner and head for the exit so that I can hopefully bump him and we can kill him before he gets to the exit. This is the plan at least.
The moment I land I go to click on my afterburner... and I mistakenly hit my bomb launcher...(CRAP!!) Everyone around me sees that i have just chucked a bomb directly between two of my corpmates near the wormhole. Now, if this bomb hits the wormhole and goes off, ALL of us are within the blast radius. The HIC and the BC will live, but the mark, my corpmate in the covops, and myself in the bomber might have a very bad day... lucky for us all, after the bomb had sailed between my corpmates it had also managed to miss the wormhole and exploded the full distance away. It was a very tense couple of seconds. Everyone froze, and when we finally realized that we weren't all dead we let out a long sigh of relief and changed our, now freshly soiled, underwear.
*Lesson Learned: You probably might want to move that bomb launcher button over a few slots so that you don't, you know, kill everyone next time*
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Aw, hell no... I did what..?
I don't know what happened, I must have missed a decimal point or something...
-- Michael Bolton: Office Space
Yeah, it's kind of like that, only with more cussing, tears, and suicidal thoughts...
So, as you have read previously, I used to live in a C1 wormhole by myself, and I am currently shacked up with my corp in a cozy C5 pulsar. When I was moving out of my original wormhole, it took me about 3 days to get everything that I had out. This was mostly because I had to fly a lot of ships out individually. Because of this, when I was done, I had assets strung all across known space. Something else you may have gathered from the description of my personality type, I can be a bit of a perfectionist (Yay OCD). After a while it began really eating me that I had assets all over the place. I would have loved to just consolidate them all at one station (Jita 4-4). But to be honest, I just didn't want to spend two weeks flying ships all over the place just too soothe my OCD. If only there were a way to let someone else do all of the work for me...
Enter the world of courier contracts (The experienced players are letting out a collective groan)...
It works like this. You create a courier contract that says please move X item/s to Y station. I will pay you Z amount. While this sounds too good to be true, there is a catch. If the pilot is so inclined, he can just take all of your stuff. Because of this risk there is also a collateral system built in. This is how you discourage the theft of your items. The hauling pilot needs to front a certain amount of money just for the privilege of hauling your assets. If he takes even one, he is out the entire collateral. So you, as the customer, need to make sure that you are leveraging this collateral system properly to prevent any unintended theft.
As an example, one of the loads that I needed hauled to Jita contained four ships. All fully fitted and rigged. It was two Drakes, a Buzzard, and my (mostly) brand new Noctis. When adding the values, two drakes will run about 60M, a buzzard is under 20M, and the noctis, was like 65M. That's a little under 150M just in the ships not to mention the modules and rigs on them. Now since none of these were set up for pvp, there was no super faction or officer stuff on them. So, just to be safe, I estimated that the entirety of the order was probably about 400M. So I set my collateral at 400M so that if my stuff got stolen, I would get my money back.
I also proceeded to build contracts for the rest of my assets. After doing so I'm actually pretty pleased. Soon I would have all of my happy shinies all in the same place!
After a few minutes I jumped in and ran a search to see if any of my contracts had been picked up. In fact, one had! (Yay). But wait, it was accepted and then it was immediately failed. WTF? Oh well, looks like that dude is out a ton of ISK. I check my wallet and I don't notice any major change... odd. Oh, wait.. no, please no...
I bring the contract up to look and see how much this guy was going to have to pay me, and there is a problem. In the collateral section I have made a fairly gross error. Where I had meant to put the collateral at 400000000 (400 Million) I had in reality put the collateral at 400000 (400 Thousand)... %%$#@*! I am the biggest loser EVAR!
So basically, what happened was I just sold four fully fitted and rigged ships (including my damn Noctis) to some random guy for 400,000 ISK. I wanted to throw up. Out of all of the mistakes this one is probably the most intimate and painful of them all. You see, I have this problem; Big numbers and decimal points are the bane of my existence, always have been. I am a mathy type of guy, but once numbers get sufficiently big or small I just can't process them right. I don't know what it is, but it is my Achilles heel. Anyways...
*Lesson Learned: Double, Triple, Quadruple check those contracts! Contract scamming is a big business, don't feed the beast through you own stupidity, like I did. Pay attention!*
-- Michael Bolton: Office Space
Yeah, it's kind of like that, only with more cussing, tears, and suicidal thoughts...
So, as you have read previously, I used to live in a C1 wormhole by myself, and I am currently shacked up with my corp in a cozy C5 pulsar. When I was moving out of my original wormhole, it took me about 3 days to get everything that I had out. This was mostly because I had to fly a lot of ships out individually. Because of this, when I was done, I had assets strung all across known space. Something else you may have gathered from the description of my personality type, I can be a bit of a perfectionist (Yay OCD). After a while it began really eating me that I had assets all over the place. I would have loved to just consolidate them all at one station (Jita 4-4). But to be honest, I just didn't want to spend two weeks flying ships all over the place just too soothe my OCD. If only there were a way to let someone else do all of the work for me...
Enter the world of courier contracts (The experienced players are letting out a collective groan)...
It works like this. You create a courier contract that says please move X item/s to Y station. I will pay you Z amount. While this sounds too good to be true, there is a catch. If the pilot is so inclined, he can just take all of your stuff. Because of this risk there is also a collateral system built in. This is how you discourage the theft of your items. The hauling pilot needs to front a certain amount of money just for the privilege of hauling your assets. If he takes even one, he is out the entire collateral. So you, as the customer, need to make sure that you are leveraging this collateral system properly to prevent any unintended theft.
As an example, one of the loads that I needed hauled to Jita contained four ships. All fully fitted and rigged. It was two Drakes, a Buzzard, and my (mostly) brand new Noctis. When adding the values, two drakes will run about 60M, a buzzard is under 20M, and the noctis, was like 65M. That's a little under 150M just in the ships not to mention the modules and rigs on them. Now since none of these were set up for pvp, there was no super faction or officer stuff on them. So, just to be safe, I estimated that the entirety of the order was probably about 400M. So I set my collateral at 400M so that if my stuff got stolen, I would get my money back.
I also proceeded to build contracts for the rest of my assets. After doing so I'm actually pretty pleased. Soon I would have all of my happy shinies all in the same place!
After a few minutes I jumped in and ran a search to see if any of my contracts had been picked up. In fact, one had! (Yay). But wait, it was accepted and then it was immediately failed. WTF? Oh well, looks like that dude is out a ton of ISK. I check my wallet and I don't notice any major change... odd. Oh, wait.. no, please no...
I bring the contract up to look and see how much this guy was going to have to pay me, and there is a problem. In the collateral section I have made a fairly gross error. Where I had meant to put the collateral at 400000000 (400 Million) I had in reality put the collateral at 400000 (400 Thousand)... %%$#@*! I am the biggest loser EVAR!
So basically, what happened was I just sold four fully fitted and rigged ships (including my damn Noctis) to some random guy for 400,000 ISK. I wanted to throw up. Out of all of the mistakes this one is probably the most intimate and painful of them all. You see, I have this problem; Big numbers and decimal points are the bane of my existence, always have been. I am a mathy type of guy, but once numbers get sufficiently big or small I just can't process them right. I don't know what it is, but it is my Achilles heel. Anyways...
*Lesson Learned: Double, Triple, Quadruple check those contracts! Contract scamming is a big business, don't feed the beast through you own stupidity, like I did. Pay attention!*
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
The Motherlode...
This blog is, at it's core, a learning resource for Eve pilots.You come here to read of, and laugh at my mistakes. In doing so you are (hopefully) less likely to make those same mistakes yourself. As you will come to see, I can make some seriously gross errors of both judgment and action. But nothing like this... nothing like this...
That thing that every corp hopes and prays for has recently happened to the corp that I am a lucky member of...
I live in a C5 wormhole with my corp. This particular C5 has a static C2 exit. Every day we scan it out and jump in to see who is home and if possible where the connection to high sec is. This is common, this is life in a C5. This particular C2, though, was anything but common.
Pilot A jumps into system and begins calling standard recon info.
Pilot A: "In system, wormhole is clear. Tower on scan, a few ships, industrials, no combat ships. Looks like an industrial corp. Lots of silos and assembly arrays on scan."
Pilot B also jumps into system to help speed up intel gathering, AND makes an excellent observation...
Pilot B: "uhhhh... Pilot A, do you see a force field on dscan?"
Pilot A: "hrm, no i don't. Going to track down the POS to take a look".
about two minutes later...
Pilot A: "Corp, you're not going to believe this, we have a fully loaded industrial POS with it's shields down!"
The heavens have smiled upon us this day...
At this point we kick off 'Operation Pinata Buster'. You see, it works like this; when the force fields go down, your POS modules are no longer protected. This means that other persons of ill repute can mosey on by and take pot shots at these modules. If one has the time and the firepower they can destroy your POS modules. When a POS module is destroyed, it jets it's contents into space. Meaning that if I can blow up your corporate hangar array, all of your belongings float into space where I can collect and sell them, thus the pinata reference. Anyways, such was the case with this particular POS. It was found with it's shields down and we wasted no time in tearing it to shreds and looting it. It took roughly six minutes to destroy 48 POS modules. When we were done, there were dozens and dozens of cargo containers littering the area. Now came Christmas, what did we get? After collecting all of the goodies, we ran all of the loot through a pricing engine against current average prices. It looks like or haul was worth roughly...
10 BILLION ISK!
o.0
Somebody got royally screwed today and, for once, it wasn't me. So what did we learn from this?
*Lesson Learned: Keep fuel in you tower, DUH! Not just keep fuel in your tower, but make sure that you have enough spare fuel to operate for a possibly extended period of time. In addition to this, do not wait until the last minute to go to the store and buy fuel. You never know when a K162 into dangerous unknown space might open up and the denizens therein may otherwise prevent you from leaving your POS. *
One of the first things you should have been wondering this whole time was 'Where is everybody?'. After combining the situational Intel that we collecting in the system and referencing data on the web we believe that the people who lived in this particular wormhole had been ganked a couple weeks earlier. It appears that they were all killed before they managed to bookmark the outside of their highsec connection. This means that once they awoke in high sec, they had no way to make it back into thier wormhole.
*Lesson Learned: I cannot stress this enough, if you are going to live in a wormhole, you MUST park an alt INSIDE the wormhole in a scanning ship, preferably at a safe point, not inside the POS. At a minimum this alt needs to know astrometrics I and needs to be fitted with a probe launcher and probes. It would also be a good idea to put this alt in a scanning frigate equipped with a prototype cloaking device (protocloak). If you do not have a protocloak equipped, you need to create a circuit of safe points that you can warp to (DO NOT USE CELESTIALS) while scanning so that you don't get nailed down by combat probes and killed.*
Once you factor in the market and contract prices of all of the blueprints and add them to the total item prices, we can probably assume that this haul likely exceeded 8 Billion ISK. It took us longer to collect and haul all of this stuff than it did to actually destroy all of the modules.
*Lesson Learned: Pay attention to your duties, even if they might seem menial and / or boring. This was probably the 500th wormhole that our two operators have jumped into and because they were paying attention to what they were doing, our corp gets an 8 billion isk payout.*
All in all, it was a good day to play Eve Online.
*Lesson Learned: Life is not fair. It probably took this corp months to build up all of this stuff at their POS, but it only took about 30 minutes for us to take it all away. Such is the way of the world in New Eden.*
That thing that every corp hopes and prays for has recently happened to the corp that I am a lucky member of...
I live in a C5 wormhole with my corp. This particular C5 has a static C2 exit. Every day we scan it out and jump in to see who is home and if possible where the connection to high sec is. This is common, this is life in a C5. This particular C2, though, was anything but common.
Pilot A jumps into system and begins calling standard recon info.
Pilot A: "In system, wormhole is clear. Tower on scan, a few ships, industrials, no combat ships. Looks like an industrial corp. Lots of silos and assembly arrays on scan."
Pilot B also jumps into system to help speed up intel gathering, AND makes an excellent observation...
Pilot B: "uhhhh... Pilot A, do you see a force field on dscan?"
Pilot A: "hrm, no i don't. Going to track down the POS to take a look".
about two minutes later...
Pilot A: "Corp, you're not going to believe this, we have a fully loaded industrial POS with it's shields down!"
The heavens have smiled upon us this day...
At this point we kick off 'Operation Pinata Buster'. You see, it works like this; when the force fields go down, your POS modules are no longer protected. This means that other persons of ill repute can mosey on by and take pot shots at these modules. If one has the time and the firepower they can destroy your POS modules. When a POS module is destroyed, it jets it's contents into space. Meaning that if I can blow up your corporate hangar array, all of your belongings float into space where I can collect and sell them, thus the pinata reference. Anyways, such was the case with this particular POS. It was found with it's shields down and we wasted no time in tearing it to shreds and looting it. It took roughly six minutes to destroy 48 POS modules. When we were done, there were dozens and dozens of cargo containers littering the area. Now came Christmas, what did we get? After collecting all of the goodies, we ran all of the loot through a pricing engine against current average prices. It looks like or haul was worth roughly...
10 BILLION ISK!
o.0
Somebody got royally screwed today and, for once, it wasn't me. So what did we learn from this?
*Lesson Learned: Keep fuel in you tower, DUH! Not just keep fuel in your tower, but make sure that you have enough spare fuel to operate for a possibly extended period of time. In addition to this, do not wait until the last minute to go to the store and buy fuel. You never know when a K162 into dangerous unknown space might open up and the denizens therein may otherwise prevent you from leaving your POS. *
One of the first things you should have been wondering this whole time was 'Where is everybody?'. After combining the situational Intel that we collecting in the system and referencing data on the web we believe that the people who lived in this particular wormhole had been ganked a couple weeks earlier. It appears that they were all killed before they managed to bookmark the outside of their highsec connection. This means that once they awoke in high sec, they had no way to make it back into thier wormhole.
*Lesson Learned: I cannot stress this enough, if you are going to live in a wormhole, you MUST park an alt INSIDE the wormhole in a scanning ship, preferably at a safe point, not inside the POS. At a minimum this alt needs to know astrometrics I and needs to be fitted with a probe launcher and probes. It would also be a good idea to put this alt in a scanning frigate equipped with a prototype cloaking device (protocloak). If you do not have a protocloak equipped, you need to create a circuit of safe points that you can warp to (DO NOT USE CELESTIALS) while scanning so that you don't get nailed down by combat probes and killed.*
Once you factor in the market and contract prices of all of the blueprints and add them to the total item prices, we can probably assume that this haul likely exceeded 8 Billion ISK. It took us longer to collect and haul all of this stuff than it did to actually destroy all of the modules.
*Lesson Learned: Pay attention to your duties, even if they might seem menial and / or boring. This was probably the 500th wormhole that our two operators have jumped into and because they were paying attention to what they were doing, our corp gets an 8 billion isk payout.*
All in all, it was a good day to play Eve Online.
*Lesson Learned: Life is not fair. It probably took this corp months to build up all of this stuff at their POS, but it only took about 30 minutes for us to take it all away. Such is the way of the world in New Eden.*
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)