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*

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!*

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.*

On the new character creator... WOW!

Just a quick post to say that I think the new character creator is absolutely amazing.

And as a side note, I've added a new widget on the right hand side to show you guys the new faces of ME in New Eden.

Should you encounter either of these grim visages from across the cold void, be afraid, be very afraid. Of me? Oh hell no, I suck, as you know. But at least I have the good sense to roll with some very nasty individuals.

If you are proud of your new work of art, please feel free to share it in the comments section below.

To do so, just hop on Eve Gate, navigate to the 'Profile' tab at the top. You will see your new profile image displayed. Just right click it, copy the image location, and paste it into your comment.

For those of you viewing the images, please make sure that you are only following links to images on "image.eveonline.com". Beware of malware.

Fly safe all!

\o

Where it all began... or 'Beware the Heron of Doom'

(A few months ago)

At some point I had decided that I wanted to live in a wormhole. Not just me, but the many me’s. Me and the other me’s would start a one man corp and I would run all of us from a single box. Perhaps the 'bad luck' that I blame all of the time could also be called by the other name of 'poor decision making' but we shall see.

Having made the decision, I now needed to work out the logistics of the operation. For a single person, this can be a little difficult, but it can be done (I hoped). So the question is 'Where will I live?'. In a wormhole obviously, but which wormhole, what class, and how do I find one? This was the humble beginnings of my journey to HTFU. I wanted to learn everything there was to learn about wormhole life and survival. I wanted to come out of this experience a better pilot. Did it work? Yes. The way that I had planned? No.

My father had a saying: "Education is what you get when you read the book. Experience is what you get when you don't". Truer words have never been spoken. They are especially true in the world of Eve Online, A place where 'The Book' doesn't exist. A place where all knowledge is gained through experience. bloody, ugly, tear-filled experience; and lots of it.

I began planning what I needed my new wormhole home to be. Being a single person alone in a wormhole with only my alts to assist me (one at a time) I needed to find a way to give myself some kind of tactical advantage. After a little reading and a heaping helping of good luck (at least it seemed like it at the time) I found the wormhole of my dreams.

J133653

This particular wormhole was perfect. Firstly, it is only 11au across. This means that it is impossible to hide or drop probes anywhere in the system without me being able to see it at my POS. Secondly it is a C1 wormhole. While some people look down on this, for a single individual, it is ideal. Most of this reason is because of the mass limit on the wormholes themselves. You cannot bring anything bigger than a battlecruiser into the system. It simply cannot be done. The only way for anyone to do so would be to bring in a POS and anchor a large ship assembly array (Which I planned to do) And if someone else decides to do it as well, I was fully prepared to pack my stuff up and leave. This also has the bonus that it makes my large POS virtually unassailable as it would take EXTREME numbers of cruisers and battlecruisers to bring it down. Anyone willing to amass those kinds of number and bring them to bear against my two characters can have the wormhole. You simply could not stand against that that type of determined attacker, regardless of what class of wormhole you are in. In addition to the other advantages, this wormhole also had enough planets to produce all PI based fuels. That is a very big deal. If you don't know how much it costs to buy all of the fuel that a large Minmatar tower requires, you should look it up. It's ridiculous!

So now I've found the wormhole and I have decided that it would be perfect for what I was looking for, now what? How do I actually make this happen? I needed to come up with the logistical plan to make this happen. And so I did.

I had my two characters active. One in a scanning ship, and one in a bestower carrying the large tower and enough fuel for two days (just in case). Why a bestower you ask? As far as tech 1 industrials goes, I feel that the bestower is the best all-around hauler for wormhole ops. I know when absolutely maxed out an itty V will surpass a bestower, but for a pilot just over a week old, the bestower is the best way to go. It has a ton of low slots that can be used for expanders and two high slots. Why does two high slots matter? Because for wormhole operations, you need two high slots for your most important modules of all: 1. A cloaking device, 2. A probe launcher. In the event of some unforeseen catastrophe the bestower can do two important things that it couldn't before: 1. Hide, and 2. scan its way out of a wormhole. Never underestimate the importance of number 2.

Now it is go time. I green light the operation. I scan out the new high sec exit, and bring my bestower in to start setting up the pos. That process takes 30 minutes. 20 minutes into that process, things begin to go south... enter the heron of doom. I see a heron pop up on dscan. Now bear in mind that the heron is not an intimidating ship by any stretch. The problem is that any ship in a wormhole does not represent a single ship. It represents potentially dozens and dozens of ships and pilots with a thirst for blood that only your utter and complete destruction can sate (temporarily). The heron stays on scan for about two minutes. Then to save me the trouble, it shows up at my POS, which is still trying to get anchored. It makes a few passes looking at my ships and the POS and then decides to go away... (Sigh of relief)

The tower finishes anchoring successfully. I bring the bestower in closer so that I can input the fuel because you can online a tower unless there is fuel in it. Just as I begin fueling the tower something else pops up on dscan. A drake. (CRAP!) Needless to say, the drake waisted no time in coming directly to the tower. Luckily before he lands I have time enough to finish throwing the fuel in the tower and I start the onlining just as he lands. Not knowing what to do with two non-combat ships in the middle of a wormhole empty except for the blood crazed lunatic in the drake hell bent on my quick violent demise. I do the only thing that I can do with these ships, I cloak up and try to run. Only because they are both using protocloaks, I am running very very slowly.
While attempting to make my molasses-like getaway, the drake proceeds to turn on a sensor booster and begins slowly orbiting the tower at a range of about 3000m. I am utterly defenseless there is simply nothing that I can do at this point (Except maybe have a massive heart attack from all of the stress, which is was doing my best to do). Eventually he finaly managed to bump my bestower with the drake. It only takes about two volleys to destroy.

*Lesson learned: If you have the chance, instead of attempting to run, the correct response would be to begin aligning to a celestial or a safe spot*

As an extra bonus, when the drake bumped the bestower, the bestower ricocheted off of it and magically ended up bumping my Imicus right before exploding.

*Lesson Learned: If you choose to flee, for the love of god do not flee in the same direction!*

When the bestower was destroyed I was trying for all I was worth to right click on my high sec wormhole bookmark so that I could warp my pod out. I guess somewhere between the screams, tears, and curses, I was simply unable to get the menu to give me the 'Warp to' option. So I died in my pod.

*Lesson Learned: Don't try to warp to a book mark first. Select a celestial from the overview and spam the 'Warp to' button*

It wasn't until the pod died that I even noticed that the Imicus had been de-cloaked. The drake made short work of it as well, but I was 'lucky' enough to finally get the second pod to warp to high sec and out of harm’s way. I picked the first station on the list and docked so that I could begin sifting through the ashes of what was supposed to be my carefully laid plan. When doing this, I checked on the bestower pilot... and realized that he was 30 jumps away because I did not remember to move his clone before starting the operation.

*Lesson Learned: If you ever try something like this make sure that you move your clone to the nearest available location just in case something like this happens, you can get back into the action!*

I spend the rest of the onlining time building my own drake at the nearest economic hub I could find. Once I managed to get back into the wormhole, I headed straight for my soon-to-be-online POS so that I could seek the protection of its shields. Well, that was the plan anyway...

*Lesson Learned: When anchoring a POS always make a bookmark of the tower itself so that you can warp directly into the shields*

Otherwise your only recourse is to warp to the moon where you are anchoring it. This will put you out around 100km away. In a drake traveling at the brisk rate of 175m/s that trip will take about 571 seconds. Just under 10 minutes... (*#$%!!).

*Lesson Learned: You probably want to put some kind of propulsion module on that drake in the future*

Don't forget that the other drake is just sitting outside my POS shields laughing at me at this point. He was kind enough to wait for me to slowboat my stupid self just inside his prodigious missile range before he once again attempted to tear me apart. I was almost unlucky (er stupid) enough to oblige him.

*Lesson Learned: Use your head! If you are 100km away from your POS in the world’s slowest drake because you were too stupid to bookmark the tower in the first place, don't make the same mistake again! Don't do a 10 minute slow boat to the POS like a dumbass, just bookmark the POS warp to a celestial and then warp to the tower!*

Stress can sometimes overwhelm your good sense. Do what you can to prevent that. If you feel yourself beginning to snap, take a minute to get your head on straight. Once things start going wrong they will continue to go wrong until you take the time and effort to break the cycle. I shouldn't have made so many mistakes back-to-back-to-back but because I allowed myself to go into overdrive and didn't bring myself out of it, the situation just continued to get worse.

I did eventually manage to make it into my brand new POS that night, but the costs were high; both monetarily and emotionally...

Blog Banter: BB24 The one and only me.

Let it be understood that I have no affiliation with CrazyKinux or any of the other blog banter participants. I just happen to think that this is both an excellent topic and an excellent way to introduce myself. So here goes...

Welcome to the twenty-fourth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week or so to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!


This month's Banter topic comes to us from the ever helpful Eelis Kiy, capsuleer behind the "Where the frack is my ship" blog. She asks: How does your real life personality compare to who you are as a character in EVE? Does a good leader of people in the real world make a good leader of pilots in game? Or vice-versa? Do your real-life skills help you with the roles you fulfill in your corporation or alliance? Or do you behave completely differently? Does the anonymity of the Internet allow you to thrive on the tears of others in New Eden whilst you work as a good Samaritan away from your keyboard? Or are you as mean outside of your pod as you are inside it? Have experiences in EVE Online affected your behavior, skills or attitudes outside of the game?

"How does your real life personality compare to who you are as a character in EVE? "

To start you off on the right foot, this is my personality type. I am an INTJ. Some of the positive highlights are:

INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion "Does it work?" to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms.

INTJs are strong individualists who seek new angles or novel ways of looking at things.

Hallmarks of the INTJ include independence of thought and a desire for efficiency.

Some of the negative highlights are:

Whatever system an INTJ happens to be working on is, for them, the equivalent of a moral cause to an INFJ; both perfectionism and disregard for authority may come into play, as INTJs can be unsparing of both themselves and the others on the project. Anyone considered to be "slacking," including superiors, will lose their respect -- and will generally be made aware of this.

Personal relationships, particularly romantic ones, can be the INTJ's Achilles heel ... This happens in part because many INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals ... Perhaps the most fundamental problem, however, is that INTJs really want people to make sense.

So, what can you gather from this? I am generally an over-confident, self-righteous jerk that wants things done his way. Why? Because it is the right way, that's why. If you get between me and my perfect world, there will be murders. Obviously that is an over-dramatization (sort of). I generally keep my thoughts and feelings to myself. I will be happy to give you enough rope with-which to hang yourself, and when you do, I will use your pendulum-like still cooling corpse as a punching bag (egad!). Overall I am a dedicated and thoughtful individual. I strive very hard to be kind to others unless they have somehow earned my ire. I am a good leader and an excellent follower. This is both me in the real-world as well as me in the virtual world of New Eden. Unfortunately, as you can read from the INTJ description, I am not one for authority or other social systems. I see you as a system. You and your ideas either work or they do not. This is true both in and out of the game. To answer the question more directly; the 'me' in the game is basically the same 'me' that is out of the game.

"Does a good leader of people in the real world make a good leader of pilots in game?"

Um, no. As I have had the distinct pleasure of serving in the military I can tell you with all confidence that most of you have, most likely, never even met a good leader of men. I don't mean this to come off as condescending (as i am sure it does) it's just that if you are going to find natural leaders of men, you would expect to find them in the military. I believe that after all of my years in the military I may have only ever encountered two actual good leaders of men. Plenty of good or great managers, sure, but leaders? No. Most people never get the distinction, but it is there.

"Do your real-life skills help you with the roles you fulfill in your corporation or alliance? "

Not so much the role (n00b-in-Chief), but it does shape the way that i can contribute to the whole. Specifically with regard to PI. Man do I love PI! I love it the same way i love spending hours playing EveHQ. The reason? MATH! I can spend hours and hours on EveHQ trying to get all of the number-Tetris to come together. The same can be said for PI. If you take a number of things into account, you can turn a sad and boring PI deployment into an ISK making machine! Can you make 350-400 robotics a day? Cause I can. (Pre Incursion 1.1.0). In the end, I dig PI, I spend hours and hours perfecting the numbers and working out new theories, and then I draft all of my findings into guides and post them to the corp. In addition to this I also help corp members individually with redesigning their PI deployments for maximum efficiency. So yes, in real-life I am a geek. In Eve, I am a super digital geek.

"Does the anonymity of the Internet allow you to thrive on the tears of others in New Eden whilst you work as a good Samaritan away from your keyboard? Or are you as mean outside of your pod as you are inside it?"

If it could be believed possible, I'm actually not a particularly nice fellow out in the real world. I am fiercely kind and loving to my family and friends, but the rest of you? You can die in a fire for all I care (sorry). Now, be that as it may, I do try very hard to make sure that i put up a good front when interacting with you personally. This idea even extends itself into the cold wastes of New Eden (to a lesser degree). I can probably sum this up best with an analogy. Think of it like the evening commute home. I have no problem at all letting you merge in front of me as long as you are not acting like a jerk. If you are, then I will do everything in my power to make your life hell. If you really make me mad, it's on! I believe this is where the anonymity of the internet comes into play. In the real world, I WANT to hide in your bushes and jump out and beat you with a nail covered bat, I just DON'T. In eve, there is nothing in the world preventing me from making my way into the ol' ship MX array and jumping into each one of your ships and self-destructing them while you sleep...

Here goes... Everything...

Greetings and welcome to the maiden post of n00b for life! This blog will center around my various escapades as one of eve's unluckiest pilots. As the name implies, I am relatively new to this game (less than a year). Try as I might, I just can't seem to get myself out of that 'n00b' phase. I'm not a dumb guy or anything, but I do seem to have some of the worst luck around.

I hope you all enjoy reading this as much as I (hopefully) will enjoy writting it. Because I will be writing a lot of the initial posts in retrospect, you can expect to see many posts in the coming weeks. And because my n00bish instincts and bad luck seem to be far from played out, you can expect to see plenty of great posts well after that. Let the shenanigans begin!