As I’ve mentioned a couple of days ago, Red vs. Blue declared war on EVE University, effective last Friday.
War, at least in the Uni, is weird. It’s a bit like EVE turned up to eleven: you sit around even more before anything happens, but then it all happens on much larger scales. For example, in the Uni, you are not allowed to undock during wartime if you’re on your own, you’re not allowed to fly certain expensive ships, you’re not allowed to engage in activities such as mining (although, with Hulkageddon going on, that’s hardly a limitation). So you sit in station waiting for things to happen. And wait. And wait.
And then, a fleet is formed, and you wait even more. And when you’re at the point where you think you won’t be able to take it any more soon, suddenly, you get moving. Finding a fleet, running away from a fleet, or sometimes, even engaging a fleet. Battles can be small or large, they can be even or lopsided. We’ve had it all in the last couple of days.
The war has been a mixed bag so far for both parties. We, the university, started it on a high note, scoring the first kill of the war, and winning the first few engagements. For those that do not know, winning or losing is typically measured by two things: a fleet can have a specific goal, such as driving enemies out of a system. More often though, like everything in EVE, it all comes down to cold hard numbers, in this case the “ISK efficiency”. Whoever loses more ISK worth of ships is considered the loser of an engagement.
As I said, the war started reasonably well, with the Uni being ahead with an efficiency of about 60%; meaning, 60% of all wartime losses in ISK were the enemy’s, and only 40% were ours – or, us being 50% more efficient (because 60% is 50% more than 40%. Wheeee, Math 101!). We typically lost more ships, but RvB lost the larger and more expensive ones. That shows the difference between the two corps well, too: my impression is that on average, Red vs. Blue has older and more experienced players, not to mention that they’re specifically a PvP corp, as opposed to the Uni. The Uni’s ways of engaging enemies is typically outnumbering them in huge blobs of cheap ships.
The problem with that difference is that those older players also were more eager and better able to reship – it seems their coffers are just better filled, or they’re more willing to throw money at the war. They also have more players, which makes the whole “outnumbering your enemy in huge blobs of cheap ships” point a bit moot. We definitely felt that over the weekend. We had several ugly losses, with whole fleets getting wiped out by battleship- and logistics-heavy RvB fleets. We seemed to have a ridiculous amount of spies in our ranks, with one fleet being destroyed after a five-person deep command chain was immediately killed at the beginning of the fight, and people panicking and losing coordination. By Sunday, our efficiency had come down to barely 40%. RvB also went into our home system and hit our player-owned starbase (POS) hard, driving the control tower into reinforce mode. That meant that our starbase was vulnerable, and another attack would probably mean the loss of our precious base.
Now, this is not a real problem from a financial point of view. A player-owned starbase isn’t cheap, but it’s also not hideously expensive. In fact, the initial cost of the modules isn’t even that large compared to the upkeep that you have to pay to keep them afloat. Hitting our PoS has several other effects:
- A POS is an absolutely safe area in space for the owner. Until the tower is destroyed, it projects a force field that makes everything inside it (except for the tower itself) untargetable and invincible. While it also isn’t possible for the owners to shoot the attackers from inside, a safe spot in space shouldn’t be underestimated in a game that otherwise is notoriously unsafe outside of NPC stations. In corporations that have fleets of capital ships (which the Uni doesn’t), POSs are also the only points where capital pilots can relax, because capital ships are too large to dock in NPC stations.
- A POS can make a great psychological focus. The enemy might want to take it down, you might want to defend it, with a fervor on both sides that far outweighs the economical and strategical importance.
- When a POS tower is forced into reinforcement, it creates a default point in time for two fleets to clash. Let me explain in a nutshell: a tower has an immense amount of shields and armor. If an enemy fleet drives the shields down to 25%, the tower enters reinforce mode for a certain amount of time, defined by its current fuel reserves. During reinforce mode, the tower is both invulnerable and unrepairable. The reinforce timer is publicly visible. The enemy fleet will want to hit the tower as soon as it comes out of reinforce. The defender fleet will want to repair the tower as soon as it comes out of reinforce. There is no better way to agree on a time to field large fleets to clash.
Calls went out. Everybody was urged to be there when the tower came out of reinforcement.
And come we did. We fielded half a dozen fleets with more than 400 pilots altogether. RvB brought a similar number. The battle was on.
And we won. We won in a battle that was immense both in numbers and in length. The whole encounter took more than 2 hours, with pilots who lost their ships trying to reship and rejoin the battle. I lost two EWAR blackbirds early on, then came back in a Drake and miraculously survived until the end of the battle. Because we’re still at war, I will only show a couple of screenshots that don’t show names. This is from the second half of the battle when many people already had lost their ships. (I’m really bad at hitting the Print Screen button when the really interesting stuff happens.) It should give you an idea of the chaos and sheer amount of shooting and killing going on:
Each icon is either a current or a deceased pilot.
The battle was large enough that time dilation kicked in at several points, I think I saw the 50% mark at least once. Everybody playing EVE at that time should have had the chance to notice something big was going on:
If you set your universe map to show ship kills in the last hour, the hotspot was impossible to miss.
I made this screenshot about 20 minutes after the large battle, so the peak was already over, and it still showed more than 1000 ships destroyed in the last hour:
That sure left a mark on the map.
Even the older players commented that it was one of the largest, if not the largest, non-capital-ship battles they’ve ever witnessed. The total tally of destroyed assets was a mind-blowing (to me) 57 billion ISK. It’s not completely fair to do the conversion (because it doesn’t factor in things such as the pains of liquidating all the involved assets, and the fact that implants, which contributed a sizable amount to those numbers, cannot be resold at all), but at the current PLEX price of 490 million ISK, that’s almost 10 years of subscription time. Or more than €1500. That’s more than $2000, for you people with the green money. In less than 3 hours. That’s… a bit scary. On the other hand, with the numbers involved, that’s probably only about €2-3 per player on average. It still gave me a bit of perspective.
After the battle was over, we finally could tend to our control tower, and repaired the shields in about an hour.
After about an hour, the shields were restored to full. My lowly POSprey probably didn't contribute to any noticeable effect, but it's the thought that counts.
Of course, the war isn’t over. It will go for at least another 3 days, and potentially longer, if RvB renews the declaration (at a steadily increasing price, I was told). Now is probably the most dangerous time for us. I’ve seen it before in raiding guilds: your finally, after much work, kill a hard boss, you are feel like nothing can stop you… and next week you will have the worst performance in history. Overconfidence is most dangerous.
We’ll see how it goes. I haven’t had the chance yet to shoot at Cyndre, I think. Then again, how would I know? I don’t even know what name he goes by in EVE. I wonder whether he was there last night.
A Short Introduction Into EVE Class Composition
Posted in EVE Online Tagged fleet roles, non-EVE player cheatsheet Comments (2)When it comes to game mechanics, EVE is just yet another MMORPG. It’s skill-based, not class-based, but it has distinct roles that you want to train up your skills for. The typical roles I know in other games are tank, damage, healer, buffer, and debuffer. EVE is quite similar. It lacks tanks, but adds tacklers. For anybody who doesn’t know much about EVE, I though I’d make a short overview of the “jobs”. I’ll try and look at the different roles from a fleet perspective. Of course, in very small groups, or if you’re on your own, you might want to fulfill several roles at once to be successful.
Tank
As I said, EVE doesn’t really have them. In PvP, tanks are useless. In PvE (missions etc.), you technically can try and get a ship with superior defense to “tank” damage for other ships, but there are no taunt mechanics or anything like that.
Damage
Typically done by the larger ships. For the fleets I fly in, this means battlecruisers and battleships. Above that, capital ships start, some of which can pack impressive firepower. In my case, I bought a couple of Drakes for the current UNI war. Drakes are battlecruisers that specialize in missile damage. For the most part, missiles are considered inferior in fleets, because they have a travel time to the target (whereas guns are modeled as having instant travel time for their projectiles), which means they sometimes simply might reach their target after it is actually down. The Drake is a very very capable mission runner ship though, and last time I picked up EVE, I had specialized in the two things Drakes do well: shoot missiles, and take a decent amount of damage before they go down. So Drakes it is for me. Besides, I can’t properly fly any battleships yet. I can fly around in them, but I’m not very effective at actually doing anything.
Healing
The “healer” ships in EVE are called logistics. They are typically highly sought after, because there are no really viable basic ships that do logistics well. You need to train into Tier 2 cruisers, which takes quite some time. (Or into carriers, which are capital ships, so obviously take even more time to train.) Logistics come in two flavors: shield healing and armor healing. Depending on whether the ships in your fleet specialized in increasing their shield or armor resistances, one or the other is more desirable, obviously. I can’t fly Logistics ships at the moment, hence I didn’t bother buying any. I did fit out a basic “POSprey” though. It’s a basic ship (the Osprey) that is fit to sacrifice all defenses for an at least acceptable amount of shield healing. The idea is to use it if a Player Owned Starbase is attacked: as long as the control tower of that station is up, it projects an invulnerability field around it. You can sit in the invulnerability field (hence no need for defenses) and help heal the shields of the control tower, hoping the POS will survive the attack.
Buffing
There are several things you can do to help out other ships. First of all, you can transfer capacitor energy from your ship to another. This is a job that is also subsumed under “Logistics” in EVE. Capacitor could be considered the “mana” of EVE. Most modules that you fit onto your ship will need capacitor to do anything. I don’t have experience with these kinds of ships, but I assume they would fit modules that increase their own capacitor recharge speed, so they can then support other ships by beaming it over. Second, you can fit modules onto ships that directly buff stats of your whole fleet: movement speed, shield and armor amount, etc. They have ludicrous CPU requirements that mean they can only be used on ships that come with some sort of bonus (such as “99% reduced CPU need for warfare link modules”). These ships are capital command ships, and battlecruisers. As I said, I can fly the drake, a battlecruiser, but I don’t have the skills to use warfare link modules, so I can’t be a buffer yet.
Debuffing
These are typically called “EWAR” (electronic warfare) in EVE. Debuffs come in four categories. Tracking disruptors make it harder for the debuffed ship to properly shoot enemies. Target painters make it easier to hit a target. This can be especially useful because larger ships have a hard time hitting smaller ships with their larger weapons (due to, for example, slower tracking speed – you see how the two belong together?). Sensor dampeners reduce the lock-on range for ships (you need to lock onto targets before you can shoot/debuff/buff them). ECM (electronic countermeasures) make the target completely lose all locks and unable to lock onto new targets.
That sounds very overpowered, and it would be, if not for a small detail: while the other debuffs are applied to a target and do their job 100% of the time, ECM only has a chance of working. Every 20 seconds, the attacker rolls a random number based on their ECM strength, and the attacked rolls a number based on their ship sensor strength (which is based on the ship type – larger ships typically have stronger sensors – and can be further boosted by certain modules). I have halfway decent skills for ECM, so I bought a couple of Blackbirds, which are dedicated ECM cruiser-class ships.
Tackler
These fill one of the idiosyncratic EVE niches. In EVE, it is very easy to get away from fights. You hit your warp drive button, warp far far away, dock up in a station, and that’s it, you’re safe. To actually make people stay when the fight is not going their way, you need to deactivate their warp drivers by means of warp disruptors or scramblers (I won’t go into the details of the differences between them). Many larger ships fit at least one warp disruptor module, but larger ships are typically slow, so it’s hard for them to get into range and apply their modules. This is where the small ships, frigates specifically, come into play. They are fast, they are cheap, and they need very few skills to fly. The typical role of a new player in fleets is to fly a tackle frigate, a fast, lightly tanked ship that has one or several warp disruptor modules (typically complemented by a “webber” or two, which slows down ships that it gets applied to). The hope of a frigate pilot is that he’ll be able to dive in fast, stay close to its target, and orbit around it at high speed, so the enemy’s weapons won’t be able to hit it.
That often doesn’t work, especially if you’re new to the job. So the next best thing is to dive in fast, apply a tackle and simply survive long enough that others can come in and help tackling down the enemy ship. Tackle frigate pilots die. A lot. My personal opinion is that flying a tackle frigate as a new player is both a blessing and a curse. The ships are cheap, so you don’t lose much when you get blown up. On the other hand, you will get blown up, often very early, and you don’t have much margin for error. I am not that good at flying tackle frigates, I often die early enough that I won’t see much of the actual fight at all. Nevertheless, I bought a few frigates just to have them around in case we really need more people to fly them. Did I mention they are cheap enough I don’t really care?
You could argue that this list lacks several roles, either because I don’t have much experience with them (travel time decrease: some ships can put up jump portals that allow fleets to quickly jump to systems several normal stargate jumps away), or I’m not sure I’d consider them a full-fledged role instead of a sub-role (scouts). Furthermore, I am still new to many EVE mechanics, so I probably got several things wrong, and forgot a bunch of interesting details. So be careful with that information, and you’re welcome to point out mistakes so I can correct them. The main reason of this post is: I realized that it is really hard for people, even other RPG players, to follow things you say and write about EVE, because many things work so differently in the game – or work similarly, but have totally different names.
I haven’t written much about my EVE adventures recently. I spent most of my time at Low-Sec Camp, which means impromptu fleets and fun fights with pirates. In fact, I had enough fun that I rather played than wrote about it. I didn’t even mention the event where we killed two capital ships worth 2 billion ISK (and therefore 4 months of subscription time on the market) each. Some people have too much money… I also didn’t mention the dedicated PvP Drake I had bought just the other day, then nearly lost in a surprise gate camp. All’s well that end ends well, though; we got out unscathed.
I already had nice plans for the weekend (mostly involving shooting pirates), but you know how it goes when you plan ahead. When I came home last night, I found a notification in my inbox that told all alliance members that another alliance had just declared war on us. That sets into motion a 24-hour period until the war goes “hot”, at which point the members of the two alliances are allowed to shoot at each other everywhere, even safe high-sec.
Incidentally, that will also mean shopping for ships will get a lot harder. Coupled with the fact that I also might lose more ships, I went on a shopping spree last night and spend almost a quarter of a billion ISK on a bunch of blackbirds, drakes and a few frigates. Figured we’d probably have many pilots with fewer skill points that would fill the frigate roles on most fleets.
Oh yeah, the warmongering alliance in question is Red vs. Blue. It’s the roof alliance for two corporations that are constantly at war with each other to learn and practice PvP in high-sec. (Though I assume they ended the war with each other before declaring it on us.) The war declaration letter was a bit weird, I would’ve expected this to sound more like friendly banter between two training corporations, but oh well. Not quite Mittani level at least. I think Cyndre just said he joined the Blues of Red vs. Blue. I wonder whether I’ll get to shoot at him. Or, definitely just as probably, whether he’ll get to shoot at me.
Non-MMO Weekend: Gray Matter
Posted in General Game-related Blathering Tagged Gray Matter, Jane Jensen Comments (6)I used to be a huge fan of Point-and-Click adventure games. What I could get my hands on, I played in the 90ies. Sadly, the genre more or less died when 3D came around. (I hated 3D back at the time, not only because I blamed it for the death of adventure games, but also for the hideously blocky models that replaced beautifully crafted 2D sprites. It took years until the 3D models were even close. But that is another story, and shall be told another time.) Grim Fandango probably was the last masterpiece, though I remember Gabriel Knight 3 to be a lot better than people remember it for these days. Not that it reached the glory of the first part of the series. But I’ll attribute that at least in part to the 3D graphics, which just couldn’t tell a story as intensely as 2D for many years.
Which brings me to Gabriel Knight, and its main designer. Jane Jensen has done marvelous work, and if you’ve never played any Gabriel Knight, go and do so! Please. If you can stand the pixels these days. Take the first part, it’s probably still the best. Jane Jensen has a knack for interweaving science and facts with paranormal fiction, and it shows in many of her works, such as Gabriel Knight and Gray Matter. Religious studies, voodoo, and New Orleans; or history, templars, the grail, and southern France (years before Dan Brown).
The story of the production of that game is quite complicated. It was supposed to come out many years ago, in the early 2000s. After a lot of back and forth, and near-deaths, I lost track of it at some point, thinking that it had been scrapped for good.
I just can’t keep up with stuff. Gray Matter was released 18 months ago, and I totally missed it. Thankfully, Jane Jensen is getting ready to start on her next project, and she set up a kickstarter, which I conveniently was pointed to by… I can’t remember who? It might’ve been spinks, she had written a post about Jane two weeks ago. So I went there, liked what I saw, and immediately pledged $30. A real adventure game by someone with a good track record? That’s worth the 20-odd Euros to me. It was then that I realized that Gray Matter had not been canceled, after all. So I ordered it, and had time to play it this weekend.I’ll keep this description spoiler-free, or at least free of anything you won’t learn in the first 30 minutes of playing.
I said Jane has a knack for interweaving science, facts, and paranormal fiction, and she does it again this time. The main characters (and the two you take turns playing) are Sam(antha) Everett and Dr David Styles. Sam took me a moment to get used to, she was a bit too gothic for my taste in the beginning. But it blends well with the story, and her history as girl with a troubled youth, and street-smart street magician/con-woman works out quite well. When her motorbike breaks down, she happens to end up in the mansion of Dr Styles, a neurobiologist who became a recluse after the death of his wife, and, as you will learn, is maybe a bit too obsessed with it, even several years after the fateful car accident.
Maybe a bit too large and pretentious for my taste, but I'd still take it if I got it for free.
Again, David’s model heavily relies on stereotypes: his phantom-of-the-opera-esque mask that hides the disfigured part of his face was maybe a bit too much. The game revolves around two main goals: get Samantha an invitation into the prestigious Daedalus Club for Illusionists in London, and find out what really happened the night of the accident, and what’s behind the mysterious sightings on David’s deceased wife in the mansion.
The characters are maybe not likable, but they work well in the story, and you can’t help but become at least a bit attached to them. The strength of the prior games, faithful representation of the town in which it plays, seems to show again: I’ve never been to Oxford, but I’ve seen photos, and the skyline looks very much like the real thing.
That's Oxford alright.
In adventures, story is the point that decides whether they succeed or fail (style can be a close second). The story, again I want to say in the case of Jane Jensen, works very well; and that’s coming from a person who’s neither in King nor Brown nor any such stuff. It might not have the pull of the first Gabriel Knight, where around day 4, I simply could not stop playing any more, but I still liked it. It was captivating enough that I played through the game in two days.
There are a couple of smaller things that irked me. First, some things felt more American than English to me. Do they say “cell phone” these days in Britain? Then again, the Brits maybe just tried to be polite toward (US) Sam and used the American word. And second, sometimes it felt quite arbitrary whether you had to “do” things or whether “knowing” was enough. In many cases, you simply had to read or overhear things to use the knowledge later on. However, in other cases, that was not enough. For example, in one case, you had two lists that you had to compare to find a missing name. It required you to tick all the names on one list, so that Samantha would note how was missing. It was not quite clear to me I had to do the ticking; but you needed to do it to trigger the next puzzle. These are all smaller nitpicks though.
Difficulty-wise, it was about middle of the road. I only got seriously stuck twice, in which cases, I looked up what I was missing on the Internet after about an hour. One was a “how stupid of me” moment, the other a “that didn’t make that much sense to me” moment. I probably would’ve figured out both eventually, but I’m such an impatient person! I wanted to know how the story ended.
Overall, it took me about 12 hours to play through the game. I’d say it cost me about as much, per-hour, as a hardcover book, and it was worth that to me. That’s for the “Collector’s Edition”, which comes with additional goodies, one of them the soundtrack on CD. Which was worth it: the score is very atmospheric (done by Jane’s husband Robert Holmes, who also did the music for the Gabriel Knights) and well done, and I still catch myself humming the song “Safe in Arms” that plays a vital role in the story.
If you like adventures, and live behind the moon like I do, pick up the game now. If you don’t want to spend as much money, amazon.com seems to have a cheap digital download version. Oh, and definitely have a look at the kickstarter project. Of all those that I’ve pledged so far (ok, that’s not been that many), this is the one I have highest hopes for. After seeing Gray Matter, I increased my pledge to $50. That’s how much I liked it.
Pilgrimage to the EVE Gate
Posted in EVE Online Tagged CSM, EVE Gate, EVE university, fleet, lore, PvP Comments (0)There are games rich in lore. The richest is without a doubt LotRO, because it can tap into back story filling tens of thousands of pages. Games that have been running for some time also tend to collect quite a bit of lore over the years. I was told Everquest has an impressive amount, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about that game.
In contrast, EVE Online’s back story is paper-thin. At some point, people developed interstellar space travel, by through a wormhole that opened close enough to earth. It was called the EVE Gate, and it led into the New Eden system. (As far as I can tell, the EVE Gate wasn’t a stargate in the game terminology, but rather a wormhole). At some point, the wormhole collapsed, took most of the New Eden System with it, and left the humans on that side stranded. From that point, the factions started to develop.
The remains of the EVE Gate.
Or something like that. It all seems a bit hazy to me.
Anyway, I had spent a week in the Uni’s Low-Sec Camp (LSC), practicing PvP in small ships. I managed to offset my embarrassing loss of an Industrial hauler with many kills of small and large vessels. What I missed though was large fleet travel. The LSC is mostly about small skirmishes, rarely more than 10 people. So the event last weekend came as a welcome change. The Uni organized a trip to the New Eden system in Low-Sec. The tradition is, once you’re there, to burn away from the entry stargate towards the collapsed wormhole as far as possible. You can never reach it because the object doesn’t actually exist, it’s merely a background texture. Once you think you’ve gone far enough, you anchor a can with a personal message at that point. (The anchoring means it’ll stay there for a couple of weeks instead of hours before it goes poof.)
[More text and pictures after the cut.] read more…
I said in my not-so-enthusiastic review about SW:TOR that I would probably buy the game if I could get it for less than 30 Euros. I’ve been checking amazon.de every now and then. The box price kept inching slowly, Euro by Euro, to the 30 Euro margin. Not without a few strange setbacks – sometimes, it would cost 3 Euros more than the day before. Finally, I found this price yesterday:
So I kept true to my word and ordered it. I won’t have much time to play at all in the next week or two. I might not even sign up with the free month until then. Actually, the main reason I ordered it now and not at a later point is logistics: there will be some troubles with receiving parcels for me, starting from next week. I won’t go into the details, because they’re utterly boring, but bottom line is, my convenient way of picking up orders that were delivered during the day on my way home in the evening is going away. The alternative would be to pick them up the next day in the main post office, which always has at least a 30 minute queue. So order last night it was.
Thuul: if you read this, I’ll probably be up for a bit of TORing soon.
Post-Easter Rollercoaster Ride
Posted in EVE Online Tagged EVE university, General Stupidity, Pirates Comments (0)
No, not that one, though the fair is in town.
I’ve been slacking a bit on my updates about EVE. When I last wrote about it, I had just gotten accepted into EVE University under the new and much simpler ruleset, and spent a lot of time setting myself up. After which I spent some time in the mining camp and made a decent amount of money. I should probably do that more often, especially with the expected rise in mineral prices that will happen after the next patch (when they’ll remove mineral drops from most of the NPC enemies). But, to be honest, while I like mining, it can get boring after a couple of days. I was looking for other things to do.
How I Got My Egg Basket Blown Up
How’s that for an Easter analogy? (Alright, alright, a Euro into the pun jar.)
I returned home from a family weekend on Sunday evening, just in time to catch a class. “Low-Sec Hauling”. Ooooh! The great outdoors! Running through the equivalent of countryside a couple of centuries ago, mostly empty and peaceful, but with the occasional highwaymen. That sounded interesting. We got taught a couple of the important basics (use a cheap ship until you know what you’re doing, fit it with warp core stabilizers so you’ll be able to get away from many gate camps, etc.), and off I went. I spent Sunday and much of Monday running back and forth between regulated high-sec and lawless low-sec, leaving pirates in the dust several times. I was invincible!
You know what happens after such delusions of grandeur take grip. You’ll be humbled, big time.
I started my Tuesday evening in Jita (the main trade hub of the EVE universe) with my low-sec hauling ship. I had gotten some good deals on courier contracts the day before, coming from Hek (a secondary trade hub). I was looking for something worthwhile to transport back there. Sure enough, I found a decent courier contract, and filled the rest of my cargo space with some commodities. I programmed the flight computer to get a route, and got going. I jumped, and jumped, and jumped. Jita, Sobaseki, Iyen-Oursta, … my after-work slump was setting in, but I was in the flow of hauling. Space Trucking, baby! Ambeke gate, warp&jump. Criele gate, warp&jump. Rancer gate, warp&… wait a second. Rancer? Rancer?!
… Oh crap.
Now for those of you who don’t know, Rancer is a well-known system in EVE. It is one of the maybe 15 or 20 I can properly spell, even though I’ve never been there. In fact, I know it well because I’ve never been there. Rancer is an infamous pirate system. It probably is the most infested system in all of EVE. You never go there, unless you bring a lot of guns, and friends with even more guns. How on Earth did I end up here?
- It is a low-sec system, so I typically have the autopilot set up to avoid them altogether. Flying a low-sec hauler, I of course disabled that safeguard.
- You can configure the autopilot with a handful of systems that it is to always avoid. I was absolutely positive that I had put Rancer onto that list. It should be the very first system on that list, right? Well, yeah.
- I had foolishly assumed that routes would be symmetric. I hadn’t flown through any dangerous low-sec areas from Hek to Jita the day before, so it should be the same reasonably-safe route back, right? Guess I learned that the autopilot doesn’t work that way. (Though I’m still not sure why.)
- I typically check where I’m jumping to. The last failure in the chain of events was clicking before reading.
When I realized mid-warp that I was about to jump into the pirate capital of the universe, I frantically clicked buttons… Abort, abort, jump to somewhere else, do anything! But to no avail. I dropped out of warp right next to the gate, and immediately jumped through before any of the other commands registered.
Sure enough, I was greeted by almost a dozen pirates on the other side. They were too many, so they scrambled my warp drive before I could get away, then played around a bit with my ship before blowing it up.
Ouch. I will not link the killmail, it’s rather embarrassing. I lost more than half of the money I had saved up with that mistake. I cannot really blame anybody but myself though. The loss was the result of a chain of stupid mistakes on my side. It’s not like the pirates came out of their system to gank me in high-sec. I probably would’ve been annoyed in that case. No, I jumped right into their backyard to say hello. It’s mostly annoying because I lost a large percentage of my ISK. I’m not that rich though, so if I want, I can just go and buy two PLEX for about what I would spend for a decent dinner, and end up with more than I had.
I guess “be careful” isn’t a lesson you learn by reading, but rather by doing.
My First Fleet, And How I Nearly Saw A Carrier For The First Time
The whole encounter left me with a bit of sour aftertaste. I decided the best to make out of that was to fit another low-sec hauler right away and get started again, to offset the bad experience with some more good ones. I did a couple of low-sec runs, but ended up in another heavily populated low-sec system. I was really happy when I managed to get out of there without any issues. I felt like I maybe needed a day or two to relax and not risk as much. The ship isn’t too expensive, but buying all the modules to refit it is annoying, and I tend to have expensive implants in my pilot that aid skill learning speed, but are lost when you get blown up. Thankfully, a class came by that evening that talked about fleet mechanics, with an extended practical part. So I jumped into the prepared implant-less PvP clone, bought a cheap frigate and fitted it with some even cheaper tackling modules, and joined the class. Blow up, get blown up, it doesn’t matter if all you lose is a million ISK or two.
There hadn’t been a lot of fleets out of the EVE University’s home station for some time. A lot of the more PvP-inclined people have moved into a special low-sec camp recently, so there was little going on in safer space. In no time, we had almost 50 people. It took a lot of time to get the fleet together, mostly because the professor went through all the steps of forming a fleet in great detail. I can’t say I followed all of that, because I was missing some basics, but I think I got the gist of it.
Then it was time to undock. Off went our kitchen sink fleet (no specific setup, everything was welcome except the proverbial kitchen sink). Some of us learned our first valuable lessons: the difference between an “offensive” and a “defensive” gate camp (never had heard of that before), and that “warping to a gate” is not the same as “jumping through the gate” (I got that right and didn’t jump early! Yay me!)
The EVE University Educational Kitchen Sink Fleet sitting at a warp gate. Well, at least the part that didn't jump through instead of warp to it...
After two jumps, our scout reported unusually high activity in the low-sec system we wanted to visit as part of the training. Ooooh, pirates! We gotta shoot pirates?
Sadly, no. It turned out that, while we weren’t quite sure what exactly was going on, it was definitely a size or two too large for our fleet. There were a carrier, another capital ship, and a lot of support gathered in that system. It seemed they were quite nervous when they realized there was a 45-people fleet sitting one system over – we got the occasional scouts checking in on what the hell we were doing sitting at that gate.
Our Fleet Commander made his discussions with the Scouts public to the whole fleet (not something that happens every time, I was told), and the way they went about figuring out who was in that system at which time, and why, was pretty impressive. Most of that went over my head at first, but our Fleet Commander did a really good job of explaining to us how they went about gathering the intelligence.
This is were we sat for almost an hour, listening to the class in space.
So, in the end, no shot was fired, but it was a nice first experience. Our Fleet Commander / class lecturer, Turhan Bey, was a very nice person, and my hope is that I’ll fly in fleets with such people for the most part. He was definitely the antithesis to the “ugly EVE griefer” stereotype.
I think I should read up a bit more on the introductory Fleet classes, to be prepared for the next time I might have a chance to fly around in a fun edu fleet.
OMG OMG Preorder OMG OMG
Posted in General Game-related Blathering Tagged The Secret World Comments (2)
Hear ye, hear ye! Gather round, fellow Templars!
It has been brought to my attention that the preorders for The Secret World have started. With quite an interesting preorder system:
The basic game costs 50 Euros, with the by-now expected pre-release beta weekend events, a day or two of head start, and some in-game cosmetic fluff. In addition, you’re allowed to reserve a character name. You then have the choice of several additions:
- The Initiate Pack at an addition 15 Euros: some high-quality starter items and some more cosmetic fluff.
- The Master Pack at 60 Euros: 30 additional days of game time included, an additional name reservation, even more cosmetic fluff, and a lifetime 10% reduction on all items in the item store (yes, there will be an item store).
- The Grand Master Pack at 200 Euros: a lifetime subscription to the game.
- Additional character slots and name reservations at 10 Euros each.
To make this list even more intuitive *cough*, The Grand Master Pack includes the Master Pack, but not the Initiate Pack. So a lifetime subscription of the game, plus the maximum fluff, would stand at 265 Euros.
Breathe. Breathe. It’s ok, we got you. Breeeeaaaathe.
Now see, that’s much better.
Thankfully, it was already announced that the lifetime subscription will be available for a limited time after the official release. That will give me time to actually look at that game. So for now, it will be the basic game for me. I won’t have to do a leap of faith. Which is good, because I’m horrible at leaping. And because I know that, however excited I am about what I’ve seen of this game, there is a high chance I’ll be disappointed. Not so much because it’s Funcom, and they have a bad track record.
No, rather because, the last game I was so excited about before release was… Vanguard.