Friday, October 14, 2011

Been even longer

Well I do want to start by saying sorry for not posting in a long time.  In truth I haven't really been on very much in last month or so.  I have leaned quite a bit more skills and can fly quite a bit more ships.  Truth be told every time I log in I am not really sure what I want to do and get bored after a few minutes.  This may come down to the fact that I am in a two person corp and we seem to log on at opposite times of the day.  I also suppose being the CEO of the corp if comes down to me to try and find others to include into the fold.  But therein lies another another issue that I seem to have with this game; commitment.  I will at that point need to make a larger effort in personal investment into the game and the corp.  Lets be honest I do not expect to be playing this game come December 20th with SWTOR is released.  So that might be the true underlining detriment to my focus of the game, I know I am just on borrowed time.

However on a more positive note, my step-son has picked up the game so I might be inclined to log on more to help him out and show him the ropes of PvP.  So there is a possibility to doing something like that with the corp.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

All is quiet...

Sorry I haven't posted in a few weeks.  To be honest I really haven't been online very much.  With the pre-order  of Star Wars: The Old Republic things have been pretty crazy on that front.  However I have been keeping my training up, also been trying to decide on what direction ship wise I should be going.

I finished my training of Minmatar Frigates V so I can now fly all of those T2 versions.  I am currently working on medium projectiles 5 so that I can use T2 guns for a nanocane fit.  I am hoping to get some PvP in this weekend.  Think I might move one of my jump clones down there just to make going back and forth quicker.

Monday, August 8, 2011

And then there was two.

As I had mentioned I have been around for a while and as you can imagine I have met people during my time.  I see the alert stating so and so has logged on or off.  Well there is always one name that catches my attention and that of an old friend of mine, JessyJames.  So one day I decide to to send him a mail verifying if in fact that it is still him.  Well he answers back stating that it is and best of all is he referred to me as J and not Jadark.  I knew instantly that this was him.  After talking for a bit he decided to join up with me.  Now my corp has two members.

I guess a little history here between the two of us.  He was my mentor in pvp many many years ago.  My second day in EVE and took me out to a low sec to do some pvp.  For a long time we flew together and were very successful together.  We never had to say anything each other we just always knew what the other person was going to do and just worked together in harmony.  When I was speaking with him he had said he missed flying with people he could completely trust in the heat of the moment.  He mentioned all the kills he was getting in FW and was getting close to 4000 kills and something like 2000 solo kills.  So next thing I know he is sending in an application and I am flying down to Black Rise.  All of this is kind of amusing as he was my former CEO and has much better corp skills, in fact he has the skills to form an alliance.

So we finally meet up in Black Rise and he is telling me all about FW missions.  Now I had enrolled my corp in FW the previous day so I am ready to rock.  He grabs a mission and we head out.  I am a little nervous as this is my first time back on the hunt in over a year.  He is telling me all about the changes and how insane the Dramiel is.  Now I am flying a duel web Hookbill but I am still not sure I want to face a Dramiel.  He is flying a Tengu setup for blitzing/pvp, so small and quick is not what I see, not now anyways.  We get to the first mission beacon and things are going good mission wise.  Suddenly I see a red Dramiel show up on my overview.  Mumble under my breath in disbelief, of all ships this has to be my first encounter.  I see in comms from Jessy, "Go get him."  Well it is time to see what I got, I select the Dramiel, set orbit to 5000m and target him.  He is burning in fast so I don't bother with my MWD, as soon as he is in range I fire off my scram, both webbers, and my rocket launchers loaded T2 rage rockets.  I am watching my shields drop but his is dropping slightly faster.  I am getting pretty nervous as I know for a fact that I am shield tanked, however I have no idea about him as I know nothing about the Dramiel except is is fast and deadly.  His shields drop and now is the moment of truth, time to tell for sure if it shield or armour tanked.  His armour starts to melt really fast, he is about half way through armour and my shield dropped.  At this point I know he doesn't have time to switch out ammo and my EM resists should hold out.  Then finally boom a nice explosion and a little pod in overview.  I try to target but he gets away.  I swing over to the wreck and take what I can fit in my little cargo hold and tell Jessy to take the rest.

Sometime during that fight it looks like Jessy had finshed off the mission objective and tells me it is time to head to the second mission.  We jump to the next system over and I am starting to get back into the pvp feel of things.  As I am warping to the mission gate I noticed on directional scan a Coercer.  I notify Jessy and he simply replied back that guy wouldn't have a chance against us.  A few moments later I see in local some one yelling Leroy Jenkins.  Suddenly as expected is the Coercer but about 15km from me and moving away.  I pulse my MWD and close to range, dual web, scram, and rockets all on.  Less then 3 seconds later I am targeting his pod.  He choose to take the time to say "GAY" in local which gave me enough time to finish lock and promptly pod him.  We had been back together for 15 minutes and already had two nice kills.

Afterthoughts-
Honestly I am not a huge fan of the Hookbill fit I used.  I will admit it is much much better then the one I was using, considering I was mission spec'd.  I have since built another Hookbill with some slight changes.  I decided to swap out the MWD for an AB to keep my constant speed up.  I also decided to close up that huge EM hole in my shields.  Seems every ship I have fought so far is using either fleet EMP or Scorch.  Overall I like the Hookbill, it is a cheap decent little ship.  I am tempted to go back to a bigger ship but I do want to keep costs down.  Soon I should be able to fly the Wolf/Jaguar, actually all the Min T2 frigates.  Figured since I have AF V I might as well take advantage of it.  Then from there I will need to decide if I want to do Min Cruiser V or Amarr Cruiser V.  Can't decide if I want to go Vagabond or Curse/Pilgram.  I might spend a week to learn T2 projectile(which I will have to do for Vagabond) and mess about with a Nanocane while I learn either one of them.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Picking a Direction (for now)

So now that I have myself and my corp standing high enough with Caldari State to join FW the first phase has been completed.  However before going this direction I need to try out a few things.  I know I really want to PvP but before I completely drop my standing with other Empires I should take a care of a few things.  First order of business is to fly back to Gal space and sell off my old assests as well as trade in my Fed Navy LP.

While flying around and moving things about I think maybe I should try out being a hauler.  So I do a little research and find there are websites that show some good trade routes.  One such route was to buy T2 Cap Batteries in Jita then fly to Amarr and sell it there.  I guess the buy orders in Amarr for this item was almost double the sell orders in Jita.  So I load up my Badger II and make my way to Amarr.  Once I get there and excitedly open the Market window only to find out that the buys orders are LESS then what I paid for them.  I was pretty disappointed especially flying all this way.  I took my losses and thought about how I could make this work.  I guess I could make a couple of alts and stick one in each system and compare prices.  Then came the real realization; do I really want to be a hauler and go through all that.  No I don't, I don't want to be a hauler, I don't want to be a miner.  I want to blow things up.

My next idea was to do something I really really love to do, Exploration.  Exploration was something I did for a long time, and something I have been doing for a long time.  I started doing exploration back when you dropped a probe, then warped to the signal, then dropped another probe, then warp to that signal until you finally had it.  When the new system came(first iteration) I caught onto it very quickly and found myself the resident expert in my alliance.  This also gave us a pretty good jump start into the wormhole business.  From the first day that wormholes came into existence I lived there.  I actually made a pretty good chunk of ISK in there.  So I figured I would go back to my old habit.  I found my trusty old ship that I used for such occasions.  It is a Drake fitted with T2 Heavy Missile Launchers, Salvager II, Sister Core Probe Launcher, Analyzer, Codebreaker, various T2 shield mods for a monster passive tank, and full set of T2 drones.  I was able to solo up to C3 wormholes in this beast I named 'Spelunker'.  So I fit my pod inside and undocked, then turned around and redocked because I forgot to grab ammo and probes.  Once I was fully fit and loaded  I went about exploring.  After a while of scanning systems I finally found a system with two 4/10 complexes.  So I ran the high-sec plexes pretty quickly.  All said and done I got some pretty nice mods and sold them for about 75 mill.  Not to shabby if you ask me.

So after selling the loot in Jita I was playing around in the market screen and it occured to me.  I can buy and fully fit a Tengu, but I would have to sell my Falcon and Raven.  This was fine as my Falcon has never seen combat, well once, and I have never even undocked my Raven.  I have a Nighthawk so I never had a reason to use my Raven.  So I buy and fit out my Tengu and decide to test it out on some lvl 4 missions.  I fell inlove instantly with this ship.  I could not believe how awesome signature tanking can be.  Now I actually bought this ship for exploration as with out the scanning bonuses on a ships I was forced to change ships occasionally as in the Drake I would only be able to get 90% locks on some sites.  But after blitzing lvl 4's in the Tengu I forgot all about exploration.  I think I might become a professional mission runner.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Mercurial by Design

After being in several corps (two to be honest) and doing everything from mining, WH, exploration, mission running, low sec, NPC 0.0, and deep sov 0.0 I can say I have tried it all.  So with that I can also say EVE has a lot to offer.  Strangely there are many times I have left the game because of boredom.  EVE is a game that requires motivation, either self motivation, or forced motivation.  If you are in a good corp with lots of people you like then there is an abundance of things to do.  But that left me with another issue, time.  When playing with others you really need to play at around the sametime for about the same lengths of time.  That becomes sort of an issue with me as I don't have a structured time.  I will log on at roughly the sametime, mainly because I work the same hours everyday.  But I may not log on everyday or stay on for very long as I have other things in my real life I need to attend to.  So when I do find a good group of people I feel hesitant to volunteer for any major roles as I can't commit to them.  Then after awhile I do get the feeling of being an outsider.  Now this wasn't always the issue, at one time I was single and lived alone.  Back in those days I basically lived my EVE life more then my real life.  Even once dropped an ad in Craigslist seeking a woman who must have cap ship skills and/or fleet bonuses.  I did get several responses, but they were along the lines of "I don't know what this EVE is but I am really good at Pac-Man."  So in essence I know what it is like to be part of a large group and play a major role in it.  However I just don't have the time to really do that anymore.  So I struck out on my own, well after leaving game for a long time.

Mercurial by Design is born.  Mercurial is one of my all time favorite words.  Even better is it really describes my EVE playing habits.  Not only does is cover my playing time, it covers what I want to do.  That is I have no idea what I want to do and I might change my mind at anytime.  So I really was forced to go my own way as I will always want to know the direction of my corp but I will want it to change cause I will want to do something different.  What I know is that if I wanted to do missions or FW I wanted to do it for Caldari.  So first order of business was to grind faction.

So after about a year, 10 months of it my account was cancelled, I have the standing to join FW for Caldari.  So now I am at the crossroads.  I have all my paths open to me...and me alone.