Monday, January 31, 2011

Vengeance Served Hot

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.
--Douglas Adams

I should be finished with Assault Frigates V today and, per my earlier mentioned timeline, am now ready to fly AC fit Vengeances.  It seems only fitting then that I bring to you this tale of my first outing in a Vengeance.  It was over two months ago now, which clearly shows that I wasn't ready for the hull yet at the time.  Sometimes new shiny is just hard to resist, and I hadn't yet adopted my 1 year skill plan and set dates for when I would be ready to fly what ships.  I just saw that I was able to train Assault Frigates and so I did.  My first one lasted about 5 minutes.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Morale Boosts

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
--Douglas Adams

Having faced a few defeats of late in larger (read more expensive) vessels, I had finally settled on the sound advice that I should stick to my Punisher until I truly had the skills for something else.  Deciding that packing a little extra firepower was never a bad idea however, I had fleeted up with a Corpmate in a Rifter to try our hand at a two-person-roam.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Math is Hard

Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.
--Douglas Adams

I'm actually pretty good at math.  At least, I better be since I've devoted my degree and profession to it.  However, it turns out that there's some math I needed to learn to play EVE.  Being who I am, there was only one way for me to learn this lesson: The Hard Way.  The math lesson, which I will now share with you is thus, "Frigate(T1+T1≠T2)".

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Stumbling Into Success

Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.
--Douglas Adams

I had only just completed bookmarking my new home in Molden Heath and started going out for some solo roaming action in my trusty Punisher.  It only took me two jumps to find it.  Sometimes even the most undeserving of us manage to pull off some kills when we have no right to be doing so.  This is one of those times.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Old Alliances Betrayed

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
--Douglas Adams

Getting acquainted with our new home has been interesting.  Setting up bookmarks everywhere, learning which of the locals were dangerous and which were easy prey, who baits and who hotdrops.  It took me a bit by surprise when I spotted some familiar faces out there.  Seeing a couple of members of the NC Alliance I was a part of for my first month of EVE, I decided to see what they were up to.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Prisoner's Dilemma

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.
--Douglas Adams

Having recently seen my own attempts at ransoms rejected more and more and then seeing Druur Monakh's comment I decided to explore the topic in a bit more detail.  So this post will include thoughts on why we ransom, why we betray ransoms, and why the ransomee so often responds with details of where Pirates can best stick their ship.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Everything I Need to Know About EVE

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
--Douglas Adams

Looking over some of the stats on the blog leads me to one conclusion.  You are far more interested in posts in which I discuss things about EVE in general than tales of my exploits in blowing up.  This is clearly evident when I look at this post which has more views than all my other pages combined.  So, with that in mind, I have good news and bad news.  Bad news is, I'm still going to be posting quite often about my personal exploits in the game.  Those posts probably help me more than you, because it allows me to look back on mistakes I've made and analyze them in a detailed manner so that I don't make them again in the future.  The good news is, I'll try to break them up a bit with posts like this one, where I'll discuss some more general aspects of game play and how you can apply it to yourself.

Head Full of Metal

Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized that she must be exploring her subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was really clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.
--Douglas Adams

As I promised Toterra in a previous post, I'm going to give my opinions on implants from the POV of a lowsec Pirate.  A lot of these same things will apply to high and null security space, but then again a lot of it won't.  Also if you haven't read any of Toterra's posts from Scram Web go check him out.  He's been at it about 2 years, but does most of his dirty work over in nullsec with Agony Unleashed.  They offer PvP courses to anyone that's interested in learning, which is something I've never participated in, but commend them for the service to the EVE community.  I'd also like to point out that his links to my posts on the first day my blog was posted on Eve Bloggers were a great source of initial traffic for me.  So, thanks Toterra, hopefully I can return the favor someday.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

If it Ain't Broke...

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
--Douglas Adams

I now interrupt my regularly scheduled programming to bring you some comments on discussions at other blogs. I'm already a little late to the party, and adding this to the end of my queue of scheduled posts means it won't get posted for a couple of weeks.  What discussion am I talking about you ask?  Well, start here, then read this, and finally end up here.  Once you're done with those, join me back here for my own thoughts on the topic.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Moving Day

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
-- Douglas Adams

I wasn't the only one who had noticed just how blobby our local space was becoming.  It didn't help that we were competing with a couple other well known Pirate organizations for what few scraps were left over.  Space is big though, and one of the advantages to Piracy is that you're not really tied down to anywhere in particular.  The leadership of the Blood Money Cartel had already scouted out some new regions of space that looked promising, and after a couple days spent looking them over, official movement orders came down the pipe.  As a sure sign this was a good idea, a 50 man fleet decided to park itself in our old home system for over an hour on moving day.  I tried getting a fight out of them on local, but to no avail.  I think they were French.  Primarily because they wouldn't fight me, but also because most of their bios and Corp descriptions were in French.  Come to think of it, maybe that was the primary reason.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Holy Referrals Batman!

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
-- Douglas Adams

Having added myself to Eve Bloggers I was hoping to see some increase in page views.  At the time of this writing, I went from 6 (which were all bots and webcrawlers) to 427.  In one day.  Thanks for those of you who posted about this blog on your own.  I also enjoy the comments, and will try to respond to those that want a response.

With the added site traffic, I guess I should figure out some way to pace the blog posts.  I'm actually a little embarrassed by the way Eve Bloggers' stream basically was taken over by my posts, since they all came in such a short time.  Going forward, I'm thinking about a twice weekly scheduled post.  Thursdays and Mondays are sounding good to me right now since, well, tomorrow is Thursday and I always like having new blogs to read on Monday when I'm bored at work.  So now, without further ado, more tales of people dying horribly...not all of them me!

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Crafty Little Bugger

The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.
-- Douglas Adams

After an in depth look at the Punisher fit I'm using and how to combat various Rifter tactics in it, here's a fight where none of that mattered that makes me look like I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Yeah, like we didn't know that already.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

She's a Brick. House.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
-- Douglas Adams

I recently mentioned my lovely Space Brickof a Punisher.  I thought I'd go ahead and talk a bit about some advice for flying it.  You can either heed this advice, or realize that it's complete lunacy furnished by a failure at this game and do exactly the opposite.  The choice is yours to make.

Obligatory New Year's Post

Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so.
-- Douglas Adams

It's a brand new year in EVE online.  I thought a bit about what/if I wanted to post concerning the new year.  Year in review?  I've only played 3 months.  New Year's Resolutions?  If I stop being so utterly fail I won't have anything to post about.  I finally settled on posting what I hope to be accomplishing within the next 12 months.  A timeline of personal goals if you will.  Hopefully having it to refer back to will provide me more things I will have failed at as their deadlines pass, which will mean more things to post about.  So please, join me on this look ahead.