Member of the EVE Tweet Fleet

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

PLEX for Good Deadline

  Just a quick reminder, the deadline for PLEX for Good: Japan is almost here, March 31st. So far, it seems we capsuleers are a great bunch and have gotten 1400 PLEXes or more donated to the cause. That's $21,000 and all you had to do was donate your pixels. That's awesome, guys and gals. My corp was able to get 6 PLEXes and is in the process of donating those now.

  And one of the coolest stories coming out of this disaster can be found here. There is some strong language, but the story is pretty BA. I am taking a SCUBA class myself right now and this just makes me want to be like this guy.

  Great job guys and keep up the good work
-Mem

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Meet Your New Overlords

  Well, not really overlords. But the CSM 6 roster has been chosen and posted. Just glancing at the first couple slots makes me cringe and give a bit of a:


  Why? Because 5 thousand fools voted for the Mittani and his cronies. Whatever progress was made with previous CSMs is going to be undone in a matter of weeks. Goons are goons and I really want nothing to do with them, much less letting them tear down the CSM. Some will just say that the CSM is a joke and does nothing, that CCP nods and smiles like a father that's tuning out his child. But Goons will just make a mockery of things. That and Roc isn't on the roster...that makes me sadpanda. When some pretentious dbag can get on simply because he has too many minions and someone that actually wants to make a difference isn't....

  Anyways, the list:
  • The Mittani
  • Seleene
  • UAxDeath
  • Trebor Daehdoow
  • Killer2
  • Vile Rat
  • White Tree
  • Meissa Anunthiel
  • Draco Llasa
  Seleene used to work for CCP, on wormholes specifically so I am really hoping he does something good. People seem to really like Vile Rat so I hope that works out as well. But, for myself at least, I am not really optimistic.

  What are your thoughts?
-Mem

PS. Just got my 300th kill. Pretty neat, even if it wasn't anything special shipwise.

Monday, March 28, 2011

New ADHC Vid/Clear Skies 3 Full Trailer

  Just saw a post from one of my corpmates, Asay'anami Dei, who is our in house video wizard. He makes us look all cool and deadly. It seems he's been hard at work and has another video out now, so I wanted to bump it and show you what we've been up to.



Do the evolution from Asayanami Dei on Vimeo.

EDIT: This may actually just be an re-upload of an older vid to Vimeo. That site is much nicer than most. Either way, you can tell I'm too lazy to check.

EDIT Dos: This far into my blogging, you've noticed I'm terrible and tend to edit things constantly. I'm OCD it seems. SO! I also found out that Clear Skies 3 has a full trailer out. Wooooot! If you haven't watched Clear Skies 1 or 2, it's a must for Eve players. Great writing, great execution, funny as all get out. I'm pretty psyched.



 Enjoy ;)
-Mem

Friday, March 25, 2011

If It's Too Good to Be True...

  It seems there has been something of a devblog "leak". Why quotations? Because in my mind, this kind of thing has to be a troll, although quite elaborate and well done. Supposedly, the information for an upcoming expansion called 'Unity' has been leaked with a metric ton of goodies. Not the least of these is new T3s with no more skill loss, new market tools, supercap rebalancing, etcetc. 


Real or massive troll?

  I'll leave the decision up to you. Personally, I am leaning towards fake, but hoping so hard it's not. There are things on there that make me drool so very much and would make Eve that much better. The list seems too long for a viable release, it would be too many new features at once that will cripple Eve with bugs. That's not to say it can't come out in staged portions, but the way this has been presented still screams TARP to me.  Seleene wrote it? Orly?


  You know what they say, if it's true good to be true then it probably is just that. As for me, school is getting into overdrive for this next month and I have reignited my geekness (you know..besides playing interweb spaceships) with some old school RPG action. I'll be here...probably just not as often as we would all like. Of course, I am still active and having quite a few adventures lately in Eve. Perhaps I'll stop being lazy and tell you about them soon. Ever made 3 billion ISK in one night legally? hehe Tale for another day, dear reader.

  -Mem


Saturday, March 19, 2011

Weekend Vegge

  I am quite possibly the worst student. Ok, maybe not the worst, but I am certainly terrible at being productive. So I make up for it by being productive in Eve.

  This weekend has started off quite well with a carrier kill that makes me cringe. There were a few smaller ships, one that Mech even got to help kill. He has been training to be more capable in combat lately, so today was the day he bought and fit a Harbinger. That's pretty cool to me, because it's the first time I've flown a big ole' laser boat. I did refit my Myrm to lasers, but that hardly counts. He's ready to fight players or Sleepers and I think it's awesome to have an ammo that never runs out. Until I can use T2 crystals that is. I also put fittings onto a Noctis that I bought for my solo excursions, a pretty awesome ship to have along. It's a bit annoying that it takes most of the Orca's ship array, but whatever.

  Mem has also been progressing quite nicely of late. His T3 skills are rounding out, working on level V for all subsystems. It's training intensive, but definitely worthwhile. I still find it crazy how Mem is not even a year old and is already rockin' a Tengu. While I may get frustrated by many things in my life, at least Eve gives me a sense of accomplishment, even just pixel accomplishment.

  I have also recently moved into the darker dealings in Eve. I know a guy who knows a guy, you know? I may slip a few nuggets about that here and there. But of course, opsec needs to be tight with such...activities. You understand. Let's just say, nearly having a Machariel blueprint in your hands is adrenaline inducing...the failure sucks.

  Next week, I'll be back to stress filled days of painting and all sorts of educational dealings. So thankful there's only a month left of it...wait.....crap, it's gonna be crunch time.

  If I don't show up for a month, send a search fleet.
-Mem

Friday, March 18, 2011

Solo Frig Fighting

  Welp...it's official. I utterly fail and I am kinda starting to dislike soloing. I fail at it, hard. I knew this already, but I tried a lot recently and failed hard.

  A corpmate had the awesome idea of a frigate dueling league. This combines the awesomeness of frig tourneys with something a little more long term. You can challenge anyone that has signed up and use any fittings up to Tech 2. You get a ref to check your fits and go at it, all with rankings and everything. It got me pretty fired up and I brought in 4 or 5 frigs to fit and challenge others. Within a day I already had a couple people challenging me, ironically.

  My first fight was in my Tristan, a ship I really miss and love. I was up against a Kestrel and confident in being able to take it down. Little did I know it was armor tanked and ate straight through my tank, even as I overheated my repper. My first loss.

  My second fight, I tricked out a Merlin since I am heavy in Caldari skills. I made some wrong assumptions and went against a Rifter that blew me into dust. Fail.

  Third in line, I'm looking for blood in an Imicus with a fit I thought was clever. Again, made wrong assumptions since my opponent nearly always flies Caldari. Turns out he also came in an Imicus. I stupidly didn't attack his drones with mine, but it was a close fight. We both ended in structure, but again my loss.

  And tonight my last humiliation. I fitted a Rifter with Gallente/Caldari Ewar and arty, sporting a MWD.
It was an interesting fight, I was able to get 50km on my opponent and had him jammed most of the fight. But I wasn't doing the DPS I needed and wasn't cap stable. So when he finally grabbed a lock on me, he lit up neuts and his ACs, wiping me out completely. Depressing.

  So I think I am giving up on solo. At least in frigs, I may go at it for cruisers or battleships if we go that high. It's fun and I am definitely happy to have fought, I went in with some crazzzzy fits. Thankfully our KB doesn't track those losses since it's against corpies, even in BattleClinic does. This certainly makes things a little more interesting than POS spinning, even just watching is awesome. It's a wonderful way to try your hand and test your skills as well as vent at each other by blasting faces.

  If you find me in a frig and watch me immediately warp away, you'll know why. I never trained much in such small weapons anyways, so I'm kind of at a disadvantage. Perhaps I'll change that in the future.

  All fun at the end of the day
-Mem

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Put Your Pixels to Work

By now, we have all seen the reports and footage of what's going on over in Japan. It's not good and it's going to be a while until it starts getting better. But that doesn't mean we have to wait to do something about it.

As with previous disasters, CCP is instituting the PLEX for Good. Times are still a bit tight for some in the current financial environment, but that ISK you've been stockpiling isn't going anywhere. Why not do real good with fake money? My corp is kicking money into a pot and buying as many PLEXes as that will allow us to donate. I salute CCP for the effort and generosity towards those in need. The money goes to the Red Cross to help the victims in Japan and I can't see anything wrong with that.

I won't push the point too much, since there are other blogs and sources asking the same. Just wanted to encourage some good will towards fellow man in whatever ways that are available to us.

Take care
-Mem

Friends in Unknown Places

  I have had one of the funniest and more endearing encounters in my Eve career, short as that may be. But of course, we must set the scene.

  Today, my normal night class allowed me to skip. So what is my natural tendency? Eve time. I really need to work more...but I digress. We scanned out a new connection to our home system and began our normal routines in scouting.  Within minutes, one of our scouts had a bomber throw ordinance at him and diplo channels opened up from the locals. They were curious as to our intentions, but friendly from the looks of the convo and revealed themselves to be part of the Gentlemen's Interstellar Nightclub alliance.. Even so, we are in wormholes and NBSI so we don't mind grabbing kills if they present themselves. We ended up playing on the highsec hole with their hauler and bombers until eventually, our guys got lucky.

 Well, the link to Empire space was near Dodixie, so I decided to have some fun in Kspace with my shiniest new toy. I also wanted to be a bit profitable in my endeavor so I took Mech out with his Orca and Mem in his Tengu and started scanning systems. I guess while I was out, our man soloed them again. I found a nice highsec to highsec hole that plopped me near Amarr, something I was quite happy about. Then I found one to lowsec..not so enthused about that one. Finally, I jumped another system or two and resolved a C2 wormhole, inhabited by one Russian POS with only one visible pilot. So I set up and got to work on a few anomalies, testing my new ship. Of course, it's a Tengu so no sweat, but soloing wormholes is quite stressful when you have to watch Dscan on two screens and make sure nothing goes south.

  Fast forward to a bit of a disappointed ending, too few nanoribbons in my opinion. But at least I am alive and making some ISK. I headed back out and saw in chat that our home connection was dying. Good timing. I made my way back with the lumbering pair, glad that I wouldn't get locked out. Just before I got to the transit system, our camp caught yet another ship. But the entire time we were there, they were good enough not to smack in local. Gentlemen indeed.

  So I waited on our home connection for our guys to get bored and go home so that I didn't crash anyone out. Nothing much happened so I idly tapped Dscan and saw there was a hostile Tengu in system, one I was told is a command link booster fit. Interesting fits all around. So I mirrored my Tengu's name to the hostile one for kicks. A few minutes later, my corpmate is cautioning us that there are 2 hostile Tengus. I chuckled and informed him, to which he replied that I was changing it yet again. lolwut? No I wasn't. Checking Dscan, I found my twin Tengu changing his name every couple beats.

Original: CR Nexus
Variations: Russian lettering of C and backwards R Nexus
                     C Nexus R
                     C® Nexus
                     and so on.
  I found this amusing. Then I got curious. And I changed my ship name:



  I didn't think anything would come of it, but then again you should never assume. Later I noticed local: [03:43:16] Madner Kami > copycats, I'm gonna sue you next time :P



  LOL. Welp, I wasn't going anywhere so I continued.



  A surprising and funny proposition. I wasn't sure how it would go, but quite willing to try it out. The pilgrim was my corpie getting in on the fun.



  It continued for a few more, and I think I lost because I don't normally play with a grid that has designations. I'm no chess master. The conversation kept up over ship names and Dscan,  until I mentioned the blog post worthiness of this and my corpmates began crashing. So I bid farewell to my new friends. 

[04:01:07] Memoocan > Check my bio for the blog. You have made me smile and thus shall be in it ;)
[04:01:35] Memoocan > Anyways, off I go o/ Take it easy
[04:01:36] Madner Kami > yeaha, I amde it into someone's blog \o/
[04:01:38] Madner Kami > bb o/
[04:01:40] Memoocan > haha


  It was quite a cool encounter and good way to end a long day. Thanks Madner, you're some cool cats o/

-Mem


Monday, March 14, 2011

Free Willy

  Mech cursed as he saw the wormhole collapse behind him. Not good. Mem was not going to be happy when he found out that Mech had gotten locked out in the Orca. With only a nullsec exit. And all of Mem's ships in the Orca's hangar, save one or two. Mech cursed again.

  He took a few glances at the screens that glowed in front of him, taking stock of the situation. One of his corpmates came over comms.

  "Nice one. Well there is a connecting wormhole, class four, that you can get into. It's your best bet at this point, just get a deep safe in there."

  "Roger, I'll keep you updated. Mech out."

  He closed comms to think about things. Luckily he had current bookmarks for what he needed, so he got the Orca rambling into motion toward the class four connection. It seemed that the tower in that system was dead, no trouble to be had from the locals.

  As he came up on the wormhole, he noticed the symptoms of a hole that was half dead as well as coming to the end of its natural life cycle. Oh good. Well there was nothing for it, so he jumped in and watched the hole shrink even farther. At least that would cover his backside for a while. He needed to wait it out instead of risking a collapse on the wrong side, so he initiated warp towards the farthest planet  and set the computer to mark random places in between. It certainly got his blood going to be trapped in hostile space with so many assets, unsure of his surroundings. Now it was time to wait.

  As he bounced off the planet and made it into his safe, Mech engaged the cloak. That was as safe as he was going to be for a while. So, he made his way to his bunk with instructions to be awoken if anything came up.

  ------

  The probes made their way out into distant space as Mech waited. It had been quite a few hours of waiting for the hole to die, but now the new one was up. It was difficult to narrow down with a mass of signatures in the system.

  Eventually, though, he found it with the probes that were mounted on the Orca itself. He made his way onto a shuttle in the Orca's array and set off to check the new system. As he materialized on the other side, he ran the normal programs and gave a grunt of satisfaction when they showed the system to most likely have a highsec exit.

  So back he went, getting the Orca and making his way back to Empire space. The Vargur on directional scan was a bit worrying, but chances were it wasn't even piloted at this hour. It seemed his luck was in in so many ways, with the exit showing up near Jita.


--****--

  So I was tired and had been missing out on awesome fights most of the day which got me a little testy. Not a good mix, let me tell you because when it came time to roll our static connection...I decided it'd be a good idea to use to the Orca. Well that's fine normally. Not on a hole that is already half dead, however. So it went boom and I got stuck, but now the Orca is safe with all my valuable in highsec. Close call though, so a bit of advice from me would to not be rash about things. Especially in wspace, where things are a bit more...chaotic.

  Lesson learned.
-Mem

  

Sunday, March 13, 2011

First Encounters

  When I wrote the title to this post, I thought hey, that'd be a fun series of posts to do. But I'm not sure if there are many things I haven't seen in Eve now. Perhaps I just don't know I haven't seen something. Or something.

  Anyways, I finally got to see my first supercap fleet in game. Many people see these behemoths on the daily, but when you live in space where they are not allowed you can get a little giddy at the chance to stare like a country lad in the city.

Ain't they purty?

  Our scanner had found the new connection to our home and we were exploring it, finding a few other connections along with the Kspace exit. He hopped into the lowsec system to see if we were close to anything and noticed an Avatar on Dscan. It was in the Rancer pipe, so we were rather curious. Shortly following that, Nyx after Nyx appeared and the list started to grow. We thought the Avatar was getting jumped and hoped to get in on the killmail. So we jumped into cloakies, I chose my Falcon of course, and headed out with high hopes. What we found was pretty cool, even if we didn't get an awesome killmail. Two POSes were filled with Avatars and Erebuses, Nyxes and Aeons. It was incredible and the first time I've seen titans, much less a plethora of massive supercaps. I found it pretty neat, even if I do have the opinion that supercaps are too prevalent and able to project too far. 


  It was fun watching for a little while, but we got bored and headed home to roll the connection. I logged soon after since school is whipping me hard. Later, though, a second connection opened into our home and we found it in time to see a Domi trying to crash. It was halfway dead, so we needed to be careful. We jumped a bunch of pilots in, tearing into the polarized battleship. The funniest part was when we were trying to figure out who got the KM. I got it \o/ It was the first time I got one in my Falcon of all things. Fun times. 
  
  I've been stuck in our home system for too long with a string of bad connections lately. I want to get out and do some good ole' carebearing, make some ISK and whatnot. Perhaps soon, for now killing things in wspace sounds good to me :P

  What was your last "first"?
-Mem

Thursday, March 10, 2011

POS mechanics

  I just got back from time with the fam and my lady, just wanted to make a quick post since I'm not feeling well.

  For those that are running for CSM and looking at issues to address, please take a hard look at POS mechanics. Everything from T3 refitting to hangar logs, etc. That last is especially important when you have to live in wormholes where everything is basically available to the community without a way of tracking what goes where. The last thing I want to find is that I log in and my ships are gone. It's one thing to die in glorious battle, another altogether to get stolen out from under me.

  I think I remember hearing CCP mention that they do want focus on wspace a bit more sometime soon...hoping that's true.

  Also did a little hunting of a familiar name today. Shout out to Nashh Kadavr, although we didn't get any tasty killmails. He's rather smart when it comes to knowing what to look for and how to not get ganked. Maybe next time ;) Asuri says hi, too.

  Anyways, I'm going to go rest because I have lots of work to catch up on in the next couple of days.

o/
-Mem

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

PL Leakage

  It seems PL has been hacked, courtesy of TEST alliance, and access to the Eve Foreplay has been given to the public. Eve Foreplay was a part of the forum that was only open to paying customers, a much desired part it seems. Well, the mirror is now available, and PL's spy strategies and intel related posts are worthless and their dirty laundry is going to be the talk for a while. Makes me so happy I never got into the drama that is Nullsec. Have fun with the board while it lasts, who knows how long it will stay around.

  I wasn't able to get in on the recent blog banter thanks to spring break, I may catch it up soon. But this event just goes along with my opinion on alliances. Too big and need to get pruned down to a size that makes Eve a little more interesting, instead of just throwing caps at each other until the other side loses.

  Also, there seems to be a live Dev Blog or some such in-game tonight at 22:00 UTC if you're interested.

  "The next Live Dev Blog from CCP will focus on Fiction and Content in EVE Online. This broadcast can be heard in-game over EVE Voice in the Live Dev Blog channel."

-Mem

Monday, March 7, 2011

Duck Hunt

  I am now back from my Spring Break. I can say we did quite the job and have one soon-to-be house owner quite happy. This is what we got done and how we left it:


  It may not look like much, but considering all that was there when we showed up was the concrete foundation I would say we did a good job. Especially since only myself and 4 other students worked on it with some geezers, while 8 others went to a different site to paint. Oh yes, what a hard time of it they had :P 

  So when I came back, I wanted to recover and veg. Eve is naturally my choice for that. It seems I was in time for a big event.


*************

  For quite some time, my corp has been playing a POS bash. Normally, we drag our feet because we hate the monotony of such activities, but this one was special. We found the wormhole home system of one Duckeye, a guy that lives in a C4 with his 13 alts. Seriously. That's gotta be some form of sociopath. Why is he special? A while ago he thought it would be really cool to dec the Uni multiple times and sit outside of their HQ being a dbag. So the Uni has a tendency to take that stuff personally and doesn't mind payback if it is available. Well, being the friends we are with them we proposed a bit of a joint effort. The Uni loved the idea and we spent this weekend executing the plan.

  Essentially, we scanned the routes and let our own pilots in first to set up a beach head so the Unis didn't have to worry about much. As we did so, the Uni got a nice blob together and I have to say I'm not used to being in those anymore. It was a bit intimidating even though I was there only a few months ago. Wspace molds you quickly. Anyways, the connections couldn't handle 100+ pilots so we had to scan a couple different routes to get them all inside.

  The funniest part came as we were still onlining our POS and the Uni wasn't there yet. Duckeye convo'ed a pilot of ours and started asking our intentions when he saw us in kspace. Then when he found our POS in his system, a couple characters in his POS started self destructing everything they had. Literally, we hadn't even gotten our force field up and he decided to not even try at escape or home defense. Kinda sad, I was hoping for good fights and there were rumors of a carrier. But this op was mainly for fun, teaching and revenge. So we watched as tons of T1 frigs, haulers, BCs, BSs, and even a Legion popped inside his shields.



  After we brought in the blob, we got them organized and finally started incapping his defenses, which weren't up to the challenge. I had to go to sleep at that point, but the next day I logged in to find the Duckeye POS rape caged and in reinforced with 9 hours left. Such a short timer. So while we waited, we chewed the cud with the Unistas and had trivia games about wormholes with them. Since these chances are rare for them, we also ran them through some anomalies and gave practical lessons on wormhole life and mechanics, something I think they really enjoyed.

  In the end, we downed the tower and arrays in record time. It's nice having countless battleships and smaller hulls pounding relentlessly in a torrent of laser flash and missile barrages. The loot was pitiful, but that was to be expected. The most important part was having fun on a joint op and helping Unistas understand a different part of Eve. I guess they thought so too. So remember, the Uni has a long memory and it could be very harmful to you if you think it'd be fun to attack them. Their blob is bad enough, but they have friends in many places.

  Exfil was timely and we were able to remove all our assets without much trouble. I was able to employ Mech with set up and tear down in an Orca, always happy to put that training to use. The Unistas went first and we made our way out of the now clean system. I'm sure if anyone is looking to move in we could make a deal for the right price.


The next couple are thanks to Honsou Blackblade of the Uni:


  Not a bad way to come back into New Eden, eh? Alas, I have neglected work that I really should have been doing before school kicks back in and murders me. Oh well...it's not like I'm paying ridiculous amounts of money for it, right?

-Mem

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Lime Light

  I was working on toe-nailing trusses into the house's walls today when my pocket started vibrating. Not that way you dirty person. My brother was calling so I let it go to voicemail. I had a few minutes between so I listened to it and cracked up.

  Turns out our next episode made a bit of news:


  That's pretty cool. Got me excited at least and made the work go a little faster. Those guys were awesome to talk to and I hope to do so again some time. Wanna listen? Here's CK's post about it and the subsequent link. Sorry, I'm still off building houses so I will have to keep it short. Hope you all are doing grand.

  See you soon!
-Mem