A Black Hole Anomaly

A Black Hole Anomaly

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

UPDATE (Final?)

The WH op is not dead, but it's moved and renamed. My blog Free2Kill (just click on my name and look for it) will be carrying on from long after this one left off. We were drove out of the C2 with C4 static, the alliance kicked us, I spent a few months in null, we reformed, and we're back in WHs.

LOTS HAS HAPPENED!

It's almost umbelievable the stuff that's happened. I've sold my two main characters in order to maintain my presence in the game and am now using my third character as my main. Disco Jack, and Pheonix Summers are not mine anymore :S. My current characters name is not being hidden and is Haunting Widow, I originally created her as a pure pvp character, to give me freedom during times when i was stuck doing carebeary alliance things. Refer to the above to see how that ended up :P

BUT, things are doing really really good. I'm back to living in a C4 with some old and new faces. This character is just reaching 10mil SP (Believe it or not, it's the highest SP I've had to date on any character) and I'm running three accounts for which I've somehow managed to grind enough isk to pay for in plex most months. And well.. selling characters...

I commonly refer to myself as "Haun" in the new posts as I am in fact a male (with a female character) and if I write about myself in character it's just better I try and make it closer to my own gender.

I'm writing this post as I've just opened up my profile for viewing and I thought this blog needed a closing post. Free2Kill is where I'm putting my attention, it's also my personal in-game chat channel, feel free to stop by, but reports of excessive flaming or douchbaggary will result in my needing to moderate the channel... so please, don't act like 4 year olds.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Project escalation

The WH project is going very strong, we've started farming C4 combat sites with 5 and 6 pilots at a time. We've got more alliance involvement and are now hosting the WH to several other POSes belonging to the alliance.

I need to step up the blogging, so long since my last blog just isn't acceptable.

I may move my focus for the Blog, or just link saying I've moved to a different subject seeing that now I am the CEO of my corporation and am mostly involved with the logistics of keeping things running smoothly. I've finished all the learning skills on an alt which I will be using to do nasty little things that my alliance does not condone. Inspirations taken from "my loot your tears", and the band over at Suddenly Ninjas, as much as I despise seeing you guys pop up onto my mission field, I admire the concept, and am training a pvp-capable ninja looter right now as well as an orca alt on my second account.

The orca is 39 days away, but I'll start with canflipping and general highsec hooliganisms soon :) You'll be hearing about this alts adventures soon I'm sure!

P.S. Education is great, I'd never tell someone to play video games instead of getting an education, but now that I'm working on my second degree... damn I wanna play instead of doing research haha.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Gaming style follows lifes necessities.

I've moved out of the WH temporarily. I've got final exams approaching and passing these two courses will say the final mark on finishing my physics degree, so yeah, I won't be able to check DScan enough to live comfortably in WH space for the next few weeks.

Things are developing though, we're recruiting more pilots from the alliance into the operations corp. A new director has been been put into place to help share the load of responsibility and access that tend to eat up our time so very much :p

I should probably mention I'm a pretty new player, my main character was made just prior to Christmas 09, I did have two accounts but sadly due to financial limitations at this time I've had to discontinue my 2nd's sub and am working on gathering the isk for plex. Thanks to a loan from my CEO I'm ready to purchase the time I'll need to remain training through exams, hopefully with the added skills I'll be able to put on an isk rush and buy the next months while working on paying him back.

My spec is all memory and intelligence, I'm focusing on all the support skills I think I'll need for the year ahead before I remap and the lack of combat skills has severly hindered my ability to make not-so-dangerous isk. Not anymore!

Just a few days ago I finally got into a nice new Dom :). Worked up my drone skills to get up to T2 mediums and T1 heavies and I'm off to attempt my first l4s. Thank goodness drones are friendly to my current remap. My tank skills were all worked on previously but being the industrialist I let a few skills slip, like energy management which I am working at getting IV as soon as drone interfacing reaches IV itself.

When I return I'll be sporting a heavily tanked and RR capable dominix for our opening and farming of our neighboring C4! The team is really excited about our static C4 and we are collecting the necessary skills, ships, and pilots to make more isk and have more fun than ever.

The lowsec static C2 was a learning experience, it got us used to sleeper combat and living in seclusion and the difficulties sometimes involved when you get three T3s and HACs dropping in on your mining operation seemingly out of nowhere haha.

Sometimes I think the WH op is expanding (or trying to) too quickly for the alliance. I do trust that the alliance will help the op through slow times since WH has considerable value for the alliances future in T3 production.

I noticed I have a follower now. Thanks for being the first :) I'm posting from my iPod now so I haven't checked to see who you might be but I was thinkng today I need to get out and commenting on other blogs if I ever want to get some real exposure.

Going to try to keep posting here and there while studying, my reports on the WH ops will be from a distance for the next few weeks, but as the founder of the operation, I will of course return and see our plans through. I just need to afford to get there :p

I'll check this out for grammer later, I don't think I'll blog from the iPod browser anymore, anyone know a decently priced or free iPod app that works well? Some of the reveiws I'm seeig report lots of bugs and crashes, i see enough of that runnig eve haha, not paying for more in an app.

Peace.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

From grapes to raisins

Of course what I'm referring to here is the WH drying up. We've had 1 non-wormhole signature in the past several days and it's beginning to wear on us.

One member has had to be removed from the operation due to a lax in discipline resulting in the loss of multiple grav sites, needless to say, this has contributed to the current situation in which we find ourselves.

We've all got more experience now in the WH and in WH life so we're looking at expanding the operation. After deciding to move out of the WH and seek out a more difficult/rewarding dwelling, we've come across a C2 connected to empire, a C4 and a C6 (All non-K162), needless to say we're very interested in seeing what the statics are so I've parked a scanner in-system over night. We still nee to move some 2.5+ million m3 of ABC ore out of our hangers in our original WH.

With a growing alliance and hopefully more WH-Ops members soon, we're planning on moving into a highsec static WH, a higher class WH, or (fingers crossed) both. Farming neighboring WHs has kept the income flowing, but on many days things have been quiet and slow within our little slice of unknown space.

I've personally been taking a break from full-time dwelling since I have exams approaching but I still never seem to keep away from the WH for more than a day. Mostly it's been head-down, timer set (3 minute alarm repeat), and mining what Scordite I can from Sinq Laison. I bought a PLEX with a down-payment from an alliance mate and still need to work that dept off.

Our POS has a Lab now too :) Which is increasing interest in the operation and giving it something to do/contribute all the time and on slow days, I myself have added a few BPOs for research while I work on production efficiency 5. Nothing big from me, just some ammo types and riggs that I am going to use to convert my salvage and ores to isk instead of selling the base mats outright.

I know it's been a while since I've posted, I had an especially hard time thinking what to write after we had some internal troubles, it can be difficult to rant and keep the peace sometimes haha.

I'm still around though, and I'll be posting for the blog until I leave a post saying otherwise. As it looks now though, we are only expanding, and have yet bigger plans for the future.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Of the Alliance and Other thoughts

Like many of my fellow EVE players, I grew tired of my initial NPC corporation very quickly. NPC corps are boring, they are good for the mining/production solo player, or for that scanner alt you use in Wormholes to hide your true identity, things like that.

So when a player applies to our Alliance after being in an NPC corp for nearly 2 years, you really have to wonder. The timing doesn't help either, one war ending, another expected to end soon. We're not sure why people keep wardeccing us to be honest, they spend most of their time cooped up in stations with us watching them, and hunting/locating their buddies.

The Alliance was birthed from a mining corporation, maybe that has something to do with it, people think you're weak and so they attack what they assume are a bunch of industrialists. We have a lot more than just industrialists though, and with a strong financial back-bone that runs from mining and production to wormhole ops and regular PvP, many of our members aren't afraid to lose the random ship, to take a mate and chase a war-target until someone loses a ship. I've lost some, I've destroyed some, it's the nature of EVE. My first kill was an absolute adrenaline rush, mining and industry are simply tools to pay for the fun!

I had an interesting conversation with a war-target recently, an Alliance mate and I were chasing him down and had him hiding in a station. We spoke in local and he came out with the equivalent of "that's hardly fair, ganging up on one person like this", I suggested he take it up with whoever the idiot was that began the war if he thought things were unfair.

I can see how so many players find EVE invades on their personal lives, I too am finding it difficult to prioritize with EVE around. Incredibly addicting, very cool, a cinematic experience, but it is still just a game, or so I keep trying to tell myself.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Blog Maintenance

Today I am cleaning up the blog, I could not figure out where these erroneous spaces between the lines of text were coming from until I looked into the HTML, wow what a mess. Being a new blogger I was trying out different texts and sizes and each change I made created additional spaces in my blog. I am slowly sifting through the code now and fixing the errors.

Expect a cleaner blog shortly.

EDIT: Appears to be the same if I remove all the HTML completely.. odd, this post itself has NO HTML in the editing feature... Would someone please let me know if any of my posts do not show correctly in your browser/reader? Whichever ones do not, I will adjust them to fit the same style as the ones that do show correctly for you.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Give a little, take a little

Our little piece of W-space has been extremely busy lately. Escorting in new pilots, making fuel runs, mining gravity sites and fending off intruders. The latter has kept us especially busy in the last 24 hours.

An old corp-mate of mine from my last corporation was around so I invited him into the corp and the WH operation, he arrives at the last empire jump-gate, to my surprise, in a Dom. This pleased me greatly since we could always use another BattleShip (BS) for closing of wormholes and for fighting when necessary. We're usually very up on our sleeper sites so npc contact is pretty limited right now. We scout him into the WH without issue, although we had a close call with a Covetor and a Dramiel.

The new dweller fits his Dom to help with the mining and proceeds to make tea for himself, unfortunately for him, this is exactly when things begin to heat up around our lowsec connection.

Myself and a pilot close to me are returning from a quick jaunt to empire with a much needed logistics cruiser and a few skill books. As we approach our W-space's entrance my overview lights up, turns out our present entrance is directly between two of IT Alliance's territories, and a few of them fancy some cat and mouse with what few players we have online.

I call out that we've got company, and everyone who's not AFK immediately jumps to safety. The two of us returning take our time to cloak up, align, and get to safety at the POS. Then our newest arrival says what we all dread to see, "Oh shit, I'm dead.." I, hoping he's just saying that in panic, ask him if he's really dead, podded, or still trying to warp out.. Turns out they set onto him like a pack of wild dogs and devoured his Dom whole. Frustrated as anyone would be after arriving to the system and being blown up from self-error, he logs for the night and we kick up the alert level.

D-scan is completely bare, not sure if they were employing Project Poseidon or not, but one thing is for sure, there were a lot of cov-ops in system. The ships that we happened to notice consisted of Enyos Manticores, Hounds, at least one Nemesis and an Oneiros.

Scouts reported enemy ships leaving through the WH so after several minutes we tentatively restart operations. We swap the Covetor for a Retriever, I keep an eye on the WH, and one of our aspiring PvP pilots gets into a Rifter and fits for combat especially for the Hound, which seems to be the invader that most enjoys toying with us, flying in and out, warping in not cloaked even though he had a cov-ops fit.

The operation recommences with our Rifter pilot flying in and out of the Grav site, systematically flying around the system and checking Dscan. The Rifter pilot returns and orbits around the ships and asteroids, my guess is hoping to catch a cloak unawares when suddenly the Hound shows up again and starts to tear the retriever apart.

The Rifter jumps on the Hound but not in time to save the barge. The barge goes up in splashes of molten metal, but now the Rifter has the Hound in his clutches. The Hound zigs and zags trying to shake the Rifter loose, at one point it looked like he almost succeeded but the Rifter pilot adjusts from orbit to approach and the two look not unlike a snake writhing in a fire. After only a minute or so of battle, at least 4 other enemy ships show up on grid to find the Hound burst into flames, the Rifter, already damaged, succumbs to the force of the reinforcements.

We lost a barge, and a frigate, but return to the station with our pride intact, and congratulate our corp member on his first killmail, a very good start to a career that I will watch very closely. He admits that he did mess up towards the end of the fight and thinks if he had his wits about him he could have possibly escaped ship-intact, but the thrill of the hunt and the surge of adrenaline of his first intentional PvP fight fuzzed his thoughts. Now that he's had a taste, I believe he'll show improvement and clearer thinking, despite the yea-haws I heard and expect to hear more of, over the voice chat.

I looked into the killmail too, the Hound pilot was a 2003 player, our Rifter pilot started playing in Dec. 2009, a feat worth mention. We've ordered him new parts for a Rifter and the leader of the alliance is thrilled over the situation, even considering the loses.

Despite the thrills and the pride we find in our pilots, I do hope we don't need to see this much action in the future. A few combat pilots are being flown in from the war though, just as an extra precaution.