Who is Retribution for?

I've been out and about a bit, finally back in the US, in my apartment with my wonderful wife, my amazing bed, my brat of a cat, my Keurig coffee maker, and most importantly, my high-speed internet. I also got a new laptop that was absurdly expensive and so far seems to have been worth the price.

Now, aside from doing a few missions and just looking at every single ship in the game in high quality graphics for the first time (I love the look of the Manticore with all the graphics on high..such a beautiful ship..), I haven't been doing a great deal on EVE. I've fiddled with the new release, but I haven't put it through it's paces yet, but I have still been reading the blogs when I'm not spending time with the wife or taking the cat to get a very expensive operation done because drier sheets are just oh so tasty. Something I've noticed is that people are on the fence about which group Retribution is for..if on the fence was a see-saw and people tended to crowd on each side so that it's balanced out. Now, just as a heads up, I'm not double-checking to make sure I'm actually right about this, so everyone may be on the side of "It's for pirates" and I'm just speaking out of my ass. Won't be the first time, won't be the last.

Now, assuming my distraction-addled brain is correct, (75% chance), the main two sides are those of pirates and those of the noobs. Now, the short answer is that it's pretty much for both, and CCP seems to have done something fairly right, which seems to be a new trend lately ever since I joined EVE Online. I joined almost immediately after the Incarna release, so it was a turbulent time, but I haven't been around for a release that would turn me into a bitter vet. Crucible, Inferno, Retribution..they may not have been perfect, but some people consider Crucible one of, if not the, best releases of EVE history. Inferno may have messed up some of the FW, but it was a good release, especially for a Caldari user like myself, and Retribution..It's a bit soon to say, but everything seems good with it so far, and I have yet to really hear of/see any new game-breaking things.

Now then, the point: Who is CCP working for? The noobs? Certainly, they need it most, but that is not to say CCP is catering to them. Pirates? Yes, in a fashion. Carebears? A bit, but I wouldn't say they are the main focus. The vets? I wouldn't say so, but they've come to expect it, and many don't mind because their focus probably falls into on of the other groups. (Again, my opinions are my own, and probably bad.) Miners? A bit. Indy? No, not really in this expansion. Ratters? Yes.

Now, I'm sure I missed a few, but let me explain my choices for my answers a bit:

Noob pros: New destroyers, able to kill someone for stealing from a can even if it's not yours, 
new mining frigate, more powerful lower-level ships to be able to help in fleets better, better info from hovering over your icons, weapon safeties, probably a bit more. All of these things are noob friendly, and that's not bad.

Noob cons: More skills, can't just join a higher level mission and sit in the room and add dps or salvage anymore due to NPC changes, and...umm..huh..well, it's still EVE, so it's still difficult to do/learn to do anything at all.

Pirate pros: All bounties wiped out, gate guns no longer attack if you warp away and come back and they don't attack drones (apparently), bounty pay-outs are most likely significantly lower for any success, camera focusing on selected objects (for D-scan purposes), new destroyers, free rights to kill anyone for stealing from a can, more powerful lower level ships, and probably a bit more. All of these things are pirate friendly, although some are double-edged swords, and again, this is not bad.

Pirate cons: Easier to place bounties on anyone, any corporation, or any alliance, bounty pay-outs are most likely significantly lower for any success, everyone has rights to kill you for stealing from a can,  and probably more.

Carebears pros: Mission enemies might attack any pirates they decide to come into the room with you, drone rats now drop loot and sec status (I think, it was either sec status or bounties, and I think they already did bounties).

Carebear cons: Mission enemies have changed behavior leading to needing to make some changes to mission plans for multi-boxers/people helping noobs. Missile changes, enough said.

Miners got the new mining frig and can run away better if need be.

I'm tired for writing in this format. Anywho, as you can see, the changes help a lot of different people, and hurt a lot of different people. A beautiful example of give and take, and I'm perfectly happy with it. Did I catch everything? Hell no, and I'm okay with that. I'm sure I missed a lot actually, but oh well.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go look at more high quality ships and possible kill some mission rats with my neutered Tengu.

o7 Fly safe, if that's your thing.

Another month, another post.

So, another month has gone by (almost), and so far no new information from me..BUT WAIT! That is currently changing!

Okay, enough Billy Maysing, I'm about a week from heading home and frankly I just remembered I had this blog. Not a great sign for the future of this blog but what are you going to do, right?  But yeah, less than seven days to go (hopefully, knock on wood, sprinkle salt, etc., etc.) until I come home to faster internet, a (hopefully) eager wife, a brat of a cat, and a miscellaneous mish-mash of exotic pets. I'll post pictures sometime, most of them are cute in some way, shape, or form.

Anyway, Eve: playing has been a bit difficult lately, internet is worse than usual in the past week and thus I've been dropping connection way too much to be comfortable playing in my usual low sec spots. Lately a guy and his alt or two have also been camping my preferred area, which makes it doubly troublesome, especially since only my main is combat oriented in any way, and my only alt is industry-based/about 20 jumps away. I can't really PVP with crap internet anyway, and from what I heard this guy isn't exactly easy to kill either.

Looking forward to Retribution, the inventory changes seem interesting (How can that comment come back and bite me? Find out on December 4th!) The new destroyers seem interesting as I've commented before, and the new bounty system could bring some promise, or not. The new UI seems good, but I haven't had an opportunity to try it out myself yet, only going off of videos and screen shots, so I could be talking out of my ass a bit (I am). Still, we'll see on the 4th and the following few weeks.

Well, I'm out, and that calls for the end of my update. Fly safe, if you want to.

o7 

Still Alive

It's been about 20 days since my last update, so thought I would make some kind of indication of my continued survival. I haven't been able to play a great deal of EVE lately, instead focusing on the RL stuff, but I have been keeping my skill queue up to date. My two characters are alive and well, as is my wife's, and I never let their skill queues get too hungry. Beyond that and the occasional market transaction or jump-cloning, nothing of interest has been happening. No newly lost ships, no interesting pvp (or any, for that matter), no new ship purchases, etc.

In short, at the moment I'm living up to my blog title.

Still, it shall not always be this way. I'm going to be getting a new laptop soon, as well as returning home to my glorious high-speed internet, and having weekends, and just days off in general..It's been almost nine months since I've had a weekend..Working twelve hours a day, every day for nine months, except for 4 days in a row about two or three months ago. That's about 269 days of working, give or take..

Anyway, that's enough of my self-pity.

But also playing EVE again, and enjoying that, and even getting my wife into it (hopefully.) So, I do have something to look forward to, and hopefully anyone reading this blog will as well.

Fly safe.

o7

P.S.-Warm showers with plenty of hot water..I miss those too.

An issue with planning..

So, I lost another Noctis the other day.

I had just bought it to replace the last one, made a few jumps, fitted in Hek, threw on some warp core stabs II in all three of the lows, and left to low-sec to go back to my usual area, confident in my abilities (This is what we call 'foreshadowing').  So, on the way back, I notice that I need to get some skill books. Unfortunately, Hek, as much of a market system as it may be, does not have skill books in the system for the base prices. I find a skill book system that's only a few jumps out of my way, set my course, and set myself to warp as I'm about to look at the maps to see what I can expect.

I didn't open them in time. I knew I should have checked them, but I warped before I could. In hindsight, if I had just docked up for a few minutes, or decided to drop off the Noctis and come back later with another ship, or this, or that, or all kinds of other things that seem like better ideas after the fact..

But I didn't.

I jumped through the gate to find some new friends waiting for me. An Oracle, a Legion, a Cynabal and a Hurricane all decided that they wanted to just have a rave directed at my ship. LASERS EVERYWHERE! I wish I had thought to grab a screencap of it, but alas it is a moment lost to the world now. Hopefully never to be repeated, at least by me. Unfortunately, they had at least enough disruptors and scrams to kill even my triple stabbed warp core, at least three of them disrupting my poor, poor ship. So I waited patiently as my new Noctis disintegrated around me..waiting..waiting..And then, for a brief moment it looked like they might ransom me, all damage stopped at about 15% armor and seemed to just sit there for a good thirty seconds or so...

LOLNOPE

My eve-mail starts to flash and I return to sighing in my pod and clicking the to station button, managing to escape with my pod intact once again. After that I get out of the pod and surf the internet for a bit, and then get back in my pod and check the map. In the past 24 hours, 35 ships had been destroyed. In the past 1 hour, 5 ships (Yay! I'm part of something) and 2 pods of people a bit less lucky than me taking the fast track to their station of choice, or at least the last station that they chose. After about half an hour of waiting, I decided to say screw it, and undock, setting my course back to my 'home' station. I get back to the gate, no one there. The flight home in my pod was uneventful. Mostly empty systems, no camps, and within twenty minutes I'm back to my preferred station, isk-kill ratio about 100 mil added to the red, but my ratio is possibly still green. I haven't checked recently.

I decided that I'm going to take a bit of a break from low sec, and clone jump myself into Jita to spend some time without living with risk to anything besides my wallet. I'll be back to my low-sec home soon though.

That's were all of my fun ships are.

o7

Temporary Hiatus

Well, considering I just found out that some people actually read this thing, I thought I would put up a quick post about my lack of posting. When I started this blog, I thought I would have a bit more free time, but alas, 'twas not to be. Being currently in a war zone, fairly inactive though it may be, still incurs a penalty on my playing time and ability. You can probably expect my posts to become much more uniform in a couple of months, but no guarantees. But, since I'm posting, I might as well post about something.

So, the new destroyers. So far I've seen the unofficial renders for the Caldari and the Minmatar one, as well as some very unofficial pictures of the Gallente and the Amarr one. My opinions* are based solely on aesthetic features, not on actual stats.

So, the first two, I have to say the Caldari one looks very nice. Asymmetrical, but not in a bad way, it looks like an aircraft carrier, a submarine, and a gundam had a threeway and this popped out. I definitely plan to fly that thing to it's death, but I also would love to see some stats on it.

The Minmatar one looks like it's preparing to tunnel underground into some cheesy underground lair..I'm not as big a fan on that one, but I'll have to see how it can hold up in game. Stats are a must before I say I will/won't fly it, but it doesn't look great.

The Gallente picture I saw looked good, kind of like a bomber/boat. I would definitely fly it, or at the very least give it a try.

The Amarr one looks like the art department is trolling Star War fans. It's a Star Destroyer, pure and simple. It looks interesting, but almost no actual details..Once they get it more worked out, I can provide a better opinion.

So, basically everything either looks like some kind of submarine or a drilling device (looking at you, Minmatar), and so far half of them look pretty damn good.

And now, for something completely different:
They are proposing some HML nerfs, reducing flight time, slightly increasing flight velocity, and reducing damage. The current proposed figures are 25% range reduction, and a 20% damage reduction. As someone who only flies missile ships, this has me a bit perturbed. It seems like a pretty heavy nerf, but I suppose we'll see how it gets handled.


*-My opinions are usually fairly biased towards Caldari, but as I can fly any T1 ships, it's usually not overly biased.

I now allow comments! (Or, I'm new at this, so there are some challenges)

After much stress and confusion, I finally managed to figure out how to allow posts on here. I know it sounds rather stupid, but it is, so there. Also, I would like to point out that this blog is a bit inspired by http://diaries-of-a-space-noob.blogspot.co.uk/, hence the name. I know it may seem like a bit of a rip off, but I assure you that it is only because I'm unorigional.

I'm still working on the layout a bit. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm working on making it a bit better and it is still very much a work in progress. As it was, my main issue was getting the comments section up, and all other things became secondary. The people need a voice! Whenever the people end up arriving, anyway..

I don't know what I'm actually going to chronicle with this journal..
PVE is done by some bloggers, and the missions can only be so interesting and different than the rest, so I'm not really planning on that.
PVP is much more interesting, expecially with killmails, but no guarantee on me even looking for that, much less doing it.
General politics is one option, but that can be and usually is handled much better by much more experienced people.

I'm rather good at sarcastic commentary, but usually only to my sense of humor..

Sarcastic commentary it is!

So basically what I'm saying is, don't expect too much, and I might not disappoint.

My first solo PVP experience (Tengu vs Loki, Tengu)

So, in my previous post, I spent about half of it telling you about my first real solo PVP experience. There wasn't much detail, so I decided to expand the story a bit.

Shortly after running two level 4 missions in losec with my PVE Tengu, I was salvaging the wrecks in my Noctis. I managed to get to room 2 of 4 for the second mission when suddenly a Loki warped in. Due to some stupidity on my part, I had neglected to watch local, so the Loki came as a bit of a surprise. He quickly locked and warp disrupted me, so all I could do is sit and wait as my ship was destroyed. As soon as I got the insurance mail, I was spamming warp even more than before. One Noctis lost, one pod saved, and one kill right gained. I quickly docked and hid, then gathered my courage, undocked, and one warp gate and two warps later, I was in my preferred station that also happened to have my PVP Tengu, based rather loosely off of an 100mn AB Tengu fit I found on Battle Clinic.

So, in an untested, not exactly cheap, never before used ship, I undocked, warped back to where my Noctis was, and I find...nothing..Nothing but the remaining wrecks from my mission. My Noctis is truly gone, and my blood lust is fired up. I know he is still around because I actually checked local this time, but I have no idea where he is and no probes on my hull.I warp to the asteroid fields, nothing. I check the stations, nothing. Finally, I warp to a random asteroid field and sit, waiting for the Loki to come to me.

Ten minutes later, I'm reading something on the in-game browser and suddenly I see movement on my overview. He's here! But he didn't warp in, he just appeared..Of course! He was in a Cloki! He's 15Km away, I immediately lock, disrupt, web, open fire with my HAMs and run my AB, setting myself to orbit at 15Km as he locks and disrupts my ship. My missiles are tearing into his shield, but slowly, most likely a shield-tank, but he's eating away at my shield slower than I'm eating through his, 425 IIs pinging off my shields. Suddenly, after neglecting to watch local again because I totally learned my lesson 15 minutes ago, a Tengu appears. Another damn cloaked ship, but a cloaked Tengu is a weak Tengu, but my shield is now taking a decent beating. I over heat my missile launchers, missile after missile flying to the Loki to make friends with him, web is off because I'm such an obviously smart guy at PVP and I didn't even notice what the range on it was, the Loki is snuggling with my ship, and slowly the missiles are burning through their circuitry. At this point, I have tunnel vision on the Loki, and I don't even know what the Tengu is doing besides trying to kill me somehow. My assumption is that his attempt involved missiles. My missiles are crashing into the Loki, and suddenly, I broke his tank! I'm past the 33%, closer to 25%! My missiles have stopped because I forgot to turn the overheat off! ****!

I'm not going to lie, at this point I was a smidgen worried. I may have broken his tank, but my Tengu is only faring slightly better, and now I can't even spit at him because I'm pretty sure even that meager offensive ability was burnt out. I try to warp, and no luck, my heart is racing and my warp core is disrupted. But my AB still works, and it isn't exactly small. point and click, sending my Tengu away from the asteroid belt, but the Loki is staying close. I still have no idea what the Tengu is doing at this point..I think he was playing in a corner somewhere, but I'm pretty sure he was still firing at me, just from a distance, but he doesn't have any points on me. If I can get out of range of the Loki, I should be in the clear. I'm powering my Tengu away, but I'm only 5Km from the Loki, and an unheated disruptor can hit about 30Km out. I'm far from free and a Loki is usually pretty fast, maybe not 100mn fast, but usually pretty fast being Minmatar and all. Suddenly, inspiration! In a tactic vaguely similar to pushing on a short person's head so he can't hit you, I turn on my web and push him away, my AB running unhindered while he's being held away from me. My web may run out of distance before he does, but it would take him a while to get back up to speed, and by then I should be away from his disruptor range.

My tactic worked, but only because of failures on their part, not really success on mine. My tactic would have worked wonderfully, and it did, but only because the Tengu failed to have any kind pf point on me. I only had one web, if he could have webbed me, or disrupted my warp core once I was almost out of range of the Loki, or brought bigger guns (cloak Tengu generally aren't very effective on the offensive side of things from my experience.) I would have lost my Tengu. I warped out, about 1 to 1 1/2 minutes after the Loki warped in. Missile launchers are dead, my shield is sitting around 33%, more than 25% at least, but I survived an encounter that I probably shouldn't have. I check local one last time as I dock up, and find a quick comment of "Lucky bastard" from the Loki pilot. Truer word are rarely found in local chat.

As a post script, this happened about a week ago. I recently checked some kill boards, and found that the Loki pilot is seriously no joke. He had about 750 kills, to 150 deaths. Enemies of his had a 17% survival rate. The Tengu pilot was a bit less impressive, 34 or so kills to 40 deaths. Not stellar, but probably learning. Today, I sent the Loki pilot an eve-mail, telling him a bit about my situation, about how much I enjoyed the fight, and I actually thanked him from blowing up my Noctis and causing me to take part in the PVP, and giving me this story to use. He actually seems to be a pretty good guy despite blowing up my ship, and I no longer really hold any animosity to him. Turns out he wound up burning out his warp disruptor on me, which is one reason I was able to escape his grasp so quickly at just around 20Km or so. I now fully understood the "Lucky bastard" comment. I will try to be seeing him again once I have better internet and a better computer. I may not have animosity towards him, but he did blow up one of my ships. Fair is fair.

So, lessons I learned from this:
1. If going into PVP, more than one ship needs a point. This is, of course, not always the case, but for small things like this, you should have more than just one disruptor.
2. My PVP Tengu needs some work. It held it's own against more experienced people, but next time I might not be able to survive just due to a fluke. I was lucky, and I might have survived with or without it, but I don't want to cut it that close again.
3. Understand your ship. This is pretty self explanitory. For instance, I did not know how far a scram or disruptor could hit, I thought it was about 20km, but it is actually 30 or so.
4. CHECK LOCAL. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble this way, but I got a decent story out of it, so it's lower on the list.
5. Maybe try to keep a warp core stabalizer on my Noctis. At least one.
6. I'm not really all that good at PVP. I'm pretty sure I already knew that, but this is pretty much confirmation. Still, my survival means I'm not all that terrible at it.

That's all for tonight.

In the beginning, there was nobody...

Alright, this is my first post, if that wasn't already apparent. The reason for the name of my blog is because, frankly, in my year or so of playing EVE, I have mostly just done carebearing and not much else. For those that might not know, carebearing is the act of doing PVE missions.

Recently, I cut my teeth on PVP after my Noctis got murdered in losec by a Loki. I saved my pod, undocked my pre-set-up (never before used) PVP Tengu, set a trap and used myself as bait at an asteroid field.  It wasn't very eventful, except for the back-up Tengu that arrived for the Loki. There were no explosions or pods made visable, no minmatar ship production, just a quick fire fight, and then me running away because I managed to burn out my missile launchers, which is generally not good for a Tengu.

It was exhilerating, and one hell of a rush. The most fun I've ever had in EVE, honestly. Then, to underline how much fun I had, I promptly went back to PVE to grind for isk and buy a new Noctis that I still have yet to pick up.

Anywho, at the moment, I'm not sure what I will do with this blog, but hopefully it will drive me to be a bit less of a nobody.