Eve Gate

I tried to get to it once before, months ago when I was still based in Arzi with Atrocitas. Unfortunately, between Arzi and New Eden, there's a pesky 0.5 system in the middle of Aridia that I couldn't get through thanks to my low sec status. And I know, you say 'Of course you can get through there, silly! Just warp immediately!' Sorry to disappoint: I did lose a ship in there - a helios - when I was travelling down to join Tygris in Syndicate. You can't evade the local police 100% of the time.

Ah, but! But! I'm now based in Genesis, only a few quick jumps from the Gate. I logged in a couple days ago to see one of our guys saying, 'You should come check this out!' and decided I would, along with a few others. It was hardly a fleet op; all of us going independently down in little ships, some incapable of being anything more than a buffer tank around our pods. Some of the local reds clearly wondered what the hell we were doing; one of them was ratting/complexing in a Cerberus a couple systems down the pipe, and one of the local neutrals caught up and passed me in his Malediction a system past it. I ninja'd up on a planet in Promised Land to wait till the Malediction got off the gate (pardon me if an inty on a gate makes me a tad nervous), and watched a red jump into New Eden in a Hyperion.

This ought to be interesting.

The last of our 'fleet', a friend of one of our guys, showed up in an unfitted Rifter and jumped in as I was in warp. Arriving on the other side, I noticed two things at once: first, the absolutely amazing view, and second, that our blinky Rifter friend had been tackled on the gate by the blinky neutral Malediction (see, this is why inties make me edgy - they don't get aggro for shooting me, either) with the Hype sitting there sounding incredulous:

[ 2008.08.29 20:10:43 ] unclesam88 > you came all this way just to gawk at this thingy>?

Yes, yes we did. Is there anything wrong with that? I once went 80-odd jumps through 0.0 to see the Ruins of Steve, evading a gatecamping BoB titan's DD in the process. The little jaunt to the Gate was nothing, by comparison.

The Hype left, the Rifter went pop, one of our guys warped in to bait the inty, who bit... not noticing that Thmuses wasn't blinky like the rest of us.

[ 2008.08.29 20:18:05 ] Teilla > oops :P
[ 2008.08.29 20:18:45 ] Chakrai > ...
[ 2008.08.29 20:18:51 ] Teilla > booze ftw
[ 2008.08.29 20:18:55 ] Chakrai > rofl
[ 2008.08.29 20:18:58 ] Thmuses > ?
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:07 ] Captator > can we have km please- ceo needs to know we did something pvp orientated ^^
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:14 ] Chakrai > did thmuses whore onto the mail?
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:46 ] Teilla > only sentrys
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:50 ] Thmuses > nope
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:54 ] Teilla > he didint even lock me

Normally, I'd say alcohol and pvp go quite well together, since some of my best memories are from drunken ops... in nullsec. Alcohol and sentry guns don't mix quite so well.

Teilla left in his pod, we buzzed about for a little taking pictures, but never did try to see what happens if you try to get close to the Gate. On the way home, Cap sets a different route.

[ 2008.08.29 20:41:10 ] Captator > we gonna go look at the monolith too while we down here

I'd forgotten about the Monolith. Like many other hidden features of Eve, it doesn't appear on the map. I never would have known it was there.

Think 2001: the Monolith is a reference, a big, black rectangular solid drifting in space. If it's meant to have any significance in the development of Eve history, I've not heard it. It looks impressive, and I'd love to know if anything interesting happens if you bump it. And yes, it is indeed full of stars.

The run back home was uneventful, though there was some fun involving getting stuck on the ruins of a mining outpost on one of the gates on the way home. That is one damned treacherous gate, though there's some logic in putting an outpost right on it... wonder if that's meant to be a relic from the early days, or if it was just put there to make people nervous ^_^ The development of Eve's background and history is something I find fascinating, and is one reason I've trained an alt for exploration. Someday I'll send her on a Grand Tour, but for now I'm content to pvp and be a bad girl ^_^

Oops, wrong channel...

I really can't put these in the corp forums. My CEO, bless him, wants a policy of No chatting with anyone outside the corp, EVER!, but we all know that's just not possible, and let ourselves slip a little when he's not around. Mind, it's a good policy to have, and we do keep to it 95% of the time; there are just moments where you can't remain silent.

Our local reds appear to be frustrated that I won't come out and play:

[ 2008.08.27 16:55:00 ] *Duhust has a shuttle with 3 rigs for uber damage
[ 2008.08.27 16:55:33 ] Locii > shuttle fo doom
[ 2008.08.27 16:55:37 ] Locii > of
[ 2008.08.27 16:55:55 ] Duhust > always.. but the plates it make it hard to warp ;p
[ 2008.08.27 16:57:05 ] Shae Tiann > I prefer the pods with turrets gaffertaped on, myself
[ 2008.08.27 16:57:16 ] Locii > you fly mim?
[ 2008.08.27 16:57:31 ] Shae Tiann > occasionally
[ 2008.08.27 16:57:42 ] Woei1988 > she flies stations
[ 2008.08.27 16:57:44 ] Locii > gaffer tape and rust ftw
[ 2008.08.27 16:58:08 ] Shae Tiann > I love my rifter
[ 2008.08.27 16:58:32 ] Woei1988 > tried unpackeging it?
[ 2008.08.27 16:59:05 ] Shae Tiann > you just think I fly stations because you don't *see* me in space ;)

He went rather quiet after that, strangely enough...

[ 2008.08.28 00:34:38 ] Cheech Solo > you are the relationship doctor :P
[ 2008.08.28 00:35:27 ] Shae Tiann > >_> I'm not the best person tp be asked these kinds of questions
[ 2008.08.28 00:35:46 ] Cheech Solo > sure
[ 2008.08.28 00:36:32 ] Cheech Solo > confess shae
[ 2008.08.28 00:36:44 ] Skarned > I have a relationship question...
[ 2008.08.28 00:36:55 ] Shae Tiann > osht... =_=
[ 2008.08.28 00:37:00 ] Cheech Solo > lol
[ 2008.08.28 00:37:40 ] Skarned > there's this redhead babe, we hang out in the same places... but she's so shy. How should I get her to decloak?
[ 2008.08.28 00:37:57 ] Meck Dokow > lol
[ 2008.08.28 00:37:59 ] Cheech Solo > hehe!
[ 2008.08.28 00:38:03 ] Shae Tiann > LOL
[ 2008.08.28 00:38:12 ] Shae Tiann > bless ^_^
[ 2008.08.28 00:38:23 ] Cheech Solo > that's poetic skarned

I tend to function under the assumption that anyone can be a decent person if you just approach them the right way. It works, too, most of the time...

Eve Virtual Estate - Sold to the Highest Bidder

It seems to be the story pretty much everywhere, now: 'My old home got overrun by militia.' It's the reason why UnSec moved, it's the reason other corps and alliances are moving. I just heard that precise line this afternoon from a guy who was sitting cloaked and bored on the highsec gate in Antem.

Moving is a pain in the arse. I had to move at least twice a month when Atrox was doing the merc thing; then Arzi became home, and you know how stuff piles up when you reside someplace more than a month or so. When I joined Tygris, it involved a carrier jump and several gscs hauled down by a friend via highsec and then jumped into our 0.0, but a few got left behind when we moved from being OSS buddies to being Huzzah buddies (I still can't get ahold of my precious morgue can... some of those corpses meant something, dammit!). Amd when I left Tygris, I ended up selling off a lot of stuff, still ended up with too much shite and when UnSec moved to our new system, I left the majority of my stockpile in care of my hauler friend. Slightly less hassle in moving... slightly less complaining from my ceo about how much stuff I've got :p

But finding a *place* to move to is even worse. When I first started out, I got a taste of this when I would spend half an hour finding really quiet systems to rat in (hey, it paid off with highsec faction loot). With Atrocitas, we went where the contract took us, then Arzi was just a natural option, since that was where UWoF had started out as a pirate corp years ago. It was also full of people who weren't as capable of enforcing their claim as we were in enforcing our right to pirate, with hundreds of lovely hauling isk-farmers to pop over and over again. Tygris had us bouncing around lower Syndicate so much that my stuff got scattered and consolidating it for a move took ages. When I joined UnSec, they were half in lowsec, half in null, but the lowsec was full of militia, including a carrier they liked to leave camping the undock point of the station we used. The nullsec was full of blobbers the corp liked to guerilla-attack, but then theytook it over again and - hurrah for summer holidays - we didn't have enough people to push them back out again.

Now we're in Antem. Our CEO spent a week trying to find a good lowsec that wasn't full of FW bollocks, was quiet enough itself, and was attached to a comfortabele expanse of lowsec to go roaming in. And for the girst week or so, while we were on the move, it was quiet. Too quiet. Turns out the local pirate alliance had been off elsewhere in Eve and started to return about two weeks after we'd moved in. Chains of Chaos. I fought these buggers near Alal with Atrocitas when they were Antesignani. They died easy back then, but Atrox had about even numbers with them. Things have changed since October, and their main system isn't such a great place to be based in as our CEO seems to think. As he's barely been online the last couple weeks since the system started getting busy, I suppose his lack of perspective is understandable, but with everyone suggesting it wasn't te greatest selection, he's being horribly stubborn.

It's hard to find places that tick all your boxes. The prereqs change depending on your corp/alliance's staus, and the map of the Eve community changes rapidly - a fortnight is more than enough time for an area to change hands twice and shift from dead and quiet to active and hostile. And it's impossible to tell what the next change will be. Who could have predicted that Tygris would pancake their standings with OSS and make a grab for their dyspro moon? Or that Arzi would suddenly be full of BoB pets looking to secure the area in front of the entry to Delve?

Life in Eve is an existance of perpetual vagrancy. We are all homeless, and fighting over who gets which cardboard box to shelter within. There will eventually come a time when another hobo will be able to kick you out and take your place; thanks to the perpetual power-shifts, there will always be a bigger bully. It's like that American game show Wheel of Fortune, done Battle Royale style - if the wheel lands on the wrong section, somebody loses their head. It's not enough to simply pick a spot and settle; you have to be able to either secure your claim by kicking the contenders till they whimper or wrangle enough blue standings to keep your position secure from any opposition. And eventually someone will decide they want your spot and have the manpower to take it, or you'll get bored and start looking for greener pastures... hoping they'll still be as green two weeks down the line.

Coincidence?

Quick musing before I go collapse:

Why does it seem that so many of the outlaws who fly covops/recons have the highest prices on their heads? My last tally was up to 25 mil before I lost it, and it's starting to creep back up again (though I know I can blame a small part of the recent bounty on a friend of mine - the rest is unaccounted-for).

Is it because people are frustrated that they can't catch us?
Or is it simply that our ability to hide means there's more time between poddings?

(Granted, there are some notable exceptions to this: my mate Matthias Ungabii - yes, you, sweetie - has more lives than a cat and can go months before losing a hull.)

The stuff the non-capsuleers just don't 'get'

I've just copypasted the code right from my boring, everyday LJ over to here, where it belongs.



Gunslinger
Take The EvE Personality Test today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Personality Test Generator.

Eve is a PvP game. The PvE parts of the game are there to drive the economy in order to produce more PvP. Multiplayer is key, and even though solo-play can be fun, the game should be balanced as a multiplayer game. High-sec is as much of a warzone as low- and nul-sec. It's just a matter of finding ways to get at the people living there. You usually play with other people, because when the going gets tough, the tough get some backup.

Amen to that!

Oh yeah, and:



*cracks up*

Ribbon-Cutting

Tbh, I didn't really consider using Blogger this way until Mynxee showed up in Antem tonight and I took a peek at her bio (because let's face it, I'm curious about the others who play Eve, and sometimes you can make some cool friends that way), followed a link and discovered other people who like to record their experiences in the game. And it makes sense - in its own way the game is as real as anything in RL. It affects us the way RL events affect us. Who hasn't ragelogged at least once after a severely crappy shiploss? if it wasn't 'real', wouldn't it be easier to laugh off? Just as people blog about their daily lives, one can blog about experiences in a virtual world totally unconnected to our own... though there are significantly fewer people who can sympathise :p

I've had a LiveJournal account for years, but recently I ran into a minor problem: namely, that while my friends like keeping up with how things are going, they don't necessarily want to hear about my adventures in gaming, particularly in Eve, since it means little to them. I had to vent about a situation I found myself in about a month and a half ago, so I used my LJ for it. Unsurprisingly, it was greeted with a collective eye-rolling and a comment that perhaps I ought to shut the computer off and do something productive.

When your production in Real Life also involves the computer (Photoshop and word-processing), this isn't the most helpful comment to recieve.

I put up a few other Eve-related posts, more for my own benefit than anything else. Reaction: rinse and repeat. It was time to create a separate blog, where I can geek about and hopefully connect with people who will understand what I mean when I say I hate bubbles with a passion and take great pleasure in slipping through camped gates and stations and scouting friends safely through dangerous territory.

Hi. My name's Shae Tiann. I've had positive sec status for all of three weeks since I started playing Eve a year and one week ago. Then I joined a merc corp, Under the Wings of Fury, and the descent towards outlaw began.

Starting pvp as a highsec mercenary and gatecamping MHC - Harroule during the down-times was probably the best way I could have chosen to get into it. It's not like I could have found mining interesting, or stayed with pve, never to fit a warp disruptor: I started gaming by headshotting my way through rounds of CounterStrike (no h4x necessary :p) and causing havoc in multiplayer Worms and Unreal Tournament. Now I play Eve Online and dabble in City of Villains (trying the hero route was annoying).

At the same time, I try to 'play nice' - when I was with Atrocitas, we made a reputation based on professionalism and a certain level of honour, and I like to maintain that now that I've 'left home', so to speak. I help newbies (the ones who genuinely need help), I'll scout former blues as they move their stuff out of the region, I've helped carebears learn to pvp. There are situations where I'll leap in, drones out and turrets hot, and times when I'll sit back and say, 'You're on your own'.

I guess that's the difference between being an antisocial cock... and simply wanting to have fun ^_^