PI Challenge - Day 23

Results as of day 23:

Daily average profits are now at 4.28m isk.  We are getting close to the end.  No commentary today, just wanted to update the progress!

The Battle of Hikkoken

Fweddit came to Hikkoken tonight.

Word came in that the Amarr Militia wanted to come over and fight.  I guess they needed a break from getting shoved around by the Minmatar?  However you look at it, they made it known when they wanted a fight, and we started preparing.  But not well enough.

We got about 30 pilots together, and sent out scouts.  Much bouncing through systems and plexes ensued.  As the Golden Glob was approaching one jump out, we learned they had significantly more numbers and organizations that we did.  10 logis, and another 50 or so cruisers.  We had about 5 logi and 20 cruisers with some frigates for fun.  A frantic align and warp got us out of Pyn and back into Nennemaila, and reshipping began.  ECM was added, the call was sent out, and we eventually got up to around 60 people.  Fweddit was nice enough to wait next door while we tried to make the fight more interesting.

After a bit too long a wait for some tastes, we undocked and flew to Hikkoken.  The dirty slavers had taken up residency in the Medium plex of the Cadlari pig-dogs, and we warped on in to have at them!  It started out nicely, but over time the greater logi support of Fweddit and their tighter organization began to win out.  Our target calling started well but broke down part way through the fight.  A few mistakes left our fleet a bit scattered on the field, and we reached the point where our DPS could not break the Fweddit reps.  Even though we could reship next door, the visiting team won the day.  To make matters worse, someone had the bright idea to put an fast locking Thrasher on the Nenn staition, and a few of us got podded while trying to reship.  Fweddit also had some ships that seemed to be dedicated to podding us out of the fight.  After my second cruiser went, I found myself in Athinard instead of Nenn, and that was it for the night.

A few lessons:

• Fweddit was nice enough to let us even up the odds, but that's not the norm.
• Signal calling is very important.  Both in this fight and a previous spat today, slow and/or confused target calling had an impact on the fight as a whole.
• Keeping your fleet in a decent place for reps and targets is also key.  Getting ships strung out over 80km of space makes reps hard to manage.
• Fleet doctrines and organization can make a huge difference.

Thanks to Fweddit for being good sports!  It was a fun fight, regardless of the outcome.  And double thanks to the Gallente logi pilots who kept my Thorax going far longer than it had any reason to.  That was awesome!

A Week in Black Rise

We always hurt the ones we love...

I officially have a rank in the Gallente militia now, so I guess that makes me a totally legit faction
warfare pilot.  Right?  Guys?  Oh well...

I'm a week in to FW, and after missing fleets most of said week, I finally got in on some fun action tonight.  By fun, I mean I managed lie, cheat, point, and whore my way into some 17 kills, give or take, tonight, including my first solo killmail ever.  On a Condor that I'm pretty sure didn't know I was shooting him.  So that was awesome.

But the most interesting part of the evening wasn't my first solo kill during a fleet fight.  It was a particular Vexor gang that found out what happens when you linger too long in one place.  A mixed group of Fidelas Constans came for spin through Black Rise and got pincered between at least two Galente FW fleets and a whole bunch of folks who showed up.  It started out Innocently enough.  Chatter had been coming in about some FCON Vexor fleet that was tooling around in Enaluri and thereabouts.  This was met with mixed thoughts on my part, as the CFC has been sending some large battleship fleets through Black Rise, and foolhardy as I am, a lone Incursus is ill-suited to taking on a wing of much larger ships.

The fleet I was in was torn.  We had been chasing a group of Squids around for a while to varying degrees of success, and weren't sure if it was worth sending our small mixed frigate and shiny fleet up against the Vexors, which were known to be in the double digits.  Impatience and word of another FDU fleet stalking the FCONs pushed us over the edge in the end.

We jumped into Enulari, got a terrible warp in, and ended up burning towards a mixed FW fleet duking it out with the FCONs.  After much slowboating and warping in and out, the dust had settled, and the intoxicant-fueled Gallente fleets sorting out the wrecks hovering over the Enulari star.  Villore Accords, Monkeys with Guns., Sicarius Draconis, and a lot of unaffiliated FDU celebrated the accidentally-on-purpose death of a bunch of misappropriated Vexors.  I blame it on the Omen and Auguror FCONS brought.  We can deal with seeing Squid ships, but adding the Amarr to the mix with all those obviously stolen Vexors was an act too far to let even Squid hunting get in the way of.  They even had the temerity to bring a flight of purloined Thrashers!

We then celebrated with some low key gate camps that¹ were wonderfully successful².

I'm still failing at the very-small scale fights, but I'm starting to learn things, and not take all the damage in my face.  I'm starting to look at fits and understand some of the considerations that go into them.  Mostly, I'm learning to love the impromptu nature of FW roams, and the joyous risks taken in the name of finding things to shoot.

---

1 This wasn't even part of the camp, just stupid luck and fast responses by our fleet, which was docking at the time.^↩
2 Nothing besides the cloak? Really?^↩

PI Challenge - Day 18

More results for you:

Up from 36m isk in profits to 72m isk.  The daily average profit is now at 3.6m/ day, or an end estimate of 108m isk, in profit.  Interestingly there is a side to this that I have not spoken of:  What you will profit not including the initial costs.  Since my initial outlay of about 33m isk, my daily costs have hovered around 1.5m, and my total sales are at 133m.  That means the profit only including day-to day costs is 106m, or 5.9m isk per day.  That gives a final profit, less sunk costs, of an estimated 177m isk.

So month one may be a bit of a bust, but subsequent months will be more profitable, by a considerable amount.  I'm interested to see how this plays out.

I also moved a lot of ECUs around today to combat depletion, which cost 315k isk.

Odyssey Mumblings, The First

Odyssey is upon us.  As much as I’d love to make a crack a Jester’s great caravan of the stars, there are some other ideas I’d like to spin out a little.  With the hints in CCP’s release at PAX, there’s plenty of opportunity to speculate and put on our tinfoil hats!  I'll put some posts up over the next few days regarding the topics announced in at PAX, and my thoughts regarding those topics.  Today I want to talk about exploration a bit.

Discovery scanning.  We have no idea what it is.  I can hope that it is a system that makes the process of scanning sites down more enjoyable.  Currently the dedicated explorer is pigeon holed into a few core concepts.  You need a scanning ship, either a CovOps or a T3 fit properly.  If you are serious about beating the competition, you probably also have another account with a combat cruiser, again likely a T3, flying with you to jump into those sites as soon as you find them.  The choice of useful ships is rather limited, and the fitting requirements to take advantage of those ships narrows the selections even more.  The skills needed to fly the narrow range of suitable ships are not insubstantial.  The skills to utilize the sites are very specific and often have no use outside scanning.

This is not bad, per se.

What is ugly, however, is the capricious nature of scanning and the tedium of finding and resolving signatures.  It usually requires a notepad and some patience.  So how can CCP improve things?

First, I’d love to see a change to the dynamics of what ships are allowed into resolved sites.  Specifically, I’d like to see the mechanics work so that if your ship can scan it, your ship can go inside.  There’s nothing quite like finding a handful of sites in a system, and learning that your cruiser, battlecruiser, or T3 isn’t allowed in.

Second, I’d like to see dedicated exploration ships that can fit some of the scanning gear without severely sacrificing the ability to complete the sites.  While this is primarily true for combat sites, there is only one CovOps that can fit all the modules needed for a scanning roam without needing to dock up to switch modules.  Obviously there are balance issues, as giving a cruiser PvE or PvP tank and gank AND scanning would break aspects of combat scanning.  But giving each race a cruiser hull with a few more mid slots and scanning bonuses would go a long way towards making solo scanning roams more feasible.  Perhaps make cloaks and probe launchers a dedicated hardpoint?  Perhaps just change the way high-slot hardpoints work by adding specific role-only slots?

Third, and tied directly to the first two, scanning needs to be made more possible for solo roamers.  A dedicated scanner should be the fastest and best option, and PvE and PvP fits should excel at those tasks, but reasonable balance should exist that makes scanning and completing sites a one-ship, one-account activity.

Fourth, the scanning mechanics need a tweak.  Saved probe formations.  Ship-board logging of sites you have resolved or are working on resolving even if you leave the system or need to dock.  My ship can hand a neural-interface, route through all of known space, and control weapons, navigation, scanning, targeting, and EWAR at the same time.  It can’t remember how I launch my probes or the data loaded in the scanning system if I close the window?  And as for the D-Scan, if it can figure out what something is and how far away it is, why can’t I warp to that point in space?

Fifth, and most contentious in my mind, is that scanning should be less random in the rewards received.  Nothing saps my will to scan like clearing through a half dozen systems and getting nothing for days on end, only to hit the jackpot once in a blue moon.  I'd love to see low end rewards boosted with a corresponding reduction in high end rewards.  If exploration is to be a viable career in Eve, like mission running or industry, there needs to be a more dependable income stream that comes from it.

I'm sure some of these ideas are not feasible, and others, such as ships I consider suitable for scanning and completing sites and rewards, are open to debate.  But there are many changes CCP could enact to make exploration more interesting overall, and more enjoyable and accessible.  

Luminotgonnahappen

I tried to go to Luminaire today, but alas, it was not to be.  A fleet of us got together, sorted out logistics, spooked some camps along the way from FW LS to Dodixie, and then we watched the Live Feed of the Luminaire event.  Once the Leviathan was at about 30% shield, we said screw waiting, let's go.  We had been holding back to see if the null sec fleets would pound each other down, but that was not to be.

We got to the Pettinck-Luminaire gate at were locked out.  For a while.  While watching hundreds of ships orbit a gate on the lowest graphical settings was a new experience for me, it was less than enthralling.  I honestly had more fun playing cat and mouse to move some Caldari gatecamps out of the way earlier.  We were making the route safe for some of our lowsec pilots to rally up.

As I was sitting at the gate, idly punching the jump button to see the error message, the gate briefly unlocked, and I was pulled through all by my lonesome.  My Myrmidon was immediately, although languidly, target, scrammed and popped by the fine members of various branches of the Goonswarm.  TiDi gave me a wonderful slow motion experience.  On the plus side I got my pod out.  Yeah, those Navy Cap Boosters were from the active tanked fit that I dropped for plates to use with our logi.  Who were having a grand old time on the other side of the gate.

I warped off, and a very odd thing happened.  Because I had somehow accrued the combat timer that prevents jumping, even though I was targeted and fired upon first (someone tell me what I don't understand about aggression mechanics, please!), I had to bounce around Luminaire in TiDi for a few minutes before trying to escape.  My pod, while in warp, told me I was being warp scrambled, and I was taking pod damage.  So I picked another celestial and started spamming the warp button.  In a very odd collection of moments, I went from being scrammed while in warp to being scrammed while in warp in a completely different direction.  I don't even know how this is possible.  If I am warping, I'm not targetable, or scrammable, I think.  Much less able to take damage.  But all these things occurred at the same time!

I got out.  I went back to Dodixie.

So overall, the whole Luminaire event was a bust for me.  No chance to see the Leviathan, although I was watching the feed.  I heard it went down.  Cool beans, but what else would happen?  It is Gallente space, after all.  The whole experience left me wondering about a few things:

Eve's interface for large scale events is terrible.  The hostiles I tried to target and interact with on the Luminaire Gate were so lost in the overview that the ships popped or warped before I could do anything.

On the Luminaire side, the gate camp was a clusterfuck, in multiple ways :).  I knew I would lose the Myrm, and that's fine.  I just had no chance to really respond to anything.  It took getting halfway through armor before I could lock or launch drones or fire.  I also incurred the aggressor tag somehow, even though I was locked, scrammed, TP'd and taking damage before I locked anyone.  I probably don't understand aggression in Eve well enough at this point, but it seems silly.

The overview really can't handle large events, either.  I have a few tabs set up just to sort friendlies, hostiles, war targets, etc.  It was still useless today.  The pod-saver tab worked, only because it has nothing in it save for planets, gates, and the sun.

From a player participation side, the system locks and lag and TiDi kind of ruined the whole experience.  Great kudos to CCP for doing this event.  I love the idea, I anticipated the hell out of it.  They publicized it, the community got behind it.  But in execution it pretty much fell flat.  The rest of my fleet never jumped through, and eventually turned around to regroup and head back to Low Sec.

Maybe next time, CCP should look at spreading such events out.  Make various fleets have to choose from a number of systems to engage in.  This would make the whole thing less node-intensive, and reduce the player counts in each system.  With one spot where everyone wants to go, the infrastructure ground to halt, and the larger blocs got to run much of the show.  Even more people were just stuck sitting at gates.

Overall, I'm glad the event happened, but I was hoping to play some role besides killmail fodder.  Cheers to anyone who got in and took part!

Tackling Tempests and Trailing Tengus

Close only counts...

A few days into faction warfare, and I'm fleeting up and roaming around.  Today I'll give a three informal after action reports of situations that didn't work.

Tricky Tengus

On a roam starting in Nenn, intel told us a pair of Tengus were running mission sites a few systems over.  We take a look at our fleet, mostly frigs and destroyers, and decide that between an Arazu and some tacklers, we had a chance to sneak a point in and hold at least one Tengu long enough to get the rest of us in.

Operations commence with the fleet holding on gate outside the Tama system, home to our pair of would-be kills.  They don't appear to notice anything aside from one fleet member warping through system.  We get cloaked eyes into the mission room.  Then it comes to light that the Tengus have a Buzzard hanging out off-gate watching traffic.  This doesn't seem to be a problem, as we just need to sidle our tackle in and then once point is accomplished, the Buzzard is irrelevant.

Then a fleet mate jumps the gate.  The Tengus spook and dock up.  Good game.  The moral of this story the importance of fleet discipline.  We were just about ready to get our tackle in on the targets, from another gate that the Buzzard couldn't see.  One nervous jump ruined the planning, and the glorious killmail we might have scored.  My killboard efficiency would have skyrocketed!

2 v 1... then 2... then 3... then None.

5 or 6 of us are holding at a small outpost, after clearing out the pesky squids that had been hanging out there.  A second outpost had a few hostiles.  In a sane world, the gang would align as a unit and warp in, grabbing points and taking targets out while FC calls them.  Eve is not a sane world.  I was unsure what was going on.  A hesitant newb, I was holding on the plex while one, then two, then three members warped off in staccato fashion.  I was waiting for the FC to give the go ahead.  He realized what was happening, and simply said "Ok, how many people still have ships in local?"  Turns out we were down three ships, with nothing to show.

We had more force, more ships, but not better timing.  Again, discipline was the key missing factor between feeding a choppy line of kills to the foe and clearing the field.  I blame the ease with which we had mopped the previous complex.  That nice high of dropping your gang on a target and managing the field carried over into overconfidence and sloppy execution.

Twin Tempests

The frigate roam continues!  We spot two Tempests chilling at the gate to a complex.  We manage to hold discipline, warp in, land tackles, and most of us orbit under the Tempest guns.  I'm in a long-point Atron, so my job is mostly holding one of the Tempests.  Things are going fine until they go pear shaped.  Drones come out and start taking a toll.  A few frigs are orbiting too far out, and are taking fire from the 800mm shells the Tempests are raining upon us.  Eventually I realize I have a stack of drones chipping away at my armor at alarming speed.  I burn out, as things are falling apart.  I manage to make it out of scram range in deep structure and warp out.  The Tempests hold the field, with one nearly out of hull.

A few things went wrong.  A few frigs managed to orbit into those 800mm shells.  I failed to focus on the drones soon enough to mitigate the incoming damage.  This fight was far from a given on either side.  Had we downed one of the battleships while losing our hulls, it would have been a victory, but we came up just short.  Perhaps I should have kept my blasters on the Tempest, and perhaps I should have targeted drones sooner.  Both would have eliminated half of the incoming damage or more.  This was a better managed fight, but still eluded us.

***

I had some victories today as well, a few kills that padded my efficiency.  I got part of a kill in my first pirate act in Eve.  A fellow militia mate and I fell to an obvious mismatch out of stubborn anger and honor.  It was a good day overall.  I look forward to the next.