The Eve Universe At Work

Well, in typical Eve fashion, my return to wormhole space is marred by losing both my Legion and my pod, along with Nyslia in a Harbinger and her pod.

I had returned to finish off the POCO we had reinforced with the same fleet, when a Devoter appeared on DSCAN. I started squad warp immediately, but the Dominix was the only ship that got away. I didn't get a shot off as I was jammed the entire "fight". So that'll be the last T3 I buy, more than likely. That's the breaks when you try to go it alone or in a small corp in Eve.

I then received an Evemail from the owners of the POCOs, that they had dispatched the fleet to stop me. I had already put these individuals on my watch list to try to buy the POCOs, and they were never on, and their corp had 6 members, and I figured it was a dead corp.

Say it with me now. "Assuming in eve...."

So, gritting my teeth, I asked if they would sell me the POCOs. Their response was I owed them 800 million in "fleet" fees, and then we could talk about lowering the taxes to 3%.........

So now I'm considering hiring a merc corp to remove all these POCOs for me. Anyone have any recommendations? It's been awhile since I knew any, if they even still play.

POCO bashing

As I sit here, I've got a fleet tasked with putting POCO number one into reinforced. I've got a PvE Legion fit to 647 DPS, a Dominix with Garde 2s, and a Harby doing 611 DPS and some Infiltrators.

This thing is going down slower than a nun in high heels.

Basically it'll be two hours to reinforce one POCO. Not too bad, really. I'll kill them one at a time and replace them as I go. Ought to be easier on my nerves. Spamming DSCAN as quick as it'll let me.

My high sec static led to systems behind low sec again today, so no gear runs. I did manage to get more White Noise Generators and Energy Neuts in and set up, so we at least look like a PITA to attempt to take out.

And our first mining site, an Average Frontier Site, popped up today! Can't wait to get at those roids again.

Forgotten Heathen out.

Forgotten Reloaded : Return to Wormhole Space!

I finally did it, I'm back home! I moved into a C2 with C1 and high sec static last night!

Everything, of course, was not so smooth. The seller and third party were fine, I just had Eve luck.

After finding out the system, I was only 11 jumps away, but the seller said the hole was EoL. Crap!

I jumped into my Anathema as fast as I could, followed by my Prorator with the new tower in it. As I jumped into the system, the seller said the wormhole collapsed.

Doh!

He probed down the next one and it was 28 jumps away.....on a high sec pocket behind 2 jumps of low sec.

Double doh!

Oh well, I know how to scout, shouldn't be a problem, and it wasn't. Got my tower anchored and onlining. Seller noted a Helios from Outer Ring, a wormhole corp, coming out into the high sec. Alrighty, ought not to be an issue.

I probed down my area, and had three wormholes, one leading to dangerous wormhole space, so a C4 or more. Checking the C1, it had a low sec static, so no real help there. Looks like I'd have to wait to get the majority of my gear in. Figured I'd online the tower and get some fuel in it and be done for the night.

Tower online, force field up. Done.

Fast forward three hours and I was done gaming for the night so I decided I'd check on the tower before I headed to bed. And found three people shooting it......

Oh FFS. An Ishtar with Garde 2s, a Nemesis, and a Hyperion. Well either they have more coming, plan on packing a lunch, or are trying to just bait me out. I voted it was for bait.

Well, I wasn't going to combat them with what I had in the hole, and I had no guns or ECM with me, so I tried the age old bluff. It didn't work, references to my corp killboard were made. Oh well. I know our killboard sucks. Hey, at least it has SOME kills.

So I snuck the Prorator out and over to Amarr for some heat shield hardeners and at least a bit of stront.

Got back, anchored and onlined the heat shield hardeners. This effectively killed the Garde's DPS. The Nemesis swapped out for a Phobos and bubbled the high sec entrance. Well, I guess I'm done with trying to run in stuff. The Hyperion joined the Phobos on the hole as I watched them with my Anathema.

Hmm, so an hour into this and there's these three visibles and a Buzzard from the same corp. After the onlined hardeners, they weren't going to be hurting the shield anymore with the Gardes, so they'd have to come up with more firepower to crack the shield, so I was no longer worried.

Decided to log everyone off except Forgotten in the Anathema and loaded up Netflix to watch some Fringe while I waited for them to give up, move the Phobos off the hole so I could get in with more shield hardeners for the EM hole, or for them to muster up an actual POS bash fleet, which this wasn't one.

About an episode in they all disappeared off DSCAN, I'm assuming back into the dangerous wormhole. All their bluster for nought.

I got the Prorator back in and managed to scout in a load of guns, fuel and stront in an Itty 5, got the guns, neuts, webs and scrams set up so I was no longer just a wormhole pinata and called it a night.

Logged in today to find no sign of intrusion, but three more inbound and one outbound wormhole! Sheesh, I hope this isn't a normal occurance in this wormhole constellation.

I can't wait to get my equipment in and start in on PI! This wormhole has perfect full PI, so I'll be exploiting that to the best of my ability, which should generate a steady income of isk.

The POCOs are all set at 7.5% tax, and are owned by an extremely small corp, so I'll either try to buy them, which I'm not sure how that works, or I'll fit up some bash battleships and get rid of them one at a time.

Looking forward to wormhole exploits again!

Forgotten Heathen out.

Wormhole Sellers MIA

So I've decided to get back into the wormhole business. I, at first, was going to go with a C1 with good PI, which was the bulk of my profit when I last did WHs.After doing some checking on the eve forums and wormholesales.com, I found that empty C2s are going for near the same price.

Except I can't get anyone to respond to my Evemails. I've got cash in hand, but no one wants to sell the wormholes they have advertised. I don't get what changed while I was gone.

Usually, people selling wormholes want to do it very quickly.. They either have a scanning alt in the system and are not actively holding the system, or they are a corp wanting to get out of the system as fast as possible. Every tick of fuel is worth isk, so getting out quickly is paramount.

So why am I not getting return eve mails? I ponder.

Low Sec Mining

Well, I've been poking around low sec a bit to see what has changed since I was gone. The system I do PI in is very quiet, with almost all pass through traffic. So I was pretty astonished when I found a Large Spodumain and Crokite Mining Site!

Honestly, I've never spent much time in low sec, certainly never scanned out grav sites. Now everyone can see what mining sites are there with their ship scanner. These sites may have been there all along, but I thought it was a weird site for a .4 system.

So I decided, what the hell, why not mine it. I fitted out some Retrievers and a Miasmos with a cloak and got to mining.

And now I know why these sites are never mined.

First off, there's no security from people having to at least put out probes to find you. I'm not sure how loud or how hard the Wormhole CSM screamed about this change not going in, but I have to assume this has mostly ended wormhole mining. Cloaked ships could show up in belt with you and you would have NO warning. Not even spamming the directional scan button is going to help you there.

Second, since I normally mine in Hulks that are outfitted for max yield, these Retrievers were miserable. I had one Warp Core stab in the lows, so lost space for Mining Laser Upgrades. I guess I should have just treated the ships as expendable.

Third, since people can ambush you with no warning, I was jumping the fleet out to a safe spot every time someone came in system. This becomes tedious very quick.

I have to wonder, why was the grav mechanic changed?? Was this supported opposed to removing ABC ores from wormholes? I'll investigate.

Forgotten Heathen out.

Providence BPC

Just picked up a Providence BPC pack from Jita, was surprised to find it was only 40 million. I could have swore these were much more expensive, so either I remember incorrectly, or competition has really brought the price down.

I had a lot of left over BPCs from making all the cap ships in the wormholes, so I've been turning them into parts as we've been clearing out belts and I ship the minerals to our manufactory. All we actually have left to build are Capital Cargo Bays. But there's a TON of them, 77 to be exact.

We're running out of trit and pyerite regularly, so we're out in the fields with three Hulks, an Orca and a Miasmos. What a gem this new ship is. I noticed it after hauling in my Iteron 5 from the empty system to one jump over as fast as I could to keep up with mining. My fully rigged Itty is only like 32K space. I was going to buy another one for some reason, and I saw all these new Gallente ship types.......why would anyone train anything other than Gallente Industrial now?

My Itty pilot has rank 5 in Industrial, so gets a 50% bonus to the ore hold on the Miasmos, making it a 63k ore hold. Holy crap! I wish I had one of these in the wormhole!

So I'm still discovering things that have changed in Eve.

Forgotten Heathen out.

Wormhole Planetary Interaction is BEST Planetary Interaction!

So I've been screwing around with some low sec PI in a pocket close to our base of operations. This is the first time I've seriously done any PI other than wormhole PI in YEARS.

AND IT SUCKS!!

It doesn't just suck, it blows. Horrendous chunks. Like after you've drank WAY too much. If there's anything that is going to make me run screaming into the next wormhole I see and collapse it after me, it's this.

The extraction rates are garbage. Compared to low sec, high sec is a barren wasteland. Compared to wormholes.....there is no comparison. The only analogy that comes to mind is trying to go fishing in the Sahara.

 The existing player POCOs (Player Owned Customs Offices) are set on ridiculous taxes. The lowest I've found is 13-15%. I move my items up from the planet, 15%. I transport them down to my High Tech planet, 15%. I bring the finished product up, 15%.

I seriously considered going and getting my battleships and blowing the ever loving snot out of the low sec POCOs, and SERIOUSLY considered war deccing the high sec ones. Really. I was that annoyed.

I'm seriously running numbers in my head every single time I do a transfer and compare it to how much extra I'd have in a wormhole with my own POCOs. I am just jettisoning isk into space at this point.

But can I maintain even a Class 1 wormhole mainly by myself and still maintain a casual Eve playstyle? The answer I continue to give myself is a resounding no.

At this point, I've been logging in an average of every other day for PI running and a mining op. Last night I and my corpmate Thulium mined out an entire belt so I could continue to produce cap ship parts for our eventual Providence production. In the amount of time I didn't log in for 24 hours, my POS could have been sieged and coming out of reinforced as I logged back in.

I guess this is why I quit Eve last time I tried to play it casually: you can't play Eve casually if you have a knack for only doing things the most efficient way possible. I feel like I'm playing Eve wrong if all I do is run high-low sec PI and mine high sec asteroid fields.

My other option is to join a wormhole corp. There are probably a lot out there that would have me. But, is there room in serious wormhole corps for casual players? I know I made allowances for them, but I'm not a normal Eve corp director. And honestly, I think I just want to make things run smoothly too much, I'd just annoy whoever was actually in charge.

Well, it's something to consider, anyhow. I'll keep on keeping on.

Forgotten Heathen out.

Ooops Incursions

Logged in yesterday to my corpmate letting me know he lost his Hulk. I was confused when he said belt rats killed him.....until I logged fully in and found a Sansha Incursion going on.

"Oh." I said.

I don't have any experience with Incursions, so I figured I'd go check it out. I hopped in my PvE fit Legion and went to the belts to find some.

JFC!

These guys are not kidding around.

I managed to get into half armor in the first belt I warped into. There were four frigates, a cruiser, and a battleship. I figured, heck, ought to be a piece of cake.

Mind you, this ship is what I soloed Class 3 wormhole sites with. It's not exactly a wilting flower.

Except it was, and I got the hell out of there.

I decided I must have had my transversal wrong, or it was the webber that was hurting so bad, so I tried again. Managed to get the web frigates dead and killed everything.

Well that wasn't so bad, just gotta get the hang of it.

I hear some of my readers more experienced with Incursions snickering.

On to the next field! I landed and was promptly alpha-ed by eight ships. Alarms screamed, I was aligning as I landed. Structure! LOTS OF STRUCTURE!

I warped out at 18% structure remaining. One more shot would have killed me. I almost lost a 1 bil plus ship on day three of my return.......

So, moral of the story is! DO NOT SCREW WITH INCURSIONS SOLO!

Today, no more Incursion, so we're out mining.

o/

A New Beginning?

As most of you probably noticed, my last foray back into Eve did not hold me. I had no purpose other than to raise my isk numbers. Of course, isk is all well and good, but I crave more than that. So I'm giving it a try again for awhile with a couple of friends.

So far the plan is to mine the ever loving snot out of Ammatar space, and use the minerals to produce Orcas and Providence freighters. I've also secured some decent low sec PI spots, even though that didn't go so well for me last time I attempted it. But, I am much older and wiser than I once was, so mayhaps I will not make the same mistakes.

I'm constantly fighting the urge to look for a new wormhole.......we'll see how long I can last. :)