Lessons: The Road Not Taken

A few months ago, I purchased a new character with the intention of placing her in a corp that specialized in small gang roaming.  I was targeting small US TZ corporations who roamed through PvP-rich environments.  I wasn’t ready to go full pirate (read: -10.0 sec status, ever to set foot in high-sec again) and didn’t quite have the skills trained up to go wormhole (scanning and T3s), so I was looking closely at the corporations that fought in Curse and Syndicate.

As an added treat, they would have to be fine with two of my characters still remaining in Razor.  And because of that affiliation, I didn’t want to join another CFC alliance, and our enemies were pretty much out, too.  While some might unknowingly accept an alt of a CFC player, if they did, they wouldn’t be as sharp and on-the-ball as I wanted.

Believe it or not, it’s an incredibly tough task.  The US time zone is smaller than EU, but there are still a lot of opportunities out there.  I was impressed with Rote Kapelle, but having characters in other alliances was a deal-breaker.

This Is Why I'm Training JDC V

Just a quick one for now...

In Razor, JDC V is a required skill for flying a dreadnaught.  A week ago, I started the long slog to finish it… on January 2^nd.  A 36-day train.  Why am I spending so much time to train it?

http://www.eve-razor.com/killboard/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=654768

Trading a suicide dread (which would be reimbursed to kill a PL titan and a couple supercarriers?  Yeah, I’d be fine with that.

Case closed.  Sign me up.

What I’m Thankful For

Between botched CCP events and mechanics changes (and everyone can find something to complain about with every change), discussion about Eve in recent months has been filled with cries of “the end is nigh!”  With the American holiday of Thanksgiving happening today, it seems only fair I use this post to talk about the things in Eve that make it an experience to remember.

So here is a list of things I’m thankful for.

This Is No Time For a Nerf Bat!

I’ve been away for a while, probably a combination both of RL and the psychological effect of training a 36-day skill (JDC V, one of the nastiest practical skills).

During that time, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Rubicon changes in general, as well as the paradigm-shifting interceptor changes in particular.  In general, I still hold to my opinion that Rubicon’s changes are not that impressive, though they are significant.  I have yet to see a ghost site, and while I appreciate attempts to make PvE more interesting, I really feel like they phoned this patch in.

Yes, mobile siphons are going to be annoying for all the major blocs and may result in significant null sec changes in a “death by a thousand cuts” way, but the change itself seems a relatively simple one.  And mobile depots are an interesting addition, too.  Once they add in the T3 refitting in space,

Observations on Rubicon Interceptors

Well, as anyone who has been playing the game since Tuesday is aware, interceptors are all the rage now.  Early adopters like Black Legion have begun experimenting with Crow fleets with Sabre support.

Incidentally, I was flat-out wrong when I suggested CCP would purge all charges with the Rubicon expansion.  I saw at least one Sabre launch a whole series of bubbles, a fun trick each pre-Rubicon fitted Sabre can do once before having to reload.  They were having a little fun with it, making what appeared to be skid marks in space.  My 10-bubble Sabre is sitting in my hangar until I really need it.

On Tuesday afternoon, I watched them practice with the new mechanics in Doril.  In particular, I noticed that they spend some time setting up bookmarks and practicing warping to various locations.  No longer can an Interceptor simply warp to a station, be caught by his gang’s bubble, and tackle a

Tidi is Why I’m Not an Environmentalist

With the Rubicon patch, the Internet is ablaze with chatter about benefits, consequences, raging, and trolling about the various features.  This post is not about Rubicon.  Briefly, I’ll say I’m not really impressed with Rubicon as an “expansion”, since expansions, in my mind, are supposed to shift paradigms regarding the experience.  Rubicon would make a great patch, though, as it makes tweaks here and there, changes some things, etc.  But an expansion?  I don’t feel very expanded.

That said, I do want to talk about something I read on Eve News 24 about the mobile siphon units.  Not them themselves… they’re the most interesting thing in Rubicon (but, again, not “expansion”-worthy).  Look down in the comments, and you find a discussion about why Tidi is so terrible, which is silly.

The argument they use is something like this, “Tidi sucks.  It strengthened nodes so fleet fights of 1000 pilots could happen without causing crashes, but it did it so well that now we have fleet fights of 3000 pilots.  And now the nodes are still crashing, so tidi didn’t work.  Now the blocs are bigger, and that sucks!  Screw tidi!”

What Are You Trying to Do?

It’s the most basic question in Eve, but for some reason, folks tend to forget about it when they head out to PvP.  Too often, I see people trying to chase a Cynabal out of their space in an armor cruiser (it’s not fast enough).  Or an assault frigate hunting ratting Tengus solo (can’t do enough damage).  Or a gate camp that contains only one tackler, with the rest DPS ships (if your tackler gets popped…).

Or even a Sabre or bomber in low-sec.

The list of stupid things is endless.  While sole of them are obvious, some of them are less so.  A lot of times, people take excellent ships to do wholly inappropriate things with them.