Lessons: Name and Shame

Normally, I don’t call out pilots who fly like complete idiots, because that’s not very cool.  The goal of this blog is to help people improve their PvP by taking a critical look at their game and identifying not just tactics, but approaches to the game and ways of looking at things, too.

But, in rare cases, improving one’s game requires public ridicule as a motivator.  You have to be certain that you either a) never want to speak to that person again, or b) understand what makes that person tick.  And the mistake has to be particularly egregious.  This scenario suits both criteria.

Yesterday, I observed a loss that was just horrible.  The pilot in question was flying a Svipul – oddly enough a dual ASB fit – and slid into a FW plex to fight a lowly Catalyst.  As you might imagine, the catalyst was sitting right at zero, and the fight began quickly.  It ended almost as quickly, too.

That’s right, folks.  The Svipul pilot was me.  What was my egregious error, other than losing T3D to T1D?  Did I forget to overheat?  No.  Did I forget to load the right ammo?  No.  Did I delay before turning on my ASBs?  No.  I made the most basic error you can in a T3D.

I forgot to switch to defensive mode!

BB65 - Easiest One Ever

I admit, I don’t see the blog banters all the time.  I’m very bad at that, and I apologize.  These topics are typically a really great way for readers to crowd-source the community’s opinions about certain topics, and it’s very helpful to read a variety of viewpoints on them.

This month’s blog banter is all about attributes:

Does Eve need attributes? It's been discussed a lot recently. Unlike other MMO's your characters attributes don't make a difference in day-to-day gameplay. They simply set how fast you train a skill. Is it time to remove attributes from the game or totally revamp their purpose? Do they add a level of complexity to the game that is not needed? If you really need to use a 3rd party application to get the most from it should it be in the game? Should they be repurposed with each attribute adding a modifier to your ship? Are attributes a relic from the past or are they an important part of Eve - You make your decision and deal with the consequences?

Should attributes be removed from the game?  Yes.

Moving on…

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Lessons: Svipul Fight!

Svipul Fight!

This post is going to be a bit different from most lesson posts.  Instead of the usual path, I’m going to give the lesson right up front, then tell the story behind it.

The lesson is simple… it’s important to log in every day and interact with the game in some fashion, because you never know what may happen during that particular session.  Sometimes, you even stumble across a situation that’s so engaging and enjoyable that it leaves you feeling re-energized about the game as whole.  You wouldn’t want to miss out on that, right?

So sit back and I’ll tell you a tale of two Svipuls and the old schoolyard try.

I’ve been pretty open about being somewhat disengaged with Eve recently.  We all go through low points as a result of factors both within and beyond our control, and I was in the midst of one of them.  As I dig into the causes, I’m learning more about both my own interests and the game as a whole.  And that’s a good thing.

I’m one of those odd folks who seeks the unironic “good fight”, the kind that can result in a beautiful death or a proud victory.  These kinds of engagements require me to face the very real risk of both failure and success… too far in either direction robs it of the satisfaction.  I can count perhaps a dozen or so engagements I’ve had throughout my lifetime that I found intensely satisfying.  They not only top off my gas tank, they’re the equivalent of retrofitting me with a hybrid engine, replacing all the moving parts, and handing me free fuel for a year.

My standards are pretty high, and while few engagements meet them, a lot of them come close, “filling the tank”.  But I remember those special engagements like none other.  And over this weekend, I had one of those engagements. 

Nonni

There are too many stations in Nonni.

That is all.

The FozzieSov Experience From The Other Perspective

Rixx Javix recently posted about how he and (presumably) A Band Apart have been having a lot of fun since FozzieSov.  And that’s great.  I’m glad pirate groups are having a great time.

For me, the past six weeks have been utterly, soul-crushingly boring.

Now, it’s possible that this is just a personal experience, that the specific conditions of me in my coalition, my alliance, my corporation, and – most importantly – my play time all result in a boring, unengaging experience.  Other members of my corporation haven’t felt the same.  But I know I’m not at all interested in chasing around individual entosis pilots or ratting for sov indexes.  I don’t want to be a babysitter.  And I highly doubt I’m the only one.

The key question is how many people agree with me.  Am I representative, or am I an outlier?  Are others experiencing the sense that sov ownership is going to be a chain around the necks of players?  I don’t know the answer to that.  

Lulls are a hell of a thing in MMOs.  Many players have built Eve into their daily routines.  They have in-game obligations and build their schedules, expectations, and responsibilities around those times.  After 30 days, it becomes comfortable.

That’s all it takes to establish a habit… 30 days of repetitive behavior.

And it works in reverse, too.  If you spend too much time away from a thing, you start to not only learn to live without it, but you find that you start to prefer not having it.  This is how you slip into bad habits, too.

Theomachy: Battle of the Gods

In a game dominated by drones, it all ended with missiles.

With wrecks littering the arena, all that remained were a Drake, a Caracal Navy Issue, and a Caracal that was outclassed and hoping to slip unnoticed for as long as possible.

Each ship tested out their enemies and each other’s piloting abilities.  The Caracal was the least threat, but held the most power in the situation.  Both the CNI and Drakes pilots were eyeing each other up, realizing that their stiffest challenge would be each other.  They were natural enemies, with victory laying on the opposite side of one of their wrecks.  But the Caracal was the wild card.  Which side would he support?

In the end, it didn’t matter.  The Caracal fell quickly, leaving only the faction cruiser and the battlecruiser.  On the surface, it seemed like an easy fight.  There was no need to remain in point range for this battle… for all intents and purposes, only two ships in the whole universe existed, fated to engage in this fatal dance to determine the lone survivor after four hours.

It was a classic battle more suited to 2009 than 2015.  The Caracal Navy Issue had been crafted into a killing machine.  The designer had called it a “hunter fit”, with T2 rigs and modules.  After a day of troll-fits and empty hulls, it seemed like the perfect weapon for a 1v1 for the prize.  This was a ship meant to strike hard and fast, and give an opponent no time to recover.

His opponent was fit with meta-0 missile launchers and shield recharges to maximize the Drake’s passive regen.  His dps was laughably pathetic by any standard.  To win, he’d have to outlast his enemy.  It wasn’t the fit he’d have chosen to win a tournament in a 1v1 battle.  If he had a choice… if any of them had a choice all day…

Slowly, painfully, and – to the viewers – thrillingly, the final battle contained no opportunity for retreat, and no disengaging.  And the relentlessly predictable dps of missiles and shield regen rates gave an inescapable result.  The Caracal Navy Issue exploded in a crash of color.  The Drake was still king, if even just for a moment.  But the Caracal Navy Issue pilot, Dan Radermaker, still earned a Barghest and 18 PLEX for earning second place.

Second place out of over two hundred.

Not bad for “the best Eve event” he had ever been a part of.  He had never been more excited to lose.  “CCP themselves would have had a hard time organizing something so engaging.”

Long Live ECM?

Well, FozzieSov has hit, and the first set of timers has begun.  It looks like more than 280 timers were created yesterday alone.  So far, predictions from around the community that FozzieSov will succeed in burning down all the things are looking encouraging. 

So are predictions that the well-organized are more than capable of dealing with the hassle.

Suffice it to say, I’m incredibly disappointed in the enemies of the Imperium.  Very few systems were successfully pushed into reinforcement.  Apart from a MOA internal message, I didn’t see much in the way of significant efforts to attack.  It should surprise no one that Goonswarm came into FozzieSov with very high indexes throughout most of its core systems (ie. Deklein).  Indexes were around 5.5 or higher, providing plenty of time to react to reinforcement attempts.  With sufficiently compressed space, it looks as if Fortress Deklein is certainly still a thing, perhaps more so after FozzieSov.

As I was watching Slack, my corporation was responding to multiple attempts to shut down station services and swat off folks trying to entosis EC-, the gateway system to Torrinos and Caldari high-sec.  We saw a lot more traffic coming through that system, including a hostile gate camp made of three Orthrii.  That bump in activity was encouraging.

Yesterday did see the various Eve forums and Slack fill with a solution to troll entosising that pretty much headshots all of my concerns, though.  After all, to frustrate an entosis effort, you don’t need to pod the aggressor, or even kill his ship.  All you need is to disrupt his target lock to prevent his entosis cycle from succeeding.

That’s right my friends.  The supercap king is dead.  Long live ECM.