Wednesday 30 March 2016

A "fair" fight

When I find a lone, hapless Covetor mining a belt in a wormhole, unlike some I don't really enjoy dropping a linked Orthrus on it to murder it. I prefer my murders to be more stylish than that.

So it was that I dropped my Procurer on top of poor young Grettir Orlenard's Covetor, handily murdering the poor chap.

He returned with an Astero and nearly lost it (Procurer drones are no joke), thence reshipping into a PVP Myrmidon, by which time I had brought in the sly Lachesis to do the actual killing.

He was pretty happy with the experience, to which I said one has to experiment and try things out, or you never learn anything.

Tra-la-la


Battle Report: Tra-la-la Ding Ding Dong (Unofficial) Coalition vs Dropbear Sanctuary

Missed it by 2 jumps, silly lack of jump clowns.

Friday 25 March 2016

Surtr

Ye gods, we got the tiniest black pomeranian puppy this week and named him Surtr, after the jotun (fire giant) of norse mythology who kills Freyr at the time of Ragnarok.


Maybe he'll get onto that tomorrow. And maybe he'll stop peeing everywhere like a ninja and I can play some EVE for more than 10 seconds. Maybe.

Wednesday 23 March 2016

Clogs and Ploughs

NoobMan wrote a thing to CCP. 

He makes a bunch of points which are quite apposite. Firstly, income levels are maybe high seeming, but if you are supposed to be experiencing peak level hoo-hah (see a 180B ISk eviction on Sunday, for example) and dread-heavy fisticuffs going forward, yu need to maintain the ISK income to some degree for players going forward.

Sure, you can make a lot of money. Leaving NoobMan's arguments that it's not really that much ISK aside (a case of living to your means, clearly) the alternative isn't really conducive to peak-level hoo-hah carrying on into the future. So, yes, some people, especially the Russians in C5-C6 Red Giants with bombers, are making scandalous ISK for ridiculously no risk.

Income levels are clearly high if peak WH people in the "WHCFC" are all running farm corps outside of Quaserknocks (which, really, means there isn't really anyone else doing it to all intensive porpoises) and, presumably, most are PLEXing their alt accounts and carrier sitter toons.

But there's nothing wrong with that, per se. For a start, if they weren't doing it, some station trading baron would be in order to provide liquid capital for his ISk scamming means. Or it would be some nullsec shitlord grinding his next Nyx sitter and Nyx. So what? People are jelly of this perception/reality. And lets be honest, NoobMan has multiple supers, including a Revenant with crazy purple shit all over it, so he's not doing badly despite his self-deprecating bullshit in that letter.

No. I agree - you need to keep roughly the same ISK income going forward. Maybe the ideas of keeping or making it less farmable by solo (hero) dreads, tethered caps and sitter alts will help make it a team activity, and spread the lucre around. That would be good, but it won't guarantee no farming and peasants tilling fields. It'll still happen, to support super toons, dank frags, or Russian dread blob evictions (or whatever replaces them going forward).

it should happen. If you want to max out your game, you need to be able to raise billions upon billions of ISK in ways that don't involve L4 missions or nullsec anoms. Escalations have been a way of doing this, and their removal (even if via Dreadnoughts getting High Angle Gayness) necessitates their replacement, otherwise C5s will be dead and wormholes will become a hopeless wasteland plagued by stories of the glorious past, when real men fought with big toys over meaningless shit, and threw away nearly 200B at a time.

You know. Like happened on Sunday, for no apparent reason.

New Carrier Mechanics



RocketX runs through the new fighter mechanics and UI.


  • Fighter MJDs
  • Einherjis with rockets blap frigates
  • Webbing!
  • Scramming!
  • Neuting!
So, yeah, new meta is carriers, AKA slowtars. 

Tuesday 22 March 2016

The TL;DR on Haywire vs Dura Lexx 4

So, I have left enough time for the dencorub stains on the rectums of all involved to wash off in the slow grief tears of eviction before commenting on the weekend's action, but here we go.

Firstly, I have to give respect to Dura Lexx for what they do and how they do it. They are pretty pro at the whole thing, and put in inhuman amounts of effort into the preparation, and the hole control. They rage roll and get connections with which to bring in dozens of dreads, and they get it done with robotic dedication which a lot of couch-swooning groups can't or won't do.

Secondly, you may look at a 158B vs 18B battle and think "lol what scrubs" about Haywire, but remember - this was the 4th invasion of that hole by Dura Lexx. This was also the second set of engagements, and haywire handed them 28B-ish of losses in a previous skirmish that happened off a RF timer.So, yes, it wasn't exactly the most even of battle reports but all in all the defenders came out with a great amount of success and pride, but unfortunately, not with their toy box.

So what actually happened? 

Well, an empty Archon bumped out of the Dura Lexx POS, so we went over there and dropped our 15 dread fleet on top of it and got ready to fight. This resolved into a short brawl, as the enemy were caught pretty much by surprise, resulting in a Devoter and a Loki going down. We then noticed that, lets say 5 minutes after the fight started, one of the DAM Revelations warps onto grid....and gets caught 140km away in a stop bubble. So we can put it all down to Cardiff Solast, who is deaf as well as dumb.

Anyway, Louis tried to reposition the fleet, and warped us to a ping. Dura Lexx burned a Sabre atop us and dropped their arty aglfar fleet about 100km off, and burned 5 of our dreads before we could blap our way through the enemy Sabres. here's where the persistance, preparation and dedication of Dura Lexx pays off - not only did they have 10 fitted Sabres, they had another 5+ sitting unfitted inside their POS or inside Deep Space Transports, and these were fitted up as soon as they could be and thrown at us.

So, the first engagement was pretty decisive. We had superiority in dreads going into it, but Dura Lexx's tactics are to pin you down with interdictors if they can, and warp their dreads at range and sit safely out of brawl dread range plinking away. After losing 5 Dreads and 3 pods, we had more even numbers with them and our subs were heavily outnumbered as well (so many Bhaals).

So, we retired to the Lenny POS and sat inside, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with the whole Bolivian Army outside, and waited for the POS to get raped down around our ears. The Russians got it to 5% hull and then, because their dreads were arty fit, dropped siege and began slowboating away to reduce their risk.

So we just turned the POS field off and went for it, picking on the less experienced Naglfars first. We did OK, but not that great, and the BR speaks for that.

So, why did Haywire. lose?

Strategically, Haywire was a little unprepared. Compared to DAM's eviction however, there's Haywire unprepared and there's DAM unprepared.

Haywire had 28 dreads in their hole, but 12 or so were partly fit or unfit entirely. They could field 16-18, but we only had 6 dread pilots. So, obviously, there was a large volume of logistics that didn't get done for those unfit hulls.

Haywire had 2 Yachts and 1 Fagroller. Dura Lexx imported about 3-5 Yachts. The recent eviction meta relies almost exclusively on Yachts to punitively get and maintain hole control and flip connections. Having no spare Fagrollers or Yachts, and dealing with the chaos of hangars and POSs with passowrds and having to deal with security and expedience when allowing access to the batphone, that was simply not enough to get hole control for more than 1-3 hours a day, and even then, that was still one to two Dura Lexx yachts slowly slowly rolling holes while we probed desperately for connections.

Haywire. was 11 meat bods and the battle went down at a not totally convenient time Sunday night AU TZ. I was the only BUGRY / Empty Vessels guy there, as most of my guys have been couch swooning, having an IRL or have been doing 6 months in Taiwan trying to finger bang hot Taiwanese babs or something. The bulk of the fleet was made up of DAM, with quite a few US guys getting up at inconvenient times on the weekend. So, we were pretty undermanned at 22 meat bods and 45 toons in fleet. Probably that wasn't too bad, considering - Dura Lexx was probably just 3 Russian nerds all up :P But, if the timer had been set a few hours earlier, we'd have had more chance of getting my guys in on Sunday pre-DT.

But, really, I'll put it down to one guy: Cardif Solast. People who don't warp Revs onto field 5 minutes late could be the difference between a shit show and a decent POS defence. Its all on you, buddy.

Sunday 20 March 2016

Haywire Hangar Clean-Out

Haywire vs Dura Lexx #4

With such little time left to play with dreadnoughts, why would anyone have 16 of them lying about in a C5?


Siege Comms

So, needless to say I can only reasonably give you SFW descriptions of the NSFW shit which gets posted in fleet with 40 bored Aussies awaiting a POS reinforce timer...but here's some TL;DR descriptions.

"Oh, I never knew how you actually fucked a 500 pound woman, but I guess that's how you do it."

"Boy, that woman has a certain je nai se qouis in terms of her rectal control."

"Oh, so that's how attractive it is to watch a hobo masturbate into a dumpster."

Friday 18 March 2016

Cram Session!

It's rather typical of CCP to spend a year openly mooting the rebalance of capital ships, and then give the player base 2 weeks to gecko at the stats and faff about on SiSi (assuming they even put the damn updates on SiSi first).

This comes a few weeks after CCP released a "playtest" they did internally where they took 40-odd faction dreads up against an XL Citadel and RF'ed it with the loss of 30% of the dreads. Now, we don't know for certain if XL Citadels will be allowed into wormholes at all, but if they are, that's a hell of a lot of capital (ships) you need to invest in just RFing the tower. Of course, put a few FAX on the field and it might be different in terms of dread attrition, it may not.

Large citadels, obviously, will not have the DD chainfire hand of Bob. So if you rock up with 40 Dreads, it'll be a walk in the park. If you turn up with a couple....not so much, and a couple of dreads is what you'd normally see in a siege or eviction where the WHCFC or the Russian C6 mafia aren't involved.

But there's not a lot of time to even understand the mechanics of how Carriers are supposed to work, or get clarity on the mass problems, the impact of all the new fitting equipment for capital neutralisers, plates, blah blah.

So, sure, it is way overdue for a capital ship rebalance, but the lead-in time to understand this all is...well, pretty nonexistent, especially if you don't lurk Reddit a lot.

It's not really a good look.

Sunday 13 March 2016

The marina rules are changing

You go away in the bush for two weeks and suddenly it's Epicurius Ataraxia all up in your shit, arging that either it's pointless to nerf yachts, or they are fine as they are, or....what the fuck i don't even. Read for yourself, comment, add your voice to the crowd.

It seems that the line has been drawn by, drum roll, yet another aspie fuckburger with too many alt accounts (+/- ISBoxer, it don't matter by now) playing a game of spaceburgers attention deficit disorder against a larger collection of basement dweebs by using lets say 4 Yachting toons and a prober (they say 8, but who knows?) to instaroll TDSIN's statics, trapping them out one by one and forcing the rest to cower in POS or get back in at inopportune times while Aspie McFuckbat is asleep (next step, Maxdel will come back and do the same, except every Russian will be sharing toons like a Chechyen prostitute child-bride of Islam or whatever the fuck).

So, apparently, this might be a bit much for the gentlemanly cabal of wormholes, and the Powers That Ought To Be have yanked Goonbex's chain and demanded something be done to fix the exploitative and broken state of the hole rolling meta, viz. the fucking Yachts.

I doubt that CCP has the stomach for the Omega Option, which is of course, to remove the Yacht and replace it with a giant floating space turd that makes everyone else's fucking HUD get smeared with stinky brown skidmarks. I mean, no one who's been on the end of a horde of rolling yachts (do you call it a Lacoste? a Ralph Lauren? what's the collective noun?) would notice the difference between a shit-smeared game experience and the rolling meta right now. But CCP won't do that.

So we are left with nerfing them. The only way to really nerf them is to either remove nullification from the hull, rendering them a bauble (like most other EVE gifts), or crunch the power grid so they can't fit a 100MN. Everything else is just a grab bag of dickass.

Seriously, when the Chinese lost that competition, their wormhole community didn't know the benefit they got. Well played you commie motherfuckers, well played. We got Yachts, you got North Korea.