Explosions In The Sky

Alpha King from Three Floyds Brewing is probably my favorite pale ale. It’s got a very juicy hop profile, but also pushes some sweetness through the middle with their malt bill. It’s my warbeer of choice.

I have been rather sporadic in my playing due to RL responsibilities (its a good thing since I’m preparing for my wedding), but I logged on last night to make some iskies. My friend Robtex was online so I chatted with him while completing some missions. IIRC the missions were just some L2′s from Pator Tech School so they were unbelievably easy in a BC. I think I ended the night with a couple mil isk made, not bad considering I was chatting and watching Mad Men most of the time. I have under 2 days left on Electronics Upgrade V, so come Friday I shall be cloaky. I’ve been waiting for this so I can explore much more of the EVE universe. I am consistantly impressed by the sheer size of the EVE universe and I know that I’ve barely scratched the surface of it.

I’ve been reading a lot about 0.0 and have decided that by the end of the year, I want to be in a corp that’s out there. A good corp that has opportunity for isk making and player growth.  I’ve seen lots of corp lately that advertise 0.0 and then say “the move is in the plans”. Sounds lame to me. If anyone has a good corp that they are in, I’d appreciate the 411 on it.

The Ship With The Dragon Tattoo

Last night Rob and I met up for our epic mission run. The L4 has 5 rooms plus a bonus room, so we were looking at least a 2 hour mission since most of what we were fighting were cruiser size ships and higher (aside from logi frigs). Rob was in his Abaddon that was specifically tanked against the NPC damage type. He was able to take massive amounts of while I would try to get in close with my Cyclone. This would have worked great had my fit not been awful. I was running 425 AC 1′s with Nuclear ammo and heavy assault missiles with torrent missiles. I couldn’t hit worth shit. It was like 60-90 damage per cycle. I was running a web that turned out to be really useful, but I had no AB or MWD so it took forever to get into range of anything. I’m thinking that I will swap out the fairly useless DCU1 and fit an AB on and take off one of the missile launchers and fit a nos instead (it seems like all of the BS in this mission rep pretty heavily). My other option is to head over to jita and pick up a Minnie destroyer and fit it with small T2 AC’s and barrage ammo plus nos and web. That’s a bit dangerous though since Rob would have to grab all the aggro in the room lest I pop in one shot. It seems that all of the BS’s Scorpions with Drakes as support. Needless to say, there are lots of explosions. We worked our way through to the third room before calling it a night. Part 2 starts tonight.

On a slightly different topic, Gencon starts in Indianapolis tonight. As semi-avid gamer, Gencon has always seemed like it would be a lot of fun, yet I have never made there. I’m mainly interested in seeing some of the Warhammer 40k tables that I hear get set up (although I didn’t see Games Workshop on the list of exhibitors). Has anybody been to Gencon? What was your experience like? Would you recommend a visit? Now since I live in Indianapolis, getting to the event wouldn’t be an issue, the only real constraint would be work schedule since I didn’t plan ahead.

Swish Swish Mishy Mish.

Another brief night last night. I was logged in on and off for the better part of two hours. I was really hoping to catch a fleet but none formed up when I was on, so it was back to watching The Wire and paying attention to my neat whiskey. Eventually, I decided to go ahead and make some iskies. In my usualy lazy fashion, I bounced from roid to roid blasting some low level rats in my little Rifter. After a couple go arounds, I became extremely bored and thought “hey, I think I have access to a level 2 MMC agent around here”. Off I go to Himboko or something like that (its one jump from Aldrat) and sure enough found said agent. I jumped into deadspace and found myself confronted with 10 frigs, 6 destroyers, and one large transport. The frigs were taken down no prob, but the destroyers were much more difficult for my little armor/speed tanked frig. It didn’t help the they all stuck together too so that eliminated the option of picking the bastards off one by one. After 3 or 4 times of warping out with very little armor remaining, I finally grabbed the OBJ and headed back to station where I docked for the night.

The last two nights have been incredibly dull because I’ve had relatively no human interaction beyond the occasional piping in to a convo. I am amazed at how this game is so community based. I can’t imagine people stick with the game very long without a corp. I know I’ve quit several times because I haven’t found a corp or when I did, it was almost inactive. Lesson learned: We all need each other.

The Necessity of Boredom

Last night was rather uneventful despite finally caving and purchasing a Rupture. I spent most of the evening sipping that 03′ Hess Cab that I mentioned in the last post and studying various PVE and PVP fits for the rupture. I like the versatility of the rupture as a 10k frig/destroyer killer and a 70k arty boat. While playing around with various fittings, I realized that I need to train my cap skills to higher levels. Most relevant skills are at III right now as I’ve mainly been hitting the gunnery and  skills like crazy. Anyway, once I finally found a few fits that I really liked, I made the 26 jump trip over to Airaken. I did that dirty NPC grind with Sisters of Eve for a few missions before getting obscenely bored. A cruiser is a bit of over kill for lvl 1 bullshit.

After spending the majority of my time in PVP roams, PVE just seems very… impersonal. I would much rather get my ass handed to me by another person than pew pew loads of Angel Cartel guys, but I need some cash and really want to be able to initiate higher level missions. A lot of new guys in Eve Uni are a bit daunted by PVP roams and run to the safety of missions, so I’d like to be able to take some newbies on high level missions in order to work on fleet commands. The end goal is to prepare the fresh meat for slaughter in some Friday Night Drunk Fleet.

Like most people that play Eve, I certainly find the social aspect to be the best part. I am amazed at how warm most people are in the game. By warm I don’t necessarily mean that they are nice, etc. but that nearly anyone will accept a convo invite. Maybe that’s the curiosity of human nature taking over, who knows? Regardless, if the community within Eve didn’t exist, the game would certainly not be worth my $15 a month.