Wednesday 22 August 2012

Day 66 : Defective Work

It is Monday once more. Monday. Back to work. It’s normally the worst day of the week, though tonight I’m out meeting an old friend which should be fun. It means no EVE in the eve, but you have to come up for air sometimes. This EVE will be spent stood outside a pub, pint in hand. internet spaceships vs Beer AND Company? Pah! Well, until tomorrow anyway. Then it will be back to the glory of Internet Spaceships.

This morning I finished checking the moons in the local system. No more pots of gold hanging around waiting to be looted. It was a one off mistake by someone which potentially nets me a lot of cash. I read around POS anchoring a little in the time I had at work which turned out to be not much time at all. It was a bit of a mad, bad day the circumstances of which I won’t get into. Mondays.

Apparently it takes quite a while for a tower to complete anchoring. I’ve done anchoring with secure cans and that takes a minute, it isn’t surprising that would take longer for a control tower. Was the anchoring process underway when I arrived? Where was the anchorer? Hi-sec isn’t so safe that you’d start the process and assume it would finish without interruption.

I’m all over the place this week and unlikely to get much game time. I’ll be squeezing it in here and there so things might get a little dull blog wise for a week. Unlike muttering “250 million” under my breath every five minutes, which is never going to get old. What the hell am I going to do with that thing? Selling it has some initial appeal. Using it to cause some controversy is gaining more traction. Space Noob as Rabble Rouser? We’ll see, I’m tempted to sell it in the same system I took it from, just so it will be obvious. Even better would be in the home station of the corp I took it from.

A quick browse around doesn’t seem to indicate much discernible activity on the part of the members of the corporation that owned the POS. In fact the corp seems to be run by a character that was sold on the forums just before the corporation was formed. Then I find that it looks as if the second character in the corp was sold a month before the corp was formed. Curiouser and curiouser.  The third character I look at joined the corp minutes after being created. All these happen around the same time. The next character I found buying another character about a month after joining the corporation, and the character after that...... I get bored at this point. Being a detective is supposed to be glamorous, or at least provide comedy entertainment in some fashion. I should be wearing a deerstalker hat just to annoy people, driving a Ferrari and wearing a Hawaiian shirt at people, talking in a film noir drawl at people, wearing annoying sunglasses at people. Having ridiculous moustaches should feature at least some of the time. Wandering around evewho.com, EVE Gate itself, EVE kill and all the other sites shouldn’t be part of it at all.

I find more evidence of purchased characters being involved but my detective work is getting slap dash now, defective indeed. One character, the founder of the corporation, cost 35 billion. The corporation is flagged as “Possibly Inactive” on evewho, as is the executive corp of the parent Alliance. The most recent activity I can find is a brand new character that joined the corp three minutes after being born. That was two months ago.

So, a shadowy corporation that sounds like it has been built from scratch via character purchases or new and possibly alt characters. It sounds as if it has been built and then been dumped leaving behind annoying stationary objects. A sudden quit would explain an unanchored POS. I wonder if it was the last thing that happened to the corporation and it has been sat floating in space for the last four or five months. Perhaps no one apart from a noob would tour moons just to look at stuff and so end up finding it. However,  based on following back through the sale of the founder character I start to suspect the entire thing might be a front for someone connected with a big name alliance holding space down in null. I can smell washing powder. Has someone be laundering their identity?

Maybe I am just scaring myself. Time to flog the damn thing and do a runner?

9 comments:

  1. Quick warning.. you are going to be singing a slightly different song soon with that POS. It goes "500 million.. got to find 500 million for fuel!!!". A large POS (I think it was a large) is VERY expensive to run. All POS's need fuel blocks and I think that one blows through them at the rate of 5/min (you will need to look up the exact amounts). So.. if you want to keep a POS at this time you have one thing and only one thing you need to do. Get into PI and learn to mine Ice. Between the two, with a good PI setup and a set of fuel block BPOs you can get the components needed to make the blocks that are needed to fuel your POS. Otherwise, sell it. In high-sec you are going to need sec status to anchor the thing and then you will need to buy starbase charters which are another kind of fuel only used in Empire.

    Lastly, POSes seem cool.. they aren't. They are a massive pain in the ass. The interface is something terrible. The main reason for Empire POSes is for research. You don't even have to be at the POS to use the research slots, just have a corporate hanger there (also why it is pointless to kill high-sec POSes. there is nothing in them). Moon mining is another reason, but every moon worth taking in Empire has long ago been claimed. Everything else can be done easier and quicker in Empire at NPC stations. Only set up a POS if you really need one (T2 research is the main reason the get setup).

    If you want to get the low down on invention (and the massive investment costs) let me know.

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  2. oh! Sounds like you found the personal corp of a botter. Likely the accounts were banned which is why it is inactive.

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  3. Yeah - thinking of selling it, and then spending all the cash on ships so I don't have it sat in my bank balance skewing my view of what I have made! Yeah. Noobish. I know! ;)

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    1. I think most people in eve has most of their money locked up in ships or modules in any case. I know I do.

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  4. sell it, you have no need for it and you can use the liquid capital for more useful items.

    btw what corp is it you're looking into?

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    1. I'm unsure if I should tell anyone the corp name yet. I'm having a think about it and what I should do. If the place was a laundry then I'm thinking about writing to the corp/alliance in question and letting them know.

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  5. The interesting thing about this is that it's something that can only happen in a game like EVE.

    It's a "unique" event.

    No RNG planted the tower. It can't be "farmed". There's an actual reason why it was there that is completely independent of the game mechanics.

    And you now need to make decisions - decisions with potential consequences - about what to do with it.

    A year from now, you'll be able to talk about "the time I found an unanchored tower just lying in space" without someone pointing to a wiki that describes how to reproduce it.

    "EVE is real", no? :D

    (I had a similar noob experience. Jumped through a hi-sec gate to find a Matar battleship wreck, complete with a number of high meta-turrets. Looted the wreck and ran. Sold them a few days later in Jita wondering if anyone would identify the sell order and come after me.)

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  6. First time I scanned down a Wormhole and went in, I also scanned down a Dominix battleship that was just floating in space without anyone in it. I couldn't fly the damn thing, but a corp mate could, and he gave me a generous tip on the find. Since then I have always hoped to find more empty ships in wormhole space, without success thus far. :( I am pretty sure you will be looking for more unanchored POSes in the future, I haven't found one in about two years of playing.
    I got a question: All these ppl that contact you, are you happy about them, or would you rather stay an anonymous little noob that learns everything the hard way?
    I gotta admit, I have thought about contacting you and doing eve stuff together if you wanted to, but with your new found fame I thought you might not be all that happy about it. I started a new character for mining about 1 1/2 months ago, and I about as new to industry as you are, so a lot of your descriptions really resonated with me.

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    1. Empty ships in wormholes eh? Just as my scanning skills start to come good...

      As for people contacting me - it's great, I wouldn't call it fame though. Happy to chat away for a while, all the advice is handy and tends to go on a mental TODO list, and it is good to hear people did similar things.

      I would still rather do Noob stuff with the corp' for the moment without serious backup making things easy, so for the moment we are simple T1 only (see day 71 for what happens when we are not) otherwise all the discovery of things becomes too easy.

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