Day 137 : Sunday Night's Alright For....... Disco?

Full of vim and vigour after the Tuskers FFA event and having a few spare hulls left over I decided to waste my implants and join the RVB Ganked roam and get a taste of some fleet action. The theme of the night was the highly convenient DPS frigates. Having spent all day slobbing around and recovering from the night before I quickly fit an Incursus, joined the Mumble server and dashed up to the staging system.

I found the fleet involved in a conga line several thousand km long. Home at last. I joined the ragged tail end of the line as well as I could as we waited for the deadline and other stragglers like myself.

Then it was time to be off. Initially I thought the plan would be haphazard if non-existent. As ever in EVE I found myself learning more stuff. 

This was my first time in a large fleet, large meaning more than four ships, so I was nervous. I didn't need to be. Whatever Mangalas self professed "I am bad" FC skills he managed to keep a near ton of  bloodthirsty and over eager pilots in some sort of form all night long while at the same time being easy going. Mumble and chat were open and amusing all night. Mumble was full of jokes and banter and the odd blast of mocking music without getting in the way of tactics. The only bad bit about Mumble was realising how old I was when hardly any of the pilots along for the ride knew who sang Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Yet again, young in EVE and Old in RL. Old I am.

I found it easier than expected to keep up with the fleet jumps, destinations, alignments, waits, holding cloak when needed, dealing with our own bubbles and the eventual locking of targets. It was fascinating to see glimpses of the organisation of a large-ish fleet behind the chaotic guise of a bunch of pilots goofing off for a Sunday evening. In particular I was impressed by the scouts. They were constantly sending back intel from the systems around us about the populations and potential targets. It sounded like a pretty demanding, expert job. Something to aspire to maybe.

Unfortunately hardly anyone was coming out to play this particular evening. We wandered and wandered, picking up only a couple of kills until an offline POS was spotted. I can't blame the local population for staying out of our way though had I been on the other side I'd have been shipping up some fun for these amiable frigate dudes. Some our frustration over the lack of targets poured over and a sorry small POS got taken down, mainly by frigate fire. The entire tower turned into a wacky disco of multiple weapon type fire (see below). I guess that's what you get for offlining a POS in null sec. 

Targets being few and far between we ended up trailing down through Fountain and well into TEST space, looking for someone to give us a quick ride home to the clone vat. It was late enough that some of the fleet even took this option from the rest, getting shot down by fleet mates in order to save the journey home.

I looked at my journey home. 28 jumps. Most of it through null. It would be unlikely that I'd get through it on my own. One last adventure though, who cares about the ship and implants? I'd already considered them lost once I'd joined the fleet, that's the plan after all. Still. I left the fleet, set my destination and headed back the way we'd come. I expected to run into vengeful locals at any point along the route but found nothing until a couple of jumps out from low sec. I picked up a Talos tailing me as I made the second to last jump from null.  I wasn't too worried initially, it'd be hard for him to pick off a frigate at speed with large guns unless I was unlucky or I jumped into a bubble, which of course I did on an null/low entry gate. I fired the afterburner as I hit it but a shot still hit just after the Talos appeared behind me. Drones were deployed and I didn't have long. Zig zagging as much as I dared while closing on the gate I watched my trusty frigate drop into hull damage. 

Ten minutes later the luckiest frigate pilot ever docked up in hi sec, closed down the client and crashed into sleep.

All in all, despite the quiet run, a great experience. I'll go again as soon as I can. I think it's missiles next and I have almost zero skills in those. If you are a noob like me then head along, its a light hearted way to see a bit of fleet organisation, combat and probably a bit of null space. There will probably be more fights along the way on other runs. Don't expect to not lose everything you take with you, write it off before you go!

http://rvbganked.co.uk/kills/index.php/cc_detail/56/

http://rvbeve.com/forums/index.php?/topic/16-rvb-ganked/

Follow Mangala on Twitter https://twitter.com/awanderingjon

o7 RvB

The fleet on the move.  BSG in miniature.

POS Disco!

Our glitterball collapses. Cue random play of Gangnam Style over Mumble

Day 136 : Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting

The Tuskers, notorious yet honourable low sec pirates one and all, decided to host a frigate based free for all event in their home system. http://the-tuskers.info/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4066 I found out about it from The Altruist and EVEOGANDA. It was an opportunity not to be missed. My plan was to fit seven ships, each with a different strategy in mind, go along, and attempt to learn some PVP skills in an environment that might be a little lighter than the brutal roads of low sec. The plan lasted all of thirty seconds. Probably just as well I started drinking three hours before it started really.

 My seven suicide ships, all named after songs by The Libertines, comprised six Incursus and one Atron hull.

1. Death on the Stairs : a classic double repairer Incursus build.
2. Can't Stand Me Now : a speedy DPS brawler with a tiny bit of buffer tank as an afterthought.
3. The Good Old Days : an all rounder, single rep, decent speed, not bad DPS.
4. The Ha Ha Wall : a large buffer tank and, I think, a resistance mod marked this hull.
5. Time For Heroes : a rail fit Incursus with a long point.
6. I Get Along : a 125mm rail fit Atron.
7. What Katie Did : the end of night freak experiment, it had railguns, an MWD and importantly the double warp stabilizers. Almost impossible to target and fly at the same time without manually fine tuning your speed.

I'd love to tell you how each ship did individually but I can't. I started well, and then it descended into chaos. Two of the hulls above fell to sentry guns after over eager, drunken, pilot error. Sentry guns were doing a brisk trade all night.

 As I got set up for my first run into the staging system I joined the Mumble chat. There was quite the party going on in there. Mangala and some of the RvB crew had turned up and were vocal yet easy going. They honoured the nature of the event and didn't gang up on everyone else, well at least until the last two hours when they started chasing t2 frigates around using their t1's. Fair enough really, so I joined in when I could. Everyone was friendly and it felt easy to be in there despite being a four month old noob. I heartily recommend that crowds company.

Once in system I warped to the top belt, following the crowd. As soon as I arrived all my plans collapsed. The place looked like a miniature version of Burn Jita and got steadily worse over the course of the evening. By the end of the evening the entire belt was hidden by the cloud of wrecks.

I'd foolishly warped straight into the middle of the action so I fired up the burner and headed out to the nearest vaguely clear spot I could see. The overview had turned in to a kaleidoscope of craziness and it was hard to make sense of anything happening at all. As I stared in disbelief a name jumped out at me, edging its way to the top as my burn took me closer. It was Rixx Javix of EVEOGANDA. What better EVE mark of respect for an excellent blogger and pilot than to shoot him in the back? I altered course wondering if I'd get there in time, one of his oppenents exploding even as my range dropped towards something with a potential for damage. I locked and opened up the guns. My reward was not only an explosion but a ton of guilt as I realised I'd grabbed the killing blow with my paltry first two salvos. Apologies to the two Merlins I robbed. Javix I salute you, as far as I can tell you were highly amused by internet fame resulting in being frigate enemy number 1 for so many of us. I have that kill to treasure and yet I'll be back hunting Tusker space as soon as I can to return the favour.

The rest of the night turned into a whirl of warping between belts, planets, moons, and the sun. There were battles everywhere, most following the Tuskers themed mini events with expensive loot. Along with the other scraps I got into several duels with Tgl3, duels that he generally but not exclusively won even if it didn't end with a kill. In the final encounter I turned up in an experimental warp stab fit that was almost impossible to fly and target with but caused indignant exclamations when I escaped his web and scram lockdown. I treasure the memory of the yell in Mumble more than I would a kill.

While most people followed the Tuskers guidelines and didn't pod or team up there were always going to be a few pilots that took the malign road of the killjoy. In particular a team of pilots from one corporation who were all flying Merlins. Not only did the Tuskers set out to foil them by policing the event (while getting shot at by trigger happy frigate pilots presumably) but the Merlin's became a bit of a joke in Mumble. "Oh no the Merlins are here! Quick, run away" and similar became a comedy staple of the Mumble chat even after they shipped up to Enyos and the like. The Merlin pilots in question probably did well out of the loot but I prefer my rewards of almost no loot and mild stomach ache from laughing so hard.

To cap off their nights events the Tuskers set a Typhoon en route to the sun. It's smart bomb was anathema to any frigate caught within it. Typically the drunken noob had to attempt to dive down and blast it anyway. I tried timing the smartbomb activation with my run. I got a little cooked, as Mr Skywalker would say, on the road out but I survived and got on the kill. Fweddit finally turned up around this point, jumping in on the action. I had thought they would turn up earlier. I think some of us hoped they would turn up earlier, endless swarms of frigates would do a lot of damage. I'd like to think Fweddit avoided an early arrival in order to let the event run for a while. I really would like to think that but actually they got a bit distracted by miner ganking along the way.

I have to say a massive thanks to the Tuskers. Organising it, running it, policing it and even managing to join in with it must have been a massive effort. I don't think I've had as much fun in EVE before. It was one of the best evenings I've ever had playing any game. Massive thanks to I Legionnaire whose farewell gesture to EVE made this all possible. Good luck in RL, fly safe.

Once I got back to my home system the next morning I took a screen shot of the map in the mode where it indicates kills. You can see Jovainnon to the west of my home system, right in the cloud of red that indicates thousands of ship kills. I think the butchers bill was well over nine billion even on just the RvB killboard.

Tgl3 did a fantastic write up of the event  http://throughnewbeyes.wordpress.com/2012/10/28/tusker-ffa-results-in-explosions-and-hilarity/ having managed to turn up from wormhole space, speedily completing the  epic mission called "getting the bus home from work". There is even a screenshot in his post of him beating the crap out of me. I escaped in that particular case but it was a close, a very close, call. Next time dude!

RvB graciously supplied the killboard for the event, and I was just glad to be on it in any way I could. A zero kill record would have been just as amusing if less gratifying. During the event I learned about posting kill mails manually, I'd never done this or really had cause to before. Fellow noobs : you can right click and copy the Kills and Losses from your Character Sheet combat log, and then paste them into the box provided on the Post Kill  submission page on kill boards. Another handy lesson for a noob. I was learning stuff all night.

http://rvbganked.co.uk/kills/?a=cc_detail&ctr_id=57&view=kills

Not a hugely impressive killboard presence for me but compared to the rest of my EVE career so far it looks amazing. More work will be put into this at some point. Fast Frigate Fun is great. "God Hates Frigates" says Poetic Stanziel. God who? Maybe it's the Sentry Gun god. Look at the board stats on those kill whores. You should have left your crew of miner gankers, jumped in a frigate and come and joined us PS. You'd have enjoyed yourself more!

Quick noob lesson summary off the top of my head :

1. Warp stabs - just say no.
2. Railguns will always need overheating to stand any chance of breaking a tank.
2a. Alteration to the above. Fuck it. Overheat everything.
3. Remember to launch the drone!
4. Manual maneuvering counts.
5. Defensive fits might leave you stuck in a web/scram hole and yet they are good to learn under since you have more time to observe and react. You have to interact more with the ship. Be prepared for the death of a thousand cuts however.

A final note : to whoever tried to convo me and got blanked - massive apologies, I was in a bit of trouble at the time and got rid of the dialog then forgot the name. Sorry!

Day 131 : Attack of the Space Potato!

I bought a battleship. What feels like the entry level battleship for the Gallente, the mammoth Dominix. It's a  drone boat which sometimes gets referred to as a space potato. It is somewhat reminiscent of one after all.

click image to activate laughing at Noob mode

Look at that rubbish DPS! Look at all those hard points, why is it claiming there are only six? There are enough places to anchor half my inventory on that skin. Look at the lack of a propulsion boost that makes me quiver with fear. What now for my celebrated Brave Brave Sir Robin maneuver which thanks to Iain Banks I've now decided to relabel my "deflecting from current course and instigating a redisposition" maneuver?

Actually the fitting means I can run the medium repairer all the time and still regenerate cap. I can run the large repairer when things get sticky. The lack of DPS is due to the skills Large Hybrid guns II and BS II which will be easily boosted and would have been had I not been boosting some frigate combat skills. I need Drone Interfacing IV for sentry drones too though I prefer the thought of swapping drones in and out rather than just sitting there. All in all it is Noobs Moving Castle. It sits in a hole and spits out its gremlins to wreak havoc on the surrounding grid, all the while slowly preparing to vanish into the mist before things get crazy.

I've been prodding a local level 4 security mission agent for a few days. The first mission looked a little worrying so I declined it. The second mission, offered the next day, was situated in low sec. Who does this agent think I am? Sending a poorly skilled Dominix into a level 4 mission in low sec? I haven't prepared my huge "Cannon Fodder Free For All At This Location" flag, so sadly I decline this mission too. Today's offer is a little more my style. "Gone Beserk" is three bunches of battleships with some minor extra spawns of cruisers and frigates. The only thing wrong is that the damage type doesn't fit my guns that well. Since my main damage is coming from drones anyway I just switch them all out for Caldari kinetic dealing drones, shame I'm only six hours from upping the mediums to T2 versions. Job done. The cannons will still help to finish the enemy off.

Tip : Look up the missions on http://eve-survival.org before you go and alter your damage and resistance modules accordingly. Any tactics left there are also good to read..... if you are a coward! Yep, I read 'em. Do not ignore planning wave trigger events as I did or the place might get a little crowded.

Warping into the location I find a large ruin with three distinct groups of enemies just as expected. It looks like a bunch of Amarr battleships. For some reason I mess up the initial set up and manage to aggro two groups rather than just one at once. Even  zoomed out to far tactical view I can see the trails left by cruise missiles on their way to pay a visit. Oh well, I'm not running for it just yet, and at a maximum speed of 100ms I have a while to think about it even if I did. I bring up all the hardeners I've chosen and set the heavy drones onto the nearest incoming battleship. For the hell of it I set the guns on it too.

It's slow going and I have to engage the large repairer a couple of times but gradually I start to prevail. At one point some cruisers try to get all in my face but I swap out the heavy drones for mediums and tear them to pieces. This annoys the enemy so much they make a tactical mistake. They send in some elite frigates with webbing capability. I don't know why either. With no scram they are probably making it easier for me to turn around and warp out. What do they think they are nullifying? My awesome 100 ms speed at 40km from the enemy that is so useful?  They'd be welcome to it apart from the fact that they have now annoyed me. I recall the heavy drones once more and spit out a squad of T2 light drones which make short work of a couple of idiot frigates.

After this it is back to the heavy drones, damage soaking and blasting the hell out of them once through the shields. It's a tactical game. As long as I was calm and watched out for smaller enemies getting too close then I was fine. The main worry was that Heavy drones are SLOW. They resemble zombies, shuffling along, taking their time getting to the meaty part and then going beserk in an orgy of blood and hull. This is how I imagine it anyway, I was making a cup of tea in a couple of the fights so I didn't see what they did then. They take their time shambling back to get swapped out for lighter drones though.

Job done, field cleared, I warp out with my armour already back to full and my shield regenerating. I then turn up in a Vexor. It's tanked normally, just in case, but the high slots hold two tractor beams and three salvager mods. It's easy to fly through the area and tow wrecks along until they're in salvagable, lootable groups. The only problem is the loot. I end up having to dock twice to empty the hold. It looks like there are over 20 wrecks left, mainly battleships dropping large guns and cruise missile launchers and lots of other goodies that I can't use but somehow am excited to get a hold of. I'm a noob, remember. This is more loot than I've ever seen.

In the end I earn something like this:

10.8 million in bounties.
19.8 million in estimated loot and salvage, nothing outstanding in the loot just normal/meta 1-4 stuff
1.11 million mission reward
1.15 million bonus mission reward
3376 LP mission reward

Time spent : around 2 hours including salvage. It was by far the easiest level 4 I'd seen offered so far and you could tell by the ISK reward which should serve as a measure of difficulty.

Some of that salvage will generate another million in manufacturing profits over its market price since I'll put it into rig manufacture. That should pay for my ammo which was Federation Navy Antimatter. It is around 30 million all told given the odd estimated cost of some of the modules I looted. Given that my alt had mined around 15-20 million at the same time it was a nice evenings work. It wasn't the 50-75 million an hour they say you can earn doing these missions but I have very low skills and it is only going to get better and faster.

After all this the Dominix no longer looked like a space potato. It looked sleeker and deadlier somehow. No longer was the bridge reminiscent of a neanderthal cranial ridge, it was now the command centre of a highly (un)organised cash for death machine.

NOTE: Apologies for spending more time pasting a potato into an image than I did on the quality of the text. It was amusing at the time, I promise.

Days 101 - 128 : A Month in the Wilderness

Look! I’ve abandoned the daily format!  Sometimes a Noob just has to fly. In fact I have hardly any time to fly because of RL commitments and cleaning up the blog backlog. Following that, a long holiday of doing pretty much fuck all which did a lot of good for the soul. I’ll spare you most of the RL details of what London has come to know as a “staycation” and instead scribble down a summary of EVE activities, boring though they may be.


1. Industry. After waiting for a month with a rig blueprint in a research queue I finally go and get it and try a build out. It’s profitable enough but all it seems to do is set in concrete the need for a research POS as part of my industry plans. The real target here was to force me to build from buy orders alone. Sure, I could go out and salvage the materials but it would take forever. With Buy Orders slowing gathering in the materials I can wander off and do all kinds of other things.

2. Fame. I’m featured on minerbumper.com after commenting about his mittani.com post! I’ve  still been reading minerbumper and laughing at the miner responses despite taking some slow time in EVE. I recommend it, it has saved me several times during grim days at work. Thankfully it seems to be mainly based in Caldari space and won’t suffer from the Goons Ice Interdiction, unless they get involved to save said miners from the Interdiction. Thanks to the New Order of Hisec for bumping my blog stats a bit!

http://www.minerbumping.com/2012/09/minerbumping-in-eve-media.html

3. Corporation. A conversation with a blog reader results in me thinking about a public channel for the corporation.  I’m happy with the corp at the size it is now until I get round to planning it better. If you’ve seen the amount of stuff you can do in the corp management window you know what I mean, so I may just open a noob friendly channel instead. Stay tuned.

4. Live Events. A live event happened. It was live. Apparently. I missed it all due to spending the entire time rewatching old favourite films for a few days. I’m hoping they become a regular occurrence. The Live Events. Not the films. I’ll watch Goonies, Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark any time I can.

5. Blogging. I finished 100 days blogging. Only at the end did I realise it was becoming a grind to document what I’d done daily. I was enjoying it a lot but it ate into everything else, including actual EVE time. I needed to take a break and that is coming to an end but I doubt I’ll ever take up the daily format again. I’m a sucker for getting too into something too much and burning out fast. I need to pace myself.
 
6.  Week off. I have a week off work. It’s an annual thing where around the time of my birthday I like to be able to sit and contemplate the year, weighing up my successes and failures, planning for the next and taking a good long look at how I feel. Wait. No. That’s not right. It’s an annual thing where I avoid doing anything much other than getting drunk at inappropriate times, reading, watching films, enjoying not bothering to get dressed all day and generally behaving like a tramp with a room full of consumer electronics. I’m a birthday hater. This annual week of honing my ability to do bugger all is my way of giving the pace of life the single finger salute. Not many could do this, it’s a talent. I’m a valiant anti-hero fighting on the side of the sin of Sloth. For a week. Then I get bored of being boring.

 Since my birthday falls in the week I get a couple of presents in the post. On the morning itself an Amazon package turns up that looks like a book. Unfortunate since I’ve just bought myself a Kindle, looks as if I’ll be dual bagging the reading material for a couple of weeks. Lying in bed I rip open the cardboard package and a glossy package falls out. It’s not a book. It’s the latest Warcraft expansion that I’ve avoided buying. The much derided Mists of Panderia. The PandaPokemon Experience. I know who sent me this without looking. This is good because I spend the next ten minutes laughing so hard that I couldn’t read through the tears.

Several (many) years ago a friend visiting me saw me playing Warcraft and moaned at me to turn it off and get down the pub. I did turn it off and go down to the pub (it doesn’t take much with me) but revenge is a dish best served cold. Through the post. I mailed a copy of Wacraft up to her in Sheffield as soon as she had a PC that could run it. As it was a present she couldn’t not have a go at it. Then her boyfriend did. Then they bought a second PC so they could play at the same time. Then they bought better PC’s. It snowballed from there. I’ve written elsewhere how the three of us played a lot of Warcraft, drawing in other friends with us and making new ones along the way. The only thing I miss about playing Warcraft is hanging out with them all. So me receiving a copy of the new expansion is both a heartwarming “come back and play” message and also a “ha ha, just returning the favour” joke. I’m going to play it a bit. It’ll take me all year to get through it with the amount I’m planning to play but at least I’ll be able to catch up with them a bit more. I do log on once to take a look around but get scared by seeing Panda characters that are already at the maximum level, seeing the amount of crap I need to clear out of the bank before I begin, the amount I’ve forgotten about said crap, accidentally getting into a pokemon fight within five minutes of being in the game, and because I attempt to right click and select “Show Info” on EVERYTHING. EVE has crept into my subconscious. It’s only so long before I start doing this in real life.

Here I need to salute my two friends who got me this present. Not for sending me the Warcraft expansion but because the ten minutes I spent laughing about it is probably the best birthday present anyone ever sent me. C+G - love ya both. See you in the world.

7. Second account. I got one. I began listing the reasons to get a second account in the last five posts but I missed one and underestimated another. The missed reason was experimentation. Frigate combat is FAST, you’ll be lucky if you learn something in a fight though I try to take something from every loss. While I know I should just throw endless T1 frigates into the fray and learn from exploding many, many times there are some effects that would still be hard to learn. With a second account I can find a quiet, out of the way system and try out all kinds of experiments and judge their effects from both perspectives. I’ll see the effect of ECM and be able to judge it better. I’ll see the effect of range dictation on short range weapons and slow tracking. I can experiment with flight strategies for escaping from propulsion disruption. That’s just for a start, experimentation isn’t just limited to combat. I can experiment with fleet mechanics on a small scale without annoying anyone or losing their ships. It should give me a better understanding of what’s going on when/if I end up in some larger fleets.

I underestimated the focus benefit of the second account. The simple fact of knowing that I had a second account in training to take up the slack in the grunt work areas of mining and hauling made it a lot easier to plan the future of the main. It wasn’t that I could already replace its mining and hauling skills, it was the fact that I no longer had to worry about planning for them. The main account wasn’t going to end the first year with skills spread across categories like butter scraped over too much bread. The depressing thing about this focus is that it then took me less than five minutes to work up a six month skill plan in EVEMon. Six months planned out ahead of me. Sigh.
       
A minor side effect of choosing a Caldari background for the second account was the discovery that I actually like some of the Caldari ships. I’d previously avoided them but, as ever, I am all about the shiny new ships. The plan to fly all the racial frigates is back on the cards. Currently I’m admiring the steel space sailor that is the Heron, and the resting raptor that is the Merlin.

8. Fail Day. I have one of those days. One of those days you occasionally have where nothing goes right. It started with a missing bit of knowledge. I was cheerfully grinding standings up to POS anchoring levels when a friend informed me that it was Corporation standings that counted for anchoring a POS, not personal standings. This puts the POS back by months, unless I throw caution to the wind and anchor the first in 0.2 space. This isn’t going to happen for a while either. Back to the drawing board.

Continuing with the chain of missions I was already on for standings I then nearly lost my Ishkur to a set of elite scram and web frigates in the Yan Jung ruins somewhere in Sinq Laison. I got out intact but it was the second defeat of the day and made me completely abandon the standings chase for the day.

Returning home, I got a shout from a corp mate in trouble running a 5/10 site. I jumped into a fail fit Myrmidon without thinking and headed out to lend a hand. A fail fit and poor BC skills, a 5/10 site in a busy low sec. I’ll give you three guesses what happened. You won’t need all three. The only plus point was tanking nearly 22K damage in a badly thought out, and badly skilled Battlecruiser. http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=14804638 I really must draw up a pre flight checklist that includes the final item “Are you sure you are not being a complete idiot?”. Who am I kidding? A corpmate was in trouble. I’d have gone anyway. Kudos to the two guys that scanned me down and jumped me!

9. London Meet Up. I turned up at the London meet up around 3pm expecting things to be quiet. In truth I sort of expected a few geeks sat around a table or two and that I would be fine fitting in. I walked into the pub and saw nobody. This was because they were all around the corner in the side of the pub. Loads of people! Men in black clothes were pretty much in the majority but otherwise geek stereotypes were not really that evident. Maybe the quiet geeks had drowned in the amount of alcohol flowing through the place.

I found myself oddly nervous all of a sudden so headed for my usual social gateway. The smokers. I was involved in conversations within seconds. I met a lot of great people and heard a lot of stories. I appeared to the biggest noob in any conversation which occasionally caused bouts of hilarity. I’d remember more but the piece of paper I was using as external memory was destroyed in a lager spillage. Among the things I do remember:

Various members of the now defunct REPO who I spent ages swapping stories with while standing outside smoking. All good blokes whose names were sadly lost in the lager incident, if you remember talking to me and are reading this then comment below!

Meeting a character whose sole income was training up alt accounts and selling them on through the forum. Billions worth of them. Billions! He was 17 years old.

Meeting  Mangala Solaris and the RvB crew. I was quite drunk by this point and the single clearest thought I have of the incident is not believing a famous FC could come from Preston. I will make that RvB ganked roam one day. I just need a jump clone and some artillery skills. I was serious about that RvB ganked roam in the new mining frigates by the way.

Meeting Heimdallofasgard (@Heimdall_EVEO). I had thought his promise to badge us all up was a joke. Nope. I still can’t believe he turned up with hundreds of these things even though mine has pride of place above my monitors these days:

                                  

Finally catching up with Tgl3 of http://throughnewbeyes.wordpress.com/ I found him stood at the bar next to another player I’d wanted to meet, Azual Skoll, The Altruist http://www.evealtruist.com/. By this point I was quite drunk and their advice didn’t really sink in. I do remember thinking that I must have been as old as their ages combined. They were young in real life (well, compared to me) and I was young in EVE. Ha. I win. Ok, no, not really. Good chaps both. Great to meet them both and apologies if I exclaimed about your youth too much. Lets face it, I wasn’t the first. Someone had already told me Azual was younger than some and had a photo on his phone to prove it, and I walked past when Mangala Solaris was claiming Tgl3 wasn’t old enough to drink.

POS fuel. This was some blue stuff in a bucket (not a cube), with a straw in it, that people regularly made me drink for some reason. I am not sure what was in it. It did taste like fruity fuel. Did I mention it was in a bucket of some kind? A communal EVE bucket of fuel. It can still make me feel slightly ill just thinking about it.

In fact there were only three bad things about the event:

1. I left too early. For reasons I don’t understand but must have made drunken sense at the time, probably avoiding a London taxi fare by getting a late tube home.

2. Missing meeting pjharvey of http://www.tigerears.org/ She turned up, presumably saw the results of POS fuel on a room full of EVE fans and then wisely ran away before I could say hi. I wanted to thank her for the exploration inspiration!

3. The way I felt the next day when I woke up, which at least makes bad thing #1 easier to bear.