Finally I find an entire day where I can pretty much just roll through EVE. Monday was a Bank Holiday here in the UK, meaning a three day weekend. Despite the lure of London calling I dedicated myself to the Importance of Being Idle. One of the tasks this magnificent aim required was to spend a day exploring my new space home, the low sec system of Barleguet. It's a well connected system. It's rich in resources, pirates, gankers, newbies, and some bloke called Gray Arachnid shouting a lot. Commonly referred to as Barle, Barley, Le Baguette or variants of the same.
http://evemaps.dotlan.net/system/Barleguet
I put aside my desire to go and waste as many Talwars as possible without a single kill. That task can wait for a post work evening. Wary of jumping straight to voice comms before I had a handle on the community I kept my eye Alliance chat and jumped in if I could offer advice or random nonsense. While I did this I fired up my Nemesis and used its CovOps cloak facilities as a way to fly around making bookmarks and observing what went on in system. Then I tested the pipe to hi sec several times trying to get a handle on the number of enemy pilots and gate activity while stacking up some gate observation perches as I went.
Today I Learned
1. At one point I got bored of flying at cloak speed to a perch location near a belt. I switched off the cloak and turned on the MWD. Within 30 seconds an enemy fleet of around 8 ships dropped into the belt. No ratting in Barle unless it's Alpha and Away style tactics then. I warped off safe and shaky.
2. The process of grabbing your own set of bookmarks familiarises yourself with the system and the way it gets used. For me it removed nervousness about flying around while preserving wariness of that associated contempt thing.
3. Using a CovOps ship improves your DSCAN skills. Mine had got a little rusty. A CovOps ship in a safe point of your own making is virtually unassailable. It gives you time to relax and to experiment, getting dscan operation and interpretation back to the levels of second nature. Sure you can try this in hi sec but nothing is going on there, nothing potentially threatening anyway. CovOps takes about a month of skilling from scratch and all of it will come in handy elsewhere bar the 4-5 days of cloak training. I'm not talking about probing here. Just the ability to fly a ship that can cloak under warp.
4. Flying around cloaked means you'll get chance to observe fights from the outside. This is worth doing once or twice just to double check your overview settings which you should have followed a guide on. I recently updated my overview to Sarahs Overview Pack so I had new tab settings to get used to in addition to setting up the orders and colours. It was easier to do the latter when something was actually going on that I could watch and interpret.
5. EVE has sound. Following the earlier MWD incident I wanted to try and see what happened with MWD from a safe spot. Combat probes were out in system so I knew someone was looking around but was probably swamped in signatures. I thought I'd crack on the MWD and run uncloaked for a while and see if anyone warped in. No one warped in during the admittedly short amount of time I dared fly uncloaked but I discovered something else. I was zoomed in on my ship at the time and as I turned on the MWD heard sounds changed. I ramped up the volume and spent a minute listening to the entertainingly industrial hum that now accompanies Microwarp Drives. A quick mention on Twitter reveals a) it's fairly recent - I haven't been ignoring it for over a year and b) I didn't know TIL meant Today I Learned, prompting a joke exclamation to hide my irony driven embarrassment (sorry).
6. Barle Is Busy. I took a few side trips and the surrounding systems are massively more quiet. I don't think much will actually get done outside of fighting in Barle itself. The day to day subsistence, exploration and general mucking around will get done elsewhere. The pipe out to hisec is busier than most of the surrounding systems but it isn't so busy that you can run it in relative safety if you pay attention. It's good to realise you aren't trapped in a thunderdome. I took to flying out in shuttles I was building in Barle, breaking them down and flying the Tritanium back with me in one of the pre-rigged ships I've got stashed in hisec. I'm too cheap to lose the rigs by repacking the ship and having BLT freight all my stuff into Barley.
Next up : Less: recce. More: fleets, voice chat, and probably ship loss.
EVE Track of the Day
The Importance of Being Idle - Oasis
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
Day 425 : Summer In The City
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away......
Then these things happened :
Work went mad.
I went on holiday.
I returned to over a months outage of internet outside my providers control (well, speeds that comprise outage anyway)
Brave Newbies moved house.
CFC and Test set the Eastern side of EVE aflame and I missed it all.
Britain had a proper summer for once. A real burner which compelled me to lie about and drink cold lager a lot. (Not much different to my usual behaviour I know but a good excuse)
Several weekend evenings spent sleeping off watching the Ashes in the pub (this is a cricket reference, sorry to those outside GB or AU. Particularly sorry to some of those actually in the AU timezone for reasons they'll understand, ha ha. I'm looking at you Rob).
Add a sprinkling of the usual RL ups and downs and you have a summer snapshot.
As the weather cools, a slightly heavier and more tan coloured Noob finds himself thinking again of doing more than just autopiloted runs between markets and updating skill queues over breakfast.....
I didn't leave EVE, I just didn't play it. With the first hints of Autumn on the horizon and 24 degree temperatures at midnight no longer a problem (lack of sleep and an inability to wear headphones without overheating) it is time once more to aim to misbehave. Hopefully this time there will be more than just aiming.
I got as far as moving my stuff down to the hi sec entrance to Raha before the extreme outage set in. Last night I had it all carted back the same way and beyond, this time to the hi sec system nearest Brave Newbies new home. I'll figure out a way of shifting it the last few jumps myself, once I've taken a look around. All I need to do now is run the pod gauntlet myself and I'm there. I'm going sometime between tomorrow and the weekend so if you are one of those Braves that are still floating round Mendori and see me leaving then feel free to tag along. I'll be in the one in stealth bomber using you as a decoy. Just kidding...
I haven't been idle in the slow time. I've saved up some cash from slow trading and industry and had characters on PLEXed dual training for various purposes. There is enough cash left for at least a month of Talwars. I tried out a short term project elsewhere in the meta game that I think I'm going to let die off. It was fun while it lasted. I've EFT Warriored until it became like an odd game of Chess (At which point I decided to learn Chess again and my phone gave me a kicking. On easy level. The bastard thing. Chess is definitely not like riding a bike). All in all it's surprising what you can achieve in EVE and the metagame using only lunchtimes, breakfasts and, thanks to autopilot, the time spent in various uses of the bathroom. Apologies to anyone who said hi during this time and never got a response. It'll be safer if you imagine I was cleaning my teeth at the time. What I need is a waterproof mobile phone and EVE chat as an application. Anyone heard anything recent from Jon Lander and mobile EVE apps?
I've missed wars, I've missed chat, I've missed space (I was generally in the shower when it passed by), I've missed but never forgot EVE. So I think it is now time to get out there and die gloriously in pursuit of , well, EVE.
7o
PS Hurrah to me for not raging about British Telecoms organisation and customer service. A bigger advert for corporate fuckwittery and the perils of monopoly I have never seen. Well I guess I had a little bit of a rage.
PPS Four hour turn around for 32 jumps by Red Frog for 800,000m3. Nice work.
EVE Track of the Day : Boys of Summer, Don Henley
(or the title of the post, whatever)
Then these things happened :
Work went mad.
I went on holiday.
I returned to over a months outage of internet outside my providers control (well, speeds that comprise outage anyway)
Brave Newbies moved house.
CFC and Test set the Eastern side of EVE aflame and I missed it all.
Britain had a proper summer for once. A real burner which compelled me to lie about and drink cold lager a lot. (Not much different to my usual behaviour I know but a good excuse)
Several weekend evenings spent sleeping off watching the Ashes in the pub (this is a cricket reference, sorry to those outside GB or AU. Particularly sorry to some of those actually in the AU timezone for reasons they'll understand, ha ha. I'm looking at you Rob).
Add a sprinkling of the usual RL ups and downs and you have a summer snapshot.
As the weather cools, a slightly heavier and more tan coloured Noob finds himself thinking again of doing more than just autopiloted runs between markets and updating skill queues over breakfast.....
I didn't leave EVE, I just didn't play it. With the first hints of Autumn on the horizon and 24 degree temperatures at midnight no longer a problem (lack of sleep and an inability to wear headphones without overheating) it is time once more to aim to misbehave. Hopefully this time there will be more than just aiming.
I got as far as moving my stuff down to the hi sec entrance to Raha before the extreme outage set in. Last night I had it all carted back the same way and beyond, this time to the hi sec system nearest Brave Newbies new home. I'll figure out a way of shifting it the last few jumps myself, once I've taken a look around. All I need to do now is run the pod gauntlet myself and I'm there. I'm going sometime between tomorrow and the weekend so if you are one of those Braves that are still floating round Mendori and see me leaving then feel free to tag along. I'll be in the one in stealth bomber using you as a decoy. Just kidding...
I haven't been idle in the slow time. I've saved up some cash from slow trading and industry and had characters on PLEXed dual training for various purposes. There is enough cash left for at least a month of Talwars. I tried out a short term project elsewhere in the meta game that I think I'm going to let die off. It was fun while it lasted. I've EFT Warriored until it became like an odd game of Chess (At which point I decided to learn Chess again and my phone gave me a kicking. On easy level. The bastard thing. Chess is definitely not like riding a bike). All in all it's surprising what you can achieve in EVE and the metagame using only lunchtimes, breakfasts and, thanks to autopilot, the time spent in various uses of the bathroom. Apologies to anyone who said hi during this time and never got a response. It'll be safer if you imagine I was cleaning my teeth at the time. What I need is a waterproof mobile phone and EVE chat as an application. Anyone heard anything recent from Jon Lander and mobile EVE apps?
I've missed wars, I've missed chat, I've missed space (I was generally in the shower when it passed by), I've missed but never forgot EVE. So I think it is now time to get out there and die gloriously in pursuit of , well, EVE.
7o
PS Hurrah to me for not raging about British Telecoms organisation and customer service. A bigger advert for corporate fuckwittery and the perils of monopoly I have never seen. Well I guess I had a little bit of a rage.
PPS Four hour turn around for 32 jumps by Red Frog for 800,000m3. Nice work.
EVE Track of the Day : Boys of Summer, Don Henley
(or the title of the post, whatever)
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