Dreaming big: why I do FW

My EVE Online Faction Warfare goal is becoming a little more well-known to people as my little blog starts to reach the eyes of a wider audience. Interesting tidbit: according to my statistics, much of this audience comes from Sugar Kyle’s blog, and my blog link there. I guess it’s something I have to thank her for. I never began writing as if I had an audience, rather, I wrote as if I would want to understand my posts if I were to read them in the distant future. It’s a style that I guess doesn’t really work for some readers as I leave out a lot of context that maybe only I know, but I suppose the posts are at least barely understandable or I’d be getting no views at all.

Oops, there it is again, my classic digressions.

“Isn’t it funny how the most unforgettable scenes can be the most trivial?”

“Isn’t it funny how the most unforgettable scenes can be the most trivial?”

Time for another “life” post. No EVE Online to be found here, sorry friends.

More decisions!

I’ve witnessed what the Russians can bring to the field. They’re happy to bring capitals, and HACs, and T2 logistics. Why is it that everyone else can’t do the same?

I’ve run straight into an SP barrier. I call for cruisers, and people ask if they can bring stealth bombers and frigates. It’s not even because they don’t want to lose cruisers, it’s because they simply can’t fly them yet.

So I have two choices.

1) Run frigate/destroyer fleets, keep plexing up the warzone, and let others with the big ships bash hubs.

OR.

2) Run more cruiser fleets, leave out the newbies, and force them to skill into cruisers to join us.

Sebeistor? Or Se-BEAST-or?

That’s right friends, Revi the pun meister is back. It’s 1:30am and by the time I finish this post on my phone with my fat fingers it’ll probably be 2:30, but there’s once again things on my mind.

Let’s get a cool bit of news out of the way first. I can use t2 medium neuts! Fear me.

Besides that, today we plexed up and flipped 3 systems. 3. One, two, THREE.

And by the beard between the legs of Empress Jamyl Sarum, bless her immortality, was there a fight for the last one.

Brutor force

Not the smoothest of puns, but nevertheless, today the militia (or at least some 15-20 of us) managed to haul our warzone control up to tier 4 by increasing the level of most of our infrastructure hubs to 5.

With this comes, frankly, exorbitant LP gains. I put in around 500 thousand LP to the hub-upgrading effort as that was all I had on hand, and one mission run later, I was back to 600 thousand. Abso-frikkin’-lutely ridiculous.

Before everyone drops what they’re doing to join and farm Tribal Liberation Force (TLIB) LP, though, it is important to keep in mind basic microeconomics, supply and demand in particular. When supply exceeds demand, price falls. The market is going to be flooded by TLIB LP, and converting items into LP get a little less profitable because of it. I don’t really see any problems with that, on my end. Even at a very weak conversion rate of perhaps 400-500LP/ISK, a single mission that yields 60,000 LP is 24-30 million ISK. Optimising the missioning lets you do them all in about… 2 to 3 hours, for a total of 12 missions, lets say.

12 x 30 is 360m, so at a VERY WEAK conversion rate, you’re earning a tidy sum of a bit over 100m/hour. Great stuff!

Remap time!

Been a 1.3 years roughly since I started, so my annual remap has been refreshed. In the beginning I went for Perception/Intelligence, and I think it served me quite well for a PvP focus. Now though, I’m switching to Intelligence/Memory, to catch up on all those core skills that I never quite completed because I can be a little obsessive-compulsive when it comes to maximising training efficiency. Hence right now, my skills are heavily invested in spaceship command, gunnery, navigation and a little in missiles. As I said, great for PvP focus, but I do have some catching up to do in other aspects of my character.

Snapshot of my skills/queue.

Funnily enough, I’ve crammed the limit of 50 skills into my queue, but the total training time only amounts to ~90 days. Hah. I’m avoiding all the level 5s, though, but the fact that I can avoid them means I still have a lot of training to go to become as well-rounded as I would like.

Anyway, my plan is going to consist of a lot of EWAR support skills, finishing my capacitor skills, bonuses for resistance modules, some drone support skills, polishing off my shield skills… okay, I could go on, but lets not. Suffice it to say EveMon puts my plan at about a year, which is perfect because I will probably switch back to a Perception-based attribute scheme next year (wow that’s a while away), to return to skilling into bigger, badder ships.

Some people say they’re too lazy to remap, and I’ll admit, I put quite some time into developing my character’s skill plan. It’s my justification for not PLEXing my account, I guess. I tell myself if I’m making the most out of my training, I am okay to keep paying for my EVE experience.

Hopefully I don’t get bored of training, but recently I’ve barely paid attention to the skill queue. I still remember complaining about week-long skill trains, but today I looked at my 80-day skill queue BEFORE the remap, and I considered just letting that finish before I remapped. But I knew I’d throw more on top of that queue and end up never remapping. The thing is, in terms of gunnery and spaceship command, the skills I can train now benefit only a few ships, or unlock certain ships. These core skills I have switched to training, benefit ALL if not most of the ships I can and will fly in future. It’s a good time to start thinking about them, since I’m not exactly losing EVERY fight I pick nowadays, and can probably step back from aggressively training pure combat skills.

Although I did lose three ships yesterday, in three 1v1s. Was a bit disappointed, but all good, they were good fights!

“You hit Amarrian Infrastructure Hub for… PROTEUS ON SCAN!!!!”

Tried to bash Kurniainen again.

Once again, Amarrians send in a neutral hyper-tanked Proteus to bait tank for their fleet to arrive. Funny thing is, the Proteus was bait for a fleet of armour battleships and cruisers, 3 Guardians with an Exequror, more than capable of repairing all our DPS alone. Don’t see why they needed him.

Don’t see why they needed three Guardians either. I am more than willing to fight them even if the battle looks slightly uphill, but wow, they just don’t want a fight at all. To be honest, I’m just whining. Of course, if they can field something that can utterly destroy us, why wouldn’t they?

Frustration stems from the fact that I really can’t think of anything to do. Do I sink to their level and find neutrals of my own? Is that the best option? I was contemplating it in the previous post, but it’s a double-edged sword. How do I know I can trust people who aren’t in militia, who haven’t proven themselves to me?

It’s also my stubbornness. I see the Amarrians bring battleships, T2 logistics, neutrals, links, and a whole array of other things to compensate for their cowardice lack of numbers, and I want to destroy them and crush their smug fleets. Today though, they had equal numbers, but their ships were simply a class above.

3 Guardians. 3! We brought two Augorors, for Christ’s sake. Oops, there I go again, having to justify why I ran away. That’s the real painful thing, the running.

Would I bring a good fight to the Amarrians if I had the option to field something unstoppable? I don’t know, perhaps. But for now, we are still the underdogs, and on this front at least, we’re fighting uphill all the way.

I wonder if null-sec is like this on a larger scale. Someone fields 200-man fleet, roams for fights, nothing shows up until a 400-man fleet that has been forming for the past hour prepares to crush them, forcing the 200 to either run or give it their best shot. Running leads to no fun for both sides, but the difference in FW, I suppose, is that the Amarrians are certainly defending their systems. And that defense, I suppose, gives them some pleasure. I worry we won’t be able to burn them out before they whittle our momentum down.

All these attempts, too, are taking up a lot of my time. Lol. I shouldn’t be playing so much EVE, but I can’t help myself. I think I need to start imposing limits. Probably for the best; blogging after I should be asleep is bad. It relaxes the mind though, especially after a stressful fleet.

Speaking of which, it’s really difficult to maintain control of your fleet when you have to bash the hub, fend off the kitey crap that comes in to harass you, and also keep in mind the plexers trying to keep control of the system’s vulnerability. It stretches one to his mental limits, and having to run after all that, is just sad. I feel more sorry for my fleet. Nothing happened. I have my burning desire to win the warzone, I don’t think many others share in the strength of that dream. People want action, and I couldn’t really give them much for a few hours, those same hours are probably all the daily play time some of them get.

If the Amarrians intend to just shut down all our attempts at bashing that system, I guess I need to go with the flow. Bend like a reed in the wind, as they say, instead of trying to take a hurricane like a brick wall. I must look at other ways to further our cause, without slowly eroding our morale. I can think of few ways, I guess.

Also, I’m poor again. Waiting for the next round of LP items to sell. If anyone knows anyone who wants Tempest Fleet Issue blueprint copies, I can assure you the ISK will go to good use. 🙂

Being poor makes me think more innovative, though. I have an idea with FW missions. More later!

Resistance

Today, I ended up standing down a hub bashing fleet because the opposition formed up too much for us to handle. We had a kitchen sink DPS fleet to bash the hub, mostly shield cruisers. The Amarrians initially brought their usual kiting ships, being a pain to us from afar. Eventually, though, they formed up T3 battlecruisers. I would’ve fought the attack battlecruisers, however, they threw a Vargur at us, and that was when I had to sound the retreat.

The funny thing was, the Vargur wasn’t Amarrian, it was a neutral pirate. Another pirate from the same corporation landed with the Amarrians in a Machariel too. I enjoyed teasing them about it in local, and was especially amused when they dared to say the  neutrals were just random, when I had witnessed with my own eyes a pirate and an Amarrian warping to the same tactical on the hub, not to mention undeniable fact that the Vargur didn’t engage the Amarrians after we warped away, but instead both proceeded to trash talk in local. Fun.

Admittedly, I may have had the last word, but it was after we ran, and it ain’t really satisfying. The problem is, how do we beat them if we have to worry about back-up coming to their aid from all sides? It’s difficult to create a fleet with the resources we have that can combat the threats the Amarrians can call in, that can still bash the hub. All they have to do is put pressure on plexes, continually kite us, harass us until our DPS is distracted, and do so until their reinforcements arrive.

The hub bashers are generally at a disadvantage because of this. We have to defend ourselves AND hit the hub; defenders only have to stop us from bashing, and this can be done by running plexes. This means attackers also need forces to protect the plexes, or else provide enough DPS to crush the hub before the defensive plexing brings the hub back to invulnerable state.

I want to fight them, but I don’t often see the Amarrians bring a force we can contend with. They either harass us from a distance or bring enough to utterly crush our forces.

As for our own troops, I hope calling off a bash half-way into it isn’t too demoralising for them. In that regard, it’s a gamble. We blue-ball the Amarrians until they get too frustrated to even try assemble a force, or our own militia dissipates and doesn’t attend hub bashes because it feels like we go no where.

The problem is, we don’t have the capabilities to take on the Amarrians head on in a brawl. So we need different methods. As much as I wish I could be that white knight on a huge war stallion that can trample over all opposition, while my allies rally by my side, it ain’t going to happen. So, discard honour, and embrace the darkness of New Eden.

To date, my solo PvP has instilled in me a sort of code of honour in PvP where I am offended when enemies bring unfair fights to our doorstep, and hence I am also reluctant to field the scummiest of the scum when it comes to fleet compositions.

Let us see how far I am willing to sink, to what lengths I can possibly go, simply for the sake of victory.

One year ago…

…I started this blog.

Hmmm. The year flew. Hahah, that’s funny.

Staying strong

I’ve burnt myself out once. The worry is that I could do it again. Recently I’ve caught up with the High Life Industries guys, and we still get along but I wonder if they… harbour any resent or see me in a different way, for bailing on them with almost no notice. I feel like some of them were dropping hints, and I don’t really want to play this game of words. Perhaps I’ll approach the issue directly next time I chat with them. It might not be a loose end at all but I want to just make sure. I was looking for a way back into EVE at the time, and well, FW was the answer. I’ve probably said this a few times now but it still astounds me just how strong the connections can be between people you meet in New Eden.

-sigh-