Anniversary

Almost two years ago, I undocked a ship with the intention of using it to PVP, without any idea what I was doing. Realising this milestone has made me reflect on the changes that have come over the past two years, and the people I've had the pleasure of meeting and flying with (and sometimes against). PVP is mostly a social activity for me, so I think it's appropriate that I take the opportunity to offer my thanks.

Explosions!

Since this blog is about EVE Online, and the vast majority of the pilots I currently fly with are in the game for the "pew pew", I thought I'd give a summarized version of the spaceship murder I've recently been party to in the name of "good fites".

• A hat trick of firsts: my first night in R1FTA, my first kill as a member of that corp, and my first killmail as a member of the corp, all on the same Myrmidon.
• A brawl with RANSM at the Angel Creo-Corp plex in Heild. This was actually a series of four separate engagements: Haerod's Enyo and Duke's Wolf popping Dirty Protagonist's Coercer while my Jaguar and Ris' Enyo took Totera's Thrasher down (later joined by Haerod's Tristan and Aliaksandre's Rifter). Second, a group of us jumped on Titus' Bellicose after I had reshipped into a Stiletto. The third fight was a larger frigate and destroyer brawl that spelled the end of the same Jaguar that had killed Totera earlier. Finally, a little later that evening, I had a 1v1 against SneakyBadger's Thrasher that I lost by the skin of my teeth (Sneaky was at 6% structure when my Retribution popped). 
• A pair of 1v1s with Naoru Kozan of the Tuskers where I lost a Retribution and a Jaguar. Due to the comments left in the second lossmail, I suspect the surprise pointing incident was arranged by Jaxley. :P
• This Vagabond aggressed my Retribution on the undock of our home station while I was typing something to a corpmate. Though he managed to burn 40 kilometres away in the time that it took me to dock and reship, it wasn't quite enough to escape my Lachesis' point range.
• Unfortunately, not everyone who offers 1v1 fights has good intentions. This particular pilot offered a "friendly" duel in a Nighthawk, showed up on field in a Daredevil (which stood far less of a chance against my Hurricane's 720mm guns), and then proceeded to call in a gaggle of friends to gank my poor battlecruiser. I was miffed about the entire affair for about half an hour, but after that, it was more hilarious than anything.
• On the generous invitation of my friend anf fellow Woman Gamer of EVE Shalee Lianne (who sounds SO CUTE on comms!), I spent a few hours camping gates in The Forge lowsec with her and her corp, Imperial Outlaws. Among the results were a Talos (my first tier 3 battlecruiser kill), a Lachesis and a Ferox.
• Last but certainly not least, the only explosions to come out of a brief venture into Innsmother with my partners in crime Huo and Judge. We had just returned from a tour of 0.0 featuring some module lag shenangians and a frustrating lack of kills. On the lowsec gate from L4X to Skarkon, I saw a gate flash, and what popped up but a Vindicator? Unfortunately, contrary to Cyber Ten's assurances, it did not end well. (Despite that, though, we had a blast - pun definitely intended!)

While I try not to dwell too much on killboard stats, I'm pleased to note that in the past eight days since joining R1FTA, I seem to be on my way to setting personal records for both kills and losses - I'm currently at 21 kills for the month (with a record of 53 in March of 2011, primarily due to participating in the Wensleyday Roams), and 12 losses in the same period (with a record of 14 in March of 2011, likely also due to the Wensleyday Roams :P).

I certainly won't claim those as examples of prolific PVP activity - I know pilots who pull in as many kills in an average-to-busy month as I have in my entire four-year EVE career - but if I maintain the pace that I've set for the month so far, it'll represent significant changes in both the quantity and quality of my fights in New Eden. I'll discuss that in more detail in a separate post, so if you're interested, keep an eye out!

Rebel Yell

Lots of stuff going on since my last post, which probably isn't that surprising, given that it's been three months (ish). For the sake of keeping this entry relatively brief, I'll go through the broad strokes rather than minute details. Apologies in advance if things seem a little disjointed as a result.

Look ma, I'm on Sov Wars!

As fate would have it, a mere day after I started writing blog posts again I was contacted by Shalee of Sovereignty Wars to see if I'd be interested in doing an interview. I'm sure you all know how well I get on with the opportunity to ramble at length about anything, so I was more than happy to accept!

Direct link to the interview is here.

Frustrational Warfare

With a post title like that, I think I've succeeded at both banishing any confusion about what the topic might be, and losing the interest of a significant portion of anyone who might read this blog. Since I've already managed to accomplish two things with this post, I reserve the right to present the rest of the content in an utterly pointless way. :P

My perspective on Factional Warfare is admittedly narrow; I haven't spent a great deal of time in the FW environment recently, and I've never really ventured into the Amarr-Minmatar side of the conflict at all. If you're interested in getting a broader view of things, I'd highly recommend a blog written by my awesome Amarr counterpart and fellow gamer-chick Shalee Lianne. You can find it over at Sovereignty Wars.

WARNING: This is going to be a long post, even compared to some of the wordier ones I've written here. I won't be offended if people don't read the whole thing, so don't expect me to come out and randomly start quizzing people on its contents or anything like that.

Back with a snap-crackle-pop!

Every time I'm away from the game and intend to come back with a vengenace (or more likely a Jaguar, but I digress), my burst of enthusiasm lasts for all of a week before some sort of external influence takes its toll. So, rather than loudly proclaiming how I'm ready to turn internet spaceships upside down, I'm just going to say that I'm here. Maybe the universe won't see it as a challenge that way.

Still, I can't say my EVE life has been entirely uneventful. I haven't made too much of a flap in the areas that I'm typically involved in, but I've slowly been getting myself re-adjusted to EVE. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call the happenings "exciting", but for the sake of putting a post up for the first time in ages, I'll share a few details here.

FC Review - 22 May 2011

So after much needling from some of my partners in crime in Caldari FW, I took the reins for a roaming gang last night. All in all it started out fairly boring - we'd initially shipped for frigates and fast cruisers and set out for Enaluri to roam the pipes toward our mortal enemies' headquarters in Heydieles. The first leg of the roam didn't go as well as I'd planned, ending in a small scrap between Oinasiken and Pynekastoh that lost us a Caracal and Enyo.

The Gallente gang we engaged was somewhat heavier than hours, with roughly even numbers but more battlecruisers compared to our frigates and cruisers, so I pulled our fleet back to the State Protectorate station in Rakapas to clear my head and allow the pilots who were based there to re-ship. While we were there, we picked up a couple more fleet members in Drakes, while losing several due to various other commitments combined with the late hour of the evening. Once everyone was ready to move again, we set out.

The RANSM has been offered and paid...

Hey all, sorry things have been quiet from me lately. It's been longer than I'd intended since my last post. I don't even really know how to describe what's been happening over the past few weeks. I've been dealing with a ton of RL health issues, and as a result I wasn't online regularly for practically that entire time. (As a measure of how sick I was: I started a three-week skill train, finished it, and left my account not training for a good four days after it was done before I realized I needed to log in and change it. Yeah, THAT sick.) Before all the RL stuff happened, I was starting to feel a bit of a creeping malaise regarding EVE, but I couldn't figure out why - I'd left factional warfare, joined a new corp, was making a solid attempt at being a "serious" pirate (or at least a "not sure if serious" pirate, as I imagine Sulei would say), and things were generally pleasant. I didn't know why I was still feeling unsatisfied when everything looked good.

A Pirate's Life For Me

About a week ago, I came to the realization that I needed a change of pace in EVE. There were quite a few reasons for my decision, stemming from both my own preferences in the game and the environment that seems to have taken hold in Caldari-Gallente factional warfare. (The explanation of the whole thing is long and relies on people having knowledge of the current FW scene, so I'll leave it out.) Eventually, I decided that I'd hang up my State Protectorate badge for the third time and look for other opportunities.

Huo and I talked about our next steps at length; I mentioned not too long ago that he'd joined the pirate corp Meatshield Bastards, and while he was enjoying the PVP, the inconsistency of being a US time zone player in primarily EU-based corp was starting to take its toll. He wanted to continue lowsec piracy-style PVP, and I've been more and more interested in the field myself of late. The decision wasn't without its hiccups - we had a couple of significant differences of opinion on exactly how we'd go about the next chapter of our lives in EVE, but eventually, we came to an agreement.

1v1 = 1vWin?

Sorry in advance if this entry is kind of incoherent. I'm still a little shocked that the entire thing happened the way it did. I'm sure more details will come once the adrenaline wears off, but I'll record what I can for now, and add to it later if I need to.

This particular encounter was an unintentional Part 2 of what I'm starting to think of as the Loren Gallen saga. Last time I fought Loren, it was very intentional, very uncertain on my part, and ended with the loss of my ship. This time was different, on all three counts. I'd been in my Jaguar, ferrying some ammo from the nearby highsec hub of Ichoriya to my home base in Enaluri. As soon as I jumped into Akidagi, the highsec gateway between the two systems, I spotted a familiar face in local. I waved to Loren in local chat, he waved back, I didn't think anything of it - until I landed on the Enaluri gate and saw his Ishkur. There was second's pause, since I was surprised to see him, and he probably expected that I would jump through the gate and run, like I usually do when I meet him on a gate.

So, what did I do? I pointed him.

1v1? More like 1vFail...

I don't get into many 1v1 fights out in militia lowsec, for a few reasons. First, the times that I want to go out and get kills, I normally end up joining a fleet (or more often FCing, lately). The times I'm more inclined to actually solo, I'm stuck with the "lowsec curse" of either finding nothing or getting blobbed. I think I've had a grand total of four 1v1 fights - a frigate duel I narrowly lost with both of us in structure, a Taranis that tried to tackle my Ishkur on a gate, an inconclusive duel between my Jaguar and a Hawk (he couldn't keep point on me and I couldn't stay in range to break his tank), and one far more lopsided fight - which is the subject of this post.

My opponent in this particular duel was Loren Gallen. Loren's something of a celebrity in the Caldari-Gallente FW community, due to the staggering number of kills he packs into the course of a day, ranging from ganks of highsec mission runners to 1v1 duels in lowsec. (Despite some Caldari militia members turning their noses up at both his highsec ganking and a few fairly obvious cases of killmail whoring, holding a #9 rank on Battleclinic is nothing to sneeze at, in my books.) Aside from that, Loren and I get on quite well with each other, having developed something of a friendship since the first time we met on the field.

Updates!

It's been quite a while since I've updated this blog. I'll try to remember everything that's happened since then, but if I leave anyone out by accident, my apologies!

I think I can safely say I've resolved my dilemma about flying Minmatar. The answer ended up being "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em", and looking back I'm honestly glad I've made the jump. I still have a special place in my heart for Gallente ships, but I've been spending more and more time flying rustbuckets with guns - even I'm shocked to see that the last few kills I've gotten have been in Firetails and Hurricanes, respectively. In turn, that lead me to a couple of other discoveries regarding my style of PVP.

A Tale of Two Fleets

I suppose it was more like a lead-in and one-and-a-half fleets, really. The evening began with my CEO, who's been a sweetheart about encouraging me to FC (much to my chagrin), pulling me in for an after-action review after listening in on the FCing of a corpmate. (Shout-out to Stalking Mantis for doing better than I did tonight!) The review was full of useful information, especially tips on fleet decision-making and intel management. Little did I know, i would end up getting spectacularly pwnt at both.

Definitely progress.

Things have mostly been slow for me PVP-wise lately. I'm in a bit of a difficult situation in terms of finding targets, for a couple different reasons.

First, from what I've heard from some of the people in the Tuskers Public and Rifter Drifter channels, genuine solo targets in the areas that I frequent - mostly Black Rise, Essence and Placid because of my residence in Caldari FW (basically anything on this map that's lowsec) - have been drying up. Last night, even the normally bustling FW/pirate hub of Tama had a local population of a whopping 3 people (all blue to me) at one point during the evening. It's awfully hard to PVP when there's nothing to shoot at.

"Have any orders, FC?" "... oh, you mean ME?"

Last post, I mentioned that I had lead a small gang for the first time. I'd been anxious about the prospect of being a fleet commander, due to a general dissatisfaction with my own PVP skills and the fact that I felt I had no idea where to begin. Like many things that have turned out better than I expected, this particular adventure started on a whim - a few of us were bored in corp chat, someone mentioned going on a roam, and before I realized it I had responded with, "Hey, if people feel like going, I'll FC."

Before I knew it, I was sitting in a safespot in our rally system of Nourvukaiken, absently watching the fleet composition window and wondering what I'd gotten myself into. Before long, our merry little gang of Tommy and Max a pair of Drakes, Recklessness in a sniper Zealot and myself in a tackling Jaguar set out to see what kind of trouble we could cause.

Progress, not perfection.

I don't know if my PVP skill has exactly grown by leaps and bounds over the past five or six weeks, but I'm getting more comfortable with it. I've reached a few milestones that I'm pretty proud of, some of which I've wanted to do for a long time but never actually thought would happen.