Just a quickie blurb due to spread some news thats caught my eye. Science community is
getting the wheels turning on getting more data. Info is good enough SETI is taking it seriously.
Possible Alien Megastructures Spotted Around a star
I’ve started a discussion in the EVE Online forums: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=450830&find=unread
Still looking for notes its a hoax but its not looking like one. Exciting. Crossing my fingers.
There is no denying that EVE Online numbers are down. As I type this I’m looking at a launcher showing 15583 online. Personally I think CCP is on the right track, and while numbers are down they’ll start going back up with the next expansion. If I am wrong about that, we’re in EVE’s end game. There are reasons to be optimistic though. The steps CCP has taken are good ones…
Basically all the ingredients are there for the right gameplay to come together with the right marketing opportunity. The stars may actually be aligned for this one. I’m gonna be optimistic this time. I say CCP keeps its usual 10% of the trial spike long term and we get a good number of resubscribes.
So IOC has been doing a lot of entosis/sov stuff and I decided it was time for another nice relaxing BLOPS fleet. The neighbors have been harassing us so I decided to pay them a visit. I formed a sizable BLOPs fleet up and went roaming through Stella Nova/The Corvos space in Scalding Pass.
I started hunting and jumped into KZ4F-4. I saw a Paladin on directional. Figured it was at a POS but there was a lot of stuff inline with where it was on directional. Checked an anomaly and nothing. The station was an option so I warped @ 100 to the station in system and there it was. At first I was thinking I was being baited, and then I realized it was about 80km from the undock and it was salvaging. Several wrecks were near him. Normally when I land on a target I have to warp in/out from another celestial/wreck or slowboat cloaked and hope the target doesn’t warp off. This time I was conveniently 180km from my target and you can warp to a wreck. Warped my hunter @ 10 to a wreck and decloaked. Saw him try to MJD but I had scram/web/long point on him and there wasn’t any hope. Yes the second falcon was totally necessary for this drop.
So lesson to learn. When you’re in a marauder salvaging is the absolute worst thing you can do with a neut in system. It gives people a warpin directly on top of you.
One core question I think the EVE community struggles to answer is why would a new player begin playing EVE right now? I think that is a question the community doesn’t answer for new players in a great way. EVE is already over a decade old and was a niche game to begin with. Theres also a huge ability/social/SP/ISK disparity between older established players and newbies. This is my stab at answering this question:
What else should be on this list I wonder? When it comes to EVE what one thing would you say to a new player or just to give to them that would make them stick around? I honestly do think its a good time to start playing EVE. We’ve just go to let people know.
I will be the first to say that it was a smart move. Said it to my guys when we saw it happen and if others haven’t seen what I am about to describe, I can only imagine it wont be long before you do.
I-1QKL was held by Blue Alliance before Fozzie Sov was implemented. I know their main leader has been out due to real life issues and there were people put in place to lead in his absence. This is what I am told anyways and some of this might not be accurate. Never saw calls for help or anything until all of a sudden the system is in Tri’s hands. They took the station, the TCU, and the IHub. Red Alliance took the I-hub back, IOC had the system by putting up our own TCU, and the station had been being fought over. Reinforced a couple of times and Freeported one time.
We all know how much fun entosising is and how long it took before the changes. I was on the fence as to what I thought about Fozzie Sov until last night. What Tri did was instead of them taking the SOV back or defend the station when it was in freeport, they showed up in force and had a couple of guys from an alt/pet alliance of theirs take it. What this did was allow them to keep us at bay because alliance to alliance they out number us 5 to 1, but to make things easier for them they had the other alliance set that system as their capital. So now it automatically has a defense level without any index levels raised up. Which only made it harder for us when we tried to reclaim the system. All part of the game, this is just a run through of what happened.
Yesterday the patch was deployed with the updates to Fozzie Sov. We are ready to go hit the nodes like we have been literally every night since Fozzie Sov has been out. We place eyes in systems knowing where people would be coming from and we start to work. Two Tri start coming up and we get a couple of guys going back to reship to handle the two guys. Then it is a 25 man fleet of Tri coming up the pipe. We are outnumbered, one guy not on comms lost his ship, and the rest of us safe up knowing they are going to hunt us. What used to take a decent amount of time to get back safe, they were able to do so in a little over an hour with 3 guys. Might now have been that long.
This isn’t a little guy is being picked on by the big guy story. They are bigger than us and I am working on growing my alliance. What was supposed to be something to help the little guys in all reality does NOT help them though. You can still be pushed off by groups who are bigger than you. You have groups that roam around now specifically looking for people to pick off that are entosising. Really you have to have fleets unless you are in the middle of nowhere Eve. This wasn’t a benefit for the little guys at all and from what I keep seeing is that it is a lot of work for someone to easily come in to stop all your progress.
Tri has done a good job and I wouldn’t say we have given them a run for their money, but I would say I think we have been a thorn. They have tried five man fleets to run us off and that usually doesn’t work. Their leader Garst has been the one heading up these defense fleets lately, which maybe I am reading too much into it, tells me that it is seen as a big deal what we are doing.
Forewarning to those who haven’t seen that tactic though. It is an excellent and easy way to get a foothold into a region or constellation. You got to keep in mind that 1B for an alliance or getting a pet group to do it for them is nothing. I bet you will see more of this across Eve. Just my opinion.
Before I was running my own alliance and it was just the corporation, we would talk. I don’t know when it was that it hit us, but there was a point when we had double the forum posts in our directors room than we had in the rest of our forums combined. Even now between Jabber and Skype we are constantly in touch with one another letting those who are running their own corps in the alliance know what is going on.
I hear quite regularly that there is generally a lack of communication in the younger alliances. Yes my alliance is only 3 years old which is young compared to many of them in Eve, but my Corporation is 8 years old and one of the others is 5 years old. Plus in the midst of the other groups are veterans to this game, so there is experience that is brought to the table. I have always told people that I can give them all the information they want or need, but I can’t force them to read it. Never fails even when there are posts on the forum, mails sent out and you could be talking about it in TS that there are people who can’t be bothered. Those are the people who tend to not stay long anyways from my experience.
Plus I try to have an alliance meeting once a month. Lately we have been acquiring a corp a month the last two months and hopefully that trend will continue, but that is why it is important for us to have a meeting once a month. With new guys coming in, they need to know what is going on within the alliance. This shows that there is a direction that you are heading in, you give updates to your goals, and you ask if there are any questions.
It never fails that when I ask if there are questions about anything from the meeting or otherwise, that there are crickets in the background. You as a member of the alliance should speak up if there is something on your mind. I know that not every group wants that, but I want that from my people. I constantly say that my ideas aren’t always the right one. I will listen to what others have to say, but that requires them to speak up. I have changed directions based on better ideas, but when only a couple of people are saying anything it leaves my maybe not so good of an idea in place.
For me it is a two way street. Good leaders should listen and those who are in the corp or alliance should want to let others know if their idea will benefit the group. Some times criticism is hard to swallow, but if it is constructive and will help us grow or learn, I am all for it.
Had a member of the corporation this weekend say something off the cuff that to me was hilarious and of course might have needed to be there kind of thing. I am sure it was when we had to dock up, move to safety or something like that and the subject of e-peen came up. He just so smoothly threw out there that his was massive and kept going on with the statement of whatever we were talking about. That and some fights this weekend gave me this material to write on how people in Eve act because of their “massive” e-peen.
This alliance to those who know us, read this blog or seen our recruitment post on the forums would know we are Blops flyers most of the time. So when it comes to fights we are a hit and run style group, but have been known to risk biting off more than we can chew. Not saying we have never been caught by a trap, but yes we usually know when we are jumping into a trap. Some of those traps we are able to kill the bait and get out while others have sent us down into balls of flame. Then there are those that due to their not working together provide 4 or 5 kills before they escalate it to a point that we have to get out. So I can admit that we go for a fair fight to a fight that we know we can win. Oh, but I am sure we are the only ones that do that based on the smack talk we tend to get when we dock up when the fight is overwhelming in others favor.
Those who follow what is going out in Null Sec might know that has been hitting IOC, Red Alliance, Blue Alliance, and Lux Aetherna SOV so they can have better ratting space. They took a couple of systems and we have taken them back from them, but they still hold a station in two of those systems. Tri is bigger than IOC and they have a US side which can contest us when they are online. How can I admit that? Well for one thing when they show up with two to one odds, we can’t exactly compete with that and yet they still expect us to come out to fight. I even love it because they have learned by now if we think we have fair odds, we will fight and so they will hold people back a couple of systems to bait us out. It has worked, but we have started to use a lot more eyes these days.
So this weekend as one of the times we had to dock up because of being out numbered, it is funny that Garst is still trying to call us out for a fight. We are doing our best to ninja some command nodes and doing so successfully even though we lost a few ships. In local we are being called everything under the sun like it is actually going to draw us into a fight. Are people so hung up on who has the bigger e-peen that they will undock to die in a ball of fire for no reason? Why is it that the people who try to draw you out will talk big when you are docked up, but the minute the shoe is on the other foot they wont undock. When the odds turn from their favor to yours, then all of a sudden you are the bad guy for being able to beat up on them. Or they run complaining that they can’t believe you brought in more people even if they just did the same thing.
Lastly I love it when people think they know the agreement you have with a coalition. We were called pets this weekend, Russian slaves, or you name it and I bet it was said. Some things I wont go into or what some of my members were told must be their job for a living. IOC does not rent from Red Alliance and never has rented from them. IOC is on the border and is that prime space? No it isn’t, but someone needs to man that front and Red’s Capitol system is a couple of jumps away. They are right on the edge with us. Are we pets? Well I would say no to that one as well because of the fact that pets always in the past never received help from their masters and were always just pure meat shields. We have had help with our timers and Red has shown it has our back.
I don’t get the insults flying, because you aren’t going to insult me enough to undock to die. I don’t get why it is who has the bigger e-peen or why they are justified to dock up, but you should never dock up. Is it ignorance on their part or are they just kids? At the end of the day this is a game we are going to have fun with and I don’t care if you think my mom was a good lay last night. You wont draw IOC into a fight based on what you think is insulting words.
If you have read my posts or basically anything talking about my corp, I mention that I fly with the best that there are in Eve. This also these days extends to the alliance as well because we have some really good people throughout it as well. First I will start in saying that if I am repeating myself that I am sorry. Though I do think this is something that demands and explanation if you don’t already know why that is. I know I have said before that if you play eve that you know of people leaving the game and if you had a friendship with them that you wonder how they are. Also I can’t tell you how many people started with friends they had before Eve and they are the only one left now.
This is a tribute to those who have come before and those who are still here now. I have been around long enough that I know that in most groups appreciation isn’t shown very much in the larger groups. Thing about those groups, they have enough people to go around that if someone isn’t doing their job, then someone else is going to be appointed or step up. Thing is in smaller groups you have no one but those who are beside you and usually if a key figure leaves there is a gap that multiple people have to fill until someone comes forth again down the road to fill it. Some times that happens quickly, but usually it doesn’t.
I fly with the best that there is in Eve because when the chips are down or things look a little dim, they step up each time without fail and deliver what is needed for our group. No one knew really how the Sov changes would impact the game. I do think that in many ways we are still seeing how they impact things and it feels like it is a battle of attrition. Going through saving our space, we didn’t know what we were going to do. There was talks of what would happen if we lost the space or if help didn’t come in time, etc. etc. and yet we are still here holding onto what we feel is ours. People showed up at ugly timers for us, stayed up late when they had work the next morning, or things like that. Yes, we hear of people doing this in Eve quite a bit, but these are in most cases grown people who have families or bigger responsibilities. When I was in school or before I moved out, I could see where staying up late, waking up early or calling in sick was a real possibility. These guys have stepped it up to show we aren’t leaving and we are fighting.
Yes, the SOV game still is about who has the bigger fleet despite these changes helping the little guys. It is also a way for groups to just pester one another and really gain nothing in the end put a headache. The entosis process is no easier than structure bashing in the way that they are both boring and take time. To me I’m not sure that I can say yet if the new way is any better or not, but I know that we have been alright. That has been in part of those in the alliance and not just those in my corporation.
There are people who I will never forget that had an impact on me in this game and an impact on my corporation. Right now the story of the alliance is being written. The impact they have had in these early times will not be forgotten. I am a CEO, but what does that mean if there aren’t people under you? I am executor of the alliance and what does that mean if there are no corps willing to help or follow? Without these people there wouldn’t even be this blog. I promise you, you haven’t flown with the best in Eve till you have been apart or with this group. I am a guy that they put up with, but I am a guy who wouldn’t trade the hardships for nothing.
IOC – Men and Women….. and Furries – please don’t ask. Thank you. I genuinely mean that.
In the wake of the end of the Halloween War, there has been a decline in Eve overall in my opinion. We decided to rent to keep people in isk after our floating around doing nothing for the better part of a month and a half. Feeding another persons war machine by paying rent isn’t something I wanted to do and it wasn’t bankrupting the corporation, but I didn’t want to run our wallets dry. This was a hard decision to go back to renting that we made as a group. In the end we still moved out of Null Sec which can kill a group that wants to be out in SOV space. There were members who decided to go to other places and this is something that any CEO who has been around a while can see coming.
When we moved back into Empire space, we setup in Low Sec to claim Otsela as our base of operations. Things were actually going so well for us that we garnered a lot of attention in the form of War Decs. Even in the process we managed to upset some Code guys because that was an area their alts used to do their own mining and such. I truly didn’t want it to take a year, but we had moved in our own alliance and wanted to get some people to join before trying to head back out into Null Sec. One of the groups that joined us was Tribal Mist (Trim) and they had known us from Mildly Intoxicated days. At the time they were in Mildly Sober and helped with the defense of our space in Tenerifis. They were the first and because I had at that point some dealings with chbm, their CEO, it only made sense to make him second over the alliance. Especially since his primary TZ is in the EU where mine is the US.
Being in low sec, the constant wars wasn’t an issue for most guys though there were a few taking advantage of missions and such while in high sec. In the end it was pretty much figured out that the mercs have a little bit of racket going on within the groups. We hired some on retainer basically to keep the other mercs off our backs and that left the wars which no one ended up fighting in. There were more than a few times we would head out to hunt some of the mercs for some fun fights. Usually they would run off and reship to counter us before actually brawling. Being honest we lost more than we won, but we stood our ground and we had fun. I could say that I think some of those fights were lessons for us since most of our fleets up till high sec were blops only or pretty close to it. Also during this time to help with funding the SRP we started our booster production. Also was the inspiration for the name of the Blog site that Toriessian started “The Booster Addict”.Now how we ended up with Red Alliance is kind of an odd thing really. I think the guy who found me just saw our ad on the forums or I’m not really sure how it came about that he wanted to befriend me. In the end they didn’t join up with RA and we did, but he was the one who introduced me to Greg. Greg at that time was just the diplo to RA, they were looking for some USTZ guys to help offset the fact that is their weak time. There was promise of space after a 30 day trial period in their space showing we were active and serious. Also with the way Eve is, also I am sure in that period would have been when someone would awox on them. So we set about moving basic assets into place without putting anything major on the line. The trust thing works both ways and we weren’t about to bring out anything expensive till we had our own space.Not sure when they joined, but an alliance called Diplomatic Immunity (Dip) was apart of the Coalition. We moved up into their area to help them with grinding out dead towers and just claiming space. This was after our initial 30 days was up, but we were in a station, helping other USTZ guys and really trying to just go with the flow before pushing for our own space. It was during this that Kasken from DIP approached about us merging into his alliance.The points he gave were valid, because at that point in time he already had space. They had a handful more people than us, but I still think that we had a more solid infrastructure than they did. It was something that gave quite a few of us pause because of the effort that goes into running and building an alliance. In the end what did it for me was the fact that I was not offered anything in their leadership. If I am going to be doubling the size of your alliance, I do expect a say in how things are going to go in the future and he didn’t see that as an option. In the end though, his alliance did fall apart a few months after all this happened. I do think that if we had merged his group would still be around, but much like what happened in Mildly Intoxicated we would be the case in that alliance I am sure. The guys would have been the backbone to the alliance, Kasken’s desires for his alliance would have been being fulfilled and the “Old IOC” guys would be the ones handling all the slack.What leadership had decided was to give ourselves about 3 months to see how things were going to pan out before 100 percent deciding to join them or not. During that period Space Ants joined us to add 60 plus more members to the alliance. Even though they are a relatively new bunch to Eve, that just means they don’t hold the bitterness some of the old vets do. Also recruiting during this time wasn’t easy because of waiting for Fozzie Sov to deploy was something a lot of people were waiting on. With it bringing a possible new changes and unknowns when it came to how SOV was going to be handled. As this is the most current moment to my addition to this, we have been saving our space, taking other space and having some fun with it. In some ways it seems to have even the field a little, but in others it is still about who has the biggest fleet.As always there is more history being written daily. 5 Parts is all there is for now.
Shortly after this point there were a lot of changes that came down the pipe. HPL did finally peak over 200 members, were very active and had a steady flow of fleets being ran. As a corporation we had about 60 carriers and 10 dreadnoughts within the fleet. Now our carrier use was really a minimum, but during fleets it was nothing for HPL to field 7 or more of its dreads for bashing purposes. The Halloween War as it was called was in full effect, our alliance leader was no where to be found and we were trying to keep our Catch assets from falling apart. To this day I still don’t know the complete cause of animosity to Mildly Intoxicated or how it started, but this is when it came to light to the masses from the N3 Coalition. A Handful of guys were assigned diplo roles to the coalition, myself being one of them, and every time we tried to get in contact them for coordination, it fell on dead ears. It wasn’t until we lost a couple of dreads while hitting some TCU’s, SBU’s and the like, did they decide it was worth talking to us. We got chewed on, told how stupid we were for not letting them know what we were doing, and next time we need to fill them in on what we plan to do. Just like before comms went silent and no one would talk to us.
Then there was the loss of E-Y station and system because the rest of the alliance wasn’t informed that it was on its last timer. Didn’t even know that it was on its first timer to be truthful about the situation. When that went down, there were a lot of people upset about the situation and I think the coalition was using that system as much as we were despite their…. indifference at times. Still there was no communication, there was no alliance head and it was four people trying to keep things a float in the alliance. Also during this whole time, despite our fleets which had coalition members in it, HPL had people flying constantly in coalitions fleets.
Next came the call to abandon Tenerifis. The battle of B-R was and at the moment still the biggest/costliest battle that has happened in all of Eve. It turned the tide of the war, this is solely MY opinion on this next part, and demoralized N3. Too many people had been in a constant struggle, due to a few stupid choices during the fighting, and the CFC came out on top. Three regions were steamrolled in no time flat and basically we were the last in Tenerifis to be actively fighting for our territory. Kadeshi pulled up and abandoned their space so quick that no one realized that had happened till their relocation had been announced. EON had space still in name only, but their alliance was falling apart and we had a Titan at stake. At the time the Titan was put in the cooker, things with the war looked like it was NO where near our space and usually a grind takes a while. No one thought that N3 would withdraw like they did without a fight.
Defense of our territory. One of the core beliefs that HPL has always had whether Indy or Hybrid, was that we were going to defend our stuff to the utmost degree. We had pulled a lot of important assets out, members worked together to get their toys out of systems, and only a few at this point had run. Morale alliance and corporation was very high. Unfortunately the stakes were too high to let the average person in the alliance know that there was a titan building. To this day I would have had no issue letting the HPL guys know because I know we had no spies in our ranks. Though there were spies in the alliance and one was fairly high in the holding corp. Fighting was a daily thing of taking their SBU’s down and they would put them back up. There were a couple of systems in the pipe we lost, but the fight to hold them wasn’t where we deemed it important. Noir was getting the Titan, so they had an interest in making sure that it was completely built and they helped in defense of our territory. After the Capital ship tower was hit, anyone who looked at what was inside would have known something big was cooking. I still think most thought it was a Super Carrier and not a Titan.
I think different people are going to have different opinions as to which battle was most important to them. All I can say is against all odds, we held for over a month against Darkness before we struck a deal to save our stuff. To me the battle that will stick as one of my most memorable was when Darkness was trying to put a Tower in T-A with a Rorqual and I will be honest I don’t completely know all the details because it started before I logged in. I do know that it was a small escalation of force because more subcaps came in and Darkness called in Carriers. When I log in, people are talking about needing more DPS on the grid, that they can’t break the tank of the carriers. So I find out that they are wanting Dreads and I am pretty much the only one online with dreads in the right spot. I launch four dreads and another guy launched his from the station in the system. We get on grid, he is calling the shots, and we are melting them so quick that we are mainly waiting for our targeting to lock them. The other guy was calling the shots, but when his dread got popped it was left up to me. There was even one point during the fighting I was able to dock up and repair to return to the fight. By pure chance the CFC was bringing its carriers home from the war front, were able to stop in long enough to kill my dreads and keep going. In the end, we would have won and I still call it a victory because we owned the Darkness guys. 18 carriers and a lot of subcaps for our total 6 Dreads and some subcaps.
After this battle and could be another reason why I remember it so well, was the fact we sat down to talk to Darkness about us Evacing our assets out. They knew something was cooking in the tower, they knew we were working to save it and we were told it was going to be targeted after it came out of reinforce. The time that it was coming out was bad for our EU and US guys for being able to defend. Someone…. again that was when we found out about some of our spies, hadn’t adjusted the stront to work in our favor. The odds would be that they could take the tower out without meeting much resistance from us. It was never admitted to them that we were saving something from the tower, by handing over some systems, the moons, and doing so quickly was going to buy us the time we needed. N3, PGL (Progodlegend), questioned why we made the deal and I had to point out to him that by his own admission they couldn’t help us save the tower. Any time PGL pings for fleets, the enemy is watching his move and they have who knows how many spies in the network.
Darkness fell apart due to internal stuff and another thing that we might have been able to hold out if that was something we knew. The risk was too great and the odds against us, 70B would have been the possible price tag. Then the alliance was told we were going to still lose the territory despite it all. The Kadeshi had been after it for some time and by this point Mildly was led by Rage and myself. I went into immediate negotiations on us keeping our space, I laid everything out I could. There are still copies of the negotiations that I will consider posting in this as a record of our past. In the time span of two weeks, I haven’t put as many hours into Eve as I did during the negotiations of keeping our space and then into negotiating for new space. The coalition used just about everything they could think of against us in why we shouldn’t keep the space. Some weren’t pleased with the amount of people that were in Coalition fleets, but the line members used to love joining our roams weekly between CTA fleets to give them a break from the usual grind. A couple of leaders ended up having some kind of grudge against some of the other members and there was nothing so I was told that could be done to repair the damage. Only to find out some months later that the former alliance leader wasn’t even talking to coalition leaders. That for two years or a little better the alliance we hanging on by good graces and that our last stand meant nothing despite the fact all our allies ran.
Then the negotiation for new space that wasn’t going to be as good, but would give us a chance to redeem ourselves. Mildly Intoxicated was going to stay incognito from the N3 Coalition and make it look like Mildly Sober broke away for greener pastures. This would gives us a chance to operate near anywhere, but also have a place to come back to rat and make isk. There were decent moons there that would fill the SOV bill and our standard SRP requirements without it falling on the coalition. Not only would we be self supporting, it also would give us the chance to run fleets best suited for our style of fighting. I worked to team with Noir, MOA, and us to form a group to hammer the CFC renters. It was a plan to shutdown a region and deny them the ability to make income off those groups. There were starting to be talks with Tri as well to bring them into the fold of the plans. There was a go ahead for us to start settling a constellation in Impass, but then there was some confusion over the moons. We had been told that we would have the moons and to take them as soon as we could. Deny anyone still manning them isk. Next thing we know, a notice of 24 hours to evac was given and that our standings were going to be rest with the coalition. On top of that, part of the deal with Noir was going to cost 15B, and they needed to be paid so that their services would be secured. In the end, we were denied the constellation that was promised us and effectively removed from the coalition. PGL promised to refund the isk since he was the one who made the deal with me, but we have yet to see that.
The Booster Addict 