Saturday 28 September 2013

London Veto Eve meet Saturday 28th, all day, Goodmans Field Wetherspoons

Details and sign up thread here.

Look forward to seeing some of you there!

Thursday 26 September 2013

Eve's Winter Expansion: Rubicon

CCP's ever improving public relations team announced the date for the Winter Expansion and talked about the vision for it and some of the features.

It was broadcast live tonight on Twitch TV and will no doubt be on Youtube and/or CCP's Twitch archive in a day or two.

The presentation was hosted by CCP Guard and his first guest was CCP Seagull. She gave the overview, the broad perspective.

Over multiple expansions "we're going some place together" and it will be "beyond the bounds of the known universe." Words like colonisation and increased control over technologies and capsuleers gaining more power over the universe were mentioned.

"We're starting to question some of the rules that have governed Eve Online for a long time." A picture was shown which looked like a bunch of Badgers constructing a stargate. That's the long term vision, over multiple expansions.

This expansion will go live on November 19th and is called Rubicon. Rubicon of course was the start of Caesar's challenge to the Roman Republic.

The presentation then replaced CCP Seagull with CCP Rise and CCP Fozzie.

Customs Offices: players will be able to take over high sec customs offices. They will be able to set whatever tax rate they like. They are expecting large groups of players to fight over them. There are some very valuable sites - I personally have a bunch of manufacturing installations next door to Jita.

Personal deployable structures. This is a new set of structures, not based on the clunky old POS code. 4 new types of structures in Rubicon. All can be attacked and destroyed. Shooting them in high sec will not provoke Concord.

 Siphon Unit - steals resources from moon mining or reaction poses. Steals stuff over time and anyone can access it and take the resources. So it just sits outside the pos - very effective against people who don't pay much attention

Depot - storage and fitting. Drop it in space and refit your ship or stash loot.

Deployable automatic tractor beam and looting device.

Deployable short range cyno jammer (disposable, one use). 70-100km range. Won't stop covert cynos.

Warp acceleration changes. Ships that warp faster will enter warp faster. (Right now all ships accelerate at the same rate and most warps spend most of the time in acceleration/deceleration). Some adjustments will be made - generally small ships will warp faster and large ships will warp slower. T1 cruisers are used as the baseline. HACs and frigates should be able to catch battleships and so forth. "Interceptors will actually be able to intercept."

Ship balancing:

Marauder has already been announced. A new mode will be available giving ewar immunity and enhanced tanking called bastion mode. A gorgeous picture of a bastioned Kronos was shown. The ships will also get a role bonus to MJD cooldown.

Interceptors. In addition to the warp acceleration changes interceptors will get bubble immunity. Slight drop in hit points and small cargo bays will make it tricky to cyno fit them. (Thread on Features and Ideas promised by early next week).

Electronic Attack Frigates. Cap recharge and lock time to be improved. Double range on secondary ewar effects (points webs neuts). CSM loves them.

(Light) Dictors. Core role remains, warp acceleration changes will help them, they will be more balanced within the class (ie sabres won't be miles better). Bubble art is going to be reworked.

plus possibly more ships balanced if time allows.

New battleship missile launcher: Rapid Heavy Missile launcher. Battleship-ish dps with heavy missile effectiveness against small ships. "Looks great."

"The Raven's going to be super-awesome!"

New ships: Sisters of Eve faction ships.

Frigate

Cruiser

Really nice concept art was shown. Mostly white with red highlights. Bonuses from Gallente and Amarr. Long deployment versatile combat ship. Drones and armour bonuses and exploration/hacking bonuses. Cov ops cloaks. Intended to be pvp viable.

Usability changes:

Certificate system to be completely replaced with a new cleaner system. Attached to a new concept called mastery. No longer need to be claimed.

New Interbus ship identification system. Shows you all the ships in Eve in a chart showing what you can fly and what might be good to train for. Ties in with the mastery system.

Character selection screen. Hint at extra functionality.

Twitch TV will be integrated into the Eve client.

Collector's Edition shipping 24th October.

Eve Vegas coming up, Guard Rise Fozzie Bro and Locksey will be going. Prizes, Eve Valkyrie in HD.

Eve Down Under end of Nov - Fozzie and Chribba going.

Gatherings published in their own subforum on the Eve boards.

CCP Fozzie mentioned that the interceptor bubble idea was stolen from a player.

Sometimes you warp away whistling...

Me, Pixie and Saiyon did some more low sec pvp. At the end of the evening after Pixie had turned in me and Saiyon (Breacher and Tormentor) decided to take on a Stabber.

Little did we know he had backup.

Luckily for us the backup was slow.

We traded Saiyon's Tormentor for the Stabber. Me I started to loot then had to run away when a griffin and stabber rudely interrupted my efforts to make space a tidier place.

I left on 17% structure.


Wednesday 25 September 2013

Low sec frigate brawling

In our corp, SEDNA, Tuesday downtime - Weds downtime is scheduled for optional low sec pvp, staging from Minmatar high sec.

We did pretty well tonight and got a bunch of kills.

Here's a blow-by-blow on our best fight tonight:

There were 3 of us: me in a dual ASB Breacher, Saiyon in a dual rep Incursus and Whitewalker in a Kestrel.

My weapon of choice.


We picked up a Cormorant on D scan near a medium plex. We warped to the gate and engaged on the gate, he was about 40km off. Saiyon got on top of him but me and White couldn't get close. We then picked up a Rifter and Slicer on short scan so we bugged out, everyone managing to escape. White was pointed but successfully burned to range and warped off before they could firm up their tackle.

We regrouped and rechecked the probe scanner - there were now unopened novice and small FW sites that hadn't been there before.

We squad warped to the novice and immediately hit the gate. Effectively we were now inviting the slicer and rifter in but locking the cormorant out. They came in with Griffin, Rifter Kestrel and slicer, the griffin cunningly timing his entrance for about 5 seconds after the others landed. White and me primaried the griffin, Saiyon tackled the slicer.

We pushed the griffin quickly down to half armour then he landed a jam on me. He then managed to survive an agonising 20 seconds or so with just White shooting him plus my 2 Hobgoblin IIs. Meanwhile Saiyon was heroically tanking 3. The griffin pulled us about 30km away from the others.

Saiyon popped then shortly after the griffin popped. We primaried the slicer but he pulled range so we had to switch. White died.

It was now me versus a Rifter a Kestrel and a very mauled Slicer.

The Rifter and Kestrel had come very close while they were not being primaried so I picked on the Rifter next. I was tanking by pulsing my asbs So I'd press it to start it then press it again to stop the cycle, judging each cycle as and when needed. Early on that was almost immediately but after I managed to survive only using ASB1 and that one went into reload I managed to squeeze out longer and longer pulses, eventually making the second asb last until about 10 seconds before the first one reloaded. I was in half structure when the asb reloaded - just in the nick of time!

I burned all the reload charges on ASB1, carefully metering them, and ASB2 was ready when ASB 1 ran out. I used about half the capacity on ASB2 - a total of three and a half loads of cap charges. I'm so glad I chose Navy cap charges, the faction ones are worth the extra cost. Also it's important not to use both ASBs even if it means taking some armour damage if you want to have any hope of the second ASB covering you for the long long minute it takes the first one to reload.

I nuked the rifter down pretty quick, then, as he wasn't being targeted the slicer came in to about 5km to get better dps on me. I switched to him, got a good dps spike in using javelin rockets and the drones. I don't think he'd been expecting the javelins and as he pulled out to 10km, out of rage rocket range the javelins killed him.

I'm gradually becoming a fan of combat reloading. I never used to be - just guess the best ammo type and mash till you crash was my old approach. However the player on the receiving end of your dps won't necessarily realise your dps is low because you're reloading, especially on a ship with (comparitively) strong drone dps like a Breacher. They take 40 dps for a bit think "woo hoo I'm a god, yeah baby, I can go all night" then suddenly 143 dps with hobgobs and overheated rage rockets right into their resist hole. It makes you harder to play against than if you did a constant number that they could expect, especially if you were using the wrong damage type or range type.

With just the kestrel left and my asb reloaded I was pretty confident. I approached him, smashed him with mjolnir fury rockets and drone damage and kept him scrammed.

Great fun fight, blowing up ship after ship in a T1 frig is an awesome feeling. Props to Saiyon for magnificent early tanking that bought us time to get rid of the griffin, to Whitewalker for killing the griffin while I was jammed out and to our opponents from Dustm3n and Fatal Ascension alliances  for a well executed attack that made for a very close very exciting fight.

Here's the Eve Kill battle summary.

Friday 13 September 2013

Pirate Detection Array 4: Drone Regions

Pirate Detection Array 4 was a very useful upgrade for us. As I've mentioned before we have very poor truesec in our rented system. Rents are based on true sec and it would cost us at least triple to get one with high true sec.

As long as we keep it upgraded we get good enough anoms from a cheaply rented system (I'll show you the benefits of level 5 tomorrow as we were able to get that installed yesterday).

Moving from level 3 to 4 gave us a level 10 site (Drone Horde), a level 8 site and 2 level 7s.



The level 8s we have now allow a soloer to chain them for a string of 9 million ticks, with the occasional 19m tick when a Sentient appears at the end of the anom.

The level 10 is complicated. It's a very challenging high value site that we've had fun doing in groups but frankly a bit daunting solo. I'll talk more about that tomorrow when I will be publishing a guest article explaining how to run the site.

Monday 9 September 2013

SEDNA is recruiting

Our recruitment thread

Let me give interested players some idea of our military thoughts.

First, our pvp is opt-in and you can log on and mine while the rest of us are fleeted up off shooting people if that's your bag. Most people do choose to come because the fleets are really good fun and we don't pvp all the time so you're not likely to burn out.

As renters we don't really have a stake in sov war. If our region were to be invaded we'd probably go out shooting the neuts because they're neuts and because it's possible to get a lot of good kills around the fringes of other people's big fights. But we don't really have a horse in the race and if our current landlords lose sov we'll likely make overtures to the new owner.

We do have our own objectives and our own style of pvp. We want our players to be more than F1 monkeys.

Tuesdays is low sec frig pvp day. The idea is to jump clone to a staging point near Faction War and go murder people in plexes. Of course the main customers are other people looking to murder frigates in plexes so it's competitive, high skill, independent piloting pvp that gets people thinking about range control, traversal, ship manoeuvres etc.

MIND GAMES is the latest pvp video from STSLight, our frig-fighting expert.

Fridays is our roam night. Our CEO has run Friday night roams for years now and we've had some epic adventures. Probably battlecruisers.

I run some small fleets throughout the week. The focus is on fighting outnumbered so we're building our experience of using either nano or snipers or bombers to give us an edge against a larger force.

We're aiming to get most people into Dreads and to aggressively deploy them. This is a mid-term goal: 6 months to a year off. We'll lose a fair few dreads most likely getting good at that.

As a SEDNA pilot your first priority should be to secure your income stream. For most people that's ratting in anomalies and/or PI but we also have ice and mining etc. Once you are able to fund yourself your next priority should be to get involved in the low sec frigate pvp. The corp subsidises ships so it costs very little, it's fun, intense and very instructive.

After that we'll want you to fly the correct battlecruiser or tech 2 logi ships in our null sec roam doctrines. I've been fighting quite a ferocious battle against people's tendency to want to bring random ships - I had an oracle fleet yesterday where someone brought along a Geddon and got killed because he was fat and slow and went AH HA! So we will be trying to get you into the right ship with the right fit, basically keep your pvp ships separate and don't pvp in your ratter or hangar trash.

Once you're competent with a battlecruiser we'll want you to get up to speed with a bomber. Bombers are the ultimate ship for fighting out-numbered as even a very small number can make a big impact on a much larger foe.

After that we'd be looking to get you working towards cap ships : carriers and dreads. For most players saving for those will mean doing a lot of ratting, we'll still take you out pvping and want you to keep your edge but you should expect to run a lot of anoms.

By this stage your extensive pvp experience and our open discussions of tactics and issues should make you something of an expert. You'll be well-equipped to FC a small gang and we'll support you if you want to try that.

At some point the politics of our corp may change. We've gone from a ferociously active pvp corp in a large nullsec alliance to a very independent renter-based small gang pvp corp. Will we still be renters in 6 months? Well possibly not on our mains but the plan is to always keep this system for our ratters and PI and miners so we never have the horrible chore of moving again.

I would commend SEDNA to you because I think it's a really good balance between PVE and PVP. We're doing really well with pvp and the pve seems sorted. Living in the back end of nowhere we rarely see a neut.

We're looking for people who will talk to us on Teamspeak, get involved with our fleets and roams but doesn't feel a need for perfection or tryharding. Sometimes we'll all be ratting, half-afk watching a movie. We expect you to be self-critical, to be trying to improve, to be looking to be a skilful player. We hope that having you join our corp will cause you to enjoy the game more and will cause us to enjoy the game more.

Friday 6 September 2013

The march of progress - evolving our space

Pirate Detection Array 3 proved a sweet upgrade even in our rather crumby space: we went from 4 level 5 anoms and 4 level 6 anoms to this:



The system rates anomalies at

Class         Pirate                               Drone
5               (Faction) Yard                  Drone Surveillance
6               (Faction) Rally Point        Drone Menagerie
7               (Faction) Port                   Drone Herd
8               (Faction) Hub                   Drone Squad

The pirate ones get various levels which mean better sites but drone ones don't get that. For example Guristas Forsaken Hub would just translate to Drone Squad in our space.

Full details here on the surprisingly good official wiki.

So getting to level 3 and installing the third tier of pirate detection arrays gave us a level 5, 2 level 7s and a level 8. I run these by doing the squad if it's up, otherwise a herd now. This has improved my isk per hour from about 10m to about 30m. Not great but for me this crossed the barrier from Not Worth Doing to Worth Doing, especially as I can run them on two characters simultaneously.

We should, fingers crossed, install Pirate Detection Array 4 tonight. (There was a bit of a delay as our jump freighter service got distracted by Final Fantasy 14!)  Hopefully that will bring even better sites. Generally as the site level improves you get more battleships and less frigates with cruisers being more or less constant.

In the background, behind the stretched Probe Scanner window, you can see that I'm demolishing a poco. So in addition to the ratting we'll soon have PI production in place, another steady income stream both for individual pilots and, via taxes, for the corp.

You may be wondering why we're putting this effort into a system with rather poor truesec. It's all about the rent. This system is cheap to rent and will still, eventually, give us high end sites. Renting a very low truesec system would cost us several billion more per month.

One day, when the corp is a bit bigger and we're feeling flush I'd like to us to take on a second system, possibly with better truesec. My idea is to have a jump bridge so if someone comes into our ratting system to inhibit us we can just take the jump bridge to our other system and keep right on ratting. Preferably a system that doesn't have a convenient stargate route so it will be within the 5 LY jump bridge range but will be about 30 jumps by gate for anyone who has come up to dick with us.

I used to do this when ratting in Fountain right in the middle of the Goon invasion and it's a pretty sound technique - so long as they don't camp both sides!

Wednesday 4 September 2013

Pirate Detection Arrays - our new hobby

It's a great shame that most players who live in nullsec are insulated from the mechanics of the terrain improvements that the sov system allows.

We in SEDNA have been working on upgrading our Pirate Detection Arrays this week.

WOOT! 58% Cmon Level 4!


We rented a system that held a TCU owned by our alliance. We then installed an ihub, an infrastructure hub, which is a base into which you insert modules that improve the system. I picked up some of the first ones: Pirate Detection arrays 1 and 2 and Entrapment arrays 1 and 2, all of which was small enough to fit into my Deep Space Transport (30k m3).

I then very carefully moved it to a suitable nearby low sec system from where we rorqual jumped them to our home.

We had to kill some rats to raise the military index to level 1 and then we put in the first pirate detection array. This gives the system 4 anomalies continually of a quality based on the system truesec. Our system is a rather crappy -0.2 so we got 2 Drone Surveillance and 2 Drone Menagerie. These are level 5 and level 6 anoms respectively - not very lucrative, I was running them at approx 3m per tick or about 9m per hour. They contain mostly frigates and cruisers, occasionally small defensive towers.

We very quickly killed enough rats for military index 2 and installed the Pirate Detection Array level 2. We waited till downtime then got another 2 Drone Surveillance and 2 Drone Menagerie, still a bit disappointing, we're assured we will get some good quality sites as we upgrade higher.

It was still pretty fast to grind enough rats to get military index 3 and that let us install the Pirate Detection Array level 3 and also unlocked the ability to place Entrapment Arrays.

This is where you see the percentages and your upgrades.


Entrapment Arrays give a slightly higher chance that when a combat DED site spawns in the region it will spawn here. Now that's particularly interesting for renters as we compete against each other with these upgrades, having them means we magnetically pull sites away from our neighbours into our corner of space allowing us to own them and run them. We put in two levels of those.

We had a more complex logistical problem of getting the Pirate Detection Array 3. It just fits in a Rorqual and one of our neighbours was selling one for 100m over the high sec price a couple of rorqual jumps away. So we bought that one.

Pirate Detection array 4 needs a jump freighter to move it. We've bought this and moved it to our nearest Empire station from where it will be jump freightered in.

We have ground the military index up to 60%. However after downtime we're hoping our third wave of anoms will see us gain access to more exciting sites which will make grinding much more enjoyable and lucrative.

For the final Pirate Detection Array upgrade we'll need to move it in by Freighter. Our best hope is that a wormhole spawns near our space that has an entrance big enough for a freighter and isn't too dangerous to bring a freighter through. We would then jump the freighter in through the wormhole from high sec. My neutral freighter pilot alt has been volunteered for this exciting mission.