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.

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!

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.

Farewell to TEST

Dear Test

Gosh this is a hard post to write.

Dear Test Allaince

Gahh, that's still not it.

Dear, darling, Test

The topic came up a couple of weeks ago that if I ever had to choose between my corp and alliance it would be a really tough choice to make. It has and it is.

I've had an amazing time with Test, both as an ally in Aug-Dec last year and as a member of first Dawww then the alliance from Feb this year. Not only have I had the enormously enjoyable time of being a line member as we've created some of the most dramatic and exciting content nullsec has ever seen but you've been gracious enough to endure my bumbling development as a newbie fleet commander.

Now FCs famously have hide of Teflon and hearts of stone but I'll share a secret - inside we are, all of us, deeply aware of how privileged we are to be trusted with hours of other people's time in the quest for fun and victory. Thank you everyone who's come on one of my fleets, I've had a blast hurling you around the spaceways and we've got some pretty exciting kills. (Blowing up Vince Drakken's battleship in talwars then warping us all out just as his outraged alliance in blinged out ships was landing on grid to try to save him is right up there!)

My deepest memory of course is the laughter. So many utterly hilariously moments, from the day I took a newbro into a wormhole to rat in drakes, we got ganked, went back in and begged salvage rights off the w-guys then came out with a few precious nanoribbons and he said I"VE NEVER BEEN SO SCARED IN MY LIFE! To the recurrent drake jokes, the Kurator banter and so many golden moments.

It's farewell but please please do say hi if you see me about, even if - no, especially if - one of us blows each other up.

Take care and best wishes. And thank you so very much.

The next great nullsec war

Mord Fiddle believes that the future of nullsec's economy centres around the rise of renter empires.

I believe the next Great War will be a contest to become the premier purveyor of rented systems and that the first campaign will be fought on forums and news sites while an irrelevant sov war is fought.

Successful nullsec empires are always built on a solid bedrock of isk revenue. The Technetium revenues pre-Odyssey allowed Pandemic Legion and the CFC to rise to the top, helped by the OTEC agreement.

-A- have consistently proved able to bounce back from defeat by running missions in Stain until they get an opening to attack the sov of whoever displaced them. Currently owing to the dissolution of first the HBC then the Dinner Squadron they're pushing towards Period Basis. After a solid win against Tribal Band and a small Test presence last night they took Tribe's staging system, trapping assets and securing what must be the decisive victory.

There are now several south west regions completely ripe for the taking: Delve, which any day will see Test finally drop sov, Period Basis and Paragon Soul, currently being evacuated by Tribe, Catch, formally abandoned by Initiative, Impass, abandoned by EMP

It won't all go to the Darkness and Despair/-A- bloc - some of the Dinner Squad's old territory in Feythabotholis has been picked up by N3 and some minor CFC-friendly entities have picked up small parts of Delve already but most will.

So when all the unopposed structure grinding is over we'll see 3 major blocs: PL/N3, CFC and the russians in the south west.

Now nullsec wars work on a straightforward principle: if at all possible you pick a target you're sure you can beat. As the CFC and the N3/PL bloc are fairly evenly matched that suggests the target of both is likely to be the Russians who may find themselves attacked on two fronts and driven once more back to Stain to regroup.

But meanwhile another far subtler war will be fought - a battle for hearts and minds, for superior branding and higher market share over the latest hot commodity in nullsec: renters.

The Goons are starting a long way behind. For years they've derided the notion of renters and claimed that having subservients in the community is a fundamental flaw. They've also built a considerable economy around scamming prospective renters with skilled scammers taking a large security deposit, persuading the mark to pack everything they own into a freighter for "escort" to their new home, only to get killed and looted 2 jumps in.

So in the shadows of a ship v ship sov conquest war we will see the beginnings of the next great war take place on the boards of the Eve O forums, on /r/eve, FCed by the spinmasters of Themittani.com.

The first TMC articles have been attempts to convince line member goons not to screw up the new system by shooting renters, depose Mittens or ragequit Eve. The next step is to convince the Eve public that enlightened self-interest suggests that renting from the CFC is better than renting from N3/PL.

They have a few things in their favour:
- TMC is very popular and taken as truth by many Eve players (for the most part it is truth, the spin is subtle and generally well disguised).
- they have better rats - Serpentis and Guristas are much better rats than Angels and Drones.
- they have better ice - Caldari and Gallente ice in nullsec are more or less exclusive to CFC space - yes, they interdict the ice in high sec they mine in null!
- they have very good awoxers and cloaky campers. If they start trying to make opponent space hard on renters they will put players in to screw with PL and N3 renters, likely in anonymised alt corps.

So even though they're starting a long way behind if PL and N3 focus on good fights space brawls or even sov grinds they will eventually lose their position as the safest entity to rent from in nullsec.

Unless they in turn develop mastery in the metagame.

The burden of democracy

Democracy is a core part of our values as Westerners coming from the cultures we do. TEST alliance, which is based on the grass roots and permissive Reddit forum underlines those values further, as does the largely American base of the alliance with their written constitutional guarantees of free speech.

However there's two obvious prices you pay for operating as a democracy in Eve - 1) slow decision-making and 2) vulnerability to hostile agents.

As The Mittani once put it:

Abhor Democracy, Mistrust Reason: Most of the western world is governed by ‘representative democracies’ of one flavor or another. In practice, most of these are republics or simple plutocracies, but when players come to EVE they often try to recreate democratic governments as their first structures, as they have been taught that ‘democracy is good’ while blind to the fact that their real-world country is not actually a democracy. Similarly, there are some who believe that human behavior is governed by ‘reason’, despite decades of research into cognitive flaws. If you encounter someone so misguided as to actually believe in ‘democracy’ or ‘reason’ in EVE, run. Or, more likely, take them for everything they’re worth.

There's another more insidious evil too: internet arguing.

(With credit to XKCD)

TEST suffered huge burnout during the Fountain War and has a history of burning out its talent. Not only that but when people leave they are often bitter. Kurator, heroic defender of Fountain, who at one point during the campaign put in a 50 hour FCing stint left TEST to gatecamp our exit from Delve and take bitter revenge on the evacuees. (Although to my immense satisfaction I did get to use the words "Kurator is primary" yesterday when we blew up his Slasher).

TEST's next best hope, in my opinion, rests in its stated intent to transition to the campaign commander model used by Pandemic Legion. In this model for the duration of a campaign the FC in charge essentially runs the alliance. I'm given to understand they run it completely - one campaign commander even threatened to disband the alliance recently after people were playing particularly badly.

I'm really not sure TEST quite has prepared for the consequences of this. For example if someone's running a campaign (as Kurator was) and people start getting political, this can't be done, that can't be done, under the new model will the FC be able to sack them and replace them with someone more compliant. Because what a military leader needs is obedience not analysis, he's not telling you to do something because he wants your views on whether it should be done, he's simply telling you to just do it.

TEST has a culture of undermining its leaders. Recently Boodabooda, our CEO, kicked a disruptive player. When he woke up the next day that player was back in TEST, someone had just invited him back in. That led to a storm of argument and mudslinging that seems the main cause of some of our best FCs burning out, notably DingoGS. This kind of internal drama is inevitable when people who are not in charge feel able to exercise executive authority.

So the question for the next few weeks is can Eve's main Reddit guild get over its love of arguing on the internet to focus on playing Eve effectively?

My day

I've actually found Eve really good fun today. (but don't tell Gevlon!)

I scouted my carrier to a beacon but a red logged in on the beacon while I alt tabbed, I landed on the beacon and got pointed by a RIOT stealth bomber. He cynoed in two dreads who sieged and began to melt me. He then released the point and I warped to an asteroid belt in low armour making two safes on the way, turned the bus round and warped back to the safes. No idea why he took his point off, bet he had fun explaining it to his buddies.

I FCed a convoy that hit a Boob wall in 1-Smeb, Me and some of the tankier dudes went in and wrecked bubbles while the others hid aligned in a safe. Killed Iwishiwasawookie in a dic and 2 large mobile IIs for the price of a condor and an ibis. Then got the rest through.

Did a 2 hour Silentmajority bombing fleet and killed a couple of pizza.

Got bombed by odell the multiboxer and lost a vexor.

I got to test out my headbutt doctrine idea doing a combat wing in a combo combat/convoy fleet that flew rings around RIOT in 6q- (I waited them out in RCI, they jumped in, we cross-jumped killed their broadsword and escaped for the loss of a couple of rather unwanted half-fit battleships. Convoy then went on to engage and kill kurator's bubbles again while nados sniped rather ineffectively and we got the convoy wing into warp the moment the last bubble went down, deaggressing and jumping into sakht and escaping (i was in structure).

Then did a convoy that got the rolls royce bridge treatment and sailed carefree into our new home while dozens of people in delve wondered where we were and if we were coming like a fat 15 year old on her first date.