EVE Journey

Eight months! That’s how long since I’ve last played EVE on a consistent basis. Other than the occasional logging in to switch skills, RL has occupied most of my time as well as a new MMORPG called “Aion”

The characters in EVE are progressing nicely with capital skills being trained slowly (EVE has the unique? system of learning new skills in real-time). Jar is counting the days till the next big mining op while Mica is currently stuck with a shit-load of assets in Fountain after he was booted out of the corp for being away for too long. Bad timing to get busy IRL when living in active 0.0!

Came across a post today that illustrates the real world cost when a ship is created and lost in PvP. Sobering to note I’ll soon be able to fly 100USD ships and getting them blown up!

I’m now part of “The Scope”, a small sized corporation with global extent. The new corp chat shows 258 present but I’m just another person joining the ranks. Finally took the plunge to drop from TGIND as I’m not able to devote the energy and time necessary to get things working again. There are many things to fix and I wish Page well in rebuilding the corp.

Since I had roles, the action of dropping roles actually requires a 24 hour standby period. Interestingly Nova got war dec’d by OuterRim Jobs and fighting could legally start before I could quit so I helped out by talking to locater agents to find the “scumbugs” who declared war on us. Level 4 locator agents allow you to query a person on his whereabouts. Within 10 minutes, an evemail is sent indicating their location. There is a 15minutes interval before you can use them again so its worth going to a region where you can use a few locator agents at one time. Eve-agents.com has a great database of all possible agents you can work with.

2009.06.05 22:52
The sleazebag is currently at Nourvukaiken II – Moon 1 – Modern Finances Investment Bank station in the Nourvukaiken system, Okela constellation of Lonetrek region.

Mica has already moved to the forward base and I heard he had an interesting encounter but he’ll also be moving on after the war dec. Hope we get back to 0.0 soon.

Those of you who browse this site (I do wonder with RSS readers these days, does site design matter?) will notice that the background and header images changes pretty frequently. This is all thanks to a nifty piece of code by Matt Mullenweg at http://ma.tt/scripts/randomimage/.

I tweaked the code a little to run a cron job on the script so that it would serve the background and header of the site as a static file without requiring a script load every time the page was refreshed.

There’s a total of 6 background changes and up to 24 header images (as of this post) that is picked up automatically and served as I add new ones. The latest from the faction frigate series (more to come as soon as this war dec is over) is shown below.

With another recent change in management and the lack of plans and activity, it seems that it might be time to move on to something else. I’ve tried my best and suggested stuff we could embark but the progress is non-existent. TGIND has a bunch of great folks and I wish them well.

Directed Mica to make a formal application to a PvP corp and hope to hear news soon. After 47 days in Empire, 0.0 beckons again.

Excellent guide to hiring mercenaries. We used Malum Crusis last year but good to know more about the hiring process.

http://podlogs.com/declarewar/?p=170

Just got news from the lab techs running the Arazu and Ishtar invention jobs! 3 Arazu and 1 Ishtar are now ready for production.

2 more Ishtars are being invented but chances seem slim.

T2-007 has also ended with 57.14% success for a total of 400 modules. Worst performing this time was 200mm AutoCannon II and 425mm Railgun II with 30% each. Surprisingly Armor Explosive Hardener II came up to 90% success. Its really like rolling a dice and waiting with dread when you hit the “Deliver” button.

Communiqué from K (research associate I knew from Core Complexion)

Hey Jar,

Just wanted to let you know that the research POS is up and running. We managed to get a good deal on a Shadow Control Tower and have anchored labs and defenses in a quiet corner. Let me know what you need and I’ll get started on the copies. Best of luck with the T2 program! Sending you a photo of the POS (did they upgrade the shields again?). Looks fine doesn’t it?

K

Excellent News! I met K while working at Core Complexion and he expressed a desire to start his own research facility. This sounded like a great idea since my lab access got cut off when we pulled out of 0.0 and having to endure Empire lab queues was a bad experience. Now the T2 process can be more efficient with BPCs being churned out at a faster rate. With some training, K can also take on some of the workload in the invention jobs and I can focus more on the corp programs.

T2-007 is putting along after I made a mistake with one of the traders and forgot to get sufficient Mechanical Engineering Datacores. The 425mm Railguns were left sitting in the hangars while waiting for new datacores to be delivered.  The rest of the jobs went smoothly with 55% success rate providing a spread of 330 T2 modules to work with.

After gaining Gallente Starship Engineering IV, I reactivated T2-005 to begin Arazu (Recon) and Ishtar (HAC) development. 9 hours to go before the lab techs tell me if they were worth the ISK. Mica has been pressing me to send these new ships so that he can start testing them out in the field. Hopefully I’ll see some success in invention as it will bring us a step closer in providing fitted combat ready ships.

Most capsuleers in EVE move on to a player run corporation one day (even if most choose to stay in NPC Corps for its safety net) since that is where the fun begins (drama, intrigue and espionage!). The key thing to a well run corp are the members who choose to be active. In the past year, TGIND has seen relatively good growth. However for the last few months recruitment has slacked (mainly as only 1 person was interested). With this current stint back in Empire, it seems we need to reform and rethink our goals and strategy.

The above shows a simplified view of how members can be organized to be more productive and actually have some fun while we focus on getting back in 0.0.

Example of teams and their goals:

Production
Every Month

• Produce 30 x Ships (T1 and T2)
• Produce 2000 x T2 modules
• Maintain 2 bil worth mineral store to facilitate production

Security

• Run Lvl 4 Missions as a group twice a week
• Run Exploration Complex (Scanning and Clearing site hand in hand)
• Run a 0.0 Roam Every Weekend with the aim of practicing FC’g and tactics.

Human Resources

• Recruitment Campaigns once a week in different Regions
• During off-hours can choose to be part of Security or Production
• Recommend recruits and train them to be effective in the teams they will be joining. This includes skillbooks, training plans, ships after they are certified.

Finally! QEN for Q1 2009 is going to be released next week according to this dev blog. Seems they decided to skip 2008 and only gave us some numbers of Orca last year.

If you love charts and want to know how many ships are destroyed in PvP each month, hop on over to "I didn’t want that ship anyway” by CCP Diagnoras.

More Dilbert humor :

Kirith Kodachi started a new meme asking people where they have been in New Eden.

Here’s my journey (not terribly exciting as I’m heavily into mining and production)

I’m just slighly over 1 year in game and as you can see, having only been with TGIND has somewhat limited where I’ve travelled. Most of my purchasing work is outsourced to associates who almost never travel beyond the market hubs and thus I seldom need to travel to the crowded Jita area. In fact, only time I’ve been to Jita was during early days when we were war dec’d and we were advised to relocate to a safer system in The Forge.

In terms of corporate history, Gallente space is our primary area of operation and during the time with Sylph Alliance, Providence and Catch regions was mostly where we saw action. ERVK-P is probably my favorite station to spin ships while Mica is out having fun

What’s Next? The alliance is currently mulling over prospects and hopefully some decisions will be made soon about 0.0. It’s been some time since we left 0.0 and a disastrous attempt to move back in the Outer Ring with Dead Man’s Hand saw us getting caught in a crossfire with Avarice and a bunch of other hostiles. Mica had more experience there as I chose to stay in Empire to revisit some agents. I would also like to visit the Minmatar area to get in touch with some agents just to have a change of environment.

* Understanding the map : Small yellow means few number of visits to big red means LOTs of visits.

Other travels

• Kirith Kodachi – Eve Meme! The Places I’ve Been…
• Wensley – Where I’ve Been
• Mynxee – New Eden: Places I’ve Been
• Melindhra -The Places I’ve Been
• pjharvey -Places I’ve been
• Shrike Juk – The Places I’ve been
• Shae Tiann – Journeys in Eve
• Manasi – Kirith asks…Manasi answers II
• Kyle Langdon -Where in the World is Kyle Langdon?
• Pod Pilot -Eve Meme! The Places I’ve Been…
• Letrange – Where I’ve been
• Karox Lominax – Where have you visited