A Killmail for a Point

One of the things I feel isn't made clear enough to new players is that you don't have to be able to fly big T2 fitted battleships or fancy T2 ships to be useful within in gang or fleet. One of the roles that new players are often suggested to do is that of a throw-away tackle. A simple T1 frigate with a speed mod and a point. Even the newest of players can fill within a day or two and it can change a battle within a few minutes if done even half decently.

To exemplify this I present my alt, Treya Trewtis, who for the past few weeks has been training her learning skills up like any good alt. After completing these I sent her to learn useful skills until we got word of a POS defense op. In response I quickly grabbed the Propulsion Jamming and Afterburner skills and trained them to level 1. I then purchased an Incursus and fit three mods: an Afterburner, Web and Disruptor.

The next day we're on our op when the Goons come to play even if they weren't the ones to reinforce our POS. Next thing I know my main is blasting away while I send my alt straight at the Goons tackling anything that got called primary. A couple of minutes later I'm running off in my Pod to pick up a new Incursus and my name is on 5 battleship kills. I had survived long enough that in fact a Thanatos had been able to lock me up and start shooting at me. Lossmail. Take a good look at that fit. Three mods, no guns (I never did launch the drone) and I was instrumental in getting five kills.

Now for the one caveat. This was a POS op so I didn't have to worry about gate guns but even then a cheap, throwaway tackle is great for holding a ship until the heavy tackles and battleships can lock and point the target up. And if you're lucky enough you may even escape.

So to the newer Eve players I want to show that even with three skills, Propulsion Jamming level 1, Afterburner level 1 and your racial Frigate skill, in my case to level 4, you can play an integral part of a combat op. So don't feel left out if all you have is a frig. Bring it along and be prepared to lose it for a kill. You never know, it may be you that actually got it by holding the target down.

Never Forget Your Cloak

The core rule of flying a Covert Ops is pretty limited and simple in practice.

1. Never fly without an active cloak

Or more specifically for this occurrence.

1. Never warp to 0
2. Never let anything get within 2,000m of you.

Tonight I failed at both and lost my Buzzard. I had probed down a Wormhole and warped to 0 at it knowing that it would put me about 8,000m off the wormhole and in position to cloak. What I then forgot to do was move away. While focusing on probing down all the other Cosmic Sigs in the system my first notice that I had been decloaked was the sound of artilleries pounding at my shields. 30 secs later it was over and I was high tailing it back to safety in my pod.

That was a stupid mistake that should never have happend and I gave a pilot a free kill. Simple lessons need to be reinforced every now and then even if they should never have been forgotten in the first place.

EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic

Well it's time for the latest of CrazyKinux's EVE Blog Banters and this time I think it's quite an interesting question. So straight from this month's blog banter page here's the question. The EVE Blog Banter Contest!

Welcome to the ninth installment of the EVE Blog Banter and its first contest, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created byCrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

"Last month Ga'len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith "WebMandrill" Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?"

So what did I choose to remove. Well read along and find out.

For this month’s Blog Banter I’m proposing that as a game mechanic gate guns should be removed completely or at a minimum from lowsec. Gate and station guns are a fact of life in lowsec away from the reaches of CONCORD. For those that have never ventured into lowsec I’ll briefly tell you about what they are for and then I’ll outline my reasoning for why I think that they should be removed from the landscape of EVE.

Gate and station guns exist on every station and gate in empire space. In high sec they really don’t do much as any aggression that gives a player a Global Criminal Countdown (GCC) will call CONCORD to that player following shortly thereafter with a new wreck in the system. If the aggression occurs within 150km of a station or gate the stationary guns position around will also throw in their two cents but by that time the aggressor is scrammed, webbed and ECM’d to impotency anyway.

In lowsec however CONCORD don’t respond to the aggression so the gate guns become the only way your naughty GCC is punished. It is possible though to tank the gate guns just like it was possible to tank CONCORD in days gone by. This means that more experienced players can sit in their battleships waiting for their juicy prey to come by and as long as they aren’t outlaws they are almost immune from any sub-battleship aggression.

So what we have currently is a mechanic that is pointless in highsec due to super CONCORD and decreases small gang PVP in lowsec by making anything smaller that a battleship near useless for more than a couple of seconds. So my proposal is simply to remove all gate and station guns from the highsec and lowsec. This would remove the superfluous highsec guns and encourage small cruiser and frig PVP in lowsec by letting them survive for longer than a few seconds. This won’t however turn lowsec into 0.0 as all other lowsec restrictions remain in place; no sov, doomsdays, bubbles, etc. This proposal also keeps the sec hit that aggression causes which means that pirates will still become flashy after too much fun. Add on the GCC means that for fifteen minutes after aggressing you can’t go back to highsec unless you want to face CONCORD and you stop people from jumping in and out of fights. I would even suggest upping the time to thirty minutes to keep people in lowsec and offer the chance to get back at them.

What the removal of gate guns is likely to do on the other hand is encourage the use of frigates and cruisers for pirates with the faster locking times that these smaller ships provide. I feel that this is a fair tradeoff as the lack of gate guns should encourage the use of small ship gangs for opponents. Also many pirates use the smaller ships already to catch other players in belts and deadspace.

To summarize, the aim of removing gate and station guns is to encourage the smaller gang PVP and entice the younger players into the not so wild regions of lowsec while still maintaining the differences that lowsec has in between highsec and 0.0. This can help bring more players into the direct ship to ship side of PVP by reducing the bar to entry with the use of frigates and cruisers. And I think we can all agree that more PVP is always good.

Edit: Well Crazy has asked us all to add these bits and the beginning and end so that's why they've been added.

Diary of a Space Jockey, Blog Banter: BE GONE!

EVE Newb, (EVE) Remove You

Miner With Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch

The Eden Explorer, Blog Banter: The Map! The Map!

The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "Beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, mushroom, MUSHROOM!!!"

Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Kill the Rats

Mercspector @ EVE, Scotty

EVE's Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #9

Miner with Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch

A Merry Life and a Short One, Eve Blog Banter #9: Why Won't You Die?

Into the unknown with gun and camera, Blog Banter – The Hokey Cokey

The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic

Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 9: Who is Nibbling at My House?

One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 9: What could you do without?

Life in Low Sec, EVE Blog Banter #9: Stop Tarnishing My Halo

Cle Demaari: Citizen, Blog Banter #9: Training for all my men!

A Mule in EVE, He who giveth, also taketh away?

Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter 9

Morphisat’s Blog, Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !

Facepalm's Blog, EVE Blog Banter #9: What a new pilot could do without

Memoires of New Eden, You're Fired

Kyle Langdon's Journeys in EVE, EVE Blog Banter #9 Titans? What's a Titan?

Achernar, The gates! The gates are down!

Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #9: Down with Downtime!

I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #9-F**K Da Police

Ripe Lacunae, The UI... Where do I begin... (Eve Blog Banter #9)

Clown Punchers, EvE Blogs: What game mechanic would you get rid of?

More articles as they are posted!

Estel Arador Corp Services, You've got mail

Epic Slant, Let Mom and Pop Play: EVE Blog Banter #9

Deaf Plasma's EVE Musings, Blog Banter #9 - Removal of Anchoring Delay of POS modules

Podded Once Again, Blog Banter #9 - Do we really need to go AFK?

Postcards from EVE, 2009.07.02.00.29.06

Harbinger Zero, Blog Banter #9 – War Declarations & Sec Status

Warp Scrammed, Blog Banter 9 – Never Too Fast

Mike Azariah, I don't put much stock in it...

Rettic's Log, Blog Banter: Overview Overload

A Sebiestor Scholar, [OOC] EVE Blog Banter #9: Slaves

Diary of a pod pilot, [OOC] EVE blog banter #9: Because of Falcon

Roc's Ramblings, Blog Banter #9 – Taking Things Slow

The Gaming-Griefer, EVE Sucks, But I Love It: The Memoir of a Masochist

Letrange's EVE Blog, Blog Banter #9: Bye Bye Learning Skills

Lyietfinvar, Remove that monopoly

Sceadugenga, Blog Banter #9

Industrialist with Teeth, EVE Blog Banter #9

 

Inteceptor vs Covert Ops

To quickly lay out the scene my Alliance is currently participating in three wars. This should mean a pleathora of targets but around home we're either heavily outgunned or heavily outgun. This lead into me deciding to semi autopilot my way to the other side of empire space with my route going through Amarr. That means gate camps.

So to be a little sensible I take my Buzzard along to take care of some old assets that I've decided to retire. I'm flying through system after system with no war targets in local. I also don't notice I'm coming up on Amarr. Landing on a gate I see a single war target in a Stiletto. Thinking 'crap' I quickly jump through and have a brain fart. Instead of warping away I cloak and move off in a random direction away from gate. Stiletto pilot burns towards my last position and bang, I'm decloaked, locked, scrammed and being shot. Not expecting to survive much longer on goes the self-destruct and I slow boat towards the gate thanks to the Stiletto's scram turning off my MWD.

30 seconds later I realize I'm still at 80% shields and there are no other war targets coming to this pilot's aide. I'm sure he thought I would be an easy kill as much as I did. My 380m/s base speed combined with the rockets the stiletto was using meant I was escaping the blast radius. 5 seconds later I hit the gate and jump and quickly warp off to a planet while the war target's agression wears off.

It's interesting how in EVE things can go from crap to relief in a few moments. No matter which side youre on.

The tl;dr version: Rockets are useless against a frig doing 300+ m/s. Even if you do have the target scrammed.

EVE Blog Banter #8

Welcome to the eighth installment of the EVE Blog Banter , the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here . Check out otherEVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
This month's topic comes to us from me, Ga'len at The Wandering Druid of Tranquility. He asks: "What new game mechanic or mechanics would you like to see created and brought into the EVE Online universe and how would this be incorporated into the current game universe? Be specific and give details, this is not meant to be a 'nerf this, boost my game play' post like we see on the EVE forums."

Even though this isn't an EVE blog I'm a long time player and fan of it so I thought I'd jump into the blog banter and offer up my view. My first thought was that I'd like to see something like a dueling system where two players or groups of players could agree to a fight without being Concordokkend. But then I remembered an older thought that I've seen put up elsewhere:

"Claimable Low-Sec"

Now the quotes are important. I don't want to see 0.0 style Sovereignty in lowsec. That's what 0.0 is for. What I'm thinking of is something a bit more casual in a sense. And giving pirates and other lowsec corps something fun about lowsec.

The way I see that it could work is by giving corps or alliances the ability to 'register' claims with the Empire that claims a lowsec region. In exchange for a small payment of some sort (ISK, towers around moons, etc.) the Empire give the corporation free reign to destroy ships of corporations with Headquarters or Offices in enemy Empire affiliated stations.

Now to balance it out and to stop the pira... I mean corporations and alliances from having life to easy anyone is allowed to engage the ships of claiming corporations without sentry gun aggro.

Also multiple corporations and alliances can claim a Region of lowsec so they would also be able to shoot each other just to make life more interesting.

Now this would need more work but I think it could make life in lowsec more interesting by reducing the amount of GCC and the consequent sentry aggro.