One year

I realized yesterday I joined Wormhole Engineers one year ago.

One year ago I was in an uncomfortable situation, my wormhole corp (Border Deepspace), that was dying from lack of activity, was finally evicted from our C2 and throw out to highsec without a clear path, at least from my point of view. Full details can be read in this post.

In hindsight, I can say I don’t regret at all my decision, and the funny thing is my old previous corp did end asking for joining our alliance, and later merging into WHEN, so I got back my old friends.

WHEN (Wormhole Engineers) it’s a special corp - probably all them are - but at WHEN, the more crazy we do, the more we laugh. There is not any nonsense about killboard reputation or similar, and the only goal is to have fun (even if it looks it’s going to south) like this battle report against an ISKBoxer fleet of proteus versus us with T1 ships, in which by the way we got down a nearly 1B proteus.

In this corp, people are not selfish, they would risk their ships to help you, they would invest their time to fly with you even if it’s a clearly whelp op, and if you add ST (Silent Terror) in the formula, anything can happen.

I have lost some ships flying with ST, but I don’t regret a single time I have done it, because he has delivered the crazy content that makes fun this corp. In the other hand, I learn a lot when Mick is FC’ing, because his calm attitude, even when things are hot. I still remember that occasion when we tried to roll our static and we got attacked in both sides.  Mick managed to handle the situation perfectly without losing a ship (with orcas in the middle) and without any sign of pressure or stress. In the future, as soon I feel myself able, I’d like to start FC’ing small fleets, I am sure it’s a great experience.

Besides improving my subcap skills and getting Kippel into the capital path (he’s able to fly a Dread now) I also enjoyed providing IT support to the corp. Those IT services cover from a Jabber server, that helped to ping colleagues for action or for support tasks; Mumble and now TeamSpeak server, in a private server; and, a forum, not used too much, but it’s there.

Probably, the best thing at WHEN, are the people, not a single one of them is a jerk, all of them are different, but good pilots, and I enjoy alot sharing my time with them and learning from them!

I clearly see myself in this corp for another year… and I'd recommend anyone to try it out.

Blogging is hard

I always wanted to blog about my experiences in EVE, that's the reason why in April I did create this blog, and in my first entry,  I tried to sum-up my past. During some months I did enjoy writing about interesting stuff that happened, taking screenshots when I saw good opportunities to write good stories, but after some months, that excitement seems to have been evaporated.

It's not good stuff has not happened. It's that has happened suddenly and I was not taken notes or good pictures, and later, spending time to remember all the details and write something that could be worthy to read is kinda a lot of work and not something I would call "fun". And at the end of the day, I am here to have fun!

Probably, the key to be a good blogger is to enjoy writing as much as flying ships, and obviously having the right skills. Probably a good blogger (basically, someone who blogs nonstop good content, not like myself) would blog about anything with the same pace, because at the end, writing is a skill independent of the type of content you write about. Having said this, I am completely sure, even for them it takes a lot of time and effort to deliver what they do.

I admire Penny (Tiger Ears) for the amount of detail she can provide in each of her posts, sometimes I wonder if she has an assistant to take notes meanwhile she fights and takes good screenshots!

Another one is Von Keigai (Deep in EVE), another wormholer who writes pretty often, and with lots of detail, and sometimes interesting reflections on w-space changes.

Obviously, there are out there tons of good bloggers, but those two, represent to me what I'd like this blog to be.

I will continue trying to find that "strength" to write, as you only improve by doing, but don't expect to find lots of content here :)

Hardeners in the space

Like anybody living in w-space, it's quite common to find offline towers, and most of them are surrounded by the mods and defenses that were deployed around the force field when they were active.

You can shoot hangars and other type of structure to try to find some loot, but you can not get any defense module if you don't bash the tower first, and that's a totally unworthy effort, as they have large amount of HP and those mods are just a few millions of ISK.

Today, I found another offline tower, but the main difference was being the first time I see only hardeners and nicely aligned to the tower. I really enjoyed the beautiful sight.

 



You wanted an U574? Take some!

Sunday afternoon, time to see what EVE will provide today.

As starters, our C4 static is gone, so I get my alt Kippel with his cheetah and send it to scan. It doesn't take long to find it. I warp to the signature and jump into.

As always, first thing do to, check dscan, nothing, so lets see what we can find in this hole. A quick look shows 24 signatures! This is going to be a long while scanning.

I deploy my Sister Probes and start scanning, some gas.... and a weak signal of a wormhole, perhaps it's the static of this system, an U574 (C6). I continue focusing on that signal and I resolve it, yes, the static, I add a bookmark and continue scanning.

Further scanning shows another U574, and another, and another, WTF?! It seems this is a bugged C4, and it's not the first time it happens according to my corp colleagues. This C4 system is connected to a lot of C6 systems so it becomes like hub for them.

C4 with bugged static

There are still a lot of signatures to resolve and as we continue scanning, we keep finding more. So far, I only have seen activity in one wormhole and an Anathema cloaking at J144420. I wait a few minutes and I decide to take a look into that system again to see what kind of activity - if any - is there.

Claiming territory

In w-space you always have the risk to have "visitors", and visitors that sometimes they are not just passing by, but they want to stay in your system, and they bring  their furniture, stuff and often friends with them.

Often the goal is just evict you, to keep the system for themselves, or just to get rid you out of the system because they have a contract, they don't like you or they think you got shinies in your hangars. I have been there and in both sides, and two of those examples you can read here.

And that is partially the reason for this post.

I start scanning and I find the static C4, it's inactive, nothing interesting in dscan. I continue scanning through the bunch of signatures and I find a C3. After resolving all the signatures, I decide to jump into the C3.

As always, meanwhile I hold cloak, I check dscan to see if they are ships in range and my surprise is the number of towers.

Reinforced POCOs at 2DWM-2

I log in and notice the Instrumental site is still in the system. Someone was mentioning yesterday in the corp channel about cleaning the sleepers from the site, so I wonder if that did happen and if there is at least the cheap C-540. Sometimes, some of my colleagues don't consider worthy their time and effort to suck that one, compared with the C-320.

I warp to the site, and confirm there are no sleepers, and still plenty of C-320. Time for Venture fleet!

I grab both ventures and I warp to the site and without hesitation, I start to harvest the gas meanwhile I watch d-scan.

A few minutes later, silent terror logs in and confirms there are new signatures in the system, and suddenly, sleepers show up in my gas site. What? I thought they were gone!

Silent terror explains me that they "return home" after downtime, so even if the site was triggered, as it was yesterday, it's like a fresh site. A new thingy learnt, and always learning. This is EVE.

So, I warp squad the ventures back to the tower, and I get Kippel into the cheetah and start to help Silent to locate the new signatures.

Besides the new static C4, we have a null inbound (2DWM-2). I jump in, and I see at least two POCOs are reinforced and their timers will end in about 2-3 hours. The locals are aware, and greet me in the channel.

Sucking some gas

Sunday afternoon, the chain I scanned yesterday it's gone, perhaps rolled. There's nobody at home, and there are new sigs, so I get Kippel and his cheetah to start scanning.

I find the C4 static as expected, the deadly data site, two crappy gas sites, and voila! an Instrumental gas site. That's the best gas site you can find, with lots of sweet C-320 and some C-540.

I finish scanning all the sigs, and jump to C4, I want to be sure there's no activity there if I want to start getting that gas. C4 looks inactive, good. Time to swap ships and get into ventures.

Before triggering the site, I broadcast through our jabber that I found the Instrumental in case anybody wants to join. I think it's kinda rude to trigger the site without giving the chance to my corp colleagues to share the good gas.

I don't get any reply, so I fleet warp my pair of ventures and start to suck. After 2 minutes in the site, Omaristos and Aymala show in and join the fleet in response to my ping.