Applying What I’ve Learned

Since I joined Skunkworks, I’ve followed the lead of others. That’s not to say I’ve never taken the initiative, it’s just that someone else has always laid the foundation for us getting action.  Lately the Skunkworks corp channel has been empty; most of our active guys are immersed in a long-term project which is still shaping up and isn’t something I can detail. It requires anonymity and, given that I’ve attached my name to most every foul deed performed in the name of The Skunkworks since October, we agreed that it was probably best I kept my distance from that project to avoid name recognition. That has left me to strike out on my own and try to keep myself entertained, with mixed results.

We’ve had a rapid succession of wars, most of which don’t last long due to CCP allowing corporations to simply shed any wardec they don’t want. I usually have only a few hours to hunt any given target. So far, no kills have come of the hunts. I’ve had a number of close calls where a target got away from a station, I moved in for the kill, and they escaped just seconds before I could get them pointed. It’s been exciting, frustrating, and surprisingly entertaining. True to my roots as a PvE explorer, I’m having a lot of fun just in finding these guys. Kills would make it even better, but I’ll take what I can get.

This is the first time I’ve really gone looking for fights without any kind of backup. It’s just me and my scanning alt, prowling around from one end of highsec to the other, looking for prey. I’m much familiar now with trade hubs and common routes than I ever was before, and I’m starting to get a real feel for the larger picture of empire space. I’m using locators myself instead of depending on others, I’m having to be much more wary, and overall going solo has already made me a much better player.

I’m thinking about visiting some of my old lowsec stomping grounds where I know most pirates operate solo. I’m sure it will end badly for me more than once, but in the end it’s all about the fun and the experience of it. I learned enough from running with the Skunkworks to feel confident about doing solo PVP. Now I need to push that envelope and get some experience that I can bring back into the corp and make myself a better fleetmate.

My philosophy on gaming is that every loss is a lesson. If I go out to lowsec and get blown up, the next time I won’t make the same mistake. I just need to keep doing it until I get good at it.

——————————————————————-

A while back I said I was aiming to train for a Proteus next. Gallente Cruiser 5 finishes in a few hours, I have medium blaster spec trained, and all I have left to do is get my sub systems to 4 or 5, depending on the need. In addition, I’ll have access to all the Gallente HACs and recon ships. I’m about to buy some new toys. I’m about a month out from finishing out the Proteus training; it’s time to plan my next move. Gallente battleships? Minmatar cruisers? More drone skills? It’s tough to decide.

edit: On second thought, it’s an easy decision. I recently trained Caldari Cruiser 5 so that I could fly a Falcon. I’m about to have Gallente Cruiser 5. Once I’m happy with my Proteus’ performance, I’m going for Minmatar cruisers and T2 medium projectiles. That will put me able to fly everything smaller than a battleship, and able to progress to any given battleship in a much more reasonable amount of time.

In Which I Unexpectedly Make a Bid For CSM

I won’t lie and say I’ve never thought about being on the CSM. I think I have a lot of good ideas and I do my best to be open-minded and unbiased. I’ve even had a few people–some of them rather influential in the Eve community–tell me I’d be good at it. But I never seriously considered running, especially not in CSM7. I just never thought I had the backing to do it.

Then I started getting the Eve-mails. Two dozen people asked me if I was going to run on the first day of “voting” in the Jita Park Speakers Corner, including four key people whose opinions I greatly value and whose backing might actually mean something in the election. Still unconvinced, I created a campaign thread to find out whether there was any point in me trying. I’ve received 46 votes since then.

As I’m pushing on the half-way mark, I guess it’s time to think seriously about this. I need to clearly state where I stand on a lot of issues and why I’m a worthwhile candidate. I’ll address the latter first.

I’m a relative newcomer to Eve, having played for a little over 20 months as of this writing. While some people will see that and think “this noob has no place setting policy in Eve,” I believe it gives me a perspective the grizzled veterans lack: I know what it means to be a new player in 2010, while they are much more removed from the experience and don’t know what it’s like to learn Eve in the modern Eve universe. I would be a voice for the new players trying to catch a break and for those who know the pains of trying to compete with players with wallets and skill point totals significantly larger than their own.

That doesn’t mean I’m trying to make Eve a softer place though. The first post in this blog details how I spent the first 15 months of my time in Eve, and what lead to my decision to end my carebear lifestyle and join The Skunkworks. Since then I’ve found myself completely on the other end of the spectrum playing the role of griefer, ganker, ninja looter, and all-around bad guy. So while I have the perspective of a new player and the struggling small corporation just looking to run some missions, I’ve spent the past five months among veterans of all sorts, seeing New Eden through their eyes and sharing in their frustrations.

Before I get into specific campaign points, I want to say a bit about my overall vision for Eve Online. What makes Eve unique is the fact that almost all real content is driven by players. We write our own stories here. PvE content is static and story arcs are generally just loosely-connected pieces of fiction designed to link missions together. The real stories come from what we do, not what the game tells us. Take incursions for example: the only really interesting incursion story I’ve heard is from when the Lead Farmers/Skunkworks/Brick Squad coalition was attacking mothership sites to close incursions. One particular assault, they only took in about 25 ships. By the time it was over, they were down to 16 due to lost ships and disconnects. They finished the site with so few people in fleet that they didn’t even get a reward for it. It was intense, and from all accounts it was the most exciting PVE they’ve ever faced.

Eve needs to be focused on players creating more content. Being a part of a corporation should mean more than a common chat channel, a shared hangar, and the occasional war. There should be a shared experience, a compelling reason to form corporations and work together. I want to see the game encourage exploration of all its facets, from highsec missions to lowsec mining to nullsec sov. Right now we have a fragmented player base where you have The Carebears, The Pirates and Mercenaries, and The Alliances. It seems like everyone seems to think that their goals are mutually exclusive and that you can’t make one happy without stepping on another. I disagree with that notion, and think that we can find a balance for at least 19 out of every 20 issues.

Speaking of issues, here are a few that I consider a priority:

• Incursions.
• War and Aggression Mechanics.
• Making Lowsec viable. Some time ago, I posted an ambitious proposal for what would amount to a full-on expansion to create more compelling reasons to go into lowsec. I think there are a lot good player suggestions on ways to make lowsec better, and I would press for CCP to heed some of those. Whatever choices are made, I believe the only way to make it work in the long term is to make lowsec about more than combat. Industry should be viable there; as of right now, it isn’t.
• Implementing a working bounty system and making bounty hunting into a functional profession.
• Player-owned stations. Some have complained about lack of management options for POS access, while other have complained about the space litter that is abandoned stations, and the amount of time it takes to remove a single station that has sat without fuel for months. The POS system definitely needs to be tweaked to make it more user-friendly.
• Creating more compelling content for small corps. Like it or not, there are a lot of small corporations out there who are just a group of friends looking to play a game together. They might not be looking for PVP or sovereignty or any of the other goals others have in the game. Because more subscribers means more investment into the development of Eve and more people participating in the sandbox, I’d like to see new content such as corporate missions designed for various-sized fleets according to level. I’d even advocate a reduction in rewards for solo missions if such content became available.

I welcome any suggestions for other issues which need CSM attention. If I don’t know much about the issue, I’ll learn or defer to the council of other players who are more expert in it. This post will probably undergo some editing as people make suggestions and ask questions.

Fixing Eve – Warfare

There has been a lot of debate among the Eve community regarding the handling of the wardec system. Some people want to abolish it. Some people want to make it more expensive. Some people want to make it easier. And some people just say “real PVP is in null,  you nubs” and dismiss the whole discussion. Personally, I believe the wardec system is underused because the Eve universe doesn’t function the way CCP intended all those years ago when they designed it. Based on the existing mechanics, I can only infer that they wanted a universe where nullsec alliances had strong ties with highsec, using the trade hubs and relative safety to engage in business and industry. In that world, it would make sense for alliances to use actual wardecs to attack each others’ supply lines and disrupt the enemy’s economy while also engaging in battles over territory in nullsec. What’s more, the wardec would allow alliances to guard those all-important lowsec routes without suffering from drops in sec status.

Of course, the game doesn’t play that way. Neutral alts reduce the usefulness of the wardec, and self-sufficiency in nullsec–now a goal of CCP, it seems–removes the vulnerability of supply lines. Wardecs simply have no purpose for the nullsec alliances, making them a matter for those of us who choose to live and fight in highsec. Now, there are a lot of legitimate reasons to have war in highsec. In the ideal Eve world, competition for limited resources like ore and plexes would be a major reason for warfare. What better way to drive out those hulks that are mining the ore you want for yourself? I have personally hired mercenaries in the past in order to prevent an industrial alliance from forming that would have trampled all over my own little corp’s abilities to operate in our chosen area. It worked remarkably well: 100 million isk prevented the alliance and devastated the corporation that was at the center of the effort. It may not sound like much to you bittervets and PVP addicts, but it was more in the spirit of Eve than most of what goes on.

Obviously the wardecs I see in Skunkworks are rarely for those “legitimate” reasons. We’re looking for fights and/or ransom. I could invent reasons for every war we’ve fought. We could lie and say we were hired by anonymous enemies of our victims. But the truth of the matter is it’s a combination of piracy and thrill-seeking…which are, in my mind, legitimate reasons in themselves. I’ve gone on at length before about why I like highsec combat, so I won’t drag you through all of that reasoning again.

To sum up all of the above, I think having a system for highsec warfare is good for Eve. The problem isn’t that it exists, it’s that it isn’t well-implemented. So I want to point out some problems I see, and recommend some changes.

• Neutral logistics. This is an old discussion that just seems so stupidly easy to fix that I’m appalled CCP has ignored it for this long. There was a time when neutral logis were untouchable, so the ability to shoot them when they give aid to your enemy is certainly an improvement. The problem is that they are largely still risk-free as they can assist an actively hostile ship without inheriting the aggression that would prevent them from docking or jumping through a gate. It’s an easy fix to pass on any active timers to any supporting ships, forcing logi pilots and alts to think twice before rendering aid that could leave them cooling down a timer under fire.
• Neutral fleet boosters. This is something I don’t see discussed often that I think should be addressed. A good fleet booster can confer massive advantages to a fleet; it can easily be the deciding factor in a battle. I don’t want all aggression timers transferred to boosters, that would make it too easy to gank PVE boosters by can flipping on engaging Concord to shoot them. However, I would like to see boosters for at-war fleetmates inherit the war aggression. This way it would be possible to hunt down and destroy a fleet booster that is giving your enemy a significant bonus on the battlefield. Just include a warning that says “Hey, boosting Warmonger McGank with your orca will cause you to be vulnerable to his wartargets” so that friendly boosters like those orcas who share fleet bonuses in ice systems don’t get unwarned aggression.
• Dec scraping. As it stands right now it’s considered a legitimate strategy to join an alliance and immediately leave it should you attract an unwanted wardec, transferring that wardec to the alliance. I have two issues with this being considered acceptable: first, it allows the targeted corporation to simply throw away the wardec fees paid by their would-be enemies, and second it’s allowing people to simply refuse PVP, which is supposedly the core of everything in Eve. A lot of people have suggested preventing alliance changes or longer cooldowns during war or dec fee refunds. I think those are patchwork fixes that don’t address the real problem. Instead, wardecs should remain with the declared target: if I declare war on a corporation and they join an alliance, the war should EXTEND to the alliance rather than transfer. If the corp should then leave or be kicked from the alliance, the war would go with them. Taking this one step farther, I want the ability to wardec a corporation even while it is a part of an alliance. If my objective is to destroy a certain POS, the alliance shouldn’t be able to eject one corp in order to protect its POS.
• Neutral characters in general.One of the major problems with accomplishing war objectives in highsec is that it’s easy to put characters in NPC corps and protect them from war. Whole mining fleets and mission/incursion/transport accounts can be kept in NPC corps, paying minimal taxes in exchange for total immunity to all aggression beyond suicide ganks. There’s not an easy solution here, because characters do need somewhere to go when they quit or are kicked from a corporation. I’ve had a number of ideas and will list them all here, hoping some combination of ideas might be effective:
  • Use role-playing in NPC corps to make it inconvenient to be in them for long periods of time. Player corps change relationships on a regular basis. Nullsec alliances can go from having unfettered access to  each others’ space to all-out war in a matter of hours. Why should highsec’s NPC corporations be any different? The empires have rivalries, the corporations have loyalties and competitors. All this should affect the ability of NPC corp players to dock, gain access to agents and services, and the amount of taxes they pay. Imagine NPC corps where one day the members can access L4 mission agents of a rival corp, and the next day they can’t due to an accusation of corporate espionage. This would make it quite inconvenient to remain in NPC corps.
  • Create a new corporate status of Freelancer, an individual that is not enlisted in any corporation. Freelancers can be the target of wardecs, but cannot declare war on their own. Should they join a corporation, their war will be transferred to the corp. This way once a player has left NPC corp employment, they can never return.
  • Increase NPC corp taxes based on the age of a character so that the longer they play, the less profitable it is to remain a member of the corp. Extend those increased costs to station services so that it becomes cost-prohibitive to perform most activities after a character has been in the game for several months.

  As I said, there’s no easy solution here. I don’t feel like any of these would do the job quite as well as I’d like, but I do believe that the ability for a player to live in an NPC corp for years is a detriment to Eve’s philosophy of player-driven content.

• New player protection. This is a touchy subject, and I understand that not everyone will agree with me on the subject. What’s more, I don’t have a good solution for this issue right now. However, it’s an important matter to me. When I started playing Eve, it was with a group of friends who were all new to Eve. We set up our own corporation (as do a lot of small groups who start the game together) and found ourselves the targets of several corporations who apparently think the height of Eve play is shooting inexperienced pilots in poorly-fit T1 ships. As I said, I’m all for being able to wardec corps for the sake of fighting, but these guys were looking for fish in a barrel, NOT for fights. And we were too new for it to be profitable. What I’m saying is that the intangible “something” should be done to help young players not fall victim to a long string of no-risk PVPers taking advantage of them. It most certainly impacts subscription numbers and discourages new players from staying in the game.
• The New Player Experience. Eve is notorious for its high learning curve. I’m not advocating making the game easier, but I do strongly suggest that CCP make it easier to understand and greatly improve their documentation. New players complete the tutorials with no understanding of wars, aggression, grids, or basic fitting theory. Let’s separate the difficulty of the game from the difficulty of getting good information on the game. Teach players how to do more than run missions and fly ships.

I feel like this list is incomplete and it will certainly meet with some disagreement, but this is my take on the war system as it exists from the perspective of an carebear-turned-PVP griefer who is new enough to the game to remember being a rookie. Bittervets and PVP-averse players need not bother arguing, I’m trying to strike a balance here rather than cater to your particular whims.

On The Hunt

This time of year, I leave for work just as the sun rises. As I stepped out the door two days ago, I saw the neighbor’s cat lying down in the road. Curious what she was up to, I quietly moved a little closer and realized she was facing a bird about ten feet away. I stood watching as this cat stared at the bird, motionless. Every time the bird would move, the cat crept a few inches closer. Even with the bird still, she moved one foot at a time to close the distance on her prey. I watched this suburban Discovery Channel for at least five minutes. By then the cat was within two feet of the bird. She coiled up her hind legs and sprang on the bird, neatly snatching it out of the air with her claw. This cat’s tremendous patience and perfect technique rewarded her with what had to be a most satisfying meal.

The more I think about it, the more I realize how much that scene relates to PVP in Eve Online. After five months in The Skunkworks, I’ve learned that the hunt is a large part of what makes Eve combat satisfying. It’s the setup, the long game of drawing an enemy into a trap, the thrill of chasing down and catching a fleeing target, the tension of creeping up under cloak until you are in the perfect position to pounce. This is why the “real PVP” people claim to practice in lowsec and nullsec has little appeal to me; most of those kills are either between large blob fleets that encountered each other on a gate, or the result of a PVP gang waiting at a gate for unsuspecting victims. Then there are their polar opposites, the highsec station game experts who won’t get more than 500 meters from a station, and never travel without their neutral RR that guarantee their no-risk PVP lifestyle. These people are passing on the adrenaline rush of being in fights where every pilot’s skill matters.

A lot of people approach Eve looking for the instant gratification they can get from a first-person shooter. They want to log in and immediately stumble into fights. As a Team Fortress 2 player I can certainly appreciate the appeal, but Eve is different. Eve gives us the flexibility of a sandbox universe where people have more choices than any other PVP-oriented game. People routinely try to shoe-horn Eve into the philosophies of other games, seeking the safety afforded by WoW or the constant conflict of Battlefield. These people don’t appreciate the unique nature of Eve, and the opportunity it gives for developing the skill and patience of truly hunting your fellow players.

Fixing Eve – Incursions

Not much has happened lately on the Skunkworks front. We’ve done some fighting, but nothing special. The most notable thing of late is that we have teamed up with Brick Squad and Lead Farmers, a wormhole group, to close out highsec incursions quickly. The past two weekends have seen very little time for active incursion running. For example, they shut down the incursions Friday night. When new ones sprang up yesterday, they were closed half a day later. The moaning going on in the forums and incursion chat channels has been incredible. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to be a part of the mothership-killing fleets, as they have been operating before I go online in the evening.

So, I’ve had a lot of time to think about ways to make Eve a more consistent, balanced universe. I’ve tried to think through changes that would enhance gameplay, balance various mechanics, and make sense in respect to existing lore. As we have continued to make incursions the hot topic on the forums, I figure I’ll cover that first.

I’ve never been “into” incursions. I was interested when they first came out, but never had a fleet of friends to run them and never wanted to play the “LFAF” pickup game. So my first real exposure to them was after I joined Skunkworks; that whole story is well documented and I’ll spare you even a summary of how it started. Early on, I started trying to think of ways to fix the issue of highsec vanguard farming without breaking incursions.

It needs to be said that I do not object to incursions. I’m all for cooperative content. After all, I got my start playing cooperatively with some friends. Had incursions existed when we were actively playing together, we probably would have been involved in them as soon as we possibly could. The problem is that high sec incursions, specifically their vanguard sites, create a bottomless well of isk. It’s like missions, only the payout has been reported to be twice as high. As an avid explorer, I have a problem with CCP creating something that pays just as well per hour as wormhole life, but more consistently and without the risk.

My first solution was obvious: reduce vanguard payments, and balance that change by increasing the payouts of the larger sites which require larger and more coordinated fleets. It’s an obvious solution, and perhaps too simple. Taking it a step further, I suggested a lore-based solution: Concord would become frustrated with capsuleers farming incursions when they are being paid to stop the Sansha attacks. As a result, after a certain amount of time (or a certain amount of PvE activity), rewards for incursions would be reduced over a period of time to about 50%. It would then become more profitable to end the incursion so that a new one could spawn than to continue farming the same one.

Recently, I had this idea: have Sansha adapt their strategies. If Vanguard sites are being swarmed, reduce the number of vanguards and spawn more of the other sites. What’s more, they could react to the fleet composition of the defenders, fielding more e-war or more DPS depending on what kind of resistance they were facing. It makes sense that a force capable of overwhelming Concord would be clever enough to not press a failed strategy over and over again.

These three solutions are not exclusive; they can all work together. Rebalance payouts, create a steady decline in rewards in order to make a compelling reason to go after the mothership, and make the Sanshas smarter on a macro level. Do that and you’ll have much more interesting and balanced PvE content without enraging most of the incursion community.

It’s a Beginning, Part 3: The Disappointment

November 8: Skill training for the Orca finished this morning. I snuck my Orca alt into the wormhole a few days ago, and last night another member of Skunkworks brought his Orca alt into the wormhole in a shuttle. At the same time I placed my scanning alt in the hole so that no matter what got stuck in that particular hole, I could scan it out when it was convenient. That means I’m planning on filling three Orcas full of loot, ore, and ships. In my last check of the hangars there was only one T3 ship and no Nighthawk, but at this point I can’t afford to wait for everything to show up. I have no idea whether some of those will ever be back in the hangar and waiting could cost me the entire haul. Two Orcas, 2-3 hulks, and a pile of T2 ships is enough. The rest is just bonus.

A final take on the plan: I start by putting my scanning alt to work verifying we have a highsec path out. This is critical. I pull out an orca and load it with the most valuable ships, mods, and ore. I fly that out to my friend who boards it and logs off (to keep the orca off the scanners as much as possible). I then take the other orca and fly it to my orca alt and trade ships, then log off the alt. Then I take my own empty orca and load it up, and decide whether there is enough left to warrant a round trip with one orca. If there is, one orca makes the run out, and then returns empty and swaps ship with my infiltrator in order to pick up the rest. That should finish it off at that point, leaving us able to make a run for it, or simply log off and come back later.

Now I just have to wait about 12 hours to actually be able to do this.

————————————————————————-

January 4: I haven’t looked at these posts in forever. When I logged in to actually commit the theft, several of the most expensive ships were gone, including both the T3s that had been in hangar, and one of the Orcas. Also missing were the most valuable faction mods. After much internal debate and discussion with the corpmate who was going to assist me by providing a third Orca pilot, I decided to stall for a day and see if things came back. The next day was even worse: the ship hangar was being emptied and people were leaving the wormhole. There was still an Orca and a couple of T2 ships, but I’m not even sure I would have made a billion isk and I didn’t want to risk burning that alt as a corp thief for that amount.

In a fitting end to all this I didn’t have as much Eve time after my vacation and shift change and I went mostly inactive with that alt. The CEO of the corp confronted me about it one day and proceeded to lecture me about how I have responsibilities to the corp and other such nonsense. He acted as if I were being ungrateful for my membership in the corp, and generally sounded like a typical real-world middle manager. I finally snapped and told him how idiotic he sounded, so he threatened to e-stalk me by telling every future CEO of mine just how I felt about teamwork and employers and so on. I quit on the spot and have left that alt in my own holding corp for a few weeks to see if he keeps his word. So far, no warning. If I do get one on my CEO, he’ll likely get a wardec from The Skunkworks.

At the end of all this, I’ve learned a few things: first, have your skills ready if you’re going to conduct a proper theft. Weeks training to fly an orca can cost you the haul. I’ve solved that problem now, and my alt can fly the Orca plus any T1 battleship I find, meaning that the only ships I’d have to leave behind would be marauders, black ops, and capital ships…and for those I’m sure we could figure something out.

Second, even I have a threshold for tolerance. Having so recently been a carebear, I do better than most Skunks in dealing with them and talking to them in a believably carebear way. I know how to push their buttons and gain their trust. But when you sound like some schmuck in a cornflower blue tie who thinks he’s arrived because his cubicle is a little bigger and his desk chair has padded arms on it, when your real life is so engrossed in corporate doubletalk that you use it in Eve as well, when you treat your corpmates the same way you treat your minimum wage burger flippers as you assist managing at the local Wendy’s, I can’t take much of you. Guys like that represent everything that’s wrong with our society. Even that little bit of power coupled with that little intelligence is a dangerous thing. And we do it every day in the real world. But that’s a whole other rant, for a whole other blog. Which I don’t write.

It’s a Beginning, Part 2: The Plan

November 1: After living in the wormhole for a while and familiarizing myself with their routines and with the operations of a POS, I settled into a bit of a routine myself. I’d chat with the guys in the wormhole channel, do a little scanning, and check out the contents of the hangars. A few days after I got in, I found something glorious: an Orca had been stored in the hangar.

That cemented my plan. The easiest way to get that Orca out was to fly it, full of ships, out of the shield. As there were a lot of ships, part two of the plan was to bring in my own orca and trade in space, loading them both up. I needed about two weeks of training on my infiltrator, and a couple of skillbooks. Getting out of the wormhole in an area where I could find the books wasn’t easy, but I had a few days of training before I needed them. I made it out and back in with 12 hours to spare.

I’m now under seven days away from being able to fly that Orca, and now I have even more good news: there’s another Orca in the hangar. When I counted this morning, I found three hulks, seven T2 frigates, three T2 cruisers, and a nighthawk command ship. There’s also a Rokh, several Drakes, and more battleships that I won’t be able to get out as they can’t be repackaged in the POS. Unless things change as the time draws near, my plan is to put my orca alt into the wormhole in his pod and deliver a loaded orca to him, then pod back and load the other. If things go really well I’ll be able to get a highsec exit and make a couple of trips, moving ships and stolen goods out until the hole collapses, leaving an orca or two in the wormhole until I can scan a new exit.

I think for a bit there one member got suspicious of me; he started asking why I hadn’t been in on any ops. I’ve made a bit of a thing about how I’ve had trouble getting a combat ship in via lowsec and have been telling a story of a close call with a gate camp that forced me back to high to sell the drake and come back in a shuttle. To put some of the fears to rest, I’ve started taking it upon myself to make sure our bookmarks and online spreadsheet of signatures are all well-maintained, under the pretense that don’t really need the cash so much as I need to learn how to conduct operations like this because it’s all new to me. I was talking on TeamSpeak this morning with some of them about how much I’d learned doing this.

I have learned quite a bit already. Just not what they think I’ve learned.

It’s a Beginning, Part 1: The setup

Two months ago, I set out to commit a corp theft. The next three posts are what I wrote during that process. I made references to this scheme at the time, but never published these drafts that I had sitting around. I’m not editing them now (except for one last proof-reading) because this blog is about the process and the experience of learning new things. You can guess it didn’t go as planned; read on for the details.

————————————————————-

October 22: There’s an alt I’ve never mentioned here. I will only ever name that character here if it becomes publicly connected to me directly and is no longer viable for infiltration operations. An unspecified amount of time ago that alt joined an alliance to scout them as a war target and theft victim. They are highly organized to the point of being overmanaged, and after seeing their response to another wardec I decided they wouldn’t produce the fights we look for in Skunkworks. Instead, I joined their wormhole operation, thinking we had two options:

1. I scan members of Skunkworks into the wormhole when no one else is around, and we spend a few days wrecking things and getting kills in the wormhole.
2. I steal their stuff.

The two goals are not mutually exclusive. It would be entirely possible for us to enter the wormhole, rob them blind, and then stick around and shoot them until either they leave or we get bored.

It took me three tries to get into the wormhole. On the first two attempts someone already inside told me where the entrance was, but it collapsed before I could make the 20+ jump run.  Last night, after 27 jumps across two empires and a jump into lowsec, I finally arrived. The person who directed me to the hole had logged off while I was in transit, so I didn’t know where the POS was, so I just logged off in space and called it a night.

This morning I logged in and found several people in the wormhole. They guided me to two POS: a small placeholder POS that was used for staging and is scheduled to be taken down, and a large POS that is still in the process of having its defenses set up. Under the pretense of never having worked with POS before (that part is true, my old corp never had a POS) I “explored” and checked out all the hangars and made a show of poking my head everywhere I could.

Can I have your stuff? Yes, I think I can.

There is also a corporate hangar array that is already stocked with ore and T2 modules and faction ammunition. I didn’t bother with screenshots as it would have been tedious and largely useless. What interests me most is Hangar 1, where they store all the Sleeper loot produced by the wormhole dwellers. The way it works is you send the guy running the operation a list of what you put in there and who it belongs to and when he runs all those goods to highsec and sells it off, you get a cut. This means that everyone is putting their salvage into one pot, and it could quickly turn into a quite a bit of isk should he wait a while between paydays. The problem is, I don’t have access to this hangar. My first order of business is to figure out how to get in there.

So I Bought a Falcon…

I recently trained up to fly a Falcon with one particular purpose in mind. A few days ago we actually had someone declare war on us, something that doesn’t happen often. It turns out it was a group of guys (or one guy with alts) that like to play no-risk station games with multiple Dominix and Guardians. Here’s a video of these winners in action:

As I’d recently completed my Falcon training, I decided to pick one up and fit it out for jamming those guardians. As usual, I missed all the fights with these guys. It was mostly an exercise in frustation, though: as that video demonstrates, some people don’t want to fight, they want to pad their killboards with unsuspecting enemies. When a few of the guys demonstrated that we were more than capable of overcoming their “strategy” and killed one Domi, the wardec was promptly dropped. People who declare war and then run when they actually get that war…I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or vomit a little in my mouth.

Still, there was other action to be had. We had two other wars going at the same time, and one was showing promise. Last night I logged on to find my fellow Skunks hunting an enemy fleet of three Drakes and a few smaller ships. We finally caught up with them in Poinen, their home system. They engaged at a stargate while I was checking planets in my cloaked Falcon. When I arrived, the fight was just getting started.

The Falcon is an annoying enemy. They can take multiple ships out of the fight, and they do so from a range at which they are difficult to catch. I’d already fitted out my ship with four Caldari-specific jammers, and when I landed I proceeded to shut down all three Drakes. The remaining fleet that could range on me locked me up, and when one of the Drakes got lucky enough to stay unjammed long enough to get a lock, I had to warp out at 50% armor.

I didn’t stay gone long. I landed back, decloaked, and started laying jams on everything I could. After months of not being on killmails, I took advantage of this new role and spread the love before going back to shutting down the Drakes again. The enemy fleet began to fall apart, I got primaried again, and warped out with 90% structure. When I returned, we were mopping up. I can’t say for certain what blew up when in the course of that narrative, so here’s a list of the kills from the battle, in the order that they happened:

Armageddon
Hyperion
Coercer
Drake
Drake
Drake
Maller
Armageddon (same pilot as the first ‘Geddon)

One of our new prospective members did lose a Hawk in that fight. He immediately returned in a Slicer, which turned out to be a boon for us when I noticed that my scanning alt, which I left sitting cloaked near the sun, had just watched an enemy capsule warp in. I warped to 10 km from the sun under cloak to verify his location and then called for that Slicer to come attempt to lock him. He succeeded, we realized we had hold of their CEO, and decided it was a good time to renegotiate terms.

While we were trying to talk him into paying a ransom to end the war, an enemy Brutix–flown by the pilot of the recently-obliterated Hyperion–landed on grid with us. We quickly killed the pod and engaged the Brutix. A Slicer and a Falcon can actually make a Brutix quite miserable, it turns out. He was active tanked and we couldn’t break him, but we did hold him in place while some big guns were brought to bear. The Brutix didn’t last long against them.

Just when you’d think we’d broken their will, a new member of their crew shows up and starts smack talking. He undocked in a Punisher and started playing safe spot games with us, warping in and out of the station grid at extreme ranges. I popped out some probes, caught him in one of his off-grid safes, and got my Falcon in position. I called for the Slicer to come in again and we successfully pointed and destroyed a pitifully-fitted Punisher that I assume they never expected to actually have to fight.

So last night let me do all the things I’ve quite enjoyed: Being a cloaky bastard, surprising people who think they’re safe, and utterly disrupting the enemy’s ability to fight. And this time I even got on the majority of the kills I helped make happen! Nights like that remind me why I love playing Eve.

—————————————–

As fun as all that was, I’m not sure the Falcon is going to be a long-term thing for me. I’ll keep it in the arsenal and will use it if necessary, but it’s a little too soft for my tastes. I don’t like having to run in and out of fights that much, and jamming seems a little too passive an activity for my personality. Even neuting with the Legion seems more aggressive, probably because its tank lets me get in close and stay on the field. I’m hoping to get some amusing killmails with the Falcon during Hulkageddon–whenever that happens–but aside from that it will probably only be brought out when an FC directly requests it. That is, once I get motivated enough to put it away.

And now, back to training for my cloaky Proteus.

TEST Alliance, Please Wardec

So we’re at war with TEST. It hasn’t been as interesting as I’d hoped, but we did get one good fight out of them while I was around. As an added bonus, CSM alt and Crime and Punishment forum hero Darius III joined one of his alts to the corp and was along for the fight. This happened just before Christmas, and I’m only now getting around to writing about it.

Several of us were running around in Slicers and found several of them in a system. After locating a pair of them sitting on the undock of a station, I undocked as the others warped in and we engaged their Thrashers. All was going well, until my Slicer got hung on an invisible piece of station and lost its transversal. It promptly exploded. We set about changing out ships as they were fielding at least one Hurricane and multiple Thrashers. The other guys grabbed battlecruisers, and I went back for my cloaky Legion. The waiting game began as more TESTies streamed into the system and they set about building a fleet while we got in position. Monk was in place behind the station in a Tornado, Odemis and Darius were on the undock in a Harbinger and Hurricane respectively, and I was sitting just off the undock path cloaked, abut 8 km away from the station.

Finally, they undocked. There were two hurricanes, a blackbird, an osprey, a Maller, and at least two frigates. They immediately engaged Odemis’ Harbinger. Sixth was on standby in the next system in a Rokh and immediately jumped into the system and started warping in. Odemis had to dock up after a short fight, and I took that is my cue to decloak. The Legion completely surprised them and was immediately made primary. I targeted as many of them as I could and fought to prevent a hurricane from bumping me off station, but didn’t actually aggress any of them. While they slowly worked through 170,000 hitpoints of armor, the rest of our fleet took down the Osprey and the Blackbird, as well as the pod of the Blackbird pilot. I was finally forced to dock up after absorbing all their firepower for more than a minute.

I quickly repaired and undocked as the guys destroyed one Hurricane, and then the other. I was only able to apply any kind of aggression to one ship, the Maller that was the last to be destroyed as the frigates fled the field. So while my killboard doesn’t reflect my full contribution to the fight, that battle confirms for me that I’m on the right track in how I choose to contribute to our small fleets. Surprise is a powerful weapon and can completely cripple an enemy.