Eve is Ten Festivites

As all of you know, Eve is 10 years old today and there were a couple of events that happened over the weekend to mark to occasion. After giving up on my plan to wardec carebears because they kept on hiding in stations, I headed to Jovainnon to participate in the Tusker's FFA.

I merrily undocked from Jita and head to Jovainnon, and I warped to one of the belts in my Tristain.

I launched my drones and tell them to shoot people, but my targets somehow manage to outpace them. I did manage to get on a few killmails, but I eventually decided my Tristain was useless and I let it die. I reshipped into free frigates provided by the Tuskers, and had some close fights where I overheated errything.

I also did some completely suicidal things, such as burning towards a Thrasher and dying in a couple of volleys to it.

Of course there were a few people who showed up to try to ruin the event, such as this Cynabal gang. They succeeded in making a few people ragequit (tgl3) and getting a few kills on ships that were free in the first place.

 But then I found my favourite ship of the night, a railgun Merlin that was able to practically solo another Merlin with 90% shields remaining.

Then at 21:00, Tuskers began to give out dessies.

I then lost several more ships, and by the time I got bored the battlefield looked like this.

Thanks to the Tuskers for organising this, it was great fun.

The next major event was the 'Flight of a Thousand Rifters', where one pilot, Marlona Sky, would undock a Nyx moved into a station by CCP and let it be killed by players. Then name of the event was actually slightly incorrect, a more appropriate name would be 'Flight of Two Thousand and Five Hundred Spaceships', since that is what local peaked at before CCP closed the system shortly after the Nyx undocked.

I didn't actually want to shoot the Nyx, so I got my Arty Thrasher and started blapping suspects at 0 m/s.

 I distinctly remember killing many a pod, but none of them have appeared on any killboard yet for some reason.

The fight raged on at 10% TiDi for around 2 hours, which would be equvilant to 12 minutes if there was no TiDi. Many carebears, who had no experience of TiDi outside of Jita, whined about it and left the system.They also whined about PL, who were repping the Nyx and eventually caused it to self destruct. Everyone began to leave, and although it was a fairly fun event I preferred the FFA. I also ensured that my killboard will remain green for the next few years, which can't be a bad thing. Thanks to Marlona Sky for organising the event and sacrificing the Nyx, and to CCP for preventing it from becoming a massive clusterfuck.

Tuskers FFA Battle Report
Flight of a Thousand Rifters Battle Report

Highsec Must Burn

It has been a sad week. Two carebears betrayed a RL friend who was a director in our corp and blew up or stole every ship in the POS. We then evacuated the WH and plotted our revenge against all the carebears of Highsec, but shortly afterwards the corp fell apart. We went our separate ways and I founded a wardeccing corp and wardecced some publords.

I began to recruit in the recruitment channel, but to no avail. Suddenly, I was informed by someone in our public channel that I was in fact a black man.

[ 2013.04.26 20:30:11 ] Admiral Silva > you're a n****r

It was none other than Admiral Silva, who has been both a friend and enemy in the years I've known him. I inform him I'd wardecced a corp and that I was about to ask for a ransom, and we went into their public channel.


[ 2013.04.26 20:45:16 ] Tubrug the Second > Hello!
[ 2013.04.26 20:45:31 ] Tubrug the Second > I said hello!
[ 2013.04.26 20:45:33 ] HTowerH > hey tub
[ 2013.04.26 20:45:41 ] HTowerH > so, whats with the wardec mate ?
[ 2013.04.26 20:46:14 ] Tubrug the Second > I'm here today to ask you for 1bil in exchange for your corp being saved

[ 2013.04.26 20:46:39 ] EVE System > Tubrug the Second was muted by Manic M1ner
Effective until: 2013.04.26 21:16
Reason: "None"

Well, that was rude. The price of the ransom went up to 1.2 billion isk. I get my main in and activate cocky arsehole mode.

[ 2013.04.26 20:47:25 ] Tubrug1 > Plebians shall address Tubrug with the prefix 'Sir'

Meanwhile, Silva entered the fray.

[ 2013.04.26 20:49:27 ] Admiral Silva > I'm here because i want to join a corp
[ 2013.04.26 20:49:59 ] Admiral Silva > are you guys recruiting?
[ 2013.04.26 20:50:13 ] HTowerH > admiral, you may want to look elsewhere as we are about to head into a war with tuborg, and he will likely kill you

[ 2013.04.26 20:51:30 ] Admiral Silva > I'm good miner
[ 2013.04.26 20:51:33 ] Admiral Silva > i fly retriever
[ 2013.04.26 20:51:40 ] Admiral Silva > with efficency

[ 2013.04.26 20:53:00 ] Admiral Silva > whops
[ 2013.04.26 20:53:04 ] Admiral Silva > that was not the apply button
[ 2013.04.26 20:53:24 ] HTowerH > nope, but nice work
[ 2013.04.26 20:53:29 ] Admiral Silva > sorry
[ 2013.04.26 20:53:33 ] Admiral Silva > it was mistake

The health of their alliance in a week was beginning to look rather bleak. But would they fight or would they dock up in the station all day?

Stupid Never Sleeps: Wormhole Edition

People often share stories of the stupidity of carebears and nullbears, but what happens when a corp of them scan down a wormhole and stick a POS in it?

Tis a quiet day in our wormhole chain. I'm waiting for our C2 static's C2 static to die, which has been critical on time for around four hours. But suddenly, I think I hear the wormhole activate. But who would be stupid enough to use a wormhole that had been critical on time for four hours? Oh yeah, the C2's corp.

2013.04.20 17:08:10 ] Tubrug1 > A pilgrim jumped in then the hole collapsed 10 seconds afterwards
2013.04.20 17:08:19 ] Tubrug1 > And it was stable on mass

A couple of hours later, something catches my eye in the recruitment channel.

[ 2013.04.20 20:20:46 ] dlorian > STARMINE inc.... recruiting uk/us tz wh corp convo me for info...

'STARMINE inc' is the C2 corp and the owner of the Pilgrim who just managed to make it through the wormhole. I hatch a devious, if unlikely plan involving my awox alt. Considering he is only a month old, has had 6 corps in the past 3 days and had been in my main's corp for weeks, I estimated there was only a remote possibility of me being accepted if I tried to apply. Fortunately stupid prevailed, as it usually does.
Enter Tiger the First:

[ 2013.04.20 20:23:21 ] dlorian > hi how can i help ?
[ 2013.04.20 20:23:42 ] Tiger the First > I'm interested in joining your corp
[ 2013.04.20 20:23:51 ] dlorian > sure ,,

I thought the 'sure ,,' was sarcastic at first, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn't. He only asked one question during the whole recruiting 'process', and that wasn't for my API.


 2013.04.20 20:24:08 ] dlorian > u have any wh experiance?
[ 2013.04.20 20:24:22 ] Tiger the First > Nope, but I've read up on it quite a lot
[ 2013.04.20 20:24:29 ] dlorian > np
[ 2013.04.20 20:26:17 ] dlorian > well a app will take up to 24 hours to processs,

I'm not sure how an APIless app can take 24 hours to 'processs', especially with a corp that only receives one or two apps a day.

[ 2013.04.20 20:29:48 ] dlorian > il get tha app sorted asap

Meanwhile, we developed our own theories of what he was doing in corp chat.

[ 2013.04.20 20:50:37 ] Tubrug1 > I've worked out how he's processing my app, he's licking the screen to see if I taste good

Back on Tiger I'd been invited to their public channel, where I asked a few questions to make me seem semi-legit. Then he makes this comment:

[ 2013.04.20 20:44:18 ] dlorian > and small gangs r the way to go

I'm surprised these people have the ability to make a fleet and coordinate it. In fact, I'm surprised they have the intelligence to roll their face across the F1 key every now and again. However, I'm getting bored of this small talk since the wormhole connection will die in a few hours and any chance to sabotage and spy on site running fleets will be gone, so I convo him again.

[ 2013.04.20 21:09:34 ] Tiger the First > Sorry for being impatient, but is there any chance you could accept me now?
[ 2013.04.20 21:09:52 ] dlorian > give me 5 mins m8

15 minutes pass. I'm starting to get slightly nervous and I wonder whether he thinks I taste funny. Maybe he's detected the light touch of awox on me, or the flavour of WIS. But he hadn't, since these are amongst W-space's more unintelligent inhabitants. I'm accepted and I join the corp, then moments later I receive this mail from a fellow newbro.

Thanks! This honest hard-working fellow had the decency to randomly give out his API to the whole corp, even though it wasn't needed! What a good chap. A quick check of his full API reveals him to be a poor carebear, with little clue as to how to fit even the simplest of site running ships.

I congratulate you on your lack of EM resists sir! And your 3 LSEs! And your T1 cloak! We learn that a Myrmidon will guide him in, but he logs off as we are about to engage him, then logs on again a few minutes later after the new guy jumps in. A bollocked opportunity. They were reluctant to run sites for the rest of the night because of the loss they suffered 14 hours ago. Ah well.

This morning I logged on to find myself corpless with one item of mail:

Me? 'Unpleasent'? What? All I did was kill a Mack. And a Retriever. And two Algos's. And four pods. Nothing unpleasant about that, I just politely reminded them that if you play Eve your spaceboat will explode at some point.

If any WH mercs are reading this, I would be grateful if you could return these muppets to where they belong before they soil the WH name.

tl;dr I joined the corp which owned our static C2 with an awox character that's had six corps in three days and has killed 8 ships/pods in that time, and he was also the member of our wormhole corp (the one connected to them at the time) for a few weeks. The recruiter's background checks were limited to tasting my portrait, which would explain why I was accepted.

May I violence your boat?

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If I were on the CSM....

With the disappointment of James backing down from running for the CSM, I currently don't know who to vote for. All these containers I keep finding on D-scan in wormholes are telling me to vote for Nathan Jameson of Talocan United, who seems to easily be the leading WH candidate. However, Highsec also needs someone to watch over it to ensure it does not become a themepark, and I believe Psychotic Monk is the right man for that job, but this isn't about who I'm going to vote for, it's about what I would stand for if I were on the CSM.

I'm quite a way off the minimum age required for running a CSM place, which I believe is 21, but this is how I would fix the game in general. This will be a consolidation of other posts on how various parts of Eve are broken, along with some new ideas.

Highsec
As we know, Highsec is broken. Nearly everything about Highsec is broken. Even the careiest of carebears will admit deep down in their heart that there is a negligible difference in the risk:reward ratio between Highsec and Lowsec. Whether they think this is good or not is another matter entirely, but due to the nature of Eve there should be a much greater difference between High and Low.

To fix this requires consecutive nerfs to Highsec and buffs to Lowsec. As I've said in previous posts, there is currently no reason for your average non-PVPing carebear to leave Highsec. Miners, mission runners and traders, to name a few, can make the same profit in Highsec as they do in Lowsec, with much less risk.

For example, because of the recent drone regions nerf, Highsec ore such as Veldspar is nearly as valuable as Arkonor, and many lowsec ores such as Jaspet struggle to compete. The solution here is simple, remove all Highsec ores except for Veldspar and Scordite, and bring the lower end ores from Nullsec up into Lowsec. This would mean only Tritanium and Pyreite would be supplied from Highsec, which would consequently deflate the prices and comparatively give Lowsec and Nullsec ores more value.

To take another example, mission running in Highsec can make too much isk. We can see this by looking at the completely stupid officer fits mission runners use that are featured on themittani.com. If someone has made enough isk to spend 10 Bil on a faction fit Vindicator with no knowledge of what a stupid idea that is, something's seriously wrong. I know L5's are only available in Lowsec, which is a good thing, but these have obsoleted in their role as group PVE by Incursions. I propose level 4's are removed from Highsec. Level 3's can stay, as they give out a neglible income compared to Level 4's.

However, I believe the worst example of how broken Highsec is is Incursions. Incursions allow a group of practically anyone to make hundreds of millions of isk an hour, with pratically no risk of being on the receiving end of a PVP engagement at all. The very notion that someone in Highsec could make as much isk as they could in a C3 wormhole is fundamentally wrong. To fix this, one of two things will need to happen. Either Incursions need to be completely removed from Highsec, or their income in Highsec needs to be drastically nerfed.

In order to bring the risk part of the risk:reward equation into line with the rewards, the risks of non-consensual PVP will need to increase. Wardec costs need to be brought down to the region of 10,000,000 isk per week, which is still more expensive than what they formerly were. In order to make things more interesting and explosive, and to stop floods of carebear tears, the defender in the war should be able to hire as many allies as they want for free again.

The other great tool against Highsec stupidity- ganking, should receive the well deserved buff it needs. Anyone who opposes this should be kindly reminded that Eve is not WoW and that they should stop thinking that this is what should happen. Ganking is, has been, and hopefully will always be part of Eve. To this end Concord response time should be doubled in all systems, bringing the response time in a 0.5 security system to a reasonable 50 seconds. Security penalties for all aggressive acts will also be halved, meaning more hammers can be delivered to the face of stupidity.

To summarise:

• L4 Missions should be removed from Highsec
• Omber, Kernite, Pyroxeres and Plagioclase should be removed from Highsec
• Ice in Icebelts should be made depletable
• Incursions should be removed from Highsec
• The cost of declaring war should be bought down
• Concord response time should be doubled and security penalties halved

Lowsec

Lowsec is broken, but in a different way to how Highsec is. In Highsec, the risk:reward ratio is positively skewed, in Lowsec it is negatively skewed. As I mentioned in the Highsec part of the post, there is currently no motivation to drive carebears into lowsec. At the moment, the only reason to live in Lowsec is to do PVP. Factional Warfare is the only reason Lowsec hasn't died yet, as it sustains the foodchain and stops the pirate corps living there leaving to Null or WH space for better fights. Lowsec therefore needs a massive overhaul to make it more profitable and lucrative.

I shall copy James' idea of the 'food chain' to explain what should happen. The miners, mission runners, traders and travellers represent the grass of lowsec. These are then fed upon by small gangs of pirates, which are in turn prey for larger gangs and fleets of pirates and general PVPers, which then get eaten by large roaming alliance fleets. The problem 

As I've already mentioned, all Highsec ores excluding Veldspar and Scordite should be moved to Lowsec. This will drastically cut down on the amount of AFK mining and force people to actually play the game in order to make a bigger profit.

Incursions will also be moved into lowsec. This will make lowsec Incursion constellations a hotbed of PVP activity, and will force people to fend off attackers. In other words, people will have to PVP to PVE. This will make incursion bears, who will be bears no longer, have to earn their ludicrously inflated payouts.

CCP have adequately fixed Faction Warfare for now, and there are a dwindling number of site farming alts. However, having being in the milita for several months I would like to see a system that rewards PVP more, considering the whole idea of Factional Warfare is to PVP. Faction navies that spawn when someone enrolled with the opposite faction enters the system should also face a slight nerf in DPS to allow for more Highsec combat between the participants.

Of course these changes will significantly increase the amount of traffic that goes to Lowsec, which will increase the number of gatecamps. In order to encourage people to go to Lowsec, I propose increasing the number of Highsec-Lowsec connections, as well as adding a new wormhole generating module (not as bad as it sounds bittervets) which I will elaborate on later. I do not believe that sentry gun damage should be increased in any way, as this would restrict PVP on gates and stations.

To summarise:

• Incursions, ores and L4 missions will be moved to here
• The foodchain needs to be restored
• FW should include more PVP incentives
• More HS-LS gate connections

Nullsec

Compared to the other three regions of space, I know little about nullsec. However using what I do read from themittani.com articles and other news, I do have a few changes I would like to make.

There should be less structure shooting. One of the many reasons the HBC and CFC didn't go to war was because of the amount of sovereignty grinding that would be involved, so instead they opted for a standings reset. I suspect that many other wars have gone like this, where there was not enough gain involved to warrant shooting stationary objects for many an hour.

Another key issue that (used to) pop up on the forum a lot was the issue of local chat. The removal of local chat from Nullsec would stop botting and allow PVP to thrive, with tactics similar to that in WH space. I can't really see a downside to this, other than the amount of nullbear tears it would generate. Come to think of it, that's not really a downside. 

To summarise:

• Less structure grinding
• No local

Wormhole Space 

In my opinion, W-space is mostly fine as it is. I wouldn't mind seeing a few more systems added with the ever growing population of wormhole space, and the addition of C7's would be interesting. The main problem facing WH corps is errors in the security and simplicity of the POS system.

I own a small research POS in Highsec, which I occasionally use from time to time on my alt. As it is, the system is somewhat complicated, and if you're the CEO of a WH corp where everything has to be stored in a POS, security is a fairly large issue. There are several easy ways in which CHAs and SMAs could be guarded from theft, including passwords and the ability to create more divisions. However it appears CCP may or may not be fixing this is the next expansion.

Other stuff
Wormhole Generating Module
This module will be able to generate short lived (1 hour) and high mass Wormholes that either go to Highsec, Lowsec or Nullsec, which the pilot can choose. This device will not be able to be activated from inside a wormhole. "But Tubrug, what is the point in such a device?" When I was the CEO of a new player oriented PVP corp, which had 120 members at its peak, we used WHs to gain quick and gate camp free access to Nullsec. The problem was we had difficulty finding a wormhole sometimes. We weren't really picky about where we ended up, just somewhere in nullsec or somewhere in lowsec that was close to nullsec. Such a module would help small gangs of carebears greatly. Considering this would not devalue the difficulty of WH logistics, I can't see anyone having a problem with this module.

Station games
A thorn in most Highsec wardeccers and Lowsec PVPers backside, station games could easily be solved by distance from the station more consistent with the model of the station, or at least the undocking part of it. Problem solved.

More stuff will be added as I think of it.

TUBRUG1 FOR CSM14!

A Rather Large Fight

Tis a quiet day in W-space. I am scanning chains and my corpmates are doing whatever they do while I'm scanning. Suddenly our batphone rings. On the other end is a German corp who were defending their staging POS from a horde of Russians. Something like that anyway. Not being the type of people who would let such a fight slip by, we accept the challenge and head off to the HS exit.

After a bit of a tricky trip there (All 5 C2's in our chain had LS statics), we fly past a large fleet consisting of T3's, BCs and Guardians on a gate, as reported by my alt.

However, our fleet, which has by now near fully formed up on the wormhole, appears to be much larger.

We were fighting in a C2 Magnetar wormhole, which meant a 1.44x bonus to damage, but with a 0.81x tracking speed reduction. This did mean my meta 4 Talos would be able to dish out over 1K DPS, but with slightly reduced tracking speed which makes it hard to hit even a Guardian.

Moments later my alt reported that they were warping, and the fight was about to begin. In a Tubrug1.blogspot.co.uk first, I will be linking a video that I frapsed.
CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO. HERE.
This is the text commentary that accompanies the video. In the first few seconds of the fight, it appears all WIS members were primaried for some reason. I got hit by a massive wave of lag from opening FRAPS hastily as well as several autocannons. I'm able to jump out of the wormhole again in 40%, at which point I start filming.

The rest of the fight is a beautiful scene. They only had one Guardian inside the WH, the rest were on the Highsec side repping people who jumped through. This would be a great idea if it wern't for the polarisation timer, which trapped them on the wormhole side for 4 minutes after they jumped through. Without sufficient reps in the wormhole, we quickly managed to disassemble their fleet.

After the smoke had cleared and the last Russians had died or GTFOed, we looted the field, including the wrecks of the shiny T3's...

I was rather pleased with this, and after it was safely stored we headed back, where a GENTS Thanatos and Rorqual were repping up the tower. They didn't return for another proper fight, instead opting to try and snipe us with Oracles and Rokhs, which didn't really work. Eventually after the POS was repaired and the Russians were gone, we buggered off back to our wormhole, some with our ships still intact and some not. 

Stabbed in the Back?

As many of you may be aware, James 315 recently pulled out of the CSM 8 race. This is a massive blow to Highsec, which desperately needed someone to stop CCP driving it to destruction. But why did he abandon his campaign when he was practically guaranteed a seat on the CSM?

The official reasoning he gave for it was because of the new way that CCP determines who goes to Iceland. While going to Iceland is a pretty important part of being on the CSM and being able to persuade CCP to change their ways, surely there would be no harm done if he didn't go.

According to James, the NDA would prevent him from writing on minerbumping.com, themittani.com and positing manifestos on the forums. For those who don't know, the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) exists to stop sensitive information about incoming content from being leaked, which could give other players an unfair advantage. Referring to these outlets of his works, he claims that he would have to put his 'unique' platform aside when he became a CSM member. Personally, I can't see how posting screenshots of miner tears violates the NDA. Infact, I don't see how posting his opinions on miner ganking, or even suggesting how to improve it would be a breach of the NDA.

So the question is: Did James really ever intend to run for the CSM? Was it just a rather successful attempt get publicity and voice his views on the CSM and how he would run it, which he covered more than adequately. It is true that CCP announced the new system after James had declared he was running for the CSM, but as he said the STV system would mean that he would be more likely to succeed to obtaining a high place in the election because of his popularity amongst nullsec and lowsec voters.

We may never know the real reason why James dropped out of the race, it could have been because of the new Summit system, or it could have been planned all along. Whatever reason caused it, I am slightly disappointed James promised so much but delivered so little- in fact he delivered nothing.