f13.net

We are the Eve alliance who started off as lost, lonely newbies being bullied by the most powerful alliance in the game. And we are the people who became the most influential power in the game, who destroyed those enemies and who tainted their memory. And we are the alliance that exploded beautifully, survived, and are rapidly becoming a terrifying, griefing power again. We have been in the print media and online news too often to count, because we do stuff nobody else does. We are utterly unique in Eve. We can offer you the chance to do things, alongside other goons, that nobody else in Eve - nobody else in gaming - ever gets. Join Bat Country in Goonwaffe.

WHAT IS EVE ONLINE?

Eve is a game in which you can steal thousands of dollars' worth of someone's stuff and be applauded. It is a game in which you, a newbie, can scam a corporation of a hundred people out of everything they own. It is a game in which you, a newbie, can play a key part in destroying a ship that took years for someone to get into.

It is a game of wolves preying on sheep, and we will teach you how to hunt. It is a game where the smart make others into victims. It is a game where you, a newbie, will have nothing to lose and can rely not just on finding a target but on a furious storm of anger and rage when he discovers what has happened. It is a cruel game of fraud and theft, and yet most of the people playing don't realise this until it is too late, and you own all they have worked for.

Considering that it is a marketing trailer, the video CCP put out with their Dominion patch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDVEHE10nHc) is surprisingly realistic in many ways. If you think that the audio is a little stylised, then watch this film (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rk-gLXqA5g), playing the real soundtrack of a classic Goonswarm operation (when we killed the first manned titan ever to die in the game), while at the same time accurately portraying the mighty myrmidons and glorious paladins of the swarm: role models that with time, thought and abundant calories, you can aspire to mimic.

(https://goonfleet.com/uploads/1280493486/gallery_516_181_17517.jpg)

JOIN F13 IN EVE

"Right, they've not scouted our fleet, and I don't want to scare them.  Frigates from squad one only, jump into them and try to tackle something valuable.  Shout when you have someone trapped and we'll come in after you."

Along with three others, you approach the stargate and activate the jump sequence.  Within seconds, you are hurled light-years through space, the blue-white light of the system you left replaced by the angry glow of a supermassive red giant.  Around you, hanging silently in space, are a dozen battleships and heavy assault cruisers, their targetting systems active and waiting to ambush the small force that just appeared on their local scanners.

You remain cloaked for a few seconds, and have enough time to look around you and select a target: an Absolution.  Packed with electronics to enhance the performance of its fleet members, it is the terrifically expensive flagship of their fleet.  Half a kilometre in length, it dwarfs your tiny frigate.

Selecting it on your targetting computer, you issue the command to orbit the Absolution.  Instantly, your ship uncloaks and you engage your microwarp drives, hurling you forwards at almost 2 kilometres a second.  At the same instant, you see your three gang-mates appeasr on scanners, each with another target in mind.  One makes it only a few thousand metres before exploding in a fury of fire.  Another misses the tackle and overshoots.  But within seconds you can announce to your gang "one point on an Absolution".

The hostile fleet sense the trap: four frigates against a gang like this?  Even Goons wouldn't be so reckless, unless...  

The gate virtually erupts with the dazzling rays of jump-ins.  Desperately, the enemy try to get a lock on you and your surviving friends, trying to scrape you off for long enough for them to flee, but you have their warp cores shut down and are circling them at dizzying speed.  Your overview explodes with yellow and red warning data as a dozen ships train weapons on you, but they cannot even track you at these speeds: they might as well try to shoot a mosquito with a rifle.  A lucky shot peels away your shields with a single impact, but the fight is already won: the hostiles are dying and you're looking for the next target.

(https://goonfleet.com/uploads/1280493486/gallery_516_181_67625.png)

WHY PLAY EVE?

The Eve universe contains over 350,000 people, all playing on the same server. No shards, just a single, massive universe where everyone can affect anyone else if they decide to do so.  You can fight to take their space; you can grief them where they think they are safe; you can trade with them, hunt them down or compete with them in the marketplace.  No other MMO comes close to the richness and complexity of Eve Online.  Eve is too big for anyone to do everything.

Eve is probably the only MMO that has, over the years since its release, grown almost constantly.  There is a reason for that: you cannot exhaust the content.  A sandbox environment with a universe that the players themselves can shape and alter; conquerable space that engenders wars that last for years; grudges that outlast the alliances that spawned them; charismatic leaders followed or vilified by tens of thousands of people.  This is the ultimate in player-generated content, and other MMO developers cry themselves to sleep about it.

CCP have a dream that Eve will be the ultimate sci-fi simulator, encompassing everything from the individual on the ground to the miles-long supercapital in the skies.  There is a long way to go on that dream - we only just reached the planetary surface - but it's an enticing prospect.

There is no grinding.  Skills train even if you are not online.  You don't need money, as the alliance or Bat Country will give you what you need in order to fight.  We have reimbursable operations every two days, minimum, and are trying hard to get our Euros involved.  If you can't find a Goonswarm operation then do what I do and join an NC one: there are gangs pretty much running 23/7.

While player skill can matter a lot, Eve is not twitchy.  Think of yourself as the captain of a ship: you order the crew where to go, who to shoot at, what ammo to use and so on, but it is the crew that actually carries out your orders.  Eve works much the same way.

(https://goonfleet.com/uploads/1281431154/gallery_516_181_21638.jpg)

WHY JOIN BAT COUNTRY?

There are reasons that Eve is one of only two MMO subforums on f13 that have not ended up in the MMO graveyard subforum (the other is WoW): we are fun to play with and we do ambitious things.

We are a pvp-oriented corporation in an alliance that is almost always at war.  It is also an alliance that shapes the entire gameworld just by existing: we are loathed or feared by most of the universe of Eve, and barely tolerated by many of the rest.

As an alliance, we have swapped from the strategic PvP of the last couple of years to small-gang warfare, skirmishing and griefing.  In April, we moved to the south (along with our French allies) to attack a massive group of second- and third-tier alliances.  Over many weeks, we made their lives miserable.  Eventually, others tasted blood in the water and joined us and as a result something like six or seven thousand hostile players have had to leave their space, driven out by the sheer unpleasantness of having us as neighbours.  All without mandatory operations or tedious sov warfare.

If you need funds for ships, or if you want to explore the industrial parts of the game, then we just acquired a new region of our own: Deklein.  I did that.  It's cool, don't thank me...

(https://goonfleet.com/uploads/1280493486/gallery_516_181_86120.png)

WHAT CAN I DO IN GOONSWARM?

As a big alliance with lots of willing leaders, Goonswarm has a wide variety of stuff to do:

TopGoon - Anyone can do this, from day one, and it is ideal if you have other stuff to so.  You sit beside a titan, with headphones on waiting for someone to give the order to go.  Meanwhile, a bunch of scouts are out finding you fights.  When they find one, you get instantly bridged by the titan pilot to the targets, you fight, then you get back and wait for the next victim to be found.  It absolutely terrorises the people who live near us, as every ship is a potential ball of 20 goons waiting to burst onto them.

(https://goonfleet.com/uploads/1280493486/gallery_516_181_62431.jpg)

Bomberwaffe - Goons are the best Stealth Bomber pilots in the game, thanks to Mister Vee.  Last week, one hostile alliance - Atlas - turned up to fight someone aligned with us (PL).  Atlas and friends sat on one side of a gate with 350 people, knowing that they would have the advantage if PL jumped into them.  So 20-odd Goons took on the 350 Atlas pilots, killed about one hundred of them with only a single loss, and drove them through to get slaughtered by PL.  Evem the Goon that we lost got 94 kills.

(https://goonfleet.com/uploads/1280493486/gallery_516_181_4427.jpg)

Black Ops - One for the more experienced PvPer: these small-gang specialists fly fast anc cloaking ships and disrupt enemies' home space.  They drove a couple of corporations out of 0.0 entirely by themselves last month, and have killed alliances in their time.

DasBoot - Are you a bitter vet, scarred by your high levels of Gallente skills?  DasBoot fly Dominixes, Absolutions and Guardians against superior numbers, relying on organisation to survive.  They also hot-drop enemy capitals at hostile towers.  This is a new group, and we're still learning.

Small gangs - We just destabilised a huge chunk of the map through a combination of the above and running daily gangs through enemy space.  Amok in particular run great gangs which are fun ways to learn about PvPing.


(https://goonfleet.com/uploads/1280493486/gallery_516_181_59491.png)

But there is more: you can build the ships the alliance needs. If you are unexcited by PvP then you can run trading empires, indulge in regional arbitrage or make a fortune hauling or importing goods to where they are needed.

You can use the new Planetary Interaction features to play, well, Farmville in space, logging in each day to run industrial installations on the surfaces of planets. Or you can set up a complex series of installations to create industrial components others use to make stuff; or explore constantly-shifting wormholes to uncharted space; or build the expensive new T3 cruisers. CCP's goal is that virtually every aspect of the Eve economy be player-run, eventually, and this leaves gaps in the market for the savvy entrepreneur to exploit. Acting on the recent advice of economically-minded alliance members, for instance, many goons recently joined the ranks of the super-rich following the Tyrannis patch.



I'M A VET: WHAT HAS CHANGED?

Bat Country, freed of the baggage of the Ultrapolite socialites, are genuinely popular members of the alliance.  On the alliance level, The Mittani is now CEO and over the last couple of months has reinvigorated and revitalised the alliance in general and the directorate in particular.  I'm now a director, now, and I can tell you that we all log in and play Eve, which is a novelty both for goons and for most other alliances.

Planetary Interaction has gone live: it lets industrialists "colonise" planets and run networks of factories and mines on their surfaces in order to create goods that were previously sold by NPCs.

Lag, which became very bad after the last patch, has been gradually improving again.  While not quite back at the level where we can throw 1500 people in a system and expect a lag-free fight, I have been in two one-thousand-person fights in the last two weeks and have got on thirty-plus kills in each.


BUT I'M NOT A PVPER

You will be after you hang out with us for a while.  You'll reluctantly allow yourself to be dragged along on a big op, telling yourself this is dumb.  Then you'll start locking up hostiles and experiencing the thrill of watching them explode under the guns of you and your fleet, and then you'll realise you're dying and you'll freeze in panic, and you'll die.  Then someone will give you enough cash to buy the ship again without loss and you'll realise that that fight lasted 15 minutes and it seemed to pass in two, and that you can't wait for the next one.


(https://goonfleet.com/uploads/1281431154/gallery_516_181_281045.png)

WHAT'S IN THE PIPELINE?
 
The list of features under development is striking.  There's Dust 514: an FPS set in the Eve universe which will let Eve players hire console players as mercenaries in order to sieze regions on planets in the Eve universe.   See a preview here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzVjggarRns).  Walking in stations - leaving one's ship and exploring the orbital outposts in which players dock - was slated for launch last winter but was pushed back, but is still in development and a teaser can be seen here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNWWxD-q-bg).  If these changes roll out as planned over the next couple of years then the Eve universe will encompass everything from the single grunt on the ground to the vast titan gliding in orbit above him, tens of kilometres long.
 
Perhaps their CCP's exceeds their grasp.  It's an MMO, so we're all jaded enough to be sceptical of how much will result of this list.  But the fact is that CCP are creating the sweeping and varied game that nobody else is even talking about right now.

TL;DR

Free ships, round-the-clock operations, rich space, one of the most active alliance leaderships in the game and a corporation with a great and growing reputation.  

OK OK I WILL JOIN IF YOU WILL SHUT UP

Glad to have you on board, pilot. Just follow this link: http://wiki.goonfleet.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Remember that you can try Eve free for 14 days by following this link for the free download and trial. Also, if you know a Goon well enough to give him your email address without anticipating a flood of coprophagic porn in return, you can use this link to get 21 free days of trial instead (he gets a free month if you end up subscribing).


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq2oxt7Nrxo - The Butterfly Effect
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzVjggarRns - Dust 514
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfv1QtZDirY - Little Bees, without which it would not be a recruitment thread for Goons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAmK84ur9AE&hd=1 - Querious - a campaign from a bit over a year ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Sye46MEUk - 5 virtues of the successful goon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5TIFjKdcik - The traditional old-school Stahlregen video with Nine Inch Nails music and plentiful jump-cuts.

(https://goonfleet.com/uploads/1280493486/gallery_516_181_347930.png)

This is us.

And if our recruitment post seems to borrow from the Waffe' one on SA don't accuse me of plagiarism since I wrote them both (this one first).


Also, bitter vets and keen Eve-haters, please do not shit up this thread: we have places in the Eve subforum for you to offer your no-doubt well-grounded critiques of the game design.

Hi Endie, I'm an aussie, have 57M sp, like to fly logistics (Oneiros, Guardian and Basi) and can fly Gallente capitals.  My skills, jump drive cal and jump fuel con are both L2 so I have to get them up to L4 to be fleet ready.  I am an experienced PvPer but am not an FC.  Whilst in Shiva I flew in goon fleets during Delve 2, had a lot of fun and I think I could be a useful Bat Country pilot.  I've been hoping that you would start a recruitment drive so I've been biding my time in Amarr space.  

As it happens I'm a paid up member of SA forums but predominately lurk so I don't have much of a posting history.  One of my friends is a director of hirr, (who would be willing to give me a reference), but I would prefer to fly with you guys.  I check the F13 forums everyday and enjoy the community, although I'm not a prolific poster.

If you think I would be a good fit could you tell me what I should do next?

Ugh, I'm getting the itch again. This always happens when I burn out on WoW.

I have an Idea, some may think its moki-ish, and that's ok. As a newbie, with the boring grind of learning skills, why not do some simple market trading, play the 1 isk game, with MY isk. Yes, that's right, I will loan you enough isk to be able to afford to buy your ships when you have trained the skills, and after paying me back, you should have alot of isk leftover.

How does this work? It's easy, train up trade to get a few more market slots, then pick a few...5 or so (depending on trade skill) T2 items that have a large (>10% ) difference between buy orders and sell orders. Place a buy order for say....10 of the item and find another item. Check it often via my orders tab and make certain you are the highest buy order (meaning you will pay 1 isk more than the next guy). When orders are filled, immediately place the item for sale and make certain you are 1 isk cheaper than the cheapest seller (so your item will be purchased first). You should make about 100,000 isk or more for each item that you buy/sell.

Whoopie, 100,000 isk is blah. I am currently running 10 items on buy/sell. Overnight my wallet increased substantially. For example, a few days ago I purchased a Jump Freighter for 3,300,000,000 and if I were not going to use it, could turn around and sell it within hours for 3,750,000,000. The more you have to spend, the more you can make. You cannot lose this way, the worst that happens is your (or my) isk is tied up in items as you play the 1 isk game.

This does give you something to do while training the boring learning skills, and does provide some 'passive' income between missions. This is not truely passive, as you do have to occasionally check to see where your orders are in the 1 isk game, but other than that, when the items sell, your wallet grows.

How do I get into this? Join us in Bat Country, then convo Mo Ki, its that easy.

I am in BC and had fun (until the twins showed up). I have a lot of respect for Shiva, I used to fight against them back in the day.

Being an Aussie may be tough in BC or GS, but don't let me discourage you. Hope you fly with F13, NC spy ! :)

I actually was in the Eve beta and I probably tried it at least once a year. No luck. I think the only time I made it more than a month was with the Hellcats pirate group, where I made it like six weeks.

I joined up with the F13ers in January (on a drunken whim) and have been playing since. The people are fun. We have a good time. There are things to do and you're well supported. And you're part of the entire big game that you read about on the forums.

If you wanted to play the game you read about instead of the one you played when you tried Eve, join up with us and I think you'll find it.

Grats on being a director Endie, even if you do go against tradition and make reasoned and thoughtful posts on Kugu :)

I meant to point it out before. The goonfleet "rules" page referenced in the main page is not public... maybe intentional, but no point directing potential new recruits to it if so.

Flying as part of f13 sounds a pretty good way to explore eve, just some questions.

Are both goon's / BC pretty much inactive in post-downtime periods and their homelands occupied by revenge-seeking euro's or is it just quieter?

What sort of activity level counts as acceptable / useful? I'm got some other commitments that need some time invested over 6-8 months (plus that job thing)... while I'll try and advance and take part where needed I know I'm not going to be able to match some of the people I see in the f13 channel.

If you are reading this and perhaps thinking of trying Eve, you shouldn't even consider doing it outside of joining up with Bat Country/Goonswarm. If I could paraphrase the OP, it opens an array of avenues to new players that would seem otherwise unattainable and the only true way to enjoy Eve is with a good community of players, we happen to be in particularly good position at the moment.

Do join our ingame channel, "F13" for any questions or comments.
I think we are more than happy to answer your questions and debate why Amarr race is superior to others.

Regarding aussie TZ, we do have ops around the clock, and if we dont have one ongoing NC sure will have a fleet flying around shooting hostiles.
I'd think you would make our other aussie members more than happy to see a new face flying with them. Come join F13 ingame channel if you have any more question or just send an application to join Bat Country.

If anyone is on the fence or played EVE before alone and hated it, I would really suggest playing with these guys. It's an entirely different game and you'll be sure to enjoy it for at least 6 months.

My life has been in chaos, so I haven't put in much activity other than showing up for maybe one scheduled op a week when I knew something was going to be going on? But I managed to get 8th in kills for the corp in June and July.

Comstr is the guy to speak to about Aussie TZ activity, off the top of my head.  It was really quiet for a while after we lost Delve, I know, but there is an upswing happening.  Also, you can do everything you could do in MM: I jump in on their ops from time to time through a combination of fleet-finder, their TS, and Razor's Jabber server alerts.  There is stuff on literally 23/7 if you can be bothered.  I keep one alt with a JC over in Tribute (currently up by Cobalt Edge, actually) to jump in on this whenever I fancy.

Yeah, I've seen you guys on the IRC offensive.

In Bat Country we don't call "red pen" or put timers on our players. We realise people have lives outside of the MMO world which is totally normal. The important thing is how you use your time when online and we try to make that as productive and destructive as possible by offering something for everyone, new and old.  

Acceptable levels of activity are making good posts.

At one extreme you have people like Uriq who will merrily rank up 100 kills and more every month.  Then there are a bunch of us who tend to clock somewhere in the 40-50-ish level most months, and a long tail of people whotag along on a drunk roam or a fleet op when they have a free evening every few weeks.

We're one of the most consistently active corps in Goonswarm (the directorate has graphs for that, which are public).  We've been quieter for a few weeks as we babysit the handover of Deklein region to us but things should start to pick up as that comes to an end.

Oh, Bat Country also has its first outpost (yes, spies, the timers have been properly set and are Xttz-approved): http://evemaps.dotlan.net/outpost/S-DN5M


A few of us have made the trail over there to pick up some kills, including myself.  It's a bit more of a trail at the moment since the TCF Jump Bridge network is down and ours are not yet up, but Cobalt Edge has been a welcome distraction.

... that's a wonderfully tempting recruitment line. Though I plan to be a bit more active than that some of the "srs bsns" people from other corps are terrifying.

So reading the goonwaffe pages it looks like I first apply to -BAT- (using the in-game method I assume) and then use the "Member corp" path on the link from the wiki?

Yeap, thats correct first apply ingame to Bat Country and after you have been accepted you can use GF's auth page to gain access to their forums and wiki.
Please state in your application your F13 name/you are from these forums.

Fuckers. This is one of the best recruitment posts I have ever seen and I actually almost clicked the trial link even though I have no interest in this game and would not know where to start or where I'd find the time to play. Bravo.

Allow me to give you a story in pictures.

Prologue: LIVE FOOTAGE OF GOONSWARM ATTACK ON A STRIP CLUB AN IMPORTANT STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE!!! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xad3DbOptMI)

I, long time eve player, resub and join these people. At the time they were fighting off an attack by Russians due to goons taking this important objective inside Goon territory. 3 days later BOB invades and I'm stuck in the middle of the Second Eve Great War. I blame myself

SO I start the southern war series of youtube videos to chronicle my adventures. Stand by for overdramatic movies with some (fuck the haters) great music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGaqqdIHBg

First video. This is us attacking AAA towers that they had planted in one of our home systems. And then Band of Brothers, the self styled "Best PvPers in the game" turned up and we counterattacked... and they ran away. This became a theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTbluOwmwX4

Ahh the beginning of overdramaticness. What happened is fairly self explanatory. Stain had been attacking towers in C6Y for literally weeks. After all that someone inevitably fucked up strontium timings with the result that they managed to blow up towers and plant their own. Despite our fightback they ultimately took the system. This stands as the only station system taken by the enemy in direct combat in the entire war.

Second half is the fact that AAA only held an important station system with 2 towers. They fought off this attack by shoving 7 titans into the system 24/7.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzJUwzzvgqM

Our enemies tried some stratergy!

Basically they attacked 2 sides of our space at once to try and break us, as our jump bridge net had been broken. Needless to say, we smashed BOB, causing them to lose pretty much their entire capital fleet, then took a side trip to AAA space to help out an ally, then raced back in time to smash the AAA fleet that was trying to kill our towers. AAA logged off then mass logged back in at downtime and ran for the gates.

BOB explanation on that was they were testing our response time by using a moderate number of Dreads, and they did kill one tower (out of 10 that were coming out). Did I mention our enemies are... uh... veridicalitly challenged?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPkvZbBxGQ8

Just some general combat footage. The main fight here is fighting over a vital system that we had to keep SOV in as it was vital for our jump bridge links. We won every fight but it was lost due to game bugs. So we muddled along regardless the old fashioned way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCG7VgFWVCE

Killing a titan happens sometimes after 2 and a half hours of boredom sitting on a gate. This video caused me to upgrade so lag was better from then on.

Actually I'll stop waffling and just give you the rest of the vids

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro1mCcEVhHI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFFnO5oPlWU

That one is significant as it was the one that BOB imploded after months of fail. Also I started that vid in a ship you could be flying on day one, a rifter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LY-feGmVLw

Shows the progress of the war. Also The mighty BOB spent longer sitting in a station telling everyone they "COULD kick the shit out of us BUT they JUST didn't want to right that second" than anyone ever before or since . Didn't bother me. I bought a carrier in the firesales...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEkd8uf5usA

This is narrated by me on my own, as youtube was fucking me around. If you want to see my comments on the fighting and learn something about the tactics involved have a listen to this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPMWv_D-2VE

The end of the war. Sung to the national anthem of the Russian Federation. :)

General combat footage:

Killing Carriers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZJININMCOM

One of the best fights I was ever involved in in Eve: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNj7-ysT9z4

So, the question is, what will be your story?

In all seriousness, Goonswarm is probably one of the best places to be in Eve right now, and Bat country is a very good corp. If you want to try Eve, join these guys.

Aussie time zone is the quietest for Goonswarm, but fortunately there is neatly always a NC gate camp set up before downtime at the EC-P8R gate. I've setup there as a Hurricane with a insta-lock-insta-pop sensor booster and had some fun there. There's also nearly always a NC fleet doing something somewhere. The EC- gate gets a lot more hostile action after downtime too.

From my post on the SA thread:



I go through stages of playing, usually on the weekends. I'll get on some ops in the Morning AUS time (Prime US time) during the weekdays, but are more active on the weekend, when there's a US or Euro op every day pretty much. When I'm not flying the 110% reimbursed command ship and giving everyone 20-30% shield or tackle bonuses, I'll fly a fully reimbursed Hurricane or Drake with replacements on instant sale on alliance contracts, or a 1mil costing Bat Country corp cruiser. I make my money buying mineral's from local goons (Please sell me minerals in S-D!) and using that to build tech 1 mods and selling them to local goons (who, unlike some alliances like BoB/Kenzuko/IT, actually use tech 1 mods).  It's slow going but lasts all month without needing to rat. If I wanted to rat, I can do it in "our" system that's off pipe but only 4 jumps from Goonswarm Federation Central and upgraded with encounters that can be done by anyone between a tech 1 Rifter and a Carrier (though, please don't rat in a carrier).



Goonswarm has the best wiki and help manual that exists - it goes into great detail about anything and everything in Eve. You'll always have a Ship fitting suggestion, guides and help on how to do things and an amazing political and historical section to read afterwards. Probably half of Eve 0.0 use ripped copies of it in one form of another, the CCP version is a pale and outdated shadow.

The Goonswarm forum has a calendar listing all up coming ops with the local time it's starting and the time left before it starts, with direct links to the op thread detailing the ships needed, form up location and overall mission. So you can normally see several days ahead when there's a fleet op happening.

What I Did in Eve Online Last Night

First, I played Rock Band for thirty minutes while CCP unexpectedly rebooted the server.  I almost five starred Deluxe on my first attempt with drums.  So close.

Then, my Sigma squad brosefs called an operation for fast moving ships.  Everyone was welcome, as long as you brought something small and fast.  We had a few newbees with us and they were given free Rifters.  We set out for a system about twenty minutes from home and raced there in our tiny fast fleet. 

When we arrived, our scout reported that the destination system had a small fleet of larger ships than ours and a warp disruption bubble anchored on the other side of the gate.  The fleet commander ordered us to jump in.  Our fast fleet was on top of them before they could warp away and we easily blew them to bits.  We shot the bubble so that we could warp freely.  A scout reported more hostiles flying outside of the station and we quickly warped to him.

About this time, I noted to myself that we were in a dead end system.  The gate we came in through was the only way out.  We came out of warp at the station to see another small gang of mid sized ships and we quickly tackled them, getting a few more kills.  A single Drake remained outside the station.  His shields finally failed and we were quickly tearing his armor down when an ally of his undocked in a massive capital ship and instantly restored the drake's shields.  Knowing that this carrier had drone ships that would rip our tiny ships apart, the FC ordered the fleet to disengage and return to the jump gate.

We landed on the gate at zero kilometers, ready to jump through.  But then the gate lit up once, twice, three times and three ships appeared on our overviews.  We were engaging them and laughing about our good fortune when the gate hissed and started lighting up again and again - it was an ambush.  An enemy fleet twice our size uncloaked between us and the only way out.  With nowhere to run, we scrambled to escape to random planets and, shortly after, to safer spots deep in space.

The enemy fleet sat on the gate with interdictor ships constantly launching warp disruption bubbles that would trap anyone who tried to escsape.  We were debating how to get out when a scout reported a ship had drifted far enough from the enemy fleet that we could kill it.  We aligned for the gate, ready to warp in at the FC's command.  The scout decloaked his ship on top of the target ship and tackled him.  As we were about to warp in, he reported that the enemy interdictors had foolishly dropped their warp disruption bubbles to come to the aid of their ally.  With only seconds to get out, the FC ordered us to the gate.  Palms sweating as only Eve can make them, I clicked warp.

We landed on the gate surrounded by the enemy fleet.  Unable to stop us, they watched as we jumped through to fly home.  We had killed a few and lost a few, but most of us had escaped thanks to their stupidity, our awesome scouts and a quick acting FC.  On the trip back home, someone pointed out that the Eve map showed that the system we had just escaped was now the most active system in terms of pvp since the server had come back online two hours before.   Thus is life in Goonswarm.

<grumble>
Fuck no.  I aint doin it.  Stop it.  Endie.  Damn your recruitment posts.

This can't be emphasized enough. Eve-Goons is the only MMO where you can participate in the "end game" the same day you log in. People love newbies.

Grats to all you kids on getting out from under the LOVEU banner and into GF on your own. That whole drama was one of the driving forces behind my latest EVE hiatus. No urge to come back just yet (hooked up with the goons in Darkfall, so that should whet my PvP appetite for now), but I am glad to know there is a good spot should I choose to return. Enjoy!

It's me. I'm the long tail. Or at least part of it. I've had a on and off relationship with F13 in Eve for a few years now. It's a great bunch of folks to fly with and very helpful in game. Come, join us, see the universe, kick some dicks in.

There's always something going on in.  Just last night I logged on to spend an hour quietly making some cash when a hostile showed up in my system.  He was flying a stealth bomber which is a small ship that can fly around undetectably cloaked and do large amounts of damage.  Rather than let him hang out there all night harassing our allies, I hopped in a frigate of my own and chased him out of the system.  Right into the waiting arms of the friendly gang that had been waiting for him to come through.

One less ganker to worry about. (http://batcountry.7mph.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=4832)

One thing to note is that all the GoonWaffe corporation members on that killmail are being run by one person.  He's four-boxing expensive, diverse PvP ships.

SOLD.

Sign me up. Me and my 56k skill points are ready to be blown up.

I'm in.

Gentlemen, some questions:

1) is there a free trial / welcome back program for previous subs?  
2) how much ISK can I get now for an in-game time card?  Going back with many millions would be best.
3) Goon forum.  I bought an SA forum membership and signed up for Goon Wiki but never got a reply.  Should I register again or ping them (again)?
4) Where are you guys?  I really would want to make sure I could be within a few minutes (ie. 5-10mins!) of travel time for any fun corp stuff.
5) What's the best way to move down to where the corp works?  Shuttle AFK (frequent podding) and make Jump Clones along the way for safety?  Or is there another way to fix your clone/rez point?

Whee, tried to log into my years-old account (I don't want to pay 20bux for a new client - sue me) and I'm being prompted for the name of a character I haven't played since, like, 2005.

This is gonna be fun!

Every so often I take a break from Eve to play some other MMO (most recently Age of Conan to try out the expansion), but I always come back.

1) I'm not sure, honestly.
2) 60 day TCs are going for 600m and up.
3) You get onto the Goon forum after joining our corporation in-game, you don't need an SA membership if you fly with Bat Country.
4) We're in Deklein, and you can get up here within minutes of starting the game by joining our corporation and podding yourself.  Though I'd suggest spending some time shopping in empire and taking advantage of one of our several hauling services so you can get cheaply priced ships.
5) Pod or clone jumping, as mentioned above.  Our jump bridge network is currently down as we take over the region from our french allies Tau Ceti Federation, but should be back up within the next few weeks.




E: The very first thing any one of you should do when getting in-game is to click on the little icon in the top-right corner of one of your chat windows and join the f13 channel.

As far as number 1 is concerned, I know CCP occasionally sends out reactivation emails for a free week or weekend or something of EVE, and now I'm wishing I'd taken advantage of them, if only to remember my goddamn account details.

Also, if anyone is looking to sub for the first time, PM me and I'll send you a buddy invite that will extend the trial period a bit.

I haven't followed the f13 Eve drama in ages. Didn't goons get disbanded and reformed and threw f13 out or something a while back?

Sort of.  Our old corporation, LOVEU, was removed when the alliance was reforming in Syndicate due to a combination of old drama and misinformation.  I don't want to get into too much detail right here, but we've kissed and made up since then and the only drama the corp is currently experiencing is over what to call the outpost we just took over.

The Goonswarm CEO said he'd got f13 confused with another forum with a name beginning with "f" (this is true) and once he realised the mistake he invited us to rejoin the gang.

1) is there a free trial / welcome back program for previous subs?   - Err Don't know. A current member can get you keys that last 21 days instead of 14.

2) how much ISK can I get now for an in-game time card?  Going back with many millions would be best. - 600 million or so. I bought one 2 months ago and still have all the ships and gear I started with, and I'm only down 50mil isk. The 100% reimbursements help a lot.

3) Goon forum.  I bought an SA forum membership and signed up for Goon Wiki but never got a reply.  Should I register again or ping them (again)? - You don't need to go through or have SA membership - you have F13 membership to get into Bat Country instead. We are a corp inside the Goonswarm Federation alliance. SA members join the Goonwaffe corp. Once a member of Bat Country, you get full access to the Goonswarm Federation forums and wiki.

4) Where are you guys?  I really would want to make sure I could be within a few minutes (ie. 5-10mins!) of travel time for any fun corp stuff.  - We are in Delekin, about 15 jumps from Jita to the 0.0 entrance at EC-. Do NOT attempt it till your in the corp, it is often camped and the route is dangerous first. Move your stuff to Jita before you join if possible. Once in the corp, Goonswarm members will haul it for you to our region for 50isk per 1m2 (this is very cheap). We have wardecs up right now last time I checked, so don't go to Jita AFTER you join. We have a station with an office in Delekin for you to pod jump to as well. Our home station which we own is S-D, but the Goonswarm Federation is currently N-T. It will shortly be moving to VFK. VFK is 4 jumps from S-D, so it's going to be pretty painless to live in S-D and travel to VFK for ops.

5) What's the best way to move down to where the corp works?  Shuttle AFK (frequent podding) and make Jump Clones along the way for safety?  Or is there another way to fix your clone/rez point?  - Move you gear to Jita. Make sure none of it is in containers or is damaged. Join the corp, and pod yourself to our office in S-D. Then get goonswarm haulers to move it for you as a courour contract from Jita to N-T.  Do NOT get anyone to move out who is not in Goonswarm, and don't do it until you can arrange it with them via the Goonswarm Forums first - otherwise you WILL lose it to scams.

Because our newbie drive and that of Goonwaffe started on the same day, you get to enjoy the efforts of the whole alliance in helping out newbies.

Thus, there is a newbie training op this weekend.  I'm not going to say when, where etc on an open forum, because there are people who would love to crash it, but this will get you up to speed on PvP and will then lead you out to shoot stuff in a huge, unruly gang.

Edit: actually the newbie ops start as soon as tomorrow, Thursday.  When you join up, register for our forums and check out this link: https://bat.enqack.net/index.php?topic=86.0

If you cannot get your API in time to register, just ask in corp chat about how to get ships, where to go and how to get there.  PvP is the best thing in Eve by a million miles, and if you start you will want much more of it.

Alright, screw trying to retrieve my old account. What do I have to do to get in on the extended trial thing?

It's been so long since I've played EVE that I remember absolutely nothing about it; I'll be going into it as essentially a (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6089362/newbie.gif)

I believe the extended trial is for new accounts only, I'm not sure how to make it work for resubs.

I would be creating a new account. My old account was crap anyway.

Now I can't come back to this thread...ever.  :oh_i_see:

Off next week to pack and move to the land of the insane, South Carolina. I can't be playing this....

damn it

At least it's starting to cool off here a bit! Just try to ignore anyone who looks to be over the age of 50.

Anyone creating a new account, for whatever reason, is recommended to PM the people who have offered to give them the extended buddy trial. This will give you the longer 21-day trial and once you subscribe, for whatever reason, the person who sent you your buddy invite also gets a free month, to which I will personally give 100mil ISK in return if you use one my invites. So that's a week extra and enough money to fly a hundred frigates into a wall.

The "F13" in-game channel is where you can talk to some of us and ask questions and solve problems.

You can apply to join Bat Country from any station simply by looking up the corp info and pressing a button.

Do not fly into 0.0 unless you have been accepted to the corp. You will die in an explosion.

But don't stick around in Empire once you are. It's more dangerous and none of your friends are here.

Sell or ask about shipping your shit.

Set your medical clone to one of our null-sec offices and self-destruct your pod. Update your medical clone always after doing this.

Yo dawg, you a bat now.

From here your future success story depends on how much effort or creativity you can spare.

Hmmm.  Very tempting.  I played EVE for about 6 months last year and enjoyed it.  The corp and alliance I belonged had a lot of great people in it but it was very small so engaging in any kind of large scale pvp was hard to do.  I got bored after awhile ( I even joined a pirate corp to see if that would spark my interest) and quit.  I had 2 accounts.  One I was able to fly AF(Minny) and had most of the skills needed to fly a BC effectivley and the other account I was able to fly interceptors (Gallente).  Tempting.

Is it still possible to really gimp yourself during chargen? I remember having to reroll once very early on when I last played due to fucking up my starting stats to the point where it'd take weeks of training to fix.

They seem to have gotten rid of all that now. Basically you start with pretty even stats, and then you get double time training for your first 1.5m Skill Points. I found this out last night.

I'm in as well, just moving my stuff around and deciding whether to try running low-sec or pod-jumping. Thankfully there's a certain synergy between the two.

Koro: As a noobie you get two free stat respecs. So you can't gimp yourself in the character generator... but the advice of making sure you can stand your avatar picture is still a good one.

There was a existing account 5-day re-activation linked in one of the SA threads and somewhere in our Eve forum. It was part of a special offer but apparently still works fine.

just found it: https://secure.eveonline.com/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2freactivate707.aspx%3fid%3dreactivate5daysfree&id=reactivate5daysfree

ended 8/12 though

He means the offer link before the last offer: https://secure.eveonline.com/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/reactivate707.aspx

Supposedly it works for unsubbed full accounts. Worth a try :ccp:

Koro, I sent a buddy invite to the e-mail address in your profile.

1) "pod yourself to our office in S-D"  So once you join you can choose to revive at a Corp office?  Even if you've never been to that station?

2) how well can newbs/lowbies survive in PvP?  I've been reading these links but I keep remembering AOE/ROOT (warp scramblers) and other insta gibbing that just didn't make it realistic to PvP until you had a BC or better.  I realize there's the whole tackling thing, but is that real?  Has the game been balanced to help people in low skill ships because my experience was brief.

1) Yes, you can set your medical clone to your current medical or anywhere your corp has an office.

2) I have flown a Rifter in intense combat, warped out as soon as they've tried to swap me, repaired up and warped back in until the fight was over. It's a mixture of experience, skillpoints and ability to keep cool. I only have one of those.

1) "pod yourself to our office in S-D"  So once you join you can choose to revive at a Corp office?  Even if you've never been to that station?

Join Corp. Then in a station with cloaning, move your clone - S-D will now be in the list. Set that. Then either a)traval through 0.0 till you blow up (take a shuttle) or b) pod your self. Either way you wake up in S-D. RESET your clone in the station.

2) how well can newbs/lowbies survive in PvP?  I've been reading these links but I keep remembering AOE/ROOT (warp scramblers) and other insta gibbing that just didn't make it realistic to PvP until you had a BC or better.  I realize there's the whole tackling thing, but is that real?  Has the game been balanced to help people in low skill ships because my experience was brief.

The hard truth is, you need to experience combat to survive it. While doing so, you will die. But that's ok, it costs you very little to die when you're new. And a 5 year old character will die just as quickly (in fact, once you get into interceptors, you can die REALLY quickly). Once you high speed, small target, high agility Frigate gets close enough to the enemy, you can orbit it as a speed faster than his turrets can revolve. Once there, he is doomed.

However, big ships have many ways still to kill little ships. He can kill your speed. He can take your energy. He can deploy drones (very small, AI controlled fighters) that can catch you. But if he's doing that, the REST of you fleet is killing him. And because he will care more about his clone costs, his implants, his faction mods and his K/D Ratio, and you don't, he will inevitably panic and warp out.


..And that's when that 5 year old 50 million skill point 10 billion isk player discovers....he's been trapped by someone like YOU. And there IS no escape and he's 500 million isk tech 3 Strategic Cruiser, is dead to a 250K Rifter with a 10k scrambler and pilot who is out to ruin his day.

Which is why we say this:

(http://stonekite.net/images/252.jpg)



You could say, bah, that's just goonswarm propaganda (http://www.google.com.au/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=a2t&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&biw=1395&bih=905&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=goonswarm+propaganda&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=). But rembember this story. One day Goonswarm was fighting IRC. The Goonswarm fleet was camping a station and nothing much was happening. Suddenly, the IRC CEO warped into the station..in a covert op frigate...with his cloak turned off...and no Micro-warp Drive.

The IRC CEO *did* have a cloak fitted, and wisely cloaked his ship up when he saw the hostile Goonswarm ships.

...Unfortunately he simply headed towards the station at slow cloaking speeds. And got decloaked by a guy in a Drake and another guy in a Battleship. Before he could escape, some newbee tackled him with their tech 1 warp disrupter*. And it turns out the IRC CEO was carrying the entire Tech I and Tech II BPO collection of his alliance.  Whelp. IRC surrendered the next week.


Then of course, the First Ever Titan Killed in Ship To Ship Combat, was Shrike. And he died when a Tech II frigate Interceptor, decloaked him. Shrike lost his 4th Titan when a Heavy Interdictor warped to the wrong moon, at the right time.

-----------
* I may be stretching the truth here, as I actually think he got trapped in a warp bubble. But he DID get decloaked by a Drake.

Gets nabbed me earlier, but thanks!

That killmail I linked earlier had me in a very fancy, advanced frigate.  However, the same thing could have been accomplished in a newbie t1 frigate.

Also, I thought the game plopped you into a tutorial. It simply dumped me into a starbase with no tutorial prompts. What gives?

Edit: Nevermind, figured it out.

Press F12.

I think I'm going to take you guys up on this offer.  :grin:

Hmmm LOTRO trial expires in 2 days. F2P on 10th Sep.
I've got lots of free time...but..it seemed so..alien.

How complex is it? Can I just press buttons and watch things die? Do I repair (heal) myself in space? Can I be a repair bot? Is it harder to than healbotting in WoW?

Everyone loves a logistics pilot (heal bot).

The game is quite complex, the actual gameplay...not too bad.

OK will PM when ready. Let me just scratch my MMO itch with LOTRO a while longer  :grin: while I download the client.

Coming from the outside of only heard about this game in passing, when I check out the vids and screens and see how much shit there is on your screen, I check to see if I have enough stimulants to keep up with all that info. That's the intimidating part...there is a huge amount of stuff on the screen which I assume you have to keep track of and I don't believe I'd be able to handle it all.  :awesome_for_real:

And I can say I do like being a heal whore...especially when it comes to large scale stuff.

god damn it I just realized clicked on this thread again...

I'll say this as someone who's just come back to EVE from years of absence: the combat's not bad. Early on you mainly just hit "Orbit at xxx metres" and fire away, but there is a lot to keep track of, and even against NPCs there can be some tension involved when you notice that that one guy you were shooting at now has six reinforcements and they're all eating your shields for lunch.

It can be incredibly boring if you let it be.

apologies, another question

I remember it was bad grind trying to raise reputation with NPCs (Agents).  Do you even need to bother with NPC missions? 

There was never any kind of questlog/Epic-quest like chain I remember to help you through a Tier or some unique skill.  I never understood then why NPCs existed if everything can be made by other players and bought off the market.  True?

Some specific ships and modules can only be obtained off of NPCs.  They mods are more powerful than the regular versions that are made by players, and the ships are often very powerful as well.  However, there are other ways to obtain them and most of us don't bother with running missions.  There are also skills that will help you raise your standings faster if someone really had their heart set on missioning.

If you live in 0.0, no. Ratting and doing Encounters will make you far more money, unless you want an Alt in empire doing level 4 missions in a Raven or faction battleship.

There is a newbie "epic" quest that takes 50 missions and is not epic. It is boring, shows you nothing you won't see every time you jump into another system, gives crappy rewards compared to 0.0 and ends with a fight you cannot win unless you flying a Battlecruiser or Tech 2 Frigate. It has ONE branch that changes nothing and does nothing. You DO get to traval across the galaxy 5 or 6 times because CCP says jumping 20 gates is fun. My advice, don't do it.

There is also 2 0.0 epic missions, but you don't need standing for them, and apparently they suck too.

If you DO want a change of pace, you can do Pirate missions in Venal, next door to Goonswarm's region. It's more dangerous in that hostiles can dock at the same station and keep you trapped. However, from what I hear the NC keeps several of the stations perma-blue so it could be worthwhile in doing them in HAC.

I got a Gila from the speedboat mission arc. Not bad for 3 hours spent in NPC space. You do need either Caldari, Gallente or Guristas standing for that.

Otherwise missions are completely optional, but the career agents in the system you start in give you worthwhile information and goodies.

There is a tutorial in the beginning to get me comfortable with controls and interface?

*sigh*

Yes. There is a 10 mission arc to start off that gives you some mods and newbie ships, and also teaches you how to use the various mods. I just finished it. I got 2 ships loaded out and about 1m isk.

Fuck, there goes my weekend I guess... I hate you all dearly for this.

We've already taken in a couple of new guys, and I can't remember the last time I saw so many ops lined up.  It's going to be a fun weekend.

My desire to rejoin  is tempered by the fact that my computer just died  :oh_i_see:

So I am screwing around on this tutorial now. Nice and so far, overwhelming... but step by step playing works. Who was actually recruiting again? I may stay a bit.

The f13 corp name is "Bat Country".  Put your F13 name in your application.

Ye gods, why did I open this thread?

Very, very tempted to resub but won't be any time in the next month...

Damn you Endie. You need to be made minister of propaganda with these posts. I'll pay for the title. Anyway, as usual, your post makes me want to come back, dispite my far greater preference for reading about Eve rather than playing it. Maybe I'll give it another shot once my headset parts arrive and I can chat in fleet.

Come and join, shared suffering builds strong bonds!
/me hands back propaganda hat.

And I don't believe I'm breaching op-sec (heck, still too newb to know any secrets) to state that the goonfleet CEO writes equally amusing posts, and that the recent splits seems to have subdued the "leet" crew and maybe helped the goon's recover their roots.

Also something very cool about sitting in a Bat Country space station. The real draw of Eve is planting your flag on a patch of space and saying, "This is ours".

Hey there, haven't seen you for ages.


Actually, although I'm officially the Alliance diplomat I also, amogst other stuff, am pretty much the Voice of Sauron (aka Mittens).

I just wanted to hop in here and say that while I have zero interest in Eve, I'm impressed every time I read one of these recruitment threads.

Well played Mouth of Sauron, well played.

Best of luck from me.

Im very much enjoying Eve but committed to other people at the moment. I'm sure you'll all have a cracking time.

It's not cheating if you don't get caught.

GAH! Your recruitment attempt succeeded. Recoiled Fusion is up and running and its a lot less intimidating than I expected.

It looks like being a successful recruiting drive, I checked out the F13 channel yesterday to see 4 new inductees into Bat Country. 

I'm taking a little longer to apply than I thought I would, due to not wanting to cart my goods around empire with war decs in place, however I should be good to go very soon.

It's a shame the JB network is going to take a few weeks to get up and running, as Pure Blind is a cluster f**** atm,with D00M hammering Space Monkeys and generally being a nuisance.  I guess the NC will wait for NCdot (D00M), to grab some space before coming back and putting them back in their hole.

On the other hand, the really good thing about Pure Blind is that there is a plethora of targets just a few jumps away from Bat Country space - lots of opportunities for glory....lol

I tried this last recruiting drive and ended up getting busy at work, giving it another go since it really does sound like pure awesome. IGN: Sidiri. I have some of the basic tackling skills from the goonfleet wiki, not too much more to go that I can see for that.

I just made some newbies a bunch of isk.  You, too, could hang out on teamspeak and chill out while getting newbie-rich.

Shame I had to miss it, but I had Stuff to do. Maybe another time!

Ha ha, you really are a bad man, Slayer.

I downloaded and installed the client. So all I gotta do is PM one of you guys for 21 day trial invite right?

Yeah, with your e-mail.

So everyone who hasn't signed up yet missed a pretty neat roam tonight.
 
(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/318368/2010.08.21.17.36.10.jpg)

https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479839
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479843
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479846
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479847
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479848

If you've played before, you'll notice the dominance of smaller ships - even at the start of 2010 EVE fleets were dominated by relatively skill intensive long range BS fleets, the balance has shifted toward cruisers and battlecruisers, which are much easier to train into and more fun to fly. Drake battlecruisers are now Goonswarm's standard serious business fleet ship and they take less than a month to prep for. 


On a completely unrelated note, for some reason I like this old video from the war that was going on when we lost Delve, this is footage from the 49-U6U system, where Goonswarm was holding off a number of other alliances until the entire region was lost to misclicking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoNAorIzB50


Most of the complexity is in the setup and out of game discussion (selecting ships and fits, handling the economics and strategy of the corp and alliance) - and in an alliance like Goonswarm it is pretty much up to you whether you want to get involved in that side of the game. Once you are in game and on grid with a whole bunch of reds, the game becomes fairly straightforward, pick something to shoot at, try to keep up with and in range of targets called over team speak (but if you can't just shoot anything).

As a new player you often end up either tackling or running ewar (debuff ships), so long as you read the wiki beforehand describing wtf to do in these roles, then it isn't as complicated as it looks or sounds.

I'll be playing in a couple of days quite a bit. Work has kind of gotten in the way the last few.  :heartbreak:

You forgot:
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479838
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479849
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479850
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479844
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479852
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479851
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/479853

It may not look like much, but some of them might not have remembered to update their clone. :grin:

Shit.. I love me some BCs, too.  I can fly Gall and Minnies and had a kickass Drake setup.  Argh.. must not give in.. so much time sitting around. 

I had an old Raven pilot that I played around a bit last year I was thinking of reactivating.  Is it much of a leap skillwise to the stealth bomber role?  I seem to recall that I had up to torpedoes trained.

I played around a bit with PvP when Eve first came out, but never had a chance to really get into 0.0 space.

Stealth bombers can be trained up very quickly, especially if you already have torp skills. They are also very heavily used these days since they were improved, some of the most lethal and fun ships you can fly.

I have concluded I am not capable of handling this game at this time or in the foreseeable future. I'll be PvEing for the time being until I can settle my life down enough to rope off a few hours for someone to mentor me. By that time I should be able to hold back my tears of anguish.  :awesome_for_real:

You don't need to learn it all at once, being in fleet on ops in a rifter there isn't much you can do to fuck things up.

Come get free rifters, go on fleets, point ships worth billions and die in a hilarious ball of fire with us. Then get a new one and repeat the process.

You know you want to.

Damn.  I'm DL the client now and will resub when it finishes.

Crap.. CCP just sent me a one day activation so I can use some of the 665mil on my char to buy plex.  Why is the universe conspiring against me?   I know nobody's on when I play, y'all are west coast/ euros and show up before/ after I'm on.  I've tried 3 times already, don't drag me back.

/whine.

*tug* *drag*

Come play in EST with me.  Or stay up really late and hang out with our Australians who get lonely sometimes.

High marks for the recruitment information.

Eve is the game I've most wanted to try but knew better than to try alone... might stealthily investigate.

It's certainly a good time to be in goonspace. The space is still only newly claimed, there's lots of new players, lots of nearby hostiles who need a kicking and the leadership seems pretty capable. Will be fun watching what happens :)

Our space was just visited by about 120 hostiles in a really strong gang and we had a great fight with them.

Had to go to work *just* before the shooting started... was so :cry:

I got back in game tonight.  A little confusing at first but I slowly started to remember what I was doing (sort of).  I can fly BC's, AF and HAC's, though it would probably take about 2 or three weeks of training before I can fly HAC's effectively.  Got into the F13 channel and talked to some friendly people.  Despite EVE's reputation, I always found that it had the most helpful players of any mmo I've played. 

Endie I'm looking forward to your weekly roundup to point and laugh at Atlas/AAA

If only Aion wasn't actually somewhat enjoyable while being a laggy zergfest, I'd still be playing the less laggy zergfest that is internet spaceships with y'all  :sad:

I'm writing it this afternoon.

You got to HACs before quitting but are confused at the game?

Spy.



Actually, after enough years I'm sure Eve would kick about anyone's ass. You're still a spy though.

Patently an attempt by a genuine spy to cast suspicion elsewhere. You can't fool us.

They made good recruiting tools (and I can read it at work).

That's what a true spy would say to save his own skin.

Only someone who is really a spy uses the "that's what a true spy would say" line.

Quick shout out to Phildo for putting up with my constant stream of newbie questions. I really appreciate it man.

Saw this recruitment post a few days ago and it got me thinking about EVE again. I hadn't played for about a year and it sounded fun so I resubbed and I've been dorking around solo for a few days now. The spark of fun is there, but I know that if I just start running level 4 missions again I'll be bored before the first week is up.

Is it too late to get in on this? In the past I've mostly just played solo or with small groups of friends, though I did join a corp to see what 0.0 was like at one point. We set up shop there and got kicked right back out to Empire in short order.

Do you guys have a place for a fairly experienced player, but a pvp noob?

Hehe.  I only have about 6 mill sp, spread out all over the place.  I had no idea what to train at the beginning so I can fly both Minny and Amaar ships, including BC and BS, though neither very well.  I think I'll stick to training for Minny HAC's and BC for now.

If you can fly a rifter/merlin/whatever the amarr and gallantee version is - YES. EVERY SHIP COUNTS.

If you can fly a Drake or Hurricane you can immediately start ratting in 0.0 and flying the standard fleet ship, but bring anything with a tech 1 Warp Disrupter and you're good to go to come PvP. There are several newbee ops that are occurring to teach people new to PVP and 0.0 how to fight.

I can't decide whether 'Hehe.' ing the spy accusation is good or bad, I would be a horrible counter intelligence agent.

Honestly, this thread went WAY too long without any spy accusations.


Basically, Bat Country should be great for real Eve noobs. Phildo is the man. We have a few very active PVP guys. And we have me, the guy that gets drunk and logs on every so often to throw isk at PVP stars and noobs. It's a good time to collect your 10 million isk from me.

[20:04:34] Jalia Terensa > yaaay warp  drive operation lvl 1 is finished, now space is mine!
[20:04:42] DaiTengu > :shobon: !!
[20:05:11] DaiTengu > cute newbee, sending 10m isk
[20:05:41] Jalia Terensa > holy jesus on rollerskates! Thanks
[20:06:24] janiti > wait
[20:06:34] janiti > we get free ISK for being  :3
[20:07:22] DaiTengu > another cute newbee!
[20:07:37] DaiTengu > isk sent!
[20:07:59] Devilish Ledoux > cute newbees got me 2 free months of eve
[20:08:02] janiti > holy shit, I will post you my kitten now
[20:08:07] Devilish Ledoux > I gave them 25m each
[20:08:24] DaiTengu > this is how newbees get rich

join 4 isk!

If only I was around at the right times  :oh_i_see:

I'll be out most of the week with moving so maybe this weekend I'll get my ass in gear. Though I am thinking about messing around with the Amarr stuff... I like those ship for whatever reason. I however, am not rich nor a spy.

Awesome. I can pilot a lot of things, but I'd rather start at the beginning when it comes to pvp. I'll join the F13 channel in game.

(Edited to remove superfluous quotation)

counterpoint: you have four posts

edit: half in this thread

FUCK

You caught me. I'm a spy.

Are you any more relaxed on post count and history now than before? Last time I contacted you via PM, GS was in a big war, and you said I would need way more posts/history.

Can provide my API keys/info if you want, but if there is no chance still, I wont cry, just let me know.

Catch me online and I'll throw you some cash. I've got a few bil laying around that I was gonna blow on stupid shit. MIght as well give it to nooblars.

Yep.  You, for instance, are probably fine.  But there's tolerance and there's an open-door policy and we don't open recruit.

Did you plan Shadowbane with us? Your name sounds familiar.

Every Rifter Pilot has a Fleet Commander's baton in his Cargo Hold.

My very first Offical OP. Reimbursable and everything. We helped take a station. And killed some hostiles at a K?d ratio of 5 to 1 and  ISK ratio of 150mil to 250k.


Got a fleet of 41 ships or so, nice mix of frigs/interdictors/ECW/Logistics and BC's.

Travelled the 20 jumps to a NC Titan who bridged us in system P-E9.

NC had 350 already there.

Went back towards NC space to collect 2 late commers and came accross a small gang- rapier, dramiel, claw, heretic. 3xvagabonds. The Heretic died as it jumped into us and we chased the rest away to allow the 2 friendlies to catch up.

Then played some games with the hostile gang and killed 3(?) of them. We lost 1 rifter(?) who got a point on a vaga but died before the rest of us could warp in. I salute that brave Rifter pilot. I somehow put my shields on Heat and burnt out 2 of them. Whoops. 2 of the hostile Vags jumped into P-E9 and warped to an asteroid belt the NC was using to Rat in with 150 ships. They died.

Headed back to NC space to try and find a 30 ship BC gang who ran away before we could find then. Half the fleet headed home at that point (and got home with no problems).

Took a 10 minute break (and discovered we couldn't dock at the NC station).

Flew back down to the station system and watched the NC cap fleet shoot the station down to 20% armour in 2 minutes. I don't think the managered to finish it before downtime started though.


After Downtime NC deployed caps again and finished the station. Then we all shot the TCU.

During this time Russian Bear Bombers came in and fired Kingfisher missiles.- Ie- Bombs on grid exploded FROM BOMBERS NOT ON OVERVIEW. Not coincidently, a CCP Frigate showed up and stretched the grid 1700km. I think when he did this, this squeezed the grid so much the bombers were able to release their bombs outside the grid.

Afterwards the Bombers came in to the TCU, warped into bubbles, and took 10 minutes to die due to lag. One pod escaped.

Travelled home with various random people who seem to have joined our fleet by mistake. Just as we all docked, our Cheeta Pilot died to a rat. WTF. I sent him 10mil.

At the start of the Op I sent 5x10mil to our logistics pilots and 2mil to the only newbee rifter who X'd for it. Money well spent.

It was a fun op, goon TS is a constant cacophony compared to what I'm used to with battle comms with the NC.   When I flew with Shiva no-one would speak except for the FC and various scouts, heaven forbit you should say something, the FC would go ape shit!  

Com was relaxed and keen to kill, it's good to see a Bat Country FC step up and lead the goon contingent.  I felt like part of the army of Darius, there were representatives from a multitude of different alliances, with different fleet combinations, armor tanking, shield tanking, bombers etc.  Typically not too many pilots from any particular alliance, but added together there were over 700 blues assaulting the station system .

Eve is unique, what other mmo has battles like this?  If you're thinking about joining Bat Country, stop thinking and take the plunge.  A lot of new players to eve have signed up so you'll have lots of company exploring this massive, dangerous and exhilarating universe

lookat dat new trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGplrpWvz0I

I was waiting for the "...and in EVE you can forget to pay the bills, disband an entire alliance and lose your territory completely" tagline.  Pretty cool though. 

It's been about 6 years since I've played, and there was a lot that confused me even back then but I'm feeling a little tickle to try this game again.

I'm pretty sure I'm gonna log in deep in some 0.0 I can't remember where, probably long kicked out of my corp and I'll get killed the first gate I try to take.  I'm kinda scared.

Make a petition- a GM will move ONE SHIP that your pilot is sitting in, with any cargo, to empire.

Firesale everything else.

Thanks for that.  It kinda seems the wimps way though :)

I'm gonna try to not be so afraid to die this time so I'll treat this first challenge like an adventure.  I remember the last time I played the main reason I didn't get into the pvp and what I knew was the best part of the game was the hassle of refurbishing ships when I died.  There was always a couple of parts I had run out of and I had to go a few systems away to replace, that time spent really inflated the cost of dieing to me, though I know I was probably doing it wrong.

EDIT: eh I just logged in and I'm in empire space, I feel kinda boring.  Information overload too, I think it'll be a while before I leave this station.

Organized corporations and alliances will try to alleviate such hassles, like getting into a new ship, with things like reimbursement fittings and pre-fit ship sales. It's all a combination of public wealth, industrial capability and mostly player effort in the interests of everyone. Players get back into combat faster, spreadsheets see a rise in profits and space tyrants get to boast about their tireless armies.

I really implore everyone returning to use the GMs benevolent ship+clone transporting service through the stuck petitions. It's instant, safe and won't turn you into a collection of debris and frozen corpse when you try and autopilot through a gatecamp. Also new people should take up my offer for a 21-day buddy trial with free 100mil ISK paid after your subscription. The first payement(s) have been made already!

This is a great offer Gets! 

Bat Country is very relaxed and helpful.  No panicky CTAs every 5 minutes, a solid group of players who enjoy watching pixels explode.  If you're thinking about having a go, this is a good time, lots of newbies, lots of fun.

It's really easy to sell off your stuff remotely, so long as it's not damaged (if the station it is in is hostile to you then you are stuffed anyway, since you won't be able to repair it).  Since you last played contracts have become useful and you can set them up for your stuff from anywhere in the galaxy.  You don't need to be in the same station.

Except, apparently, if you're trying to sell to IT, as they don't buy much in delve. :why_so_serious:

Indeed, I bought every Warp Disruptor on the Market before we left Delve and I only sold a small amount.

As far as I can tell, IT don't even log on other than for an invasion. Hence the comically out of date fleet doctrines they use.

To give them their due, they very good at logging on when the time comes.

They are very good at padding everyone else's killboard stats too.  :why_so_serious:

I thought they padded their own stats by ECM bursting so even if their SCs died, their stats never went below 50%

For those who are not sure what TGR is talking about, its worth explaining for comedy.

Ok Supercarriers have a special ability to fire a jamming burst at something at range, so everything around that has a good chance of losing lock, if you don't have lock you can't hold someone in place with a point. Now when you fire one of these thing you appear in the killmail if the ship is destroyed, as you have done a hostile effect and its not friend or foe, you can jam your own side.

Nowthe way that IT does killmail efficiency is that it credits IT with the kill if an IT guy is on a killmail. So in a supercap battle these ecm bursts are firing around like crazy, so guys from their own side will be on the killmail. In a famous example, IT lost 10 Supercarriers worth over 10 billion each, the opposition lost some cruisers and a Battleship or 2, and IT still seemingly had 40% efficiency, as they credit themselves with both losing a supercarrier, but also Killing a supercarrier from the same loss!

A decent killboard would have one team on friendly and the other as enemy, which avoids this stuff. But if they did that, IT, the "end game alliance," would have a killboard efficiency of less than 10%.

The ultimate Irony? Ecm bursts don't effect supercaps, as they are immune to ECM  :why_so_serious:

That's not fair. I wanted to start Lotro F2P next week and my EvE account expired last week.......

How to contact ? F13 channel?

My 2nd Combat Op as a FC. Every ship counted. One of things about Goonswarm is that everyone can lead an op if they want to. one of the most active FC's is a 3 week old Euro who can fly a Blackbird.



We formed up and left around 09:05 with a very respectable 30 or so ships including a covert op, hictor, dictor, about 10 frigs and cruiser and 10 battlecruisers. 2 newbees caught up later.

Just as we were about to leave intel said a hostile supercarrier NYX was sitting in 30AT (next door to our starting point). Our scout reported he saw an Archon but it logged out before we could do anything about it.

Got to the EC- gate and joined the existing NC camp. One guy lost a crusader to a hurricane that was running around the system - he was using it to import porkuswine cutlets from empire or something.

https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/481964

I think we killed something in EC- when it jumped through but I could be mistaken.

After the newbee's caught up we headed to Pure Blind via bridges and entered Ev0ke (evil space-nazis) space. As we passed through FCON space at the west of Pure Blind a small 4 ship gang was coming the other way. We killed their vagabond scout thanks to some good webbing and the rest hid.

https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/481966
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/481968

Travelled down to Cloud Ring and got scouted by a covert op/dramiel in 7ZY on the G8AD gate. Despite this, our prober found a Cyclone merrily looting away in a belt without an intelchannel care in the world.

https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/481970
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/481971

We entered the fabled homeland of XZH and killed the bubble on it. While doing so, a Bomber came in and bombed one of our Rifters.

https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/481973

The Bomber was spotted and shot down moments later inside the bubble. He was carrying a Standard Lava Command Centre for some reason.

https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/481969
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/481972

By then it was 30 minutes before downtime and time to head home (so I couldn't shoot the XZH station). On the way home, intel reported 4 carriers and a Rorquel(!) had jumped in behind us to Y-C3. Suspecting a mothership ambush (and not having the DPS to kill a triage carrier, though our 3 blackbirds might have jammed one or two of them) I avoided them and got the fleet home to N-T with 15 seconds before downtime. I don't understand what 4 carriers and a rorquel was DOING in Pure Blind, maybe following up an escalation?



I had a covert op 2 jumps ahead to probe out the enemy.

I had a newbee in a Rifter who had never scouted before scout 1 jump ahead. He forced that vagabond through to his doom.

I had a logistics pilot who kept the Rifter alive.

I had a dictor and hictor that bubbled the hostiles so we could kill them.

I had some interceptors to chase the enemy and lock them up quickly.

I had some blackbirds to jam the enemy and prevent him from firing.

I had some cruisers to act as heavy tacklers.

I had some battlecruisers for long range DPS.

I had some HAC's to add fast locking short range DPS.

I had my command ship giving bonuses to everyone.

...And I had some newbees in some tackle frigates that pointed and webbed the hostile ships and caused ISK to Loss ratio of 10 times the amount we lost. Thank you to everyone who came along. Maybe next time we'll engage enemy capital ships at point blank range. And take some of them with us.

EVERY SHIP COUNTS

I read this after catching up with some discussions on twitter including someone frustrated that everyone in nulsec wants 20m sp minimum and (correctly I think) feeling that this phenomenon is not doing Eve as a whole a lot of good.

Yep, Eve mudflation is becoming a serious issue. That said the goons have a very noob friendly approach to the game. Partly because they remember that period themselves but mostly because they don't take the game that serious and fixate on K/D ratios as measures of e-peen. So while you won't be flying the super-elite ships for quite a while you can still be respected for taking part in the battle in whatever you can fly and can be flying something useful reasonably fast.

... and I'm mostly there to see the sights and explore the mechanics so I don't really mind what I'm flying as long as I get a good seat to watch the action from.

I certainly wouldn't want to start playing Eve in any of the other corps.

I would ragequit if I were ever told that no, that hurricane you have with t2 guns is not desired in any way, shape or form, gtfo, foad and hand.

I am quite possibly the worst MMO player ever, and my newbie character is now making 10m ISK a night being a dirty filthy scavenger while training up the all-important "Checking To See If Guns Are Loaded IV" skill. You have no excuse not to join up.

We have 8 ops posted in the calendar right now, five of them tonight and tomorrow.  On top of this, you can just drop in on our allies' ops.   There is a lot to do.

I see the Goons are doing a "WTF newbies 101" op. But im not sure what time it is. They listed it in EVE time. Is that GMT?

Yes, Eve Time is GMT.  A handy way to remember it while out of game is to have the program Evemon (http://evemon.battleclinic.com/) running in the background.  Evemon is also useful for setting up skill plans and keeping tabs on how much money you have.

Propoganda video for those few of us who played FreeSpace II (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCtE7tnytLo&feature=player_embedded&fmt=22)

For those who are interested, there are actually two explicitly newbie ops upcoming in the next two days.  There are, however, 6 ops in the next two and a half days, on all of which newbies are welcome.

There was an op yesterday which was kinda advanced, tactically, but a newbie who had been on a few ops and who could fly a fast frigate, like a vigil, would still have fitted in.

I've looked at this thread many times since it's creation and I've held out... until now.

I've reactivated, but it's been a while since I've really played EVE and don't really know what I'm doing. I wouldn't be opposed to making a new character, but I've got a dude with 6.5 mil-ish skill points. However, I don't really know if he's gimped or viable or what.

Here (http://eveboard.com/pilot/Bick) is here character sheet.

So - should I reroll? Is he already good? If not, is he easy to fix?

Since training up in skills doesn't restrict later training, and 6 mill SP is a decent amount, re-rolling sounds pretty unwise. Especially since you have the learning skills to 5 already. You certainly have enough to be productive in goonspace and decide what your next focus / fun is.

Defiantly keep it- looks like you can fly a Hurricane already, and could switch over to a Drake later.  You can fly Rifters and Stabbers already- it's welll worth keeping.

I'm dinking around in carebear land now with my one month old character along with my wife.  I'm having fun but she may be abandoning me.  I have very good for my age Amarr frigate skills (IIIs and some IVs), and all learning skills up to IV, and am working my way toward stealth ops.  I'm game to tackle some but would want to just putter around and explore or mine or whatnot a lot of the time (gotta manage the blood pressure).  Can Bat Country use me with those conditions?

Also a random question.  Can a stealth ops ship dock and undock while cloaked or is that a critical vulnerability?

Sounds like your character and goals are similar to mine. I'm working towards being able to fly a Caldari Drake (default mid-level PvP/ratting ship) and making a decent income via salvaging and about to diversify into planetary mining.

Most things coming within 2000 meters will decloak you. And you can't cloak while targetted.

It just so happens I've been looking for newbies to use as slave labor cool helpers for exploring in Goonspace.  Would you be willing to work for a competitive wage?   :drill:

What? I can go exploring and do some tackling AND get paid????  sign me up! 

Phildo actually runs a pretty good crew on those ops. I've been on one or two and they are great fun.

I can run all but the hardest site in Deklein by myself now, but if you probe it out for me I will pay you roughly half the value of the site.  And if I can't run it, I know the guys who can.

As a matter of interest, how newbie friendly are the probing skills these days, Phildo? Its been a very long time since I did up the probing skills and the skill requirements have probably changed a lot. How fast could a newbie be helping you probe stuff out, is what I'm trying to say.

I lead my 3rd op today. Whelp.


But we did actually do something useful.

Left at 08:05 with 37 ships or so- about 10 BC, 10 frigates, 3 blackbirds, 2 scimitars, and a cloaky scout 2 jumps ahead. (and one hictor). A newbee in a Vigil acted as fleet scout 1 jump ahead. I paid the Logistics guys 5mil each, and the newbees in Rifters 2 Mil.

As we came into NC space a NC FC asked for an escort- they had about 20 tech 1 rep ships that needed an escort to 7D- to rep a broken jump bridge. We escorted them through without loss or hostiles sighted. So their op was a success.

Come to think of it, it reminded me of some Xwing or Freespace missions  "hey go escort this fleet through and once done go attack something".  Was nice timing on my part.

2 jumps later our scout reported 10 hostiles coming towards us.

A single hostile inty comes through and scout reports 10 hostiles in battleships on the other side have just arrived at 0. I thought they were sniper BS come to shoot the NC rep fleet.

I should have waited for the scouts correct intel.

Overexcited, I order everyone to jump in and start pointing stuff.

Mistake #2 - should have told everyone to STAY CLOAKED and looked at the situation first.

They has about 15 BS (Armageddons, Megathrorns, Tempests), 6 logistics, 1 dictor and no light or medium ships at all.

I called one of the Armageddon's primary and...we got through his shields and 50% armour..and then he repped.

Mistake #3.

Tried switching to one of the logistics but that went worse.

I should have called the logistic a target as a secondary before switching as one group,.

Mistake #4

Then I thought that a Tempest might make a better target.

Mistake #5

By then we've lost about 1/2 the fleet and our hictor bubble is down (because he is dead). I order everyone to align, which I should have done at the start

Mistake #6

By then 2/3 of the fleet was down and I ordered every to warp out to a planet. By then they had a point on me and I soaked up some damage allowing the rest of the fleet to get out.


I should have stayed on the other side at optimal, waited for them to jump into us, avoided fighting a RRBS gang at close range, avoided fighting a gang with that much rep power with a frontal attack, stayed cloaked and decloak as 1 group, called primary and secondary, got everyone aligned and out of the hictor bubble, warped out earlier and in general not do everything wrong as soon as we contact the enemy.

Still, we got a fight, Mendoza was able to get 1/3 of the fleet out and is running around Syndicate, and the NC reppers are fixing a jump bridge (hey can someone add that bridge to the wiki?). That was my first real fleet fight, and as can be expected, I lost.

Never did get to XZH. Maybe next week.


Comment from the NC afterwards which DID make it worthwhile:


I posted my loss mail. Op success.

I've played this once, maybe 2 years ago? Anyway, I would like to give it another go. Having a group of people to run around and PEW PEW with sounds much more fun then the mining/missioning I did last time I tried it. Fair warning, I have two jobs, plus full time college. I highly doubt I will be on much, but I hope I can make an OP or two.

Going to just make a new account, as my old one is noob, plus I have no idea what the login details are. Downloading it in Steam now, first person to send me a buddy invite can have the free month if I happen to buy the box. Just use my profile e-mail.

Edit: Looks like someone got me with an invite. Probably Phildo. Thanks.

The probing system is a little confusing at first, but there are some great tutorials on Youtube.  And it doesn't really take much skill to get started, though it may take a while to narrow down tougher signatures for a newbie.  What I know is that a few guys in Theta and Space Violence have been doing it with low skills and making great money selling the bookmarks to sqaudmates.

I wouldn't mind trying this out with my 19M SP character.  Who can get me in?

2005 spy spotted.

Join f13 channel in game, and I'm sure someone can help ya out.

eh fuck this game.  Lost two ships trying to work out level 3 kill missions.  Buy a replacement battleship for most of my money (insurance only covers half the market value and looked like it scaled horribly for the higher levels of coverage) and whilst flying through empire space got ganked whilst doing laundry.  Too boring to watch the whole time, not safe enough to leave alone and now I'm pretty much got stuff all money left and can only do level 2 missions which aren't worth any money at all.  Can you do level 3 mission in cruisers? The ones I tried there were just far too many ships wave after wave.

I don't remember what I liked at all about this game every single thing is a fucking hassle.

You can do some level 3 missions if you are in a cruiser but you need a high skill character and a lot of experience. They're pretty trivial in a battle-cruiser though as long as you read the cheat sheet (http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=missionreports) so you know what you are facing, what resists to pack, and what the triggers are. Missions are still boring at best though. If you're not playing Eve for the PvP (which is just mostly boring) or space empire building it goes way beyond my understanding.

Pretty unusual that someone in empire would kill your battleship. They'd normally only bother if you were carrying something really valuable. Did you wander into low sec (security < .5) perhaps? Because yes, that's full of pirates in expensive ships who feed on newbie tears (every PvP game has them).

It's also possible to configure your autopilot to avoid low security systems so you can safely AFK as long as you're not carrying something worth hundreds of millions.

Do not play Eve in Empire. If you really want to do missions, join Bat Country and do them in Venal (next door to where we live). Several of the Venal mission hubs are controlled by Blues doing the same thing.

If you're doing missions for money, join Bat Country and do the cosmic anomalies instead- these are private spawn sites that respawn the second you clear them, and can be done in everything from a Frigate up to a Carrier.

Like comstr says, and as has been mentioned several times already, if you hang around in empire doing missions then you will quit.  The point of Eve is to be social and do stuff with a good corp and hopefully to pvp your ass off.  Missions are probably fine if you are autistic but that's about it.

All I mainly wanted to do was get used to the game again so I wasn't a complete moron when I joined some ops.  I even made a new character and ran through the tutorial again just to learn how to control the ship because I don't find anything intuitive about this game at all. 

So I run a few level 2 mission in my thorax and they are ridiculously easy so I try some level 3 ones.  I killed a lot of ships and they kept coming in waves but I can only take so much damage I can take so I figure I'll use my Dominix and it should be over kill and I can learn and have a bit of a revenue source in downtime.  From there it just seems like one dick punch after another and now I feel like I've ruined my character because I've lost so much money that I don't know how to make back.

Did you try killing all the enemies in Recon?  That mission isn't designed to be one through combat, but by speeding through the warp gates and getting the hell out of there before all the other spawns show up.  I run them in a shuttle, even at Level 4.

As for your point about learning the game, you've missed out on half a dozen ops designed specifically for training new players on things like combat, scanning and surviving in 0.0.  These would probably have served you better than figuring out how to stack your resists to survive against NPCs.

Incidentally, don't try to multi-tank.  Focus on armor-tanking since you're gallente, and ignore hull/shield repairing or you're just burning excess capacitor and not accomplishing much.

No it was definately a kill mission http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=GoneBerserk3 (http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=GoneBerserk3) , I got to the last wave from the looks of it.

Hey Wasted, I suggest you put in an app to Bat Country and see how you go.  I'm not a recruiting officer but I can assure you that the problems you're having would disappear if you were in 0.0 with us.   There's lots of easy isk to make, just from salvaging if nothing else.  Make sure you have the salvaging skill and if you get accepted to BAT pod yourself to HQ.  I'm happy to give you some isk, just let me know when you're with us.  My in-game name is Folikar.

Gone berserk is pretty damn easy as long as you're careful about killing the triggers.  But yeah, forget about missions and come join us already.

Wasted : My character builds battleships for a living. If you need a replacement Domi just send an evemail to character Regel. Once you're in Bat Country you'll make all that money back easily in a few days. Or I can just send you some money so you can buy a new ship once you arrive in 0.0. Just let me know.

Wasted. I also would recommend joining -BAT- and coming out to 0.0. I am the annoying newbie in chat right now, and the only thing I really know well is how much I dont know. But, its still more fun in 0.0 than in Empire. I find the most exciting thing I can do in Empire is watching my skills train.

I plan to do some miner ganking once I get in to a Stealth Bomber, and get the feel for it, but even that is low sec stuff.

I played one month quit one month quit one month and so on from launch to January. In January I joined the folks from here out in Goonspace and haven't looked back since. It really is a completely different game.

Alright.  Someone pm me the friend thingey.  God damn it.

I can fly a battlecruiser!   :awesome_for_real:

(still a couple days out from actually killin' things with it aka T2 fittings)

You don't need T2, you can always go for the top line T1 fittings. I can fit T2 on my drake pilot, but she never bothers. It's just not that big a difference. I have two Maelstrom's both with the high end T1 fittings. Just not worth the isk to replace them.

If I were space-poor I'd just revert back to what I found were the best isk/performance combo for most of the fittings for my hurricane. Literally the only thing I would always go T2 on, is the guns.

Then again, I never did fit my hurricane for tanking. My logic is that since I normally only fly in fleets, if I get primaried i'm likely going to die anyways.

I tried ratting with T1 fittings and the large ships regenerated sheilds faster than I was damaging them.

You need to check which type of damage the rats are vunerable to.
After that its easy.

This is probably an issue with your weapon support skills, rather than the weapons themselves.

The only difference between t2 and best t1 weaponry, is that t2 is cheaper, t2 has higher fitting requirements, t2 has a 2-10% damage bonus according to your spec skill, and t2 guns can load t2 ammo (which you don't use when ratting).

Plus use kinetic weapons vs Guristas as Elaen mentions.

Resubbed!  Not sure what part of my brain decided the best time to start playing casually again would be when I've started school and don't have much time to play.  But here I am.  :uhrr:

Now I just need to decide if I'm going to drop the isk for +5 implants since I will likely be spending most of my time just training in Jita....

Got a good suicide gank character Thrawn? Thinking about running a quick gank op maybe this weekend. Anyway, join BC already! Not that you'll ever see me on, with the new twins and all, but ya never know!

Hey Lum, Nef and I have been doing Anoms in S-D, you are welcome to join us. Nef is in a drake and does most of the tanking. I am flying a Caine with mostly t1 fittings.

Join the guys doing sanctums and havens in our home system - you only need 1 person to tank and everyone else goes DPS. You just warp out when the next wave spawns and warp in 20 seconds later.

Otherwise if there's NO ONE else around ratting, try the lower level ones like Hubs - they should be doable in a cruiser. The lowest level ones you can do in a frigate. Port's can be done in a Battlecruiser.

There's no reason to do belts these days.

Started dinking around with the tutorials and newb missions.  Just getting my feet wet, reading the wiki.  I'll ping f13 chat tomorrow or the next day time permitting.

Don't know if I'm joining BC or not, as much as I really really want to fly with Goons and get back to the forums to read I'll probably be very off and on playing with school/work so I'm planning on spending a lot of time in empire doing industrialish stuff.  Having all of the fleets wardecs on me all the time would suuucckkk.

I think every account I own has a scanner and/or hauler and/or ganker on it so if by some miracle times line up I'm sure I can do something to help.  :awesome_for_real:

I can't stop laughing, my second day back I get suicide ganked in Empire for like 130mil worth of cargo.  :awesome_for_real:

Have gankers degraded that far that 130mil is a worthwhile target?

Went on a fantastic roam through enemy territory with this excellent result:
https://killboard.goonfleet.com/battles/1846

There were several newbies in the fleet and this is the sort of action you can expect if you join Bat Country.

I was flying a 10mil isk blackbird and their entire fleet was shooting at me for about 5 minutes in optimal range. However, our 10 or logistics kept me alive until they gave up and tried another target. Meanwhile I am jamming 4 different ships worth 40 to 140ISK million each pretty much permanently and switched as each one went down.

Latest update on Incarna ("Walking in Stations"):

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-09-23-eve-onlines-incarna-for-summer-2011

Hopefully this will be like all CCP 'progressive implementations'.

ie. They'll complete the first phase (portrait design) then get distracted by passing insect and forget about the whole thing.

They may be learning from that, judging from the changes and development of PI from the last patch that are currently on Singularity for testing.

I don't see how this is supposed to revolutionize the game or draw in new customers. If "this will not be a full-blown new game inside EVE with 10,000 hours of content," how the fuck did they spend three years on it? Right now, Incarna is filed in the same folder* as Star Trek Online's ship interiors.







* The one labeled "pointless wastes of development resources."

Incarna is the one thing that never made any sense to me. But it seems to be incessantly talked about by people like it was the next sliced bread.

Wasn't the whole point of Incarna to basically be a tech demo for the Vampire MMO that CCP is also working on?

My guy may be Space French but there's still no way you're getting him into a dress like the CARBON toons were wearing!

It wasn't working on Vampire 5 years ago when they were first  talking about Incarna. I'm sure Incarna and Vampire will share the same tech though.

It makes sense if you think that CCP (and MMO companies in general) are trying to extend the life of their custom dev tools / engines through using them in different titles. Without humanoid models, CCP is limited to titles involving spaceships, boats and cars. I'm sure a Thomas the Tank Engine MMO would be a unit shifter, but I don't see it fitting with CCP's output.

Human models were a popular idea back when they started on it, but the work has since led to the options of Dust and WoDO. It might be a waste of time within EvE, but it certainly gives CCP more flexibility.

STO ship interiors, OTOH, were a massive waste of time until something like hostile boarding becomes possible.

At a guess I would suspect that has more to do with them needing to evolve it as a part of the framework for DUST. Also possibly due to them discovering people have produced PI bots, thus the add more clicks.

Incarna will be as useful as the new gameplay options it brings... and so far I've not heard anything on that front.

The full sentence, including the first half you edited out, does rather explain that:


CCP have been pretty open for some time that they want Eve to be a sci-fi simulator, not just a spaceship simulator.  At some point, that means getting out of the spaceship.  That's a pre-requisite, not a destination.

Just wanted to say that after about a month of playing I have come to the conclusion that EVE has the worst, most confusing, assbackward, least customizable UI of any MMO.

How hard would it be to have a select nearest ship keybind? And the overview, my god, trying to get the overview set up the way you want it is a nightmare of confusing, unintuitive menus.

Did you use the import feature for overview settings with a nicely made preset?  Probably no consolation to yourself but before that existed it was huge pain getting the overview "right" (ie. not showing people you shouldn't shoot) even if you knew what you wanted, now it's a few clicks to get from fresh install to ready for small gang hijinks.

There can be no possible debate on this.

Oh, you began fiddling with PI then? :grin:

After learning to configure my ovierview on the fly after many settings resets from patches I can configure my overview on the fly quite easily. As far as the UI is concerned the only thing that ticks me off is whenever an opening window pushes and existing window somewhere. That really should be an easy fix.

That "window pushing" thing drove me crazy when I used to play. I eventually found out a little trick to get it to not do that with the windows I was worried about. Basically the problem only comes into play when you have a window "snapped" to an edge and you enter an area that calls up another window to populates that same space... when you enter a station or leave a station for example. To avoid it you just make sure the misbehaving windows are slightly under-size and not "snapped" to the UI component the offending panel usually locks to.

This might not work depending on what windows you are referring to but I figured I'd try and help you out anyway. Regardless you are correct, they really should have had a fix for that or a "disable UI snapping" feature a long time ago.

I have taken the reins for a bit.  Things are pretty active right now, with operations at the weekends, lots of PvgPing activity and stuff like that...

For currently-unsubbed vets: CCP have announced that learning skills are about to be removed and that - probably in the next few weeks - al skill points which had been invested in them shall be refunded for you to spend how you like.  Instead, all players will get their base stats increased by 12 to each.

Most people who played for any length of time will therefore suddenly have something like a couple of months' worth of skill points to instantly distribute as you like.  Obsessives like myself will find they might have more like three months to blow.

So if the idea of being instantly able to fly something that seemed ages away from you (whether that be HACs or carriers) appeals, then you should probably check out this blog: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=824

If you are applying to get back into Bat Country with the other F13 posters then be sure to include your F13 name in your application, and PM me on these forums to confirm.

Think my main character has 2.7m in training, so look forward to that.

We've invaded Fountain in order to draw our enemies, IT Alliance (née Kenzoku, née Band of Brothers) off from saving their southern allies, Initiative.  We are gutting their pets, and have already broken their logistics network in a key hub, forcing each of their fleets to jump through unsafe space for another half hour each way to reach us.  We have engaged in fights with their fleets on four occasions and utterly destroyed them each time.  If you like PvP then this is a fun couple of weeks to be in on.

Do you like 0.0 PvP? As a corporation, in the last week we have killed over 300 ships, while losing only 16 (our own killboard still has to catch up with the latest 60 kills as of this post).  We're in third place in the alliance for kills this month, despite being a fraction of the size of most other corporations, and only the two biggest corporations in the alilance are ahead of us.  We have 10% of the alliance's all-time top 30 killers, and I hope to add another by this month.  Last month, the top two killers were both in Bat Country.

I just caught wind of this now, that would finally get me into an Arazu.

Hmmm.  :oh_i_see:

Huh. I just received an email telling me I have 1,325,255 unspent Skill Points.

They've removed all learning skills and are reimbursing you the spent skillpoints.

Its been so long since I played Eve, I don't think I'd know how to reallocate my skill points. To be honest, this move by CCP is a disincentive for me to get back into the game, since at least I had my character set up to play before, and I could relearn along the way. Now, I'd have to do graduate school level of studies to not waste skill points before I could do my first pewpew and that prospect will keep me away. Possibly forever.

How could it be a disincentive?  You still have all the skills you had before.  You only get refunded SP from skills under the Learning category.

And as I've discovered, you can keep those points banked and still train normally until you figure what you want to do.  Which is what I've done.  You may not care to play again at all, but I fail to see why free SP would be the reason.

Well, your post assumes I'm not a complete idiot that didn't read the email other than the subject line.  :grin:

You're right, this reimbursement is fine, since it doesn't mess with the character build other than the learning skills modifiers.

In fact, I'd say its a good move, now that I actually think about it, since one of EVE's major disincentives to the average player is that it is too fiddly. If this simplifies the functionality of the skill tree, then that's a good reform.

Reassigned all my skillpoints from learning into Trade skills. Figured, I could try to waste my five free days into looking to mess with the market. Takes more attention than playing the game otherwise.  :oh_i_see:

I have a character in Jita with perfect Trade skills, and I basically use him to set up courier contracts to 0.0 when I need a new ship.

I have no idea what I'd even spend the points on. The game I left in 2004 was significantly different.

I tried to be a researcher/manufacturer back then, and when I left they'd just made Tech II acquisition based not on having research/industrial skills, but on grinding faction with repetitive missions. As someone with only rudimentary combat skills, I was pretty much shut out, and gave up after a couple of months. I don't even know what the relevant skills are these days for someone who wants to follow the high-tech route.

I've spent a lot of time training for the Fit O The Month and then having it change just as I trained into it. At the moment, by some strange quirk of fate, I'm sitting pretty with perfect training for the current paradigm of my alliance. So I'm just saving my points for the next time there's another paradigm change and we're all using blasters and rockets or whatever.

Training for suicide ganking pays off! ;)

Your 1.3 million skill points would be enough to get you into a fleet drake, and might well be enough to get you into a T1 fleet maelstrom, which is a 250-million ISK battleship that we hand out free and reimburse when you die.

I'd heartily recommend that you fly drakes first, though, until you get back into the swing of using the overview etc.  In 2004 you didn't find yourself in 400-per-side (or more) fleet fights very often.

Also, we (the f13 corp) have killed 700 enemy ships so far this month, woth 108 billion ISK, for the loss of 40, worth 2.7 billion.  Converted into real money via timecard rates that is 4,900 dollars' worth of ships killed for the loss of 122 dollars' worth of ships between about 60 of us, not counting alts.

We have various competitions: the top three killers in the corp get almost half a billion of ships in prizes each month.  The person who turns out on the most ops gets a free plex (that is, a month's subsscription: they play free for the month).  Stuff like that.

Anyone else get the feeling that there's something seriously wrong with ISK valuation when a corp can hand out 250 MILLION and reimburse it if the newb blows up in the first week? Can we knock off some zeros there? Maybe six of them to start with, work from there?

Its worse than the Italian lira.

It only works like that in the 0.0 end game when you have a 4000 player alliance supporting you.

In Empire ten million isk is still actual money.

Otherwise people wouldn't continue to exchange $1 for 20 million isk.

We just siezed our first station in Fountain from IT Alliance, home of Sir Molle and a massive, bloated version of Band of Brothers.

How was the ductwork?

We think there may be a mold infestation, and they refuse to come fix the leak in the roof, instead complaining that we've let the lawn die.

Well done.  :grin:  The excuses will be flying in the cult of Mollie.

can you still check your toons if you're not subscribed?  I looked yesterday and they seemed to have removed the ability for me to check my old toons and their skills and ISK.

No.

And never call them "toons".

sure thing big guy -- thanks for the MMO lesson

Eve has a mature playerbase, you see.  :oh_i_see:

More like they take the game, and themselves, much too seriously.

So, I am downloading this off of Steam now and reading up about how to participate in Eve.   Thank you kindly for the links Endie.  See you in game soon...

The corp and wealth of information  is absolutely fantastic.  I'm still trying to figure things out, but I've enjoyed my time so far.

The support group will be waiting for you when you're done.

I came to Eve as a confused newbie, learned about the game through the corp, the alliance and all the resources they offer, and had a great time for about two years. Which is longer than I've lasted in any other game.

Bat Country: We teach you how to last longer.

Eve is Impulses holiday deal of the day for today, fwi. 50% off.

CCP keeps spamming me with invites to come back to extra skill points, holiday frigates, and free game time. They should be working the towers for the Barksdale crew.

Just noticed that 11 Bat Country guys were on a Titan kill this weekend. Congrats guys.

The 4 1/2 mths I've been in Bat Country have been the most enjoyable I've ever had in Eve.  GoonWaffe is organized and is doing really well. 

It really is exciting to participate in large almost lag free fleet battles with up to 1000 people and be victorious.  It's also an excellent sign of the times that when reverses do occur, everyone laughs them off and just joins the next fleet.  Everything we do is because we want to.  There are no CTAs and no red pen ops, although to be honest if you fly in BAT you're expected to fight, because that is what we do.  This is really a golden age, I don't know how long it will last but I plan on enjoying it while I can.

The Titan kill was just another example of how good things are going.  We do the business on the Titan and then have a massive fleet battle with a 2:1 kill ratio in our favor - fofofofofofofo

We've been having a whale of a time recently.  We're less than a hundred people in an alliance of almost five thousand, but we're the fourth-top corporation by kills over the history of the alliance, with four pilots in the all-time top thirty.  In the last few weeks we've notched up four titan kills and two supercarriers and last month we got more than 1200 kills between us: an average of 40 kills a day.

We've been on a roll in our campaigns to the south.  First, we took the Cloud Ring region from the Germans of Evoke and their allies, and now we've moved onto Fountain where we're fighting the latest chapter in our foreverwar, against Sir Molle's IT Alliance and their pets.  So far we have taken two station systems, cut off much of the rest of the north of the region, driven out a renter alliance, cut another pet's numbers by half (with more to come!) and forced IT to abandon their southern allies in order to try to defend the region (unsuccessfully, thus far).

We're always open to established f13 posters, even (especially) newbies.  However, due to a director accepting a would-be awoxer/spy on autopilot (he was booted in time) I've turned off corp applications by default at the moment and trimmed the directorate down to size, so you need to PM me here, or evemail/convo me (most likely to get me on Teratoma Smith or The Groundskeeper), Uriq, Petto Behr or D0omer and let one of us know who you are on these boards and that you want in.

Over the past few weeks I've trimmed about forty people from the corp: everyone that remains plays and contributes, whether it is because they PvP, help out with running stuff or are just part of the social glue.  Our forums are extremely active, now as well.  If you log in and you think it's because you'd just been inactive then do feel free to reapply, and if you have friends who are not from f13 who you'd be willing to vouch for/sponsor then that's cool, too.

Also CCP have made huge progress on lag: apart from the minute or so when I foolishly turned on all brackets and therefore caused my system to have to display twelve hundred ships and probably two thousand drones, I had very little lag throughout the weekend's fights where we often touched 1,500 people in the system, with the vast majority in the one place and fighting it out.

Re: lag, I'm kind of surprised they haven't actually released a celebratory dev blog saying they've actually fixed what was normally categorized as "lag" (but was probably more a deadlock of some sort during gridload than anything else). I just suddenly went from being afraid to jump from system to system (and I wasn't even in on the y-2 debacle), to suddenly realize that I hadn't had a desync/problems loading grid/etc in a few weeks.

And the results speak for themselves, the fights I've been in even just the past few days have been hilariously awesome. More or less completely lag-free, the hilariously despondent/raging TS recordings from IT's pets are just awesome to listen to, and I think my killmail god is starting to become literally fat from all the killmails I keep feeding him.

Ah ha, so I will message you in game once my skills are trained up a bit more. 

No need. Goons LOVE noobs. They will throw isk at you.

PM me your character name, and I will as well.

(http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x7/MrKingGeorge59/Game%20News%201/DukeNukem3DToFeatureRewind.jpg)

By the way, for those who have never done it, this is probably the best video I've ever seen for  capturing the experience of fleet commanding in eve online.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8

I'm sure it applies to leading WOW raids as well...

7 years ago the f13 representation was basically me and nerf.  Then we talked Endie into trying it, and I gave him 100K to get him started and told him the real game was out in 0.0.  My god, what have I done?

--Dave

I think that does count as creating a monster.

MahrinSkel you should come back and try eve from the other side.

Also we are currently the second-top corp in GSF for kills for the month, with three out of the top five killers.  We should thank SirMolle for this since it is him that created such a mass of awfulness in Fountain that we can merrily chew through literally hundreds of kills per week each.  To say thank-you, I made him a movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcM7iCBN6T4

Edit: someone tell me how you in-line youtube videos on this forum tia

For those who have been following our current war in Fountain against our ForeverEnemy, SirMolle and IT Alliance, here is some porn from his top secret alliance CEO forums, which we have penetrated so thoroughly and redundantly that we can afford to risk an agent to use them before IT collapses and the intel is stale.

http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?7438-fuck-secrecy-i-m-just-going-to-leak-some-it-ceo-threads-nbd

As you'll see, it is a miserable alliance full of miserable, charisma-free people that hate each other.

That's some brilliant porn right there.

And its amazing that Mollie could construct an alliance like that again after experiencing the failure of BOB. That takes skill right there.

On a serious note, this stuff illustrates why Eve is different to any other MMO out there. The politics of the game, with corporation CEOs (ie guild leaders) forming alliances, or falling out with each other and leaving alliances, makes a real difference to the gameworld. It ultimately affects who owns which bit of the map.

Thanks to the new avatar system in Eve, this new recruitment poster has made its triumphant arrival.

(http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/4357/gallery8746551900.png)

(http://homepage.Mac.com/surlyboi/talifearinyoface.jpg)

Oh my....

Shit, I'd resub just to play with that character creator.

So, play Eve Online with F13 if you want to look like the Village people!

(http://www.alien-earth.org/music/images/VillagePeople.jpg)

Reading that they're still adding to the creator, which means I'll wait. Saved by CCP themselves!

For those who haven't been keeping up-to-date, the alliance now reimburses... well, pretty much everything.  After our final victory over Molle, we have declared a "peacetime reimbursement" program that will reimburse you for everything you lose in (intentional) PvP from battle badgers (5 million ISK) to dramiels (72 million) and from cynabals (132 million) to T3 ships (150 million).  If you really want to fly a hyena or a raptor or some other novelty/comedy ship then those are covered, as are all the faction ships and everything from T1 frigates to T2 battleships.

Of course, some ships reimburse better than others, but as long as the fit is at least vaguely sane then you are sorted.  For those who still/already have goonfleet dot com access you will find the payouts here: https://wiki.goonfleet.com/Peacetime_Reimbursement

I approve of the rome posting gimmick. 

Meh, I had goonfleet access for about a week, and then they redid the servers and I was SOL.

This game looks fun, I put in an application to Bat Country.  :uhrr:

Welcome back.

We've been working on small gang stuff with some guys we picked up a few months ago.  It has now reached the point that we took 19 Bat Country (plus Courthouse, an alliance diplo) to IRC space on Sunday because we knew they'd form up a big gang to fight us.  Most people were in hurricanes but we had support from two sabres, three scimitars for logistic support, a lachesis (me in the only non-minmatar ship) to hold long points, a huginn to web tackle, an inty and a command ship (comstr) for tackle bonuses.

We fucked around for an hour trailing our coats and shouting in local in order to get them to form up, and were astonished when we discovered that they had formed up a 90-man fleet to deal with us.  It had more drakes than we had ships; it had more canes than we had ships; it had battleships and faction ships and various scouts dotted about watching us.

We fought them for over an hour, moving spot about 20-30 times as their shit-hot on-grid prober warped their massive fleet onto us again and again, but Halo is an ace small-gang FC and they just couldn't grab us.

Eventually, we began to lose DPS and decided it was time to leave.  They chased us through gates, and each time we would burn off and kite them for as long as possible in order to kill their tacklers before moving on, while our remaining sabre dropped bubbles off each gate to snag them and give us time to make range for the next skirmish.  The final gate was so close that Comstr had to burn out his microwarpdrive in order to escape, while I only just got out with less than a second to spare.  At that point, we were totally vulnerable, with our most expensive ship capable of only 20% of its top speed, and the next two gates surrounded by a dozen or so warp interdiction bubbles that we could not have escaped.  But we'd inflicted yet more kills on them, and IRC just gave up and began to burn back to their home system, tales between their legs.

We lost two people to disconnects and one to his kid giving him a present just as we had to move again, while others got killed in unlucky tackles or foolish solo manuevres.  But when we added up the butcher's bill we had killed about twice as many of them as they did of us, and we did so outnumbered by almost five to one:

We killed:

Federation Navy Comet, 2xSabre, Pilgrim, Harbinger, Kestrel, Caracal Navy Issue, 4xDrake, Jaguar, Flycatcher, Vagabond, 2xStiletto, Merlin, Kitsune, Hurricane, Malediction, Dramiel, Heretic, Breacher, Wolf, 11xPods

We lost:

8xHurricane, 2xScimitar, 2xSabre

tl;dr we are pretty fucking hot at small gang warfare these days

Sounds fun.

I'm getting to the point I'm almost ready to do PvP (yeah, I'm slow, I know).  My PvE corp is seeing a distinct lack of people of late.  Considering moving to a FW group with one of my corp mates, or maybe even take Ky out to BC space, if things don't pick up soon.

Ail is still out there, but a Rifter without many skills is a bit more limited.

Our 60-day training plan for newbies has them in fleet fights on the second day.

Admittedly, one guy last week skipped to the fights on day one but forgot to fit any guns.  That'll teach the impetuous scallywag.

rifter, MWD, nano, warp disrupt. what need does one have of guns?

Yeah, I need to get in on the training program.  I've got the basics down from PvE, but learning the finer points of PvP would be helpful.

It doesn't matter if they're completely useless, hearing that rata-tat-tat is comforting to a guy flying a tiny ship.

You have to do this right as I find and offer for 7 free days in my mailbox, haven't you ?  :awesome_for_real:

Curious how that fight played out, money wise. :)

I always like to see the cash totals, mostly because I can't ever remember what ships are what.

I hate to say it, because I hated to be told the same thing...but the only way to learn is experience it. Example, when I (the worst and most newbee FC in Goonspace) ran an op yesterday because I love the idea of camping the EC- gate forever:



A Rifter will NEVER be useless on a Goonswarm op. Hell, we had a Rifter on an Incursion op yesterday to take down a Sansha Mothership! (He died, but he still made a lot of money doing it). The only op you can't really go on is a TopGoon Stealth Bomber hot drop Xwing-style Hit'n'Fade attack, but you can ignore them (only a few people do them). After I lost half our Rifter pilots to a PL Stealth Bomber hot drop on us, we got to the target system with only 3 Rifters, and I wished throughout the op I hadn't lost those Rifters - I really needed them to watch the gates (including the EC- Torrinos's gate, one of the most traveled Nullsec/Highsec gates in Eve). On the way home, and PL saw our tacklers coming to their bait ship (http://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/564221), they dropped their Stealth Bombers on the Rifters...allowing our Battlecruiser's to kill a target worth 100 times as much as the loss of the Rifter's earlier.

Come join us in a Rifter- you won't lose anything except your recloaning costs, and the corp/alliance will give you enough money to cover THAT without a problem. If you can probe, you can probe down sites in Deklein, sell the location to someone who wants to run them in their Drake/Tengu/Supercarrier and you get 50% of the profits. Probably more isk/hour than ratting or salvaging, and your ships still cheap to lose.

Don't fly what you can't afford to lose, gain the experience by doing it, and YOU might be that hero tackler who was there, as CCP would say. It was a tackler (Hrin) in an Interceptor who found Shrike and changed the course of the 1st Great War by just being there.


Come to think of it, we were flying a Hurricane Whelpfleet when it got dropped by the PL bombers. So Star Destroyers vs Bwings, and the guys in the Rifters are our TIE fighter pilots. Tie Fighter was always a better game than the original Xwing (though Xwing Alliance was a good ending to the series).

The phrase "TopGoon Stealth Bomber hot drop Xwing-style Hit'n'Fade attack" hit about every "Wee! Internet Spaceships!" button I had.

I didn't mean the Rifter was useless.  I meant the guns on a Rifter.

And I was generalizing about taking on huge targets.  They can put out a nice bit of damage, and their tackling is of course extremely useful.  Even though Ky's skilled enough to be in a battleship now (Thanks Surly!), I still pull my Rifter out and go hit up L2 missions.  Getting a Jaguar is pretty high on my priority list, too.

Ailuria is in BC, I just haven't done much with her.  Costs I'm not worried about.  Y'all set me up.

When you're in a rifter and get a point on something and 300 people open fire on it, "nothing... will ever be the same."

In the system with the longest, biggest fight we ended up with almost precisely the same value of kills as losses, but at 20 vs 82 on the battle report, plus their logis, scouts et al, that is still a stellar report.

When you add in the rest of the kills from the neighbouring systems as we kited and ganked folks while moving around we came out well ahead.

I was interested, so I manually added up the various system totals, and came to:

Kills:      1,333,334,000 ISK
Losses:     663,275,000 ISK

So about 66% efficiency at greater than 4:1 odds in well over an hour on grid, you K/D whore.

That's pretty fucking impressive any way you cut it.

A few quick questions, I got the 7-day renewal notice and the wife and I quit WoW so my MMORPG time is free now until SWTOR starts.  I fondly remember sitting in PR- for a month listening to Goons read the count of Monte Cristo and recite Remedial slash fiction.

1.  The last time I logged in we were in Delve, and most of my stuff is there.   :uhrr:  How much has the game changed since then?

2.  I heard they got rid of learning skills.  I had all my advanced up to 4 and some up 5, are all those skill points gone forever now?  (I think my character was up to like 26 million SP, Ammarr focused).  Will I get to reallocate these skill points?

3.  I like interceptors and smaller ships, is there small fleet stuff going on in EST?  When I left it was pretty much bring a fleet BS or GTFO.

4.  How long would it take to train up to get into the "stealth fleet"?  Is that something really viable for someone coming back who is probably as bad as a newbie? (If it turns out I can reallocate SP).

5.  Are you still even recruiting/interested in having folks come back?

You get the skill points back to reassign to whatever you want. So if you had that much assigned to learning, you'll pretty much be able to buy the skills to handle some of the stealth shit.

If your stuff is still in Delve and you need some re-establishment cash, let me know.

As for the Goon recruiting stuff, I'll leave that to the recruiters.

1- Delve is a thunder dome of a dozen different alliances, most of whom are unfriendly. If you petition a stuck request, a GM will move ONE ship with your pilot and everything you can fit in it to empire. We live up in the North West now, in Deklien, though if you can get to Fountion, it's friendly space from there (YMMV), inhabited by TEST- our best friends from Reddit (the website and community).  Goonswarm is now called Goonswarm Federation.  Bob is Dead. Kenny and Barbie are long gone. The new evil empire is the NCDOT, PL and the Drone Region Russian's. Supercaps often win the day, but winter is coming, and we have a sub-cap Hurricane fleet that makes them run in terror. We very rarely use Capital ships in full scale combat- the fleet is either Alphastriking Maelstroms with attendant subcap support ships or Hurricanes with attendant subcap support ships (mostly Minmater is must be said. There are a couple of Amarr and Caldari ships used).

2- You got refunded the points. DON'T SPEND THEM YET. You probably have enough to immediately be able to fly a Tech II Alphastrike Maelstorm for the fleet, or any other subcap you want. Keep them till you decide what to do- you could get Recon V or Logistics V or Dictor V or a lot of other things, but think about it first.You also got some points from the PvE social skills that got collapsed down. 

3- Small fleets best fleets - see Endie's combat report above, the corp is running fleets once or twice a week. Also, we now own the EC- gate, meaning there is a gate camp in system of small ships 23/7 if that's what your interested in. Topgoon - a squad of Goonswarm Federation also regularly runs Stealth Bomber hot drops and other sub-cap gangs. And if you want money and can fly (Armour) HAC's, there is a Incursion fleet that runs around 0.0 doing small-fleet subcap PvE/PvP (by killing the other PvE fleets trying to run the same raid).

4- You can probably fly one if you spend all your points - you need the Frigate V (ideally a Hound, but any bomber will do), and the ability to use a covert-op cloak, which needs Electronics V.  Otherwise you need Cruiser V and more support skills. Stealth bombers are also used as main fleet scouts, though they would prefer you bring a Maelstrom, bring anything. See Rifters, for the use of. With the changes in Jump Bridges ONLY allowing one bridge per system, it's also common for a squadron of Stealth Bombers to sit cloaked on a bridge and kill anything that comes through (which is how I lost a ship last week) and then cloak up before the POS guns open fire on them. One of our allies - Fatal Ascension, uses Stealth Bombers as their MAIN fleet to shoot structures and then cloak when the defenders arrive in their impotent supercaps.

5- It's not up to me, but I believe anyone in good standing is welcome back at any time.

Sweet k/d numbers. :) So much more money there then ever I had....

I reactivated and all of the myriad of reasons why I quit came flooding back to me.  It's a shame because people wise I think Eve has the most interesting and fun folks who play (including endie, Phildo and crew), but game-play wise  :uhrr:.  I haven't read the EvE f13 forums in a while, can someone point me to a thread here I can vent my spleen about the horrible implementation of ambulation?

The "Summer Expansion - Incarna" thread should fill all of your ambulation bitching needs. It's about the 4th thread from the top on page 1 of the Eve forum.

Crossposting from the subforum where we have a bunch of returning players:

For anyone thinking about when to use a 5-day resub, you may wish to bear the following corp ops in mind over the following six days:

Tonight (Tuesday) evening eurotime: roam in our successful shield-tanking format, with drakes instead of canes as the backbone this week, and the usual lachesis/scimis/huginn/dictors/light tackle to round it our.  Newbies very welcome, although Halo will tell you you are "so bad at this game" (I have 750 kills and one or maybe two losses this year and he tells me I am awful at Eve not once but twice in a post, yesterday, so this is unavoidable).  These ops run every week, sometimes twice a week.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday evenings eurotime (afternoons US): corp blackops hot-dropping.  Unusually for us this is not, I'm afraid, very newbie-friendly, but we've had people wanting to do it for ages.  Recon ships, bombers and black-ops battleships being bridged onto baited targets.

Saturday evening bonus op euro/US crossover: interceptor gang that rogueant is running in return for getting to choose his own corp title.  Rogue is allegedly as good as - or better than - halo.  Perfectly newbie-friendly: just fit out a t1 frigate for speed (vigils are great and you can train to use one with an mwd, point and stabs in a few hours) and come along to learn how to fly fast stuff.

We are also brainstorming good, cheap T1 gangs for newbie corp FCs to take out at zero cost to anyone to learn how to FC with no pressure.  Those will be ultra-newbie friendly (you may end up FCing, after all!)

On top of this there will be newbie-friendly alliance operations most days as well, spread through US and Euro timezones.  The US dudes have more ops, but Euros and crossover time have Mister Vee, who is possibly the best FC in the game.  You'll tend to find out about these by hanging out on jabber and receiving "log in for fight" broadcasts, which is a nice, lazy way to play because you can do other stuff within earshot of the ping and never miss a fight (supercap dudes get SMS messages but that's a mixed blessing when you forget to turn off your phone ringer before going to bed).  Rifters are always welcome on these, and any FC who ever tries to say otherwise (dbrb, ninetales) gets negrepped into the ground.

Here are the ops that I can remember from the last ten days or so:

Last Saturday - Corp roam to Syndicate: killed stuff outnumbered
Last Sunday - Corp roam to Drone Regions: killed stuff massively outnumbered (best fight yet)
Last Monday - Alliance strategic ops in Anzac, Euro and US timezones.  There were a few of these this week and we took a system and various tech.  Huge success.  Also, Comstr FCed an alliance fleet to help take EC-.
Last Tuesday - Early US/late EU Evening Alliance roam to Syndicate: no as easy as it looks, is it?  Newbie FC lost heavily
Friday - US TZ Someone takes out an alliance welpfleet and gets murdered.
Saturday - US TZ Alliance op in Cobalt Edge.  Murdered Dirt Nap Squad's elite PvPers.
Saturday - Euro evening/US Afternoon ambush on vast Raiden supercap fleet with experimental, throwaway fleet: kill a few things including a carrier; almost kill supercarrier; almost kill titan.  Lessons were learned to refine the fleet, but basically a big welp.
Sunday - Alliance late Euro/early US evening op: we and our allies in a three-way brawl against the Germans of Ev0ke and the combined forces of Borg/Brick/Morsus Mihi when they decide to attack our allies' sovereignty.  Huge win against both enemies.  Fortunes are made by our elite wreck-looters.  The nine Bat Country dudes there were on 116 kills, including 42 Heavy Assault Cruisers, 43 logistics ships, 9 strategic cruisers and three command ships.
Sunday/Monday - US evening drunken (slosh) op in frigates.  Slosh ops cannot be welps.
Monday - US Evening: our revised welpfleet doctrine goes out and kills five PL capital ships and a bunch of support ships.

So there is tons of stuff to do (this doesn't count the various small gangs, Topgoon ganks and pretty much 23/7 EC- chillaxing gatecamp) and I have forgotten more ops I imagine.  Just read the alliance and corp forums and hang out on jabber.