Keeping the corp afloat.

Our corporation is currently experiencing some economic difficulties . As I understand it this is caused by a combination of things rather than a single event. But the important thing is that something needs to be done before we can't even fuel our POS.

The response from the corp has been very positive. In the last couple of days I've seen more people ratting in Providence and last night our mining wing went all out in our Monday's mining op. With the help of an Orca (thanks Meatay) and an Iteron V (thanks Gert) our Hulks and Retrievers mined non-stop.

The best part of it all?? Beside reaching our goal of ore for the night we were able to pull a bit more for personal profit.

I think Meatay is doing a great job leading the mining wing. Hopefully we can get a momentum going and maybe add a second day a week of these ops.

Now some pics:

Printed media.

Its been a while since I bought or subscribed to a magazine. With all the information we have at our fingertips via blogs, wiki, forums, fan pages, etc it seem to me that spending money on a magazine is a waste of hard earn cash. The magazine may be printed and delivered in no time, but the articles in it had to be written, reviewed, edited and whatever else that was needed weeks before the magazine was shipped. It means that even the day the magazine arrives it has information that is probably weeks old.

Because of this and many other factors, I have to say that I was surprised when I first learned about E:ON magazine. A printed magazine of an ever changing MMO. Not only ever changing, but one that had already great coverage in the web via multitude of sites. I basically said "bah!" and ignore it... until a post in Manasi blog.

The list of content included almost every blogger I followed. Hmm... Could this be worth reading? We'll find out soon. I decided to give it a try. Hopefully is as good as it sounds. We'll see.

Exploration re-visited.

Two weeks ago I hit a wall with the PVP in Providence (more about that in another post). I decided to park the Thorax and Brutix and went back to ratting and missions.

I did a few missions in the low-sec areas of Domain when I came to Providence, but going back to Mamet or Misaba was out of the question. I decided to try something in the Domain empire space. After looking at the list of agents in the area I decided to help the Carthum Conglomerate. There were three reasons for this. They were in Domain, had a big amount of L4 agents and multiple research agents. Unfortunately the L1 missions are BORING! After doing this for 2 days I JCed back to Providence for a change of pace.

Ratting in Providence is great. The bounty is good (around 950k per Sansha battleship), the salvage is better than anything I've seen before and if you get lucky a True Sansha can appear and drop some crazy good loot. This also goes great with my ad-hoc schedule. I can join at any time and get going immediately. It is really a great place for ratting, but that is also the big problem. A lot of people come to this area to do the same.

About a week ago I couldn't find a system that wasn't packed. I still was not ready for more PVP, but I didn't have many options... or so I thought. After debating between continue my search for a ratting spot or going back to those L1 suddenly it came to me. Exploration!!!

I immediately jumped in my Imnicus and started to explore. I forgot how much I liked exploration. It is like nothing else in EVE. Its own mini-game. After deploying the probes and running some scan I hit a Sansha Provincial Hub. I thought I could hit it alone, but it wasn't the case. After an SOS in Corp chat Gat and Zee came to the rescue.

If I recall we had 4 or maybe 5 waves. The fights were fun and the loot amazing. We had a True Sansha battleship that dropped great loot. This was besides all the great bounty, salvage and regular loot. The plex was a success and I was hooked again.

Every night after that I've done some exploring. Some times I get lucky sometimes I don't. I've found a big number of different plexes in the area. I tried to find information about them, but so far nothing really good. I'll start writing down the name of the plex and put together a description of it. Maybe I can add that to Evelopedia or EVE-wiki to help future explorers. It will be a while before I can hit all the different types, but I look forward to them. Specially the really tough ones like the Sansha Provincial HQ and something called the Sansha Minefield.

Additions to the fleet.

Those following this blog know that I got me a Myrmidon last month. This has become my 0.0 ratting boat and so far has been a great success. Unfortunately I didn't feel it was the right boat for a PVP roam. I'm not saying that it can't be and I know some corpmates use it successfully. Its just not what I was looking for. After saving some ISK I got me a Brutix. I fit it really close to what I had in my Thorax. Based on the bonus for the ship I went with a 2x MAR II in the lows to help me stay alive long enough since I can't fit Tech 2 guns at this time.

It still hasn't seen any action, but I hope that changes soon. For now here are some pics of these 2 beauties.

I really like Gallente engineering.

The more the merrier.

We are multiplying! Corpmate Ajax joined the blog-sphere today with his first post. This makes the third AU-F member with a blog.

Hopefully he can keep up with Mend because I can't. :)

Someone Loses an Eye

Welcome!

Greed.

There are so many aspects of EVE that mimic real life, but I think nothing reflects true life better than Industry roles. As in real life it is all about GREED.

Yes, you can do a lot of other things to increase your ISK consumption like ratting or exploring or missions or roaming for unexpected pilots (if you are a pirate). The difference is that those will provide you with entertainment while you increase your wallet. That is not the case with Industry.

Putting invention jobs on the station to see if 1 of the 20 invention jobs will produce something or pointing your mining strips to an asteroid are far from being fun or entertaining. There is only one reason we do it.... ISK!

I found the Industry role interesting from reading other bloggers entries. I always done some sort of crafting in previous MMOs, but it usually was just a side thing with little to no importance. That is not the case here. In EVE crafting is a very important part of the game. The ships, the fits, the booster are almost all player created. Yes, you get some stuff from LPs and the occasional loot, but the majority of people buy their stuff from markets or thru contracts.

The original idea was to do some light mining at the beginning while I figured out the direction I wanted to take with the production, but then the ISK started to come in. I thought "If I can do this much with this crappy setup, then how much more I can do with a better setup?!" That lead to a retriever which lead to mining upgrades which lead to refinery V. Then Refinery efficiency and veldspar processing. I kept looking at one thing... the ISK filling up my wallet.

I still want to do inventions and produce Tech 1 and Tech 2 gear for me and to put in the market to have income when not online, but that has been pushed back again and again.

In 4-5 days Armand will start the slow process of learning Gallante Industrial V. An Iteron V with rigs and expanded cargohold II can carry an insane amount of cargo for a Tech 1 ship. This will also open the door for a Viator. This will allow me to participate in the hauler division of our corp. The question is what to do after that.

The original plan was to stop the mining related skills and concentrate on production. The problem is that with a Hulk so close at hand and the invention and production of tech 2 items like shield extenders/hardeners, armor hardeners and med size drones still so far that decision seems wrong.

Hulk... I can already see my wallet icon blinking.... :)

The Mysterious Enigma.

A while back while I was in Mista someone linked an Enigma in local chat. I was blown away by the ship. It was like nothing I've seen before. I tried the usual places for information, but the only place I read something about it was the eve-wikia that the previous link takes you to.

I don't know how the player got that to link in channel. I couldn't link it myself back to corp or alliance channel. I don't know where that ship was seen. And more importantly... How do you get one?!?

Is this a GM ship? Or is it a future ship which information was data mined? Any information is appreciated.

For now I'll leave you with some screen shots:

A thief among us.

The stories of undercover agents and thieves in EVE became real to me this past week. I'll give very little credit to the thief. He wants to think that his operation was a successful corporate hit, but it was far from it. After months of "working" he was never able to steal from the corporation or hinder the corporation and/or alliance in any way. Instead he stole from a group of members who shared their resources willingly with other corp members.

The loot was good. A total of 3 ravens, one scorpion and one navy raven. Still a far cry from a well planned and executed corp hit.

Compared with the loot that he may have been able to get (since this was the w-space project which is producing Tech 3 gear) if he had waited patiently and worked better the social angle it is really not a successful hit.

Mend and Ajax have posted about this also. Please read their comments here and here for more info.

W-space break.

Earlier this week AU-F's presence in w-space ended. All the goods were taken out and the POS dismantled. Last week I logged and had an evemail saying to move all my stuff out since the POS was going offline. This took me by surprise. After asking the leaders of the expedition it was part of the plan. Let me explain...

Phryxia (the name given to this class 3 w-space) was a private project. Two members of our corp, Ajax and Rayth Phaenor came with the idea and funding for the project. I'm not certain of the goals, but Tech 3 and ISK income is definitely in the equation. They were kind enough to open this up to the corp. Me and others (Sarah Turtle and Nlor among a few others) were happy to join. Many combat/hacking/archaeology sites were cleared and parts were salvaged/looted. Asteroid and gas sites were sucked dry. Money was made and Tech 3 components were produced.

It was all good (except one small bump at the end i'll talk about in a future post), but as with anything in life it wasn't perfect. The class-3 didn't produce enough links to similar class w-space. There was also a shortage of grav and ladar sites; our mining/gas harvesting group stood there for days without anything to do. There was also limitation in the POS. The storage wasn't big enough for the amount of minerals that were being extracted from the sites and the refinery (which came at the end) was not able to keep up with the ores coming in.

I have my own list of "lessons learned"

• You can assemble ships in the POS, but you can't repackage them. This is a big logistic issue for someone like me with limited hauling capability. With Armand flying an Iteron IV I was able to bring multiple packaged ships at once, but they all had to be flown back to Empire.
• There seems to be no way to divide goods in a hangar. Everyone can see/take anything. This can cause issues.
• You definitely need a battleship with appropriate skills to be of help. It is also a good idea to have a logistic pilot helping out too.
• All pilots need to have good exploration skillz
• All pilots need to have anchoring skillz
• Not seeing anyone in Local until they speak definitely makes thing more interesting and complicated.
• The refinery penalties are huge compared to Empire. Having Refinery V, Refinery Efficiency V and the specific ore specialization to IV is very important. A hardwiring implant will be cool too.

I'm really happy with the experience and can't thank enough Ajax and Rayth for the opportunity. I also want to mentioned ST and Nlor for all their help and guidance while I was there. For a new pilot like me to be able to experience something like this is priceless. I look forward to future w-space projects. As Dante's and Armand's skillz set grow I feel I can help make the next one even a bigger success.