16 January 2014

Writers' Block

As you may have noticed I have been a bit lax in my posting recently. A large part of that was Christmas and New Year preparations and subsequent recovery. Since then I've sat down several times to write something but never really gotten anywhere. It's not that I don't have anything to write about. The problem is I come up with ideas for topics when away from the computer and can't remember them when I'm back at it. I guess I need to buy a little notepad or something to scribble down ideas. Who said paper was dead?

My lack of blogging is in no way mirrored by an equivalent lack of time doing EVE stuff. For the week between Christmas and New Year we had an alliance gathering in the wormhole of a third-party. What started as our C5 brethren trying to elucidate a fight from a nearby C3 escalated quickly to a fully-fledged eviction. I didn't make it to the initial reinforcement of the POS. I did make it in a couple of days later to help explode their tower. I was top damage dealer too which was nice even if doing so was simply pressing F1 then chatting on comms. Nasty meanies we are. It feels a little bad of us but being willing to fight is part of living in wormholes. It's one thing to not be able to stand up a fleet at any given time but the ships these guys evacuated showed they could have fought back if they wanted.

Just into the New Year and we were welcoming a new group of people into the wormhole. I was just about to log off when my long suffering corpmate, Epigene, announced on comms he had a couple of Ventures on d-scan. I said we had no chance of catching them but was still talked into combat scanning them down while Epi went back for an Onyx to bubble them. I've read the correct way to combat scan, using direction and range to pre-place your probes before actually calling them into range and catching the targets in one scan. I've tried this and I suck at it. I went for the more familiar route and treated scanning these Ventures down like I would a wormhole. One scan, two scans, three scans and I had them. Probes in and I waited for the Ventures to vanish spooked. That never happened and with Epi arriving in someone's Onyx and a new recruit in a Cruicifier I warped the three of us to the scanned ship sig. We landed on their heads, Epi bubbled up and we killed both Ventues and both pods. I got all four killmails. Not bad for going to bed.

Since then we also staged our second monthly alliance roam. We headed into Providence, as we had done previously for our December roam. For some unknown reason CVA have us set to kill on sight so we figure we may as well earn that standings for something. In December we had fun with them, driving a Naga fleet off and killing a few other things. This time around we were not so lucky and got squashed between two CVA fleets. But, well, it was a laugh anyway. The second part of the roam saw us trying out something called "Duck Fleet". This is a fleet dreamt up by Fatal Ascension which comprises a bunch of MWD Algos destroyers filled with drones. All the Algos anchor on a fast frigate who leads the way. Another fast frigate gets all the drones assisted to it and goes off to tackle things. The anchor keeps the ball of Destroyers moving rapidly around on the edge of drone range while the tackle frigate leads another ball, of drones, around. The drones deal massive instant damage to most things the tackle gets a point on. Flying this takes practice and we had a laugh getting the hang of it. Mostly it's just the tackle and anchor frigates who need to actually concentrate though. We got a couple of kills even if we did suck slightly at running this type of fleet.

All in all I've been having a decent time in EVE. Unusually for me it has involved a lot of PvP. Thankfully I'm almost only ever the grunt and not in charge of the pew.

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