Last weekend's highlights

Plexing together
On Sunday we were cleaning the flat with my GF. I finished my part and started to play EVE. Soon she finished her stuff too and reminded me that I had promised to clean the dishes.
I had totally forgot about them and have already started orbiting a button in a novice plex.
I was happy to do the dishes but asked my GF if she could watch local, glance at the overview and hit d-scan every couple of secs :)
She was cool with it, so she sat down, started playing candy crush while spamming d-scan every 3 secs.
Told her that if she sees anything new appear just shout. (its a small flat so the kitchen sink is like 5 secs from the PC)
Luckily no squids (caldari FW) came to blap me, so we got the LP! 20MM ISK while washing dishes! Beat that ISK per hour :P
Fun stuff for the whole family! :P

"Why do you always get killed?"

I play EVE alone, no corps, no contacts, no social interaction (other than this blog). So I tell all my achievements to my GF, who has never played EVE and is not a gamer at all.

During the weekend I told her each time I had been blapped... After the 7th kill, she starts a conversation asking me "Why do you always get killed?" and "What do you think you are doing wrong?"

She suggested I use the best guns and get a bigger ship :)

I told her that the biggest issues are: my failing on maneuvering the ship and not picking the correct fights. Also explained that I am using the "best" weapons. She thought that it was actually my shooting skills (FPS style) that are crap and I wasn't able to kill anyone because I was aiming horribly. Understandable, as she has seen 1-2 fights and they were all lame to watch, just as all fights in EVE. Compared to LOL where it is pretty easy to understand what is going on, in EVE all you see in a fleet fight is bunch of blue and red stars and nothing happens.

I know very little about PVP, but have been playing for +1 year. I have tried to watch a few tournament matches but had no idea what was happening! I just look at the health bars and thats it.

Is it me or are others having the same issue?


My Condor kite fit is "perfect" ie its all T2 and its a mirror of all the Condor LML kite fits. My Kestrel rocket brawl fit is not T2 yet but training into it as I write.

With my Condor I always get scrammed and blapped, in my Kestrel I get kited and... (you can guess the outcome)

So I've had a new plan: Kestrel MWD only hunting for kiting Condors! Fit a Kestrel with MWD (had to play around in EFT a bit as was having powergrid issues) and headed to into FW!

On the first gate in LS (Old Man Star) saw an Algos hanging around. I knew that it was a destroyer but knew that with gateguns (if he engages first) I can blap him probably.

(If you were wondering: "Yes, I have been killed by gateguns and stationguns before in LS." Was out "hunting" a couple of months back and got raped by gateguns after engaging a neutral pilot next to a gate in my frigate! Terribad!)

So with the gateguns on my side, hopefully, I locked him and tried to "taunt" him (don't know exactly how you do that in EVE, but I hit approach). I see that he locks me too, and then starts to fire!

I web, scram and overheat the rockets. About 5 seconds into the fight I realize that he is in Caldari militia, ie a valid War Traget so no gateguns will back me up... Again you can guess the outcome: T2 Algos vs Scrammed Kestrel with MWD.

Anyway, learned my lesson!

Fly on!

Still not that lucky

It was a long weekend here where I live. We got to work from home on Friday and it was a national holiday
on Monday.

Most of the days went with packing and moving and various house chores, so not much time for EVE or blogging.

I played for a couple of hours quite sporadically. Mainly concentrating on FW...
Have still not killed a single ship. Which sucks... If you search up my KB (please don't!) you'll see that I have lost like ~8ships since I joined the militia.

Not much to write on about regarding my deaths. Most of the time it's me being stupid, not flying properly or being blobbed.

I did run a few plexes, so my LP is ~80K at the moment. Been looking at Fuzzwork to see how to cash out most profitably.

There are low LP cost items with high isk/LP ratios that also have low trading volume. Meaning that it would take ages before cashing out.
I'm probably going to buy navy cruiser BPCs and build the ships myself on Butcher Hentes who has PE5 :)
This seems to be the fastest and most profitable way of cashing out. ~1400ISK/LP is what the site says. Sounds good to me!

Really the easiest way to make the most isk as a noobie who doesn't want to join a big corp due to play time restrictions is joining FW and plexing. You get to have fun, meet people(even if you don't join corp with them)
Your other choice as a 1 week noobie would be to go mining in a venture and train into bigger mining ships. The training invested into mining is absolutely useless and the money you make is extremely low. Not to mention that you learn nothing about the game and you are just sitting still.

An other choice would be for you to run LVL1-2 missions. At least training is going to be useful for other EVE things but the money you make is really low. You learn how to PvE which is useful but its really not that complicated...

For people who don't have a lot of time to play and want to get instant action and make money (10min timer on a novice plex is really not that long) FW is really good!. If you want to explore or do missions you need at least 1 hour of constant playtime to be profitable and enjoy the game.Sometimes you just don't have that whole hour! Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to encourage plex farming I'm just saying that FW is a great source of revenue. Even if you start off only wanted to stab farm a plex (not even going to mention what that horrible thing is!) you will soon want to defend the plex instead of running away at first sight of danger :)

Fly on!

FW here I come!

So, the 24 hours past that I needed to get our of my corp and then joined Gall FW. They (should I say "we"?) are at T3, but it dipped a bit into T2 last night.

I'm comming off all smart and **** but I had no idea how it all works :) As natural I was prepared to be at war with caldari and not being able to fly to Jita. That's pretty much all I knew...

Btw! Is it possible to fly to Jita while being in Gall FW? Just with a Crow maybe?

So I got my trusty (never killed anyone with it) condor LML kite fit (with which I always get scrammed and blapped in like 5secs) and headed to the first FW zone from Dodixie: Old Man's Star. Went straight to a Novice plex and started orbiting the button (FW slang ftw!) A few caldari flew into the system at one point, but no one came into my plex. After 10mins, I got the message that I received 421 LP...
I didn't know a lot about FW but suspected that this LP amount is really low. So I read exactly how the LP payout sytems works. Turns out, with offensive plexing (going to a contested caldari system and orbiting the thing there for 10mins) you get the highest payout. Orbiting the button in your owned (gallente in this case) gives a lot less.
Exact info on payouts is here:Uni Wiki FW at the middleish...
The system in which I captured the plex was 0.42% contested, causing the really small LP payout... Terrybad on my part!

Later on the evening, I had a mirror match vs a condor. Blapped me with easy... Had and still have no idea why I lost that badly.
Then I got careless and tried my luck in a medium plex. 4 mins in some gang jumped and raped me. That was all my bad, should have never went into a medium plex and should have watched D-scan.

Got other FW fights ( me being torn apart) coming up! Along with a post on my XPath "adventures"!

Fly on!

Checking In

I again haven't had much time to update much. But am proud to say, that the "OMG PI" part of my past projects have been written:

From the title you could guess that I got into PI. If I remember correctly, it was actually because of Gevlon's posts about his PI and some other PI blog entries which I can't recall right now. So, as usual, I read a crazy amount and played around a bit. So quickly I got my main into skilling up for PI. Initially I started a few random planets and just did basic P0->P1 stuff. However as I read more and more I knew that a factory planet was the way to go!
I consider myself "quite good" with excel and I always enjoyed programming/excel oriented challenges so I decided to make a sheet which optimizes a factory planet for me. To make things easier I knew I wanted to do P1->P4 production.I didn't do any fancy API downloads or use EVEtoolkit data dumps, just manually input each P4 product's underlying P1 component requirement. The biggest issue was updating the P1 prices manually. Luckily the most profitable P4 didn't change at all :) (I was making Wetware Mainframes and Self-Harmonizing powercores).
To be honest, I don't really remember nor does it seem really interesting (still happy to elaborate on anything, just ask away!) but in short about my setup:
- Each P4 requires three P3s
- Each P3 requires two P2s
- Each P2 require two P1s
As a results, I had 1 adv-factory building P4, 3 adv factories building P3s, and 3*2=6 basic factories building P2s. Biggest bottleneck in the setup was sending the correct P1 from storage facilities to other storage facilities or launchpads. I don't wish to dwell into this, but I might be able to dig up my old s/s if there is interest.
Finally about the numbers! By the end (when I had optimized everything) I had 3 planets running. Two on my main and one on an alt. Two planets in Meves and one in Athinard (both one jump from Dodixie).
I tried to track my profits as best as possible and I would say that it was around 100-125MM per planet per month. Skill wise it didn't require much of training as command center upgrades Lvl4 is more than enough. On my alt I only had Lvl3, it was a bit more fiddly to set up the production, but was viable.
Even though, after filling the storages full the planet ran for ~48 hours, ut required way too much fiddling! I got burnt out quickly from all the hauling, the waiting and messing up the correct routes :)
I made nice ISK (for a solo noobie like me) but was tired of all the pressure of refilling the planets with goo :)

Can also check the whole thing here: My EVE history
On my current things:

I have started the process of moving Butcher Hentes to join Gallente FW. I failed a bit because I thought joining would take like 5 mins, but it turns out that you need 24 hours before you can leave corp if your a director... So I'm still waiting for that to happen :)
I will write about this in more detail, but I trained and read and did everything to do lowsec exploration in my little Tengu. But to be frank I find it ****. Just recently I went around in Molden Heath for a bit more than an hour and earned like 1M ISK. Didn't find a single combat site worth running. Found like 5-6 Data sites, checked their loot, all crap... No idea how Pilgrim in Exile deals with this. Anyway...

I find that I play too much of EVE industry tycoon too much so I want to force myself into PvP. I will expand on this too :)

Fly on!

Update

Just a note, that I have written the first segment of the My EVE History!
Please check it out and let me know what you all think...

During the weekend I didn't play a lot as was out of town visiting my GFs family.
Having a mayor toothache at the moment, so please forgive me if there are some errors or typos.

Hopefully will finish the EVE history page this week and finally get started on writing about what I'm actually doing in EVE currently!

ps: the blog seems to be getting hits from the US and Germany :) Somebody seems to be reading on his phone (android) and someone is using a MAC :O Big props to my first readers! (whoever you are)

Fly on!

Why do you EVE?

In my last post I said I was going to update both my EVE history and my current projects... Unfortunately I didn't have time to write those up yet.

However I wanted to share my view on why EVE might be such a unique game!

Before EVE I played WOW, LOL, SC, SC2 and Mtgo. I was totally hooked on all these games at the time. I tried EVE two times before finally subscribing. On my first two attempts I just didn't understand what the goal of the game was! In each game I played there was clear goal. Wow = Raiding (for me), Lol = ranked matches, SC = ICUP ladder, and so on...

In EVE I did the tutorial and then didn't know what to do... So I searched the net and read many guides. Still I didn't find a goal with which you can: "Win the game!" So I didn't subscribe...

My third attempt was no different to my previous two other than maybe I was a bit older :P
The only difference was that I had a goal in my mind: I wanted to make enough ISK to play EVE for free!
I didn't want to spend more money on videogames (because I'm cheap that way) and wanted to have fun for free.
Since than I have always had new ideas and goals that I want to achieve. Without goals the game is no fun! In EVE the devs don't lay the goal for you. You have to find them yourself! This is why I think EVE is such a hard, but very great game!

What go you into subscribing for the first time? What was your first goal in EVE? What keeps you motivated now!?

Fly on!

Getting Started

The is going to be my first ever blog post, so please bear with me.

The goal of this blog is to write about my adventures in EVE, the problems I deal with and just general tips to newbies along with my questions to my readers who play EVE.

I read quite a few EVE blogs (I will try to put them all on the blog roll) and I feel it has become quite common to categorize your EVE blog into a specific gendre ie: Industrial, Trader, Wormhole, Lowsec, Null PvP (is there any blog out there that actually is about a null sov-bloc pilot? Pls let me know!)

I do not wish to label my blog in any way other than that its going to be mainly about EVE. I have done quite a few things in EVE ranging from industry to trading to missioning and etc... My goals in this game always change and one month I might be a MoxNix trader wannabe but the next day I'm down in Nullsec ratting all day and praying I don't get hotdropped by AAA.

I want to always have my two most important pages updated:

• My EVE History
• Current EVE projects

(I have not written these up yet)

Next posts this week are going to be on why EVE is such a hard and very rewarding game.