4 Years, 3 Months and 7 Days

4 Years, 3 Months and 7 Days that is how long it has been since I last posted on here and geeze has a lot of things happened. I have managed to change corps 7 times moving to the drone lands to highsec back to the drone lands. Spending 3 months unsubbed due to real life and then finally moving into the Imperium into Echelon Research (ECHRE) which was at the time part of SpaceMonkeys Alliance (SMA).

 Now being part of the CFC as it was still called at the time was a nice refresh from back when I was part of the Northern Coalition (not the alliance), the fact things were run at a coalition level really well was fun. Now I have never enjoyed anything much else apart from mining, and 7 years of it I think I know it now. Being a miner as part of null sec alliance before the new sov mechanics was a hard job. People did not want you around and just made you feel like you are leaching off them (which in some aspects you are). But with the new sov mechanics more people want you around to get those ADM's up. But the CFC was still fun to be in. With the downfall of the Imperium, I stayed with my corp when we moved with SMA to the outer ring. As a miner the Outer ring had some significance to me as it is the home of Outer Ring Excavations (ORE) a NPC corporation was pretty fun for the few weeks we stuck it out. However NPC null for an alliance who have been used to full sov null for years is pretty much a death stroke.

 After leaving SMA we as a corp had a few options but we chose to go to Volition Cult (.VC.). .VC. at the time was Not Red Dont Shoot (NRDS) which is a difficult stance to stand in null sov space at the moment. This was a culture shock for our corp, not just for the fact that neutrals in local is not a bad thing but also for the fact of how laid back the alliance is for participation. For me changing to NRDS was really difficult. I have almost typed into intel channels when doing a Jita run before as I have hit high sec, it took a week or two but I go used to this. The biggest change to us as a corp was the lack of IT services. Now as one of the main guys for our corps IT backend I know how difficult it is to just get things working but .VC. had nothing. We were expecting API checks forums and API tracked out of game services, nothing of this. We just got over this and moved into Catch.

The straw that finally broke the camels back was the giving up of the constellation JZV-O6. Now this constellation had been given to VOLT from I N F A M O U S after they had closed their doors due to internet struggles. With Goonswarm Federation (CONDI) moving into Delve certain alliances were displaced, one of these alliances were League of Unaligned Master Pilots (LUMPY). Now .VC. fought well with LUMPY holding their ground and never loosing a system. But one day a directors meeting was called now as a director of ECHRE I was part of this meeting, we were told that we were giving up JZV-O6 to LUMPY, thus surrendering. Much arguments happened within this meeting, however while this was happening the directors of ECHRE were talking, we had decided to move on and look for a new home.
(Please note other things were happening with the alliance which I am not going to go into detail here)

Searching for a new home was not the easiest thing as this would have make it our third region move in less then a year. We had to make sure our next month was right for us. We started putting out feelers to alliance diplos looking for our new home. Now after years of playing and with the corp being almost 4 years old at this point many contacts and friends are made along the way. We started to talk to some of these who had joined CONDI. Now for all the people out there that are "Grr Goons" there are some great guys in Goons. One such corp is Minion Revolution (MINI3). Now MINI3 we knew from back in the SMA days so we knew they were cool guys and we could get along with them. Talks were had and we got the nod that we could join CONDI.
Now this for me was amazing news. I have always kinda admired CONDI for an alliance even if some of what they do sucks. But I was happy as this could very well be the perfect place for ECHRE.  Along with this week the Rorqual changes were announced and not long after the Engineering Complexes were also announced, both of which I will talk about in later posts.

So today finds me in Delve with CONDI and I couldn't be happier.
I started typing this up 2 days ago after talking to a long term EVE friend Randunip (who I forgot to mention I got to join ECHRE a few months ago now). With it being so long I typed a bit out and then deleted it two or three times now, eventually just getting to the point I will just spew onto the keyboard and see how it comes out.
Lets see if my next post is a lot sooner then 4 Years, 3 Months and 7 Days eh :).
Fly safe and target those Roids.

ATX Day 5 Half Way Thoughts

So were in the break for Day 5 and I've got to say there have been some great matches and some really surprising victories.

Nulli Secunda vs Black Legion I didn't manage to catch as the stream started abit earlier so no real thoughts on that match but the Nulli win will give them some good moral while their are loosing their space to Test.

HUN Reloaded vs Choke Point was a good fight and HUN winning was a def for me and that's how it turned out really the triple Vargur set up from HUN was really strong and Choke points triple Gila and Oracle set up just couldn't match the set up.

Fatal Ascension vs Agony Empire was a kind of boring fight, Fatal bringing a rush team and Agony bring a immensely heavy ECM team, Fatal was unable to lock until near the end then a sabre was able to lock up one of Agony's Griffin and finish it off.

The G0dfathers vs Dark Taboo was a fight that I for one was betting on The G0dfathers and that's how it ended up. Dark Taboo lost a cyclone early to a disconnect putting them at a immediate disadvantage. In the end The G0dfathers took a convincing win.

Mildly Intoxicated vs Alpha Volley Union was for me a weird fight Mildly Intoxicated brought a old fashion with a Minmitar rush team and Alpha brought well what seems to be their flag ship and a bunch of ships they had hanging around. The Bhaalgorn flag ship was a fail fit in itself. If you can bring officer mods and such use them don't stay on T2 and faction fit some things, flag ships for me should be a ship where you spend a chunk of your alliance wallet fitting.

Northern Coalition. vs Test Alliance Please Ignore was a great match in my eyes Test bringing dual Windicators against NC.'s dual Loki's and NC. got obliterated a early Hurricane loss from NC. really sealed their fate with the Windicators obliterating the ships one at a time. The Test pilots should however have stuck abit further from their targets with them sitting at 0 even the blasters have abit of trouble tracking.

Goonswarm Federation vs FEARLESS. was the best match I had yet seen. Goons was my favourite but for me they made a drastic mistake of not dropping the drones early enough. I can see the reason of waiting to drop them at the centre but while loosing their frigs early they really needed to drop the sentry's and get going from there but Goons definitely put up a good fight but it just wasn't good enough.

Verge of Collapse vs Capital Punishment. was a fight which I didn't know how it would play out. The Verge team with their Tengus and Capital with their Machariel and Sleipnir's but the Verge Tengu's just couldn't handle the Minmitar team and lost heavily.

And that wraps up the first half with the second half now on I will put up another post once the second half has completed.

ATX and my early thoughts

So I have been watching the Alliance Tournament vids on Youtube due to me being away both weekends and I have got to say this years final should be a good one. Alot of big names have already been knocked out and alot of the lesser known alliances are still in meaning that we could very well have a final of alliances that were barely known.
This weekend is the only weekend that I can actually watch any of the fight live so I will post again sometime this weekend with my thought of some of this weekends fights which should be good ones.

Also going to some of the complaints of people on the forums saying there shouldn't be the deal going on in local and such and that is to be honest rubbish, deals is part of this game and should happen, and as CCP does it should be endorsed as the deals are one bit of this magnificent game.

This must be the shortest post ive yet to have made. hehe

Thinking about eve and the Community

So at the current moment I am down to one account and that is because I haven't plexed them this month. Now this isn't because of anything CCP has done in fact 4 of the accounts ran out even before Inferno was released. The reason my accounts have run out is that I have simply no time to be on and get the 3.5 bill each month to keep the accounts alive. I was having to spend 10 hours a day minimum mining to keep the accounts open and with exams coming up that cant happen. I may be returning after the exams but I have yet to decide. This is the first time in nearly 3 years that my accounts have lapsed and it feels weird. True I wouldn't be playing at the current moment anyway due to the fact that my main pc is dead after the hard drive fried itself, so my accounts would probally have lapsed anyway.
Ive got to say even with my accounts lapsed and at the current moment not a certain of me returning, I still read the forums, evenews 24, twitter (where half of the people I follow has something to do with eve) and still listening to the podcasts and this I see is a great thing of this community that even after I stop playing the game I still follow much of the community.

Ive got to say that there are things pulling me away from starting eve again after the exams, ive spent countless hours playing this game and countless pounds before I started plexing the accounts. I enjoy mining and have tried to play other types of gameplay in eve and have simply not enjoyed it. Though I would love to move back to null if I was to come back to eve, the main problem I have is isk and buying plexs, I need to make the isk each month to be able to pay for the accounts and moving and setting up in null takes time and this is time I'm not making isk so the accounts get tight, and also if I was mining in null I would need to transport minerals to high sec and currently I have no way of doing this which is a major problem for me too. If I was to finally move to null I think I would like to have 2-3 months worth of game time sat on each account so that I can have a buffer for the accounts when I move I can have abit of time to set up and get comfy in null before my account time starts getting scarce.

I have still one of my spare pcs that can run eve and that I used to log on the last remaining account I have and was able to use the new unified inventory and ive got to say its nothing near as bad as people on the forums are saying. Many people on the forums have said its the worst thing since Incarna (which I personally liked but needed more). People have been asking for it to be reverted and in my eyes this would be the worst thing ccp could do. The reason for this unified inventory change was to fix up old code which needed changing and this is important. A rollback is not a good idea even is a minority of the community doesnt like it this needed to happen and has happen so people need to HTFU.

Ive also seen recently this thread which shows the goons are extending hulkageddon indefinitely. Now for me who has mined for the majority of 3 years and has always mined throughout hulkageddon I don't find this as a problem but for the people who whine about this somethings wrong, the problem is that eve is dangerous and people can get blown up anywhere. At least now people don't have to worry about meta-gaming as hulkageddon is happening all the time.

Right that puts the end of today's ramblings. It may be abit hard to read as I'm sat here on my laptop listening to Lost in EVE, so Ive got to say I'm kinda distracted. All this post is about is I wanted to get some things off my chest

New fictions and old Friends

I'm still going strong and finally have my mining fleet set up, Well almost. Just got to buy 2 more hulks and it will be complete,

Soo Rand asked me the other day whether I wanted to do a colab sort of thing with him on a fan-fiction.
With him writing one post with me replying to that post from a different perspective, and I agreed, OK its all on his blog but that's fine with me, don't get many hits on this anyway and its just full of ramblings.

Will probally do one around the new inferno and I will catch up on escalation at the same time.

Well may as well add the link to Rands blog where my reply was just added.
http://harshworlds.blogspot.co.uk/

Fanfest and all the complaints

So I've been reading through General Discussion as usual, its what I do each morning. And the amount of people who have started complaining about what the Mitanni said in the Alliance Panel, which I did watch live on EVE TV, is staggering. There was one thread posted vaguely about it before the results for the CSM were posted and this I can accept some people would be bum hurt from it. However as the majority of the new threads were only posted AFTER the Mitanni was back in the chairman seat shows that the idiotic calls for his resignation about this is only for people to pull him out the seat.
Now I am not a Goon and have no intention to ever be one, however I do believe they are a very integral part of this game and their history goes back almost as far as the game does. What he said may have been wrong but everyone says wrong things while drunk. The Mitanni has publicly apologised and this I accept as being enough, there is no need to pull him off the seat as what he has done for the CSM helped this game no end.
Also another thing with these threads and many like them when people start raging, they always put that the community is not happy with this and that is completely wrong, SOME of the community is not happy with this and wants his resignation, SOME not all and this I feel everyone should get into their heads, just because some people do not post on the forums or some people do not express their intents does not mean they agree with you.

So that's my rant as I do get very annoyed with people like this and I believe this blog will be a mix of some of my PVP experiences and also my ranting as some of the community for being douches.

Unusual Occurances

So yesterday something very peculier happened. I went on a low sec roam and killed something. Now if you have read this blog before or know me ingame then you would know that I am a massive carebear. In the three years I have been playing EVE, I have only got into 4 fights before hand. Although the third time was against a noob ship. I have got to say it was exilerating specially when the so called battle hardened vet of pvp Randunip, started flapping when the guy landed. Anyway onto the report.

So Rand logged on EVE which at the current state is a rare occurance. We started chatting, but then decided to jump on TS as Rand wanted to know more about the newest dev blogs. Later he simply stated, im bored do you want to go on a cruiser roam. Now normally I would have said no but after mining and programming all day I really needed a change. So 20 minutes later and too many vulcan autocannons bought we were sat in Ordion. With the first thing on the agenda to rescue Rands Domi located 5 jumps in low sec after a botched wormhole expedition. We made the jumps and all we saw was a cyno on the way in and no cyno on the way out. This was it. So Rand got back into his cruiser and we go back into low this time actively looking for a kill. We make it back to the system the Domi was in and still nothing. We jump into the next system and theres someone in local. We decided to have a crack and see if we could locate him with D-scan. We managed to see the guy who was also in a Arbitrator a few times before Rand stated "I think hes going for the gate, you go check and I'll go the the planet." So off I go to the gate. As I land the guy jumps out into the next system. So after we go. Now after 10 minutes of trying to scan him and ending up believing he was in a safe spot. We were sat at the sun about to warp off. And low and behold what happens. The guy warps in ontop of us. Now I am no pvper but I started getting abit jumpy but remembered to stay calm or die. I carmly locked the guy put a scram on and started the autocannons. Now while I am doing this the "Seasoned pro" Rand was flustering and shouting down comms "there he is there he is". While also activating and then subsequently deactiving half his modules out of excitment. Well at this point the arby had activated his neuts and was trying to neut me. I was in a stabber so my guns kept firing. Before my cap was sucked dry and I lost scram, Rand finally came to his senses and scram and webbed him too and activated his neuts subsequently draining the guys cap. A few second later. BOOM. The guys down and I have a great day. Gf was said in local and Rand and I warped off to safe spots to wait out the counters.
After that we just jumped back to highsec and docked for the night.

All in all I have to say I see why people enjoy pvping, and I hope to be doing some more soon.