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.

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/

Burnouts and Sov

So I have burnt myself out again, it happens atleast once a year and its not just EVE its gaming in all general, I suppose its just the fact I do play games alot and most of the time I am playing solo which leaves me getting bored of things. I will get back and start playing EVE again in few weeks after I've relaxed and listened to a few more podcasts and listened to Eve-Radio untill I get soo itchy to log in I'll just log in and spend a couple hours mining as I always do. As Rand knows it happens and I'll be back. The characters have got long skills on like Minmitar carrier 5 so its all good untill I get back and play more. So this blog in terms of what I have done is going to be short and the posts as always will be sporadic as any previous readers of this blog will know (dont think there is any).

So in other news any people who like Verites influence maps and would like to see them in motion, I have put together the maps all the way back to August 2007, in both monthly and yearly views in animated sequences. These can be seen in this link. These will be updated monthly.

Thats going to wrap it up for today as I dont know much more to add.

I folded and Crucible 1.1

So on the day before the 60 day trials expire, I caved in and created another account. This accounts going to be my second orca pilot, leaving my maxed out booster in the pos while I haul with this orca, some people may this this is a waste of an account but tbh I find the loss of boost while my current orca warps to the pos and back a large loss of isk as the roids could be out of range while the boost isn't on. This account is a minmitar meaning I have now got one character that trains from every faction. Two from Gallente them being my oldest two accounts getting onto nearly 3 years old, 3 Amarr pilots as I like their mining frigate as while they are training they will be making my isk through mining in 1.0 away from the rats, 1 Caldari mission running account who's account was opened last year but due to lack of funds was shut down fairly soon afterwards which as stated in the previous post was opened up again, and finally onto my newest account the Minmitar pilot who's ships I simply adore but I have never had a character for some reason or the other.


From the account perspective that's currently it and I don't see myself opening anymore any time soon. So yes tomorrow being patch day I'm getting all excited. As a number of the features being brought in are of a massive interest to me. So first of all ill start with the T2 mining link boost where the range boost given out by the Mining Foreman Link – Mining Laser Field Enhancement II boost being upped from 5 to 5.625% which will give me a nice range boost while I'm out mining. The next beautiful extra is the pos fuel blocks, which will make my life soo much easier fuelling the poses as I don't have to check if anybody else form the corp has put any more modules onto the pos and the pg and cpu have nothing to do with the fuel anymore which in my mind is a great addition. Moving onto the next extra is the new neocom which looks beautiful and I cant wait to get my hands on as many of the links on my neocom I barely ever use and there is others which I use on a daily basis. Ill post a screen shot of my neocom tomorrow showing exactly what I use. From my point these are the main 3 things that Crucible 1.1 is bringing to the game for me, the full patch notes can be found here.

That's all but does it for me today, something I want to start and have done bits of in the past is giving my own stance on the happening within new eden, this will not be locked to just high sec news and some people may think me being a high sec carebear that's all I know and that I think that the edge of high sec is where eve finishes, however I follow the going ones with null sec and so I will also be commenting on the news from there. Which also brings me onto a quick linky for myself but have produced a animated version of the nullsec sov maps and a link to the eve-o forum thread can be found here ( you do have to be logged into the forums to see that link). A link directly to the you tube channel can also be found on the right hand side.

Which also brings me to the end of today's post. Fly as you wish to fly.

Returning

So its been awhile since I have posted here, I've been busy working with the minecraft servers and general home life. Im on the final year before heading to uni so getting the results is extremely important.

Im back to mining in high sec, bringing in about 120 odd mill a day from mining with my two hulks and an orca, and thats been ticking over. I bought a noctis and brutix BPO to not really increase my profits but to cut down on the hauling needed. So a full load of noctises and brutixes would equal to about 1.7 bill in isk when sold to buy orders, the same amount of minerals sold on the market is about 1.5 bill however the minerals do not fit into one freighter load, they fit into 4-5 freighter loads resulting in alot more hauling and when its 23 jumps a return journey to Jita takes ages even when manualy jumping with the freighter.

Ive also took the second christmas present CCP gave us, 60 day trial codes and created two new mining accounts which brings my mining accounts to 4 and my total accounts to 6. Yep 6 last time I posted here I had just created my third account which is now in a hulk and mining away with me as good as my 3 year old miner. So in between I started a new account which now flys drakes with missiles. Both my first accounts are gallente cross trained into minmitar and all my new miners are amarr so I really wanted to find out what caldari ships and missiles are like. So that gives me a mission runner account that I can just jump on and mission if I dont feel like moving my main account to a mission hub.

So that just about wraps it up for this blog post, I am going to try and keep this up to date but if not I'll see you next time.

Small things

So another month rolls by and 800 million disappears from my account to keep my accounts open.
Ive been reluctant to make a new post as there’s simply been nothing much happening, I hoped to have my two new accounts open by now, but I’ve not had time to actually mine the needed minerals to pay for the extra plexs. I’ve spent a lot of my time working on little programming projects so not spent much time on eve apart from keeping my accounts open and keeping them training.
Incarna 1.1.1 was released today and I’m downloading that, but the changes it brings don’t really affect me so I’ve not much looked into what it actually fixes. Little things with the cargo hold and bits like that. My tech 3 ships are still flying backwards but I still won’t refresh my cache as I like the looks of it.
I got this blog listed on eve-blogger.com which seems to have brought some more traffic to the blog which is always nice. That site doe have a lot of great blogs listed, and some that I had never heard of before.

Now as my reader I want to give you some reason to come back and actually read my blog and pass it on to your friends to read, however I do not know what you want from me, so what I am asking is you leave a comment saying what you would like to see me doing with the blog. If you want me to start doing some fiction again I can. I did eve fiction a long time ago and never really got it posted but I could have another crack at it while mining.

Mining mechanics

So people have been complaining for a long time now that mining is boring and should be made more exciting, and CCP have just said "no we like it the way it is people can use the time to chat with friends and still make ISK".
Now I’ve been playing eve for 2+ years now and been mining for the majority of that time, so I can say that I know a-bit about the profession. My thoughts on the matter is that CCP is perfectly right, I like the current implementation of mining as it allows me to work on other things whilst still making ISK. I could be programming, typing up blog posts, watching a film etc. etc. The thing is it allows me to carry on making ISK in a way that I find fine while doing other things that interest me at the same time. Now some people would argue that this is bad game mechanics, that any game that makes you do other things apart from playing that game to actually enjoy playing the game is a bad thing, and I can kind of see the point of that argument however I believe that the mining mechanic currently implemented in the game should not change.
Currently mining is one of the few professions that actually scales well with having more than one account and if mining needed more interaction on each character then the miners that multi box 4,6,8,10+ accounts will simply stop mining with so many accounts which means there will be less miners meaning the prices would rise of everything in the game, now there are some people that will say that if mining wasn’t so boring that many more people would actually do it and drop the prices down, but I can’t see that there would be enough people to actually contradict the loss of the multiboxing miners.

Incarna 1.1 and Ice

So the new forums are being (re)Released, this in its own right should be good, now I did use the forums before they got took down last time and they weren’t too bad there was some glaring problems with them, which really should not have made it into the release they released but CCP did see the error in their ways after a largish security breach was found in the code.
Now I’ve had a poke around the test forums but I’m not yet sure if they have fixed the huge quotation marks that were in the last iteration, for the people who didn’t see them before these quotation marks were so large they were adding on 4 lines of space without actually adding anything into this space other than the quotation image on the left hand side. So hopefully this has been fixed to save some real estate on the screen.
They will be adding some new stuff to eve gate and making it look a bit more spiffy which should be good. Now I don’t use eve gate as a social networking site like CCP hoped I would, all I simply use it for is reading my eve mails on my phone when I'm away from my pc. This I believe is more use then most people use it, however if CCP can do it correctly then I believe that they could very possibly get it to be used how they wish it to be used.

In mining terms it’s been slow. I had my birthday yesterday so spent most of last night out with friends so no mining happened then and before that I was in Wales again so absolutely no mining has been happened since Tuesday night last week, which means in the long run I could very possibly be able to only sub one account this month which isn’t too bad as I can still mine with just one account but it does mean that I can’t have my boosts from the Orca which I still have to buy anyway so currently my second account is just training up till I can get him an Orca to sit in and increase my ISK per hour from 8-9 mill to 14 mill.
I’m also still going to get some more account’s it will just be when I can actually get the ISK in-game to buy two new plexs which hopefully at the rate I’m currently mining should be the end of this week. Now the first two account I’m going to train them into Hulk's. However what I’ve been thinking is after that with me living in high sec the roids aren’t that big and trying to multitask with more than 4 characters mining, targeting fresh roids/ emptying the cargo hold could overwhelm me so which about ice. Now I live in a system with a ice belt so it wouldn’t involve moving anywhere, the roids never pop and all the multitasking I would need to do is making sure the cargo hold was empty into the Orca and then having the hauler warping back and for emptying the Orca's hold so I would not need to warp off the Orca and lose any boost. So after 4 mining account's this could very well be the better idea until I can move to null and get my strip miners on those massive rocks.
Either way hopefully I should be opening two new accounts by next week and tripling my current ISK input within 2 months.

Camping trips and more accounts.

So I’ve been really busy the last fortnight was running the three peaks of Yorkshire one weekend off the Wales the next week and the down to London for another week so I have had no access to a computer that could run eve, so on the blogging front there was nothing to actually say.
Well I’m back now and unfortunately due to my last fortnight of camping I wasn’t able to make any ISK but my accounts time still run out so I’ve had to sell all my minerals to cover two more plexs. So that’s my Nidhoggur minerals gone and I now need to build up my stockpiles again, which means that my plans to move to null have to be moved back while I get some more minerals. That’s one of the set back's Delve is currently not safe and won’t be for a while so I’m going to put off the move indefinitely. So I’m still going to build myself a Nidhoggur but I’m going to put it in a low sec system until I’m ready to make the move to Delve.
Well in going with an Indy persona, industrialists like to have more than one account. I have currently got two a mismatch of a character that can do most things but not well and my second account which is a perfect logy pilot/carrier pilot and is now training for command skills and the command ships. Now this is good as my main character can build and mine but mining with it doesn’t give much in terms of ISK or minerals. Now if I was to get two new accounts and solely train them to mine then my ISK per month can triple. As my carrier pilot can’t even fly a covetor there’s no real need to get him into a mining ship, however he can fly an Orca, which means boosts. He can fly a Rorqual but as I am in high sec I can't use it so it’s not an option.
So this month for the price of two plexs I’m going to be getting 4 accounts which is a blessing as I will be using the buddy program to open up the two new accounts.

Mining

So I believe that the last post is going to be the last post about ranting at the community as that won’t get me any readers. So I’m going to start with what this blogs really going to be about.
Null sec.
This is mainly going to be null sec industry as I am a Indy pilot at heart. But for any pvp action that I get myself into then I will post a comment about that too. I will be following the news and giving my views on them, but I’ll keep these to a minimum unless people actually want to read these.

So yesterday I bought myself a hulk after selling the mackinaw. This alone will boost my mining output, but I also have got my hands temporarily on a orca. Which combined with Trebs great command skills means I can strip 0.5 belts in 5 hours with just a single hulk and an orca. Now I have been toying with the idea of starting 1 or 2 new accounts and getting them into hulks but I’ve never needed to before as I haven’t mined enough but now that I’m going to null sec to join THORN-Syndicate again as a Indy pilot I feel that I could do it. I will just need to make sure that my pc can actually handle it, as its currently just about does 2 eve clients and a Minecraft client.

So yes I will be moving to null to be a Indy pilot, running PI planets again, and making ships sub and capital class hopefully as I will have the skills for them by the time I actually want to move down there.