Monday, September 12, 2011

The Kut

My last Axazia clone has been "replaced." Look here for the reasons why.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Final Post as Axazia

Well, I sold my character. For roughly twice her worth. I got called an idiot and a scammer in my sell thread (here), yet I got almost double the appraisal price. So, yeah, Im a pretty hardcore idiot, right?

Yeah, I sold her with 1-5 slaves and 6-9 slots with 5% implants in a jump clone. Yeah, she can fly Amarr cruisers, including the heavy and strategic ones, as well as Minmatar frigs and cruisers. And Battlecruisers for each of those two races. Dont forget that Im only 2 weeks from an Amarr freighter and can already fly an Orca as hauler or support. Speaking of support, not amazing, but decent leadership skills.

All in all, this is roughly 7-8 months worth of actual training that was watered down by being so generalized in a variety of skills and careers. She can mine with a Retriever, she can lead an ops with either an Orca or Legion, and she can manufacture ships. The downside to being able to do all this is that I get stomped compared to characters of the same age due to their mostly specialized training. This is the reason I decided to sell my character and start anew.

I know most of the rules of engagement. I just fly stupidly and have made many mistakes in my adventures. With this seed fund; I plan to fly more intelligently, focus and stay as close to my skill plan as possible, and make some profits along the way. I will definately be moving to Low Sec, with a small amount of assets this time, rather than everything I own. I have a bad habit of having dscan open constantly and spamming it midwarp while looking for targets.....Yet, Im in high sec space.

This will all change with my new blog that I will be announcing soon-ish. I say soonish because I just made this new character to be my main about two to three weeks ago. He's currently spec'd for a more general training skill plan to get the basic but required skills out of the way. Ive decided to train into corp management as well to have my own corp/alliance to assist me in starting my own wars or recieving them. Pluses and minuses to doing so, but thats a post for another time.

Anyhow, I leave you with the knowledge that tomorrow, the player you know as Axazia will be controled by another entity. A Goonswarm entity at that.

Monday, September 5, 2011

War Retracted!

Well, wars are fun, until you start losing assets. Things like PoS's, ships, and most importantly, time. When you camp your opponent in their hq, they dont come out most the time. Your time is being wasted, mostly because your opponents arent even at the keyboard trying to play. Ships and modules are replaceable when you have some industrial backbone part of your corp supporting you. PoS and their modules, however, are a decent sized investment that is a hard nut to swallow sometimes.

All of these things happened to the Independant Miners Guild. Not really independant as they're part of an alliance, but w/e. Anyhow, after taking out several of their ships the other day, our leadership quietly orchestrated our pos siege. I say quietly because somewhere, someone in Ubuntu is a spy. Proven by switching from an insecure Vent server to a secured Mumble server, we were able to deny all of the blatant spies and now we only have the moles to dig out. We'll get you, but for now, Im talking about something else.

With our enemies morale lowered due to the stomping they recieved, they decided to have a 5-8 member fleet against a Tengu at the Akhragan gate. Im not sure what exactly happened, as I caught the tail end of it from warping in in my ship. I saw the Tengu jump through the gate, and with me landing at 100km, I cloaked up. Yes, I had a cloak on my ship because I was out'n'about in space. I hadnt used my dscan so I warped in blind. Why had I not known of the enemy fleet before, you ask?? Well, first, the Tengu pilot was in a channel by himself, so his yells for help fell on deaf ears. Second, I was the only one out in space at the time and I was not actively dscanning. I was just jumping around to see if anyone I had seen docked would undock.

On topic, the Tengu pilot made it back to the gate easily with about 50-60% shields left. As I cloaked, the enemy fleet warped out. They must have seen me and thought backup was coming shortly after. It wasnt, but they thought so, and docked up. Worked out for me, because I doubt I could have taken on the three drakes and harbinger along with whatever else they had by myself for long enough for the tengu pilot to jump back in to help. Not that it would have mattered, he wouldnt have known cuz he wasnt in the correct channel with everyone else. =P Ten minutes later, he was though once he realized wtf had happened.

Later on, we got our battleship fleet together to hit up our enemies PoS. Yes, we sieged a high sec PoS. Why do that, you say? A total waste of time, you say? Well, yes, yes it was. However, with the way their modules and defenses were setup, we just couldnt resist and decided to at the very least, incapacitate all of their defenses and reinforce their PoS. Plus, we're at war and we can. So we did. Being in high sec, we were hoping the pos didnt have any Strot to fuel their reinforcement and we could have destroyed it. We were'nt that lucky though and it seems they had it filled to the brim with Strot, because the reinforce timer was 1 day 17 hours. Damn those medium towers.

Today, when I logged in, I had a notification. Well, well, what is it, I say to myself? Opening the letter, it boldly declares that the "Guild has retracted their War Declaration on Ubuntu Inc." Well, thats fantastic. 24 hours until the war is over, several hours less than what we need to blow up their PoS. Im glad we won this war, but Im sad they gave up when they took a small amount of damage to their assets. Oh well, maybe Ubuntu leadership will see fit to continue this war.

I, for one, hope they do decide to do so.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

New Things for Ubuntu

Some of my corpmates have gotten riled up about me posting so soon after a battle (for both times that I have) and so Ive been asked to limit the amount of details or wait a week or two afterwards for the politics to work themselves out. I offered a compromise of giving me some of the politics info for delaying my posts. Well, Im posting today with one bit of info that has nothing to do with politics and is more of a guide for my corpmembers to figure out a few new shiny things. As with every new software available, there are bugs, and I will explain work arounds as I get to them.

First, as most members probally have a bookmark for, you will load up our home page (http://ubuntu.truthonly.com/) From here, you will either register or login if you already have. Scrolling to the bottom of the screen, you will see a few links; click portal. The rest, we'll get to later. Personally, I prefer this bar of links at the top of the screen for conveniance due to me using most of them frequently and in quick succession to get quick updates.

Anyhow, this portal link will take you to the core of info about our members and how our corp is run. You have several links off to the left and on the right you will see a chart of the top 10 sponsors in Ubuntu. Sponsoring is required to complete the "Quests", or training, for the corporation to succeed in both PvP and PvE. Things like bumping, fitting, how to use and get jump clones, aquiring the corp standard overview settings, ect. Its not required, but strongly reccomended you complete these. I hate Minmatar ships and have been slacking on getting the Amarr version for bumping, so Im currently stuck on that quest =P

I reccomend doing several Quests in the scholarship section, completing as much of the initiation section as you can, up to the ceremony, which is done in groups. Another quest that should be done quickly, is th toolkit quest. With this sponsorship, you will aquire all the tools needed for fleets (like vent, mumble, ts3), soloing, learning fits, and setting yourself up with a plan to train skills. That last part is important as alot of new players train skills for things they may not enjoy, eventually letting the SP go to waste and not being used. Getting a sponsor is pretty simple: Ask in corp chat for someone to check that you have added the correct info, have them take 10-15 mins to train you the basics of each quest, and then they will sponsor you once they are happy you have learned the training to a competent level. Afterwards, you can sponsor other corpmates for the same training, giving you practice as well. And we all know practice makes perfect!

Once you've completed the toolkit quest, you will need to go through a couple security features that have been implemented recently. The first of which is the "Voice Comms" security pass. Ill go into the different layers of our security system at a later point when the kinks get worked out. Once on the Voice Comms page, you will scroll down and hit the button for "Request More Access". For now, you will want to choose Level 3. This is one of those bugs. Level 3 is for allies of our corp, but level 4+ doesnt recognize us as members yet. But I digress, send your request, which will show up in the "Whispers" subsection of the forums. This allows all corpmembers to see who is progressing with security status and assist in noticing weird and spy like activity. Cuz we'z h8 dem spais!

Once your security status has been processed, you will now have a list of access tokens. Just follow the steps. For me, the instructions were in the middle of two sets of tokens. I tried the bottom part as it was in the order of instructions, however, I must have missed a line and the tokens didntwork for me at first in Mumble. I tried the top list, which was more organized and readable. This set working, I was able to jump into a secure channel on Mumble. Go me! And go you; if you followed the instructions right!

For the last part of my post, Ill go through the different levels of Security. There are seven, kinda like the seven gates of Hell or something. I dunno. Anyhow, without further ado, the security levels!

Level 1: This is for guests of our corp. Like all the newbs that we invite to our lobby channel, who are interested in joining Ubuntu. This is for them to talk to us on voice.

Level 2: This security rating is for blues outside of Alliance or corp. Id like to keep these to a minimum, but Im not da boss =P

Level 3: Allies. If you are in our Alliance, you get this standing. Feel special.

Level 4: This is for corp members who have joined but not yet completed the initiation quests. Yes, we trust you more than we trust alliance members. Feel more special.

Level 5: Full members of Ubuntu get this security status. Full members have completed the Initiation quests. Go us!

Level 6: This status is for our full members who have completed our low/null sec training and are ready for deployment to these areas. Eventually, we'd like all full members to have this standing. Which may need a change of security levels at that point =P

Level 7: This is reserved for the leaders and directors of Ubuntu. They are not special. They are sheep and we follow them as wolves do.


I have also taken the liberty to create some Ubuntu Corp killboards HERE. Because I didnt like the battleclinic ones we were using previously.

And thats all, folks! For now anyways.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

First Skirmish

Logging in today, hoping for some action outside of a 1v1 and station games. My wish came true after a lil while setting up and waiting for others to get their things situated. Here's how it rolled out:

I log in, with HQ camped by several enemies, join the fleet advert and briefed on which to target first. Undocking, we all focus targets. I overheat my guns while targeting and start unleashing torrents of pulsing blasts of laser plasma. We went for the Raven first, but I was able to lock up some other ships at the same time, so I tossed drones out on them. Watching this Ravens hp deplete quickly thanks to overheating guns, he soon popped. Along with some others and I tried to grab the pods, which wasnt happening with my large ships locking speed.

Anyhow, Raven popped, I switched to the Thrasher, wiping out his shields in one hit. Taking out his armor with the help of the rest of the fleet, I then switched to the Caracal which popped so quick, I dont think I got any hits in. There was an Arbitrator, which was escaping quickly at the sight of his friends and corpmates getting blasted to peices. Cant blame him tbh, it was caranage. We caught two of their pods throughout the battle, and we only lost one cruiser; which tbh, was due to a locking error and brought in Concorde.

While scooping loot and salvaging wrecks, a Slicer jumped in. Sadly, I missed out on this as I had docked up to repair my damaged mods. However, our rifter pilot caught the slicer and he very quickly blew up. His pod got caught fast, and we expedited his trip to the med bay. This entire skirmish happened quick. I mean quick. From my warp in to the end of the fight where I left to repair, it was only a 3-4 minutes. Alot faster than I expected a battle to be. I like fleet combat a lil bit more now!

The biggest kill in this skirmish was the Raven, at about 100mISK. Below is the killmail link and I hope to continue our fights in this way.

Raven

Thursday, September 1, 2011

All is Fair in Love and War!

Yay, we're at war! A second corp dec'd us and that starts today also. Been continuing our ganking of random hulks, trying to focus on the IMG guys, but they been ganking ours back if they the get chance. So its kind of a war with them, just not official.

Ive found that war in high sec is similar to living in low or null. Gotta keep dscan up, gotta watch local for hostiles, ect. I also find that people using neutral toons are extremely annoying. Not only do they get the advantages that having a second person there for intel, they also get the fleet boosts if they have any leadership skills, making a solo engagement, not really a solo engagement.

As I connected to the pod network, other corpmembers were chasing down a target. Cpt Boomstick in a Taranis and his alt repper in an Oneiros. He's obivously looking for a fight, so I convo him and see what he actually wants. Turns out, he wants a good fight like me. We're both pretty hesitant though, due to being at war and our lack of trust in the other. So I mention in fleet chat that Im going to go 1v1 him. I get denied and told to wait a bit. Im waiting in station bs'ing with Cpt Boomstick as he's chasing down my corpmates, and warping off when the blackbird jumps in each time. No intel sharing from me and him sharing his locations, just the rapport building to keep a 1v1 open as an option.

Eventually, he gets caught. Dropping into hull, his alt repper jumps in, gets one cycle off, and warps out. I had got on grid to see this happen and was only 23 KM away from the alt when it warped in. I had him locked and had clicked my t2 warp disruptor just as he warped off grid. Damn that lag! Switching targets to Cpt Boomstick, he warped out before I finished locking. I didnt catch how far away  or how fast he was moving from corpmates, so Im not sure how he got out of scram range. With this, his alt caught a timer, so he docked up and waited it out. While everyone else in fleet was getting situated to get the repper with a suicide gank as he undocked, I redocked and continued my conversation about a 1v1.

With Cpt Boomstick in an interceptor that likely had no tank, I asked what kind of ship he'd like to duel with. He didnt care, any ship up to bs. Offering Assault Frigs (because I was itching to try out my new vengeance fit) he claimed to need to jump over a few to get his ship. So, off he went. As he went on his way, I let the fleet know my plan of the 1v1. He was taking too long, so I asked if he had a BC nearby (also wanted to try out my new Harbinger fit). He did and we agreed to meet up in Ashab, but being so busy, we jumped over a couple to Oskashu or something.

This was a good fight for me, a costly one, but a good one. I engaed his Hurricane at planet 2, 20km out. He closed range quickly, and I saw he was using 425 AC's. Popping out our drones, his were obviously better being tech 2. Knowing I wouldnt be able to hit them, I sent my drones on the first one his. Not doing much, I turned them back to my main target. While doing this, I had switched back to my INMF crystals and forgotten to turn my lasers back on for a good 3-4 seconds. Fixing this issue, I ate through his shields pretty quick, but I was at about 80% armor. My cap booster kept using up its charges and turning off, so my inexperience with using them showed in this fight. I turned on my MWD trying to set range, and I did for a moment while it was running, but my stupid cap booster turned off again, causing me to eat through alot of my cap, down to 40%. I still was able to stay cap stable with all my modules going as long as the booster held out, but without it turning back on by itself, I had to keep paying attention to it; which diverted attention from keeping range and I fell back in under 3km. With his 425's doing mostly full damage at this point, I was getting low on armor while he was about 50-75%. Knowing this was a losing fight now, I aligned to a Celestial. Without looking to see which one I chose in the right click menu.

Well, It so happens that I chose to align to my current planet. So when my ship popped, with me spamming my warp out key, I didnt move. I figured it was my UI not responding as it does sometimes, so I had to click my celestial tab in the overview and click a new spot to warp to. Doing this made it so my opponent snatched my pod. Son of a bitch! Now its either ransom or lose my pod. So as soon as I saw that disruptor hit me, I asked if he'd ransom my pod or draw out the kill. Being that I honored our 1v1 by not having any corpmembers jump in (even though I had 3 nearby just in case he wanted to be tricky too), he chose to honor a ransom. I asked how much and he said 100 misk, of which I didnt have due to just buying a shiny new Providence earlier in the day.

Offering 50 misk instead, I got offered 90 as a final price. Well, thats a small price to pay to save one billion isk of implants, so I paid it, dropping my funds all the way down to 2 million isk. Yay for insurance, because that made it possible to pay the ransom. Whatever, good fights were had and we bs'd for a moment more before release of my pod was done and I warped to a gate and headed home.

I really enjoyed this fight more so than fighting in a frigate. The main reason is that it lasted long enough and wasnt at a frantic pace to make sure everything was done right and missing things that I wouldnt remember later. I was able to slow down and see my mistakes as I made them. I also do no like buffer tanking. Its nice to see those high resists and ehp, but it doesnt matter much if he can just slowly chip away at me faster than I can him. Ill be looking around for an active tanking harbinger soonish, and I think I will keep a neut instead of nos. I was able to drain him dry of cap and he claimed to be jumping back and forth from zero to barely enough to keep his modules running. So that made me happy, but with him using capless guns, it didnt matter much. I need to work on my module management and keep focus at the same time on keeping range.

All of my faction mods were gotten from LP, so those were a huge loss; and I build my own harbingers now, as long as I have minerals. So overall, this wasnt a huge loss for me, even though it may seem like it. Im sad I lost, but practice makes perfect. With the slower pace of the midrange ships compared to the small class of vessels, I think I will learn more by doing pvp in the bigger ships. Plus I enjoy them a tad bit more. Just in case though, Ive still got 5 vengeances ready to die.

Killmail

And remember: !!!!YOU CANNOT WARP TO A PLANET YOU ARE CURRENTLY AT, EVEN AT 500KM!!!!

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

"Anti-Pirate" Does Not Actually Mean Anti-Pirate

Ubuntu Inc. is awesome so far. I mean, I had my hesitations due to the anti-pirate sentiments. Most of those standings were more due to being part of the CVA roleplaying alliance, but my corpmates; we're out for blood. This comes in many forms; be it from being the dominant corp in a syste to just killing everyone.

Well, we've begun our campaign to be the dominant corp in our home system. This system is roughly 4 jumps from Amarr, has come to the attention of several other mining corps, and has plenty of traffic. We have taken on the first part to establishing ourselves as the boss of this system by getting rid of the other miners. We are ganking their hulks. Seriously, any hulk we see, if we have enough people online with enough dps output, we fleet up and destroy their ship. This has created issues with other corps, obviously, as 200 mISK loss to some gankers is bad. Oh well, it means I can get my low sec on while in high sec and I dont even have to leave home to do it. Awesome!

Now, the downside to this is that we are becoming what we are against, or better to say, the alliance, is against. Sort of. This is where it gets tricky. They dont want to fight and be killing people, but they want to roleplay EVE. Killing and ganking and hi-sec YAR'ing is roleplaying in EVE. So we get to piss off other people and do so with the blessing of our anti-pirate alliance. Another downside is that eventually, we will either clear the system of opponents or we will have so many we wont be able to do anything.

Either way, Im glad to be doing some pvp, whether its high sec, low or null. I think I prefer the solo pvp aspect more, but there is very little solo pvp due to people bringing in or having support alts off grid that fleet combat has become essential and almost required. So Im getting myself some small gang and fleet experience developing alongside other capsuleers who are new-ish to EVE pvp. Works out because it is awesome fun. Awesome fun is ganking hulks. Another awesome fun moment just happened as I logged in, so I missed the full fight. However, the kill and the victims fit made me happy.

Please bear in mind that this victim is a War Target, and was baited into a fight with a Rifter, resulting in the following killmail:

Victim: Sippowitz
Corp: J5 Industries
Alliance: Unknown
Faction: Unknown
Destroyed: Dramiel
System: Ziona
Security: 0.6
Damage Taken: 3028

Involved parties:
Name: Zealot Nagah (laid the final blow)
Security: 0.5
Corp: Ubuntu Inc.
Alliance: Lonely Maple Conglomeration
Faction: NONE
Ship: Rapier
Weapon: 220mm Vulcan AutoCannon II
Damage Done: 2070

Name: Nos Sectus
Security: 0.9
Corp: Ubuntu Inc.
Alliance: Lonely Maple Conglomeration
Faction: NONE
Ship: Drake
Weapon: Scourge Heavy Missile
Damage Done: 530

Name: Kitteh Nagah
Security: 0.4
Corp: Ubuntu Inc.
Alliance: Lonely Maple Conglomeration
Faction: NONE
Ship: Drake
Weapon: Scourge Heavy Missile
Damage Done: 428

Destroyed items:
1MN Afterburner I (Cargo)
Corpse (Cargo)
Warrior II, Qty: 3 (Drone Bay)
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Stasis Webifier I (Cargo)
'Limos' Rocket Launcher I (Cargo)
Small Capacitor Control Circuit I
True Sansha Power Diagnostic System
Republic Fleet EMP S, Qty: 1060 (Cargo)
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I (Cargo)
Thorn Rocket, Qty: 41 (Cargo)
Republic Fleet EMP S, Qty: 106
Shadow Serpentis Warp Disruptor
200mm AutoCannon II
Dark Blood Small Nosferatu
Small Polycarbon Engine Housing I
Foxfire Rocket, Qty: 918 (Cargo)
Small Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I

Dropped items:
Sansha Copper Tag (Cargo)
Warrior II (Drone Bay)
Gistii B-Type 1MN MicroWarpdrive
Damage Control II
Thorn Rocket, Qty: 41 (Cargo)
Republic Fleet EMP S, Qty: 106
200mm AutoCannon II
Warp Scrambler I (Cargo)
Overdrive Injector System I (Cargo)
Gistii B-Type Small Shield Booster
Gistii B-Type 1MN Afterburner

Look at all that faction stuff!! Im sad the Small Nos got destroyed because I would have liked to get that onto one of my fits, but tbh, Im surprised this pilot flew this ship with that fitting. You would think a 2006 player would have the experience required to not be tricked into a trap like he was, especially while at war and without backup corp mates nearby.

Personally, I dont like his fit. Using autocannons, he's fighting in falloff almost the entire time and his nos is not helpful outside of 7.5 km. I thought Dramiels were kiting ships? He has the dual prop, giving him the gtfo ability, but if everything else is short range, why would you use the long point? Other than stopping someone from running away as they see you jump in outside of 30km, which is closer quickly with the mwd. With the high speeds and bonused tracking though, he wont have an issue hitting people as they may have hitting him.

Either way, this guy was baited and trapped and paid a hefty price for being overconfident during a war. Dont worry buddy, Ive been there too. Of course, you didnt have much of a chance with a few battlecruisers dropped on your skull.