Screen shots

just a few shots of what we've been doing

Camping

a trio of drakes

roaming

Death, with relish.

This is my entry to the Inspired By Images Of Eve Competition 3. More details and links to all entrants can be found at Starfleet Comms.

After camping the 4 gates into our systems for a few hours we had managed to kill a few cruisers and a BC, nothing shiny and the drops were your standard T1 junk, only good for recycling, life as a pirate can sometimes be a hard and frugal existence, so a kill is a kill, and you salvage what you can. We had all been hoping for that juicy prize, the expensive faction ship, with dead-space mods and a pilot with some good implants in his cranium who would pay us lots of ISK not to send him home on the podless express.

Excitement rose when a CNR (Caldari Navy Raven) appeared at our low sec entry point, our cloaky eyes alerting us with a squeak of tension in his voice, we primed our weapons and points, but the flashy warning on the gate from hi-sec obviously changed his mind, he sat there contemplating for a while and then turned his treasured carebear beauty around and warped away. We cursed on comms and settled back to waiting.

There had been a rifter on d-scan for some time, and the guy didn’t seem to be moving. I had gently suggested that I swap out to a probing boat, but the FC had decided against it, too much effort for such a small reward. He obviously wasn’t at an immediately obvious celestial such as a belt or planet, we knew he was either in a deep safe, mission or anomaly. The FC finally relented for lack of juicier targets, and I was given the go ahead. I docked, gave myself a quick once over in the mirror of my quarters, if this went well I may reward myself with monocle from the Nexus store.  I reshipped into my Buzzard covert ops probing ship, normally a Rifter is hard to probe down, but I had a good feeling about this one.

As my little frig was catapulted into space, I dropped sisters combat probes, set the four of them at 8AU scan range, in my usual diamond formation and warped them over to the area of space we knew him to be. I got a hit, but a weak one, lowering the scan range and setting my formation more precisely got him to 76%, one more shift of variables and pop….100%, there was my warp in point.

I warped to him at 10km, still cloaked, blood beginning to pump, to find him perfectly stationery, sitting just off some weird looking asteroid, home to a deserted landing pad. I manoeuvred my ship so the target was directly between me and planet 4, which was 30AU in the distance.  The FC gave orders to the interceptor pilot, "warp to planet 4 and then warp to Reli at 10". Perfect. I sat cloaked, observing, sometimes you have to take one for the corp, this was one killmail I wouldn’t be on.

In came the inty like lighting, landing directly on top of the rifter, within seconds he was locked, pointed and webbed. The Rifter’s only reaction was to start slow boating towards a distant planet, an unusual reaction under the circumstances, maybe he was hoping the lock would drop and he’d be able to warp out.

I’m still cloaked and just turn my ship and slowboat away from the scene, activating my camera; this would be something worth watching later. The FC warped in the boys and they quickly reduced his noble frigate to space dust, surprisingly they even caught his pod and the FC opened a comms line up to him. “Got implants buddy?” …..no response…..strange. Then WTF!

A Widow black ops battleship uncloaked 30km away and within seconds 30 stealth bombers appeared from the ether like bats out of hell. Shit, this was not good for the fleet, the FC popped the pod, “fuck him, the devious little bastard, why is it always a trap?”  The FC had done everything by the numbers, everything was perfect, “Christ, here comes another clusterfuck” he didn’t sound happy. The FC screaming on comms, “GTFO” A few of the guys were laughing, …’but they are only frigates boss”, they were still quite new at this and didn’t realise the damage 30 stealth-bombers loaded with torps could do.  “Lets just kill the black o….”

”Shut the fuck up…get the fuck out, or I’ll pod you myself” he screamed.

I sat cloaked, camera running as we lost one ship after another. The guys were pointed, and sensor dampened before they knew it, the Widow unleashing electronic warfare hell, disabling targeting systems rapidly. Unable to lock this little swarm of frigs orbiting at 30km, the torps raining down like righteous justice, such a beautiful but deadly light show. The BS went first, a maelstrom with large artillery is useless against this fleet and the widow already had 3 ships locked out with ECM.  Faster than we would have thought possible, the BCs then started melting, damage from 4 or 5 SBs each is a mighty amount of DPS, they quickly followed the BS. This was not a good day for the corp; only the interceptor pilot and I were still in our ships. The FC was raging in that completely silent, if I open my mouth only filth will come out, kind of way.

Most of the guys got their pods out and redocked, for some post match analysis, which would not be a courteous affair. I docked up, got out of my ship and stepped from my pod. Feeling the usual disorientation and that awful sense of being deaf and dumb, when one goes from god-like perception and neural-boosted reactions, to normal human being; I went for a beer. I needed a drink, my hands were shaking and I couldn’t talk on comms or look the other guys in the face right now, I knew I wouldn’t have the self control to not betray my feelings.

The beer tasted great as I looked out into the dark, eye-sucking infinite beyond, a small smirk starting to appear at the side of my lips, my hands slowly calming. Maybe one day…. Maybe…. when I’m about to quit the corp, I’ll tell them about my alt, and his sacrificial Rifter….but maybe not.  

Religiosa

A crazy few months in Eve

So where to start: wow what a few months.

Last post I'd been bumming about in low sec, running anoms and generally making decent isk and not losing too many ships.

After a 'we're recruiting' blog post by Rixx Javix of Evoganda and Lucifer's Hammer fame, I decided to throw in an application, knowing that my 8 kills and 33 losses over the last 2 years were not gonna stand in my favour. Amazingly they accepted me and I was suddenly living the life of a low sec pirate. Quite a different life than anything I'd done before obviously. Ships are now all cheapish fits, I only really fly frigs, cruisers and BCs as my main PvP boats, given that I'm a Caldari pilot through and through, this causes some ridicule, apart from the stalwart drake, which nobody laughs at unless they are a bit mad. I've lost about 6 drakes, 1 tengu, 1 dramiel and a maller I bought for giggles. More importantly I suppose, my kills now stand at 145 kills for 46 losses; so things look a lot better: oh.....and I have a "-10" sec status! Get In! never thought I'd be at this end of the criminal system in Eve. I used to hate pirates!

http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/combat_record.php?type=player&name=religiosa

Lucifer's hammer went into melt down because Rixx had RL issues that were more important than running a corp and alliance in Eve, and I jumped across to our other alliance corp "Black Sail Anarchists" and havebeen there for the last 3 or 4 weeks. Things are going well, I think. We have a new alliance 'Yarr Collective' with the Sinners, we do lots of gate camping and the occasional roam. The most fun roam so far was a frig roam where we caught this fella in a belt http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=13669954 and best 1v1 so far has to be this one http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=13721469

Apart from my own activities of course, Eve has undergone a very stormy few weeks. Incarna arrived, pitchforks and torches came out, people started quitting the game left right and centre, Perpetuum got a massive (temporary) boost from all the disgruntled Eve players. The NEX store started selling monocles for 1.5 billion isk, pilots started foaming at the mouth. A certain CCP news-letter did the rounds and pilots started sacrificing children to the gods of games to bring down wrath on all CCP employees, various CCP people then made a very poor attempt at addressing the mob's concerns. Huge gangs of people camped trade hubs and spent days shooting an invulnerable statue in Jita. The forums were filled with vitriol and anger on an hourly basis. And.....through all of this, I carried on playing the game, I carried on ganking noobs and getting into fights around our home system. I played with Captain's quarters for half an hour, then turned it off to save time on docking and changing ships etc. The door 'screenshot' is an insult in this day and age, I'll say no more.
I'm loving playing Eve atm, I look forward to signing in and seeing who's online, what's happening in our neighbourhood and I look forward to undocking and going at it with others.
Religiosa update: 40+ million SP, about 1bill isk in the bank, no steady income atm, PI a mess a 18 jumps away, research agent 20 jumps away in Hi-Sec! Had to sell most of my ships in hi-sec as i couldn't get them out and into low-sec once my sec status went west. Oh and the slightly modified 'new' me below:

Fly deadly

Reli

The New Look Me

So, it's been a while...

I've been playing, just not posting...very lazy.

I have an excuse; wanna hear it?

I've moved country, 3 times since my last post (China, England and now Borneo)

What's happened...well Incursion came along. Meh...can't be arsed with incursions, if I wanted to do missions I would, doing missions with lots of people you don't know.. a good number of whom are gonna be ninjas, gankers and scammers..nah. Go ahead do them, enjoy yourself, but you won't see me there.

We got new portraits... here's my main's new visage.

As near as i could get him to the real me. Though my crows feet aren't that bad.

I've also moved corps but not my playing area. I moved out to the low sec entry to Providence some time ago, thinking the rest of my corp were coming with me; a handful did, the rest just joined the Industrial arm or stayed in Hi-sec.
So I'm now UTC +8 and very few of my corpies were ever on, and if they were they were somewhere in Hi-Sec running missions or mining.

Got chatting to an Ex corp mate and we talked about the possibility of me joining his corp and after a few days, it became reality.

So Amarr Border Defense Consortium is my new home, based on the border of of Provi. Got my first EVER real kill the same night, which I took as a good omen.

I have something like 33 million SP, can fly all Caldari t2 frigs and cruisers. and am generally very happy. Need to improve my PvP skills, but that  will come with trying, and at the moment I really am trying.

Reli out, Fly Dangerous ppl

BTW if you don't read Kane Rizzel's 'A Pirates Perspective' you really should, it's one of my fave blogs, along with many more in fact. If I can't play Eve...travelling, working etc...I read about other ppl playing it. Some of my faves are down the right side of the page, but they are sadly out of date...I'll put that right soon...promise.

Kali

Here she is, 1.5 years in the longing for, dreaming off... the age of Kali the destroyer has come.....tremble....run....nothing will save you now... the darkness is upon  you....

Widow...Black ops battleship...fitting...fuck off, I'm not telling you

Character Update

Sometime a few days ago, I passed 20 million SP. Never thought I'd get this far, I remember being a complete noob (still a bit of one now) and chatting with the old timer who had 30 and 40 mill SP, thinking, 'OMG' how will I ever go head to head with these people and win, and the answer is (most of the time) you don't, but I now have lots of skills, 36 of which are at level 5, I can take pain and dish it out. Caldari Frigs 5 finishes in 3 days and then it's cov ops, electronic attack frigs and all the other fun fun t2 frigs. can't wait.
I'm still with the same corp (alliance anyway) that i joined 15 months ago, and doubt I'll ever leave them. We are getting better and better we've divided into specialties, we have training programmes and graduation etc, a great bunch of people and some good leaders.
Eve life goes on, though I really need a kick up the arse to start PvPing, I'm crap at it. Stupid really, it's a game, what can I lose?

Aaaarrrrrghhhhhh!

I was amazingly calm, I should have been punching myself in the face, I should have been smashing the keyboard over my head and putting my very foul mouth to full use. Instead I slowed my heart beat down, relaxed, got my pod and implants to relative safety and then logged and watched the Alliance Tournament for a while, before logging back on and getting my pod back home to settle into a slightly less expensive ship.

It all started with Mericus in Aspire main chat announcing WH op. Stupidly I thought "why not?" been looking for something more fun than low sec ratting or mission running, here it was.

So loaded the hold with all 4 dmg types of missile....it had been over a year since I was last in a WH, forgot what they tanked etc. so took everything including nanite paste, and mods to swap in / out depending on the circumstance. On the way out to the op start place, I had a bit of low sec to traverse, so fitted a cloak and sisters probes.

We found an occupied C3, but no-one was at home, so we went in (just the 2 of us) and cleared out the 2 anomalies. Not a single nanoribbon in the place :( We then started exploring the other exits, and found a C4 entrance from the first WH.  Now....Meri was in a Legion and I was in a Tengu, we knew that trying to do a C4 with just the two of us would be hard, so we called for re-enforcements. Yumirion and Devinaty offered to come in BSs. So we killed time and waited for them to arrive.
Eventually they were at the low sec entrance to the first WH so Meri went off to lead them down the rabbit hole. I waited at the entrance / exit of WH No.2

Now I should explain, AT8 was on, I'd missed the previous days matches and was waiting for the Final days matches to begin, anyway my mind was elsewhere and not really paying attention, as I was watching 2 screens at the same time. I had relaxed spamming the d-scan.
In hindsight....what a ridiculous place to wait. It was like sitting on a nullsec gate with a target on my ship!
I had removed the cloak and probes for more launchers, so wasn't even cloaked up.
Out of the corner of my eye, a flash of orange, Shit! too late, 4 ships had landed at the exit, 2 BSs (I think) and two frigs. Locked in seconds, scrammed and webbed and then as I hit the A/B and Shield booster my ship melted. 550 million isk worth of ship lost in seconds. Why didn't I just jump through? I don't know, I panicked at first and my first thought was get to one of the other BMs I'd made around the sys. Wrong choice! I got my pod and my Implants out of there, back through low sec and to my home.
Gutted, but Mazzy Dark et al, well done, GF. Hope next time I can make life more difficult for you.
Remember folks, be alert, especially in low sec / 0.0, your ship and your life depend upon it.
I suppose I'm grateful I've been put back on my toes.

So after the sad loss of my never flown Tengu, I ground my teeth for a while and eventually stopped feeling sick. Ran level fours for a while, sold some plex and had the money to buy something shiny. I had been training for the Tengu for the last month or so, so bit the bullet and flew to Amarr, Jita and it's contracts and suicide gankers can go to hell. I flew over, bought the shell and the subsystems separately, taking corp mates advice on fitting etc. and here she is. Flown home this time, fully fitted and rigged. 540 million or there abouts, for everything, bar the dread Guristas booster waiting at the home station that was due to go in.

Her name is 'Om Namah Shivaya', all my ship are named after Indian deities or have Indian themes. More on this later.
I'm not telling you the subs and mods, if you know about T3 ships, you can work it out.

A Tengu dies at birth

EVESo, finally 20 days of training cruisers 5 came to an end, popped strategic cruisers in for lvl 1, 2 and 3. Had a good think, how to get 500mill of ship out of Jita? How to get there? Pod over? Or buy a disposible frig and slap a mwd in, for that super fast, semi-concentrating AP, with occassional MWD stabs to keep it intersting, trip to jita. But... It's my first T3 ship, never fitted subsystems, have seven waiting in Jita, which to fit? Which mods? Then try them out in Jita? Jita!!? I think not. So I need to get it somewhere I can experiment without drawing every suicide ganker from every toilet bowl in the area. I'll haul it out in my badger II, yes I thought I'd out fox them, shitty little t1 hauler that anyone a few days old can fly, nothing to see here, move along, just hauling my shitty worthless loot about.
So into my lovely little badger I slid, ECM across the board in mids ( I know, I know!) WCS in low, I thought I'd be safe as houses. Some tedious, but growing in excitement as I neared jita, jumps later. I arrived at the monstrous place, noting the swarms of oranges around the gates, and the occassional red. Docked up and quickly grabbed my precious cargo, 1 shining Tengu and 7 subsytems, into the hold, set course for sehmosh, and got the hell out of there. Cleared the first gate, and as I initiated warp to Urlen gate someone started to target me, I warped after about 1 sec, so it was no prob, I didn't get chance to see who it was, overview shimmered as usual in and around jita due to sheer numbers. I noticed a few orange dudes jump through as I jumped on contact. The grid loaded slowly, as soon as possible I initiated warp, the further from jita, the faster, the better. Then, before I could even see who was doing it, I was being targeted, I didn't panic, cos I had time, didn't I? As soon as he locked, id slap on the ECM and be out of there. Sadly, he instapopped me, one volley ready to melt me upon lock, good tip, activate guns before lock! That was it, heading spinning, afloat in my pod! Get the pod and the implants contained in the soft squishy thing inside, out of there! That done, the nausea kicks in, and the depression, I tell my Corp mates who are a mix of sorry and incredulous at my stupidity. I log off.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Urlen

Welcome to my blog

Welcome,

 I used to include stuff about Eve over on my other general blog (fruit60.blogspot.com), but as I quite often get my students to visit my blog, and I've started getting the urge to blog about Eve more frequently, I've moved the old posts over here and will be using this exclusively from now to blog about the game.

Hope I can maintain the momentum, I'm entering a new phase of gaming, thing are about to get a lot more interesting I hope. I have money and can afford to replace ships and fittings, this means I'm will to start taking a lot more risks and therefore probably have a lot more fun; we'll see.
I noticed that some of the posts didn't come across (pics especially) very well, I'll try to sort out those glitches ASAP.

Fly recklessly

Reli

State of play

Well, here I am, a little over 1yr and 1 month old, with a little short of 16 mill skill points. I had a few months complete downtime while my marriage fell apart and new people came into my life, and now manage to play a few times a week. In 7 days time I'll be sliding into a T3 Tengu, and am very excited after seeing a Corp m8 (NGResonance) tank a mighty difficult lvl4 in one and not go past about 10% shield dmg. Awesome, dps is a bit of an issue. I was all set to go for a marauder (golem) but have been side tracked. The marauder is a week or two away, once I decide to go for it. I have 620mill in the bank and a tengu and seven subsystems waiting in Jita for next week, that I got relatively cheap via a contract. All subsystem skills are already at lvl3, cruisers 5 finishes in 7 days, then strategic cruisers to at least 3 and I'm ready to rock.
Btw, joining my Corp (Aspire)  was the best thing I ever did in eve, I may not agree with everyone all the time, but I'm still here, knowing what I know, thanks to all of them, we get harder and less of an easy target by the day.
my Drake (Bahut Shakti)

End of term and holidays

Well the end of another long term and boy do I need a break.

We were going to catch a helicopter to the north east of the island, sadly that changed to a small plane, then the small plane decided it was going to go a day earlier than planned (while we are still working), because the day we were supposed to go, is good Friday, and the pilot decided that being a Buddhist, he'd like to celebrate Easter. We only bought the tickets a week ago, and obviously good Friday was decided at the last minute.
I lost my cool, as you can imagine.

So no plane trip to the North East. A bus journey to the beach for a bit of RnR before jetting off to Bangkok next Wednesday. Really looking forward to the next two weeks off.
I may blog from Bangkok depending on whether I've got anything to say or not.

Will be putting cruisers level 5 in the queue before jetting off, and upon my return I'll have a few days more training before I can get in my recently acquired Tengu.

A return to Level 4's

This week has seen Religiosa return to doing some level 4 missions with an old friend Harry (do you feel lucky punk?) Calahan. It must be said he did the majority of the tanking and the DPS and I just went along in my Raven (got BS lvl5 completed last week) to help. We ripped through some good ones and earnt ourselves lots of iskies and LPs. It was really good to get back into that kind of mental action again, it was good to see how my tanking and DPS had improved since I last flew my Raven.
I still prefer the tank on my Drake, but my BS lays down a lot more hurt.

My Eve Space

A lot of the Eve bloggers have been posting their Eve Spaces. Here's mine. I'm lucky if I get any eve time at the moment, but if I do here's where I play.

What you're looking at: one 22" and one 19" screens (this screen set up for EVE was an experiment, I don't play like this normally (horizontally split; gives me neck ache! and my ship is always cut in half ). Wireless mouse and keyboard. Quad core processor, 1Gb PCIexpress Graphics, 4Gb Ram, Sound Blaster Audigy sound card. 1 x 120Gb HD and 1x 500Gb HD. It rocks. Oh, and...of course...XP Pro. Considering going to Windows 7; any advice?

Eve Quarterly Economic Newsletter

http://ccp.vo.llnwd.net/o2/community/QEN/QEN_Q4-2009.pdf

Sorry, I had posted this originally from my phone and it came out a bit cryptic.
This is the quarterly economic report for Eve, prices, numbers, etc. Interesting if you're into that kind of thing.

Why I love Eve

Crazy Kinux on his blog wrote:

Eve Blog Banter Special Edition: Why I love Eve

Welcome to this special installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to me. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

When you’ve been roaming New Eden as long as I have, it almost feels like home. That’s how familiar it has become over the last 5 years. Not that I have done everything or touched every aspect of this most amazing of virtual world, far from it, but it just feels as though it’s always been there. And always will be.

Whether you’ve logged into the game every day since its launch in 2003, or you’ve taken one or several sabbaticals from your capsuleer career, you’ve always come back to New Eden don’t you. Why is that?

We know the EVE Online Community is unique in so many ways, and that EVE Online is like no other MMORPG out there. But what makes the game special for you?

What is it that makes this particular virtual world so enticing, so mysterious and so alluring that we keep coming back for more. Why is EVE one of the very few MMOs to see a continuous growth in its subscriber.

To put it simply: Why do you love EVE Online so much?

Eve is an MMORPG, based in space, a universe of thousands of different systems, inhabited, shaped, changed, managed, exploited and loved by people like me. Here's why it rocks...

1. It's hard, when you start playing it's not a learning curve; it's a learning cliff (as one of the developers of the game called it). It's challenging to get familiar with, the brain works out a lot while you play Eve. It keeps growing and becoming more complex, learning is endless; I like that. I don't want to pay £50 for a game I can blitz in a few days of intense play.

2. Someone worked out it would take 13 or more 'real time' yrs of play to train all the skills the game has to offer, and more keep getting added. This means that everyone who plays has different skill sets, they choose different paths, all players are unique in what they can and can't do; that's amazing when you consider there are in excess of 30,000 players online most days.

3. I've been playing for 10 months , I'm still a noob in so many ways, I like having something to aspire to ( I'm a member of Aspire Corp for that reason). When you meet players who been playing for 6 yrs or more, they are like gods; but even they are afraid sometimes, there's always someone out there who will eat you for dinner.

4. The first time I went into a PvP fight with my corp, after weeks of abuse and intimidation we had decided to fight back, I got into my best ship ( a caldari drake battlecruiser) that had taken me weeks to train and save for. Excited and nervous 12 of us went hunting, hours passed while we tracked down and chased three of the Corp members who'd war decked us. We eventually found one sat at a gate, alone, and we engaged. My heart thumping, sweating and truly terrified of what was about to happen. He had a tank of the gods, his two mates in battleships warped in within seconds. About one minute later we'd lost five ships, mine included, and were running for our lives to gates and stations. Yes we lost, yes I personally lost my ship in about 15 seconds ( it felt like hours), yes we ran scared, but it was amazing, breathtaking...wow, I was hooked. At the time I knew nothing, I had no comprehension of how they'd even done it to us, so easily too, but I knew that I wanted to learn. They tracked us all down later while we sat in a station licking our wounds and counting our losses, AND THANKED US for a good fight! And they were serious! One of them gave me a skill book he 'tongue in cheek' said I'd need; he was right.

5. The people, the community, my Corp mates. People come and go, leave the game, move corps or just go off solo exploring the Eve universe, those that stay are like old friends, I'll probably never meet them, or know what they look like, but friends they are. And what a diverse bunch, scattered across the globe, different cultures and languages all coming together to share something wonderful.

6. The graphics are lush, the screenshot is a real in-game pic, this is what I dreamed of 26 yrs ago sat in front of my Commodore 64 playing Elite.

7. I can do what I want, go where I want, be what I want. I can mine, manufacture, trade, explore, build corporations, run missions, act as a courier, act as security and most importantly... Blow stuff up, in a spectacularly blinding fashion, that is very satisfying indeed.

Get online, come join us, you'd be mad not too :-)
Religiosa ( in game character name)