Faction Warfare

A week before Inferno I joined the Caldari militia and have been having a blast ever since. In my opinion, faction warfare is the most fun thing to do in Eve, especially with the Inferno changes. My reason are there always plenty of targets to engage with, you feel like you are working towards a grander goal, faction warfare alone can provide you with enough isk to live on, and the politics with the local pirates and other entities are fun too. If you have not tried out FW I highly recommend it.

Weekly Update

Hey everyone! Sorry for not posting in a while I've been super busy. I ended up joining a good incursion corp on my main while my alt is still in RvB. My plan is train my alt up to be able to fly a ship that can do incursions and then put my main into either Merc Corp or a Faction Warfare corp to test out the Inferno changes.

Goodbye Hulk

No, my hulk did not die. I sold it! For the last week or so I have been mining on my alt and running incursions on my main. For the first time, both my accounts have been doing care-bear activities. I don't like that. So today I decided I am quitting mining and putting my alt into RvB. Mining just isn't worth it for me anymore, especially when I made 225 mill from 3 incursion runs (Not to mention boring). The only thing I regret is I will be leaving my corp-mates who I have been with for the past 3 months. Some great guys. I may go back there at some point but my goals in the game just dont meet up with theirs right now. Right now I am fitting some Amarr ships for RvB. I have never flown Amarr before so I am excited to try them out. In my next post Im going to post some of the fits Im going to use and such. Stay posted!

Weekly Update

Lately I have just been running incursions on my main. On my alt I have dipped into trying to learn exploration. I'm not doing it for the money but its just something I never really learned how to do. Probing was pretty hard at first but I think I am starting to get the hang of it. I haven't done much mining lately due to the system my alt is in is currently in incursion mode, so there are sleepers at all the belts.

Incursions have been kind of aggravating lately. I feel like there are too many indians  and not enough chiefs. There are always a lot of people trying to find fleets but not enough FCs. I planned on running incursions a lot this week, but most of the time I cant find a fleet. In a few days I will be able to use T2 guns, so hopefully I will get faster invites once I get those bad boys online.

My long term plan is to train my alt up to be able to run incursions and then put my main into RvB again, or another PvP corp.

PS sorry for not posting in a few days, there has been some real life drama going on for my right now. Also stay tuned for my opinion on the elitists in Eve, and why I think they are a scourge on the game.

Incursions

I ran my first Incursion the other day. I really enjoyed it. They are much more fun than any missions and are extremely profitable. I made around 80mill in only an hour of playtime. I am using a blaster fit Rokh fit for maximum dps. I love the Rokh, it is one of the coolest ships in the game. With Crucible it is actually good now too. I'm excited that my skills in hybrid guns are now useful, instead of it being more of a role-play choice.

I only have a few more days left until I can use T2 large hybrids, I am really looking forward to the increased dps. I cant wait to get in and do some more incursions, but haven't had much of a chance. The past few days I have had a few tests in my graduate classes and have been playing one of my favorite games of all time which is Mass Effect 3. Once I beat it I am sure I will be back to playing Eve a ton again.

Leaving Red Federation

So I decided to leave RvB for a little while so that I can help the corp my indy character is in. I just got a new Rokh for incursions, and I also am going to teach some of the people in my corp how to pvp. We will hopefully be setting up and moving into a POS in low sec very soon.

Eve Uni vs. RvB

Continuing from where I left off, I started playing Eve again around the time Crucible came out. I am glad that I sat out Incarna for the most part. From what I can tell, it was a low point for the game. I think now CCP know what their players want and I am really excited to see what they have planned down the road.

Once I got back into the game I went back to empire to start running missions again. After a few weeks of this I decided that I wanted to learn more about certain areas of the game. Around this time I remember hearing something about Eve University and looked them up. On paper it seemed like a really good thing. I really wanted to get a general understanding of everything in Eve, so I decided to apply. For those of you that have never applied to Eve Uni be warned, it is intense. Applying for Snigg was easier than applying for the Uni. Once you finish all the paperwork expect to wait in the 'queue' for weeks. They personally interview every single applicant, to see what your experience in the game is and to make sure you are not a spy. I do not know why someone would want to be a spy in the Uni, but oh well. An interview would be ok if it could be done in a timely manner but I waited in queue for one whole month. During that month I read just about everything on their website and had accomplished just about everything I wanted to get out of joining the Uni. Around this time I heard about RvB through the Uni channel. I looked into it and was really impressed.

RvB is an alliance with two corps and each corp is based 2 jumps from the other. The two corps are in an almost constant wardec. The only purpose of RvB is to get fights, and they get a lot of them. One of the problems I had with Eve was that it was really hard for new pvp pilots to get good experience because of how hard it is to find fights. The typical scenario for a new pvp pilot is to spend hours trying to find a fight, and then get blown up in seconds. RvB does a great job of having constant fights, so now you can find fights in a matter of minutes AND still get blown up in seconds! The good thing about this is you will learn from your mistakes and learn a lot faster because of the much higher frequency of fights. Another great thing about RvB is their application process, which persists of clicking the apply button and being accepted that same day. It is a laid back atmosphere and a hell of a lot of fun.

In the end I have concluded that if you are interested in being a strictly PvE player (which I dont know why you would) you should join the Uni. If you want to be a pvp player join RvB. You could even get the best of both worlds by joining RvB and staying in that while you wait for the really long queue in the Uni.

In my next post I will get into what I have been up to most recently.

Waffles

Continuing from my last story post, Demonic had become a good cap pilot in PL. I told him i was interested in joining Snigwaffe, or Waffles for short. Waffles are the PL training corp, and if you serve your time you can enter into one of the main PL corps from there. He was able to pull the right strings and get me in. 


If you want to learn some elite pvp skills, and want to get to fly with some of the best pilots in Eve, I would highly recommend trying to join them.


However, there are some things to keep in mind. PL is a merc corp, so be prepared to pack up your assets and move. In the three months with the Waffles we  changed home bases three times. My advice would be to not bring too much,that way you do not get bogged down in the logistics.


The next thing to keep in mind is that it is probably not the place for you if you have a large ego. My rule for surviving Waffles is to remember you are always wrong. I never had any problems with anyone because I never tried to argue with people that had been around much longer than I am. Even if you are right, arguing is a bad idea. I saw quite a few Waffles get killed by their own men for arguing with the chain of command. 


I flew with Waffles for about 3 months and had a pretty good time. Their leadership was excellent, and their FC's are spot on. I ended up leaving because I just decided that being a Merc was not all that fun, and very costly. I ratted when I could, but really couldn't sustain myself. In the end I got really busy in real life so I stopped playing eve for a while. I got great experience and I am grateful for people like Jeff Raider for putting up with my noobness back then, and teaching me a lot of great tactics I still use today. 


In my next post I will start to talk about what I have been up to recently, and then I can finally get to recent topics that I have been wanting to talk about since I started this blog!

Weekend Update

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am taking the first part of the CPA exam this Sunday. This is why I haven't posted in a few days. In game I have been mostly passively mining on my industry account while I study. Be sure to check back regularly after Sunday. I plan to post an entry ever other day.

Rediscovering Eve

After quitting Eve in 2006, I continued to keep interest in it. I knew the game had great potential. What decided my to return to Eve was two things, 1) Eve winning all kinds of awards in 2009, and 2) my friend Demonic becoming really good in game.

I remember walking in Walmart and passing a PC gamer magazine with Eve on the cover. I picked it up and began to read how much CCP has done to improve the game. I then noticed that a lot of game review sites were saying the same sort of things.

Around this time my friend Demonic had transferred to the same school as me. I called him up and we went to dinner together. I brought up Eve and we started talking. Apparently, Demonic had stayed with Sylic for a while. He learned how to pvp and became very good. He also opened up two more accounts, an industry account and a capital ship account. He even met a girl from Australia in game that taught him how to industry very well. (She even came and visited one month) He then told me how he had recently joined Pandemic Legion (PL) and he would help me out and stuff. so I reactivated my account.

For the first couple of weeks I just re-affiliated myself with the game, and ran a lot of missions for the Caldari Navy. I was almost able to do lvl 4s when I got bored of missioning and decided to join a corporation. I joined an interesting pvp/pve corp called SOL. There were two corps that made up SOL, SOL Industries and SOL Combat. The reason for this was so that people that wanted to just make money could stay in SOL Industries, while SOL Combat could get themselves into Wardecs and pvp. I switched over to SOL Comabat because at the time of my joining, they were being wardeced in Hek. It ended up being a great time because I learned about how to win in a wardec by making the aggressor miserable.

Once the wardecs ended we did a lot of small gang combat in and around Otou. It was a lot of fun, but I decided I wanted more in the game. I wanted my actions to player a larger role in the game.

In my next post I will talk about how my friend got me into the PL training corp and my great experience in that.

My first experience with Eve back in 2005

"Thank you for signing up for Eve Online! However, you must spend 6 months training learning skills before you can actually play the game! Have fun!" -CCP


I came across Eve online in late 2005, while I was in high school. I had been searching for a game like it for a long time. I downloaded the trial and thought it was pretty fun, and was able to convince my two friends Atheal and Demonic to play with me (those are their in game names). I still have fond memories of us running lvl 1 missions in our Kestrels, but we had no idea what we were doing. We probably would have quit the game after playing for only a few weeks if it had not been for Atheal meeting a veteran player in the help channel (ya, it used to not suck back in the day). His name was Sylic.


I want to give a shout out to Sylic right now. He was a great guy, who went out of his way to help noobs learn how to play Eve. I really wish more people in the game would be like him. He ran a 0.0 corp, but gave us all 10million isk and a lot of guidance. However, the first thing he told us is we made our characters completely wrong and that we needed to start over. Back in the day, you had to make your characters skills just right in order to not gimp yourself (I forget exactly how it works, but I am sure you can look it up). He then told us that we need to learn all the learning skills or we would gimp ourselves. We then soon found out it would take an extremely long time for this to be done. I think that is what turned me off from Eve, but I stuck it out for a little while longer.

After getting tired of running level one missions, we decided to join Sylic in 0.0 in the FATEX corp. We had a nice setup there for a while (I remember ratting in a Ferox haha). It all came to an abrupt end when an alliance full of Russians came in and took over the system (I forget which alliance it was at the time).

The last thing I remember before quitting the game was joining up for Firmus Ixion's (FIX) death. After we lost our space we joined up with them. They were down to one station but had a lot of isk still. They wanted to make one last offensive in a last ditch effort to not die. FIX was accepting any corp, and any pilot to fight on their behalf. I remember just taking Ferox after Ferox out only to have them killed. I had no idea how to pvp at all back then. I also remember the last fleet battle when the FC told us to get in the biggest ship we could fly, fit for extremely close, and go down in a blaze of glory. We accomplished that.

Soon there after, FIX died and everyone moved back to empire. I followed but soon got bored with the game and quit for a few years. The main reason I think I quit was simply not understanding the core game mechanics and a lot of things that were simply not user friendly at all.

My friend Atheal and I ended up quitting, but Demonic stayed on and fell in love with the game. In my next post I will talk about rejoining the game after PC gamer gave it Game of the Year. I will also talk about how Demonic ended up becoming very powerful and respected in the game by the time I started playing again.

I'm Back!

Well here it is, my first blog post about my experiences in Eve online. I plan on using this blog to discuss my experiences in Eve and my thoughts on certain things that happen in Eve Online. This blog will strictly be about Eve online. I decided to write this blog because I am a long time Eve blog reader and have a lot of interesting things to write about. 

Intro
I have two in game characters. One is a Caldari combat character, Fenix Veers. He is my main, with 14 million (m) skill points (sp). The other is a Gallente industry character, Triton Fenix. He is my alt, with 8m sp. I say alt, but I play him like a second main. My two characters are on opposite sides of the map, and rarely interact. I am going to write about my experiences on both characters, and will give a well rounded look at all parts of Eve.


Background in Eve
Eve has always interested me. It is a game where everyone is on one server, and everyone can affect everyone else. It is truly a sandbox style game, and is very life like. I created my account back in 2005. I get a lot of undeserving respect for that. People assume I know what I am talking about and that I have billions of sp.  Actually, I have only been actively playing since 2009, with a year and a half gap until just recently. You are going to come to find out that I am extremely knowledgeable in some areas and a complete idiot wow playing noob in other areas. The reason for this I will explain in other posts.

I plan on my telling my history since I started playing Eve in the first couple of posts. Then I will begin posting on my current activities and my thoughts on certain things Eve related. Here are the different posts I plan on doing to get everyone up to speed on my history.

1. My First Attempt, 2005-2006
2. Rediscovering Eve, 2009
3. Joining WAFFLES (the Sniggwaffe training corp), 2010
4. Breaking, 2010
5. I'm Back, 2011

Stay tuned for the next post where I will discuss how I first discovered Eve, and what happened that turned me away from Eve at first!