Apparently torpedoes do not work on frigates

After adding the post today I flew some more anoms. Nothing interesting NPC wise, but in one I saw a wreck of someone's Nemesis. Which is apparently a Stealth Bomber. Why would anyone try to run a high-sec anomaly, composed of frigates and destroyers only, in a Stealth Bomber? I though for a moment about looting or salvaging their wreck, but forgot if salvaging triggers the suspect flag, and I unloaded Salvagers by mistake from the ships cargo hold. Good thing I noticed that, so far salvage from faction spawns was marginal, but you never know. Anyway, I didn't really want to risk losing my cruiser in highsec, or taking the security status hit, so I left that alone. It was interesting, at least.

Running the shadows

Last week I even got invited for L4 missioning fleet by a mostly random person and didn't get horribly murdered. Apparently EVE is not quite that bad as some are trying to give an impression it is. Not that the gain was that much greater than soloing L3 when split between three people. Also micro jump drives with sniper setup seem broken mission wise, not that missions are that well though out in the first place in general. And I suppose it is not possible to kill quite everything in three minutes without full T2 setup with very high support/drone skills.

I finally reached 8.0 standing with Federal Administration, and have my jump clone. I mostly forgot why I wanted a jump clone in the first place. More wormholes, I suppose. Including going down the chain, just to see how populated are systems without k-space statics. Or dropping a clone into deep low/null sec, although of course not sovereign nullsec. It might be just easier to go there normally. I have planned training a covert operations frigate, but that is still weeks away, especially since I want some battleship skills just for completeness. Because I am mostly tired of missions right now.

Tried hitting some anoms. Apparently sunday morning is not a good time for that. Or maybe I just got unlucky, but I have seen maybe five total. No faction spawns of course. One each of a "Forlorn" and "Forsaken" hideaway though. Those should really be more common, then it might be worth it to run anoms regularly. Of course, highsec is not supposed to be particularly lucrative. I need to go through lowsec a bit more, and see how quickly the pirates actually arrive.

On that note, I played my Faction Warfare alt a bit more. I gave up on actual fighting after I got shot down with T2 weapons by "neutral" pirates twice last time, fitted a cloak and went to see how that goes. Got seventy thousand LP in maybe two hours while reading a book. In a system without stations you can just keep the cloak turned on the whole time there is anyone in Local, most people will just d-scan the plexes, see no one there, and leave after a few minutes.

I am still confused at what the timer is doing exactly when the only ship there is my cloaked ship. I think I have read, and I am fairly sure I have seen, the timer going up when no one is at the plex. But I am pretty sure in some cases it froze, and in others it kept on ticking. Strange.

Not the most riveting gameplay, to be sure, but pays ISK-wise more with comparatively much less attention that anything I can do on my main. And that's at Gallente at tier 2. No wonder the side at tier 5 overflows with farmers. Not sure what I need that ISK for, though. I guess I planned to buy some PLEXes with real money, dual train the FW alt to frigate competence, and get some actual Warfare in Warfare, which would need ISK to pay for the ships and fits.

Flying under the lasers

So, during the week I created a new character and switched the training queue to it. Accumulated around two hundred thousand skill points in basic frigate operation. Gallente, because I know at least basics about their ships and it near the base of my main character, which saves training and operating the hauler on character in faction warfare. Transferred some ISK, put together an Atron fit as good as I could with so limited skills. Which is probably not optimal anyway, but I don't really see a way to improve it.

Today, that is, Saturday morning local time, I flown around the FW area trying to do some plexes. I have not seen a lot of militia pilots on either side. Mostly, there is what appear to be typical between one and five neutral pirates of lowsec, which apparently have nothing better to do than attacking low level FW pilots. Well, to be fair, it involves glancing at local every five minutes or so, so its not as it is a waste of time as such. Although wouldn't most pilots running complexes just run away, when six year old pirate drops on grid?

I had three frigates with fittings prepared. The first I lost when I decided to charge the pirate who warped on grid to see what happen. Or, well, first to warp off to station to drop ammo, since I had way too many reloads. Mission running habits. Then returned and promptly died to T2 rockets.

With the second frigate I got lucky and actually found an Ammar militia pilot running a plex in a system with no pirates, I suppose because it had no stations to idle in, and actually managed to catch and destroy them. They were few days older, and could not hit me with their beam lasers, since I fitted for a blaster brawler. And then literally seconds later a pirate entered the system, or actually entered a bit earlier, but warped into the plex seconds after I got my first PVP kill, and destroyed my ship. With T2 autocannons. I'm beginning to see a pattern here.

The third one was the last one I had a complete fit for, so I tried not to risk it, fly around the area to see what is going on, not much apparently, although it might be the time of day, and run away when someone hits the plex I try to sit on. Not very interesting.

Where do the pirates get the money for all the T2 equipment anyway. And why don't the plex gates lock out neutrals. I mean sandbox and everything, but if they limit ship types… Well, frigate level T2 equipment is not actually particularly expensive anyway. I mean, I actually finished about three plexes in various systems before I got hit by a pirate, in one case around ten seconds before, which even considering two of those were defensive means I could buy and fit faction frigate with full T2 fit. And I couldn't use it, because the FW character doesn't have the skills.

But, after playing around in EVEMon is see that I can get the skills to use all those things in less than a month, and after two-three months of fully focused frigate training the solo frigate capability seem to cap out. Of course, that is more than half the time I am playing EVE at all. But then MMO are supposed to be long term. I don't want to suspend the training on my main, which is not very focused but I want to get some battleships or something, so it will have to wait until Odyssey anyway. I might buy a plex or three, and train it that way. A second account might be marginally cheaper, but I still don't want to mess around with character transfers. And definitely not committing to paying for two accounts.

Although I wonder if that makes an actual difference. There thing about PvP in EVE is that it doesn't really matter how much your ship is worse than that of the enemy, since once you are in point range there is no running away. And then percentage points matter, and all five skills six year old characters will still kill my twenty something million frigate, and then what is the point? I suppose I could ran away only from multiyear characters and hope the others are not purely specialized in frigates.

Diminishing returns

Didn't post for a while, but I still play EVE occasionally. Didn't have as much time as I would want to. Not doing anything particularly interesting. I have 7.74 standing with a corp I'm doing missions for, and I even checked that it does have medical facilities. Not particularly sure what I want to do with Jump Clones once I have them, especially since I don't have very high level implants, but it would make me feel better.

I am kind of at a point where I have more ISK that I do know what to do with right now, but not enough to just spend it on big ships, or PLEX, or waste it trying to PVP. Especially since I don't particularly want to PVP as such, and there is nothing, as far as I can tell, in normal lowsec that can be achieved in a ship cheap enough I could afford to lose multiple of them.

I have an idea though. I saw than in Oddysey they are adding an option for dual training on the same account. Which seems like a good move on CCPs part. There are likely many people, like me, who are either too lazy or unwilling to commit to maintaining a second account. Or too lazy to just register a second time. Lowering barriers for people to spend their money is just good business practice.

I definitely don't want to pay for a second account full time, and don't make nearly enough ISK to plex it. But I could drop a PLEX or two on an alt on the same account. For example, I was somewhat interested in Faction Warfare, but do not want to sink faction standings with Empire factions on my main. So, creating a FW alt is an obvious solution. And I played around with EVEMon, and a pure combat character flying disposable ships can be trained very quickly.

In fact, I might just create that alt soon, train it for a few days pausing my main and fly some basic fully T1 frigates to see how that works. If I get constantly blown up then I can just buy a lot of those with the money on my main, but the FW dungeons NPCs are supposed to be trivial, unless what I am reading is from before the great relatively recent rebalance. So nominally FW should be achievable in that. Which is something.

So, that's the plan. Assuming I have a block of time to play EVE, because in the burst I had so far since the beginning of May I'm not really motivated to do more than a mission of poke the planets. I though about finally joining a player corp, but same thing applies. Oh well.

Faction spawns are real!

I did more anomalies. Still not very efficient as far as ISK per hour is concerned. Although if more dens or hidden hideaways spawned it would be better as far as bounties are concerned. Or maybe they spawn, but people finish them quickly, and just don't bother with adjectiveless hideaways and refuges. Of course unless the chance of faction spawn depends on the difficulty of the anomaly, then more difficult ones would be actually worse for faction spawn farming, since they take more time. The probabilities appear to be low enough that gathering enough data by a single person would take a lot of time.

Not that ISK matters that much right now, since there isn't really anything that I could spend it on that I could use. Waiting on skills. I should probably join a corporation or something, since the way this is going I will lose a sense of direction fairly soon. Because, well, I could try to go for soloing L4 missions, but really, what is the point?

Anyway, I finally got a faction spawn with a faction drop. Not a great one, but at least it proves that they happen. A tag, some faction rockets and an explosive shield hardener. The tag is basically worthless, there really should be some sort of a sink for those. Why are data centers one time use? Seems sort of pointless. The rockets are, as all ammo, in too meaningless quantity to be worth anything. I don't see why they even bother to put them in loot tables, they should drop by ten thousand at least. The hardener is worth two million ISK at Jita. I put it for six locally, because you never know.

Those all are all Guristas stuff, because I flew into Caldari space to check out how long flying to a system where a corporation I am thinking of maybe applying to takes. Also I probably should do some missions for Caldari to shore up the standings. They are still effectively positive thanks to Diplomacy skill, but I don't really want to lock myself out of parts of the map.

It turns out it is not that far. Especially considering I hit every anomaly along the way I located. Including drone encounters, which I read are pretty much worthless, but we shall see. Or not. Such is the way with low probability events. Anyway, I am not sure if actually joining a corp makes much sense considering how irregularly I get to play.

Guristas npcs are noticeably more difficult than Serpentis. I might not have much experience, but it seems that ECM is way worse than most other forms of electronic warfare. Especially considering Serpentis use sensor dampening, which does almost nothing if you attack at blaster ranges. Also missiles are really annoying when I rely on certain degree of speed tanking on my Thorax. I beat three Guristas Dens, but it took quite a lot of time, since I had to keep them at range and kill them with drones only. Probably should be using a Vexor, but I really like how Thorax looks.