Current Situation

Things have been busy again this last week. The launching of Neo Catamites is coming along well and we’ve had some decent looking new members join up. Still looking for more new applicants though, so if any wannabe pirates approach your corp but don’t make the grade send them to us.

As previously written about Larkonis Trassler is running for CSM and will be the first credible pirate friendly member of the CSM if he is elected. Voting has now started so give him your support and vote for Larkonis. You can also see his campaign blog here, and read his latest CSM forum post here. If previous CSM elections are anything to go by he needs only about 700 votes to get a place on the CSM (last successful candidate in CSM1 got 706 votes, and in CSM2 637). I’ve voted for him 4 times and hopefully with most of the Crime and Punishment forum behind him I think he has a pretty good chance of success. No matter what you think of Larkonis in game I’m convinced he is the right man for the job when it comes to representing the occupants of C&P. Even The United members seem to be giving him their vote! lol.

We had a particularly good last week when it comes to capital ship kills with 6 dreads and 2 Carriers on the killboard. In comparison we only lost 1 Carrier, but what started out as an inadvisable move by one of our cap pilots turned into the opportunity to kill 3 Dreads. The more we get of these type of kills the more I can’t wait for my Carrier pilot to be fully trained. Only about 80 days to go until I can use and fit a half decent Archon.

Headhunting

Now I am a Director of Neo Spartans (and my alt a Director in Neo Catamites) I spend a bit more of my time thinking about how we can move forward and expand. The priority at the moment is getting the Neo Catamites membership growing so that someday we will have a good supply of experienced new pilots for Neo Spartans. But at the same time I think it’s important to be on the look our for pilots that already have the skills and experience that can come straight into Neo Spartans.

I come into contact with other pilots I admire all the time in Eve, and there are a fair few I’d like to recruit, but they are generally happy where they are. Or are they? You see, the problem a lot of the time is how do you go about approaching pilots to see if they might be interesting in joining? It’s particularly difficult and sensitive if their current corp is friendly to your own. The risk is that by poaching some of their best pilots some bad feeling between the friendly corps is created. Even worse, they might be a CEO in their own corp, or a Director which would certainly take some persuasion to get them to switch corps.

To be honest I don’t really have a way to deal with these situations yet, so I’d be interesting in hearing what some of my readers think. Also, feel free to speak with me if you’re looking for a new pirate corp ;o) Although not actively recruiting at the moment the Neo Spartans are always on the lookout to recruit talented and experienced pilots.

Neo Neo Spartans

The Neo Spartans have for some time had minimum requirements for potential new recruits to meet before being allowed to join. It means that we have kept a decent standard of members who all have some experience with piracy before they come to us.

The problem however has always been that we have had to turn a lot of applicants away. 15M skill points means that a player less than a year old has little chance of joining us. Sure we have always made the odd exception for the right people (me included, so maybe not the right people after all) but it always seemed a shame that we were losing some decent pilots because of this rule.

So in order to address this problem we have created a new corp that goes by the name of Neo Catamites, and we have joined them with Neo Spartans via the Laconian Syndicate alliance (Name has nothing to do with our CEO Larconis – Larconia is a region of Greece that has Sparta as it’s capital). You can see a bit more detail of what it’s all about in our recruitment post but essentially Neo Catamites has a much lower skill point requirement of just 4M, mostly PvP based skill points. The idea is that pilots will have enough of an idea about PvP that they can join in straight away without anyone needing to explain what a warp disruptor does, but are still needing to gain experience in the art of piracy.

Members of Neo Catamites will frequently work with Neo Spartans and eventually it’s members will get transferred over once they make the grade (whether they have 15M SP or not). Members of Neo Catamites won’t be able to coast along in the corp without taking part however, as members will also be ejected if we think there is no chance that they will make the grade.

Onatoh not so bad afterall

When the Neo Spartans first moved to Onatoh I hated it. I was used to the way of life in Otou where we could go out and solo in the belts, camp a busy gate, or roam around in a gang depending on our mood. Life in Onatoh is very different. For weeks I barely made a kill, but in these last 10 or so it all seems to have clicked back into place.

For those of you that don’t know Onatoh isn’t located on a busy pipe, so gate camping is usually a slow occupation. No-0ne is stupid enough to come here to rat in the belts, and it is just two jumps away from the Faction Warfare system of Tama, which mean a lot of blobs. For me and the way I was used to working it seems like a nightmare system to have to live in. Now however I have warmed to some of the charms on Onatoh.

It’s difficult to imagine being anywhere else than a FW zone, getting hit by a 30+ man blob and still win outnumbered 3 to 1 (there were more ships there than appear on the killboard). We also benefit from much more interesting roams as from here we can get to 0.0, Old Man Star and Amamake without having to leave the comfort of lowsec. The quality of kills has also been much improved with Neo Spartans being part of 5 Carrier and 3 Dread kills in the last 8 days (with no cap losses).

On balance I think I have now made the conversion from Otou to Onatoh. The elements that I have left behind in Otou have been replaced by new ones in Onatoh, and in time I’ll probably find a system near by the will allow me some solo PvP when I want it. Admittedly Tama is a pit of a system where if you make the mistake of docking up you’re unlikely to get your ship out without the assistance of a friendly gang outside, and I’m certainly not keen on bringing my supplies through that way in a freighter (which means a long way from Jita to take the safer route), but Onatoh certainly has some charms of its own.

War in hiatus/Take more care

The war with The United has ceased for the time being. The United’s tactic of napping everything that moves has meant that either we were getting blobbed when their friends were online, or they remained docked up when numbers were anything close to approaching equal (for equal read 2-1 in their favour). It’s a shame it has come to this as we were really looking forward to taking on The United head to head and were sure it would be pretty equal even though they have more the twice the number of members that Neo Spartans have.

Basically we have had a better offer and have moved our operations out of Otou. But mark my words we will be back to sort The United out at some point, when they least expect it, and hopefully when all their ‘friends’ have got bored with having no one to fight. It’s only a matter of time before their naps turn on them for entertainment instead (they were fighting most of them before the napfest).

Instead we are working with some other pirate corps in an area around Caldari and Gallente Faction Warfare, which is completely different to what we are used to. For a start the FW guys like to fly around in large gangs, usually in small ships, but sometimes large BS gangs. It means we have to be far more careful of what we are doing when out and about on our own.

A good example of this came up last night. 4 or 5 of us travelled in the direction of Old Man Star to see what fights we could get. We were in a mixture of frigate and cruiser sized T1 and T2 ships and the journey was a little quieter that we were expecting. Eventually we had some fun with the locals in Heydieles before deciding to return to our home system.

We had to jump through a huge gang fight on one of the gates but after that the journey was pretty uneventful again. I needed to take a bio break and docked up in Deven while the rest of the gang continued home. It was when I got back to my ship and undocked that I became careless .

Forgetting that my destination was still set to Old Man Star I warped to the yellow gate on my overview. As I arrived on the gate there was a frigate on the gate. The guys on Vent were saying that the systems ahead were clear and I just wanted to get back to base however so didn’t really want to get a global counter again. I jumped right through to….. Fliet….. It was at this point I realised my mistake and I was going the wrong direction.  I’m not familiar with Fliet and didn’t have any bookmarks there so as I arrived on the other side of the gate I looked for something to warp to before returning to the gate and get on my way home. Before I had even uncloaked something bad happened.

A FW fleet arrived on the gate and before I knew it there were 20+ ships right on top of me. I realised that the was little point in me trying to warp away as I would surely die so I maintained cloak as long as possible in the hope that they didn’t realise I was there and jump through the gate. I guess the frigate I’d seen on the other side however had been their scout and they waited. Eventually I could wait no longer before my cloak was to expire and made a break for it, but unfortunately for me they had a lot of fast locking ships and I was toast in a matter of seconds. Bye bye my T2 fit Cerburus, I barely got to know you.

My undoing was a mixture of my lack of care with a good dose of bad luck by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had I warped as soon as I jumped through the gate I’d have been in warp before the blob had landed on the gate, but I was wrong footed by needing to think about the best way to turn around and go back through the gate I had just come through. Of course I shouldn’t have been there in the first place and it is a good reminder of the importance of checking the destination before undock. A bit more care and I’d have saved myself from losing a 200M ISK ship.

Blog changes.

Just a quick note to say that I have tidied up my list of links to other blogs. I have gone through each link (which I do from time to time to see what others are writing) and removed links to blogs that have not posted an Eve specific post in the last 4 months. In the future I will been keeping an eye on new blogs added to the blogroll but maintaining my own list of links on this criteria.

If you are the writer of one of the ‘dead’ blogs I have deleted which later comes back to life then let me know and I’ll re-add it to my links.

I’m planning a design change to my blog in the next week or two so expect to see further changes.

Lowlife CSM

Wow, have I been slack or what with my blogging!

There has actually been a lot going on with Kaya and Neo Spartans lately, but nothing interesting enough to write into a blog post about (I wrote a few and they sucked enough for me not to publish them).

Biggest news for me recently is that I have been made a Director at Neo Spartans. Business as usual to be honest except that now a have a few extra tools available to support my fellow Pirates.

Anyway, on to what I really want to write about…

The Council of Stellar Management (CSM) is in the words of CCP:

A democratically elected representative council manned by players elected by players.

But up until this point the interests of the darker side of eve have been mostly unrepresented on the CSM. Hopefully though this is all about to change.

In recent weeks a number of candidates have shown themselves to be interested in representing the interests of the ‘underclass’ of Eve. I’m talking about the Pirates, Privateers, Mercenaries, Griefers, Ninjas etc. who prey on others to earn their ISK (or sometimes just because they feel like it). Up until a few days ago however it was looking like all we would get are joke candidates – Captain Pompous and Death4free (sorry mate but it’s true), or people that don’t have the dedication to see it through – Tchell Dahhn. But now we have a proper candidate that all us lowlifes can get behind to represent our interests. I present to you Larkonis Trassler for CSM.

Now I’m sure you’ll think I am biased here, what with Larkonis being my CEO and everything, but if you had known him as long as I have then you would know that he is an intelligent, articulate and motivated individual. You only have to take a look at his Manifesto to see that he has some good ideas to present too.

As a proportion of Eve players us shady types don’t make up a very large number of pilots, so for any C&P candidate to be successfully elected we need to get behind just ONE person to take our views to the Council. If the vote is split between multiple candidates then none of them will be successful and we can expect another round of pro-carebear changes to further curtail our way of life.

The War Has Begun

So our vacation in 0.0 has been cut shorter than we intended. The reason is that since falling out with The United one of their Directors has gone too far by making real life threats to one of our members, and now we just can’t wait to deal with that problem the only way we know how. By destroying them.

Last night one of our scouts back in Rancer noticed that The United were trying to take down some noob’s POS. We saw it as an opportunity to get some action on The United’s Battleship fleet, and if we were lucky their Cap fleet too. Unfortunately for me the POS was coming out of reinforced at 1:30am and my boss doesn’t understand if I come in late to work after a night of Eve.

Once The United had their Battleships in place to knock the life out of the POS the Neo Spartan cap fleet jumped in to try and take down as many of their fleet as possible. Unfortunately they were too scared to bring their own cap fleet out to confront us, so we had to make do with 6 BS kills for 2 BS losses of our own. That puts the totals at 8 kills vs. 2 losses since the falling out.

There are going to be some interesting times ahead for the Rancer pocket. Now we are back home I expect the number of engagements to become more numerous, and most piracy is on hold for the moment until we have taken care of business.

It’s interesting to note that we have had offers from other corps asking to help us smite The United. It just goes to show how disliked they have become in the Eve universe. I think we can win this fight on our own however. They may have more numbers than Neo Spartans, but they just don’t have the class to see it through. Their perma gatecamping style means that they are ill skilled in other areas of the game.

0.0 Vacation

The Neo Spartans have been noticing a decline of traffic through Otou of late, so it was decided that we would go on a Vacation somewhere else in the Eve universe to allow some time for Otou to become ’safe’ again and encourage some new traffic. Then we fell out with our closest allies (or rather we fell out with the main leadership of their Corp) as well which gave us another reason to look for something different to do for a while (“this will be dealt with” in good time).

That somewhere else was 0.0 so that we could do something different from the piracy that we were used to. We could rat up sec status a bit from -10, and have the luxury of killing stuff without the intervention of gate guns, and make a bit of ISK too.

I was hoping to write a series of exiting account of my time in 0.0, but a week on and I’m finding it to be a pretty dull place, and I’m wondering what people find to do out here other than rat and carebear. It seems that small gang roams are pretty much pointless as about the only time you see other ships to shoot at they are on massive gate camps. Even if you do feel like you can take them you just know that there is a force of their allies 3 times the size a few jumps away.

I wonder what in it for the guys that gate camp as well, as I can sit in systems on one of the main pipes and not see another person for an hour or more. Do they just sit there and do virtually nothing for hours at a time?

I’ve been in 0.0 many times before, but this is the first time I have spent an extended period there. From my experience so far I’d say 0.0 has little to offer the PvPer unless they want to be part of the large scale 0.0 alliences, or are out to roam with the intention of killing as much as possible before inevitably dyeing (which when in empire is what we normally do on out 0.0 roams). I just don’t see the attraction of staying out here long term, and I’m looking forward to getting back to lowsec piracy.

Gank Gank Gank

So here I am at 5 minutes to 10pm on a Saturday night. Location Sendaya, intention Ganking. It’s the Scrapheap Challenge Gank Night 13.

It’s the first time I’ve been on one of these, and I’m not really sure what to expect. All I know is that we are all supposed to be in Drakes (although other BC also allowed), and the idea is to roam through as many lowsec and 0.0 systems as possible killing everything that we find. Basically if you come back with your ship intact you’re doing it wrong.  All I’m hoping for is to survive more than the first 10 minutes of the event. 10pm arrives and there are 111 pilots in fleet with more latecomers to join no doubt. Apparently these things never set off on time.

We’re off and running at 10:25pm. Not too late I suppose. Looking around there are now about 120 ships in fleet. When we land on the first gate the blob of ships on screen looks like a force to be reckoned with.

First Gate

On our very first jump we are presented with 5 ships on the other side camping. They must crap themselves when they see 120+ BC jump through the gate at them. The gank fleet quickly disposes of the 3 Battle Cruisers, a cruiser and a Heavy Interdictor. The engagement literally lasts about 10 seconds. Unfortunately I’m not into the run of things yet and forget to switch on my Sensor Boosters which means I fail to even get a lock on any of the ships. On the plus side I have survived the first jump of the gank night, but not everyone has made it.

We make a few more jumps and then we’re in 0.0. It’s on the next jump where we land in a bubble that I realise that I have mistaken fit a Afterburner instead of a MicroWarpdrive and I get left behind. I have to decide if I carry on and risk getting left behind every time we hit a bubble, or go back 3 jumps to buy a MWD. I decide to go back and get a MWD, but the fleet stops for no-one and I get left several jumps behind by the time I have gone back and back out into space. I’m trying to jump and warp as fast as possible to catch up. Fortunately the fleet is stopping at each gate while someone scouts ahead, so I’m only out in 0.0 on my own for 5 or 6 jumps before I catch up. I notice in local that there a few other stragglers too, so I’m not completely alone.

Whenever a fleet member drops connection they are blown away in second, before the FC has a change to shout ‘Don’t shoot!’. So far we have killed more friendlies than anything else. The pace of the fleet is also picking up as the scout gets a few systems ahead. It seems about 20% of the fleet gets left behind as they miss the fleet warp each time we jump into a new system, and we start noticing a bit of lag as we travel through system after system. Not really surprising with 120+ ships jumping at once.

1 v 120 - A Pilgrim dies to overwhelming odds.

Some info come over Team Speak that said a gang of 40+ ships are following up behind us, but the FC decides to carry on regardless. Sounds like they are all small ships. As we move through 0.0 we encounter the odd small group of ships, but it’s mostly quiet until we get blobbed by a large-ish gang of small ships. It is unclear at the time if it is the gang that was reported to us earlier. Normally a gang of BC would have no chance with killing these small ships, but due to our overwhelming numbers we managed to catch quite few of them before we get bored of chasing them and move on.

At about 23:40pm the FC calls a 5 minute break. Up until now we’ve only made a few kills, and I gather from other Gank Night veterans that still being alive this long is pretty unusual. A few jokes are made to the effect that the FC doesn’t know what he is doing if we’re not dead yet. We continue after the break but we are still yet to find any big fights, or die horribly.

We start heading towards Providence with the intention of getting CVA to get a fleet up against us. They are pretty slow to do so as we get several systems inside Providence before there is much activity in their intel channel (we have spies watching). Eventually at about 1am we get what we want, and a large mixed CVA gang appear in AY-24I. Primaries are called but I quickly realise that ships are dyeing before I get lock on them, so I order my overview by distance and lock up everything I can, closest first. It seems others are doing the same as there plenty of ships taking damage that have not been called primary.

Surprisingly I mange to survive longer than most, but eventually succumb (and lose pod) after about 13 minutes. The battle only goes on for another 2 minutes after my death. I’m not going to go through all the kill stats, as you can see the carnage on the Gank Night Killboard for yourself. I personally manage 22 kills.

From start to finish the gank night lasts for 2 hours and 47 minutes. From what I hear from other fleet members the gank going on for this long is virtually unheard of, particularly when about 80% of the original fleet were still there for the final showdown. I feel my first Scrapheap Challenge Gank Night went very well, and I found it most enjoyable. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for the next one.