Phoebe: Bones

CCP has a new dev blog out featuring stuff coming up in Phoebe.  There's a lot of things of moderate interest to me.  But then there is this:

Data sites get better reward balance and a variety of new items will be possible to find in these exploration sites. Data and Relic sites found in Null Security Space will also be present in wormhole Class 1-3 systems. An upcoming blog will describe the changes.

(My emphasis.)  This means for the first time there is a reason for unarmed frigates to come into wspace to seek their fortune... and also to be killed by me!  Yay!

Also, scanner window separation:

there will be separate windows for Directional Scanner, Scan Probes and Moon scanning.

Huzzah!

Of interest to everyone: UNLIMITED SKILL QUEUE!

in Phoebe you will be able to construct and start training skill queues of unlimited time length.

Finally, not in the dev blog but via Nosy, there is a very interesting rumor:

Cloaked ship decloaking others on SISI.

I'll be testing this tonight.  If this is true, it's another godsend for me.  [UPDATE: Just tested.  Yes, two cloaked ships decloak each other.]  Imagine it: you see probes in a system you've already scanned down.  So you warp around to each wormhole sig at zero, trying to find the one the guy is scanning next.  If you uncloak, it's because the other guy warped to the sig at zero.  He uncloaks too, of course.  For me, GTFO if he's in T3; engage and destroy if covert ops.  Should be particularly fun for T3s.

First time I've been excited about a new release in a while.

Another Massacre

It's corp night.  That's the night we get together as a corp to run PVE sites in C4 -- usually -- to earn ISK.  Since we got a C5 static in Hyperion, C5 is now also a possibility.  We got our latest incarnation of our PVE fleet ready to go last night.  So, tonight we are hoping for a good system.

I log on.  I expect the guys to appear in an hour or so.  But I am on by myself right now.  This is wspace, so there is no gain without scanning.  Let's see what we've got in the home system.  A bunch of new sigs since last night.  Only two gas sites have persisted, but there are five sigs.  This is likely to mean we have a K162, but it might mean a new sig site.  Only one way to find out.  I launch probes and scan.

Sure enough, the extra sig is a K162.  I warp to it; it's from C2.  That probably means a highsec connection, which would be nice if we needed anything.  But we don't really, and we will probably be popping this wormhole.  I also scan down our statics, and fly there to bookmark them.  The statics may or may not be linked from the far side; that depends on whether whoever opened up the connection from C2 came in and instantiated them.  But the K162 is linked for certain.  I'll look at it first.  I warp to it, and jump into C2a.

As always when I jump in wspace, I dscan upon entering C2a.  And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but two mobile depots and one tiny reindeer.  No, I mean a Ferox.  A Ferox?  Caldari battlecruiser, T1, guns.  Shield based tank means big sig radius likely.  Guns means I might be able to kill it in my Manticore.

I am near the outer planet in this system, which is rather far out from the rest.  So I can only see it on scan.  I bookmark the wormhole, then move away and cloak.  Now I look to see if I can find the Ferox.  If it is out in space, I cannot.  But it might be at some moon or something.  A quick narrow-beam dscan of the nearby planet disproves that theory.  It's out in space.  I dscan towards the inner system.  It appears to be on grid with a mobile depot, or maybe both depots.

A ship not in a POS

I dscan again, expecting that by now it has disappeared.  But it is still there.  That's... odd.  Why would someone be sitting out in nowheresville?  I can't fathom.  What I can do is get combat probes.  Not in my Manticore, of course.  The CPU is far too limited.  I'll log in my alt, Otto, for the purpose.

I log Otto in, then fly him to our tower to change ships.  He's got a Cheetah that has combat probes, so I get that, then warp to the wormhole.  As I warp, though, a dscan from Von shows the Ferox is gone.   Rats.  Kind of expected that, really.

I bring Otto in anyway, and orbit the wormhole at 30km cloaked.  It is possible the Ferox is running sites or something, and so I may still want the combat probes.

Meanwhile, Von examines the system map.  There is just a single anom in the whole system.  It's an ore site in the inner system.  Recently I have taken to entering un-dscanned space by warping to ore anoms if they exist.  The reason for that is that if miners are there, you find out via overview.  You do lose the possibility of luckily finding of a tower at a moon.  But you also eliminate the possibility of warping into a tower with a decloak trap.  So, all in all a slight win.  I warp Von to the ore site.

As I enter the inner system, I dscan, and my excitement rises.  Covetor!  Miasmos!  Retriever!  Mack!  There's a mining op on!  And I am headed to the only place it can be.

Sure enough.  I land on grid and there they are.  They are about 80km from me, so I can use Look At.  Three of them are clustered together near an arkanor asteroid.  The fourth, the Mack, is elsewhere in the field.  You might ask WWPD?  But I know, and I think you know.  This is a miner massacre waiting to happen!  I bookmark the asteroid, then hightail it back to the wormhole.  I am going home to get my Onyx.

Otto will keep cloaky eyes on.  I warp him into the ore anom, where he sits and watches.

Von crosses into C4a, then flies to my tower.  He gets into my Onyx, then warps right back to the wormhole.  This is no time to be worrying about polarization.  This is a once in a year opportunity which should not be missed.  The operation might break up at any moment.

I cross back into C2a, and sit cloaked a second.  Where to warp to?  A little eyeballing with Otto shows that the arkanor asteroid is a bit further away from the outer system than the miners.  So I warp the Onyx to the ark at 10km.  The die is cast.  I notice as I am doing this that the Mack has now joined the other miners.  Mwahahaha!

Will the Ferox interfere?  I don't know.  I don't know if my Onyx can kill it in a straight-up slugfest or not.  I do know, though, that I'll get a bit of warning.  I'll dscan.  And if the Ferox does warp in to attempt to help, my bubble will stop it before it lands right on me.  If it has a scrambler, it can't pin me before I can (maybe) drop my bubble and attempt to flee.  But I think I'll take my chances and just slug it out.

All this rumination is cut short as I land on grid.  Hands shaking!  Cool.  The miners don't flee in time.  I pop up the bubble, and start locking up ships.  It's killin' time.

Trapped in my bubble.

I kill the Mack first since it's most expensive.  The barges have some drones, which attack.  But they can barely more than scratch my paint, and they will soon be turned off.  When the Mack dies, I shift to the Retriever, Covetor, and finally Miasmos.  I get a conversation request from someone as I am killing the ships, but I have no time for that now.  While I am still killing the barges, I move over to loot the Mack's wreck.  I get a bunch of low-value loot, but it fills up my Onyx.  The barges all killed, I dispatch the pods.  (Strangely I miss one of them.  Not sure what happened there.  Did not notice it get away.)

Massacre.

I feel like a god.  Fear me!  I dscan from time to time through the massacre, but I never see the Ferox.  Now that it's done, I feel it's time to GTFO.  I don't know who lives here.  The Ferox may be swapping ships into something appropriate to kill me.  So, I turn off the bubble (this takes a while), and when it finally deflates, I warp to the wormhole back home.

I check Local for the time to see if I am still polarized.  (I am not.)  I am amused to find the following conversation there:

[ 2014.10.08 23:48:58 ] NightFury128 > Hello :D
[ 2014.10.08 23:49:09 ] Alpha Strike Toaster > SUP :D
[ 2014.10.08 23:49:31 ] NightFury128 > Hows hows WH life been?
[ 2014.10.08 23:50:08 ] Alpha Strike Toaster > good I enjoy it so far. trying to get into Astral inferno to try it out more.
[ 2014.10.08 23:50:17 ] NightFury128 > ah nice
[ 2014.10.08 23:50:47 ] NightFury128 > WH space can be fun :)
[ 2014.10.08 23:51:43 ] Alpha Strike Toaster > It has been so far. I'm curious what it's like living out of a POS
[ 2014.10.08 23:52:13 ] NightFury128 > in High sec space? meeeh not very exciting
[ 2014.10.08 23:52:20 ] dav Uitra > u do know talking in wh local shows all the other players that ur active lol
[ 2014.10.08 23:52:21 ] Forloth Rollard > ^^^^^
[ 2014.10.08 23:52:32 ] NightFury128 > lol
[ 2014.10.08 23:52:51 ] NightFury128 > I like being socialble :)
[ 2014.10.08 23:53:16 ] dav Uitra > makes u a target use a channel
[ 2014.10.08 23:53:32 ] NightFury128 > k

Ironic.  I did not see this in time for it to matter.

Meanwhile, I have this lovely chat with CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK:

[ 2014.10.09 00:03:57 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > what an ass hole
[ 2014.10.09 00:04:12 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > we are a new miner corp you would have mad more if asked us to pay
[ 2014.10.09 00:04:45 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > never mind, your a pussy not an asshole
[ 2014.10.09 00:05:43 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > poor little pussy cant fight anyone with gus?
[ 2014.10.09 00:06:26 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > most the guys you killed are players less then a month
[ 2014.10.09 00:07:39 ] Von Keigai > Sorry, was busy.
[ 2014.10.09 00:07:48 ] Von Keigai > Hi.
[ 2014.10.09 00:07:49 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > being a pussy, yes
[ 2014.10.09 00:07:59 ] Von Keigai > Look.  I don't pause to look at bios or whatever before I kill.
[ 2014.10.09 00:08:06 ] Von Keigai > I kill first, ask questions later.
[ 2014.10.09 00:08:21 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > because your a pussy, it was easy for any body but a noob to see
[ 2014.10.09 00:08:30 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > duh no fighting escort, no links
[ 2014.10.09 00:08:46 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > all bunched up
[ 2014.10.09 00:09:05 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > lol, what atool, your skill must really suck to pick on a new miner corp like that
[ 2014.10.09 00:09:33 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > you even pod killed, waht a totall pussy to pod kill after that
[ 2014.10.09 00:09:48 ] Von Keigai > Hmm.  Pod killing is de rigeur for wspace.
[ 2014.10.09 00:09:53 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > pod killed people who cant fight wow what a man, lol
[ 2014.10.09 00:09:58 ] Von Keigai > I think this is a valuable lesson for your new guys.
[ 2014.10.09 00:10:02 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > no
[ 2014.10.09 00:10:13 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > taught me what a real pussy looks like
[ 2014.10.09 00:10:31 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > a man would have said wait these guys could need some help,
[ 2014.10.09 00:10:42 ] Von Keigai > I am sorry you are so hurt.  That's EVE, friend.  Permanent gain, permanent loss.
[ 2014.10.09 00:10:48 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > a child or boy acts like you did
[ 2014.10.09 00:11:06 ] Von Keigai > I am not a man.  I am a monster.  Don't forget that in wspace.  Most people here are.
[ 2014.10.09 00:11:11 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > i am not hurt, just amazed at what a tool you are
[ 2014.10.09 00:11:22 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > monster, lol
[ 2014.10.09 00:11:25 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > your a child
[ 2014.10.09 00:11:32 ] Von Keigai > Aw, so hurt.
[ 2014.10.09 00:11:41 ] Von Keigai > Did you lead these guys up here?
[ 2014.10.09 00:11:47 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > not trying to hurt you, your too noob for that
[ 2014.10.09 00:11:57 ] Von Keigai laughs.
[ 2014.10.09 00:12:37 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > run away child, find more targets that cant fight back
[ 2014.10.09 00:12:53 ] Von Keigai > Um, I just did.  A clump of them.
[ 2014.10.09 00:13:04 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > another miner group?
[ 2014.10.09 00:13:12 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > wow, what a pussy
[ 2014.10.09 00:13:58 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > whats really funny is in all you pussniess you missed the most valuable target, lol nood
[ 2014.10.09 00:14:25 ] Von Keigai > Please educate me then.  What did I miss?  Other than some kills?
[ 2014.10.09 00:14:53 ] Von Keigai > I am always looking to improve.
[ 2014.10.09 00:15:13 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > the ship, 100 km off, no pilot, thank god you did not pod ivanna
[ 2014.10.09 00:15:29 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > hopefully by now she has it and is gone
[ 2014.10.09 00:15:41 ] Von Keigai > I went for the clump.  Assault missiles have a range of about 25km.
[ 2014.10.09 00:15:43 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > no kill mal
[ 2014.10.09 00:15:46 ] Von Keigai > Could not go after both.
[ 2014.10.09 00:15:53 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > so she must still be alive
[ 2014.10.09 00:16:42 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > well if you would have been smart you would have it the unpiloted trasport ship first, that would have been right up your pussy little ally
[ 2014.10.09 00:17:29 ] Von Keigai > Missed one?  That was in range?
[ 2014.10.09 00:17:42 ] Von Keigai > See, now you are helping in spite of your anguish.
[ 2014.10.09 00:17:45 ] Von Keigai > Thanks.
[ 2014.10.09 00:18:11 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > no, we were invited in for a little minig because we are Hi sec, we wont be back
[ 2014.10.09 00:19:16 ] Von Keigai > Well.  Live and learn, eh?  Or die and learn?
[ 2014.10.09 00:19:21 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > 30 Day Pilot's License Extension (PLEX)  30 Day Pilot's License Extension (PLEX)  Tobacco  Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane I  1MN Afterburner I  Acolyte TD-300 Blueprint
[ 2014.10.09 00:19:38 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > some of what you missed, we were on a trasport mission when they invited us in
[ 2014.10.09 00:19:54 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > Concentrated Veldspar  Concentrated Veldspar
[ 2014.10.09 00:20:16 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > Expanded Cargohold II she said she is safe in .4 space, need to go later
[ 2014.10.09 00:20:38 ] CAPTAIN CRIMSON HAWK > i would have given you the ship to let my friedns live, lol dumb ass pussy

"we are Hi sec, we wont be back."  Yup.  He claims he was transporting PLEX.  In wspace.  I'd have loved to gank that, assuming it was the truth.

This chat goes on as I continue doing stuff.  Back home, I get into an Iteron V to collect loot and corpses.  It is fit for medium sized cargo, about 17k m^3m and two warp core stabs.  Seems about right for the task.  But back at the ore anom, Otto sees the Ferox land on grid.  What is it doing?  I dunno.  In any case, I can't go there now in a transport.  I want to kill the Ferox.  What ship should I use?  Hmm.  Probably one of our PVP Ravens.

As I consider this, Hiljah logs in.  Corp night!  Well, having a gang changes things.  I mention in corp chat I have a target.  Then Jayne logs in.  We get on coms.  I get back in the Onyx.  Hiljah gets something, an Arazu I think, and Jayne gets a Raven.  We warp to the wormhole.  We'll warp straight to the ark asteroid bookmark, pin the Ferox, and kill him.  Before we can jump, though, he warps out.  Dammit!  He's salvaged the wrecks (?) and perhaps looted some.  But there is some loot still there.  And the bodies.  I notice now that there are more corpses than I made: there are five.  Eh?  Is this the second gank these guys have suffered here?  (EVE is strange.)  In any case, I warp back home to get back into the Iteron V.

The Ferox appears on dscan at the wormhole.  It seems it is back at a mobile depot.  We call for combat probes.  Jayne logs in an alt who can probe.  This takes time.

Meanwhile, I have taken the Iteron in to C2a and warped to the site of the massacre.  I figure I want the Ferox to try to stop me.  I'll stay on grid as long as I can while my buddies land.  But the Ferox is still in the outer system.  I run around collecting loot and all five (again: ?) corpses.  Then I warp back.

The guys have probes out, but did not get a 100% hit in time.  The Ferox disappears.  If I were him, I'd warp out of the system.  But he seems to have cloaked.  We lurk about a while longer.  We search down the mobile depots and the Ferox reappears.  We get a 100% hit and get Hiljah on grid.  Hiljah almost gets the Ferox, but it decloaks and warps just in time.  Oh well.  It still remains in system, but we can't find it and decide to forget about it.  If he has any skill, he can evade us easily.

We pull out and pop the hole.  Onward with PVE.  These hits don't pay for themselves.

Anomalous Prices

CCP is running a contest that may be of some interest to wspace residents.  It is detailed in a recent dev blog titled Anomalous Materials: The Research Race of YC 116.  The key parts:

The empire navies are requesting donations of Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries to help them [technobabble]. 

... this storyline and the associated donation drive will lead directly to new technology falling into the hands of players in the near future. The relative success of each empire’s donation drive will determine in what order each faction will get access to this new technology. 

Each faction navy will also express their gratitude through a special ingame item representing an honorary commission to their forces. The commissions will be given to the character that donates the highest value of Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries (combined and weighted) to each faction over the course of the event.

This event is open now, and will run until downtime on Tuesday, October 14th.

So, two things of interest here.  First, until next Tuesday, Neural Network Analyzers (NNAs) and Sleeper Data Libraries (SDLs) should sell at a premium.  Ordinarily NNAs sell to NPC buy orders for 50000 ISK.  SDLs sell for 200000 ISK.  There is no reason to take less, and (blue loot being useless otherwise) no reason for anyone to offer more.  The NPC price, of course, won't change.  But the prices at market hubs will rise.

How far will prices rise?  This we cannot know.  Since the only real reason to contribute to this drive is vanity, we can imagine not that much.  On the other hand, there are a lot of players with so much wealth in ISK that they have nothing to buy with it.  If one of them decides he wishes to win this contest, the price can rise almost arbitrarily.  The supply of blue loot is only a little bit elastic.

As I write this, NNAs are selling at Jita between 115000 (high buy) and 190000 (low sell) ISK.  SDAs are selling between 300000 (high buy) to 549000 (low sell) ISK.  (We expect the two prices to stay at a ratio of 1:4, which they are very roughly.)  As one expects, the low-priced supply of these items outside of trade hubs has been completely sucked up.  I expect the prices to rise, since there was a supply of old sell orders through this morning.  From here on out, all supply must come out of stockpiles or fresh from wspace.

So, this is the time to make some extra profit.  If you are planning to sell blue loot, don't take the NNAs and SDLs to an NPC station.  Take them to a hub and profit.

A related way in which this may be good for wspace people is that there are going to be a lot of extra players in wspace this week, looking to make a bit extra from blue loot.  Newbs in lower wspace ratting solo or in small gangs?  You know what to do.

The other item of interest here is that "new technology".  Presumably CCP is planning to add some new stuff to the game.  If lore-wise a tech is a result of blue loot, there is a good chance it will be T3, or more broadly it will be something requiring inputs from wspace.  So, this may represent new wealth for us in the moderately near future.

Penny Out; Chessur In

I have been writing this blog now for a year and a half.  And of course before I started writing about EVE, I was playing it and reading other people's blogs.  Blogging is a peculiar hobby.  It is unpaid of course; nobody pays for writing of this level.  At times it seems like work.  Some people have what it takes to write a blog seeming indefinitely.  But I am not one (I know this from other blogs I have kept IRL).  And I doubt that many people are.  Writing is hard work sometimes.

It is inevitable, then, that over time anyone who reads blogs is going to have favorite blogs go dark.  This already happened to me in EVE, short a time as that has been, with Jester ceasing to blog.  And now there's another casualty: Penny Ibramovic, ace huntress and proprietor of Tiger Ears, has ceased blogging, at least for now.  She cites IRL circumstances (unspecified) in her exceedingly brief farewell note, a comment on her last post.

After 6 years of pretty much daily blogging, reaching a tidy 2,001 posts about EVE Online—2,002 now—seemed like a good place to, well, at least take a break. 

My circumstances may be changing to the point where I can't commit to writing on the same schedule, and I thought a clean break at a milestone would be better than fizzling out. It seems that my final post wasn't quite as unambiguously final as I expected. 

I may get bored and start writing again, you never know, but I am taking a break for now.

Surely it is too early to write an obituary.  Writers will write, and Penny is a writer.  (Indeed I am a bit of one.  I took up EVE blogging in part because the political blogs I'd been commenting on had gone dark.)  As I said of Jester, he'll be writing again I am sure.  Whether it is EVE Online or some other interest that Penny writes about in the future, it will be blessed by her presence.

That said, I did want to make note of it and say thank you.  Penny inspires me in several ways, which I thought I'd mention by way of saying thanks for all the memories.  I learned to hunt mostly on my own, and from other stuff I'd read online (read down for a bit more related to this).  But Penny's tales certainly strengthened this knowledge.  And I know I learned to recognize K162s due to Penny.  It's mostly simply knowing that something is possible, but Penny also had the canonical compilation of wormhole appearances.  I also want to specifically mention Penny's camera work, which is awesome.  She gets good screenies and lots of them.  Compare the spotty and/or crap screenshots I get in combat and you'll see the difference.  I am improving on that, I like to think, and that is in part due to the fact that I know from Penny that it is possible.

Another way that Penny inspired me was her in-game exploits, which made and make me want to replicate them.  I trained into Loki because Penny was flying Lokis.  (Now I am training Proteus, although that won't be ready for months.)  I trained Onyx in part based on the hope of replicating a miner massacre like Penny.  (This dream I did accomplish, although not as fulsomely as Penny did.  Someday I hope to do it again and perhaps even exceed the master.)   In game I sometime quail at some engagement, then I think to myself what would Penny do?  She'd attack.  So I attack.

In addition to in-game victories, Penny also inspires me with her sheer output.  When I have nothing interesting, I don't write.  Or I cast about for some metagame or game design idea to write about.  Penny writes what is in front of her, day in and day out.  This is hard to do.  The life of the wormhole hunter is mostly deadly dull.  Scanning, scanning, scanning.  Each day, every day, at least 90% of your time.  I don't mind it that much, but neither is it very interesting.  Oh, another gas site!  Of the remaining time, there's a bit spent lurking about, an even smaller amount spent making decisions about what to do.  And there is a razor-thin slice of time spent actually in combat or otherwise doing something inherently interesting.  This latter bit is the payoff that makes it all worthwhile.  But it's not the reality on its own.  It is pretty much impossible to convey in writing how boring a hobby hunting in wspace is most of the time, but Penny does at least point in that direction.  And she does it without being boring, by virtue of stylish writing and humor.  (Humour, I suppose.)  Her last bits of writing, reviewing Oblivion while killing sleepers, were particularly great.

And so Tiger Ears is quiet for now.  One blog does not a section make, but now that I have two blogs that I wish to record for posterity, I am making a blogroll for it.  

In vaguely related news, since I was adding the new section for quiescent blogs, I went looking for a blog that inspired me even before I found Tiger Ears, back when I was in highsec.  That blog is Confessions of a Wormhole Killer.  I've not linked it up before because it was quiescent two years ago back when I found it, and I assumed it stayed that way.  But it hasn't; there's new stuff there!  The writer, Chessur, probably more than anyone else inspired me to want to be in wspace.  So he is in my blogroll and he's got a place of honor in my heart.

Penny does too.  She probably knows that, seeing how much I refer to her.  But just in case, Penny, you will be missed.  You are already.

Sleeper Remote Repair Working

Ever wonder what those remote repairing sleepers were doing?  It always seemed to me like "not much", and evidently that has been the case.  CCP apparently broke the RR code at some point in the past before I was ever in wspace, or at least before I started running C4 sites.

But now CCP has fixed sleeper remote repair.  Here is CCP Fozzie in a forum thread:

The issue that had been breaking the remote reps in incursions was also breaking the remote reps from sleeper NPCs. For the past while sleepers have not been applying any of their remote reps (you were only seeing their local reps). They are now once again working at original spec.

There is a good summary in that same thread of the effects.   Real short version: no RR in C1/C2 so no effect.  Not much RR in C3.  C4 and C5 have several sites with 1000+ DPS of RR, so don't do those sites solo.  (Or maybe it's no big deal in C4; some posters say more like 200.)   Probably little effect on any decent sized gang. 

Coincidentally, my corp ran Garrisons in C5 for the first time the other day.  (10 characters.)  We noticed the much higher repping in a few cases, to the point it was hard to break some of the frigs without a full light drone swarm being applied.  I just figured that more repair is how those sites worked.  Ha.

A Hit and a Miss

It's the weekend.  The Boy is away, and so I play.  EVE, that is.  I log Von then I log my alt, Otto.  Since I have the two accounts, I try to use the second even when I concentrate mostly on the first.  Often this means ice-mining in highsec while I explore.  But lately I have been logging on Otto in a Hound.  I use him to monitor a wormhole in my home system, and to maybe help trap people at my tower's nasty decloak trap.

Our home system has its normal two connections.  The C5 is getting old, but I have time.  I check out our C4 static first.  We instantiated it last night, and it only has about an hour left.  I explore it down a few layers finding nothing interesting.  In one final system I find a guy idling at his tower in an Occator.  I watch for a few minutes.  Then I realize I can't hang out here for long, and return back up the chain.

Coming back into my system, I see a new sig.  That's interesting, because it is likely to indicate activity.  I scan down the new sig, which is a wormhole as expected.  It is a C2.  I head in to explore.  Meanwhile, I fly Otto over to watch it, in case anyone enters.  They probably already did -- that's why the K162 is there -- but you never know.

In C2a there are four live players at a POS: two in Tengus, another in a tranport, and a scout.  It's always nice to see live players.   But they are not doing anything, so far as I can tell.  After I sit and watch them for five minutes, I give up.  I scan the system down to see what may lie beyond.

Beyond is a highsec exit, which I transit to highsec and bookmark just in case.  Then I return polarized, not fearing that any more.  Another sig is a second C4 connection.  I head further down the chain.

In C4f, I find a guy all by himself, mining gas in a Prospect.  Unfortunately, I assumed the system was empty after seeing all but an outer planet.  I started scanning his sig before flying to the outer planet he is near.  He sees my probes, and aborts to a POS that is also at the outer planet.  I start to scan down the system including the sig he was in.  He is sitting at his POS.  After a while, he gets in an Anathema and goes out to scan.  Presumably he has noticed my new wormhole.

I get a fancy new idea.  Perhaps he will go to my new wormhole predictably.  I am nearly done scanning.   So I scan down the wormhole I entered.  I have already bookmarked the wormhole itself, as a matter of course, when I came in.  But I don't know where its signature is.  Thus the scanning.  I find the signature in one try since I know precisely where it is.  Then I fly to it.  I pull my probes.

Now I watch the enemy probes.  I am waiting for them to vanish.  Eventually they do.  I wait 20 seconds, then I uncloak and turn on my sebo.

I am hoping that he has pulled his probes because he found my wormhole.  (Presumably he should have already scanned down everything else.)  He will want to bookmark the wormhole proper, so I am hoping he'll warp to the sig at zero.  This is the lazy thing to do, but safe 99% of the time.  I hope to be the 1%.  I'll be there at zero.  There is a good chance he'll be uncloaked.  If so, I hope I can lock him before he can warp.

That's the plan.  In fact, nothing happens.  I watch dscan and after about 20 seconds I see him.  We are not near his POS, so I guess he must have exited one of the other wormholes.  Oh well.  I'll have to keep trying this one. 

There are two further systems that he might have exited to: a C1 and a C2.  I randomly choose C2, and keep exploring.  I don't see him there.  There are three guys as a POS, doing laps just inside the force field.  I watch this for some time, then give up.  I re-enter C4f.  I check the POS -- still gone.  Then I check out C1. 

I am warping around C1 to look for towers when I hear wormhole noise.  Alert!  It must be Otto.  I focus on Otto's screen, and I see a Stratios enter.  I like the look of that.  Unlike cloaky T3s, Stratioses cannot be interdiction nullified.  As such, they can blunder into my trap as easily as its normal victims which are covert ops frigates.  I warp Otto back to my perch just off the decloak trap.  I watch for a few minutes but nothing happens.  Oh well. 

I turn back to Von in C1.  There is a guy in a Venture, but he's idle at a POS.  There are some ore anoms, which he might be thinking about mining.  There is no gas, there being just two sigs.  So I wait, to see if he makes a move.

I hear guns.  Eh?  Otto!  My POS guns are firing!  Yes, there's the Stratios.  I uncloak Otto and get his sebo on, then lock the Stratios with shaking hands.  I don't want to miss this.  Locked!  It is dead unless it has warp core stabilization.  I set Otto's orbit at 15km.  I doubt the Stratios can kill me in the short time it has left, but I don't want to find out.

The Stratios attempts to get out of the trap.  It clears the warp bubble, but evidently it does not have warp core stabilization.  I expect the Stratios to lock me, but it does not come before the tower kills it.

Finish him.

I am ready, and immediately lock up the pod.  Pods should be able to flee even a boosted frigate, but I guess he is so flustered from the attack that he dithers that extra second.  Otto locks.  He kills the pod with torpedoes.

Well, score one for little Otto.  Otto the spider, sitting so patiently in his web... Otto grabs the corpse and loots as much as he can from the wreck.  Nice stuff: Coreli A-Type Adaptive Nano Plating.  Loot fairy loves me today.  Then he gets a Coercer to salvage, even though it is T1.  Leaving a wreck in your trap is a red flag.

Then Otto heads back out to sit at the C2 wormhole and watch.  Maybe someone else will come in. 

Back to Von.  The Venture has logged out.  So I head back up.  Back in C4f, I fly to the POS to check and the guy who was there earlier is not there... but his Prospect is on scan!  He'll be in the gas again.  I dscan to verify: yes, in the gas.

I warp out to distant planet to refit to my anti-Venture fitting.  I hate taking the time, but I think it will be necessary.  A Prospect has no built-in warp core stabilization, but I expect it to have two points fitted because it has the low slots for it, and why not?  What else helps it survive?  So I waste two minutes refitting.  Then I fly to the gas site (a vast frontier reservoir) at 20km.

I land on grid, and there he is, 50km away.  There is only one gas cloud, the C28 cloud.  Evidently he has already sucked the C32 cloud entirely.  I watch for a moment to see which way he is moving.  And... he is not moving.  It's hard to believe: he is just sitting there sucking gas.  (Listen, kids, this is a bad way to do it.)  Well, he may not know how to mine safely, but I know how to take advantage of that.  I move straight at him.

This will take a while, so I look around to see if there is any celestial that I might bounce off of.  But there's not.  So I just keep moving at him.  I have to steer up a bit to avoid the cloud, but it's only a mild change of vector.  Won't be long now... 21km...

Closer... closer...

I am almost to warp scrambler range: 15km.  I start to rehearse in my mind what I'll do.  12km.  Suddenly the gas cloud vanishes!  Oh no!  He'll warp for sure.  In desperation, I uncloak and pulse my microwarp, and start locking.  I initiate my scramblers.  I hope that the lock completes and I am in range to scramble.

He vanishes.  What?  Ah, Prospects can cloak.  He's probably warped by now, but I continue in the direction I was hoping for a lucky decloak.  No such luck.  He's gone.

Oceanus First Impressions

Oceanus is not much of an expansion.  It adds very little new for anybody, and I am no exception.  Still, it is an expansion and not a glorified patch as some have said.  And all of what it does add is welcome.  So here's my first impressions of it, after going out last night for my standard round of hunting.  (I got a kill!  But that's another story.)

First, the things I have not tried: new burner missions (nor older ones for that matter), French, pasting in fits, new notification system, any rebalanced ships or modules.

So what I have noticed so far?

Oceanus is pretty.  I am not used to the new wormholes and wormhole backgrounds yet.  That is, I still cannot just look at a wormhole and know where it goes (other than C1/C2).  But I think this should be possible, so under that assumption it is good.  I think I already can look at them and tell the small wormholes from the others.  (Penny has a new post showing many of the new wormholes, similar to her older guide to wormhole appearances.)

Cloaking

And speaking of pretty, the new cloaking effect and the new cloaked appearance are both super cool.  Yes, these are nearly meaningless graphical improvements.  (Nearly -- the cloaked display does make it easier to see which way your cloaked ship is pointed.)  Still, since I spend about 95% of my playing time cloaked, and you uncloak and recloak every wormhole jump if not more often, I see the new effects all the time.   They are pretty, and when you stare at something as frequently as I see my ship cloaked, pretty matters.

Cloaked

 There is also an addition to cloaking that I did not expect: there is a cloaking sound that is quite evident now.  I think there was a very subtle one before.  Now it is not subtle.  (I may dial it down, actually.)  Because it is not subtle, I get feedback that I actually did cloak successfully.  Also there is a similar uncloaking noise, which is also nice.

I knew going into Oceanus that there would cooldown timers displayed.  I sort of thought that meant cooldown for micro jump drives.  And it does, I hope.  (Have not checked.)  But what it means for me is "cooldown" of cloak modules, which is very important.  It's a real nuisance when you want to recloak to be sitting there hitting cloak every second since there is no way to know when to recloak.  Now you can see it.  Very nice.  I am comically happy each time I go to recloak after firing probes.  This will fade.

It does seem a bit daft to be so thankful to CCP for this.  I mean, they should have done this years ago.  Literally years.  It is very helpful, and it is just client graphics; there is no server-side at all I should think.  The client already had this info, which is why it could tell you how many seconds left via the pop-up message.  All they had to do was display it.

I noticed one other thing.  It seems to be easier to see that cloaking is on via the greenish-pulsing of the cloaking module.  I can find nothing in the patch notes about this, so maybe I am imagining it.  But I don't think so.  It used to be very hard to see the pulsing greenish display unless the background was almost black.  I used to routinely rotate around my ship so as to find a patch of black background to make sure cloaking was still on.  Now you can see it pretty well up to about half-white.  This is an improvement.

One final thing I noticed today, when making the screenies for this.  CCP seems to have fixed the bug where you get a delayed cloaking effect when you raise the system map before or when cloaking.  (This bug was still there on the first two days of Oceanus.  I noticed.)  I have had a number of gasp-no! moments over this one.  So I am glad it is fixed, assuming I am not just misunderstanding how it is triggered.  [UPDATE: no, still not fixed.  Come on, CCP.]