The past weekend I finally bit the bullet in EVE and dipped my toes into the kiddy pool of PvP. I quit my corp (after having to wait 24 hours to remove roles, doh) and joined up with the Caldari State in faction warfare. Whee, I’m now part of the Blob!

I was originally a bit hesitant to do so for fear of getting ganked while flying around in Caldari space. Only recently did I realise that this wasn’t very likely because any war targets would aggro the Caldari Navy the moment they jumped into Caldari high security space. While the Caldari Navy is probably only good at chasing donuts, the extra inconvenience means those dirty Gallente frenchies and Minmatar rebels need to keep moving and are unlikely to muster a large enough force to just sit around waiting to gank my Obelisk.

First up I had a lot of preparation to do. I already had my Iteron V filled with 8 Rabid Rifter packages ready to go in Jita. However, I’m not sure how much pod-death actually happens in low-sec during faction warfare, so I didn’t want to risk my +4 implants and costly missile implants which would be useless in a Rifter. So the plan was to pick up some other gunnery-related skill hardwiring implants and clone jump back to my old clone with +3s and use that as a PvP clone. I bought implants for 3% small projectile damage, 3% tracking, 3% capacitor recharge and afterburner speed boost. Only got cheaper ones since I wasn’t sure how long they would last, altogether the cost was less than 50 million ISK. After piloting the Iteron over to Sobaseki where my old clone was, took a while to actually do the clone jump due to all the session timers. “You can’t clone jump in your ship… oh you can’t leave your ship yet cos you just docked. Ok now you’re in your pod, but you have to wait a while before you can jump.” Finally it was done, and feeling slightly stupider with inferior implants I started the trip out to Nourvukaiken, 1 jump out from low-sec.

Of course that -1 to intelligence showed its effects pretty quickly since I forgot to start training again after pausing to make the clone jump, but fortunately I only lost 20 minutes of training time before noticing.

Finally, arrived at Nourvukaiken and parked myself at a friendly Caldari Navy Assembly station. Time to unload and assemble my first ever Rifter.

Looking good. My gunnery skills are pretty up to snuff now after that long period of training, with every skill at 4. The Incursion change to rockets would also prove handy since my Rifter packed a rocket launcher rather than a nos or neut. Time to boldly go forth and meet flaming death.

First time ever jumping into low-sec. My target system was Tama, which was on the list of most dangerous systems according to my faction warfare overview. I had no safe spots ready either…. but it turned out there was no one on the other side of the gate.

Checking d-scan I noted there were a buttload of POS towers up. And a small bunker up for grabs! I knew there was something about capturing bunkers or plexes, so I figured that was a good place for some action.

Warped in and saw lots of NPC frigates around, with a group of 3 around a capture point with a timer on it. No enemy pilots though. Decided to try out the Rifter in combat against the NPCs, wow it’s fast. Pretty high dps also and easily shredded them all. After waiting 5 minutes for the bunker to be captured, still hadn’t found any enemy pilots. There was a Dramiel on d-scan somewhere, but I wasn’t eager to try taking that on. Also a couple of industrials, but they seemed to be parked at a tower since it was unlikely that there would be someone just sitting around waiting to be shot. One of them was an Badger Mk II called Pinata, so could be bait as well.

I also realised that I’m really bad at using the d-scan to find anything. I saw another Rifter and tried to narrow it down, but the best I could do was decide that it was in the vicinity of Tama VIII. Unfortunately Tama VIII has 7 moons, and I never did manage to find that Rifter.

Finally I was running out of time, and decided to take a peek at another site, some abandoned Caldari outpost. This one had cruisers and destroyers in it, and was pretty tough. I was taking huge amounts of damage and only managed to kill 2 destroyers before having to warp out in half armor, ouch. I made my way back to Nourvukaiken and that was the end of my first ever PvP foray, ironically without any actual PvP.

Since I wouldn’t get that much time to play during the week, I clone jumped back to my +4 clone to maximise skill training. Time to learn a bit about using the d-scan and hopefully next time I’ll find someone to blow (me) up.

So my skills on Noork and Yannie have been chugging along while they sit at their desks in Venilen studying away like good little bookworms.

Noork’s skills have been all over the place as I managed to round out most of my gunnery skills as well as get T2 small autocannons for my Rifters. Then I finished off Shield Operation V as part of my Tengu plan, leaving only Caldari Cruiser V and the subsystem skills (and T2 heavy missiles, musn’t forget that…). Now I’m training Heavy Drone Operation V so that my Rattlesnake can fly proudly knowing she’s not carrying a bunch of noobie Ogre I’s in her drone bay.

Yannie on the other hand, as befitting her simple ambition in life to be the bestiest missile lobbing mission runner in the universe, has been concentrating furiously on anything shield and missile related. Her capacitor and shield skills are now comparable to Noork’s, and she has all missile skills up to at least 4 and most impressive of all, has finished Cruise Missiles V to get T2 cruise launchers.

However, the other night I mentioned to my wife that I sort of felt like playing EVE again and she blithely asked “so can I fly a new ship now?”. To which I could only go “er… no?” She didn’t seem all that excited to simply fly her Raven a bit better, so I went to look into what else there was available. Seems like the only upgrades are either a CNR or the T2 Marauder version of the Raven, the Golem.

Most information I’ve read seem to consider the CNR and the Golem a wash in terms of mission running, in fact the majority seem to prefer the CNR. But anyway I went ahead and put together a couple of fits in EFT to compare what they would look like with full skills.

Caldari Navy Raven

Golem

Going with cruise CNR and torpedo Golem because torpedo CNR and cruise Golem are just stupid. They both have similar drone bays and bandwidth so we can safely ignore those.

Looking at simple T2 fits, it’s clear that the Golem has quite a large advantage in terms of DPS and volley damage. Not sure if the double target painters plus ship bonus to target painters are enough to be able to effectively hit cruisers with torpedoes though. Defense-wise the Golem has the advantage again due to the ship bonus to shield boost amount, so it can mount 1 less resistance module and still out-tank the CNR. The Golem also seems to have slightly better shield thermal resists, as well as better armor thermal and kinetic resists (whoopdeedoo). It can lock on to 10 targets compared to the CNR’s 7. And the cargohold is huge, almost double the CNRs.

On the other hand, the CNR can hit much much further than the Golem with ridiculous cruise missile ranges boosted by the useless ship bonus. Kind of ironic that the CNR can hit further but has a lower targeting range than the Golem, which can only hit to 60 km but can target out to 112.5 km. The CNR has a much bigger EHP buffer and slightly more capacitor. And it’s very very slightly faster and has faster lock times.

Price wise the hulls themselves go for similar amounts (around 600 million ISK). However, if you intend to splurge on faction modules the Golem may turn out to be cheaper due to only having 4 launchers compared to having to buy 7 for the CNR.

So on paper at least it looks to me like the Golem has a clear advantage. I’m not sure if the 60 km range on the torpedoes is really going to be an issue though. Of course the trade-off is that the Golem requires A LOT of skill training, 151 days more to be precise. Weapon Upgrades V, Caldari Battleship V, Advanced Weapon Upgrades V, Torpedoes V…. ouch. And it would mean that training for T2 cruise launchers was a bit of a mistake. But the CNR fit is really really tight though, I can’t even fit a T2 shield boost amplifier due to the CPU being overloaded from the 7 T2 cruise launchers. Again it seems like the CNR doesn’t really reach its prime until you go all-out pimping it with faction gear, which I’m not really a fan of. Even with all faction modules the CNR doesn’t break 800 dps either.

Oh well. She’s not in a rush to train anything else, so I guess she’s going on the Golem plan for now…

Interesting series of articles pushed out by CCP lately, detailing some of the scams that can be found in EVE. I’ve never even heard of some of these and I think the Margin Trading fake buy order scam is actually quite clever and is likely to catch many pilots since there’s no way to tell that the buy order is fake until you try to fill it. Personally I don’t think the skill should work that way and should impose a penalty if there are insufficient funds in the wallet, perhaps by cancelling other orders/selling assets in order to cough up the funds. The ability of the human race to come up with creative ways to cheat others never ceases to amaze me *cough cough subprime loans cough*.

Even though I haven’t been actively playing EVE much at all the past few weeks, I still log on once daily to adjust my orders and so still get some chuckles at what goes on in the markets.

More money for the same thing? No thanks...

Saw this gem while checking out my contracts. Not only did he undercut by a massive amount since other sellers were pricing at 70 million ISK, he even undercut the Want to Buy contracts that were already existing. In other words, he could have gotten a whole 55 million ISK by filling the existing contracts, but instead preferred to get 52 million ISK minus a broker fee and sales tax. Maybe it was his Good Deed Of The Day, but I certainly appreciate his giving me a cheap faction afterburner to resell for 18 million ISK profit. Yummy!

The next example is actually pretty common, but this is such a perfect illustration that I couldn’t pass it up. It’s called “lolnoob everyone knows undercutting massively makes your items sell faster duh” syndrome:

Note the sell order for 41 Large Autocannon Specialisation books at 9,000,000 ISK. These have been selling for more than 11 million, but some bright spark obviously was too cool to undercut by 1 ISK and decided to show what a daring entrepreneur he was. Obviously his tactic would protect his order from dirty 0.01 undercutters right? Yeah, guess not.

It obviously didn’t help that his sell order was gigantic relative to the market volume for this item. Looking at the past month’s regional volume:

We can see that the daily volume in the entire region is on the order of 20-40 items. So this is not a fast-moving market. No trader is going to wait weeks for his order to slowly clear out of there, no matter how steep his undercut. So now his 41 books will sit there for months because he has crashed the market and everyone is going to trade below 9 million ISK now. And again note the average prices over the past few days… plenty of sales were going on at 11-12 million ISK, so it’s not like no one was buying at current prices.

That said, I’m not completely condemning him. If he is unable to check his order frequently, this may have been his only recourse since putting a high price would still result in his order being undercut anyway and this way he has a chance of selling some each time the price rises and falls past his 9 million threshold. However, I’ll check this order the next time I log on and if he has modified his price, then he is a Class 1A Idiot since all he would have accomplished is to destroy his own profits for the same volume of sales.

*Update* As suspected, he is an idiot. He updated his order by undercutting by another million and sold… a grand total of 1 book. And now he has been undercut again.

My Rifter skill plan is almost complete, with almost every Gunnery skill now at level IV. However, I still haven’t had any time (or inclination) to go out hunting with them. My wife and I have actually started playing Diablo 2 again, which we last played… er… 8 years ago? Wow. But amazingly it’s still fun, especially since we can play together which makes any game fun. I don’t know if its the grumpy old man in me speaking, but I still feel that many old games were so much better than the stuff that comes out nowadays, which is all about snazzy graphics disguising brainless gameplay. We’ve just finished Act I Hell with my sorceress and her lightning amazon, but damn it’s painful without good gear (my resists are all less than -20). Can’t wait for Diablo 3 to be released, but Diablo 2 is still managing to satisfy my collector’s itch.

Decided to head over to Jita and put together my Rifters. Bought 8 Rifters and associated modules, and set up 2 buy orders for Republic Fleet Fusion S and Republic Fleet EMP S. I also bought and fitted another Iteron Mark V in which to cart my disposable Horde of Boos around in. I could have fitted the Iteron with 3 medium cargohold optimization rigs, which would let me cart around 13 ships plus fittings, but figured 8 was a good enough start. After I find a good target system in which to send my Rifters to flaming death, I will ship them over to the nearest high-sec system in the Iteron so I don’t have to travel very far to get a replacement ship.

All in all, the cost was a bit higher than expected. 67,105,897 ISK for the lot, not including the Iteron since I don’t intend to lose that if at all possible. That means my Rifters work out to be 8,388,237 ISK each. I also dropped down from the Arbalest rocket launcher to the next best OE-5200 since the difference in DPS was negligible but the cost was significant. The vast majority of the cost comes from the warp scramblers at close to 3 million each, followed by the T2 autocannons at 1.9 million per set of 3.

I decided on the afterburner + scrambler combination as opposed to the mwd + disruptor which a lot of pilots like since I’m too noob to be able to properly control the range, which is necessary with the mwd + disruptor since you want to be out of range of scramblers while still keeping the disruptor on them, otherwise you lose your own mwd. With the afterburner my “strategy” will simply be to orbit as close as possible and turn on scrambler, afterburner, web and overheat guns.

I predict losing at least 4 Rifters before even finding any targets