Our corp is small. This suits us to some extent for small gang PvP, but we generally need to arrange roams and ops days in advance to ensure that participation is good. Currently, when we engage in PvP we use between 5 and 7 pilots (which is pretty much everyone who is active in the corp).

I want to be able to log in and have lots of people online to call for roams at the drop of a hat. So we have started recruiting…

But, recruiting in Eve (and every other MMO) is a pain in the ass. We have recruitment ads on the Forums, in game, and I have been advertising in the recruitment channel for days now, and we have picked up one (ONE!) new member. Our new member is great, nice guy, nice skills, knows what he’s doing etc, but for days of recruiting, one is not enough!

What can we do to recruit more? I have no idea :(.

After our recent successes in FW complexes, we decided to go on another roam in our mighty Tristan and Destroyer gang. Our 3 Tristans, Catalyst and Thrasher departed from Villore towards Tama searching for targets.

After dodging a large pirate gate camp, consisting of 10 or so battleships, 5 guardians and various t3 ships including Lokis, we spotted a few war targets in an otherwise empty system. After bouncing between complexes for a while, we found a Rupture and Myrmidon that looked like they might be game for a brawl.

Not wanting to engage the Myrmidon in our smaller ships, we entered an FW complex which allowed T1 and T2 frigs and cruisers.  The Tristand and Catalyst entered the plex and I sat on the warp gate with my Thrasher. After a slight delay, the Rupture landed on the acceleration gate and I punched through hoping that the Rupture would take the bait…

He did, and as soon as his ship landed he was swamped by our gang. The Rupture sent his drones after our Catalyst, who was able to tank the low damage of 5 warrior II’s. The rupture started neuting my Thrasher and attempted to apply his Turret and Missile dps as well, but as the Thrasher moves at 1km/s, his guns were unable to track and my Thrasher shrugged off the pitiful light missile dps. His shields melted, followed soon after by his armour and structure. One rupture down, no losses for us.

Rupture Kill 

After scooping loot and depositing it in station, we headed further towards Tama on the look out for new targets.

After a few totally empty systems, we found a single wartarget and fellow militia member. We started to use our Directional Scanners to narrow down the war target and found him at one of the planets. After gang warping to the planet, we landed 90km away from a war target Vengeance which was engaged with a Friendly Wolf. Overheating our afterburners we zoomed towards our comrade and soon applied tackle and started to add DPS. Our Catalyst showed its worth yet again in this fight, being able to switch to long range ammo, our Catalyst started applying dps at 30km while the rest of the gang rushed into position.

After the Vengeance exploded and was podded, we recieved a little smack in local. Apparantly the Friendly Wolf was angry that we interupted his 1v1:

vickers> SDTOP
vickers> YOU DISHOUNERED MY 1v1
vickers> MUPET
Kellyl>MUPPETS HAVE MUCH HONOUR

Some protips for him: Don’t 1v1 at a planet :S.

Vengeance Kill

After scopping and depositing the loot, we resumed our journey to Tama. A hostile Dramiel was on Directional Scanner so we headed towards a small plex to fight the dramiel on our own terms. We didn’t have to wait long before the dramiel dropped ontop of us. After a slight mess up with initial tackle, the Dramiel closed enough for overheated scrams and webs to be applied. Once he was caught he died very quickly, we exchanged GF’s in local, scooped loot and headed home.

Dramiel Kill

Another succesful roam, proving once again that T1 Frigs and Destroyers are very good if you apply them correctly. Target selection is king, and Factional Warfare plexes are a great tool to help with this.

Stats:

Damage Done (ISK):150mil

Damage Taken (ISK): 0mil

Loot Acquired:

Serpentis 1mn MWD

Gistii B-Type 1MN Afterburner

Various T2 Module.

I just received an email from Codemasters informing me that LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) is stopping its European service of the game, and moving all of the players to the American servers.

First let me say that I do not play the game anymore, I played it for a few months with some real life friends before we moved on to other games. That said though, if I was still playing I would be pretty mad right now, the game has been running for a good few years, but apparently does not have the population to support a European server anymore, and I blame Blizzard and World of Warcraft in particular for this.

World of Warcraft, as a game, is ok. It’s not great, it’s average. The one thing that it excels at however, is being ridiculously easy. Compared to most other MMORPG’s, wow is a stroll in the park; players are flooded with shiny items and rewards from the get go, removing any sense of progress.

Back in the day, I played Everquest religiously. A game where rewards were few and far between – obtaining a new magical item or achieving the next level was a real achievement because it was damn difficult, and took time and effort, worlds away from wow’s easy levelling system.

Perhaps it’s an outmoded view of games, but I strongly believe that a player should have to earn progress in a game, it should take skill and effort to actually be good at a game; which is why I haven’t played Wow properly since the first expansion was released (Level 60 raiding in wow actually required skill).

I believe that while world of Warcraft still exists, there is no point developing any other fantasy based MMORPGS, as players have become so spoiled by the constant ratification of rewards in wow that no one will play anything that has a minute amount of difficulty… except Eve Online.

Admittedly, Eve is targeted at an older market. It has the harshest penalties of an MMORPG since vanilla everquests corpse runs.

In Eve, if you lose your ship, you lose it. There’s no quick respawning with all of your items, you have to go out and buy a new ship, with money that you have toiled to earn; it gives meaning to the risk of PVP, true risk versus reward – Kill the enemy and takes his stuff, or die and lose your stuff – brilliant.

Using the Carrot and Stick metaphor, World of Warcraft feeds the player carrot after carrot, just by mashing buttons. Eve takes the stick and whips you into submission until you have the skill to take it and beat others with it.

TL;DR – Stop playing Wow, stop taking the easy road, and start giving money to developers that make games that actually challenge you.

After reading Parasoja’s blog post about using the Ishtar for Guristas Plex’ing, I was reminded of the Ishtar that is gathering dust in my high sec mission hub.

When I (rarely) do level 4 missions, I use a passive shield tanked Ishtar and a Torp Raven. Passive Ishtar gathers aggro and tanks everything as it’s drones chew on the rats, leaving me free to concentrate on sending massive torpedo death blobs at the BS and BC sized rats.

If the same fitting is applied to Guristas plexing, I think that it would prove more succesful than the conventional dual armour tank.

Here is the setup:

[img]http://owenworley.co.uk/eve/eft_images/LolIshtarGuristas.jpg[/img]

As you can see, 1628 tanked vs Guristas. With the invuln shut off, it still tanks 1341 (overheated it tanks a whopping 1781!).

Compared to the armour tank, this is over a 500 dps tanked increase.

It does not have an AB, but….

[img]http://owenworley.co.uk/eve/eft_images/Ishtar%20-%20PassiveGuristas.jpg[/img]

If a shield power relay is swapped for a Damage Control, the Invulnerability Field can be swapped for a 10mn Afterburner II. And it still tanks 1057.

All this with a core probe launcher fitted to actually find the plexes.

Plus! It is fully passive, and therefore Neut Towers do not affect you, which I’ve heard is important for plexing.

I’m not sure how much the sig bloom from the LSE’s and shield rigs will affect the tank, however, the signature radius of the passive shield setup is 268m, compared to 145m. (A Raven is 460m).

This is my first attempt at the eve blog banters that regularly circulate, and I must say I approve of the concept, having ideas thrust at you to write about can stimulate the imagination somewhat.

So down to business: My current combat hanger is as follows:

Hurricane x 2, shield extenders, damage mods, nanos and neuts. Nice agile small gang boat, or solo. Named Cane1 and Cane2

Harbinger, similiar to the ‘canes, shield extender, max gank lows, scorch loaded HBL’s. Lovely 24km optimal with nice dps, more of a gang boat, but again, agile enough to solo a bit. Not names yet.

Broadsword, standard shield buffer setup, 130k ego, 500 dps passive tank. Named “On The Blob”, heh…

Rupture x2, shield gank nano, again – gang/solo :p.

Taranis x 2, dual prop neutron blaster, yummy solo dog fighter, or gang tackler (I’d rather fly the safer for gang tackling though). Named “Wheres the Party?”

Crusader, Long range nano fit, 5.5k top speed, agile, 125 dps. Enjoyable solo roam boat, had an awesome dual with a claw that I kited till he was 11% structure but like a fool I didn’t notice I had capped myself out, he got away :(. Named “Crusading”.

I also have a number of covert ops ships ready and waiting for covops gangs, including a pilgrim, rapier and nemesis.

As you can tell from my combat ready ships, I have a penchant for fitting nano/shield buffer and max gank, as I love the playstyle and it seems to work very well an most things bc size and lower.

I have many more ships spread throughout the eve universe in various states of fitting, however the above ships are the ones that I have had shipped out to our current theatre of operation. After gong on a lovely shopping spree in Jita, I payed Raging Taurus of Dark Cross Industries for his awesome Jump Freighter service to ship them to low sec for me, 8ish jumps, 400 mil collateral, and it only cost me 40 mil, which is a price I believe was fair as it saved me moving them one by one from Jita to low sec (we had 3 active wars at the time).