This week... an old friend returned.

The last few days have seen the usual caretaker "chores" of skills and PI checks. Some things never change. 

A friend of mine got back into Eve through a long and complex story. He has been playing since 2005. I guess I've only really known him in game the last few years to be more off than on, a true bitter vet.
Since seeing him last time there have been enough little changes to make things feel different for him; And he has been asking about stuff and regaining his bearings. 

His Dominix fit is very much a mish mash and in need of upgrading even after trying to sort some things out with him. But some old vets are a little long in the tooth ;-p 
I ended up giving him a load of modules, drones, containers/station containers, a mobile tractor unit and the like so he could get back up to speed.
While doing a level 4 he almost lost a Dominix! He blamed lag but when you lose all shields, armour and hull is down to 9% while being webbed by 5 frigs its hard to align fast. I really thought he was going to get popped; But he warped out and spent some time repping up before going back in for more. Desipte him bricking it, it was a good laugh and I think he is back into it(Eve), RL permitting. 
Nothing like a true adrenaline fuelled bout of hand jittering keyboard stabbing fun to make it "feel" real. 

A funny moment was him putting a 100mn microwarpdrive (a lot of fits were tried) on the bulky Dominix and seeing it blast by my little Tengu at 900 odd meters a second into a thick enemy swarm only to see it pop on a tractor beam and salvager. Very funny. Nice to know his priorities :) 
He now sees that loot/salvage sells well and is no longer mocking me for picking stuff up lmao. 
My main alts Tengu with all new upgraded T2 gear (Shield Booster) was working really well and tanked like a charm against everything. Overall we made good progress and got lots of bounty / loot. 

My main alt also got to do the next two parts of the epic arc, one mission was very easy, hack a container and collect goods, warp to station and handin mission, reward was 20 mill… nice.

With the patch out on Tuesday there wasn’t anything I was waiting for but the changes to the UI and graphical tweaks are good. 

My null alt's alliance was peeved at the way the contacts no longer work in local chat. So there was no easy way of seeing who in system is blue or red. the manual way of showing info on people is not practical. 
There were a lot of people in his main system Tuesday night and Alliance instructions were to not even undock, plus there have been lots of "stories" about POS's shooting Blue's but that's probably just a scare tactic. Things were cleared up but it was a very chaotic time.

Another friend was talking yesterday about just getting an eve trial account to just run amok doing crazy stuff in eve… I like it and sent him a longer buddy trial that lasts 21 days. With luck he may get to use it this weekend.

A New week and new Update.....

The usual skills and PI checks go on and were updated when needed.
 

Was on my main alt for for most of the week doing the rest of the Cosmos missions that were close to his location. 

In doing so I found that the rest of the missions were in a dead end system with a 0.4 system in between me and it, this bottleneck was teaming with gankers. 

Hemming and hawing I decided to bail on the Cosmos missions and try upping the level of the specific corp needed to get access to the epic arc (Expert distribution). 

All the guides say I needed 7.0 rep with the faction, with current rep at 5.1 and no way to do the other cosmos missions easily I decided to run missions for expert distrib. On my way to move gear I stopped by the epic arc agent and he offered the first mission to me!!! I was Surprised!! But on checking the rep needed on his details it said 5.0!! Sweet! (I should have checked http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Caldari_Epic_Arc_-_Penumbra sooner). So I moved about some ships and gear. and set up a Raven, Buzzard and a Hauler (T1 Badger) in prep for the epic arc.

  

The war finished on Friday morning and the 24 hour cool down ended on Sat morning to allow for normal play.

My mains re-setup the POS modules and got the jobs up and running.

PI sales were good and with some other cash set aside I got to buy 4 weeks of fuel. I hope the next sell of PI and purchase of fuel will be so fortunate. No savings could be given to the mains for the PI sales except isk to cover costs of the PI changes and tax. 

The long term plans are to streamline the POS jobs/process's to run longer over a week or two and allow more time away from micromanagement.

Did some belt ratting with my Null sec alt but felt that I needed to do more to be productive time and isk wise. I really need to spend some more time training skills to benefit this activity. At the moment it is on par with mining.

Later on the weekend my main alt started into the guts of the caldari epic arc and has done well, including completing the run to the first low low low sec dropoff mission. It was a pain but 30 mill reward for a courier mission is good. The run in was quiet but a lot of wrecks over 3 gates was a bit of an indicator as to the activity in the area. 

That trip back out confirmed my suspicions as I had almost bumped into 2 sets of gate camps with two or three groups busy fighting each other, Thankfully I was not uncloaked and with almost instant cloaking and warping I made a hasty jump from gate to gate. 

I got through and warped away to hi-sec fast enough. Still nothing like the adrenaline rush and shaking hands combined with the joy of making it through alive to give a great happy feeling. The rest of the missions went well and brought in some good bounty and loot. To speed things up I will team up with another char to get things killed faster.

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Wow was had and a few bits done and dusted, druid to 88.5 with luck we can get the new pair to 90 and then see about the timeless isle gear for them in short order. 

My main an engineer learned the lil new bad robot pet hehe, he is cool. Prices were all over the place on the AH so better to learn than sell. I did change other main a lock to be an new alchemist, dropping mining but I havn’t done a thing to level his new prof.

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I still have a hankering to finish off the new xcom game, and to play a bit more of the older Rome Total War game.  SplinterCell Blacklist is all but done and I have found myself playing a few games of BF4 multiplayer and am getting my head around the way the game works and what to look out for.

More gaming to come!

Weekend Update.....

I got home late last Friday, I was all set and ready for a weekend of rest and relaxation … first things first to check training and PI. Only to find on login that my mains corp had gotten war dec’d. 

So unsurprisingly I got to do nothing with the mains. Not that I had much planned but the opportunity to do so was stopped, that was a pain in the posterior.

In checking the details of the corp that started the war my conclusion is that the corp dec’d me because my pos modules looked like a good kill. Their kill-board has a lot of POS module kills… 
So I took mine down and fuelled up the POS to cover a week, I also took away some stronth to screw up the timers if they attacked and put it into reinforcement. 
All their “work” seems to be done about the 01:00 to 06:00 eve time.  I also at the same time got an offer of help!? The corp that was offering to “help” I guess is associated with the dec’ing corp in some way… as I have no idea who they are, to help they wanted 90 mill… no way was I doing that … they would prob split it between both corp’s. It’s a good scheme if that's the way it works. 
Thankfully so far they seem uninterested in the POS with nothing but a tower.... I will stay turtled up until the dec is declared over by concord. That should happen on Friday morning so I should be good to go about normally from next Friday night.

With limited play options over the weekend I was “stuck” to using my main alt, and my null sec alt. I'll see how this goes the next few day's ahead.

On relogging my main alt on Sunday I noticed that he had a notification…

?

No idea how that came about… 
I had just been doing Cosmos missions.... 
If he aggressed me I have no idea what or when it happened as it happened....really odd. I didn't afk pilot with the character etc...

So to get rid of it I tagged it as open for all…. 
At no cost… and there was a hit…

Pity I didn’t add an isk cost to it lol 

The dude was attacked while he was in a (mission fit?!?) raven … lost about 215 mill lol and I caused it … nice! And for him unexpected I'm sure.

All this talk of player numbers dropping is nonsense, at least for my eve time zone…. 
When I started playing eve I would see it at about 35k players online and up until a few month’s ago it was at about 45k…. now over the weekend its even bigger, it hit the 50k mark!!

Not sure if this counts the dust players but it does say "pilots".

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I got to play a bit of Xcom as well... 
I got to train up some more people and gear them up but I need a lot more melt to enhance them. So I decided that the time had come to do the next phase of the game.

So the next part was to assault the "large" ship in orbit. I'm not giving anything away by saying that. But by doing it it freezes all soldiers / research / foundry work as it is when the chamber is entered. I have a great team just started on the assault and I saved it as I know it will take a while to get though. Am looking forward to seeing if there are any changes and how the story plays out.

What the weekend holds.....

This week has seen me getting back into the tried and tested but not necessarily good habit of logon, check skill q's adjust PI and update POS jobs.  

As its handy to have both mains in the same system to do the maintenance of the POS and the PI I end up just doing that then relogging as an alt.... In the past this meant a lack of other activities on the mains.  
I want to do stuff with them and not just sit in the POS system like last time… I'll try and not let that happen this time round. I need to stick to the plans… like grinding SOE LP / Cosmos / Epic arc missions etc.

I spent a lot of time on my main last night trying to find where I had put the starbase charters that were bought from the LP store. (these are needed as part of the "fuel" for a POS)

I took my main around stations looking into can’s/cargo holds all over the universe. I checked contracts for the items I had traded. I think it took 2 hours before I hopped onto my main alt just to check on the off chance and there they were in a cargo ship I had traded to him. 

I rarely loose stuff and this is the first time that I've had to so such a major search for something that wasn't there!

On the up side I did come across a T1 hauler with a 3900m3 can full of ammo in the cargo, that I probably hadn't seen in 6 month's lol.

The (small) POS I've setup will use 10 units of fuel an hour = 240 a day = 1680 a week = 6720 a Month.

One unit costs between 17k and 18k at today's prices, so the upper average is near to 17800.00 isk per block (the price seems to be constantly going up). That means:

 

A day's worth of fuel is = 4,272,000.00 ( 4 Mill )

A week's worth of fuel is = 29,904,000.00 ( 29 Mill )

A month's worth of fuel is = 119,616,000.00 (120 Mill )

I'm beginning to really regret selling off the whole lot last time in the semi rage quit caused by the Pi changes.

But what has been done is done and this is all about moving forward.

With both Hi-sec & Null PI on the go it should cover the costs and build up a reserve to pay for cheaper fuel now before it is increased again. Exact numbers will come once I have both the PI and POS in full swing. 

I also need to set a limit on how much I'm willing to pay for fuel... 20k a block isn't a far off reality....

The niggling thought of making the fuel myself, now that I have access to null is in the back of my mind. But then I snap out of it by realising that it's not just PI thats needed to make fuel, Ice products/shipping, it all adds up as not being all that viable.

More updates.....

I did the usual gaming on multiple systems. Mainly Splintercell Blacklist and Wow over the weekend, with Eve "all the time".

Splinter cell has been completed and has a high replay value. I can foresee myself redoing the main campaign and trying to be a lot more stealthy. Though I have bought most of the stuff in the game and upgraded the Paladin HQ, I missed out on getting him to call his daughter after each mission… I only found the phone on exploring the paladin after the second last mission lol. And a few bits were not collected in game due to either not seeing them or on a brute force.

Xcom has seen some upgrading – All the teams are equipped the same except for the ownership of the chitin plating. These seem to be a lot more rare than the previous game, so only those that have both psi and genetic enhancement get the chitin plating. All others have the nano fibre vests. The only other alteration is to have Durand the first of the special psi people you get, she has the special psi armour. She will be the one that goes into the gallop chamber when I do that next… before I do so I am still ranking up some lower level soldiers and getting some more genetic enhancements done. Soon tho… soon.

Wow was a few hours of alt levelling mainly in dungeons with some quests while waiting. I got to transmog my mage's gear as I like the look of the Timeless Isles gear, just need to change the staff for either a main and off-hand or another staff...

Eve was the mainstay of gaming as it has been since I started into it.

Cleaned up my mains stations/gear & ship fits.

My Main alt did some minor level 2 cosmos missions and is now set for lvl 3’s, I've moved ships to that hub a drake, a hauler, salvage gear and some ammo.

My Main got to sell off some bits to offset the purchase and re-setup of the POS, I'll get it up and running 100% this weekend and get back into its production/research.

PI on both mains was checked and I tested exporting the bulk of my PI on my Primary Main, at a tax cost of 6 ish million on 5 planets. 4 at 17%tax and another at 22%. This sucks and gets my blood boiling, I really dont' like paying tax to a landlord that ccp says is a new landlord, really goes against my grain. But I needed to see what profits I could make. I made about 22 mill after sale in Jita… that was for far more material than would usually be produced in a week due to my just harvesting and not export/selling etc. At least the corps in system are all indy ones that own the customs offices.

My main alt’s PI was also left to run and run since the changes but all of the planets in his PI system are owned by corsp/alliances I do not want to support in any way shape of form. Suddenly ninja’s and Goonswarm. And if they think they are going to get any isk generation from me its "sooooooo" not going to happen. 

I'm glad I didnt' venture into putting up a customs office. The ones in Hi-sec seem to be slowly changing hads to bigger and bigger entities... 4 man corp to a 10 man corp, to a 20 man corp in an alliance, to a large null bloc alliance etc. 

Hi-sec fun continues....

The last while (two weeks or so) I was was unable to get the bulk of my  null-sec alt's PI/minerals/gear out or null. There have been no good times that the hi-sec entry gate was clear. Seems to have been a busy red roaming area the last while. I decided to move everything that needed to be sold to the last station in prep for a quick move when fortune swung my way... I saw there was a blue defence fleet form up and hopped on the opportunity to move it all out... Very happy to have some iskies to spend.

  

With the resetup of the POS I can see that my Null alt’s Pi is to be THE funding element for the POS. replacing the hi-sec PI that I used to have on both mains.  His skill q will change to make this a bigger goal...

In passing Jita it's funny to see the Mobile depot "art" that's being put up.....

In travelling I've come across a lot of multibox's, but this one I took some screenies of is by far the biggest.

Seemingly clearing each ICE asteroid in one cycle lol.

He boosted them with an orca and had a Fenrir as well....

 

I was very tempted to go fit a BS with smartbob’s and just warp to the middle of them!!! hehehe

It was really strange to watch them all move in the same way at the same time and start to mine at the same time too. Almost 40 odd of them....