EVE Online

[mike-l]

The drake, while a good ship, is the most boring piece of artwork ever. It's slightly better than a giant rectangular blob.

[Izawwlgood]

There's a certain elegance to the notion of corporate efficiency driving minimalist space ship design. But I love the organic flow of most Gallente ships, and the Imperial Majesty/Hubris of Amarr ships, and even the scrapped together held up by caulk and prayers look of Minmatar ships. But Caldari ships... They're like bad modern art to me.

[Spambot5546]

Some are cool.

[Kain]

Caldari ships always looked like the sort of thing I could see myself designing, were I to live in an era where the opportunity presented itself. Then again, I am a minimalist at heart, so I guess that makes sense. (Also, the Flycatcher is beautiful).

[Izawwlgood]

Anyone read Neuromancer? My impression of Minmatar ships is that Maelcum is behind the helm of each of them, dreadlocks held aloft in a hair net, and a caulk-forest gently swaying in the breeze of the air cyclers.

One thing I will say for Caldari ships is that they're very imposing when you consider the power of their shields. Yeah, see that sensitive sensor array we have jutting out, or the bridge clearly exposed on that crows nest? Yeah, go ahead shithead, TRY and harm it.

[Xeio]

One thing I will say for Caldari ships is that they're very imposing when you consider the power of their shields. Yeah, see that sensitive sensor array we have jutting out, or the bridge clearly exposed on that crows nest? Yeah, go ahead shithead, TRY and harm it.

Phhht, real pod pilots honor tank.

[Daimon]

Caldari ships are ugly.

I stared at this beauty for a long time.

[halbarad]

Cormorant Hulls, Scorpion Hulls (new and old), Merlin Hulls, Ferox hulls and some Tengu setups are pertty much the only Caldari ships I like the look of.

Drake is also looking pretty cool now on Sisi with the new launchers:

Spoiler:

Edit: pretty cool video of the new missile effects:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pd9pXgsOmk&hd=1

[Alasseo]

I have to brag a little, bear with me for this.

http://kb.hard-knocks.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=1437

So we're in our tengus, running sites in our static. Like proper wormholers, we have scouts out with probes and are hitting dscan. We finish one site, and start on the first wave of number 2. Suddenly, niddy on dscan! Not wanting to get caught in a capital escalation wave with our slightly undermanned tengu fleet, we warp to home, and jump through. Our scout gets eyes on their pos, and he says there's a cloaky loki dropping probes. We figure we can try and bait the loki with a noctis salvaging the first site. Get noctis out, reship into fast dpsy stuff. Noctis reports loki on field.. +thanny on dscan.. fleet is in warp (took him forever to find our notis, too..). Sabre bubble is up... and two carriers (who started their warp before bubble went up) land right inside it.

We pop the loki, and start freaking out. Points happen. Batphoning begins. Reshipping begins. As about 2 bhalls and a guardian are coming on field, two more thannys get on grid. Batphoning begins really urgently. We're trying to cap the carriers down. Our initial bhalls run out of boosters, and we only end up with two guards, so we actually have an itty drop a load of boosters on field. We pop somewhere between 30 and 50 fighters, and lord alone knows how many drones as we're neuting down the carriers. Fast forward 40 minutes, and we have two carrier killmails, one self destructed thanny, and one thanny that got away because our point on him DCed.

All because some dumb carrier pilots decided that it'd be funny to get their carriers on a noctis kill, and warped in before they cleared their sigs and put out scouts. and then their buddies tried to save them.

I FCed the entire thing from site running on. Good times.

[Enokh]

Batphoning is probably the most hilarious MMO slang I've ever run across. I'm assuming it means calling in backup, or maybe specifically calling in backup that's far better than the caller (i.e. Gordon calling in Batman)?

[Alasseo]

Batphoning is probably the most hilarious MMO slang I've ever run across. I'm assuming it means calling in backup, or maybe specifically calling in backup that's far better than the caller (i.e. Gordon calling in Batman)?

Just backup, really. "Better" in the sense that without backup, you lose, which is bad, and with backup you win, which is good, so it's better. Almost always used in the context of contacting people who are not nearby and telling them to come. That is, if your fleet is on the other side of the gate, you don't batphone them in when you have the enemy in your trap. Batphoning is calling in your allies form two regions over when you tackle a supercap. Or, in our case, screaming on jabber and other mumble rooms and a few texts going out when we get two carriers tackled and only have like 4 cruisers and BCs and a dictor... :p

[Swivelguy]

I always thought of batphoning as calling in support from people you don't normally fly with when you're in over your head. Gordon calling in more cops isn't batphoning, only when he calls batman. So in this case, I wouldn't actually use the word. Nice carrier kills, though

[Ixtellor]

The following story sounded incredible, but I don't really get it.

Could you retell it without jargon. I have never played EvE but it has always intrigued me and the best gaming stories all seem to come from there.

I have to brag a little, bear with me for this.

Spoiler:

http://kb.hard-knocks.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=1437

So we're in our tengus, running sites in our static. Like proper wormholers, we have scouts out with probes and are hitting dscan. We finish one site, and start on the first wave of number 2. Suddenly, niddy on dscan! Not wanting to get caught in a capital escalation wave with our slightly undermanned tengu fleet, we warp to home, and jump through. Our scout gets eyes on their pos, and he says there's a cloaky loki dropping probes. We figure we can try and bait the loki with a noctis salvaging the first site. Get noctis out, reship into fast dpsy stuff. Noctis reports loki on field.. +thanny on dscan.. fleet is in warp (took him forever to find our notis, too..). Sabre bubble is up... and two carriers (who started their warp before bubble went up) land right inside it.

We pop the loki, and start freaking out. Points happen. Batphoning begins. Reshipping begins. As about 2 bhalls and a guardian are coming on field, two more thannys get on grid. Batphoning begins really urgently. We're trying to cap the carriers down. Our initial bhalls run out of boosters, and we only end up with two guards, so we actually have an itty drop a load of boosters on field. We pop somewhere between 30 and 50 fighters, and lord alone knows how many drones as we're neuting down the carriers. Fast forward 40 minutes, and we have two carrier killmails, one self destructed thanny, and one thanny that got away because our point on him DCed.

All because some dumb carrier pilots decided that it'd be funny to get their carriers on a noctis kill, and warped in before they cleared their sigs and put out scouts. and then their buddies tried to save them.

I FCed the entire thing from site running on. Good times

.

[Enokh]

The following story sounded incredible, but I don't really get it.

Could you retell it without jargon. I have never played EvE but it has always intrigued me and the best gaming stories all seem to come from there.

They really do. If I wasn't a father, I'd play that game nonstop, but. . I don't really have the time to devote to it that I want to.

[DaBigCheez]

The following story sounded incredible, but I don't really get it.

Could you retell it without jargon. I have never played EvE but it has always intrigued me and the best gaming stories all seem to come from there.

Hmm, I'm going to unilaterally try my hand at this (Still using some MMO jargon, but trying to tone down the EVE-specific stuff)

"So, we're out in our standard combat ships, farming some NPC's in a neighboring wormhole. Since in a wormhole you can't tell who's nearby, we're making sure to keep ourselves aware of what's going on in the system around us with our ship's scanners and with dedicated scanning probes, keeping an eye out to see if anyone new comes in. We finish up the group of NPCs we were fighting, and move on to another, when suddenly we see a carrier (an expensive capital ship) show up on our medium-range scanners! His carrier will spawn tougher NPCs, and we wouldn't be strong enough to handle the NPCs in our current ships and numbers, so we return to our own wormhole and start plotting, while sending our scouts out to get more intel on the system.

Soon enough, our scouts find the home base of that carrier we saw earlier, and says that there's a stealth-fitted ship keeping their eyes on the system with their own set of scanning probes. We think we might be able to tempt him into going for a "juicy, easy kill" by sending a non-combat ship to go scoop up the loot from the NPCs we killed earlier, so we do that and at the same time get into some harder-hitting ships. Sure enough, the probe-dropper takes the bait and shows up next to our non-combat bait ship in no time at all - and says the carrier's showing as nearby also. We warp over to our bait, and put down an obstacle to pull them out of their warp right where we want them, two carriers landing right in the center.

We blow up the scanning ship which we'd originally hoped would take the bait, and then start freaking out - there's no way we'll be able to kill these carriers on our own, but it's a golden opportunity! We scramble their warp drives, holding them down so they can't get away, and start calling up people to try and blow these carriers up before they can call in reinforcements of their own. Some heavy muscle and protective ships start arriving for us, but at the same time two more enemy carriers arrive. We start frantically calling for anyone we know to come in and reinforce us. We're trying to drain the carriers' energy banks dry so they won't be able to repair each other, but our energy-draining ships run out of spare batteries to do their work, and we don't have enough remote-recharging ships to keep them active - we eventually manage to have a noncombat hauling ship fly in and drop a load of spare batteries for them to pick up!

Over the course of our fight with the carriers, they're launching wave after wave of their fighter drones against us, and we kill probably 30 to 50 of the darn things, not to mention the smaller drones they send out in swarms, until we finally drain them dry and they start to go down. After 40 minutes, we've finally destroyed two of the four carriers, another chose to self-destruct rather than give us the satisfaction of the kill, and the fourth managed to get away only because the guy holding him in place got disconnected.

And all because the carrier pilots got greedy, and decided to try and get kill credit for our trivial bait ship and didn't scout the area properly before they put themselves at risk - and then when they got in trouble, their buddies tried to come in and save them too.

Good times."

Having never lived in a wormhole or actually fought cap ships, hope I didn't screw it up

[mike-l]

I thought warp bubbles had to be up when you actually hit the warp button?

[Alasseo]

They do - that's why they landed in the bubble. They had already hit warp when we put the bubble up.

EDIT: Whoops didn't see post above!

Yeah, with the exception/correction above, and a few more, that translation is correct. Some comments: The carrier would only spawn the tougher NPCs if it came and landed in the same area as us. Due to one thing and another they can do this quite safely (if they plan correctly) and potentially leave us with far too much incoming damage to handle, letting the NPCs do the work of killing us.

Due to us actually properly scouting, we did in fact know exactly where their base was, and had a cloaked scout watching them before our initial NPC farming ships were even out of the wormhole.

Also, as a side note, each of those fighters we exploded was worth 20,000,000. The carriers themselves were worth 1,000,000,000+. Both of our ships that we lost were together worth about 225m. So, even just killing about 12 fighters, which aren't actually proper piloted ships, just really big drones, we managed to make up our losses.. before the carrier kills and the kill of their cloaky ship. Bam.

Finally:

I thought warp bubbles had to be up when you actually hit the warp button?

A bubble affects a warp if the bubble is up when the ship drops into warp, i.e., when it finishes aligning and becomes invulnerable.

I thought this too. Got into an argument, ran some tests in our wormhole. It's not true. It's from when you click warp. I swear this is a change, but either way, that's current mechanic.

[Swivelguy]

I thought warp bubbles had to be up when you actually hit the warp button?

A bubble affects a warp if the bubble is up when the ship drops into warp, i.e., when it finishes aligning and becomes invulnerable.

[Xeio]

I thought warp bubbles had to be up when you actually hit the warp button?

I think that was lost in translation. It's correct that they will not draw you in if you are already in warp, but if you're stupid enough to warp carriers into a gank at 0 you can still land inside it. Clearly these were some stupid pilots.

[mike-l]

They do - that's why they landed in the bubble. They had already hit warp when we put the bubble up.

That's the exact opposite of what I said though.... (Not trying to be difficult, I really don't understand bubble mechanics)

[Spambot5546]

If the bubble is in your path and already up when you hit warp you'll be sucked into it. If not, you will land at your destination.

In this case the bubble went down after they entered warp, but it was placed at their destination, so they ended up in it anyway.

[Alasseo]

They do - that's why they landed in the bubble. They had already hit warp when we put the bubble up.

That's the exact opposite of what I said though.... (Not trying to be difficult, I really don't understand bubble mechanics)

Might be confusion here. What happened was that their carriers warped to our bait noctis. While their carriers were in warp, our saber landed, and put a bubble up on our noctis, which was the same point they were warping to. Since our bubble went up after they entered warp, they completed the exact warp they had started, ignoring the bubble, and thus landing inside it, instead of on the side of it, as they would have if the bubble had been up before they entered warp.

[BlackSails]

Drag bubbles only drag you if you initiate warp AFTER they are up. However, if you initiate warp, and then someone drops a bubble right on you, that will prevent you from warping.

[DaBigCheez]

Ah - so, the bubble didn't pull them out, they just happened to already be warping to the same point and then couldn't get out once they landed. I was a little confused by the chronology in the original, since it sounded like the carriers were already warping when the bubble went up and thus wouldn't have been pulled out by it, and I just mentally "fixed" it the wrong way

So, bubble didn't pull them out, it just held them there once they completed their regularly scheduled warp program. More effectively than it normally would have, in fact, due to being stuck in the center. :>

[Ixtellor]

Going back to the description of the space battle I am getting the following impression.

A member of your guild, a real human, had to spend a lot of time "Watching" an enemy base while being cloaked.

Is that fun? Do people actually log on, enter their space ship, and just sit and watch a radar screen, with the very real possiblity that they never see an enemy?

It makes it sound like the real world, where huge parts of it are quite boring. (the sonar guy in a sub... Nothing to report after my 8 hour shift).


Also, you reported that the kills were worth money. Is that because you salvage them and sell the stuff, or when you kill a ship does your bank account just go up?

[Izawwlgood]

Is that fun?

Eve has many great battle stories that develop from the way combat works.

It also has many, MANY roles, in combat and out of combat, that are less fun than going to work and doing your crappy job. Gatecamping, either for intel or waiting for someone to pop through, is one of those, 'no, this is not fun. This is boring, and tedious, and my time could be better spent playing solitaire'.

[mike-l]

Yeah, EVE is kind of long monotony interjected with random epic awesomeness.... kind of like baseball.

Scanning for sites/ships is a generally boring task, which makes finding things very exciting.

Oh, and when you kill a ship, some of its items drop, and you can salvage it for more stuff that sells well. You don't get 100% of the value, (on account of the blowing up and all) and how much you get can vary a lot from kill to kill.

The only actual source of ISK (money) directly from the game are bounties from killing NPC pirates, mission rewards, insurance payouts, and the odd NPC buy order. Everything else comes from other players (so in this case, they'll sell the salvaged goods to other players)

[BlackSails]

Going back to the description of the space battle I am getting the following impression.

A member of your guild, a real human, had to spend a lot of time "Watching" an enemy base while being cloaked.

Is that fun? Do people actually log on, enter their space ship, and just sit and watch a radar screen, with the very real possiblity that they never see an enemy?

It makes it sound like the real world, where huge parts of it are quite boring. (the sonar guy in a sub... Nothing to report after my 8 hour shift).

Yes and no. Most EVE players have multiple accounts, so its possible to leave one cloaked up watching the enemy, while just tabbing into it every few minutes.

Also, you reported that the kills were worth money. Is that because you salvage them and sell the stuff, or when you kill a ship does your bank account just go up?

Killing players only gets you money by selling the loot and salvage to other players.

[Izawwlgood]

Most EVE players have multiple accounts, so its possible to leave one cloaked up watching the enemy, while just tabbing into it every few minutes.

Right, but this isn't possible for gate camping, as your window of reaction may literally be 5-15s depending on the ship. If you're keeping eyes out for a cloaking ship, you have the merest instance to watch for the ship to decloak, then insta-recloak.

[Enokh]

Could always get a second monitor for your gate-camper?

[Spambot5546]

I always rather enjoyed scouting. Preferrably for a roaming gang, but I've done it for static ops, too. Monitoring local and dscan (and probing, if the situation calls for it) keep your hands occupied, so you're not just sitting there doing nothing, and you can still bullshit with your gangmates.

I'll never understand the draw of gatecamping, though. There are people who will sit on a gate for an entire evening.

I'm also of the opinion that gatecamping seriously abuses the warpgate mechanic and should be nerfed. No idea how you'd do that, though.

[Alasseo]

Gatecamping is incredibly boring. Sometimes it's needed, for whatever reason. Note here I define gatecamping as "sitting on the gate waiting for kills to show up and come through". Waiting on a gate while you bait a target/try and find them/whatever is not gatecamping, that's just staging on the gate.

For the record, all of our scouts were alts. You sit on the wormhole, turn the sound up, wait to hear an activation. Bam.

EDIT: we knew where his pos was, but we weren't watching it until the niddy showed up on scan.

[Enokh]

See, crap, THIS is the kind of stuff I joined EVE for. I just never ended up with a corp, except this one time. . but we were all a bunch of newbies and most dropped before we were all flying half-decent anythings.

EDIT: Did they ever make it so you could program macros? For instance, pressing a key to change your orbit distance to 5km?

[halbarad]

EDIT: Did they ever make it so you could program macros? For instance, pressing a key to change your orbit distance to 5km?

They've never done this yet and I highly doubt they would. There is just too much scope for people to abuse macros (and there is already a lot of botting anyway), I think they have some guidelines of what's allowed but I can't remember where I saw them mentioned.

[m4d4sb34ns]

I have to brag a little, bear with me for this.

Spoiler:

http://kb.hard-knocks.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=1437

So we're in our tengus, running sites in our static. Like proper wormholers, we have scouts out with probes and are hitting dscan. We finish one site, and start on the first wave of number 2. Suddenly, niddy on dscan! Not wanting to get caught in a capital escalation wave with our slightly undermanned tengu fleet, we warp to home, and jump through. Our scout gets eyes on their pos, and he says there's a cloaky loki dropping probes. We figure we can try and bait the loki with a noctis salvaging the first site. Get noctis out, reship into fast dpsy stuff. Noctis reports loki on field.. +thanny on dscan.. fleet is in warp (took him forever to find our notis, too..). Sabre bubble is up... and two carriers (who started their warp before bubble went up) land right inside it.

We pop the loki, and start freaking out. Points happen. Batphoning begins. Reshipping begins. As about 2 bhalls and a guardian are coming on field, two more thannys get on grid. Batphoning begins really urgently. We're trying to cap the carriers down. Our initial bhalls run out of boosters, and we only end up with two guards, so we actually have an itty drop a load of boosters on field. We pop somewhere between 30 and 50 fighters, and lord alone knows how many drones as we're neuting down the carriers. Fast forward 40 minutes, and we have two carrier killmails, one self destructed thanny, and one thanny that got away because our point on him DCed.

All because some dumb carrier pilots decided that it'd be funny to get their carriers on a noctis kill, and warped in before they cleared their sigs and put out scouts. and then their buddies tried to save them.

I FCed the entire thing from site running on. Good times.

Roughly how long does it take to get to this sort of level, where you can dick around doing the really fun stuff? I'm about 5 weeks in (~2.2M SP), and at the stage of flying level 3 missions for one corp (CN) in a T1 fitted Drake. Haven't actually done much of this though, as I joined a corp called Pro Synergy who specialize in looting and salvaging level 4 missions on contract. I'm mostly spending time basically being a bin-man, but it seems to pay well. My plan is to build up a bit of a cash buffer, 100-200M or so, then diversify my mission running to other corps (preferable ones which don't destroy my Minmatar/Gallente standings so much). The corp seem friendly so I'll stick around for a while, but will eventually have to leave if I want to do anything other than high-sec PvE - looks like RvB would be the best bet to learn some simple frigate PvP, but eventually I'd like to try a WH corp too.

[Alasseo]

I have to brag a little, bear with me for this.

Spoiler:

http://kb.hard-knocks.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=1437

So we're in our tengus, running sites in our static. Like proper wormholers, we have scouts out with probes and are hitting dscan. We finish one site, and start on the first wave of number 2. Suddenly, niddy on dscan! Not wanting to get caught in a capital escalation wave with our slightly undermanned tengu fleet, we warp to home, and jump through. Our scout gets eyes on their pos, and he says there's a cloaky loki dropping probes. We figure we can try and bait the loki with a noctis salvaging the first site. Get noctis out, reship into fast dpsy stuff. Noctis reports loki on field.. +thanny on dscan.. fleet is in warp (took him forever to find our notis, too..). Sabre bubble is up... and two carriers (who started their warp before bubble went up) land right inside it.

We pop the loki, and start freaking out. Points happen. Batphoning begins. Reshipping begins. As about 2 bhalls and a guardian are coming on field, two more thannys get on grid. Batphoning begins really urgently. We're trying to cap the carriers down. Our initial bhalls run out of boosters, and we only end up with two guards, so we actually have an itty drop a load of boosters on field. We pop somewhere between 30 and 50 fighters, and lord alone knows how many drones as we're neuting down the carriers. Fast forward 40 minutes, and we have two carrier killmails, one self destructed thanny, and one thanny that got away because our point on him DCed.

All because some dumb carrier pilots decided that it'd be funny to get their carriers on a noctis kill, and warped in before they cleared their sigs and put out scouts. and then their buddies tried to save them.

I FCed the entire thing from site running on. Good times.

Roughly how long does it take to get to this sort of level, where you can dick around doing the really fun stuff? I'm about 5 weeks in (~2.2M SP), and at the stage of flying level 3 missions for one corp (CN) in a T1 fitted Drake. Haven't actually done much of this though, as I joined a corp called Pro Synergy who specialize in looting and salvaging level 4 missions on contract. I'm mostly spending time basically being a bin-man, but it seems to pay well. My plan is to build up a bit of a cash buffer, 100-200M or so, then diversify my mission running to other corps (preferable ones which don't destroy my Minmatar/Gallente standings so much). The corp seem friendly so I'll stick around for a while, but will eventually have to leave if I want to do anything other than high-sec PvE - looks like RvB would be the best bet to learn some simple frigate PvP, but eventually I'd like to try a WH corp too.

Somewhere around the range of 5-7m sp should be plenty to get you started in here, could actually do with less if you cut all the corners you could and sucked up not being able to do some activities. Initial isk investment for my particular corp is somewhere around 750m-1.25b depending on what exactly you bring, though. You can do lower level WHs with much less isk investment, and I'm sure there's a C5 WH corp out there that would take you in with a lower isk investment.

[BlackSails]

You can start pvping about 24 hours after starting a character.

[halbarad]

The corp seem friendly so I'll stick around for a while, but will eventually have to leave if I want to do anything other than high-sec PvE - looks like RvB would be the best bet to learn some simple frigate PvP, but eventually I'd like to try a WH corp too.

RvB is a great way to learn some skills of PVP, mostly the basics like getting used to your ships exploding and not panicing during combat.

There are quite a few WH corps who will accept you flying a T2 fitted Drake or similar and you can learn from there. You'll almost certainly need scanning skills (4/3/3 is the minimum I believe) and possibly able to fly a cov ops, mostly for the warp cloaked etc.

[Laserdan]

I've fired up a trial account and also looked up lots of information pre-playing because I'm in between two projects at work and pretty much will be only surfing and sleeping this week.

I like PvP, so Minmatar seem to be a very viable choice*? The Gallente do appeal to me politically but I heard that this has no influence on gameplay.

I'm basically thinking about being either a mercenary, an inventor or some merchant type. I'm quite the perfectionist and completionist and very competitive - any advise on a viable path catering to these interests the best?

Also, are there tools other than EVEmon that you would consider must-have?

*I realize that with enough time and ISK you can be anything anyway, so I'm thinking for the start.

[lemmings]

I like PvP, so Minmatar seem to be a very viable choice*? The Gallente do appeal to me politically but I heard that this has no influence on gameplay.

Pick your race based on who you want to look like (less important now that next to all differentiation is gone) and what race you want to be affiliated with. The Gallente can fly Minmatar ships without an issue and the same is true for all of the races, the only differentiation that I recall was that your starting skills (they take an hour or so a piece) are slightly different. If you're sticking with the account, you won't even know this after a few weeks.