NPC Losses – Week 3

TG here, bringing you some of the latest losses from our favourite NPC corp, The Scope. Let’s not mess about and jump straight into it, shall we?

As before, each pilot mentioned gets a whopping 1,000,000 ISK from myself for their troubles.

Our first loss is by the brave pilot known only as “Xcasei”. The mysterious Tengu pilot has spent 4 years perfecting his skills and wealth and felt it was time to put it to the test. He valiantly entered the notoriously pirate-haunted High-sec system of Amdonen and prepared to do battle against the religious Amarrian fanatics.

Sadly, his mission ended in failure. Truly his loss will be mourned by all in corp chat.

—

The Amarr were not the only threat facing the brave denizens of High-sec this week. The Sansha have been invading, those bastards. Alexey Titarenko has also donned a Tengu and has ridden out into battle.

Well… shit. Man down!

—

Surely the next man up can fare better. Engaging the Serpentis pirates in the Sing Laison region, LococCam Swags had bravely entered the field in his dual-tanked Megathron-class Battleship,  destroying scum outlaws left, right and…

 

Or not. Well, surely our fourth pilot will have more success?

—

The Scorpion Navy Issue is a fearsome Battleship. Capable of wielding awesome destructive power, it is rather puzzling to see Completer using it in an ECMing, Tracking Disrupting and Damping battleship. Fortunately, CONCORD took offense to the smartbomb in the highslot and the inevitable happened.

 

This brave capsuleer was not the only one that CONCORD disliked. Enter from stage right, Frank McKain.

Frank Mckain.

Frank is no ordinary pilot. No sir-ee.

You see, ordinary pilots just run about in their basic ships. No style. No finesse. Anyone can be a starship captain of a cheap Minmatar frigate. Not Frank. Frank is the proud owner of a Megathron Navy Issue. The pride of the Gallente fleet, this battleship is feared by wrongdoers all over Empire space.

Sadly for Frank, CONCORD are not wrongdoers. In their eyes, the smartbombing Megathron was an insult to everything they stood for.

 

Just like that, the pride of the Federation vanished.

 

Intermission; RvB takes on Brave Newbies

There are 3 sets of very large alliances in Lowsec and Highsec. Red vs Blue and EVE University have massive numbers in Highsec, and Brave Newbies have staggering numbers in Lowsec. RvB has been at war in the past with EVE Uni, so there was only one thing to do when they felt a large outside brawl was needed.

Upon hearing RvB had declared war on Brave Newbies for a week, I decided to temporarily drop WHEN for the weekend. Fortunately, CCP have made it so you don’t have to wait 24 hours to drop corp.

Grabbing only a Myrmidon, I burnt over to the deployment zone near the BNI HQ of Rahadalon. A Taranis was quickly bought, a fleet quickly joined and battle swiftly commenced.

Death to ECM

As the fight progressed, BNI found logi in the form of an Archon they had undocked, so RvB undocked a Thanatos.

Also death to damps

A Neutral Revelation soon undocked and engaged our Thanatos, but BNI refused to shoot it. Alts ahoy! By the time a Chimera came out for them we decided to bail the field and docked our own carrier.

We skirmished round the system for the rest of the evening, briefly dropping on a BNI noctis trying to salvage the field as well, before I called it a night.

Day 1 – EVE Kill report

The next day saw a lot of chest-beating on both sides. BNI were cowards who wouldn’t undock, whereas RvB isn’t real PvP because both sides have a chance. You get the idea. BNI and RvB both dropped large fleets on the BNI undock individually, but never at the same time…

Fweddit had shown up with a fleet of Talwars, but we had a hard time catching them untill we caught them at a belt by accident and managed to knock them off field. We  managed to get BNI to undock into us, but the battle was over rather quickly.

Yes, the Chimera docked.

RvB first fleet warps into the engagement zone

Finally, the evening arrived. A Saturday evening, to be precise. What happens on Saturdays? Ganked roams. So where did Mangala bring us? Rahadalon of course.

I was late to the party. I logged in to hear our fleet was in Rahadalon and the field was a clusterfuck. I jumped in a Merlin, jumped into Rahadalon, warped to a fleet member and… yup.

Bottom left; BNI in their POS. Upper right, the TEST Talwar fleet

The ensuing fights lasted about 4 hours, with TEST, RvB, BNI, PL and CVA all getting invoved, so here’s some various screenshots.

We also engaged a Fourth District fleet next door, killing a few shinies.

Eventually the fights fizzled out, so here’s the EVE-Kill for the day.

Cut off and escaping an ambush

A quick tale for you people who bother to read.

Last night, we attempted to launch an assault on some site runners in a Class 4 wormhole, only to have the critical-mass wormhole collapse with a token force inside. No big deal, so I decided to scan out today, link up with them and we could continue the assault. Easy.

Our C4 static leads me to an end-of-life C4b, which leads to… an end of life C4c. No big deal. I scan that to find… an end of life C6a. This looks more promising but gives me 2 end of life Nullsecs, an EOL C5a static and an inbound C4d. I decide to head home and await for the wormholes to die naturally, only to find C4b -> C4c has collapsed.

Damn it.

The C5a leads to another C6 and, quite frankly, “fuck that”. I decide to check out the C4d inbound. Maybe there’s an inbound there?

The good news is I find a C2a inbound. The better news is that there’s a highsec static there! The utterly fantastic news is that there’s sleeper wrecks on scan. There’s also a Thrasher.

Launch probes out of range. Use Directional-scan to locate the site. Probes dropped at 1 au. Thrasher hit. Warp drive active.

Hello.

I decloak and burn at the Thrasher, popping drones ready.

Then the Thrasher warps and a new contact appears on overview. A Manticore bomber has decloaked 15km from me and… I’m pointed. Shit.

D-scan lights up with a host of ships, so I lock and burn at the Manticore. He starts moving away but at afterburner speeds, and it’s moments before my drones, scram and guns are on him. Within seconds, he pops. As my drones return, the hostiles land on grid. I cloak and hit warp to a random Custom’s Office at range. Better luck next time gents.

o/

Fanfest 2013 – Round Up

So. I finally return from Iceland and Fanfest 2013 (and then put off writing about it for 2 weeks whilst waiting for photos)

Cheers to Khador, Dracoth and Del for the photos! Also, WordPress has borked most the photos giving them weird titles and the gallery acts funny. Will work on it – you should still view the pictures fine though!

I landed in some weird country called Iceland on Wednesday afternoon with Siuil, missing the snow which had plagued the country earlier in the morning. A good start. My hotel was 15-20 mins walk from the Harpa venue itself, so I wandered over to meet some other RvB guys at their hotel. Dracoth, Thecla, Scyleth, Dragon, Vora, Mink and more joined myself as we head out into Reykjavik and got a bit drunk. Met up with all sorts – Azual Skoll, Kaeda Maxwell and even Sindel & Bagehi showed up at some point or another. I lost track after CCP Foxfour gave me… something… to drink, though! I had this great magic trick where every time I left my seat, a new drink was waiting for me when I got back. I think I was rather drunk…

Thecla and Scyleth

CCP Guard!

Various players. CCP Foxfour in the black top

Reykjavik

Scyleth, me, Sindel, Vora, Siuil

Roll on Thursday - Day 1 begins

Myself and Siuil reached the Harpa after it opened due to the long walk from the hotel. What met our eyes was easily the biggest gathering of spaceship nerds I had ever seen. It was awesome. Managed to skip the main queue to grab my Fansite ticket and off we went.

Fansite ticket!

I milled around for an hour or so, meeting various players. Ran into Geddonz and Akely of the 20 Minuters and some of the Lowsec gang (R1FTA) before hitting the Ship Balancing presentation. Pretty standard cover of the known changes so far but included some neat bits about command ships – namely that both types of command ships will be evenly matched in the amount/type of Warfare links that can be used. Intriguing.

I planned to visit the Wormhole roundtable discussion but by the time I got to the room it was full. I mean full. So I left and got a drink instead. Game Design presentation came next – it was mildly interesting but nothing of note. What was good was the Lowsec/Crimewatch presentation and the introduction of “Tags 4 Sec” – new NPCs in lowsec Asteroid Belts which drop 4 new tags which can be used, in combinationwith ISK, to up your Security Status at CONCORD/DED lowsec stations. Awesome!

The rest of the day was spent meeting, talking and drinking. \o/

The Harpa

Nerdz

Foxfour being all dev-ey

Mink with Mink.

Friday

Friday saw the World of Darkness presentation as the first thing of note. All very shush shush and closed doors. We got some rather dry tech stuff followed by a neat 1.5 minute long trailer (with a heavy amount of after-effects) showing off the world. I quite enjoyed that part!

Dust 514 presentation involved some details on Planetary Conquest. As a guy who never played DUST, this also quite interested me. Figuring out how DUST would interact with EVE, however small it may be to start, was quite good to watch! Plus, y’know, we got to taunt Foxfour more.

Following this there wasn’t much going on till the Keynote, so those of us milling about generally chatted shit for an hour. Ran into Roc Wieler who was oozing cool along with Dsan and Sindel. The low-sec guys (R1FTA and co) were also great fun to chat to, especially since I’d met some of them previously at the VETO London meet.

The time had finally arrived for the EVE Keynote, otherwise known as “attack of the queues”

QUEUES!

The keynote itself was pretty good. Some of the new Odyssey features looked very cool (more on them at a later date) and I was rather impressed with the presentation as a whole. Still not a fan of CCP Seagull (nor that end vision bit) but really enjoyed the EVR demo for the Oculus Rift they showed off!

Mink then stole found acquired liberated a flag.

Met up with some EVE players and went for pizza where I even managed to run into Morwen Lagann (AKA the AFK guy in our public channel). We finally regrouped at the Harpa for the Pub Crawl with a Dev. We had signed up to Foxfour’s group, obviously.

If you want a whole gallery of the Pub Crawl, please go to this album. There’s a lot. It’s worth looking through.

Saturday

We eventually recovered for Saturday morning afternoon. Went to some presentations… I think. Tried the Oculus Rift with the EVR. It was amazing. Seriously. CCP, take my money and make a game out of this.

The EVR demo stations

Unfortunately today was a bit of a blur and, without a laptop, I couldn’t make any notes. I’m bad. I do, however, remember the CCP Presents Keynote.

I was rather vocal about my overall dislike of this presentation at the time. Too DUST focused with pointless crap that I’m sure their DUST specific keynote should have covered. Is one new pistol really central to this keynote? Fortunately, after an hour of DUST, we finally got some EVE stuff!

Collector’s Edition? Woo! Golden Pod? Nifty! Rifter USB hub? AWESOME.

Remake of CCP’s board game. Eh.

£150. Haha no. But that’s just me. Plenty seemed to enjoy it, and good for them!

The keynote spiraled back to DUST for another 20 minutes before touching on some really cool subjects – namely EVE’s 10th anniversary, a possible EVE TV show, CSM 8 was announced (congratulations to all!) and a kickass new trailer was released.

Keynote over, we went for moar food before the Party At The Top Of The World.

The RvB Fanfest group

Restaurant!

Finally, it was time to hit the Harpa and attend some party thing.

Due to us nerds being quiet shy creatures, we retreated downstairs after a while to drink and meet some others. Had a fair chat with Dsan about nullsec and ice prices, which was a lot more interesting than it sounds!

Thecla worshipping CCP Fozzie

We finally grabbed Azual and went on the search of cheaper alcohol which resulted in us finding a random pub somewhere.

Dracoth, Azual, Scyleth, Me, Jayzo

Eventually at some time in the early morning, I caught a taxi back to the hotel.

Spent all Sunday recovering. I was hoping to meet some people and visit the famous Icelandic Phallological Museum, but I overslept. I had to achieve one other objective; I had to get my #tweetfleet hat from General Stargazer.

Found CCP HQ whilst on the hunt.

Not here.

Silly TG, that is not a hat, that is Dracoth!

Finally, as the evening started to turn into night…

Hat located!

Thus it was Sunday night, and since I had to be up at 4:30am for the shuttle to the airport, it was time for some shut-eye.

Overall? 10/10 would go to strange island country again.

Fanfest, dumb Tengus and engaging the CCP fleet

So I got back from Fanfest a little over a week ago. I actually have a big post prepared to go out on it, but I’ve been delayed by being a) lazy and b) I’m awaiting a lot of photos from other sources. A wall of text is no fun – you need pretty pictures! Expect a more detailed FF2013 post some time this week next week thanks to internet going down. ANYWAY MOVING ON.

I logged on the other day to find two things – our static has less than 20 minutes left, and we had an inbound nullsec. Being the curious git I am, I scout the null until static collapses. As expected, everything docks or runs to a POS when I enter. That’s several drinks right there. After a time, I roll back to our home wormhole where our static has died and begin probing the chain.

C4a? Dull. C3a? Dull. C4b? Two Tengus are on scan as I jumped in and disappear off scan just as quick. A quick scout shows a few piloted ships at a tower – a Scorpion and a mix of frigates. No sign of the Tengus, so I launch probes. Bingo – a wormhole resolves itself in my scan window. It’s a C4. I jump in, preparing to call in allies for a possible trap. D-scan shows a single Sleeper wreck and… one Tengu. Said Tengu is 5km away from me, on the wormhole. I can see boost effects and a quick check of his ship config shows he’s not cloaky. Boosting for his fleetmates? Either way, I’m going for him. As I lock him up, he makes no attempt to flee.

As he dips into armour, I’m frantically checking d-scan. It must be bait, right?

He’ll jump any moment now.

Oh wait. Nope. Pod too. Hrm.

We throw another scout into the wormhole. There’s 5 more Tengus running Sleeper sites and they are still doing it even though I blew up their booster.

So we drop on them, catching 3 of them. Heh.

Meanwhile in k-space

It’s Sunday. EVE turns 10 the day after. Player events are going on across the universe as we attempt to break the current max PCU (max players online at once) of almost 63,000. We have a Ganked roam scheduled, and we also plan to hit the 1,000 Rifter event by Marlona Sky, involving shooting her Nyx. How bad could it be?

First interesting point of the night was that Ganked was plugged by CCP in a devblog. We usually average about 100 people on a Ganked roam? This one broke 300.  Oh dear.

The good news is that Frigates were the name of our game, so we started out with over 200 to start into the dark depths of nullsec. Gathering in Rens beforehand had CCP Foxfour in local replying, amusingly, to our comms. CCP SPAI ON OUR MUMBLE. Off we went into Null!

Our glorious trip revealed nothing and we were beginning to lose hope when CCP announced they were sending out a Dev Fleet. We gathered in Amamake as the CCP live stream kicked into gear, showing them 7 jumps away with their destination set as… Amamake. They appeared to be in a Gnosis/Scimitar gang, presumably with dev hax implants. We set our destination for where they are and set out.

We danced round a couple of systems away as CCP kept trying to throw us off. Only a handlful of locals had gotten here and a 20-man mixed fleet had just been shredded. We finally caught up to the fleet as we broke the record for the PCU count.

We jumped into CCP and engaged, much to the delight of the people talking on the livestream. Many chat comments involved “holy shit that fleet” or some variation thereof. 200 mixed frigates vs a Logi supported, devh4x implant Gnosis gang. Did I mention the Gnosis went 5.5kms+ with their MWD? They did.  As we decloaked, the fight was well and truly on. First primary? CCP Goliath.

CHARGE. INTO BATTLE, MY COMRADES

Our frigates streaked towards the enemy ships as Time Dilation began to slow the system to less than half it’s normal speed. We caught a couple of Scimitars as they tried to burn away from our gang so the rest of CCP began to kite closer, allowing our faster frigates to begin tackling them. We piled onto Goliath, ending his logistics career and began chewing on a nearby Gnosis who happened to be CCP Vesna Prishla.

Busy HUD is busy!

Kaboom, first Gnosis kill… ever? Perhaps! Mangala began calling targets like a pig wallowing in mud (or a chav in a cheap off-license, as he described) as we started on CCP Bella Bee whilst tackling CCP Falcon.

Screaming in Local will not save you now, Falcon!

Bella Bee falls. Falcon actually lives as we switch targets (he dies later with 170k damage to him, don’t worry). Next is our favourite dev, CCP SocksFoxfour.

Fuck this guy in particular.

Blam. GOOD BYE FOXFOUR. The battle really kicks into gear as some of the first CCP pilots start to reship. Amusing thing to watch was the livestream as we shot the various point-of-view ships they were using.

Death of a thousand cuts

Death to Fozzie, nerfer of Dominixes!

Dolan thought he was safe at the edge of battle. No CCP is safe in New Eden.

Eventually we realise the last CCP streaming (despite plenty on field) was some distance from the battle. The only CCP more than 20km away? CCP Rise, currently duelling (and beating) a Talos who only seems to have him pointed (not scrammed).

Sounds like a job for an Atron. Overheat MWD, overheat scram. Go.

ohai

It was quite amusing to watch myself tackle Rise on the stream a few seconds later. I called tackle and for bounce-warps to me as the Talos exploded, leaving me alone against the Gnosis. Fortunately he had no web, and his lasers kept glancing off. As my fleet started to land and establish tackle, I bailed before a lucky hit took me out. Bye bye Rise!

Returning to the main battle

Finally, after almost 40 minutes, the last CCP died and we did the most manliest of things. We ran away, since the Nyx event was in 20 minutes and we had 7 systems to cover under Time Dilation. Also, a lot of neutrals were showing up and we had no desire to be bogged down. Flee!

Field not long before we left

EVE-Kill for the fight.

We proceeded to high-tail it to Flosewin, where almost 1000 pilots were already waiting. We spiked it to 1300 and the number just kept rising. Time dilation was already 15%, then Marlona undocked the Nyx.

Oh dear god, the client lag.

I whored onto the killmail then docked and logged as local spiked to 2,400 and the game became unplayable. Oh well!