It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.

~Attributed to Harry S. Truman

I was going to say today, but by now it's been out for about a week, so let's just say recently!

RECENTLY, CCP announced that the much hated, and much revered Learning skills would be getting canned.  I've long been on the fence about this change but I think it's a change worth making.  Giving every attribute a base +12 and eliminating what could be up to four months of a new players start so they have a better chance to learn skills and move forward the rest of their eve career might be playing to the lowest common denominator, but to me makes a lot of sense.

Especially the way that CCP is pulling this off, refunding the skill-points, removing the skills from the market, a really well thought out plan and I for one look forward to figuring out what in the world I will be spending my 4 mil sp I currently have in learning skills on.

So far I have come up with a few options.  I could train Caldari Battleship from 0 (current) to level 5 and then have all races BS5, Cruiser 5, and Frigate 5.  That still leaves me with 2 mil sp in the bank, so to speak, to place into another skill later down the line when I really need it, say just before the tourney or upon realization that I need that probing skill at 5 NOW!  Maybe then I will be forced into going the cap ship route.  Thanks to having level 5 in pretty much everything else!  Or finish up all the t3's for all races to l5.  As always, so many options, so little time!  The great unlearning is upon us, rejoice!

Last night, she said...

So last night was my wife and my whole hand(5 year) anniversary.  Well since we met each other at least.  We went out and got dinner, had some wine, went out to the bars....

Okay fine, I'll get to the point

Friday night is blob night, here's what we get up to on blob nights! By our leet FC

Lets check that pocket.

It's late, i want us to move quick, but there IS a 19 man bubble on the map pretty close to the route home, so I take us over that way. Sak jumps in, says there is 50 in local, and I tell him to go get eyes. He derps around a bit (THEY ARE ATTACKING AN OFFLINE TOWER AT A PLANET!), but gets us a fleetcomp of: a few carriers, a few dreads in seige, a cyno up, and roughly a 50 man BC heavy mishmash fleet w/ no (non capital) logi.

I get the fleet off gate to a tac, and start publicly debating with myself... Lexa is bugging like champ, and I kinda want to get home rather than derp the fleet, BUT I famously pussied out on Thursday night against a fleet I could have squeezed some kills out of (even if we would have died horribly) and I was pretty emo about that, PLUS, I had specificly loaded us towards BCs or "whatever you could afford to lose" specificly so I could go have a scrap. So: Fuck ya. Balls deep.

I tell Sak to get me a warpin, as the cyno is down... he indicates that the show is @planet six at zero, so I order fleet to jump in, align, and after 10s, warp to planet six at optimals. This meant zero for DPS, 50 for logi, and 30 for me.

We do land right in the middle of fuckoff blob, and I order bubble up and start calling primaries.

I could write a book about primary calling last night. I probably should.

The bottom line is that I had brackets on, which I always use to try to best understand the SHAPE of the engagement on grid. Unfortunately, this time, there was SO MUCH on grid that this plan backfired utterly. I simply could not get an idea of the force disperal. So I quickly went to targets by range.

This meant I started with 3 drakes (I always try to call primary, secondary, tertiary)... some people were hurfing a bit but at this point, I'm just steamrolling with drake calls. The GOOD news is they go down rather quick, which allows me to get my pants on a little more, and I start preferring canes to drakes on calls.

My watchlist is showing me ships getting repped (rather than popped) so I'm happy to keep strolling through primaries eventually getting into the truly tanky ships (abbadon, etc.) There was ONE drake they had enough reps on that I wasn't able to immediately break it and had to switch off of. Meanwhile, I'm keeping a point on one of the carriers, and asking other people to keep points on the others. this started to suck as that carrier was slowboating away from the fight and my ranges were getting mucked up, so I started incorperating any other calls into my call-chain. If someone said "I have XXX tackled", I'd bump XXX to my secondary slot, and just keep steamrolling.

They cyno'ed in more carriers around this time, but I kind of just didn't care, as we continued to have no trouble popping things through their capital reps.

About this time, dreads are insta-cynoing out once their siege finishes, and we don't have bubbles to stop it (our hic died). Atan and Bacc are crying like babies on private channels to cyno in their toys, but we don't have an exit cyno sorted yet. I'm still calling primaries, and try to load another eve client to get a cyno alt loaded in TXW, but my framerates go to shit and I abandon the effort. I finally decide i don't give a shit if they lose them, and if they want to bring them onto the field, who cares.

So, I thumbs up the operation, supers come on, and bacc starts calling carrier primaries. I continue to call subcap primaries as they appear (they were broken at this point, but keep warping in "to help")... eventually this dries up, and all focus is on maintaining capital points and getting fighter-bomber DPS onto carriers.

I order our carriers to start looting as we go, letting the supers concentrate on dps, and move scouts into nearby systems to watch for reinforcements.

That doesn't happen, and we are left with a huge ass field full of loot. Looting took about 15 mins, by which time I was super nervous, so we evacced caps and went home.

I was SURE I was suiciding the fleet, and I wasn't. There are also all kinds of kills on the board that I know I didn't primary, so i'm very interested on hearing xbox's recording of the fight, because I don't remember much- it was really a blur.

At the end of the day, logi kept us up, tackle kept them there, and generally, we couldn't have done much better (maybe 2 carriers left that we shoudl have pointed).

It was easily the best fight of my eve career. Thanks for everyone who convinced me to do the unsmart thing.

Seriously, 66 kills and 6 losses.  That's a night I'm sure nobody will be forgetting soon.  Nice job Rote! 

And just as importantly, Happy Anniversary wifers!(She doesn't even know of this blog, so lolz)

A good new look

So after much messing about with the ever so painful Blogger tools to update the look of the blog, I have settled on a new look!  I know everyone can tell given that you are reading this via RSS but come on over and check it out.

Thanks to Rixx Javix for the beautiful work done for my Alliance that translated so smoothly into a nice image for this site.  Go check out his blog and other assorted amazing work over at EVEOGANDA.

Coming soon I plan on figuring out another quality post like the Vagabond guide, maybe a different ship, or a different topic, but first I have to figure out what!  Until then I'll just go back to being mostly silent while the holiday season kills my playtime!