Friday, November 30, 2012

New Eden Open Finals are upon us!


Ahh the NEO, after missing last weekend and the dramatic elimination of the FHC US TZ group, "Much Crying Old Experts" I'm left without much of a pony in this fight. Well that was until I saw that not only did the HYDRA RELOADED/Darkside. team make it into the final weekend, but so did the Suddenly Spaceships team, Winners of ATIX and Seldarine on the loose!

Here is a quick listing of all the teams left and who they actually are...



*      Goggle Wearing Internet Crime Fighters – Team Captain: Seldarine - Suddenly spaceships teama

*      Ronin and the Pixies – Team Captain: Dwimm - RONIN team

*      XXXMity -  Team Captain: KwarK uK - Team Liquid/Tuskers team.

*      Expendables – Team Captain: HaartSp - Hydra Reloaded

*      The Reputation Cartel – Team Captain: luckyccs - FHC EU!

*      Asine Hitama’s team – Team Captain: Vlada Silni - G0dfathers team

Team schedule can be found here : Day Five : Day Six

AND betting can be found on Monocle madness!

I would make predictions, but this late in the game I have no chance of getting anything right! Matches start on Saturday Dec 1st at 1800! Enjoy!

Stream link

Retribution Patch notes in the wild

And by wild I mean crazy long! Seriously I have been waiting for a centralized place I can look at all the changes happening Dec 4th, and here it is.  Thank you CCP!


@erlendur
Retribution patchnotes: 15,152 words; 34 pages. Coming 4 Dec to YOUR computer! #tweetfleet #eveonline

Man it's a doooooozy.

But it looks like everything is in there, so good luck sorting through it all.

And most importantly, here's the patchnotes link!

PATCHNOTES OF DOOM(ey doom doom)!

And this time on Pastebin; http://t.co/Of0mvpCY

Thursday, November 29, 2012

BB#41 - "Yesterday"

Blog Banter 41: Director's Cut
The universe of EVE is not without its drama and epic stories, both in and out of game. Imagine a publisher, movie studio or television network asked you to prepare a pitch for a new brand of EVE-flavoured entertainment. This could be your big break, what would be your synopsis to deliver New Eden to a wider audience?

My campaign would be two fold, first I would lead into a movie with a tri-weekly published webcomic. The webcomic would focus around the antics of a single main protagonist and their life in Eve. The protagonist would be female and modeled after the same actress who would later play in the movie.

It would cover in more specific terms the life of a up and coming capsuleer. Capsuleer training would be for once covered in more detail, the first death of jumping into a clone, becoming a freelance capsuleer and the dangerous, steep path that leads towards becoming a mercenary capsuleer for hire.

Movie Synopsis

Hook : Half a Gallente mining station hangs in view, obviously looking out a window of the staion, the camera pans back, revealing the bald head of (Patrick Stewart), hands behind his back, dressed in a power suit, standing in front of a glass desk. The camera continues to pull back, a wet cough  echoing in the room from a half seen bleeding woman. The back of her mow-hawked head just barely comes on screen, light glinting off silver implants up her spine and blood leaking from the side of her red lips. A thug's fist comes from the opposite side, twisting the head of the capsuleer with the force of the punch.

Patrick S. : (looking at, speaking to the window, Traffic is flowing in and out of the mining station, with a Megathron and Obelisk prominently moving free of the station.) "It's a shame you don't have what we want. You let us all down girl. In the long term of things I suppose this won't even matter... I suppose I will have to teach proper manners to your clone."

The camera pans out as the thug levels an impressive gun at the temple of the bloodied woman. the gun takes up more and more of the screen, and then the camera pans down, leaving just her hand in view, struggling against the tape holding her to the chair... CRACK, fade to black.

Synopsis : Capsuleers are a breed apart from humanity, raised to godhood, and some beyond godhood. Put in command of ships capable of killing, saving, or harvesting. It is with them that the future lies, but the ties of old society aren't so easily cut. In the darkness of space there is always room for a little more greed.

This story is about a capsuleer, proud, and brave, but dead in more ways and times than she can remember. After the hook she awakens, coughing, choking, the camera behind her eyes as she reaches up to be released, the same hand that just died on that chair pushing against the glass. The med techs open her bay, causing her to, ungracefully, spill out on the floor, coughing, reborn.

She asks the techs how old her memories are, she is missing 24 hours. The last 24 hours. She backtracks her steps, finding the remnants of a job, and a betrayal a bare 24 hours cold.

She makes her way to her capsuleer quarters, once there she is attacked by Sansha drones and Assasins.  A short but brutal fight breaks out in her small quarters, she makes her escape by diving into her pod and undocking in the first ship she could find, a Talos class Battlecruiser. From there she is alternatively pursued and assisted by friends and enemies while she discovers her last 24 hours.

The mission that caused her death was given to her by her  benefactor turned sponsor, turned arch-nemesis. She was sent to recover a data disk deep in nullsec, a mission she had failed at, but worse, had been captured and discovered.

The assassins that had been dogging her the duration of the movie were both from the Sasha, the true owners of the disk as well as her former friend and benefactor. In her flight she discovers the data on the disk is worth a fortune, and rests not with her enemies but with an ex-lover, a pirate.

Wagering it all, she attempts to persuade the lover to part his way with the disk, promising him a cut. Disk in hand she finds herself in posession of information that could forever change the cluster...  Information about generating stable, cheap, directional wormholes large enough to pass any traffic. Stolen Sansha technology.

The movie ends in a cliff hangar, and rightly so, as if Eve could be shown in a single movie.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Dispirited Evening

I closed the comm channel, and a quiet sigh escaped my list. The kind of sigh you make when you know something is really bothering you but you can't quite place your finger on what.

My quarters in 98Q were sparse and felt barely lived in, I had spent most of my time in my pod or in quarters of a ship in my hangar. Somehow I always ended up back in here when I joined holo channels like the summit.

I refilled my glass with more whiskey, the clear bottle, label-less belying it's smugglers nature. Good drink was so hard to find in a 'hostile' station. While I had grown so used to my connections in TXW, the people here had grown used to the demands of IRED. Those things had been, well, disrupted would be one word, hectic another, since 'we' had dropped by.

It surprised me how much was different between my quarters here and the quarters I had in TXW. Here felt like just another berth, but somehow TXW felt like home.... or at least a kind of home. I sipped my whiskey, my free hand pushing my chair away from the small comms console and walking in front of the enormous holoscreen. I turned to face the broadcast, it was some sort of baseliner news, murders, wars, deaths were the headlines, in two words, background noise.

Another Sansha invasion here, another abduction there, various capsuleer wars, the ever simmering Militia wars. Numbers trickled over the screen, overlays on overlays trying to unweave the tapestry of capsuleer relations to the baseliner level. I nearly snorted... reflecting more on 'home.'

Recently TXW had been feeling a lot less like my home. It had started when Usagi took her hound and more importantly, her cute ass off to see 'family' deep in Gurista controlled Venal. Initially we had talked often, but as usual, things slowed down. I hadn't heard from her in months, and then I went looking for trouble.

I found some welcome trouble in the arms of another capsuleer, and that had helped, for a while. Up until she had also disappeared, maybe moved on was a better term... And then I had moved onto real trouble. Finding another link to my past I had through avoided, or at the very least, buried. I frowned, mentally muting the holoscreen.

My eyes refocused, and I found the glass of whiskey waiting at my lips, I took a sip... the alcohol sliding down my throat. At least my body knew what to do. Home is where the drink is. I walked back over to the table, grabbit the still half full bottle of whiskey before moving back towards my hangar.

Mentally I scrolled through my local ship hangar, flipping through their pods and beds, wondering where I would end up tonight.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

New Eden Open team names to Actual backers breakdown



TEAMS



8 CAS - Friendly Syndicate small gang pvpers
Captain: Nopolar

Africa's Finest - Verge of Collapse, ATX winners!
Captain: Rengas

Asine Hitama's Team - G0dfathers team
Captain: Vlada Silni

Baaaramu - RAZOR Alliance
Captain: Qicia

Blue Ballers - Knights of Tomorrow Alliance, never heard of them before.
Captain: Ivan Jakanov

DeepWater - Black Sharks Division, according to the Captains history, no other team information.
Captain: HED KANDIR

EFS - Wormhole Holders
Captain: Ivanrus

Expendables - Hydra Reloaded
Captain: HaartSp

Goggle Wearing Internet Crime Fighters - Suddenly spaceships team.
Captain: Seldarine

Guiding Hand Social Club - A self explanitory team name!
Captain: Tyrrax Thorrk

ISN - Incursion Shiny Network - Highsec incursion fleet
Captain: Bozl1n

Last Huzzah - Huzzah
Captain: Sashenka

Much Crying Old Experts - FailHeap Challenge US team, has a variety of members including some Rote!
Captain: Tyrus Tenebros

My Little Nulli - Nulli Secunda Alliance team
Captain: Cas mania

Oxygen Isonopes - Goonswarm
Captain: Warr Akini

Perihelion Beryllium Duralumin - Perihelion alliance team.
Captain: IceGuerilla

Raiden. 58th Squadron - Raiden obviously
Captain: Hey You

RONIN and pixies - RONIN team
Captain: Dwimm

Something Else - TEST Alliance
Captain: SpeedY G0nZaleZ

Team Ineluctable. - Inelectable alliance
Captain: AndreWanJinn

Tengu Terror - The Unthinkables alliance
Captain: StarCrash

The Exiled Gaming - The Exiled Gaming Alliance
Captain: Imbor

The Gentlemen Renegades - No info at all.

the HUNS - Hun reloaded
Captain: Justice forHungary

Tinkerhell and Alts - Tinkerhell is the team CO, Nocturnal Romance sponsored team.
Captain: TinkerHell

Why Dash - PL team
Captain:Elise Randolph

XXXMity aka XXXMity Shadow of Ram Legion DOT Reloaded Hattree.XXXWorstOffenders - Team Liquid/Tuskers team.
Captain: KwarK uK


Day One matches


Raiden. 58th Squadron v Last Huzzah

Why Dash vs RONIN and pixies

Expendables vs the HUNS

Tinkerhell and Alts vs Tengu Terror

Oxygen Isonopes vs Africa's Finest

Something Else vs The Exiled Gaming

Perihelion Beryllium Duralumin vs Goggle Wearing Internet Crime Fighters

ISN - Incursion Shiny Network vs Baaaramu

Asine Hitama's Team vs EFS

Much Crying Old Experts vs DeepWater

Blue Ballers vs The Gentlemen Renegades - a literal battle of two unknowns, I can't predict shit like this so I will SWAG it.

Betting Sites

As always Monocle Madness is getting in on the action, setting up the usual betting pools over here with their newly improved site! They handled over 400b isk in the last AT. Or join their in game chat channel, "Monocle Madness" to get in on the shit-talking.

Or follow them on Twitter for up to the minute match info - https://twitter.com/MonocleMadness

And of course here is the link to the Site where you can go get more information, the live stream and all the good stuff! HERE

98Q-

Tonight was, or I guess last night was, the "final" move of our Syndicate cleanse diet. Honestly this was the only move of the cleanse diet that might end up meaning anything. In a speech to the alliace, Cassius Longinus rallied the troops, stating simply:

 "Sure, we'll go back to roaming, and it's all good. But YOU need to look in the mirror and decide you are OK with being John Fucking Revenants bitch."

 If anything is needed to rally the troops it is the simple call to not be beaten by John fuckin Rev. We moved into 98Q, unopposed, making it our home. Now for those who don't follow Syndicate that well, IRED has had plenty of time to fortify the pocket, they operate out of 98Q, out of the 5-4 station, the same station that is now our home.

 They roll heavier than we do, run strong fleet comps, and have consistent success against our gangs. In fact the last few times we have seen them in space they have either been us running away, due to their numbers or better comp, or they have wiped the floor with us. Most times both.

 In short, if we don't bring our "A" game, they are going to stomp us. In fact, unless we pull our collective heads out of our asses, they are going to stomp us. Once again to quote Cass:

"if Rote Kapelle is going to take a fucking nap, then I want IRED to win. I want them to be able to snark in local about how they fucked our shit up. I'm not going to make fun of them again and again, without putting it on the line and letting them put the lie to my smacktalk."

I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I won't even try. I look forward to the next few weeks with the tension and eagerness of a fighter in a bout. Round one raises it's head.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Syndicate fights

As almost anyone in my alliance would tell you, if they even know me, is that I am a mostly AFK player, or maybe away from game(er) is a better monicker. Over the last few months I have been drawn back into Eve, but my current time zone activity is still sporadic and makes it difficult for me to make the majority of the Fleet ops that happen in Rote Kapelle. So consider this a bit of an outsider's, insider, perspective.

This post is all about my commentary on the Rote Kapelle cleanse diet that we are currently on. (no more carbs)

To me, the most interesting part of our campaign hasn't actually been the campaign (IE the in space pew pew), but has been the reaction both from other Syndicate residents and the larger community as a whole. Another Rote Kapelle blogger, the famous Ripard Teg, of Jester's Trek, started out the conversation in the blogging community in his typical fashion with this post. Now after reading all 42 comments to that post and then re-reading the post it's near comical the reaction to our campaign, even several weeks down the road. Anyways, Mord Fiddle over at Fiddler's edge pretty much summed up his viewpoint in some comments and then later in his post, Scouring the shire.

That was worth a response from Ripard, here. And then another post from Mord, where I think he gets the baseline message of our campaign wrong. Ripard also responds to that response....

Mord says our objective is, in his view of course :
"Rote's way is the traditional way and the best way to play PvP in NPC nullsec.  Failure to PvP Rote's way diminishes Rote's enjoyment of Eve in general and PvP in particular.  Therefore, it is essential that those in close proximity to Rote PvP the Rote way.  If they don't, Rote will harry and kill them until they either move away or submit to PvPing as Rote thinks proper."

I think our actual objective is closer to this :
"Rote doesn't appreciate the lack of PvP we have been getting from entities in Syndicate. The only solution we can see to continu to get good fights is to force those fights to happen. In order to force those fights, we will have to get into the dirty busines of killing static structures."

Sure, Rote is in it to attempt to force out the players in Syndicate who don't or won't fight us, or if they do fight, require that they get every advantage, more numbers, more logi, we jump into them, etc etc. To one of Mord's points, yes Ripard did heavily paraphrase the post on FHC made by a NOTORIUS badposter, Anderson, who was using that post to fling shit-filled words at a wall and see what ones stuck. Looking at the comments on Rip's post as well as the FHC thread (since locked) most of them did stick.

Perhaps more explanation is in order, because in looking at Rip's comments I can tell that something just isn't being translated...

Rote Kapelle is and always has been all about "the fights." It's something we actively comp our fleets for, we engage when we can, and don't when it's complete suicide. But above all, we engage, we go out looking for a good hard fight, not just ganks and quick kills, though we certainly don't shy away from those either. When I say above all, I mean, two evenly comped fleets sit on the other sides of a gate, one is Rote and the other is most every other Syndicate entity. 9/10 times we jump into them, in fact, it is so predictable that we know something is wrong when they jump into us. Some of our most obvious defeats were still generated by us jumping into a superior fleet with the intent of finding, generating a fight. If that's not clear enough, let me sum this entire paragraph in just a few words.

"Rote Kapelle exists for the fights."

Solutions to our problem along the lines of "we need to adapt" are stupid. Yes, stupid. You clearly have  no damn idea what we do, or how we do it. Adapting is something we are doing that's what brought us to this conclusion. We are practically begging for a giant blue blob to come fight us. Even when IRED shows up in a all Abaddon and rep fleet, and wipes the floor with us, we still engage. I can't even imagine the response from IRED if we showed up in their systems, during their peak hours, with a fleet like that. Here's a expected outcome... We wouldn't get a fight.

Now recently Rote has been having a tough time with activity (alliance wide) due in part to other MMO's/games, or other activities interfering with fleets. That's not all. It's become so hard to find a fight, even finding hostile ships in space that we can throw ourselves at in Anderson's "Bushido" doctrine, the one against the many, fighting to the death, no retreat style of play... without that there has not been a reason for some of our players to login.

Usually RK leadership combats this 'lack' of fights by going on a "road trip" where we leave Syndicate for a while, and hope for what I will call a re-spawn of local fights. While we are gone other Syndicate alliances have time to dig in, fight each other, get more confident. Then by the time we get back, we enjoy a flurry of new fights either from new residents who don't know us, or often from re-invigorated old alliances that have refined their tactics a bit and are now willing to engage us.

Sadly, or happily depending on who you are, Rote Kapelle has shrunk dramatically in size since last year. For instance, last year, Rote Kapelle was swelled by Veto and we had a near 23.5/7 reach where Rote and Veto could project anywhere from a 5-60 man gang. Now our most active TZ is west coast USA, and in an all-in type operation we are lucky to pull 40 members to a gang, including alts. To sum this development, it means that we are not of a "size" large enough to go play with the bigger fish in say Curse, Provi, or any of our other usual road trip destinations. Playing the dodge the blob game to get a couple kills isn't a whole lot of fun either. In any case, yes we did toss around the idea of doing both anyways, and found that it wasn't as viable an option.

A "staycation." The solution, but also the problem. How could we stay in Syndi, generate fights, and still reinvigorate the flight-club that is Syndicate? The options are pretty limited here, either we just stay in TXW and hope the fights come to us. OR we create a campaign, something that not only draws interest from our membership but ALSO attention and interest from the rest of Syndicate, thus generating more fights.

How to generate fights? Static assets, and home systems. Static assets are a long time risk in nullsec and especially Syndicate. Rote, alliance with near to no Blues, Rote has very few static assets. No Poco's, few POS, very little that can be directly attacked. Some of the same people who refuse to fight us seemed to be building near sov level POS and poco backbones in our own back yards. Now aside from the Ripard post where he points out the folly in POS mining or moon mining in Syndicate (we have shit mins yo, and any good min moons are claimed by large sov holding alliances), well these static assets became a target, fight generators as it were. A big target.

The thought was, simply, maybe if they won't come fight us while we roam, if they won't even undock, then by attacking their static assets, we force their hand, maybe even getting a few decent fights while we are at it. So, D5IW was chosen as the first target, there Damned Nation sat happily in it's stations and POSes, willing guinea pigs for our new tactics. As we jumped in Anderson made his post on FHC, and we began.

To some outside observers we were just wrecking sandcastles, but to us, we were generating fights, content and I'm not talking just one or two fights, but around the clock skirmishes, forcing people to call in favors, have their blue friends out in Sov space form up on titans to bridge and engage us if given a chance. Further it was our chance to show them how it felt. We'd let them get all worked up, securing blue fleets waiting to help them out and save x or y pos when they came out of reenforcement. Sure enough we saw some 100+ man whelpcane fleets out in Sov space on a titan just waiting for the jump order to engage us. We waited and after a month those same friends were no longer responding to those calls for help.

BUT THAT'S AGAINST THE WHOLE POINT OF THE CAMPAIGN RIGHT?

Short answer, no. The campaign is meant to bring us fights, not needlessly throw ourselves away against assorted blues and friends of people we were attacking. We aren't always stupid, we aren't going to up engage some 15 people vs 100+. 15 vs 40 is apparently fine though. Anyways, we would let them use up all their goodwill and then be forced to either defend in person, or lose their resource. This in addition to the extra fights we got just by the effort of setting up a static camp (something people could come fight, and did come fight, namely IRED and friends, as well as Goons, and a few TEST visitors, V.e.G.A., and others), fights gave people a reason to login, a reason to play Eve. In fact something that I'm sure won't be repeated for a while, was a very successful Stealth Bomber fleet that harassed logi and repair efforts on modules and POS all around D5IW.

Killboard - Success! All this in mind, the real numbers are just as important, in the months leading up to this campaign shows low fleet based activity, mostly Solo kills or ganks. But since the start of the campaign we have 972 kills to 143 losses in our target area's. Now if your real goal is to go out and fight... that can be seen as nothing but a success.

Since D5IW was cleared out... We have now moved over to 4L- to say hello to V.e.G.A. Who felt like helping out Damned Nation was a good idea, but only showed up in Fleet BS. Really it is because they liked to bring big battleship fleets to help out Damned nation in D5IW. Since we have showed up on their porch, fights have been lacking, well at least with THEM. We've instead had some good fights vs Goons, last night in fact... here

We'll see if they start turning out while we kill off their infrastructure. All in all, using this way to liven up combat in Syndicate for Rote is paying some serious early dividends  but it will be interesting to see the long term effects.

Long Term outcomes:

  1. "Nothing ever works as planned." Rote successfully "sweeps" Syndicate, forcing out a good group of our neighbors, and nobody moves in, Syndicate goes from bad to worse with lower population and Rote is once again without fights, we fail-cascade epically when we turn on each other for kills.
  2. "Stupid Christmas" - Rote gives up on our futile plans to sweep Syndicate, and moves back to TXW for the holidays, I get to share Christmas with John Rev and IRED in a happy peaceful Syndicate. Fights return to pre-cleanse level, nothing major has changed. Rote claims success because we never lost, everyone else claims success because they were never expelled.
  3. "Rote WHO?" - Rote gets camped in/killed by one of the various coalitions either in Syndicate or  from their big brother friends in surrounding sovspace. Rote returns to TXW, proclaims success, but remains persecuted, more fights on average, but also more blobs.
  4. "Fat trimmed." Ev0ke and Rote force out all the bad alliances, Ev0ke takes up permanent residence in Outer Ring, populating Syndicate with good fights for all. More alliances move to Syndicate to partake. Everyone is happy.
  5. "I'm boooored!" Rote gets bored, (already showing early signs), still can't get fights, moves back to TXW in frustration, tries to figure out next game plan. Syndicate laughs off their campaign as unsuccessful, life moves on.
So between all of that I would think that 2, 5, and 3 are pretty likely, especially with the addition of Ev0ke to the area, having just moved into FD-. With them in the picture Rote will need to be extra careful when fielding it's cap fleet lest we become Ev0ke's next cherry on their killboard. I project that Ev0ke will beef up some more and head back out to Sov space in short order, likely CR, and will build a little defensive coalition that might give us good fights in Syndicate. Failing that we can always roam out to CR, Ev0ke's never shied away from fights.