The Glade 4.0

Although most of you aren't interested in EVE, I thought this might be fun for comparison purposes, and so you can follow my misadventures and losses of expensive ships to silly tactical errors. If anyone IS interested, send a mail to Kiryen O'Bannon in game, or Coffee Rocks and if the latter, tell him Kiryen said to contact him in the mail. My alliance is for.. well, newbies, and some of their misadventures are detailed below along with a few of the more hilarious recruiting videos.

My personal killboard is here, and while it's not exhaustive of kills (since not everyone in alliance has eve-kill, and only the "killing blow" gets the killmail) but it IS an exhaustive list of my losses! My most recent last night was very gratifying since it not only was a solo kill, but involved the other guy making a major tactical error for once! Interceptors should probably not engage battlecruisers that warp in on top of them. He had more than enough time to warp off as I locked, but he didn't, and he shortly found himself warp scrambled, webbed down, and swarmed by my drones!

Not that we should try to create some immense collection of newbies in VOID, but I joined Brave Newbies a little over a month ago, and this (IMO) is a perfect example of how a large alliance can have a small feel. The entire thing was founded by a guy that had no idea what he was doing, just wanted to get other new players up EVE's enormous learning cliff. Initially, they got picked on badly by some of the bigger entities and griefers of EVE, but then they got a few competent fleet commanders, some easy ship doctrines, and started winning fights through sheer numbers of destroyers swarming their enemy's battleships and even carriers.

Recruitment is pretty much a mater of "send in application, get invite 5 minutes later" unlike most EVE corps which have recruitment checks akin to the CIA. They don't care about spais because spais mean someone else wants to find out what you are doing so they can fight you, which is the whole point!

Coming to our home system means you are likely to find seemingly vulnerable lone newbies hunting NPCs in the asteroid belts, but beware! Aggressing one of us (who are almost always in the home defense fleet, when not in another fleet for ops) means a horde of outraged newbies from elsewhere in the system are en route to help their beleagured corpmate.. or at least avenge his loss. Coming in with a large fleet means you will be shortly set upon by a swarm of newbies in our favorite Pocket Rocket cruiser doctrine!

Voice comms are endless silliness. They are not secure, so locals looking for easy kills hunt us by listening in.. whrein we endlessly troll them!




BRAVE NEWBIES! "Because we don't know any better!"

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Had a rather embarrassing kill the other day. There ws a neutral in a frigate off our station. I thought it was an alt of one of the characters that likes to camp our station scouting or something, and when I locked him he had shield damage. I was in a Heavy Assault Cruiser, and as I was looking at his pilot info, I saw an aggression message on screen. Assuming it was him, I opened fire, and my railguns obliterated him in 2 volleys.

A few minutes later I get a mail saying he just started playing and is applying to BNI. *facepalm* While its not against the rules to shoot neutrals or even applicants that arent blue status yet, I felt bad since he was a 3 day old character and sent him 5 million for a new frigate. Gotta be more careful.

Right before that, I got a much better solo kill. Some idiot aggressed my battlecruiser at close range, and shortly got a faceful of web, scram, neutralizer, and drones. He thoyght hed get his 3 buddies to come in and pick my relatively clumsy ship apart while killing my drones and evading my guns, but moments later a swarm of outraged newbies arrived and drove them off.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No exciting kills in the last few days, although last night I got (well, a bunch of us but I got point on and did top damage) some ******* in a destroyer that likes to fly out to the belts and alpha strike our frigates.

However, elsewhere in EVE, 2 massive fights took place:

First the battle of eHED-GP. A large fight, involving huge fleets of capital and sueprcapital ships on both sides. This was a very large fight, but not record-breaking by EVE standards.

Its notworthiness comes from technical issues, so those of you in various IT fields might be interested. Many ships in EVE have drone bays. Most ships can deploy up to 5 drones' carriers and supercarriers up to 12 with the right modules. Drones can be assigned to assist another ship too, in much the way a player can use a /assist command in most other MMOs. In addition, carriers are excellent logistical (healer) ships. Therefore, it has become a thing to use huge fleets of carriers all repairing each other, and assigning their drones to one "drone bunny" who uses the massed drone firepower to blap targets off the field. This is a very hard strategy to break without using supercapitals.

There's therefore been arguments over the state of balance, but in this case the real issue was the sheer numbers of drones on the field. With a dozen drones per carrier, a full fleet of 250 carriers would mean 3250 objects on the field being tracked without counting opposing ships, support fleets, or any of the drones of THOSE ships. Needless to say, server load is an issue, and it was here. If you scroll down in the article to 17:55 EVE time you will see where CCP Tweeted that the server node was at 100% CPU load and 10% time dialation (game time passing at 10% of real time).

In the midst of this, one side (the CFC, or Goons) decided to jump in several fleets of dreadnoughts totalling around 700 ships. The server calls for 700 ships simultanouesly trying to load grid apparently caused all kinds of bizarre effects, but amaxingly didn't crash the node. The server screamed in agony, but apparently remained up and the Goons ended up getting massacred as their ships appeared on grid but couldn't load it fast enough to engage before getting destroyed. Moral of the story: When CCP emergency tweets that a node is at maximum capacity, don't throw more capital ships at it.

Next, and more spectacularly, the battle in B-5R. Like the battle of Asakai a year ago where someone accidentaly jumped a titan into an enemy fleet, this one was due to a cockup somewhere. Evidently PL/N3 either failed to pay a soveriegnty bill or a bug caused it to not auto pay in one of their major staging systems. They tried to re-online their sov structures quietly, but were seen and CFC struck quickly to online their own and destroy the PL/N3 ones.

This turned essentially into the Battle of Jutland, Midway, and Leyte Gulf all rolled into one. Both sides committed cupercarriers and titans in large numbers, although the massive drone-carrier fleets were not used and while the node was heavily loaded it was apparently not in danger of crashing.

PL/N3 got the worst of it. It's looking like at least 60 titans destroyed on both sides, with CFC getting about a 2:1 in their favor. Fighting went on over 14 hours yesterday and ended only for scheduled downtime. PL/N3 was attempting to extract, with what success I'm not sure.

Total losses put every previous EVE battle to shame. Over 5 trillion ISK by estimates I've seen so far. Using the price of PLEX to convert puts the real-world equivalent loss at over $115,000 dollars in internet spaceships blown up. More realistically, it's over 500 years of EVE subscription!

While spectacular to read about, it does make me glad I'm not in a major nullsec sov alliance. I can't really take off work, nor would my wife tolerate, 14+ hour battles.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Thanks I enjoy these. I would love to play EVE, but time and the sorry state of my current hardware make that problematic. I'll just live vicariously through these videos and descriptions of big battles. I loved the one that you mentioned last year.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

Lost a stealth bomber to a gatecamp and a cruiser in a fight on our own station, but got in on a few kills in return.

In the aftermath of the aforementioned Jutland of EVE, evidently the Pandemic Legion forces were allowed docking rights in the lost system to evacuate their member's personal assets, in exchange for bowing out of the war. They claim to be able to make good the physical losses in about 2 months total, everything except the titans in about 10 days, but it hurts even their staggering income, and they have other threats in other regions, it seems. Nulli Secunda, part of the N3 portion of the losing side, and the alliance that actually dropped sov allowing the battle to occur, is evacuating the region as well.

Evidently the losing side made a couple (arguable) tactical errors. First was the initial volley of doomsdays being targeted on the CFC/RUS dreadnoughts rather than supercarriers or titans, allowing the CFC/RUS to get an early lead in titan kills. Then several hours later, they concentrated for a long time on the titan of Sort Dragon, who was a CFC commander of some sort, and is also a member of the CSM. Evidently the CFC logistics were able to keep Sort Dragon up for a very long time, and in that time NS/PL lost 5 titans. This greatly reduced the critical mass needed to kill enemy titans at which point the battle became runaway, and PL/N# lost the ability to kill titans.

Final titan loss count was 75 for both sides, one of which was ambushed in a nearby system. It seems that there were also a number of side battles as CFC/RUS forces blockaded staging systems with battleships other powerful subcapitals and N3/PL tried to break the blockades.

*CSM is the Council of Stellar Management. It's an elected group of players that represent the playerbase to CCP, as opposed to the usual hash of forum drama (which also exists.) It's pretty cool to be on it, since they fly CSM members to Iceland for a several-day summit a few times a year.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Our alliance got its first ever supercarrier kill last week. Sadly, I wasn't there. I was there for another carrier kill, though. Thiese fools brought in a single carrier to support their fleet, which we were beating. Carriers normally operate at leat in pairs to repair each other. When it became clear he was going down, the carrier pilot self destructed to try to deny us the killmail. We got it anyhow.

Today, I got in on a battleship kill in my own battleship. Some fool had severely undertanked it and caused a ruckus in our system. He got swarmed by irate newbies, plus a few of us more experienced types in BBs and BCs.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Been slow since the beginning of the month, although I had a fun kill a few days ago. Some *** in a destroyer was sitting off a station a few jumps away from our home base, using its high alpha to pop people's frigates. Seeing as he was a war target, I headed over there in a stealthy strategic cruiser and snuck up to 5000 meters away and de-cloaked. He was sure surprised, for about 5 seconds before my blasters melted him.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The last month and a half has been mostly frustration. For various reasons I couldn't really attend any fleets until jut the last few days, and the system we moved to at the beginning of march attracted a much larger number of campers constantly sitting on our undock. I lost a few VERY expensive ships, and I just couldn't seem to make money fast enough to keep up. EVE has serious problems with risk-reward, because so much of the risk comes from the players. Int eh low-security portions of space, there tend to be a lot of people in the popular areas both moving back and forth from high to no security space, and the denizens, but the rewards for PVE activities aren't that good, so it's hard to keep up with losses.

We've now moved out to our own, conquered, null-security space which has much better rewards, even though risk is comparable or slightly higher (although that risk is from different sources; there are mechanics in play in nullsec that aren't present in lowsec, but since we own the stations there when we kill someone they're gone for a while at least while they get another ship, if they want to come back). I feel like I'll be able to keep up with losses more easily.

That said, I did have 2 really nice kills in the last 2 weeks; both interceptors that I caught at close range and killed before they could escape. Interceptors are very small, very fast, and notoriously hard to pin down and kill, so I was happy about both. The latter one especially, since I escaped 2 of his buddies, also in interceptors in the process, despite being in a slower, less agile ship.

Interceptors are kind of a pain in the *** right now. EVE has an obsession with making sure bigger ships are not automatically better. While this is good in many ways, in the last 2 expansions I feel like the downward pressure on ship sizes has gotten to be too much, and anything larger than a cruiser has become too unwieldy for most applications other than large fleets, especially given the profusion of advanced cruiser-sized hulls one can train into that can duplicate much of the function of larger ships in a smaller, more agile package.

Interceptors are the smallest, fastest combat ships in the game, and right now they have a thing going on where they have a HUGE dead zone they can orbit larger ships in where short-range guns can't reach, long-range can't track fast enough, and they are SO fast that missiles do very little or no damage, or in some cases can't catch them at all. Drones have similiar issues. While interceptors don't do much damage, and highly specialized ships or setups can still deal with them, they can hold down larger targets, even those set up to be effective PVP ships, almost indefinitely. This is compounded by the fact that 2 types of interceptors use missiles themselves, which means that even though they don't do a lot of damage, they can apply it MUCH farther than the gun interceptors can, and without their own speed making it hard to apply. This means roaming gangs of fast interceptors are really a thing. You can drive them away, but killing them is very hard at best. The problem is compounded by a large portion of the playerbase which is just mad that interceptors are immune to nullsec interdiction bubbles (systems that prevent people from warping away from inside the "bubble"). While this is a powerful advantage to the interceptor, it A) doesn't address the problem outside nullsec, because only in nullsec can bubbles be used and B) doesn't affect the near-immunity interceptors have right now to common PVP setups. Interceptors DID recently get a minor agility nerf to address this but it didn't seem to help much. I suspect part of the issue might be command links from remote ships than can boost interceptor performance to even more absurd levels.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Sounds like a mess. I hope we can avoid those kinds of problems.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

A lot of them will necessarily be avoided because in SC you manually pilot your ship and aim and fire your weapons, much like TESO avoids some of the "optimize your way to victory" that other themepark fantasy MMOs have because damage output and defense are much more reliant on player reaction than game-calculated math.

In EVE, pilot skill matters for a lot, as does fitting your ship properly; you don't go for "best in slot" modules on your ship for the most part; you fit the ones that do what you want them to do (and fitting "best in slot" on anything but a titan or supercarrier often makes you a gank target anyhow). The pilot manages the flight of his ship rather than directly maneuvering it, more like a captain issuing orders. Engagement geometry is very important. However, all shots fired at the enemy are adjudicated by the computer; the player never aims or fires anything.

My bigger worry is electronic warfare. EVE has improved its EWAR overall, but it still tends to end up as an "I win" button in many cases, especially in very small engagements. I would not want a total absence of EWAR from SC because that would seem unrealistic to me for a highly advanced civilization, and it would mean much less variety in combat options, but I hope it is signficantly toned down from EVE's offerings.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

DE -- the April Jump Point included some stuff about the UI that I suspect will probably tie in closely with Star Citizen electronic warfare. There's a segment that talks about the design of the various targeting states and how your ship's scanners will gradually upgrade the level of information you have on a target, and how that will be reflected in the iconography and targeting brackets in the UI.

Likewise, the recent ship specs update has started to include notes in stock equipment listings like "low emissions.."

Clearly, a big part of EWAR in SC will be the capability to fit your ship to be harder to detect, and/or to increase the sensitivity of your sensor packages (the stats on the Tracker suggest these might generally be mutually exclusive; it might be quite difficult to obtain a long range, sensitive passive scanner with low power draw, for instance), as well as featuring the quality of your target tracking systems (more robust/dedicated systems can scan and track -- with saved scan level info -- more targets simultaneously), which will also pull C&C gameplay into the mix, as your fighters with limited targeting capabilities would be able to get rapid data updates as you switch to new targets from communicating with dedicated C&C ships, which could then logically begin to involve the opportunity for spoofing or jamming those communications...

Like I said, a lot of this hasn't been explicitly talked about (yet), but there are some strong inferences about this sort of thing starting to come out. We'll know more for sure as the DFM comes out and we get to play with scanners and target tracking first-hand, and I think they're probably also beginning to nail down gameplay design in these areas and will be looking to make some more formal announcements/discussions about how it'll all work.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

NICE! I need to check that out.



This is all excellent news. My beef with EWAR in EVE (and to a lesser extent stealth) is that it tends to be all-or-nothing; this sounds like much more sophisticated gameplay.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

A couple very gratifying kills last night. First was this Sabre - a Tech II destroyer known as an interdictor. I hate interdictors, because they launch warp disruption bubbles that prevent anything within them (except interceptors and specifically configured Tech III cruisers) from warping away, and they're quite large. I consider them somewhat of a lazy design by CCP, but that's a long discussion. Anyhow, this clown and a buddy of his in an interceptor (a type known as a Crow) showed up on our station and began harassing some of our heavy ships, usign their small size and speed to evade fire. I got in my own interceptor and undocked.

My interceptor is a Taranis and set up for high damage but very short range, whereas the Crow is a long-range but relatively low damage ship. It's also faster, but I was so close to him that I was able to charge at him before he could react. He got away, but in the process left his Sabre buddy, who was not so quick on the draw, in the lurch.

The Sabre pilot then foolishly launched an interdiction bubble.. which he, himself, is not immune to. I promptly jumped on him and held him in place with a warp scrambled (shutting down his microwarp drive) and webbifier (reduces his base speed) and started shooting him. Destroyers do a lot of damage to small ships like interceptors though, so he started shooting back and I was going down fast.. when the battlecruiser managed to get drones on him, and finished him off. Then, due to his bubble still being in place, I grabbed his pod and popped that too, which sent him packing for the rest of the night.
Interdictor destroyed
pod

The pod was not cheap, at 205 million, so I was glad to inflict that pain on this clown for coming around harassing us.

Next up we battled a Deimos - a Heavy Assault Cruiser

Deimos

Notice the 2 Medium Armor Repairers. The Deimos has a large bonus to self-repair of armor, so with both reppers running on overload and further boosted by the 2x Auxiliary Nano Pumps in his rig slots, he could repair fully 60% of his own armor value per repair cycle. We found this out the hard way when we first attacked him with an interceptor, an assault frigate (me) and 2 standard frigates. We had him to 0 shields and armor and barely into hull, but he managed to pop all 4 of us. I got my pod out and went and got an interceptor and went back.. and he had decided to stick around. I held him down with the Stiletto seen there (it actually includes all the damage from our first attempt; the Stiletto does very little damage) and our battlecruisers and cruisers showed up and finished him off. He was a very skilled and challenging target, but he stayed around too long.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Things have been slow lately for fighting.. I have been focused on creating planetary colonies and improving my cash flow. Last night, however, was a good night and anice end to an otherwise slow August.

https://eve-kill.net/?a=pilot_detail&view=kills&plt_id=889408&m=8&y=2014

Note the Machariel. That was an expensive kill I lost an interceptor, as well, but overall it was a very positive night.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

A few nights ago I had one of my best fleet nights in a long time. I was flying an Eagle (a heavy assault cruiser); our mainline doctrine ship , and got in on over 2 dozen kills, including battleships, strategic cruisers, and other valuable stuff.

But last night promised to be the most epic battle in BRAVE's history! There's a group known as Pandemic Legion, who are one of the 3 top power blocks in the game. We've been at war with the other major 2nd-tier coalition known as Provibloc, and PL has been interfering regularly just to get fights with all the 1st-tier groups either being allies or in a state of cold war.

PL decided to try to headshot our capital systemby putting the station and the infrastructure hub (both key structures to hold a system) into reinforcement; the infrastructure hub came out of reinforcement last night at 9:42 CST.

HERO coalition, consisting of BRAVE and our allied alliances that live in the same space, formed 3 fleets - about 750 pilots; max fleet size is 256 - to defend. I was in one of the 2 main fleets in my Eagle. We put up a cyno jammer to prevent PL bringing in their capitals and prepared to defend their subcapital fleet.

PL evidently got wind of our numbers and didn't show up; having expected apparently to see one fleet of 100-200 and just wanted to have a gudfight. So, we blasted their blockade units (successfully defending the system) and repaired the infrastructure Hhub. Quantity has a quality all its own, but no epic battle was to be had.

Our very own Rane, however, was there participating in this epic fleet in his Harpy (assault frigate, smaller cousin of a heavy assault cruiser) pounding away at the blockade units with his 150mm railguns! Congratulations to Rane for participating in the great defense of GE-8 star system!

(I neglected to take a screenshot of Rane firing at the SBU! Dammit!!)

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You could even find me in all that stramash?! I had my pewpew on full force though.

Strong am I with the overview settings

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This really WAS a solo kill but the drone damage shows up from a previous fight.

This one has a little story behind it. I logged in this afternoon to discover 4 hostiles making pests of themselves in the system where I normally do my money-making. They killed one of our miners right about as I logged in, which I discovered form local chat - the miner's drones are the source of the "extra" damage.

So, I hopped in my Claw and set out. The Claw I use is set up for VERY high speed; it's one of the fastest ships in the game to begin with and my version has 3 speed mods on top of that. It also carries a pretty powerful weapon set for an interceptor; 3 20mm cannons and a light missile launcher. Although it doesn't have the staying power to take out anything larger than another frigate and is easily killed if pinned down, it's great for recon.

Knowing they'd killed a miner, I warped to some asteroid belts and lo and behold, they were still hanging out at the site of the hill - no doubt chortling in glee at killing a single mining ship with 3 combat ships and a logistics (healer) ship.

At first though, the Stilleto wasn't there, just the 2 cruisers and an interdictor, an advanced destroyer that does exactly what it sounds like. He must have been out looking for other targets. One of the cruisers was an unusually fast type, and it started chasing me but I still outran it pretty easily. Then the stilleto showed up, and I was pretty sure I could kill it if I could get it far enough away from the larger ships.

I warped in and out a few times but he didn't want to be separated. On the third warp back to the asteroids, they were gone evidently having decided I wouldn't let myself be lured into range of the big ships.

I went to the only gate out of the system, and sure enough there they were. The same chasing games ensued, but when I warped out and back this time, the cruiser pilot must have been distracted, (and the interdictor and the other cruiser were far too slow to affect things) because when the interceptor came after me he didn't follow right away. I ran away again but when I thought I had some good distance from the cruiser, I suddenly hit "approach" and dove in on the stiletto.

As you can see from the kill, he had only 2 guns to my 3, no missile launcher, and his guns were smaller than mine. It DID take me a while to chew through his medium shield extender, but once he got through my shields, my armor repairer kept up with his damage easily. By this time the cruiser was starting to draw close and I couldn't withdraw because of his warp scrambler I took a pretty hard hit from the cruiser, and I was deep in structure when he popped.. but that took off the warp scrambler, and right then my armor repairer cycled so I was able to kick my microwarp drive back on, get out of warp disrupt range of the cruiser, and warp off, barely still alive!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Nice!