TEST and Outer Passage with Ni Industries

 After a brief transition period where I consolidated my holdings around EVE and began re-familiarizing myself with all of the feature changes since I last played, I am now settled into Outer Passage with the Ni Industries corporation.

I found their post on the recruiting forum, essentially targeting returning veteran players, and subsequently found it to be a very successful recruiting strategy.   It's amazing to see a corporation with good and flexible leadership,  pushing the boundaries of new content for its members.  With so many veteran players like myself, most of us have accumulated significant wealth, and with it comes more focus on content vs income, which unlocks a lot of opportunity to be liberal with funding new projects and pursuing new content.

A key selling point for me was stability, a new area of EVE space I had never been, and opportunities to explore new content (for me), such as the new moon mining mechanics, readily-available and bountiful high-end ice mining, and options to get involved again in Fleet PvP including Black-Ops.  All of this and more available with this Corp so decided to give it a run, and can't be happier about the decision.   The Corp is growing rapidly and we have moons popping every two days, ranging from R4 to Double R-64!   If you are a multi-account miner that embraces EVE-O, then this is paradise.

My only disappointment so far has been the enormous changes in capital ship construction materials and the ore availability changes that effectively mean that you can no longer build 100% from local (region) resources/materials.  For example, not having access to Tritanium in NullSec is ridiculous IMHO, but the EVE economists are clearly trying to mix up the cross-region dependencies and everything adjusts accordingly.  But for players like myself that like to make EVERYTHING in the capital build chain, we must now rely on markets for a considerable portion of materials.  This is the first major change I can remember being very disappointed with in the long history of EVE mechanics changes over time. 

As a result, I have initially been focusing my efforts on Reactions and Components, supporting the Corp and Alliance supply-chain where I can, while considering what my next big project will be.   With Corp members building everything from Exhumers/Orcas/Rorquals to Sins, it looks like it is going to be a fun ride.

Recruiting page link here.

Reading up and considering returning

Wow, has it really been 10 years since Tenerifis and SI Radio and SI. Alliance?  Hard to believe so much time has passed and have seen kids grow, graduate from college, join the real world, etc.

I had a chance to re-read some of my old posts here and recall how exciting it was back when Apocrypha was released and the challenge of a totally new frontier in New Eden.   

I had that one brief stint in 2013 where I enjoyed some time in Syndicate in the JQV5-9 pocket.  Good crew down there and enjoyed a more laid-back effort building an Rorqual and selling it and some rare roams.

I re-subbed my two mains last week just for the hell of it and restarted skill training.  I forgot that my two primary toons were max'd out in almost all of their respective skill areas, with Star Defender skill all the way up to Titan and perfect refining and LightTraveler having perfect production skills and nearly-perfect fleet boosting skills.  I also had some fun reviewing the incredible blueprint library I amassed over time.  With something like 400 Billion in assets and ISK, I need to go find something to do in EVE.

So, time to start dabbling to see if and where I want to go set up.   

Safe Flying...

I'm back...

Well, after quite a long EVE hiatus, I decided to start playing again.  I had been keeping up my skill training throughout and have been keeping up on nullsec events on evenews24.com and themittani.com - interesting to see how things barely change...

I think what brought me back more than anything was the Retribution release and the wealth of new ships and fittings.  I spent some time down in Khanid/Irmalin where I had some old missioning ships from ages ago, mostly to do some random ratting and figuring out what to do next.

With some of the old SI Radio team members still maintaining our chat channel, it was good to see some familiar faces online.  Some folks have battled it out through the entire -A- campaign, others went off to one of the big powerblocks.  I am impressed how a few have amped up their WSpace game and now run C5/C6 sites with small fleets of Carriers and Dreads - these guys are making Billions per day - pretty sick (nice)!

I am settling into Syndicate - setting up with a small Alliance and getting my toons back on their feet.  I am not 100% online yet - don't want to get carried away like last time and repeat the mistakes...  If it was one thing I learned about EVE burnout, it was that you cannot let it drive your RL schedule - my online time will be based purely on leisure time, not at the whim of fleets and FCs...at least for now  ;-)

Biggest decision will be to either continue poking around Syndicate or joining up with old friends in Wspace and in the powerblock territories.

Fly Safe!

SD/LT

...And pushed out of Tenerifis

As the focus of the Russian forces began to focus more on Detorid and then into Tenerifis, it became apparent that our Alliance would never be able to field a defense fleet capable of defending our Sov in Tenerifis. Most of the CTA's I participated in were with Imperial 0rder (IO), which later disbanded, eliminating the last bit of fun in the Region.

As such, the Alliance evac'd out to LowSec. Based on this and some other internal issues, the lion share of the active player corps have left the SI. alliance, and many have left SI Radio (EDGAR) altogether.

I have been roaming around LowSec and WSpace (and combinations of both) - a kind of wanderlust. Rolling the dice so to speak on where I land.

I definitely want to maintain a presence in Nullsec, but do not want to play Sov games for the time being. So, most of my wanderings have been in NPC Null. I lived in Great Wildlands with the Corp just before we moved to Tenerifis and I enjoyed it - never a shortage of target to shoot, so I may stick around NPC Null for a bit before I make any big corp jumps.

I have been considering joining some corp-mates that went to BSC Legion in Deklein, but no final decision on that yet...

I think the whole "DRF can control any/all of Null" aspect of the current EVE environment took more wind out of my sails than I initially considered. I have found myself not logging in for days or a week or more, and then only for a few minutes.

We will see where this goes...

Safe Flying

Pushed out of Detorid

Well, we did not have to wait too long to see if there was going to be a real challenge to opportunistically capturing Sov in Detorid.

United Pod Service, RED.Legion, Waterboard and more have decided to purge Detorid. So, after all of that grinding to clear and take Sov, we just as quickly gave it up.

"We didn't want that space anyways" Lolol.

Of course we did, but the SOB-led coalition never really organized in a materially-effective manner, which made the process of kicking SOB out relatively easy (SOB did not even show up to defend critical strategic assets!?!?), which made the rest of Detorid fall like a proverbial house of cards.

Not sure what to make of SOB's efforts in Detorid. It looked at first like they were put in place to organize, parcel-out and defend Detorid, but things were so rushed that there was no real C&C put in place from the start, which made defending against large fleets nearly impossible. Imperial Order did a pretty good job of stepping into the SOB vacuum and trying to save Detorid, but I personally think that by the time IO really got involved, the momentum had already decided the fate of Detorid.

Learned a ton, including the need to quickly establish clear communications for joint CTA efforts and that in hindsight, a gradual expansion into Detorid may have been wiser, but it was sure fun.

It will be interesting to see just how far DRF and associates will push, and to what extent the coalition will do to either hold in Tenerifis or to push back into Detorid.

Regardless, it has been interesting and certainly more eventful than ever. I do pine for the days when things are more stable and we can do non-sov "good fights" rather than large fleet battles.

Fly Safe!?

Continued growth and expansion

A lot has happened since my last post about the war in Tenerifis to purge White Noise and being awarded the Tenerifis G3IP-E constellation for CTA participation and additional warfare.

As it turned out, the campaign pushed into Detorid, primarily with us, IO, SOB and EON waging battles deep into Detorid and maintaining a strong line at the border area between Tenerifis and Detorid. To be transparent, it was not like we had a ton of resistance, but we continued to put up good numbers and soon cleared sov on nearly all of the key systems and stations.

-A- placed SOB in charge of newly-captured Detorid, who then quickly awarded our alliance 5 constellations. As it stands currently, our alliance holds sov in PR-ACX, T875-C, MZ-PA2, 1RG-GU, and HOV-VI. We immediately shared with EON, giving them HOV and renting T875 to a very capable Alliance - TFA.

Just about the time where we began to grow weary of constant sov-bashing (akin to watching paint dry - Cyno to target system, shoot structure, lather-rinse-repeat), we finally started seeing signs of what we suspected would occur - challenges to certain systems and an increase in fun hostile encounters. There is some classic ping-pong sov action in the SOB-held south-eastern portions of Detorid, with plenty of CTAs to go kill SBUs, etc.

As we work together more, the Detorid coalition is beginning to function properly and it looks now that, short of DRF deciding to do something more than burn a few cornfields, the Detorid coalition + -A- will hold the region.

I hope things get back to "good fights" - everyone grows weary of structure bashing after a while. Looking forward to flying more with TFA and EON as the saga in Detorid continues to unfold.

Best laughs of the month: Taking Sov on the 3-LJW3 station system, getting hot-dropped and losing some internet spaceships, then naming the station "Hot-Drop O'Clock", after the timely line from the EVE Video series "Clear Skies".

Elbow room

Thought I would post an update on our NullSec efforts.

I would continue to consider our deployment to Tenerifis a great success, both monetarily and from an experience perspective. Also, we have grown tremendously. As of this post, we stand at an astounding 459 members, most of it coming from Rule of Five (plank-holder corporation in the alliance) and the welcome addition of BSC Legion.

Obviously, with this kind of alliance growth, comes the need for expansion into additional systems. As such, an opportunity arose in Tenerifis when -A- decided to push White Noise completely out of the region. Previously, WN owned mostly ratter and botting systems on the "Eastern" (Dotlan View) half of the region, basically everything from DZ6, east. This was also some our primary hunting grounds, with many juicy kills in DZ6 and up the pipe towards (and into) Detorid.

We knew from prior experience that to expand your sovereignty-holding space, you need to prove yourself by assisting in the CTA's (Call-to-Action operations) and even taking The Initiative (pun intended, see history of Tenerifis) to attack in advance of the main CTAs. So, we set out as an alliance to participate in as many Tenerifis/Detorid/Catch operations as possible. We had some good times and good kills in the process, and were very pleased with the alliance participation level. Nice to have large contingents of Capital and Supercapital pilots on-board the alliance now.

I think one of the best ops we took on was the cleansing of BW-WJ2, including their extremely well defended Jump Bridge POS and then their iHub and remaining system installations, all of which was completed solely by the alliance.

As a result of participating in the Tenerifis campaign, the alliance was awarded the G3IP-E constellation. With the recent anomaly nerf, these systems are not exactly the most prized systems in Tenerifis, but they will provide (with the direction of our experienced Moon-Goo techs) a considerable level of passive monthly alliance income. You can see our Tenerifis systems in this view of Dotlan (S1. Alliance).

No hard decisions yet on what (if any) iHub upgrades will go there, but certainly more room to scan for Wormholes and Signatures. Also, we will now have 3 rich ice mining systems to tap in addition to our premium mining systems. I am guessing we will upgrade one or more of those systems and rent out to one or more Industry corps looking to join the NullSec party! If interested, send Star Defender an Eve-Mail - guaranteed all the best ABC mining you will ever need...

My personal Eve Time has suffered from RL complications lately, so I am not online for extended durations lately, but I am still soaking up NullSec. Cannot imaging living in HighSec again...