FanFest 2013: Tuesday

After dispatching my wife and children to work, nursery and child minder respectively it was time for me to make the long pilgrimage to Iceland. This would involved walking, trains, buses and hopefully just one aeroplane. The one and a half mile walk to the train station struck home to me that it had been over ten years since I went back packing around the globe and I was long past accustomed to carrying such weight. It felt like I would never get to the train station but, of course, I did. There then followed an almost perfect set of connections which got me to Glasgow airport, through check-in and security with almost no delay, and before I knew it I was sitting with some corp mates and some Zebras drinking in the airport bar.

I'm not used to lunchtime drinking so after only two lagers I had a bit of a buzz going on. The flight to Iceland was rather boring although another fanfest attendee commented that the landscape while descending to land was "like landing in Mordor".

I did my shopping in the arrival duty-free area to get some wine and a bottle of whisky for my hip-flask. Two top tips: 1) When buying wine either make sure you have a cork-screw with you or pick a bottle of wine with a screw top. 2) When buying whisky buy something nice, don't pick a blended malt just because the name makes you think of Game of Thrones (King Robert the Second was the whisky). The final bus journey of the day seemed to take forever but I was finally at my hotel and in a pokey wee room. Hotel Cabin would appear to be so named as the rooms are the same size as the inside cabins in a ferry. An added feature was my window which opened inside the hotel.

Those blue curtains protect me from the hallway

After dropping my stuff and calling home I had a brisk walk to the Harpa conference centre followed by random direction changes trying to catch up with corp mates to go have food. While waiting outside Muan Thai on Laugavegur for more corp mates to find us we were treated to a display of how Icelanders handle shoplifters. An old, drunk guy had pinched a sandwich from the supermarket under the Thai restaurant. After a discussion with a large store employee the drunk guy decided to take a cheeky bite from his stolen sandwich. This resulted in the employee picking the old guy up by his armpits and bodily hauling him back into the store.

Tasty Thai food consumed and it was time to park ourselves in the Celtic Cross so the rest of my attending corp mates could find us. Over a short time everyone turned up and we parked in the little booth just to the left inside the door. We designated it a C3 as there was only one way out and in but we couldn't decided whether the rest of the bar was hisec or lowsec. Yes it's sad but yes we were drinking (and drinking, and drinking). It was brilliant to finally meet these people I've been hanging out on comms with for almost two years for some of them. Also spoke with people from other corps who were filling the rest of the bar. The atmosphere was great. Eventually we realised we were the last people in the bar and thought it might be a good idea to head home. We all had to be up for the Golden Circle tour the following morning.

Nothing to see here

I've been missing for a couple of weeks. I've not had anything exciting to write about. Sad really. I had a week away in the USA to give a best man speech at my friends wedding. It's surprising how tired I felt for a week coming back partly due to the five hour time difference. So tired that I actually stayed up to run the eleven accrued anomalies in my home wormhole. Fast forward several hours and several beers and I was rather drunk and babbling nonsense but we had eleven less anoms and up many hundreds of millions of ISK.

Other than that I've been fully in market mode. We had hoarded rather a lot of PI in our wormhole and a fortuitous connection to another wormhole in the alliance gave me the opportunity to move a few hundred million cubic metres of stuff to our alliance mate's C3. The plan was for me to use my alt who lives with them to move it out their semi-frequent hisec connections. Thankfully the CEO of that corp moved it all out while I was giving my bad speech leaving me the simple task of hauling it all to Jita and selling it.

What a lot of junk we had and now it's almost all sold. I never want to update a sell order again. I honestly don't know how people can be pure marketeers. I'm just not cut out for that. CCP should maybe think about forgetting about ISK fractions below 1000 ISK. Bloody 0.01 ISKers.

I've also had to catch up on my T2 BPC invention. One thing I'd love to know is why CCP insist on showing menu options that don't apply. Examples would be research options on BPCs or Invention on T2 BPCs. Given the client must know these are BPCs given it shows a different icon to BPOs or T1 BPCs why can't it also show a smaller menu. I know the UI is dated and slowly catching up, but those options should never have been displayed from day one.

This has been a bit of a stream of conciousness to prove I am still alive and I am still playing EVE. I'll leave you with a nice panoramic screenshot to enjoy. Hopefully I'll return next time with a more contiguous story to tell.

Neglect and Dying

I've been neglecting my blog for the last two weeks. The odd thing is I've had things to write about but I've not had the time to do the writing. By way of apology here's the conclusion on Geo's circuitous nullsec journey.

To quickly recap, I had noticed from my visited systems map that not one of my toons had been to the east side of New Eden and this needed rectified. In my last post about this I had gone about a seventh of the way around the map. It is from there I resume the tale.

Continuing south with Geo I encountered very little activity in any of the edge systems. Solar Fleet owned a large chunk of the next section of space I went through and other than the occasional comment about me in 'local' I saw nobody, not even any fleets passing through. There are some rather big jumps as you head south so it felt like real progress was being made. I was still making a tactical gate bookmark and safe spot for every system so this meant progress was slow. Generally I would only do five or so jumps at a time before doing something different. I continued down through Insmother before arriving victorious in FMH-OV in Detorid.

Courtesy of evemaps.dotlan.net

That was it. I was about a third of the way around the map and I had cleared Solar Fleet's space. Now it was time to head, um, further around?! I had made it this far and found the edge of New Eden largely empty. How hard could it be? The new plan looked like this:

Courtesy of evemaps.dotlan.net

The route shown above is 181 jumps. I was only 47 jumps around so if I wanted to finish in a timely manner I would need to speed up. This meant no longer making tacticals at every gate unless I actually needed one. The next few systems flew by under this new process. I should have been doing that from the start but lack of nullsec experience seemed to have made me over cautious. Things were going great until I encountered something hitherto unseen on my journey, people actually living in the systems they held sovereignty over.

I had been making good use of the 'pilots in space' map statistic during my travels. Rarely did I see even one pilot in space. Down in Feythabolis the alliance Unclaimed. seemed to have at least 6 pilots in space in all the border systems they owned. This held up no matter what time I checked. What's more they seemed to be actively hunting me whenever I logged in. Once again my progress crawled to a halt. I sat watching each out gate for some time observing all the comings and goings which prevented my progress. I was around this time I decided to pare back my cyclic ambition. Going half circle now would be sufficient and I would resume the other half at a later date. The new destination was C-PEWN which looked like the exact opposite system from where I started in OE-4HB.

Back in overly-cautious mode it took me a few days to get the last few jumps towards my new destination. It was already thinking about scanning myself a nice wormhole to hisec and going on a Bombers Bar roam. Finally I was one jump away. As usual for Unclaimed.'s space the next system showed six pilots in space. It was my last jump so I went for it. Loading grid on the other side showed a lone Sabre. Oh crap, bubbles. It was down to me escaping the bubble under the cover of cloak. I held the session cloak as long as I dared then made a break for it. Heading directly away from the Sabre I gained covops cloak then switched direction. Holy hell can that Sabre move! He decloaked me with ease and the result was inevitable. A pod express trip to hisec was requested and granted. Well at least I wouldn't have to scan my way home.

On the plus side, I completed the revised 50% circuit of New Eden. This was way more than originally intended so I'm happy. Now for something new to do.

Wandering With Geo

Style was never
a priority

It has been a while since I mentioned my PvP alt, Geo. To be honest I've just been spinning my wheels with him. From time to time I head out and have fun on RvB Ganked roams. Indeed that is where 99% of Geo's kills have happened. Unfortunately these roams only happen once a week, at the weekend, and I'm rarely able to take advantage so I had to find something else to do.

Something else would be Bombers Bar, but for a lack of skills. Thus, I have been getting Geo trained up for the recommended Bombers Bar Hound fit. At the time of writing this it will be only another 14 days and I'll be flying a pretty mean bomber. But two weeks is two weeks so what could I do with Geo in the mean time.

Back in November I wrote a post about where I'd visited in New Eden. One thing that really stood out to me from all my maps was the big empty section that cut a swathe down the east side. As I had never visited anywhere over there I thought it would be a good idea to do so now.

Starting in the spiritual centre of EVE, Jita, I plotted a route for OE-4HB. This took me up through Lonetrek and popped me into Goon space via Taisy. I wish I'd taken a picture of the Taisy gate in M-OEE8. Bubbled just doesn't convey how covered this gate was in warp disruption bubbles of all sizes. Thankfully for me there was only a couple of ships sitting on the gate so I easily managed to get my Stealth Bomber cloaked up and safely away. The rest of the route through Tribute, Venal and Tenal was quiet with only a couple of warp bubbles on gates and almost nobody in space. In fact the only thing that slowed me down was gate rats as I'm also making myself a useful set of tactical bookmarks on the gates I travel through. Rats on gates meant I couldn't make use of my Microwarpdrive to burn to a warpable range, instead having to slowboat whilst cloaked.

Courtesy of evemaps.dotlan.net

The second leg of my journey took me out of Tenal and all the way through Cobalt Edge. I guess Razor Alliance are fighting with Intrepid Crossing right now as there were a large number of Territory Claim Units and Sovereignty Blocking Units across the systems I visited. I don't know anything about Nullsec sovereignty mechanics but systems listed as 'Vulnerable' or 'Contested' hints strongly at what is going on. I hung around for a while hoping to see some massive battle but the only action I saw was a 16 ship -RZR- fleet jump past me on their way into IRC space. I never saw them again.

Eventually I found myself in Outer Passage and in Solar Citizens space which is where I still am. I'm really tempted to hang out and see if I can bag me some miners down here. I'd love to know if the stories of bots abound are true. I'm also starting to think I could go right the way around the outer edge of New Eden. I've done about one eighth already so it shouldn't take that long...

Interestingly, in Outer Passage I found my first unclaimed system, and then another and another. I didn't think there would be any of these just lying around. Maybe someone could fill me in on why these don't have owners? Awaiting new rental agreements maybe?

Where I've Been

Mabrick over at Mabrick's Mumblings posted a snapshot of his visited systems as recorded by the EVE server. At the end he invited others to post their maps so I decided to take up that invitation.

Orea's Wanderings

You can see from this I spent the vast majority of my time hanging around in Gallente space. This betrays my first two year of EVE as a carebear missioneer. I can see a single route south into nullsec but I can't for the life of me remember what that was for. Other than that, the occasional dot shows where I've jumped out from a wormhole.

Dhal's Travels

It's really easy to see Dhal hasn't moved around much in New Eden. For a toon born in 2005 this map gives and idea of how long it took between my first trying EVE and actually subscribing to the game. Only notable thing I pick from this map is my time spent around Solitude.

Geo's Journey

Geo has only been around for this year but already his spread of travel covers a lot more of the right side of the map. Now he can fly a reasonable stealth bomber I should take him for a wander around the far right of the map and light some systems up there also.

There we go, my main characters' travels up in lights as suggested by Mabrick. So, dear reader, how about yours?