Not an Orca

Somehow I managed to play a reasonable amount of EVE last week. We even saw the occasional person to shoot at! On Thursday we were hunting when I spotted an Orca somewhere in system. Oh hell yeah! I'll kill some Orca. The Orca started hauling stuff between a Citadel and an Engineering Complex so we got ourselves set up with a stop bubble. Our first and very visible attempt to catch the Orca failed terribly so we came up with an alternative - catch whatever the hell came to shoot at us. The following video shows how that went. I'm the voice who eventually becomes FC and calls the Stratios primary.

Enjoy that? Think you can do better? We are always recruiting ;-)

The final score looked like this. Note that I'm missing because I mainly acted as a diversion and neither died nor was killed.

Death to all Citadels

As I recently posted, I was definitely not going to suicide a noob ship on the Perimeter citadel which ended its final reinforcement timer last night. Here is the edited video of me not doing exactly that, set to Permaband's latest tune.

AT VIII Advert

If you were watching the Alliance Tournament on Saturday you may have seen the advert I put together for my alliance. The quality of some of the adverts shown during the tournament was amazing so my attempt pales in comparison to others'. This is not something I've ever tried before nor do I have particularly good tools for the task; I made this with Microsoft's free Movie Maker tool. I'm pretty happy with how it came out though. For next year hopefully I find someone who'll do something special for us.

Pulsar

Over the past week and a bit I've spent a bit of time staring at the pulsar effect in a class three wormhole. I spent some of that time filming the effect and then set it to one of New Eden's iconic tunes. Until I finish writing up the events of the past ten days here's the resulting video so you too can stare at the beauty of the pulsar.

This Is EVE

The more observant of you may notice a new page hanging off the top of this blog. The page is titled 'This Is EVE' and contains the wonderful new trailer CCP have put together using real comms chatter submitted by real players. Let's take a few minutes to watch it here.

Did you enjoy that? I certainly did. The first time I watched it there was a chill up my spine. This video shows why I play EVE better than any other. The people I hang out on comms. The excitement of fleeting up in a group and doing things together. When I feel like some quiet there is the planning and execution of industry.

Thank you CCP for making this, and thank you all the players who submitted their comms chatter to make this possible. To celebrate this wonderful trailer I think I'll just leave that static page up there so I can watch it all the time. I even mangled the page format to make it really large!!!

I love EVE.

Cloaking Porn

It's always the little things which leap out and grab me with excitement. Recently we had the pop/flash as people land on grid from warp. Not only does this add a little aural situational awareness it also looks really sci-fi cool. So on Sisi we have this new cloaking animation. It will make absolutely no difference to any mechanic in the game but oh my god does it look sexy! I can has now plz?

Homage to a 'Moe'

Made by an alliance mate:


I was there at the taking of Moe. I couldn't be there to defend her (him?). No words....

:'-(

CCP Endorsed Wormhole Alliance

Did you watch the CCP telethon for the Philippines PLEX for Good initiative? Sadly I was unable to but I went back and watched the first hour or so of it on twitch.tv. CCP Dolan's cries of pain were pure delight. Not that I have anything against CCP Dolan - I was just glad it wasn't myself experiencing such pain. Anyway, during the 'Ask Me Anything' section, CCP Guard was asked a very important question regarding the official word on which wormhole alliance was the best. Let's listen to what he had to say...



That's right, you heard it direct from CCP Guard - Illusion of Solitude is the finest wormhole alliance. Ignore all that head shaking nonsense, just listen to the words coming out of his mouth.

On a more serious note, the Philippines PLEX for Good initiative raised almost $191,000 for the Icelandic Red Cross to use for the disaster in South East Asia. Each and every one of us should feel proud to be part of such a generous internet community.

Alliance (and friends) December Roam

Our industrial division kindly donated 50 Drakes to the alliance with the insistence that they be whelped on some foolishness. I added a handful of Ospreys I had lying around and we had ourselves a theme roam. For reasons unknown to me CVA have us set as "Kill On Sight" making destination number one obvious - Providence. I took a bunch of screenshots over the course of the roam but one of our Interceptor pilots was filming the whole thing and spliced together the Providence incursion while I slept.



With various people having to head off we went back to hisec for refreshments before discussing where we would go next. Nobody had any bright ideas so instead we started looking for hotspots of activity in the in-game universe map. While that was being trawled we set off in the general direction of Barleguet, home of Brave Newbies Inc. They seem to be a fun bunch always up for a fight so if we were going to dispose of all these surviving Drakes somewhere it would be a certainty that they would help do just that. En route to Barleguet our scouts discovered a hive of activity in Aulbres. It appeared to be a massive frigate fight was happening so all we could do was fly right in and give them something bigger to shoot at. And shoot us they did.

Primary is, um, shoot things...

All in all it was a really fun night. The only problem we had of the evening was the form-up time of just after midnight. This confused a whole load of people who took "Just after Midnight on Sunday" to mean "Sunday night". This meant people were going to be 24 hours late. Oh well, next time we know better. Thanks to the scouts, logi and of course the FC for making this a fun night. I love it when my alliance gets together and does stuff. This is what makes us more than just a gaggle of corps who happen to fly under the same banner without actually knowing each other.

Happy Birthday Dear Alliance

Today is exactly 12 months since we formed the Illusion of Solitude alliance. The formation of this alliance was in response to being unceremoniously dumped from Jadecougar's Li3 Federation. Z3R0 Return Mining and Broken Wheel Mercantile and Trading were the original core of Li3 before Jade instigated his nullsec campaign and we resolved to remain together and not failscade just because we were dropped without warning.

One year on and I am stunned by how we have grown. On formation we had two corps and around 70 pilots. Today we have 300 pilots spread over 13 corps and we continue to grow. Our academy corp, Broken Wheel, continues to be the most violent corp in the alliance both for killing and losing ships. This is great both ways because it means people are out playing EVE and, hopefully, enjoying themselves. In the past year we also liberated a C5 wormhole from pacifistic gas farmers thus increasing the danger in the dark reaches of wormhole space.

So what's the plan for the coming year? I can't say I'm entirely sure. There are no grand alliance level plans. So far we've been pretty good at the occasional large scale Op such as the above mentioned invasion or mobilising to defend a hole when we think a member corp is in trouble. I'd like to see us do more regular organised roams but that doesn't seem to be a priority on the anyone else's mind. At the end of the day, as long as we're all having fun shooting sleepers, shooting people and occasionally maybe mining a little bit (it might not be a bait Hulk you know) I'm happy.

A Very Neat POS

It was still quiet in corp when I was out and about on Friday. We had a terrible route into deep lowsec and some new members moving up from the academy corp. My intention was to head out to lowsec and see if I could find another wormhole in the lowsec system leading somewhere better. Jumping into our c3b I noticed several ships on d-scan. Aware that there had been Noctis activity earlier in this hole I decided to swung past their POS to see if any of the ships had pilots. Sadly none of these ships were piloted but what I did see was so disturbing I had to make a video.

See those almost perfectly spaced batteries? I was greatly disturbed by those. And not one, not two, but three perfect arcs of said batteries! These people clearly have way more time and/or patience than I do. This almost makes me think any improvement to the POS anchoring system should be opposed. Just think of the monstrosities that people will create. I already have one corp mate talking about setting up a POS with a Pac Man face.

The Ships Of New Eden

Almost all the ships in EVE Online are works of art. Often we taken them for granted by either being too focussed on little red + symbols on the screen and/or by being zoomed out so far that all we see are little white boxes everywhere. If you recognise yourself from this description you would do well to take a look at this video made by EVE Outtakes. It's not short, coming in at barely under an hour, but it does make you stop and appreciate these ships for all their beauty.

Enjoy.

Told you it was good.

Death Race - The Video