So KOTW has to go to this interesting story:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=17760057
There must have been a full moon or something this last week, because the nuts were out in force. TMC covered this carrier loss in depth. Only the version of the story they got appears to be complete fiction, a deliberate troll aimed at TMC. Actual version of how this happened? Player got called for a CTA, ejected from his carrier at a POS in a system with no station, attended the op, and when he got back, his carrier was a wreck outside the POS. Password security breach? Grid malfunction? Nobody knows, and Tribal Band's CEOs are looking into it. Needless to say, the bomber pilot isn't telling.
Sometimes this sort of thing is fun: how does it happen? I myself was involved in a Paladin wreck in the last year that was POS-related. We left the wreck outside the POS as a mystery for the owner to solve. I'm not telling that story, and I don't blame the bomber pilot for not telling his. But between the article and the amusing spectacle of a single bomber kill on a carrier, that has to be this week's KOTW.
Honorable mentions? Sometimes even PL pilots forget an important step. Sometimes it's fun to theme fleet a structure bash... it takes a little of the monotony out of the proceedings if you kill a structure with dozens of Vindicators. After that, though? Not a lot jumped out at me. It was a pretty quiet week, all in all. EVE seems to be holding its breath for Odyssey, as typically happens in the run-up to a new expansion. And that also applied to the...
Number of dead super-caps last week: 0
That's right. Big ol' doughnut. Matter of fact, the only really expensive things that died this past week were a grand total of three assorted jump freighters, all in high-sec, killed by Freight Club or The Marmite Collective... plus this Heron:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=17755752
Pull up the Sleeper Drone AI Nexus, and you'll find it's a piece of loot that is purchased by large numbers of NPCs for five million ISK each. There's a running theory out there that this particular item is a great target for RMTers, who buy them slightly above cost in Jita, un-dock with them, get them ganked, scoop them with another character (assuming they survive), then sell them back to an NPC at a slight loss... only now theoretically they think CCP can't trace where the ISK went since it's now in the hands of some random character who scooped the NPC-purchased loot. Any that are lost are a cost of doing the RMT business.
Can CCP track this sort of thing? Haven't a clue. But it sure seems silly to have this stuff in a character that can be tracked by API...
Welcome to Jester's Trek.
I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about five years. One of my three mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure. ;-)You can follow along, if you want...
Monday, May 20, 2013
Sunday, May 19, 2013
CSM8 status report: Week two
Reading reading reading reading reading. Trying to stay ahead of EVE Online forum posts, private chats, Skypes, Twitter, EVE mail, pod-casts (though that's not reading, of course). This CSM thing continues to be an enormous amount of work! And thank you to all of you that have taken the time to drop me a line or send me a comment! As always, there's some fun stuff to share.
Early this week, CCP Dolan announced that CSM8 had chosen our officers:
The rest of the CSM has apparently started a pool: how long until Ripard NDA-blogs himself right off the CSM? Let's hope it's next May.
Anyway, all of us on CSM8 had ourselves a grin at this initial TMC article, particularly because several of us had already been interviewed or contacted by Rhavas for a more definitive CSM8 officer article. He was quick to reassure us that Set's article wasn't it. I have to admit, though, I had a personal amused moment. I suspect my feelings when I read Set's article were mirrored by Seleene, Alekseyev Karrde, and a few other members of CSM7 from time to time when I would write something. Ah well.
Rhavas's article came out the 17th and is terrific. I strongly encourage you to go out and give it a read. It's the clearest possible picture you could get of how the officer selection process went. There's pretty much nothing I would add to the article and the quotations from me are accurate and sum up how I feel the officer voting went. So go give it a few minutes of your time. I want to compliment Rhavas on a fine job here!
Currently going through the five stages of grief is Poetic Stanziel. He's currently somewhere between "Anger" and "Bargaining." His article "It is time to get rid of CSM titles" is an absolute riot! This blog post can be roughly summed up as "Trebor won a Grammy?! This proves the Grammies are freaking worthless. End them. Now." At one point, Poe indicates there have been few or no CSM officers that have done anything worth a damn in the positions. I dispute this in the strongest terms. Anyone who doubts Mynxee owned that Chair title is flat wrong, and TeaDaze was the finest Secretary any CSM has ever had. And that's just two people that jumped into my head reading his piece.
Onward. I'm hoping to announce the date of the first CSM Town Hall in a couple of days. Many of the CSM have agreed to my preliminary schedule for six town halls this year. I want two town halls each on either side of the two summits, one during the mid-summer lull in CCP activities, and one during the run-up to the CSM9 election. I'm also building up support for the monthly "Features and Ideas" meeting that I mentioned last week, with buy-in from a number of CSM members and (this week) a couple of CCP devs, interested to see what we up-vote. Ali Aras has been running a series of "Space Hangouts". Check out her G+ page for details on that, or it'll be on her blog very soon. She also did a pretty interesting analysis on the CSM8 voting trends.
Note to self: get the CSM8 bloggers into the "Infrequent but Important" section of this blog.
Two step really stepped up this week (sorry, couldn't resist) and provided a ton of additional input for the CSM7 transition work. Thanks very much, Two step! My initial goals for transition were four-fold:
Several CSM members appeared on pod-casts this week, and mynnna and I were invited to chat a little bit about CSM at the Syndicate Competitive League tournament. My big pod-cast appearance this week was on Podside (Mike Azariah is a co-host there). I'm pretty sure I was episode 104. It was pretty late at night and by the end I was a bit punchy and profane. Sorry about that... if you're looking for a totally classy CSM rep, it wasn't me. ;-) But it was a damn good time regardless and I got to talk about our activites a good bit. Kesper North will soon be putting up a forum thread with contact info for all CSM members.
Lots of good discussion on the CSM Skype channels this week about various Odyssey topics! You can probably guess the two items that took most of our time.
A decent number of CSM members and ex-CSM members got themselves killed in-game this week. That prompted me to joke that I wanted to be the first CSM member to shoot and kill every other active CSM member. Then I was reminded that the mains of two current CSM members are currently sitting in titans, which could make that problematic. ;-) Still, might be interesting to try for the record. I wonder what the record is?
Finally, CSM got its first bit of homework over this weekend. A CCP dev that shall remain nameless asked for information about how to learn how to do T2 manufacturing... in game. I have to admit that this made me laugh and I teased the dev in question about it for about an hour while his screen filled up with info windows. I finally took "pity" and pointed him at the little basic T2 manufacturing guide that I wrote earlier this year. His response to it was quite amusing and probably under NDA; you T2 manufacturers like me can probably imagine it. But he paid me back for the teasing and the wall of text with a homework assignment: give him some proposals for making T2 manufacturing more understandable, particularly in-game. He's also given me permission to run a player round-table on the subject, so that's exactly what I'm gonna do. Look for that to be set up in the next week or so. Feel free to start commenting on it now, though! First thing that occurred to me? How about a random 2-run T2 BPC for completing the industry tutorial? First thing that occurred to Alekseyev Karrde? A "Variations" tab on T1 BPOs and BPCs, pointing to their T2 versions. I think both are pretty good ideas: they show newer players what's possible. But I'll be looking for other good ideas, from you. Yes, you!
And that's it! Another busy week! I'm falling a bit behind on my EVE-O forum reading, so I need to devote more time to that this week. We should also have another stake-holder meeting this week. Hopefully it will be later than 4am...
Early this week, CCP Dolan announced that CSM8 had chosen our officers:
Chairman: Trebor DaehdoowSurprised? I suspect a lot of people were. Set's Chaos was surprised, for instance, and published a rather amusing article talking about his surprise on TMC. He recognizes that we got this done in a single vote, and attributes it to apathy with a quote from mynnna. The quote is accurate, but Set's caught mynnna at the end of a long work-day. mynnna had forgotten his own Google document that listed who wanted what post. For the record, there were a few candidates for each post. No big deal. It certainly wasn't anything like the biggest mistake made by a CSM member this week. That was all mine, baby. ;-)
Vice Chair: Ripard Teg
Secretary: Kesper North
Vice Secretary: Ali Aras
The rest of the CSM has apparently started a pool: how long until Ripard NDA-blogs himself right off the CSM? Let's hope it's next May.
Anyway, all of us on CSM8 had ourselves a grin at this initial TMC article, particularly because several of us had already been interviewed or contacted by Rhavas for a more definitive CSM8 officer article. He was quick to reassure us that Set's article wasn't it. I have to admit, though, I had a personal amused moment. I suspect my feelings when I read Set's article were mirrored by Seleene, Alekseyev Karrde, and a few other members of CSM7 from time to time when I would write something. Ah well.
Rhavas's article came out the 17th and is terrific. I strongly encourage you to go out and give it a read. It's the clearest possible picture you could get of how the officer selection process went. There's pretty much nothing I would add to the article and the quotations from me are accurate and sum up how I feel the officer voting went. So go give it a few minutes of your time. I want to compliment Rhavas on a fine job here!
Currently going through the five stages of grief is Poetic Stanziel. He's currently somewhere between "Anger" and "Bargaining." His article "It is time to get rid of CSM titles" is an absolute riot! This blog post can be roughly summed up as "Trebor won a Grammy?! This proves the Grammies are freaking worthless. End them. Now." At one point, Poe indicates there have been few or no CSM officers that have done anything worth a damn in the positions. I dispute this in the strongest terms. Anyone who doubts Mynxee owned that Chair title is flat wrong, and TeaDaze was the finest Secretary any CSM has ever had. And that's just two people that jumped into my head reading his piece.
Onward. I'm hoping to announce the date of the first CSM Town Hall in a couple of days. Many of the CSM have agreed to my preliminary schedule for six town halls this year. I want two town halls each on either side of the two summits, one during the mid-summer lull in CCP activities, and one during the run-up to the CSM9 election. I'm also building up support for the monthly "Features and Ideas" meeting that I mentioned last week, with buy-in from a number of CSM members and (this week) a couple of CCP devs, interested to see what we up-vote. Ali Aras has been running a series of "Space Hangouts". Check out her G+ page for details on that, or it'll be on her blog very soon. She also did a pretty interesting analysis on the CSM8 voting trends.
Note to self: get the CSM8 bloggers into the "Infrequent but Important" section of this blog.
Two step really stepped up this week (sorry, couldn't resist) and provided a ton of additional input for the CSM7 transition work. Thanks very much, Two step! My initial goals for transition were four-fold:
- Document any open switches that CSM7 had with CCP in terms of promises made.
- Document any issues that CCP had asked the CSM to follow up on.
- Document anything either from CSM7 or from past CSMs that CSM8 should hold CCP accountable to.
- Document names, CCP names, and titles for CCP devs and generally list which ones are good contacts and for what.
Several CSM members appeared on pod-casts this week, and mynnna and I were invited to chat a little bit about CSM at the Syndicate Competitive League tournament. My big pod-cast appearance this week was on Podside (Mike Azariah is a co-host there). I'm pretty sure I was episode 104. It was pretty late at night and by the end I was a bit punchy and profane. Sorry about that... if you're looking for a totally classy CSM rep, it wasn't me. ;-) But it was a damn good time regardless and I got to talk about our activites a good bit. Kesper North will soon be putting up a forum thread with contact info for all CSM members.
Lots of good discussion on the CSM Skype channels this week about various Odyssey topics! You can probably guess the two items that took most of our time.
A decent number of CSM members and ex-CSM members got themselves killed in-game this week. That prompted me to joke that I wanted to be the first CSM member to shoot and kill every other active CSM member. Then I was reminded that the mains of two current CSM members are currently sitting in titans, which could make that problematic. ;-) Still, might be interesting to try for the record. I wonder what the record is?
Finally, CSM got its first bit of homework over this weekend. A CCP dev that shall remain nameless asked for information about how to learn how to do T2 manufacturing... in game. I have to admit that this made me laugh and I teased the dev in question about it for about an hour while his screen filled up with info windows. I finally took "pity" and pointed him at the little basic T2 manufacturing guide that I wrote earlier this year. His response to it was quite amusing and probably under NDA; you T2 manufacturers like me can probably imagine it. But he paid me back for the teasing and the wall of text with a homework assignment: give him some proposals for making T2 manufacturing more understandable, particularly in-game. He's also given me permission to run a player round-table on the subject, so that's exactly what I'm gonna do. Look for that to be set up in the next week or so. Feel free to start commenting on it now, though! First thing that occurred to me? How about a random 2-run T2 BPC for completing the industry tutorial? First thing that occurred to Alekseyev Karrde? A "Variations" tab on T1 BPOs and BPCs, pointing to their T2 versions. I think both are pretty good ideas: they show newer players what's possible. But I'll be looking for other good ideas, from you. Yes, you!
And that's it! Another busy week! I'm falling a bit behind on my EVE-O forum reading, so I need to devote more time to that this week. We should also have another stake-holder meeting this week. Hopefully it will be later than 4am...
Who what when where (how) why
Little bit of Sunday geek philosophy for you.
One of the most basic tenets of journalism used to be that you don't write a story without the "five Ws": who, what, when, where, and most importantly, why. Who did it? What did they do? When did they do it? Where? How did it happen? Why did it happen?
That last question speaks to motivation and is often the toughest question to answer, and usually takes the longest. As a result, modern news organizations have gotten into the habit of going to press with as many of the questions answered as they can. These days, Woodward and Bernstein are afraid of losing their access, and CNN doesn't want to lose the "breaking story" to MSNBC or Fox News, so journalists "go to press" as soon as they can string some kind of coherent narrative together. This particularly applies to things like terrorist attacks. When something awful like this happens, you will know where, when, and to whom it happened, but only usually will you know what happened, often you won't know how, and almost never during those initial few hours will you know why. Those things come a lot later. But in today's 24-hour news cycle, the five Ws have diminished in importance in the view of many journalists.
The slow degrade of respect the public has for the profession can probably be traced in part to this process. There's just no time to get the full story if you want eyeballs in front of screens. You go with what you have.
Sometimes the choices are even harder. Sometimes you find out why a terrorist attack happens, and it's from the terrorist himself. Do you go to press with that information? Do you turn your entire media empire into a mouthpiece for the thoughts of someone motivated by hatred or revenge, even for a moment? It's a tough call. Journalism schools debate it.
It comes down to motivation: if someone has good information that answers a "W" but also clearly has an axe to grind, how much play do you give them? Not all such motivations are negative, of course. I'm sure we've all heard or read stories about someone committing a crime, only to have a family member come forward to defend that person or try to provide explanations, or information. Or a government official comes forward and tries to bring clarity. But often, the motivation is highly negative... revenge or contempt being quite high on the list. Again, how much play do you give that? It's another thing journalism schools debate.
Now suppose a journalist screws up. Is that in itself a story? If so, who covers it? The journalist's employer? Another media outlet? How do you cover it? There's a great scene in Tomorrow Never Dies with one cable outlet gloating at the misfortunes of another. You don't want to do that! But if a journalist leaves one media outlet and joins another, for cause... and wants to talk about his or her former employers. Do you cover that? I mean, it's news, right?
Yeah, let's tie this stuff to EVE Online.
For those not keeping track, there's a little slap-fight going down this weekend between EVE News 24 and themittani.com. The genesis of the slap-fight was this article published on EN24, on May 13 (remember that date). Make no mistake: the article itself is kind of a mess. But it includes Jabber logs that seem to show CFC members -- including CSM8 member mynnna -- gained access to data on the EVE Online Chaos test server data on changes that were upcoming in Odyssey before those changes were announced. Further, the logs included indicate that the CFC used that information for massive financial gain, buying materials like isotopes that Odyssey is going to make more rare.
Assuming the logs are legitimate, "what" and "where" is covered, and "who" is somewhat covered. The files are dated in the three days before Fanfest -- before mynnna was even on the CSM -- so "when" is somewhat covered. "How" and "why"? Well, the source of the data is a muddled mess. And the motivation for the original article goes back to Cerebral Wolf, who rather famously got himself blapped from Goonswarm for apparently trying to influence DUST 514's CPM through intimidation and blackmail. Whoops! And now he was providing Jabber logs about CFC activities related to EVE's Chaos server and Odyssey. Oh dear Heaven... that source doesn't have credibility problems at all, does it? It certainly raises a question about motivation.
Now let's be clear here: I don't have a dog in this fight, and anyone who thinks I do is wrong. EN24 has agreements in place with six or eight bloggers, of which I am one. From time to time, EN24 syndicates our stuff Huffington Post-style, and we get ISK for it. I don't write for EN24, I don't do news for EN24, and I don't have access to any EN24 systems. That's about the extent of my involvement here. But I've talked with EN24 editor riverini on any number of occasions. And his long-held bias against anything CFC is probably one of the worst-kept secrets in New Eden. And here was Cerebral Wolf feeding it.
So riverini -- probably eagerly -- asked Incindir Mauser to look through the Jabber logs, see if there was anything interesting in them. And apparently there was. And Mauser wrote up most of that disjointed little article about it. And then at that point, the story splits. Remember the old saying about how there's three sides to every story? This is where the slap-fight starts. What actually happened? Here's Mauser's version. Here's riverini's version.
Yep, two whole featured news stories about who did what to whose EVE news website or news articles. And the funny and sad thing is that this whole story is built on questionable motivations. And the ironic thing is that everything that happened came down to a lack of communication.
Mauser says that riverini fished his article out of the trash. How did it get into the trash? As far as I can tell, Mauser used his access to the EN24 tools to publish the article, on May 11, on EVE News 24! But then, because of cold feet or second thoughts or just a mis-click, then he deleted the article, then he apparently decided to talk to the Goons to validate the Jabber logs. We have pretty good evidence of this because someone commented on the piece before Mauser could delete it. It's still causing a glitch, right now, in the EN24 comments system: trying to read comments via the sidebar on the May 13 piece are getting redirected to the published, then deleted May 11 piece, where they obviously don't exist.
Mauser did the correct thing, and went back to Goons to get the Jabber logs validated. Only first, he published his article. Then he deleted his article. Then he didn't send an e-mail to riverini saying "Hey riv, I've deleted the Chaos test server article because I want to fact-check some things. I'll get back to you Monday." But Mauser doesn't mention any of this in his slap-fight article because that clouds his motivations... the all-important why question. If Mauser isn't the victim, that makes his "riverini wanted to promulgate his twisted, weird, little agenda" story a little bit... unwieldy.
riverini logs into EN24 whenever it is he does. The comment on the non-existent May 11 piece is causing glitches in the comment sidebar. He traces the comment to Mauser's deleted article, un-deletes it, edits it, republishes it. Why? riverini's motivations are also cloudy. Maybe he thought Mauser made a mistake with a publishing system he was unfamiliar with. Or maybe riverini just couldn't let a good article sliming the Goons go. He says flat-out he wanted it published on Monday, a high traffic day... again, motivation. Here's what riverini also didn't do: he didn't send an e-mail to Mauser saying "Hey Mauser, your deleted article is causing problems. Did you mean to delete it? What's going on?" riverini has added an addendum to his piece making that clear.
So the motivations of all three people involved here are cloudy to say the least. The lack of communications is manifest. It isn't the first time that EN24 has jumped into the fray supporting someone with questionable motives. And TMC has also jumped into the slap-fight with both feet, hiring Mauser to be a staff writer despite his first piece being full of anti-EN24 venom. It'll be interesting to see what Mauser produces for TMC.
In the meantime, all of the spilled ink has clouded the issue of the Jabber logs themselves. Remember them? They're legitimate. Neither side has disputed that.
Only they mean nothing. It's the sort of thing that EVE players at all levels have done for years to gain advantage in-game. From time to time, you've read stuff from me right here pointing to scrapes off the Chaos server. You'll be reading another here before too long about capital rigs. In the original piece, riverini points out quite correctly that for years, CCP has taken a necessarily blind eye to this sort of thing because they honestly have no other choice. Even if mynnna did benefit from this, certainly he isn't going to be in a position to benefit from this sort of data for a while. Not with CCP watching his every transaction like a hawk now that he's on CSM8. ;-)
So the whole thing is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, IMO. But interesting from a philosophical point of view, don't you think? Discuss.
One of the most basic tenets of journalism used to be that you don't write a story without the "five Ws": who, what, when, where, and most importantly, why. Who did it? What did they do? When did they do it? Where? How did it happen? Why did it happen?
That last question speaks to motivation and is often the toughest question to answer, and usually takes the longest. As a result, modern news organizations have gotten into the habit of going to press with as many of the questions answered as they can. These days, Woodward and Bernstein are afraid of losing their access, and CNN doesn't want to lose the "breaking story" to MSNBC or Fox News, so journalists "go to press" as soon as they can string some kind of coherent narrative together. This particularly applies to things like terrorist attacks. When something awful like this happens, you will know where, when, and to whom it happened, but only usually will you know what happened, often you won't know how, and almost never during those initial few hours will you know why. Those things come a lot later. But in today's 24-hour news cycle, the five Ws have diminished in importance in the view of many journalists.
The slow degrade of respect the public has for the profession can probably be traced in part to this process. There's just no time to get the full story if you want eyeballs in front of screens. You go with what you have.
Sometimes the choices are even harder. Sometimes you find out why a terrorist attack happens, and it's from the terrorist himself. Do you go to press with that information? Do you turn your entire media empire into a mouthpiece for the thoughts of someone motivated by hatred or revenge, even for a moment? It's a tough call. Journalism schools debate it.
It comes down to motivation: if someone has good information that answers a "W" but also clearly has an axe to grind, how much play do you give them? Not all such motivations are negative, of course. I'm sure we've all heard or read stories about someone committing a crime, only to have a family member come forward to defend that person or try to provide explanations, or information. Or a government official comes forward and tries to bring clarity. But often, the motivation is highly negative... revenge or contempt being quite high on the list. Again, how much play do you give that? It's another thing journalism schools debate.
Now suppose a journalist screws up. Is that in itself a story? If so, who covers it? The journalist's employer? Another media outlet? How do you cover it? There's a great scene in Tomorrow Never Dies with one cable outlet gloating at the misfortunes of another. You don't want to do that! But if a journalist leaves one media outlet and joins another, for cause... and wants to talk about his or her former employers. Do you cover that? I mean, it's news, right?
Yeah, let's tie this stuff to EVE Online.
For those not keeping track, there's a little slap-fight going down this weekend between EVE News 24 and themittani.com. The genesis of the slap-fight was this article published on EN24, on May 13 (remember that date). Make no mistake: the article itself is kind of a mess. But it includes Jabber logs that seem to show CFC members -- including CSM8 member mynnna -- gained access to data on the EVE Online Chaos test server data on changes that were upcoming in Odyssey before those changes were announced. Further, the logs included indicate that the CFC used that information for massive financial gain, buying materials like isotopes that Odyssey is going to make more rare.
Assuming the logs are legitimate, "what" and "where" is covered, and "who" is somewhat covered. The files are dated in the three days before Fanfest -- before mynnna was even on the CSM -- so "when" is somewhat covered. "How" and "why"? Well, the source of the data is a muddled mess. And the motivation for the original article goes back to Cerebral Wolf, who rather famously got himself blapped from Goonswarm for apparently trying to influence DUST 514's CPM through intimidation and blackmail. Whoops! And now he was providing Jabber logs about CFC activities related to EVE's Chaos server and Odyssey. Oh dear Heaven... that source doesn't have credibility problems at all, does it? It certainly raises a question about motivation.
Now let's be clear here: I don't have a dog in this fight, and anyone who thinks I do is wrong. EN24 has agreements in place with six or eight bloggers, of which I am one. From time to time, EN24 syndicates our stuff Huffington Post-style, and we get ISK for it. I don't write for EN24, I don't do news for EN24, and I don't have access to any EN24 systems. That's about the extent of my involvement here. But I've talked with EN24 editor riverini on any number of occasions. And his long-held bias against anything CFC is probably one of the worst-kept secrets in New Eden. And here was Cerebral Wolf feeding it.
So riverini -- probably eagerly -- asked Incindir Mauser to look through the Jabber logs, see if there was anything interesting in them. And apparently there was. And Mauser wrote up most of that disjointed little article about it. And then at that point, the story splits. Remember the old saying about how there's three sides to every story? This is where the slap-fight starts. What actually happened? Here's Mauser's version. Here's riverini's version.
Yep, two whole featured news stories about who did what to whose EVE news website or news articles. And the funny and sad thing is that this whole story is built on questionable motivations. And the ironic thing is that everything that happened came down to a lack of communication.
Mauser says that riverini fished his article out of the trash. How did it get into the trash? As far as I can tell, Mauser used his access to the EN24 tools to publish the article, on May 11, on EVE News 24! But then, because of cold feet or second thoughts or just a mis-click, then he deleted the article, then he apparently decided to talk to the Goons to validate the Jabber logs. We have pretty good evidence of this because someone commented on the piece before Mauser could delete it. It's still causing a glitch, right now, in the EN24 comments system: trying to read comments via the sidebar on the May 13 piece are getting redirected to the published, then deleted May 11 piece, where they obviously don't exist.
Mauser did the correct thing, and went back to Goons to get the Jabber logs validated. Only first, he published his article. Then he deleted his article. Then he didn't send an e-mail to riverini saying "Hey riv, I've deleted the Chaos test server article because I want to fact-check some things. I'll get back to you Monday." But Mauser doesn't mention any of this in his slap-fight article because that clouds his motivations... the all-important why question. If Mauser isn't the victim, that makes his "riverini wanted to promulgate his twisted, weird, little agenda" story a little bit... unwieldy.
riverini logs into EN24 whenever it is he does. The comment on the non-existent May 11 piece is causing glitches in the comment sidebar. He traces the comment to Mauser's deleted article, un-deletes it, edits it, republishes it. Why? riverini's motivations are also cloudy. Maybe he thought Mauser made a mistake with a publishing system he was unfamiliar with. Or maybe riverini just couldn't let a good article sliming the Goons go. He says flat-out he wanted it published on Monday, a high traffic day... again, motivation. Here's what riverini also didn't do: he didn't send an e-mail to Mauser saying "Hey Mauser, your deleted article is causing problems. Did you mean to delete it? What's going on?" riverini has added an addendum to his piece making that clear.
So the motivations of all three people involved here are cloudy to say the least. The lack of communications is manifest. It isn't the first time that EN24 has jumped into the fray supporting someone with questionable motives. And TMC has also jumped into the slap-fight with both feet, hiring Mauser to be a staff writer despite his first piece being full of anti-EN24 venom. It'll be interesting to see what Mauser produces for TMC.
In the meantime, all of the spilled ink has clouded the issue of the Jabber logs themselves. Remember them? They're legitimate. Neither side has disputed that.
Only they mean nothing. It's the sort of thing that EVE players at all levels have done for years to gain advantage in-game. From time to time, you've read stuff from me right here pointing to scrapes off the Chaos server. You'll be reading another here before too long about capital rigs. In the original piece, riverini points out quite correctly that for years, CCP has taken a necessarily blind eye to this sort of thing because they honestly have no other choice. Even if mynnna did benefit from this, certainly he isn't going to be in a position to benefit from this sort of data for a while. Not with CCP watching his every transaction like a hawk now that he's on CSM8. ;-)
So the whole thing is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, IMO. But interesting from a philosophical point of view, don't you think? Discuss.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Anatomy of a screw-up
About once a year, I have to write a major mea cupla blog post. Welcome to this year's. Well, at least I hope it's this year's! If you write 500 blog posts a year, mistakes -- major mistakes -- are inevitable. When I make a mistake, I always try to be diligent about first, correcting it, and second, owning up to it. But I thought it'd be interesting to delve into this one in detail.
First, the mistake itself: in the midst of a little QOTW post earlier today, I said that the Odyssey feature of Personal Hangar Array module for POSes was going to be delayed to a point release. That was mistaken.
For those who want to gloat at me, feel free to gloat. I feel completely awful about this error, and have fallen on my sword to CCP. It was a stupid thing to do. When I was just a blogger, making a mistake like that is dumb but forgivable. But for a CSM member, it's a lot more dangerous: while this blog is not an official communications medium, it'd be real easy for a mistake like that to go viral. So I really need to be more careful about what I print here this coming year and that's why I feel so terrible about this early screw-up.
So I want to extend my apologies to CCP and specifically to Team Superfriends for this error. If you want to know the story how this error happened, read on. It might be of interest to EVE bloggers or potential EVE bloggers. If you don't care, then you can move on to the next post.
Here's how it happened.
Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time knows that once a month, I do a little post that I call the "Junk Drawer". The junk drawer is really a side effect of how this blog gets created. To create the blog, I have a little mind-mapping application where I take daily notes on things that I read about, see in the game, hear about, or whatever. Some of those little notes get expanded into outlines, and some of those outlines get expanded into full blog posts. At any given time, there are a hundred or so "active" items in my notes, of which about ten of them are a paragraph or two (more about these in a second), three of them are outlines and about four or five more are blog posts in the process of being written.
Anything that doesn't make it into at least an outline in 90 days or so ends up in a junk drawer post. And that's how those posts get created.
In particular, sometimes the notes themselves aren't big enough to generate full blog posts by themselves. So they sit as a paragraph or two waiting to be connected to something else. Sometimes when this happens, those two paragraphs go into the junk drawer and that's it. But other times, I like to connect those two paragraphs to two paragraphs about something else if I can find a way to link them. This month, I had written three paragraphs about MSCW that I thought would be interesting, but they didn't really warrant their own blog post.
On May 8th, I read this dev-post from CCP Fozzie early that morning. Go read it. Did you catch what I misread? It was that second-to-last line:
Know what else I had three paragraphs written on? Themes, and how those themes would probably affect the future development of EVE, and how things might get pulled out of EVE expansions or delayed at the last minute if they didn't fit the theme. Then, this morning, I watched that funny little exchange between CCP Rise and CCP Fozzie in the QOTW post and that exchange forged the connection in my head:
So now you know how that screw-up happened. And knowing is half the battle.
I want to again apologize to CCP for my unintentional bit of spreading misinformation. Fortunately, with the help of CCP Fozzie and a couple of comments here, I caught it only a couple of hours after it was published so hopefully the damage was minimal. And hopefully the rest of the post still ended up being interesting for a reason other than the screw-up. ;-)
First, the mistake itself: in the midst of a little QOTW post earlier today, I said that the Odyssey feature of Personal Hangar Array module for POSes was going to be delayed to a point release. That was mistaken.
For those who want to gloat at me, feel free to gloat. I feel completely awful about this error, and have fallen on my sword to CCP. It was a stupid thing to do. When I was just a blogger, making a mistake like that is dumb but forgivable. But for a CSM member, it's a lot more dangerous: while this blog is not an official communications medium, it'd be real easy for a mistake like that to go viral. So I really need to be more careful about what I print here this coming year and that's why I feel so terrible about this early screw-up.
So I want to extend my apologies to CCP and specifically to Team Superfriends for this error. If you want to know the story how this error happened, read on. It might be of interest to EVE bloggers or potential EVE bloggers. If you don't care, then you can move on to the next post.
Here's how it happened.
Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time knows that once a month, I do a little post that I call the "Junk Drawer". The junk drawer is really a side effect of how this blog gets created. To create the blog, I have a little mind-mapping application where I take daily notes on things that I read about, see in the game, hear about, or whatever. Some of those little notes get expanded into outlines, and some of those outlines get expanded into full blog posts. At any given time, there are a hundred or so "active" items in my notes, of which about ten of them are a paragraph or two (more about these in a second), three of them are outlines and about four or five more are blog posts in the process of being written.
Anything that doesn't make it into at least an outline in 90 days or so ends up in a junk drawer post. And that's how those posts get created.
In particular, sometimes the notes themselves aren't big enough to generate full blog posts by themselves. So they sit as a paragraph or two waiting to be connected to something else. Sometimes when this happens, those two paragraphs go into the junk drawer and that's it. But other times, I like to connect those two paragraphs to two paragraphs about something else if I can find a way to link them. This month, I had written three paragraphs about MSCW that I thought would be interesting, but they didn't really warrant their own blog post.
On May 8th, I read this dev-post from CCP Fozzie early that morning. Go read it. Did you catch what I misread? It was that second-to-last line:
We unfortunately will not be able to get Private SMAs into the initial Odyssey release. It is still something we want to do, possibly in a point release.Apparently I should have waited to do my EVE Online forum reading until I was a little more awake because here's what I wrote in the mind-mapping app that morning:
DP: personal POS hangar delay point release, NBDIt's short-hand. DP is dev-post. NBD is exactly what it sounds like. Usually, I attach the link next to it but for some reason, this time I didn't. This would prove to be a major mistake. Still, it wasn't enough to warrant a blog post of its own and hell, if I had gotten to the end of the month, then I would have realized that the line was wrong and I would have deleted it and no damage done. Scary truth: sometimes this happens.
Know what else I had three paragraphs written on? Themes, and how those themes would probably affect the future development of EVE, and how things might get pulled out of EVE expansions or delayed at the last minute if they didn't fit the theme. Then, this morning, I watched that funny little exchange between CCP Rise and CCP Fozzie in the QOTW post and that exchange forged the connection in my head:
- Odyssey is about finding things in space and things happening to you there.
- MSCW might cause features that didn't totally fit that theme to be delayed.
- What features have been delayed from Odyssey?
So now you know how that screw-up happened. And knowing is half the battle.
I want to again apologize to CCP for my unintentional bit of spreading misinformation. Fortunately, with the help of CCP Fozzie and a couple of comments here, I caught it only a couple of hours after it was published so hopefully the damage was minimal. And hopefully the rest of the post still ended up being interesting for a reason other than the screw-up. ;-)
In the navy
The navy battleships have a weird distinction for me in my play of EVE Online: at one time or another in my career, I have owned and flown every single one of them. That's not a claim that I can make for any other group of ships in the game.(1) They're not my favorite group of ships in the game -- that distinction goes to the battle cruisers, and T2 cruisers after them. But navy BSs are such ferocious ships, and relatively inexpensive for how good they are. That makes buying them an easy choice for me. So I was obviously delighted when I heard they were going to be rebalanced for Odyssey.
Amusingly enough, the best change to the navy BSs of all isn't even in CCP Rise's thread on the matter but instead is brought forth by CCP Ytterbium:
As for the changes to the ships themselves? All eight of these ships are being fundamentally improved and with a couple of exceptions, I'm pleased with all of the changes. I catch flak sometimes when I classify ships as "losers" (sorry about that, Hyperion) in these re-balance posts but keep in mind when I buy a car, I'm not comparing the 2013 Honda Accord to the 2012 Honda Accord... I'm comparing it to its 2013 competition from other makes and models. And by that metric, all eight of these ships are winners.
Just some more than others. ;-) So I'm going to list them in the order that I'm looking forward to flying them.
#1: Scorpion Navy Issue. Good Heavens, this thing is a monster. It picks up an additional low slot (like the T1 Scorp) and even more base shields. That, combined with the cruise missile buff and the calibration buff, vaults this one right to the top of the navy BSs. PvPers will have their choice of a full T2 torp fit, plus a heavy neut, MWD and MJD, or whatever CML fit they want. Shield brawling battleship gang... it might actually become a thing! PvEers -- particularly incursion-runners -- have to be smiling ear-to-ear about this one between the large amount of extra damage, calibration, and CML speed. The SNI is almost too good.
#2: Typhoon Fleet Issue. In a way, this is a bit of a troll, the Typhoon Fleet Issue slipping right into the Tempest's old role as a fast, nasty battleship with high DPS and two utility high slots. Know what? Don't care. Like the T1 Mega, we're going to be seeing a dozen fantastic TFI fits each better than the last, some shield, some armor, all awesome. In particular, the Tempest never had that 125m3 drone bay.
#3: Raven Navy Issue. That stuff I said about the SNI? It also applies to the CNR. PvPers will be using the extra mid to fit a MJD, and their buffed cruise missiles will be outrunning and spiking interceptors, particularly with Precision loads. That's scary stuff. Torp CNRs are also going to be fun as hell. And you L4 Caldari missioners that aren't in this boat starting with Odyssey will be doing it incredibly wrong. "This ship is going to be an animal," Rise says. Yup.
#4: Armageddon Navy Issue. With the T1 Geddon getting bounced around, the "Neddon" vaults for me into the position of the preeminent brawling battleship. Biggest changes are the increase in sensor strength (Neddons have always been vulnerable to jamming out their already huge DPS) and base armor. The latter should make a 200k EHP Neddon quite achievable... which will still be doing horrific DPS at close range. The upsized drone bay is quite nice (though I would have been happer with 250m3). I've had an occasional running argument with alliance-mate Ben Booley about the Neddon versus the Mega Navy Issue. I reluctantly agreed that the Mega was slightly superior, mostly because the thinner Mega could cut through the Neddon armor before it went down. The balance will be tipping to the Neddon's favor for Odyssey.
#5: Apocalypse Navy Issue. I'm conflicted about this one. Like its T1 counter-part, I'm not a big fan of the changes in cap and I think it renders this one too close to the Abaddon in capabilities, performance, and cost. The buffs to mass and signature, while nice, are not going to off-set the usability issues. The tracking bonus worries me. Every Amarr BS these days fits double Tracking Computers so that opens up the very real possibility that Napocs will be blapping inties right off BS fleets. The changes particularly hurt mid-range L4 mission-runners who rely on the Napoc's cap stability in all regimens. If they could fit a full rack of Tachyons that would be one thing, but unless my math is wrong, they can't without the same fitting mod they need today. Again, I'm conflicted about this one. It's too good in some ways, too weird in others. I can see what the intent was here, but it needs more tweaking, IMO.
#6: Dominix Navy Issue. This one falls firmly in the middle. I'm a huge fan of the throwback nature of the beast (it has this in common with the Neddon). The buff to power grid is quite nice, which are going to make Neutron DNIs quite achieveable. But the biggest buff is to calibration, which is going to make fitting that T2 Sentry Damage Augmentor rig possible. Alternately, for PvE applications, double CCC/Sentry Damage Augmentor rig setups will also be possible, which is going to free up a mid slot for any number of possible uses.
#7: Tempest Fleet Issue. Like the Tempest, the TFI was slightly over-powered relative to the others so it doesn't surprise me to see it's the least changed. The slight tweaks to fitting will be welcomed by newer players who are using this ship. I wonder who those might be?
#8: Megathron Navy Issue. While I love love love the mass decrease, I don't understand the decrease in base armor, and I'm quite sad about it not receiving the 5th mid slot that its T1 counterpart will be enjoying. The ROF bonus will make it an even more withering attack platform and as such it's a distinct improvement over the current model. But most improved compared to the other seven it is definitely not. In the unlikely event it gets that 5th mid slot, jump this one up to #3 or #4 but someone has to be on the bottom and right now this one's it.
EDIT (17/May/2013): Fifth mid-slot also appears to be out for the T1 Mega. Boo.
So, that's where I fall with the navy battleships. Where am I wrong about this list? What did I get right?
(1) T2 frigates comes closest. I've flown every T2 frig in the game except the Helios. T1 BCs comes second closest. I've flown all of them except the Myrmidon.
Amusingly enough, the best change to the navy BSs of all isn't even in CCP Rise's thread on the matter but instead is brought forth by CCP Ytterbium:
Ah yes, this makes me remember to tell you guys something that should make you happy - we're going to increase calibration on all Navy Ships from 350 to 400. While it makes sense for Tech2 hulls to have less rig sots due to the specialized nature of the ships, Navy hulls are supposed to be an improvement over Tech1, but is not always the case right now due to rig / calibration restrictions.I cannot possibly express how happy that makes me. There are several ships that are going to benefit hugely from that, notably the Navy Raven and Dominix, both of which lose access to excellent fitting options thanks to their current 350 calibration. Kudos to that change!
As for the changes to the ships themselves? All eight of these ships are being fundamentally improved and with a couple of exceptions, I'm pleased with all of the changes. I catch flak sometimes when I classify ships as "losers" (sorry about that, Hyperion) in these re-balance posts but keep in mind when I buy a car, I'm not comparing the 2013 Honda Accord to the 2012 Honda Accord... I'm comparing it to its 2013 competition from other makes and models. And by that metric, all eight of these ships are winners.
Just some more than others. ;-) So I'm going to list them in the order that I'm looking forward to flying them.
#1: Scorpion Navy Issue. Good Heavens, this thing is a monster. It picks up an additional low slot (like the T1 Scorp) and even more base shields. That, combined with the cruise missile buff and the calibration buff, vaults this one right to the top of the navy BSs. PvPers will have their choice of a full T2 torp fit, plus a heavy neut, MWD and MJD, or whatever CML fit they want. Shield brawling battleship gang... it might actually become a thing! PvEers -- particularly incursion-runners -- have to be smiling ear-to-ear about this one between the large amount of extra damage, calibration, and CML speed. The SNI is almost too good.
#2: Typhoon Fleet Issue. In a way, this is a bit of a troll, the Typhoon Fleet Issue slipping right into the Tempest's old role as a fast, nasty battleship with high DPS and two utility high slots. Know what? Don't care. Like the T1 Mega, we're going to be seeing a dozen fantastic TFI fits each better than the last, some shield, some armor, all awesome. In particular, the Tempest never had that 125m3 drone bay.
#3: Raven Navy Issue. That stuff I said about the SNI? It also applies to the CNR. PvPers will be using the extra mid to fit a MJD, and their buffed cruise missiles will be outrunning and spiking interceptors, particularly with Precision loads. That's scary stuff. Torp CNRs are also going to be fun as hell. And you L4 Caldari missioners that aren't in this boat starting with Odyssey will be doing it incredibly wrong. "This ship is going to be an animal," Rise says. Yup.
#4: Armageddon Navy Issue. With the T1 Geddon getting bounced around, the "Neddon" vaults for me into the position of the preeminent brawling battleship. Biggest changes are the increase in sensor strength (Neddons have always been vulnerable to jamming out their already huge DPS) and base armor. The latter should make a 200k EHP Neddon quite achievable... which will still be doing horrific DPS at close range. The upsized drone bay is quite nice (though I would have been happer with 250m3). I've had an occasional running argument with alliance-mate Ben Booley about the Neddon versus the Mega Navy Issue. I reluctantly agreed that the Mega was slightly superior, mostly because the thinner Mega could cut through the Neddon armor before it went down. The balance will be tipping to the Neddon's favor for Odyssey.
#5: Apocalypse Navy Issue. I'm conflicted about this one. Like its T1 counter-part, I'm not a big fan of the changes in cap and I think it renders this one too close to the Abaddon in capabilities, performance, and cost. The buffs to mass and signature, while nice, are not going to off-set the usability issues. The tracking bonus worries me. Every Amarr BS these days fits double Tracking Computers so that opens up the very real possibility that Napocs will be blapping inties right off BS fleets. The changes particularly hurt mid-range L4 mission-runners who rely on the Napoc's cap stability in all regimens. If they could fit a full rack of Tachyons that would be one thing, but unless my math is wrong, they can't without the same fitting mod they need today. Again, I'm conflicted about this one. It's too good in some ways, too weird in others. I can see what the intent was here, but it needs more tweaking, IMO.
#6: Dominix Navy Issue. This one falls firmly in the middle. I'm a huge fan of the throwback nature of the beast (it has this in common with the Neddon). The buff to power grid is quite nice, which are going to make Neutron DNIs quite achieveable. But the biggest buff is to calibration, which is going to make fitting that T2 Sentry Damage Augmentor rig possible. Alternately, for PvE applications, double CCC/Sentry Damage Augmentor rig setups will also be possible, which is going to free up a mid slot for any number of possible uses.
#7: Tempest Fleet Issue. Like the Tempest, the TFI was slightly over-powered relative to the others so it doesn't surprise me to see it's the least changed. The slight tweaks to fitting will be welcomed by newer players who are using this ship. I wonder who those might be?
#8: Megathron Navy Issue. While I love love love the mass decrease, I don't understand the decrease in base armor, and I'm quite sad about it not receiving the 5th mid slot that its T1 counterpart will be enjoying. The ROF bonus will make it an even more withering attack platform and as such it's a distinct improvement over the current model. But most improved compared to the other seven it is definitely not. In the unlikely event it gets that 5th mid slot, jump this one up to #3 or #4 but someone has to be on the bottom and right now this one's it.
EDIT (17/May/2013): Fifth mid-slot also appears to be out for the T1 Mega. Boo.
So, that's where I fall with the navy battleships. Where am I wrong about this list? What did I get right?
(1) T2 frigates comes closest. I've flown every T2 frig in the game except the Helios. T1 BCs comes second closest. I've flown all of them except the Myrmidon.
Quote of the Week: Themes and tag-lines
shit pops up
you go find it
things happen
the actual tagline for odyssey
-- CCP Rise (the first three lines) and CCP Fozzie (the last line)This exchange is reproduced with permission from the CSM-CCP Skype conversation. ;-) I just love it. And it's the quote of the week.
From time to time here, you'll hear me make reference to the old-fashioned "theme" that was a hallmark of U.S. education when it came to teaching kids how to write in the 1950s and 1960s. It eventually morphed into the "formal essay" form that I believe is still used today. But one of the key elements to the old-fashioned theme -- particularly relative to today's more stream-of-consciousness writing styles -- is that kids were taught that anything that didn't fit the theme should be cut.
And that's kind of what's happening to Odyssey right now. As we get closer and closer to the release date, some features are being postponed from the Odyssey release.
EDIT (17/May/2013): I'm an idiot. I could have sworn I saw that Personal Storage Arrays weren't going to be ready in time for June 4, but Fozzie reports that they are. So I've deleted the reference to them not being ready on time. I apologize, and I regret the error.
Why pick that feature to delay rather than something else? Themes! This is how EVE development is going to work for what is likely to be the next three years:
- step one: a lot of potential and suggested features build up into a big pile;
- step two: CCP devs (with the help of the CSM) collaborate and decide on a theme for the next expansion;
- step three: features are pulled out of the big pile that seem to fit the theme;
- step four: if one of those isn't a big signature theme feature, then a big signature theme feature is brain-stormed and chosen;
- step five: devs work in sprints on the chosen features;
- step six: as the release date gets closer, features that aren't going to be finished in time are put aside; and,
- step seven: release date.
But don't forget step eight: those features that didn't get finished in time for release date are pushed back to point releases. This is what happened with dueling in Retribution. It didn't get finished in time for Retribution 1.0, but it made it into the game eventually. So "keep calm and carry on", I believe the saying goes. The features that match the theme will be in the game first. But the other stuff will make it in too. We might just have to wait a few weeks since they don't really fit the theme...
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Battleship bay
Heavens, this has been a difficult post to draft.
I mean, how could it not be? The very best thing about CCP Rise? He's willing to discuss and debate every little detail of his work with both CSM members and players, and make changes based on those discussions on a day-by-day, even minute-by-minute basis. The very worst thing about CCP Rise? The very same thing, heh. There are -- and I wish I was kidding -- 363 pages of discussion on the tech 1 battleships on the EVE Online forums. That's just the tech 1 BSs. Then there's a hundred or so more pages of discussion on FHC and kugu. The CSM has written hundreds of lines of suggested alterations and fixes. There's no possible way anyone could keep up with it all and yet somehow Rise is managing. I think. I hope.
So I want to write about battleships. But please do not operate under the illusion that I'm keeping track of every single solitary little change. I'm not. The battleships continue to evolve on a day-by-day basis. Just today, I learned about two more (admittedly very minor) changes to two faction battleships. But as I did with cruisers, and as I did with battle cruisers, I want to talk about winners and losers. And within that framework, I'm going to stay away from specifics and talk broad strokes: the role changes of these big, bad-ass ships. First, let's cover the tech1 BSs.
Winners
Typhoon. Or should I say Typhoon! I predicted this one was coming when I saw how the Cyclone was rebalanced and now that the day is fast approaching, I can't wait! Torpedo Typhoons are going to be incredible, but cruise missile Typhoons are going to be even better. Stupid fast, agile, and hard-hitting, expect to see a lot of MJD Typhoons land, start firing cruises, blink out 100km and keep firing without ever losing their locks. It's going to be fun in a way I can't possibly yet imagine. Needless to say, both Ripard and my combat alt are both in the midst of training Cruise Missiles V right now. Which brings me to...
Raven. Of the two, I like the Typhoon more. Partially, it's the explosion velocity bonus (this post from alliance-mate Namamai deftly explains why this bonus is important). The big thing the Raven picks up that's going to make this ship interesting is the great increases to speed and agility. I'm currently flying a lot of PODLA Drakes. I can very easily see myself flying some PODLA Ravens very soon. It looks like the Raven's going to be tougher, just as fast, and nearly as agile... while doing way more DPS. And not that the Raven needed any help on the PvE front, but the changes are going to make running L4 missions in this boat even easier -- and dare I say it -- slightly more fun!
Scorpion. There's only one small change, but it's huge: plus one low slot. If this change survives (and it should), it's going to change the Scorp a lot more than you would expect on the surface. Armor-tanked Scorps have indeed been a thing, but with only a four-slot tank, have been fragile easy primaries and have not benefitted from particularly exceptional jam strength to compensate. They've been used, but armor-tanked Falcons have been used more and have been more survivable. With a fifth low slot, this opens up a lot of new options for either tanking or that all-important jamming strength mod.
Megathron. This has been the subject of a lot of debate (it's no coincidence that the Gallente battleship thread is the second largest of the four). Let me just say it: I'm nearly totally on Rise's side on this one. I love these changes. They make the Mega fast and aggressive, which is just what an attack ship should be. I love the versatility this adds to the ship and you're going to see a dozen different fits come out for this monster, each better than the last. In particular, shield gank Megas are definitely gonna be a thing and I can't wait. The only thing I'm not a fan of? The ever-shrinking drone bay. That's why it falls behind the three ships above.
EDIT (17/May/2013): Fifth mid slot is off the Mega on Sisi. Boo. I still think we'll see shield Megas but they won't be nearly as much fun. Mega gets bumped down to "In the middle."
Armageddon. This was a close call. I almost put it into the "in the middle" group below but I'm going to err on the side of optimism. I wasn't initially a fan of the changes... in fact, when I first started playing with fittings for this boat, my first thought was to fit it like an armor Tempest! Complete with auto-cannons! But the more I play around with the options, the more this one is growing on me. Biggest plus continues to be versatility and that isn't changing. I don't much care for the increased cost, though...
Losers
Hyperion. Don't get me wrong: Rise is trying. But it's pretty clear that he doesn't have a clue what to do with this ship. If I had to guess (and it is a guess... I have no inside information on this), I'd say it'll be watched pretty closely throughout Odyssey, then receive a second rebalance later this year. I can't even keep track of what its slot layout is from week to week right now... let me go look. OK. I just checked Singularity and as of today, it's 7-5-7. Poor Rise. This ship is the other reason the Gallente thread is so monstrous.
Rokh. I'm sorry and I know this ship has a lot of fans in sniping fleets, but it's always felt like someone's abandoned little brother... unless you happen to be a sov alliance of thousands of pilots. In this case Rokhs take what should be a Minmatar role -- alpha strikes and blapping things off the field in one volley -- and do it better than the Minmatar can thanks to faster-cycling rail guns. I'm not a fan but hey, that's probably my prejudice showing. That said, the Rokh should have been given a slightly bigger drone bay and slightly better agility to make up for the resist bonus loss.
Small alliances in general. With tiericide in effect, the battleships that used to be relatively cheap will be no more. They are going to be much closer in price and as a result you're seeing a lot of speculation on the battleship markets just now. Sure, things will stabilize, but the small gangs that hardly ever use battleships certainly won't be inclined to start when they're more expensive! I'll have more to say about this in a later post.
Abaddon. Like the Rokh, this ship should have been given something to make up for the lost resistance bonus. Specifically, it should have been given either slightly higher base cap, or faster cap recharge. But that of course would have made it even more like the Apoc. The Amarr thread is the largest, and that comes down to how popular and iconic the Amarr BSs are.
The former tier 3 BSs in general. It's no coincidence that I consider three out of four of the former tier 3 BSs "losers" in this post. To a certain extent, Rise is doing to BSs the same thing that was done to BCs: make the good ones worse while raising up the poor ones. As I put it in the BC rebalance post: the fives and sixes out of ten become sevens. The nines, though... also become sevens. It's not as bad for the BSs, thankfully, but it's definitely on my mind.
In the middle
Maelstrom. For me, the Maelstrom is sort of the prototypical EVE battleship. I agree that its roles and purposes have suited it well and as a "control" battleship receiving no changes while the others are modified around it, you could definitely do much, much worse.
Tempest. Previously my favorite tech1 battleship, it will now be relegated to sixth or seventh. That makes me sad, but the Tempest has always been slightly over-powered (like its little brother, the Hurricane) and so the other battleships catching up was to be expected. I'm pleased it didn't lose a utility slot.
Dominix. This one really needs something to happen with the drone combat meta to really come into its own. I enjoy flying "herd Domis" from time to time, but it's not really a fleet meta that's gone anywhere in the last few years. Ironically, this ship's place has been taken over by sentry drone carriers for the big alliances, and the smaller alliances for the most part would rather have that than the flying running shoe.
Apocalypse. I alllllmost put this one in the "losers" category. I consider reducing both base cap and removing its cap bonuses near-fatal flaws. "There is some concern that the new Apoc will have a significant cap weakness, which will make it too similar to the Abaddon," says Rise. Yup. The initial very large nerf to cap has been adjusted to just a large nerf to cap, but I don't think it's going to be enough. I don't think there's enough difference between the "Apoc" and the "Baddon" now and I think it likely people will just go for the latter. On the positive end, I'm a huge fan of the new design. So again I'm going to err on the side of optimism though in my heart, I really wanted to class this one as a loser.
After a lot of thought on the matter, that's my current thinking on the tech1 battleships. In my opinion, Caldari battleships win overall. And that continues with the navy battleships, but more on that presently. In addition to training Cruise Missiles V, I'm also training up Caldari Battleships! For these, what did I get right? Where am I totally wrong?
I mean, how could it not be? The very best thing about CCP Rise? He's willing to discuss and debate every little detail of his work with both CSM members and players, and make changes based on those discussions on a day-by-day, even minute-by-minute basis. The very worst thing about CCP Rise? The very same thing, heh. There are -- and I wish I was kidding -- 363 pages of discussion on the tech 1 battleships on the EVE Online forums. That's just the tech 1 BSs. Then there's a hundred or so more pages of discussion on FHC and kugu. The CSM has written hundreds of lines of suggested alterations and fixes. There's no possible way anyone could keep up with it all and yet somehow Rise is managing. I think. I hope.
So I want to write about battleships. But please do not operate under the illusion that I'm keeping track of every single solitary little change. I'm not. The battleships continue to evolve on a day-by-day basis. Just today, I learned about two more (admittedly very minor) changes to two faction battleships. But as I did with cruisers, and as I did with battle cruisers, I want to talk about winners and losers. And within that framework, I'm going to stay away from specifics and talk broad strokes: the role changes of these big, bad-ass ships. First, let's cover the tech1 BSs.
Winners
Typhoon. Or should I say Typhoon! I predicted this one was coming when I saw how the Cyclone was rebalanced and now that the day is fast approaching, I can't wait! Torpedo Typhoons are going to be incredible, but cruise missile Typhoons are going to be even better. Stupid fast, agile, and hard-hitting, expect to see a lot of MJD Typhoons land, start firing cruises, blink out 100km and keep firing without ever losing their locks. It's going to be fun in a way I can't possibly yet imagine. Needless to say, both Ripard and my combat alt are both in the midst of training Cruise Missiles V right now. Which brings me to...
Raven. Of the two, I like the Typhoon more. Partially, it's the explosion velocity bonus (this post from alliance-mate Namamai deftly explains why this bonus is important). The big thing the Raven picks up that's going to make this ship interesting is the great increases to speed and agility. I'm currently flying a lot of PODLA Drakes. I can very easily see myself flying some PODLA Ravens very soon. It looks like the Raven's going to be tougher, just as fast, and nearly as agile... while doing way more DPS. And not that the Raven needed any help on the PvE front, but the changes are going to make running L4 missions in this boat even easier -- and dare I say it -- slightly more fun!
Scorpion. There's only one small change, but it's huge: plus one low slot. If this change survives (and it should), it's going to change the Scorp a lot more than you would expect on the surface. Armor-tanked Scorps have indeed been a thing, but with only a four-slot tank, have been fragile easy primaries and have not benefitted from particularly exceptional jam strength to compensate. They've been used, but armor-tanked Falcons have been used more and have been more survivable. With a fifth low slot, this opens up a lot of new options for either tanking or that all-important jamming strength mod.
Megathron. This has been the subject of a lot of debate (it's no coincidence that the Gallente battleship thread is the second largest of the four). Let me just say it: I'm nearly totally on Rise's side on this one. I love these changes. They make the Mega fast and aggressive, which is just what an attack ship should be. I love the versatility this adds to the ship and you're going to see a dozen different fits come out for this monster, each better than the last. In particular, shield gank Megas are definitely gonna be a thing and I can't wait. The only thing I'm not a fan of? The ever-shrinking drone bay. That's why it falls behind the three ships above.
EDIT (17/May/2013): Fifth mid slot is off the Mega on Sisi. Boo. I still think we'll see shield Megas but they won't be nearly as much fun. Mega gets bumped down to "In the middle."
Armageddon. This was a close call. I almost put it into the "in the middle" group below but I'm going to err on the side of optimism. I wasn't initially a fan of the changes... in fact, when I first started playing with fittings for this boat, my first thought was to fit it like an armor Tempest! Complete with auto-cannons! But the more I play around with the options, the more this one is growing on me. Biggest plus continues to be versatility and that isn't changing. I don't much care for the increased cost, though...
Losers
Hyperion. Don't get me wrong: Rise is trying. But it's pretty clear that he doesn't have a clue what to do with this ship. If I had to guess (and it is a guess... I have no inside information on this), I'd say it'll be watched pretty closely throughout Odyssey, then receive a second rebalance later this year. I can't even keep track of what its slot layout is from week to week right now... let me go look. OK. I just checked Singularity and as of today, it's 7-5-7. Poor Rise. This ship is the other reason the Gallente thread is so monstrous.
Rokh. I'm sorry and I know this ship has a lot of fans in sniping fleets, but it's always felt like someone's abandoned little brother... unless you happen to be a sov alliance of thousands of pilots. In this case Rokhs take what should be a Minmatar role -- alpha strikes and blapping things off the field in one volley -- and do it better than the Minmatar can thanks to faster-cycling rail guns. I'm not a fan but hey, that's probably my prejudice showing. That said, the Rokh should have been given a slightly bigger drone bay and slightly better agility to make up for the resist bonus loss.
Small alliances in general. With tiericide in effect, the battleships that used to be relatively cheap will be no more. They are going to be much closer in price and as a result you're seeing a lot of speculation on the battleship markets just now. Sure, things will stabilize, but the small gangs that hardly ever use battleships certainly won't be inclined to start when they're more expensive! I'll have more to say about this in a later post.
Abaddon. Like the Rokh, this ship should have been given something to make up for the lost resistance bonus. Specifically, it should have been given either slightly higher base cap, or faster cap recharge. But that of course would have made it even more like the Apoc. The Amarr thread is the largest, and that comes down to how popular and iconic the Amarr BSs are.
The former tier 3 BSs in general. It's no coincidence that I consider three out of four of the former tier 3 BSs "losers" in this post. To a certain extent, Rise is doing to BSs the same thing that was done to BCs: make the good ones worse while raising up the poor ones. As I put it in the BC rebalance post: the fives and sixes out of ten become sevens. The nines, though... also become sevens. It's not as bad for the BSs, thankfully, but it's definitely on my mind.
In the middle
Maelstrom. For me, the Maelstrom is sort of the prototypical EVE battleship. I agree that its roles and purposes have suited it well and as a "control" battleship receiving no changes while the others are modified around it, you could definitely do much, much worse.
Tempest. Previously my favorite tech1 battleship, it will now be relegated to sixth or seventh. That makes me sad, but the Tempest has always been slightly over-powered (like its little brother, the Hurricane) and so the other battleships catching up was to be expected. I'm pleased it didn't lose a utility slot.
Dominix. This one really needs something to happen with the drone combat meta to really come into its own. I enjoy flying "herd Domis" from time to time, but it's not really a fleet meta that's gone anywhere in the last few years. Ironically, this ship's place has been taken over by sentry drone carriers for the big alliances, and the smaller alliances for the most part would rather have that than the flying running shoe.
Apocalypse. I alllllmost put this one in the "losers" category. I consider reducing both base cap and removing its cap bonuses near-fatal flaws. "There is some concern that the new Apoc will have a significant cap weakness, which will make it too similar to the Abaddon," says Rise. Yup. The initial very large nerf to cap has been adjusted to just a large nerf to cap, but I don't think it's going to be enough. I don't think there's enough difference between the "Apoc" and the "Baddon" now and I think it likely people will just go for the latter. On the positive end, I'm a huge fan of the new design. So again I'm going to err on the side of optimism though in my heart, I really wanted to class this one as a loser.
After a lot of thought on the matter, that's my current thinking on the tech1 battleships. In my opinion, Caldari battleships win overall. And that continues with the navy battleships, but more on that presently. In addition to training Cruise Missiles V, I'm also training up Caldari Battleships! For these, what did I get right? Where am I totally wrong?
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
What's in your hangar, 2013
Last year at this time, I wrote up a list of the ships that were in Ripard's hangar at that particular moment in time, and said that I thought it would be a fun experiment to make it an annual post to compare and contrast how my hangar develops from year to year. In particular, I'm interested in noting which ships I fly a lot, which ones I never fly, which ones change, and which ones don't.
Last year, I was concerned that Goons would make T2 ships more expensive and yeah... that sorta happened. But I find that I'm not losing enough ships in Rote Kapelle to care all that much. So to date, it hasn't been an issue. When I lose something, I replace it a week or so later and if that fleet comp comes up during that week, I fly some other role. Ships that I fly a lot (or lose a lot), I keep two of in TXW, just in case I lose one.
Just a reminder: I like to name Ripard's ships after one-liners from movies, particularly action movies. So in each case, I've given the source for the one-liner. ;-)
So here we go (again), a list of all the ships in Ripard's main hangar in Rote Kapelle's home system:
Enyo (x2), "You're Fired". Name source: True Lies. I'm down to two of these, because Rote discovered quite by accident how awesome shield Enyos are in late night fleets, so I've actually been flying them again.
Harpy (x1), "I Don't Score Much". Name source: True Lies. I mentioned last year that all my AFs came from the same pile generated about three years ago, all named after lines from True Lies. This is one that I rescued from E02 in Great Wildlands, but haven't flown this year. It's a Blarpy. I probably need to retire it.
Hawk (x1), "Dance for Me". Name source: True Lies. Also rescued from E02, also not flown. I refit it to MASB. I probably need to retire this one, too.
Ishkur (x1), "Snow Cone Maker". Name source: True Lies. I refit this one to shield also, and use it as a long-point AF in Rote's late night Enyo shield roams (the shield Enyos are typically scram fit). Haven't lost it yet that I can remember.
Wolf (x1), "I Married Rambo". Name source: True Lies. Used this in a couple of solo fights and one frig fleet. It's still awesome but I don't get to fly it very often.
Naga (x1), "Just Shoot the Thing". Name source: Men in Black. This is a new add. As part of the donation drive last year, someone sent me one each of all four attack BCs. The Naga gets flown the least, mostly because of its lack of agility compared to the other three.
Talos (x2), "Bring Me His Head". Name source: Game of Thrones. Probably my new favorite PvP ship, both of them are shield gank fit. I just love them. I use them for belt ratting in addition to PvP, where they make great mid-range skirmishers. I got about 120 kills in this boat in the last year.
Tornado (x2), "Ska-doosh". Name source: Kung Fu Panda. Refit one of these to 800s. Other than that, no change.
Armageddon (x1), "Fire ship". Name source: Horatio Hornblower. That all neut Geddon I praised to the skies today? Have one.
Machariel (x1), "Let's Party". Name source: Commando. We continue to use a small number of these as anchors for larger nano gangs. It's a role I really enjoy. I don't get to fly my Mach enough.
Maelstrom (x1), "Flame Units Only". Name source: Aliens. This is an old LAWN NC fleet Maelstrom that I had a vague idea to refit to a double XLASB fit. Haven't done it. It's gathering dust in a big way. I should probably sell it.
Raven (x1), unnamed. Just got one of these from another Rote member. Ravens are about to be awesome. More on that when I finish my upcoming battleship post.
Scorpion (x1), "Nobody Likes You". Name source: The Last Boy Scout. This is an old Sturmgrenadier ship, brought in from empire because armor Scorpions are also soon to be awesome.
Tempest (x1), "For Close Encounters". Name source: Aliens. No change from last year. Every once in a while I get to undock in it, but never for anything serious. Sad face.
Typhoon Fleet Issue (x1), "Game Over, Man". Name source: Aliens. Remember that button-orbiting thing? This is one of the few things I got for myself with that. I would use it sometimes in goofy Rote armor gangs, where it was a lot of fun and got me strange looks. So you can imagine my happiness given how awesome this ship is about to become.
Vindicator (x1), "No Mercy". Name source: lots, but I was thinking of 300. This was a thank you gift from Rote Kapelle for my support of our ATX team. <3 Rote. That said, I haven't gotten to fly it in anything serious.
Brutix (x1), "Hasta La Vista Baby". Name source: Terminator. Ripard spent a lot of this year bringing his drone skills from "shit" to "acceptable" to "pretty damn good." I bought myself a couple of ships to celebrate that; a shield gank Brutix was one. A dual-rep Myrmidon was another, but that one hasn't made it out to TXW yet.
Cyclone (x1), "Mail Order Shit". Name source: Eraser. Bought and built when it became clear how awesome Cyclones were going to be thanks to the BC rebalance. And they're every bit as wonderful as I mentioned in this post. I mostly use it for home defense.
Drake (x2), "C'mon Bennett". Name source: Commando. I flew this a lot in PODLA configuration this past year. I've lost three of them and keep replacing them to keep my TXW stock at two.
Ferox (x1), "Party Pooper". Name source: Kindergarten Cop. I brought two of these -- originally Gentlemen's Club rail sniper Feroxes -- in from empire to lose in hysterical ways. One down, one to go. I teased CCP Fozzie at Fanfest about rail Feroxes but he remains adamant.
Gnosis (x2), "Sarah Connor". Name source: Terminator. Received three of these. One dead, two to go. One is fit armor, the other shield.
Hurricane (x4), "Alabama Tick", "Pushing Pencils", "Sexual Tyrannosaurus", "She's Your Baggage". Name source: Predator. One 425 Welp Cane, one armor Cane, one 650 skirmish Cane, and one 720 Cane. No change from last year, except I think I refit the 720 Cane as an XLASB Cane. I certainly haven't been flying these much since the BC rebalance.
Prophecy (x1), "English Accent". Name source: Robin Hood, Men in Tights. Rebuilt for "RR chicken" fleets, which are hysterical.
Huginn (x1), "Lowly Lowly Cook". Name source: Under Siege. Rote mostly prefers Rapiers. I fly the Huginn in ultra-small fleets where DPS is a factor.
Lachesis (x1), "Still Alive, Baby?" Name source: Mr and Mrs Smith. One of the very few new T2 ships I bought this year. It's fairly pimp and occasionally I get to fly it in skirmish gangs if I'm not asked to fly the Rapier instead (which is usually the case).
Rook (x1), "Gonna Get Me An Ear". Name source: Firefly. No change from last year. I'm pretty sure I haven't flown this in the last year, but not for lack of wanting to.
Claymore (x2), "Overkill is Underrated". Name source: The A-Team. I heard the phrase "armor Claymore" this past year and the idea so intrigued me that I bought one and it actually works pretty damn well. The other is still fit shield and I don't think I've flown it more than once or twice this year.
Damnation (x1), "Always Bet on Black". Name source: Passenger 57. This was brand new last year. I've flown it a few times. It's a dull but necessary role. I've gotten into the habit of dual-boxing when I fly this ship.
Sleipnir (x1), "Stupid, but Ballsy". Name source: True Lies. When I am providing the DPS for Rote's nano shield fleets, this is what I'm flying. I've gotten a fair bit of mileage out of it in the last year.
Vulture (x1), "Winter is Coming". Name source: Game of Thrones. I bought this with incursion money two summers ago and used it as off-grid links for incursion fleets. It made the trip from empire to TXW when a couple of FCs suddenly called for a Vulture. So I fitted it and got it ready... and there hasn't been a call for a Vulture since.
Buzzard (x1), "I Seee Youuuu". Name source: Predator. Pretty standard scanning Buzzard.
Cheetah (x1), "Like the Chameleon". Name source: Predator. Someone gave me this, but I usually use the Buzzard.
Arbitrator (x1), "Fear My Spears". Name source: 300. I bought lots of T1 cruisers this year. This one is used in armor fleets and was a FOTW a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoy this one.
Ashimmu (x1), "Web of Lies". Name source: Mr and Mrs Smith. I really like the play on words inherent in this ship name. This was brand new to my hangar last year and quickly vaulted to one of my favorite ships to fly in armor HAC gangs. It'll be a FOTW once I feel like giving away the secrets of this ship. ;-)
Bellicose (x2), "Beautiful Death". Name source: 300. Another donation, someone gave me five each of my four favorite T1 cruisers. The Bellicoses are the only ones that haven't died. I get a blast out of flying them. For all four of my favorite T1 cruiser fits, see the FOTWs from December.
Caracal (x1), "Fight in the Shade". Name source: 300. Had to try it out. I like the Bellicose better.
Celestis (x2), "Dodge This". Name source: The Matrix. One's still fit as an (improved) Dramiel killer. The other is fit as a dedicated damp ship for shield nano gangs. I love love this ship. It's thin as paper but evil and very effective. It'll be a FOTW before too much longer.
Cynabal (x1), "Goan Bleed You". Name source: Predator. No change from last year.
Exequror (x1), "Devilfish". Name source: The Winds of War. Originally built to try out single-logi cruiser gang tactics, then I remembered how much I enjoy flying logi, so I pull it out sometimes. It was a FOTW in January.
Moa (x1), "Very Human Chill". Name source: 300. My favorite Caldari T1 cruiser, though shield brawling fits are pretty rare so I almost never get to fly it.
Omen (x2), "I Can't Feel My Legs". Name source: X-Men First Class. My favorite Amarr T1 cruiser by a tiny margin over the Arbitrator. I love its mix of tank, gank, how cheap it is, and how much fun it is to fly. It's the T1 cruiser I've lost the most of.
Osprey (x1), "Ugly Motherfucker". Name source: Predator. No change from last year.
Phantasm (x1), "The Pointy End". Name source: Game of Thrones. Before "good cruisers" became almost literally a dime a dozen, the Phantasm was a good ship for a lot of different theme fleets. It does good DPS and you can fit a strong buffer tank on it, about 500 DPS and 50k EHP, respectively. Now it's out-classed by ships one-tenth its cost.
Rupture (x1), "A Fine Thrust". Name source: 300. Artillery fit, built for a Rote FC that loves arty Rupture fleets. I've flown it a few times but it's not really me, which is weird because I really like skirmish tactics. I guess for cruisers I prefer more brawly tactics.
Scythe (x1), "Redeemer". Name source: The Winds of War. Originally built to try out single-logi cruiser gang tactics, then I remembered how much I enjoy flying logi, so I pull it out sometimes. It was the FOTW in January.
Thorax (x2), "This is Sparta!". Name source: 300 (duh). My favorite Gallente T1 cruiser, these are shield gank fit where they are pretty freakin' terrifying. That said, I don't get to fly it as often as I'd like.
Vexor (x1), "Discarded". Name source: 300. This was another one I bought when Ripard's drone skills became greater than "shit". It's armor fit. I don't like it nearly as much as other T1 armor cruisers, notably the Omen.
Algos (x1), "Fly or Die". Name source: Commando. Bought and fit to try out the new destroyers. Eh. They're OK. I should probably give this away.
Corax (x1), "I'll Kill You Last". Name source: Commando. Bought and fit to try out the new destroyers. Eh. They're OK. I should probably give this away.
Hyena (x1), "Start Paddling". Name source: Commando. Keres (x1), "I'm a Special Boy". Name source: American Pie. Kitsune (x1), "Hush! Hush!". Name source: Broken Arrow. Sentinel (x1), "Did You Miss Me?" Name Source: The Mask. I have a dream. It's not a big dream. It's a small dream. My dream is that someday EAFs will be good. The Hyena isn't too bad and I fly it every so often. The others are for tournaments.
Falcon (x1), "Death From Above". Name source: Avatar. No change from last year.
Rapier (x1), "People Need Killin'". Name source: Mr and Mrs Smith. I've been flying this one a lot this past year in nano shield gangs. Matter of fact, I got a very nice compliment from a new member of Rote Kapelle who joined us after his previous alliance left Syndicate (and after we had killed him lots of times in his previous alliance). The compliment: "I hated seeing you in a Rapier, Ripard, because that meant I was gonna die." Rarely has anyone said anything so sweet to me. ;-)
Rifter (x2), "Fly in the Ointment". Tormentor (x2), "Monkey in the Wrench". Name source: Die Hard. From time to time, someone comes to TXW and asks for an honor 1v1 with either T1 frigs or T1 cruisers. Rote Kapelle honors 1v1s. So I stocked a few T1 frigates in case I'm the guy that's awake when this happens. That said, you're not going to see me in these outside of a fleet. My cheapest clone is about 20 times more expensive than the most expensive T1 frigate...
Daredevil (x1), "Don't Like Rednecks". Name source: Commando. No change from last year.
Federation Navy Comet (x1), "We Salute You". Name source: Gladiator. No change from last year. Sigh. I miss cop-car fleets.
Venture (x1), "Salvage Corvette". Name source: Homeworld (the game). The idea of having a tackle Venture tickled me, so I bought and built one. Haven't used it in combat, though.
Cerberus (x1), "I'm Really Hungry". Name source: Commando. No change from last year.
Deimos (x1), "Pikal Envy". Name source: Babylon 5. I bought this one because Rote Kapelle frequently did Deimos fleets, but we don't do that fleet comp very much any more. I've been trying to get this one killed in various armor HAC fleets.
Vagabond (x1), "The Quarterback is Toast". Name source: Die Hard. I pray for the day Vagas are good again.
Zealot (x2), "I'm Still Standin'". Name source: Men in Black. After we stopped doing Deimos fleets, we went back to doing traditional armor HAC fleets. So I've got one of these fit for that. But we also occasionally use Zealots in the Vaga's previous role of anti-tackle screen for nano skirmish gangs. So I have one fit like that, too.
Broadsword (x1), "The Revenge Business". Name source: The Princess Bride. I bought this last year because we started occasionally needing shield interdictors. Then we stopped needing them and I haven't flown this yet.
Phobos (x2), "Smell Them Coming". Name source: Commando. Ditto.
Ares (x2), "Sweep the Leg". Name source: The Karate Kid. Bought these so I could scout. Haven't scouted. Will probably end up selling these to or giving them to a regular Rote scout.
Stiletto (x1), "For Defense Only". Name source: The Karate Kid. No change from last year.
Taranis (x1), "Squish Like Grape". Name source: The Karate Kid. No change from last year.
Eris (x1), "My Mom Will Shoot". Name source: bad Sly Stallone movie. No change from last year. It's armor fit.
Flycatcher (x1), "Suicide Squeeze". Name source: Major League. I was flying dictors really frequently right up until ATX and I was given two expensive clones. Now I'm waiting for one of the expensive clones to die before I go back to flying dictors. Hasn't happened yet.
Sabre (x2), "Stick Around". Name source: Commando. Ditto. I just haven't been flying bubble ships the last year.
Velator (x2), "Seriously?" Name source: lots, but I was thinking Finding Nemo. I built this just for grins to kill anyone who lights a cyno in TXW. ;-)
Hound (x2), "Motherfuckin' Tin Can". Name source: Die Hard. No change from last year, except that I talked some Rote guys into trying bombing this year. They were... OK at it. They need more practice...
Manticore (x2), "Shoot the Glass", "Yipee Ki-Yay". Name source; Die Hard. No change from last year.
Nemesis (x1), "Gimme da Cash". Name source: The Fifth Element. Bought to play around with bomber ratting.
Purifier (x1), "Landing Lights". Name source: Die Hard 2. Bought to complete the set. ;-)
Legion (x2), "Freeze Means Stop", "I Like This Gun". Name source: Men in Black. Two out of three actual expensive things I bought this year. I wanted to play around with the super-Zealot fitting (the latter). But then I tried a HAM fit, which I liked much, much better. The exact fit is kind of a trade secret for the moment because I think it's really quite good. But it'll be FOTW eventually.
Loki (x2), "Come Get Some", "This is my Boomstick". Name source: Army of Darkness. One is a shield link ship. The other is a AHAC web Loki. The latter gets used a lot more than the former.
Proteus (x1), "Shadoo". Name source: the EVE player of note, but I was thinking "Armor HACs! Armor HACs! Armor HACs!" ;-) I'll probably rename it to fit my meta at some point. Anyway, it's for armor HAC fleets.
Tengu (x2), "I Got Lucky", "Sirius M". Name source: Mr and Mrs Smith. The latter is the same PvE Tengu that I used to occasionally do wormhole sites with. I can't recall flying it at all in the last year. The former is a Tengu that I bought with the intention of refitting it to a 100MN HML Tengu. Then HMLs got nerfed into the ground and I haven't decided if I'm going to actually refit it or not. Haven't flown this one, either.
So... ummm... 106 ships, an increase of 43 from last year. Most of the increases are T1 frigates and dessies (9), T1 cruisers (14), T1 BCs (6: 2@Talos, Naga, Brutix, Cyclone, Ferox), T2 frigates (7: two bombers, two AFs, two EAFs, Cheetah), and T1 battleships (4: Geddon, Maelstrom, Raven, Scorp). That's 40. I added six expensive ships: a Tengu, a Proteus, two Legions, a Claymore, and a Lachesis. I retired several ships: a Muninn, a Raptor, a Dramiel, and a Thrasher (heh).
But this exercise has clearly shown that I need to be more aggressive about retiring ships I don't use. I don't know what the optimal number of ships is, but 100+ is clearly too many. ;-) Ripard continues to be unable to fly any capital ship, and though he can fly the Vargur and Kronos perfectly, I don't have either (I trained the skill for this year's alliance tournament). Ripard cannot fly any black ops. I have a second combat alt that flies mostly battleships, but that's pretty much all he has: a small collection of battleships of various types.
So that's this year's list! Comments?
Last year, I was concerned that Goons would make T2 ships more expensive and yeah... that sorta happened. But I find that I'm not losing enough ships in Rote Kapelle to care all that much. So to date, it hasn't been an issue. When I lose something, I replace it a week or so later and if that fleet comp comes up during that week, I fly some other role. Ships that I fly a lot (or lose a lot), I keep two of in TXW, just in case I lose one.
Just a reminder: I like to name Ripard's ships after one-liners from movies, particularly action movies. So in each case, I've given the source for the one-liner. ;-)
So here we go (again), a list of all the ships in Ripard's main hangar in Rote Kapelle's home system:
Enyo (x2), "You're Fired". Name source: True Lies. I'm down to two of these, because Rote discovered quite by accident how awesome shield Enyos are in late night fleets, so I've actually been flying them again.
Harpy (x1), "I Don't Score Much". Name source: True Lies. I mentioned last year that all my AFs came from the same pile generated about three years ago, all named after lines from True Lies. This is one that I rescued from E02 in Great Wildlands, but haven't flown this year. It's a Blarpy. I probably need to retire it.
Hawk (x1), "Dance for Me". Name source: True Lies. Also rescued from E02, also not flown. I refit it to MASB. I probably need to retire this one, too.
Ishkur (x1), "Snow Cone Maker". Name source: True Lies. I refit this one to shield also, and use it as a long-point AF in Rote's late night Enyo shield roams (the shield Enyos are typically scram fit). Haven't lost it yet that I can remember.
Wolf (x1), "I Married Rambo". Name source: True Lies. Used this in a couple of solo fights and one frig fleet. It's still awesome but I don't get to fly it very often.
Naga (x1), "Just Shoot the Thing". Name source: Men in Black. This is a new add. As part of the donation drive last year, someone sent me one each of all four attack BCs. The Naga gets flown the least, mostly because of its lack of agility compared to the other three.
Talos (x2), "Bring Me His Head". Name source: Game of Thrones. Probably my new favorite PvP ship, both of them are shield gank fit. I just love them. I use them for belt ratting in addition to PvP, where they make great mid-range skirmishers. I got about 120 kills in this boat in the last year.
Tornado (x2), "Ska-doosh". Name source: Kung Fu Panda. Refit one of these to 800s. Other than that, no change.
Armageddon (x1), "Fire ship". Name source: Horatio Hornblower. That all neut Geddon I praised to the skies today? Have one.
Machariel (x1), "Let's Party". Name source: Commando. We continue to use a small number of these as anchors for larger nano gangs. It's a role I really enjoy. I don't get to fly my Mach enough.
Maelstrom (x1), "Flame Units Only". Name source: Aliens. This is an old LAWN NC fleet Maelstrom that I had a vague idea to refit to a double XLASB fit. Haven't done it. It's gathering dust in a big way. I should probably sell it.
Raven (x1), unnamed. Just got one of these from another Rote member. Ravens are about to be awesome. More on that when I finish my upcoming battleship post.
Scorpion (x1), "Nobody Likes You". Name source: The Last Boy Scout. This is an old Sturmgrenadier ship, brought in from empire because armor Scorpions are also soon to be awesome.
Tempest (x1), "For Close Encounters". Name source: Aliens. No change from last year. Every once in a while I get to undock in it, but never for anything serious. Sad face.
Typhoon Fleet Issue (x1), "Game Over, Man". Name source: Aliens. Remember that button-orbiting thing? This is one of the few things I got for myself with that. I would use it sometimes in goofy Rote armor gangs, where it was a lot of fun and got me strange looks. So you can imagine my happiness given how awesome this ship is about to become.
Vindicator (x1), "No Mercy". Name source: lots, but I was thinking of 300. This was a thank you gift from Rote Kapelle for my support of our ATX team. <3 Rote. That said, I haven't gotten to fly it in anything serious.
Brutix (x1), "Hasta La Vista Baby". Name source: Terminator. Ripard spent a lot of this year bringing his drone skills from "shit" to "acceptable" to "pretty damn good." I bought myself a couple of ships to celebrate that; a shield gank Brutix was one. A dual-rep Myrmidon was another, but that one hasn't made it out to TXW yet.
Cyclone (x1), "Mail Order Shit". Name source: Eraser. Bought and built when it became clear how awesome Cyclones were going to be thanks to the BC rebalance. And they're every bit as wonderful as I mentioned in this post. I mostly use it for home defense.
Drake (x2), "C'mon Bennett". Name source: Commando. I flew this a lot in PODLA configuration this past year. I've lost three of them and keep replacing them to keep my TXW stock at two.
Ferox (x1), "Party Pooper". Name source: Kindergarten Cop. I brought two of these -- originally Gentlemen's Club rail sniper Feroxes -- in from empire to lose in hysterical ways. One down, one to go. I teased CCP Fozzie at Fanfest about rail Feroxes but he remains adamant.
Gnosis (x2), "Sarah Connor". Name source: Terminator. Received three of these. One dead, two to go. One is fit armor, the other shield.
Hurricane (x4), "Alabama Tick", "Pushing Pencils", "Sexual Tyrannosaurus", "She's Your Baggage". Name source: Predator. One 425 Welp Cane, one armor Cane, one 650 skirmish Cane, and one 720 Cane. No change from last year, except I think I refit the 720 Cane as an XLASB Cane. I certainly haven't been flying these much since the BC rebalance.
Prophecy (x1), "English Accent". Name source: Robin Hood, Men in Tights. Rebuilt for "RR chicken" fleets, which are hysterical.
Huginn (x1), "Lowly Lowly Cook". Name source: Under Siege. Rote mostly prefers Rapiers. I fly the Huginn in ultra-small fleets where DPS is a factor.
Lachesis (x1), "Still Alive, Baby?" Name source: Mr and Mrs Smith. One of the very few new T2 ships I bought this year. It's fairly pimp and occasionally I get to fly it in skirmish gangs if I'm not asked to fly the Rapier instead (which is usually the case).
Rook (x1), "Gonna Get Me An Ear". Name source: Firefly. No change from last year. I'm pretty sure I haven't flown this in the last year, but not for lack of wanting to.
Claymore (x2), "Overkill is Underrated". Name source: The A-Team. I heard the phrase "armor Claymore" this past year and the idea so intrigued me that I bought one and it actually works pretty damn well. The other is still fit shield and I don't think I've flown it more than once or twice this year.
Damnation (x1), "Always Bet on Black". Name source: Passenger 57. This was brand new last year. I've flown it a few times. It's a dull but necessary role. I've gotten into the habit of dual-boxing when I fly this ship.
Sleipnir (x1), "Stupid, but Ballsy". Name source: True Lies. When I am providing the DPS for Rote's nano shield fleets, this is what I'm flying. I've gotten a fair bit of mileage out of it in the last year.
Vulture (x1), "Winter is Coming". Name source: Game of Thrones. I bought this with incursion money two summers ago and used it as off-grid links for incursion fleets. It made the trip from empire to TXW when a couple of FCs suddenly called for a Vulture. So I fitted it and got it ready... and there hasn't been a call for a Vulture since.
Buzzard (x1), "I Seee Youuuu". Name source: Predator. Pretty standard scanning Buzzard.
Cheetah (x1), "Like the Chameleon". Name source: Predator. Someone gave me this, but I usually use the Buzzard.
Arbitrator (x1), "Fear My Spears". Name source: 300. I bought lots of T1 cruisers this year. This one is used in armor fleets and was a FOTW a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoy this one.
Ashimmu (x1), "Web of Lies". Name source: Mr and Mrs Smith. I really like the play on words inherent in this ship name. This was brand new to my hangar last year and quickly vaulted to one of my favorite ships to fly in armor HAC gangs. It'll be a FOTW once I feel like giving away the secrets of this ship. ;-)
Bellicose (x2), "Beautiful Death". Name source: 300. Another donation, someone gave me five each of my four favorite T1 cruisers. The Bellicoses are the only ones that haven't died. I get a blast out of flying them. For all four of my favorite T1 cruiser fits, see the FOTWs from December.
Caracal (x1), "Fight in the Shade". Name source: 300. Had to try it out. I like the Bellicose better.
Celestis (x2), "Dodge This". Name source: The Matrix. One's still fit as an (improved) Dramiel killer. The other is fit as a dedicated damp ship for shield nano gangs. I love love this ship. It's thin as paper but evil and very effective. It'll be a FOTW before too much longer.
Cynabal (x1), "Goan Bleed You". Name source: Predator. No change from last year.
Exequror (x1), "Devilfish". Name source: The Winds of War. Originally built to try out single-logi cruiser gang tactics, then I remembered how much I enjoy flying logi, so I pull it out sometimes. It was a FOTW in January.
Moa (x1), "Very Human Chill". Name source: 300. My favorite Caldari T1 cruiser, though shield brawling fits are pretty rare so I almost never get to fly it.
Omen (x2), "I Can't Feel My Legs". Name source: X-Men First Class. My favorite Amarr T1 cruiser by a tiny margin over the Arbitrator. I love its mix of tank, gank, how cheap it is, and how much fun it is to fly. It's the T1 cruiser I've lost the most of.
Osprey (x1), "Ugly Motherfucker". Name source: Predator. No change from last year.
Phantasm (x1), "The Pointy End". Name source: Game of Thrones. Before "good cruisers" became almost literally a dime a dozen, the Phantasm was a good ship for a lot of different theme fleets. It does good DPS and you can fit a strong buffer tank on it, about 500 DPS and 50k EHP, respectively. Now it's out-classed by ships one-tenth its cost.
Rupture (x1), "A Fine Thrust". Name source: 300. Artillery fit, built for a Rote FC that loves arty Rupture fleets. I've flown it a few times but it's not really me, which is weird because I really like skirmish tactics. I guess for cruisers I prefer more brawly tactics.
Scythe (x1), "Redeemer". Name source: The Winds of War. Originally built to try out single-logi cruiser gang tactics, then I remembered how much I enjoy flying logi, so I pull it out sometimes. It was the FOTW in January.
Thorax (x2), "This is Sparta!". Name source: 300 (duh). My favorite Gallente T1 cruiser, these are shield gank fit where they are pretty freakin' terrifying. That said, I don't get to fly it as often as I'd like.
Vexor (x1), "Discarded". Name source: 300. This was another one I bought when Ripard's drone skills became greater than "shit". It's armor fit. I don't like it nearly as much as other T1 armor cruisers, notably the Omen.
Algos (x1), "Fly or Die". Name source: Commando. Bought and fit to try out the new destroyers. Eh. They're OK. I should probably give this away.
Corax (x1), "I'll Kill You Last". Name source: Commando. Bought and fit to try out the new destroyers. Eh. They're OK. I should probably give this away.
Hyena (x1), "Start Paddling". Name source: Commando. Keres (x1), "I'm a Special Boy". Name source: American Pie. Kitsune (x1), "Hush! Hush!". Name source: Broken Arrow. Sentinel (x1), "Did You Miss Me?" Name Source: The Mask. I have a dream. It's not a big dream. It's a small dream. My dream is that someday EAFs will be good. The Hyena isn't too bad and I fly it every so often. The others are for tournaments.
Falcon (x1), "Death From Above". Name source: Avatar. No change from last year.
Rapier (x1), "People Need Killin'". Name source: Mr and Mrs Smith. I've been flying this one a lot this past year in nano shield gangs. Matter of fact, I got a very nice compliment from a new member of Rote Kapelle who joined us after his previous alliance left Syndicate (and after we had killed him lots of times in his previous alliance). The compliment: "I hated seeing you in a Rapier, Ripard, because that meant I was gonna die." Rarely has anyone said anything so sweet to me. ;-)
Rifter (x2), "Fly in the Ointment". Tormentor (x2), "Monkey in the Wrench". Name source: Die Hard. From time to time, someone comes to TXW and asks for an honor 1v1 with either T1 frigs or T1 cruisers. Rote Kapelle honors 1v1s. So I stocked a few T1 frigates in case I'm the guy that's awake when this happens. That said, you're not going to see me in these outside of a fleet. My cheapest clone is about 20 times more expensive than the most expensive T1 frigate...
Daredevil (x1), "Don't Like Rednecks". Name source: Commando. No change from last year.
Federation Navy Comet (x1), "We Salute You". Name source: Gladiator. No change from last year. Sigh. I miss cop-car fleets.
Venture (x1), "Salvage Corvette". Name source: Homeworld (the game). The idea of having a tackle Venture tickled me, so I bought and built one. Haven't used it in combat, though.
Cerberus (x1), "I'm Really Hungry". Name source: Commando. No change from last year.
Deimos (x1), "Pikal Envy". Name source: Babylon 5. I bought this one because Rote Kapelle frequently did Deimos fleets, but we don't do that fleet comp very much any more. I've been trying to get this one killed in various armor HAC fleets.
Vagabond (x1), "The Quarterback is Toast". Name source: Die Hard. I pray for the day Vagas are good again.
Zealot (x2), "I'm Still Standin'". Name source: Men in Black. After we stopped doing Deimos fleets, we went back to doing traditional armor HAC fleets. So I've got one of these fit for that. But we also occasionally use Zealots in the Vaga's previous role of anti-tackle screen for nano skirmish gangs. So I have one fit like that, too.
Broadsword (x1), "The Revenge Business". Name source: The Princess Bride. I bought this last year because we started occasionally needing shield interdictors. Then we stopped needing them and I haven't flown this yet.
Phobos (x2), "Smell Them Coming". Name source: Commando. Ditto.
Ares (x2), "Sweep the Leg". Name source: The Karate Kid. Bought these so I could scout. Haven't scouted. Will probably end up selling these to or giving them to a regular Rote scout.
Stiletto (x1), "For Defense Only". Name source: The Karate Kid. No change from last year.
Taranis (x1), "Squish Like Grape". Name source: The Karate Kid. No change from last year.
Eris (x1), "My Mom Will Shoot". Name source: bad Sly Stallone movie. No change from last year. It's armor fit.
Flycatcher (x1), "Suicide Squeeze". Name source: Major League. I was flying dictors really frequently right up until ATX and I was given two expensive clones. Now I'm waiting for one of the expensive clones to die before I go back to flying dictors. Hasn't happened yet.
Sabre (x2), "Stick Around". Name source: Commando. Ditto. I just haven't been flying bubble ships the last year.
Velator (x2), "Seriously?" Name source: lots, but I was thinking Finding Nemo. I built this just for grins to kill anyone who lights a cyno in TXW. ;-)
Hound (x2), "Motherfuckin' Tin Can". Name source: Die Hard. No change from last year, except that I talked some Rote guys into trying bombing this year. They were... OK at it. They need more practice...
Manticore (x2), "Shoot the Glass", "Yipee Ki-Yay". Name source; Die Hard. No change from last year.
Nemesis (x1), "Gimme da Cash". Name source: The Fifth Element. Bought to play around with bomber ratting.
Purifier (x1), "Landing Lights". Name source: Die Hard 2. Bought to complete the set. ;-)
Legion (x2), "Freeze Means Stop", "I Like This Gun". Name source: Men in Black. Two out of three actual expensive things I bought this year. I wanted to play around with the super-Zealot fitting (the latter). But then I tried a HAM fit, which I liked much, much better. The exact fit is kind of a trade secret for the moment because I think it's really quite good. But it'll be FOTW eventually.
Loki (x2), "Come Get Some", "This is my Boomstick". Name source: Army of Darkness. One is a shield link ship. The other is a AHAC web Loki. The latter gets used a lot more than the former.
Proteus (x1), "Shadoo". Name source: the EVE player of note, but I was thinking "Armor HACs! Armor HACs! Armor HACs!" ;-) I'll probably rename it to fit my meta at some point. Anyway, it's for armor HAC fleets.
Tengu (x2), "I Got Lucky", "Sirius M". Name source: Mr and Mrs Smith. The latter is the same PvE Tengu that I used to occasionally do wormhole sites with. I can't recall flying it at all in the last year. The former is a Tengu that I bought with the intention of refitting it to a 100MN HML Tengu. Then HMLs got nerfed into the ground and I haven't decided if I'm going to actually refit it or not. Haven't flown this one, either.
So... ummm... 106 ships, an increase of 43 from last year. Most of the increases are T1 frigates and dessies (9), T1 cruisers (14), T1 BCs (6: 2@Talos, Naga, Brutix, Cyclone, Ferox), T2 frigates (7: two bombers, two AFs, two EAFs, Cheetah), and T1 battleships (4: Geddon, Maelstrom, Raven, Scorp). That's 40. I added six expensive ships: a Tengu, a Proteus, two Legions, a Claymore, and a Lachesis. I retired several ships: a Muninn, a Raptor, a Dramiel, and a Thrasher (heh).
But this exercise has clearly shown that I need to be more aggressive about retiring ships I don't use. I don't know what the optimal number of ships is, but 100+ is clearly too many. ;-) Ripard continues to be unable to fly any capital ship, and though he can fly the Vargur and Kronos perfectly, I don't have either (I trained the skill for this year's alliance tournament). Ripard cannot fly any black ops. I have a second combat alt that flies mostly battleships, but that's pretty much all he has: a small collection of battleships of various types.
So that's this year's list! Comments?
Fit of the Week: All neut Armageddon
I've done Armageddons twice before, but this time I want to do something topical and specialized. Rote Kapelle has been getting bitched at by Clockwork Pineapple and I've been getting bitched at in my recent Gnosis post about our occasional use of triage carriers. I'll say here what I've said in that argument: Rote gangs are typically so small (nearly always 20 or less, and often less than a dozen) that every single pilot has to provide maximum results. That applies whether the pilot is doing special teams, DPS, or logistics. If we're putting 15 guys in space and we want to armor brawl, we simply cannot afford three Guardians. That's 20% of our DPS gone, which for us is usually the difference between being able to scrape together a chance at winning a fight and saying home.
That usually means one guy, often dual-boxing a Damnation or something, sitting at home in a triage carrier waiting to jump in if we get a major fight.
Where I'm getting bitched at is the impression that triage carriers constitute a somehow unfair or unbeatable advantage even if your gang has small numbers itself. And that idea is so silly it really deserves a direct response. Unlike a large fleet of supers, to which the only counter is more supers, small groups of capital ships are relatively easy kills even with relatively small groups of sub-caps. Sure, it's easy to say "Jester, you idiot, a triage Archon can easily tank 17000 DPS for the five minutes it's going to be in triage. That's like 40 armor HACs. Are you calling that a small gang?" and on paper if you take on a triage carrier's tank directly, that's absolutely true.
But who says you have to take the tank on directly? That's where something like this comes in:
[Armageddon, All neut]
Damage Control II
Reactor Control Unit I
Co-Processor II
1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates II
1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates II
Armor Explosive Hardener II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Prototype 100MN Microwarpdrive I
Heavy Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 800
Heavy Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 800
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I
It's sorely tempting to believe that only Bhaalgorns are capable of neut tactics, but it's incredibly untrue. The large sov-holding alliances like neut Tempests and use them to devastating effect in large groups against capital ships of all kinds. But I like the "Geddon." It's cheap, versatile, and devastating in this fitting.
The core of the ship are a full rack of heavy neuts and a pair of heavy cap boosters. Step one, put those eight neuts on the triage carrier of your choice, cycled individually every three seconds until all eight are running. Step two, have the rest of your gang continue to apply DPS pressure against whatever the carrier is repping. Capital remote reppers are incredibly cap-intensive. If you have spare DPS, put a bit on the carrier too so that it has to both self-rep and keep its gang alive. In less than two minutes, the triage carrier's cap will be bone dry.
And that gives you three minutes to kill the thing while it doesn't have the cap to run any of its self-reppers. It won't tank 17000 DPS. It won't tank any DPS at all. And if the triage pilot is dumb enough to have active hardeners fit, you'll cut through him that much faster. During this three minutes, any other enemy repair ships on the field are irrelevant: under triage, the carrier can't accept any help.
So your big challenge is keeping your neut Geddon alive. This is actually not too difficult owing to a strong tank with 30000 armor HP before any fleet or command ship bonuses. Under a Damnation, this Geddon fit has about 188k EHP and fantastic resists for a T1 ship to everything except kinetic damage and very decent resists against that (71%). So once the enemy triage carrier goes down, make killing blaster boats a priority but chances are you were going to do that anyway.
A neut Geddon is also quite effective at breaking other types of enemy logistics. For instance, a single Geddon will snap a three Guardian cap chain in five or six cycles depending on the skills of the enemy pilots, a little over one minute. And even the Geddon's current neut range is pretty good for this kind of work, at 25km. But we'll get to that in a second.
Finally, even with a full neut fitting, the Geddon provides some damage. I haven't included it in the fit above, but feel free to load a full set of Gardes for about 300 DPS, or you can go with a full set of heavies or a mix of Hammerheads and Warriors, or Hammerheads and EC drones. Still, for this kind of ship, best to go with the highest DPS you can and then just make sure your insurance is up to date. ;-)
And by the way, everything this ship does to carriers, it does even more to dreadnoughts. For instance, if an enemy Moros with a single self-rep doesn't shut down its guns, it will be capped out in about two minutes... with dual cap boosters running full time. If it hasn't fit dual cap boosters, it will be cap dry significantly faster.
When Odyssey drops, the Geddon is getting a working over that is going to decimate its current role as an Amarr gunship. Still, for the neut role, that's not a tragedy at all. The upcoming changes include bonuses to neut range (to about 38km), drone damage (to about 450 DPS with a single set of Gardes), drone bay size (which is being expanded tremendously), and cap (which is also being increased tremendously). With a nice increase in CPU, there's even an excellent chance you'll be able to fit a Drone Damage Amplifier to this fit starting with Odyssey. The only downside is the loss of a single high slot, which is going to make a single neut Geddon a lot more twitchy proposition when facing a triage carrier: it's going to take the ship about 2.5 minutes to cap out its target, which means you'll need comparably more DPS (or a second neut ship) to kill it. Geddons are also going to be more expensive to construct come Odyssey, which is why the ship is being speculated on so heavily right now.
It's tempting to look at a triage carrier as an unfair escalation requiring a capital response of your own. And if there are two or three of them, sure that might be the case. But for a single carrier or a small group of dreads, a neut ship can be a great response. It's not a ship or a fitting that you need very often, but when the occasion calls for it you'll find it a very handy response.(1) So enough with the bitching, OK? ;-)
Happy neuting!
All Fits of the Week are intended as general guidelines only. You may not have the skills needed for this exact fit. If you do not, feel free to adjust the fit to suit to meet your skills, including using meta 3 guns and "best named" defenses and e-war. Ships can also be adjusted to use faction or dead-space modules depending on the budget of the pilot flying it. Each FOTW is intended as a general guide to introduce you to concepts that will help you fit and to fly that particular type of ship more aggressively and well.
(1) P.S. Virtually the same fitting makes an excellent "all smart bomb" fitting, by the way. I leave the changes as an exercise for the student, but you should find them very rapidly.
That usually means one guy, often dual-boxing a Damnation or something, sitting at home in a triage carrier waiting to jump in if we get a major fight.
Where I'm getting bitched at is the impression that triage carriers constitute a somehow unfair or unbeatable advantage even if your gang has small numbers itself. And that idea is so silly it really deserves a direct response. Unlike a large fleet of supers, to which the only counter is more supers, small groups of capital ships are relatively easy kills even with relatively small groups of sub-caps. Sure, it's easy to say "Jester, you idiot, a triage Archon can easily tank 17000 DPS for the five minutes it's going to be in triage. That's like 40 armor HACs. Are you calling that a small gang?" and on paper if you take on a triage carrier's tank directly, that's absolutely true.
But who says you have to take the tank on directly? That's where something like this comes in:
[Armageddon, All neut]
Damage Control II
Reactor Control Unit I
Co-Processor II
1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates II
1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates II
Armor Explosive Hardener II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Prototype 100MN Microwarpdrive I
Heavy Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 800
Heavy Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 800
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I
It's sorely tempting to believe that only Bhaalgorns are capable of neut tactics, but it's incredibly untrue. The large sov-holding alliances like neut Tempests and use them to devastating effect in large groups against capital ships of all kinds. But I like the "Geddon." It's cheap, versatile, and devastating in this fitting.
The core of the ship are a full rack of heavy neuts and a pair of heavy cap boosters. Step one, put those eight neuts on the triage carrier of your choice, cycled individually every three seconds until all eight are running. Step two, have the rest of your gang continue to apply DPS pressure against whatever the carrier is repping. Capital remote reppers are incredibly cap-intensive. If you have spare DPS, put a bit on the carrier too so that it has to both self-rep and keep its gang alive. In less than two minutes, the triage carrier's cap will be bone dry.
And that gives you three minutes to kill the thing while it doesn't have the cap to run any of its self-reppers. It won't tank 17000 DPS. It won't tank any DPS at all. And if the triage pilot is dumb enough to have active hardeners fit, you'll cut through him that much faster. During this three minutes, any other enemy repair ships on the field are irrelevant: under triage, the carrier can't accept any help.
So your big challenge is keeping your neut Geddon alive. This is actually not too difficult owing to a strong tank with 30000 armor HP before any fleet or command ship bonuses. Under a Damnation, this Geddon fit has about 188k EHP and fantastic resists for a T1 ship to everything except kinetic damage and very decent resists against that (71%). So once the enemy triage carrier goes down, make killing blaster boats a priority but chances are you were going to do that anyway.
A neut Geddon is also quite effective at breaking other types of enemy logistics. For instance, a single Geddon will snap a three Guardian cap chain in five or six cycles depending on the skills of the enemy pilots, a little over one minute. And even the Geddon's current neut range is pretty good for this kind of work, at 25km. But we'll get to that in a second.
Finally, even with a full neut fitting, the Geddon provides some damage. I haven't included it in the fit above, but feel free to load a full set of Gardes for about 300 DPS, or you can go with a full set of heavies or a mix of Hammerheads and Warriors, or Hammerheads and EC drones. Still, for this kind of ship, best to go with the highest DPS you can and then just make sure your insurance is up to date. ;-)
And by the way, everything this ship does to carriers, it does even more to dreadnoughts. For instance, if an enemy Moros with a single self-rep doesn't shut down its guns, it will be capped out in about two minutes... with dual cap boosters running full time. If it hasn't fit dual cap boosters, it will be cap dry significantly faster.
When Odyssey drops, the Geddon is getting a working over that is going to decimate its current role as an Amarr gunship. Still, for the neut role, that's not a tragedy at all. The upcoming changes include bonuses to neut range (to about 38km), drone damage (to about 450 DPS with a single set of Gardes), drone bay size (which is being expanded tremendously), and cap (which is also being increased tremendously). With a nice increase in CPU, there's even an excellent chance you'll be able to fit a Drone Damage Amplifier to this fit starting with Odyssey. The only downside is the loss of a single high slot, which is going to make a single neut Geddon a lot more twitchy proposition when facing a triage carrier: it's going to take the ship about 2.5 minutes to cap out its target, which means you'll need comparably more DPS (or a second neut ship) to kill it. Geddons are also going to be more expensive to construct come Odyssey, which is why the ship is being speculated on so heavily right now.
It's tempting to look at a triage carrier as an unfair escalation requiring a capital response of your own. And if there are two or three of them, sure that might be the case. But for a single carrier or a small group of dreads, a neut ship can be a great response. It's not a ship or a fitting that you need very often, but when the occasion calls for it you'll find it a very handy response.(1) So enough with the bitching, OK? ;-)
Happy neuting!
All Fits of the Week are intended as general guidelines only. You may not have the skills needed for this exact fit. If you do not, feel free to adjust the fit to suit to meet your skills, including using meta 3 guns and "best named" defenses and e-war. Ships can also be adjusted to use faction or dead-space modules depending on the budget of the pilot flying it. Each FOTW is intended as a general guide to introduce you to concepts that will help you fit and to fly that particular type of ship more aggressively and well.
(1) P.S. Virtually the same fitting makes an excellent "all smart bomb" fitting, by the way. I leave the changes as an exercise for the student, but you should find them very rapidly.
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