The other option is to try factional warfare. I have 8.6 standings with Minmatar, and 8.08 with Gallente so that puts me on that side. No chance to fight for the other side. Still pondering about this one..

So, if you run a WH corp in a C3 or higher, and you can use a 84m SP combat pilot, drop me a comment and we can talk

We’re running VG’s, and everyone is chilling, doing their shit. One Vindi somehow gets to about half armor before all my reps cycle on him, the Oni pilots either lagging or slow, but soon he is full armor and life is good, and the isk flowing. Even the loggi’s run Warrior II’s, which we assign to the drone bunny.

Then, one of the Oni pilots makes a fatal mistake. He clicks ‘attack’ instead of ‘assist’ on the drone bunny. Concord shows up, and boom goes the Loggi. Luckily near everything drops, so its only a hull and rigs loss. Lesson learned.

To avoid this I usually enter the site, lock and orbit anchor first. Next I lock up the other loggi’s. Thirdly I lock up the Vindicator assigned to me, and run two remote sebo’s on him. Once all this is fine, I launch drones and make sure I assign them to the drone bunny. Then it’s watching for armor broadcasts and repping people while getting the remote rep cycles right etc. And you people thought being a loggi was easy

So I’ve been pondering what to do with him. I’ve had a offer to join a old corp I was part of, but they’re in drone lands and I’m not sure I was to trek out there again. We’re talking 4 cyno relays from empire to the home station. That’s farking far!!

So last night I’m in the recruitment part of the Eve-O forums, checking out some corps. Had considered trying wormhole life for a bit, but do I reallllyy want to run a d-scan every few seconds? Then I saw a post that caught my attention. 0.0 corp looking for PVP/PVE characters, and they live in Wicked Creek. So, Wicked Creek is cool, I used to live close by in Great Wildlands. Then I nearly choked on my coffee. Ideal characters should have no more than 30mill SP.

Why would anyone cap the amount of SP that a toon can have? Both my toons have 80m and 82m sp respectively. That allows for them to have very specialised roles, but they’re also both very competent at what they do, aka Loggi V+support skills, or Recon V, with all the proper support skills.

So, I replied and decided to give it a skip

Problem was, last night we had a Abaddon in fleet. It’s a good ship, one of my favourites, but they are cap hungry if you don’t have high skills, and this pilot didn’t. The Guardian was unusual, being a 4/2 setup, but running two dead-space MEDIUM remote cap transfers, four Large t2 remote reps (not ‘Solace’). Mids were two remote sebo’s for the webbing Vindi, and the lows two True Sansha cap relays, two deadspace EANMs, and a 1600mm plate. Where I usually use t2 rep drones, he has t2 Warriors in the bay, to assign to the drone bunny.

There was some concern about capping out, but with two different 3% implants and good skills (my logistics toon has nearly 80m sp), I was able to keep both the cap transfers on the Abaddon, and by cycling the repairers keep both the remote sebo’s on the Vindi and rep anything without causing one of the combat ships to sweat.It took some micro-management to do everything, as I was squad leader as well. Land, orbit anchor, rep tank, then lock up Vindo, remote sebo him, lock up the other logi’s, then deploy drones and assign to drone bunny. It was enjoyable though and made some good isk

The Abaddon pilot needs a bit more training to get it cap stable (which is quite possible unless he is using Tachyon’s), but it was interesting running a different fit Guardian, especially without another cap transfer coming in

So I mined. In high sec. And I mined Veldspar, Scordite and some Pyrox. Then I discovered Trit is now over 5isk a unit. Hello near 100 mill isk for a few hours mindless boredom. While idling away in the Hulk and Mammoth, I watched Dredd and The Bourne Legacy. Dredd was cool, shot here in South Africa. The Bourne Legacy was not that great. Good, but not great.

Headed to the next one that spawned and it took a while for everyone to get together. This was my first Assault site so I was a little worried, but we got 7 logistics together (FC took an extra logistics as about 1/2 of the fleet had not done Assaults before, and two of the logistics only had lvl IV). I was using my standard 4/2 logistics fitting (2 Energy Transfers / 4 Remote Reps). First site went well, and I ended up sending perma-cap to one other logistics and the FC who was running a Bhaalgorn.

In total we ran three sites, and for some reason the NPC’s really took a liking to my Logistics. In all three sites I was hammered along with one Tempest Fleet issue. The logistics team were on the ball and kept me going without worrying. I was jammed several times and would just do a “break break, <char name> jammed, logistics cap chain will be down for a bit”. Don’t panic, just interrupt the conversation on TS with the proper term / etiquette, describe the problem and ask for help. We had one panic moment when a normal T1 BS (Armageddon) got primaried and went to 66% hull before we could put enough rep on him. Personally I overloaded the rack for a few cycles to make sure the player was surviving. That incident made me understand how fragile a normal tier BS can be, especially if its only T2 fit, and I was suddenly glad I had some pimp’ish gear on the Guardian.

At the end of the third Assault site, a few of us had to leave and the FC thanked us, and made it known we’d be welcome to fly with them again. So far so good. I haven’t cocked up in a fleet yet, I still have my stupidly expensive Guardian and I’ve made some good isk. The other thing is that I’m really enjoying flying with other people and doing stuff again. I want to start thinking of getting my main back in to 0.0 for some pew pew, but for now I’m really enjoying the incursions.

In one or two of the channels I was pointed to The Ditanian Fleet, and they quickly helped me with a Guardian fit. Expensive but with the right skills the resists are quite high, and its what Incursion FC’s look for. I had one skill (for t2 rigs) missing, and took a leap of faith when someone offer to fit them for me. I wasn’t scammed (yay?) so I was ready for the staging area.

As I got to one site last night the incursion ended and I ended up heading 8 jumps further. My mic wasn’t working, but I got in to a fleet with a fairly competent FC who wasn’t getting too frustrated at me (I could listen to TS3, just not talk). The fleet was running Vanguard sites and with two other Guardians we had a good cap chain and I quickly caught the gist of things. Having flown Guardian’s in 0.0 before I just needed to find my groove back a bit, but within 20mins I had the tags sorted, the orbit sorted, my watchlist and broadcasts etc. Somehow I’ve always liked playing logistics. I don’t mind the role, even though there is a bit of a responsibility on your shoulders. Screw up and someone could lose a very expensive asset!

Once the three logistics got our groove on, I was in fleet for about 1.5hrs and only once did a BS go to half armor, which had the pilot worrying a little, but we got him back to 100% quickly. I lost count how many sites we did, but it was around 8 to 9mins per site, sometimes longer when a dps ship left and we had to wait for someone on the waiting list to join. The FC’s major frustration was the lack of t3′s to deal with the smaller stuff as a drone buddy. I was jammed badly once, messing up the cap chain, but we got through it without issue luckily.

I really enjoyed the experience, made some good money, and hope that my performance in the fleet made me some friends which will allow me to get in to fleets a bit easier. One thing I can say is that all the years I spent fighting in 0.0 has finally paid of for something in high-sec *lol*

The main issue I have is what will I do when I return? I spoke to a few people, and some are still in the same areas they were in years ago, doing the same old shit. I would love to get back in to mining and industry, but with mining and mineral prices still shitty, I doubt I will be able to make that work even if I still have my Rorqual (mothballed for years now).

Then I wondered if I should not look in to maybe doing some incursions, but apparently that is being controlled by one group, and gankings are fairly frequent due to the high ship requirements (faction BS with ‘stuff’). I suppose I could get in to one of the fleets easy enough since one of my pilots is a really good logistics pilot (Loggi V and triage pilot), and when I flew with No Mercy I regularly flew in a Guardian, so I know how to roll in a Logistics ship in a combat situation.

With 0.0 being fairly static at the moment, and without the isk to go all apeshit on combat, I’m left wondering if I’m not going to find myself in a situation where I’m bored again within days should I resubscribe.. Thoughts / Comments?

Eager to fight the reapers, get it on with Miranda and continue the good fight I started playing.

First enjoyable twist was EDI being made mobile in a captured robot body thing. Wonder if Tricia Helfer also did the modelling for the base shape for EDI, and not the voice only.

I ended up using her on quite a few of the missions. Her feelings for pilot Joker comes to the fore, and you start seeing her AI reaching some sort of humanity.

As I kept playing, I marvelled at the story, and how well it was done, same as the previous two ME’s. Some new characters appear, and new twists in the plot. Some of your previous love interests are sacrificed for the greater good. Some decisions are hard. And some are not…(yes the one with the reporter  on your ship)

This was the Mass Effect I loved!

Finally, I’m on earth, struggle to get to the end goal and then…I discovered why everyone was so unhappy at the ending. Yes I knew Sheppard dies..but..

Dear Electronic Arts..what were you thinking?

In October, RAGE was released, highly anticipated first person shooter from ID software (you know those guys known for making awesome titles like..erm..Doom!). Well, locally in the shops it was expensive, and online reviews were giving it a hard time (texture loading etc). Thus, I decided to skip it and during that time I bought BF3 and MW3.

Last week sometime, I spotted RAGE on Steam for $29.99, about half price of what it was going for locally and decided to buy it. At 21gb download it took forever (remember, I live in the 3rd world, the land that bandwidth forgot!). Also, while it downloaded, I went reading up on how to optimize my dual GTX460′s for the game. Turns out RAGE doesn’t support SLI, but one card seems to run fine at 1920 x 1280 with 4xAA etc. The card hits about 74′c under heavy load, and I don’t experience any of the texture loading delays that plagued the console releases. As a reference BF3 at full tilt makes the one card cry at 86′c, and the 2nd card about 76′c.. (yes I have a really good HAF case and upgraded fans).

So playing the last few nights has me happy. The campaign is rather long, unlike some games which end up being finished in 4 hours, and entertaining enough. Sure, most missions are ‘go fetch!’ or the odd ‘kill shit’, but thats mostly par for the course. What I do like, though I suck terribly at it, is the racing section of the game, and the car combat. The game certainly doesn’t have the diversity of say, Borderlands, but then it was never meant to have it.

The enemies are fairly unique, with the mutants, petrol heads etc. Each faction moves differently and requires different weapons and ammo to kill. I’ll get to the weapons in the next paragraph. Every time I face the mutants with their jumping and dodging, I keep thinking of the line in ‘Priest’ when he shoots the vampires aiming for point B “Point A, meet fscking point B”

The weapons are the usual run of the mill, and in true ID software tradition you’re a walking arsenal, instead of the usual carry only two weapons. The fun part is in engineering the different ammunition types. At one stage last night I was having endless hassles going through the power station, until I remembered the explosive arrows. Suddenly the level was easy as pie. There is just something about shooting someone with an explosive arrow and hearing the character go “oh shit!” *whoompf!!* While some of the weapons can be upgraded, I would have liked to see more options earlier in the game, and more overall options for modifying the weapons. One example would have been a red dot sight or some such for the shotgun.

Since I haven’t finished the campaign yet I can’t comment on the ending, though I’ll probably have it done by the weekend. For now, I’m really enjoying the game at the reduced price, and after they’ve issued various patches to fix problems that occurred in the beginning. I am a bit disappointed in the the lack of SLI support, as I would have liked to up the quality even more, but at the level I play I’m quite happy. So, if you see it on special on Steam, grab it, it’s good fun for a few hours.