Evicted by Inner Hell

Once you get into your routine, it's hard to appreciate certain things. I've been around long enough to know you should never take things for granted in this game. You have to be prepared that certain things like your favorite ship, play style, or even your corp will change or disappear. Despite living in wormholes for most of my time, this week I have experienced something new. My corp got evicted by Inner Hell. While the risk of eviction was always known to me, the corps I have joined were always small-medium size focused on small gang PVP. Corps I've been apart of were always neutral, minded their business, and provided content when the opportunity arose. I took my home systems for granted as I always felt that to evict my corp would be more pain than it's worth. Well, Inner Hell was of another opinion. It felt that Epicentre Syndicate has accumulated enough wealth, got too comfortable and it was time to shake things up, by cleansing the system of any traces of player activity.

I take breaks in EVE. Sometimes, the breaks are quite long. Once you stop logging in, it becomes very difficult to force yourself to even open the client. Due to this, I often miss out on a lot of things happening such as big updates or drama and politics. My isolationist hunting playstyle did not help as it made it very easy to stay ignorant, ignore what was not impacting me directly, and just mind my own business. Therefore, the main reason I joined the corp was to be more engaged in EVE universe, relearn things I've forgotten and build friendships. After some discussions with corpmates I've learned that drama in wormholes was quite a big topic recently and a lot of evictions were going on. Of course, I refer to TDSIN and HK squabble. While Epicentre Syndicate was neutral, we did discuss the topic of eviction on numerous occasions, and mentally, at least some of us were always prepared to face the music.

On a personal level, all these eviction stories felt crazy and unreal. Being in wormholes, it always felt like being a part of a community. And while some corps hated each other, we still "got" one another. At the risk of sounding like a bittervet, one unwritten rule in wormholes was always respected. You don't evict active PVP corps. Not at least without a very good reason. The content was always hard to come by in w-space and make it emptier would do no good to anyone. It seemed like "old fashioned" approach went out of style and big cleansing was underway. So what does this have to do with us being evicted by Inner Hell? Probably not much, but I thought it would be interesting to mention. There is also a chance that due to other evictions ongoing, the list of whom to evict for Inner Hell became much shorter.

Inner Hell is famous for its playstyle which specializes in evictions. It's what they do and what they are good at. And we got to experience that first hand. While I dislike this playstyle, I do have to respect the commitment they put in. While we caught initial scanner checking out timers of our structures, the first iteration of hole control fleet caught us completely off guard. It all started with a miner gank. We thought it was a random encounter but quickly realized there was an eviction force present in our system.

The last stand

Epicentre Syndicate leadership was working around the clock to deal with a sudden crisis. It was clear that our corp alone won't have a chance to stand against the hostiles in the system and we would need help. But if you have been involved in wormhole warfare, you probably realize that it is extremely difficult to get help inside the system if you have no hole control. Even if there are volunteers to help the cause, it's useless without a way to get inside. We joke around that the only way we stand a chance is a frigate hole to our system since they can't be rolled and it's extremely hard to control the incoming traffic.

The very next day, Bob answers our prayers and blesses us with 2 frigate holes. The biggest evidence of Bob watching us if I ever saw one. Batphone goes out and soon we have over 100 pilots docked in our main Fortizar. Evening comes and I see the biggest fleet I have participated in wormhole space so far. We are ready to make a claim for the right to stay in this c4 system.

We start off well. We pick off some of t3s and force the enemy fleet to warp off and successfully defend the timer. As Inner Hell can't win the direct confrontation on a station, they warp around and we play a game of cat and mouse for a short while. 

While we could defend the timers of some of the stations, it was clear that this would be the battle of attrition if we kept it up. We could defend today, but what about tomorrow? Next week? Enemy fleet has fully committed to this invasion while people that came to our help took time from their schedules, burned to our system, and spent most of the day in it. It was unreasonable to expect and even ask them to stay longer than that. Therefore a decision was taken for the "final" battle. We would warp directly on the enemy fleet and brawl it out. We either incur big losses to the enemy that forces a regroup or go out in style. It's a win-win. We undock everything we can, align, and warp on the enemy. The big battle starts.

It all starts out great. We pop some good amount of t3s, Drakevacs, Ikitursas. However, as the battle drags on and we lose the majority of the fighters, it becomes noticeably harder to get kills. The fact that the fleet is fitted for long-range did not help shooting high-resist speed tanking ships. Especially after the enemy fleet picked off our webifiers, the damage output started to stagnate. It became clear that the fight was lost and we were just feeding kills, it was time to salvage what we could and bail.

Aftermath

Despite everything, the mood in the corp was on the upside. Everyone was feeling good for having a chance to organize a good fight and even inflict some moderate losses on our evictors. The zkillboard report shows 43 billion worth of ISK damage done and 93 billion lost.

With some random picks before and after, it's safe to assume we have done over 50 billion ISK damage. While it may not sound much in the grand scheme of things, we can say with confidence that Epicentre Syndicate members and allies gave their best to stand our ground with no regrets. It was time to go with our contingency plan - deny as many resources as possible, by self-destructing ships and logging off valuable assets on inactive characters.

We self-destructed, trashed, and evacuated assets that we could. Finally, it was time to say goodbye to our home. Even with victory at hand, Inner Hell diligently was watching the wormhole connections. To deny even a chance of catching our pods and shiny ships such as my scanning Proteus, most of the corp Yeeted out with Needlejack Filaments to null-sec and made our way to high-sec. In a way, it feels refreshing. We are no longer tied to our assets and are free to choose the next path. What does the future hold for Epicentre Syndicate and myself? Who knows, but we will make sure to use this opportunity and make the best of it.

Additional notes

1) Thanks to everyone who came to help to defend our home! Epicentre Syndicate members are very grateful and will not forget if some of you will be in a need.

2) The video of the fight.

Bullshits of EVE - Ventures.

You know what's bullshit? This:

You guessed it, that's a Venture mining gas. What's the problem? Glad you asked, let me explain. I was not sure if I should do a rant post, but what the hell...since I came across one, I might as well get it off my chest. I know this is 2 years too late.

Mining Ventures are bullshit

Before Ventures were introduced, it was not so easy to mine gas.  Most common ship was a battlecruiser, preferably with maximum high slot layout. For example - Brutix. Now it was not your standard battlecruiser. It had high slots filled with gas harvesters and lows with cargo hold expanders. Even then, you would hit the limit of 2000 m3 of cargo hold, which is enough only for like 1/5th of site. I myself used to multibox 4 Myrmidons to harvest low-sec gas. Now, battlecruiser is not that expensive, but not that cheap either. It took a while to mine out the gas clouds, so you were at constant risk of being ganked. That was life. You risk medium ship for getting that expensive gas. Then, some bright minds at CCP, decided that it would be great idea to introduce some very risk averse ships and gameplay in general (more on that later). And thus Venture and Prospect were born.

A Venture, that costs 200 thousand ISK, now can mine gas clouds in just few runs. 100% role bonus yield plus 5% per frigate skill level, gives output like Brutix with full rack of gas harvesters and 5000m3 ore cargo hold lets it store gas as 2-3 Brutixes with maximum cargo hold expanders. Currently gas mining in a 200 thousand ISK ship is much better than in one that costs 50 million. If we assume average fitted Venture is 5mil, CCP decreased risk of gas mining by 1000%. Wow.

As if 1000% decrease in risk (your potential losses if you get ganked) was not enough, they felt +2 warp core strength natural bonus should do the trick. Let's not forget the low slot, which then if fitted with extra wcs, it is immune to best faction scrambler. Don't have a double scram in your cloaky gank ship? Then you are shit out of luck. Better hope he is not watching d-scan when you bring your interdictor to kill that useless 200k ISK ship and, most likely, empty pod.

After done with t1 variant, they realized they needed a t2 version. A Prospect. Since Venture was already doing everything better than any other ship used for gas mining, it was a challenge to create something even better. But CCP made it through... by throwing a covert ops cloak on already hard to catch frigate. 5% reduction of gas harvesting duration per level is now like Brutix on steroids a.k.a warfare links. Oh, they took away +2 warp core strength bonus? Don't worry. Here's 4 low slots to fit warp core stabilizers. They will for sure make your ship unusable in a site that makes you fit modules with 1500m range and that you need to lock target only few times with a 10k m3 cargo space. A price? A whopping 15 million.

Now, of course, there are sleepers that spawn to "defend" the site. Unfortunately most of them are cleared with a Tengu in 1 minute and then back to gas mining. Yes, there are few most lucrative sites that make you bring big guns, but even then they are easily dispatched compared to their class level.

In the end, I think Venture is a great ship and has a place in EVE universe. But only for c1-c2 class. It is ridiculous that such cheap ship can mine such expensive gas everywhere. Best solution would be to introduce small/medium/large gas harvesting ships with same size modules. Make gas sites different that only small harvester can do c1-c2 sites, medium for c3-c4 and heavy for c5-c6. Wouldn't it make sense?

Leaving job half finished

I usually finish what I start, but that is not always the case. After getting multiple wardecs in highsec, I cut my ninja salvaging activities with already enough material to make several posts about it. Unfortunately, non intentionally, this also cut on my gaming time in general, where I basically moved back to my home wormhole and stayed afk for almost half a year and left those wonderful adventures unpublished.

protip for my future self: make drafts as you go instead recompiling posts from the memory.

Setting your priorities straight

Eve is like a bucket full of holes. You can keep pouring your time into it all you want, but it will never be enough. Leaving my poor analogies behind, I am happy to have quit eve as a full time job and treat it more as a hobby. It's very hard to do it for a such competitive person as myself. Even if it's pixel stuff, progress is progress and I like to win.

Even though I love EVE, it doesn't earn my bread and butter. It only make sense that person invests in himself in order to get better returns. Investing in EVE, unfortunately, gives very minimal returns if any. So I decided to reorganize my time and invest in myself. So what I have been up to?

• Learned basic programming to remove a lot of shitty tasks at work;
• Learning bloody swedish language with little success;
• Bought a guitar (hardest part done ech?);
• Kicked a lot of asses in dota 2 with techies release.

Continuing Cloaky Bastard adventures

Slowly getting back to EVE...again.... for the N^th time.  I packed my bags and set off to the unknown. Nowdays it is a bit harder to find a proper wormhole to stalk people since CCP removed API for kills information. Now I have to be creative and investigate corp towers, signatures and anomalies and make the best judgment call if I am likely to find any targets.

Being sneaky bastard makes my game. I feel like a well hidden predator watching his prey and waiting for the right moment. Best part of this is that I can do any other activities while stalking. It requires minimal effort. The only requirement is to be online and check that D-scan once in awhile.

Good old days

I miss my lowsec smartbombing pods days though. Back then, I even had timed all covert ops warp time to the second. If everything went right, I could kill those  pesky cloaky frigates without even seeing them. It really brought a sense of achievement. I even had plans to multibox several battleships to kill blockade runners, but after checking out the math, I did not have enough accounts to do it nor I felt like creating any more of them. I was never interested in an even battle. Killing someone who doesn't expect to be killed brings me most satisfaction.

Bittervet disease

Winning EvE

I've read somewhere that winning EvE is quitting. I haven't been around much. It all started with my trip for a party weekend to London to visit a friend of mine. It might have been alcohol poisoning, or should I say, alcohol cleansing my mind, but when I came back, I completely lost interest to log back in. 

It's not news to hear someone burning out from the game and doing a break. I had my fair share of vacations too, but always came back, sooner or later. Now it's been around 1.5 months since I did anything more than spin my ship and update queue. Even that has been a challenge lately. I have read about these bittervet diseases. In my younger days I did not know how one gets it and what are the symptoms, and how one can get it in such a brilliant* community. Well, I think I got it. If f 20 day skill queue looking too short is not a symptom then I don't know what else is.

Biggest problem

Eve is a huge time sink. I've been an active lurker of blogs and forums and I've seen people come and go. Especially people that subbed during their younger days and got more busy with their RL stuff after celebrating their N^th birthday. What's the main problem? It takes too fucking long to do anything. It's not your average insta-action game.

If you wanted something more than to blow up a shitty frigate then you are in the world of waiting pain. I think its a problem for most people, regardless what they do or where they live. Some places take more time than others. Like W-space for instance. If your goal is to find something to spew some ammo at, then you can cross out at least 2 hours right there. Scanning, waiting, hunting, scouting and more scanning. Suddenly you find some activity and spend another hour or two laying the ambush or running from one, such as outwaiting camps.

But it's everywhere like that. God forbid you lose a ship or two and a pod. If you fly something bigger than a frigate or a cruiser, good chance is you wont have a lot of spares fitted and ready to go, as also implants ready (if you live outside null). All logistics involved in market buying your shit, warping to location, fitting ship and realizing you are you are missing 2 items which are for sale... 5 jumps away.. opposite directions.. in heavy camped pipe system..

Someone who was/is living in the remote areas, with no near market and no self logistic capable pilots/alts will know what I'm talking about. Even for me, who has 7 accounts. Neutral freighter, jump freighter, basically free ISK from market with very little effort (even that's too much), was a pain to organize logistics. Good luck bringing various ships/types/doctrines and have spare ones with modules and implants. It's like a god damn full time job.

Getting the fix

Now don't get the wrong idea. I love everything about eve. The fact that it was so time consuming and "hardcore" was the style I liked/like. It's something that you could put a lot of effort and be proud of your achievements. I think this game is more suited for competitive people. These people don't get their fix from shooting bunnies on some retarded facebook game. They like to suffer, feel pain and once in a while, get that little feeling of bliss to keep them going. 

Of course there are many style of plays and to each its own. I'm sure there are a bunch of people who spend 30-1h a day and are happy with it,. Unfortunately for my style, to get my fix, I need to kill some helpless, unsuspecting victim. I need to hunt or camp or set a trap. I don't enjoy gf., but I do enjoy a good fleet fight if i get to FC. Otherwise I find no satisfaction of killing someone who is prepared to lose his ship. And to find such prey, it takes time. And time, is hard to come by.

In the end, I continue my yearly subs. I believe that one day I will find casual play and continue playing EvE.