Kill of the Week - The Belt Miner

Kavis Vercet is not having a good August. He started the month off losing a Mackinaw in lowsec - only a 270mil loss so not the end of the world. A few days later he was hauling a Tayra full of blueprints near Jita and when that inevitibly exploded he was down approximately 3.1 billion ISK. Some players might have just given up playing Eve for a while at this point but not Kavis Vercet - he forged on. I remember many years ago when I first started playing I read up about RvB and how it was a great PvP primer for new players. I joined Red Fed, spent all the ISK I had on T1 mods and ammo and undocked in a barely-trained Badger ready to get myself to the front line. 

I made it as far as the 4-4 undock.

At this point I didn't realise that ongoing wars between RvB weren't just constrained to those two corps but that third party entities had wardecc'd them too and I was livid that I'd just lost my worldly possessions to some random station campers. I nearly ragequit Eve there and then I was that mad but instead went off for about a month before coming back.

I digress but the message from that anecdote is that Kavis Vercet is clearly made of sterner stuff - the 3bill loss of all those blueprints did not dissuade him from staying in New Eden and merely a few days later he was back plying the space lanes. Unfortunately he took a Providence into lowsec which was promptly blapped on a gate and the hero of this tale was out of pocket by another 1.5bil. Like I said at the beginning, not a good month for Kavis Vercet.

The bad fortune for our budding hauler does not end here. A few days after losing the Providence, Kavis Vercet was out mining in highsec in an Orca - probably to recoup some of the losses he'd incurred earlier in the month. Now I've never taken part in asteroid mining because it seems colossally boring and I assume Kavis Vercet thinks so too because (and I'm making assumptions here) he went AFK in the belt. During this time an NPC Punisher belonging to the Blood Raiders landed on grid and promptly put an end to his Orca. I bet its laser crystals were nearly burnt out after putting out 114k damage.

Now you might be wondering where this is all going - what is all this buildup and backstory about? Well dear reader, lets find out. 

I've recently taken to roaming around my local haunts in my HAM Sandwich Loki. It has a wide engagement envelope and is all-around a fun, versatile ship. Yesterday afternoon I was bouncing around a few systems and ended up in Hulmate, in Essence. I noticed Kavis Vercet in local but couldn't find anything on d-scan so prepared to jump out and find somewhere else to go. I then caught wife aggro so had to go AFK. One of the joys of flying a cloaky ship is that I can drop Eve at a moments notice if needed and still be safe. 

I returned an hour or so later and hit warp to my out gate, idly d-scanning as I zoomed to my destination. An Orca flashed up on scan. I landed on the gate and held cloak. There were no stations or Citadels within 14 AU of this gate and yet there was an Orca somewhere in space. Immediately I dropped down to a 5° angle and started scanning the nearby celestials. 

There! Planet 3, belt 10. Orca.

My initial thought was that surely this was bait of the highest magnitide but I'm a big fan of taking the bait so I warped in anyway. Kavis Vercet and I were the only people in system anyway so I'd have time to bug out if local suddenly exploded.

I landed on the belt and found Kavis Vercet belt mining in his Orca. Clearly the losses of the month had drained our poor hero of a lot of ISK and he felt the need to risk the dangers of lowsec to mine some valuable ore. 

Slowboating within point range I uncloaked and got tackle. Local did not explode. I announced on the SC intel channel that I'd tackled an Orca in a belt in Hulmate. A few alliance mates scrambled to come and assist me. Meanwhile the Orca's shields were slowly being whittled down. A flight of light drones came and went. ECM drones were shot out of space. Kavis Vercet tried neuting me but I was too far out of their optimal range for them to do anything of note. The shields were almost down.

Two of my alliance mates landed on grid to get secondary and tertiary tackle and apply DPS. It didn't take long before the Orca exploded, briefly illuminating the belt.

 I collected my loot (fuck you loot fairy!) and slipped back into the night, content with the aggressive transaction that had just taken place. My two alliance buddies were happy to get on the kill. In hindsight I could probably have solo'd it but I had no idea if Kavis Vercet had any back up or any other hidden surprises so it was the right choice to bring in extra DPS.  

Moments after leaving Hulmate my notification feed lit up.

I can't say I was surprised in all honesty but I'll take it. A fairly good chunk of ISK though, 50mil - the highest one-time bounty I've accrued to date I think so happy with that. So that, dear readers is what I'm claiming as my kill of the week. It might not have been ~elite pvp~ but it was a big kill for me at least so I think it counts. I think there's only one thing left to say -

Kavis Vercet is not having a good August.

Until next time, fly reckless o/

- Cable

Milestones

 

A few days ago I hit something of a milestone in my PvP career - 1,000 player kills. I know, I know, in the grand scheme of things it's not that many but I felt like celebrating it with a light analysis of my kills from the beginning up until now.

One thing I would have liked to achieve is hitting 1,000 kills before I died 300 times but as you can see I was a little too reckless a handful of times more than I should have been. Close though! Perhaps my next goal can be 5,000 kills with less than 1,000 deaths? Lets see if I can do that, hah.

Another interesting tidbit is the 60/40 gang/solo split - I genuinely thought that I'd got a lot more solo kill than that but after some digging I found out that noobship, shuttle and importantly - pod kills - don't count as being solo even if you were on your own. It's worth noting that 250 of those 1,000 kills were pods so that's thrown the balance off a little bit. One way of getting my solo bar a bit greener is to stop podding people but that's never going to happen so I'll just have to accept it!

Above is a summary snapshot of all ship types killed and lost on my road to 1,000. 

The big takeaway from this picture is that I specialise in small stuff. Frigates make up the bulk of both my kills and losses which isn't a surprise at all - Frigate PvP has been the mainstay of my PvP career since I started way back in RvB many years ago and for the foreseeable future I'll be flying frigates more often than not. They're cheap (lol) and fun to fly so it makes sense to keep going with them. 

Unsurprisingly destroyers and cruisers follow frigate hulls for my most killed. After frigates they're the most commonly seen  ship types in lowsec so it makes sense. I'm happy that my ratios are again in the positive for both ship classes - makes me think I'm doing something right!

Speaking of ratios it appears that I suck at flying assault frigates. With only 28 kills to 41 lost - my only negative ratio across the board - I need to get a grip! In my defence the majority of those losses were years ago before the rebalance when AFs were considered to be slow and outclassed by a lot of other ships. I flew them a lot and lost them a fair few times too. I can't help that I love the Wolf, 2 mid slots be damned!

The rest of the numbers speak for themselves - I've killed small numbers of a lot of other ships and lost either none or very little of them myself. That isn't because I'm an ~elite pvper~ who doesn't die when flying more specialised ships but probably due to the fact that I haven't flown more specialised ships a great deal. That being said, since I came back to Eve in July I feel like I'm a much better pilot than I ever was when I played 7 years ago and I have a little ISK to spare to I'm planning on going out and finding fights in some more exciting ships in the immediate future. 

Until next time - fly reckless,

- Cable

Ominous Latin Name

 

So I seem to have wound up joining Shadow Cartel. Yes I know, this has completely come from out of nowhere especially when you take into account two posts ago I was shilling for my own, newly created PvP corp. 

Despite flying around New Eden solo most of the time it's still nice to have folks to chat to and enjoy the social side of Eve. In a one-man corp you don't really get much of that so when an opportunity to join Mea Culpa came up I took it. Since my return to Eve I've got to know most of the locals around Hevrice and I kept bumping into Max, one of the geezers from Mea Culpa and another SC pilot who keeps killing me in his Dragoon. Several ad hoc roams up and down the Black Rise pipe later (do not recommend - you always die when Max is in fleet) and I was basically in! There aren't too many pilots in the corp but I see that as a good thing - when you get to know basically everyone on TS/Discord a much more tight-knit group is formed rather than having randoms from a pool of a couple of hundred turn up for a fleet. 

Shadow Cartel then, eh? I remember back in my days as a Tusker they were the big alliance a couple of doors down from Hevrice who liked to drop carriers on cruisers for a laugh. I'm told they (we?) still do that, which is mighty entertaining. I mean it would be if I regularly flew carriers. I do have a Panther sitting around gathering dust so that will hopefully be useful in the not too distant future.

Speaking of big(ger) ships, there are a bunch of doctrines that SC use, some of which are nice to have and others which are pretty essential to own. Some of them aren't cheap either so I thought I'd try and grow my liquid ISK by doing some carebearing (I hear the cool kids call it krabbing these days), because PvE in Eve is easy right?    

There's no use hiding it so I'll just link it here. I welped a Loki on some random site, probably because I had no idea what I was doing. The first three battleship rats in the plex died easily enough to my HAM sandwich and I was barely taking any damage. Anyway after they exploded a whole bunch of other Mordu rats spawned and some of them webbed and scrammed me, which led to my beloved Loki with a bunch of killmarks on it also exploding. Something something hubris I guess. So yeah, I guess I'll go back to just taking other pilots modules after I've popped them. Might take me a bit longer to afford that Tempest Navy Issue though...

In other news I killed a Garmur today. That piece of information on its own isn't particularly noteworthy because lots of Garmurs are killed every day in Eve. Even the manner of how I killed it isn't really that interesting. On d-scan I saw a newbie in a Hurricane sat at an open FW plex. A few moments later I saw a Garmur on scan at the same plex. Using my incredibly impressive powers of deduction I identified the pilot, checked his recent Garmur fits on zkill - which were all semi-pimped LML kiters - and then fitted up my own Garmur with a scram and rockets.

I warped to the plex and due to Eve's rock-paper-scissors methodology I easily caught and killed the enemy Garmur. The loot fairy was not gracious and did not grant me the Republic Fleet long point but she did give me the B-type MWD which is better than nothing. I offered a gf in local and got one back and then the pilot said something in French which according to Google was slang for being irritated. Moments later my wallet flashed.

"for your skill". Had a good laugh at that. The irony of an LML-kiting Garmur pilot being salty because he got killed by an anti-kite fit Garmur is almost palpable. 

Until next time, fly reckless

- Cable