100 is a big number

Today I have reached one of those wonderful milestones in EVE. 100 million skillpoints.

Now those of you who are more eagle eyed will ask "But you should have achieved this ages ago shouldn't you? you are quite old" and you are right. However after the first month of playing I stopped for 9 months and even when I came back I didn't not know about the learning skills for a while (I never ventured to the forums - big mistake!)

So what does 100m SP look like?
Well I have a total of 319 skills:
42 at level 0
23 at level 1
12 at level 2
52 at level 3
82 at level 4
108 at level 5

I make a point of trying to have as many skillbooks in my head as possible as I usually operate out in 0.0 and if I decide to change my course of training, i'd rather have the skillbooks ready than have to make a trip to empire and interrupt whatever it is i'm doing.
This is also handy for any up coming changes to game mechanics, I can simply change my training to take advantage of anything good coming along.
I do the same with my second account but not my third - I'm not planning on putting him into 0.0 anytime soon and his skill sheet looks nice and neat with purely level 4/5 skills.

I can fly 3 races, Caldari Gallente and Winmatar, trained in that order. I don't fly any Amarr.
I do plan on training Amarr one day but I have plenty of skills left in the other three races to last me quite a while plus i'd rather not step on my third account's training which is pure amarr as that would give me less of a reason to have him.

My highest ranked skill at V is Marauders (rank 10) which I trained for this years Alliance Tournament but didn't make the most of as I switched into a Vindicator instead of using the planned Kronos (still sitting in my hangar.)

Lastly, I leave you with a nice little pie chart showing the distribution of my skills.

Not much happening.

It's been a while since my last blog post because i've not been doing a whole lot in eve recently.
The only things i've done have been station spinning, an assault frigate tournament and corp logistics.

The assault frigate tournament!
I have planned on doing a blog about this for a few weeks now but have been waiting for Suleiman Shouaa to finish the youtube videos for the tournament, he still hasn't finished them but i've decided i'm way too overdue for a blog anyway.

While reading other blogs about eve I stumbled across a pirate blogger who was running an assault frigate tournament and being a lover of AF's, I decided to enter.
The rules were simple, a round of 1v1 against another contestant, those who did not lose their ship then got put into groups of 3 and had a 3 way match against eachother then it was back to 1v1's.

I had decided to use a good old Wolf, fitted with my usual fit apart from a web instead of scrambler (since there was no need to have them scrambled for a tournament and a web would be more effective in more situations.)
My fit was :

[Wolf, Assault Frig Tournament]
Small Armor Repairer II
Damage Control II
Gyrostabilizer II
400mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

1MN Afterburner II
Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I

150mm Light AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
150mm Light AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
[empty high slot]
150mm Light AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
150mm Light AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S

Small Anti-Explosive Pump I
Small Projectile Burst Aerator II

This fit along with my high grade slave clone gave me 13,276 ehp and 249 dps along with a decent speed of 856 m/s.

The entry fee for the tournament was 10 mil along with 5m per t2 rig you fit so my total cost to enter was 15m.
I signed up a good two weeks in advance and decided it was more than a good enough reason to finally train small autocannon spec V so I swapped over my skill training.

I set myself up in the system it was being held a couple of days early and played around on sisi in the frigate arena in FD-.

My first match was against IEATCRAYONS who piloted a medium shield boosting ac/rocket Hawk.
I was surprised anyone would even bother with a hawk when I saw it land 3km from me in the arena. With a medium shield booster it has a decent active tank but that didn't stop my wolf from turning his ship into space dust within about 40 seconds.

The next match was the one I expected would be the hardest to get through, the 3 person FFA as I could easily be taken out if ganged on. I was keeping an eye on who got through as the worst thing would have been to go up against 2 people of the same corp - they would easily decide I was to be taken out first before fighting amongst themselves.
Luckily they were not in the same corp but they also both piloted a wolf!
I warped in at range to the arena to hopefully avoid being the first target and so did the other two. I was targetted and fired upon by one of them almost right away but he seemed to lose interest in me after a few moments and ran off to fight the other person. To which I simply kept my range and waited for them both to receive a lot of damage.
It didn't take long for one of them to be in low armor so I swopped in and stole the final blow and then turned on the last Wolf who exploded not long after.

My next fight was against a Retribution and unfortunately I can't remember who it was against.
The fight was a long one though, he was slightly faster than me but didn't have enough damage to break my tank while I had enough to whittle him down.
He kept on coming in, trying to do enough dps to me to break my tank then running away to repair once he got low on armor. While I was overloading quite a bit my dps still wasn't enough because of his speed and ability to get out of my range. While he was far away of course I used nanite repair paste to put my mods back into top order.
Eventually he fell as the arena was getting smaller and smaller due to time limits but as he needed his ship to determine who was going to come third, I was not allowed to destroy his ship - it was first to 75% structure.

So I had made it to the final and I was going up against Lachesis VII in a Retribution.
This was a very straight forward match, he had an mwd fitted with a completely passive armor tank. His dps wasn't able to break my tank at all and I just chased him around with barrage loaded and took his armor slither by slither until he decided to warp out of the arena deep in structure - no killmail for me.

So I had won the tournament! The prizes were pretty good, in total I got 218m (18m because the bookie made a profit from bets and so part of the winnings went to the tournament winner) 1 Daredevil, 2 Dramiels and a domination warp disrupter. Not bad for a fun evening!

Be sure to check out Suleiman's blog and when the vids go up, watch them.

Empire fun

So my recent month in Eve has been both fun, action packed and quiet.

We were recently at war with the orphanage to which a number of us in CAIN decided we'd hop back to empire and have some fun with them for a while.
Fun it was. as predicted they mostly ran around in small gangs and we have a number of skirmishes with them.

The first night I jumped cloned down, Abel and Ladel and I (mega, mega and oneiros) decided to roam around the Nonni - Isinokka pipe ans see what we could find.
What we first came across was a solo neut fitted Legion off gate so we engaged. He ended up being well fit and was able to keep the cap of both of our megas drained (medium cap booster fail) and so we could not keep any dps on him but at the same time, he was barely hurting us.
We were fighting for a good 10 minutes and the fight was going nowhere so we broke off and decided that I would replace my lost ogre 2's with heavy ecm drones and go for him again.
Unfortunately, he had moved on by the time I was able to get the drones but some other targets had come into the area.
We engaged the lone Maelstrom sitting on the Piak gate, knowing he had at least a Myrmidon and Nighthawk as backup and that the Legion was next door in Piak. He engaged us back and called in his friends. We melted the Maelstrom (those things have a hell of a tank - I must try one out) and the Myrmidon before bugging out when Abel was deep in structure. My ecm drones managed to keep the Legion completely useless for the fight.

The orphanage war didn't last much longer but we snagged a few more kills including a Vagabond who thought it was safe to afk in space while mwding, only to come back to his computer to find himself in station.

We didn't immediately go back to Deklein though as we had been having fun doing some anti pirate ops.
Two of my favourite battles were an Ishkur who thought that he could tackle my blaster fitted Myrmidon long enough for his 10 friends to jump in and gank me. And these guys who initially warped away from my bait Megathron but then came back in one at a time to die.

After this we headed back into Deklein for the usual 0.0 business.

One ship that I really enjoyed while being in empire was the Myrmidon. I didn't have a Hurricane (current bc of choice) in empire and fancied using my 2 year old Myrmidon before buying one and I was very quickly reminded why I liked it so much before cross training to winmatar. Good tank, good utility and ok dps makes the Myrmidon a very good bc for small gang empire ops, even though it has been nerfed heavily (heavy drones + nos) since it first came out. I might just bring one out to 0.0.

Carebear Beginnings

So here i've decided that I am going to attempt my own blog about EVE.

I have been following other eve blogs for a while now ever since I got an iPhone thanks to the wonderful Capsuleer application.
I enjoy reading a number of them, my favourite has to be Kirith Darkblade's blog due to his interesting writing and decision to use winmatar ships exclusively for the time being.

My aims for this blog are to see if I can get onto CK's eve blog pack and hopefully see myself listed on my iPhone. You've got to have a goal, right?

So here's a bit about my EVE career.
When I first made my character back in 2004 I thought i'd try giving manufacturing/research a go as the character creation menu at the time made it sound quite interesting (normally I go for straight damage/tank in any kind of mmo.) I started off training mining skills and such and got myself into random corporation. I mined with them a few times bit then lost interest and stopped my sub after the first month.
A few months later I was still looking for some kind of game to fill the 'space' void and thought i'd give EVE a go again. This time again I joined a mostly industrial/carebear kind of corp and started enjoying the game more than the first time around. After a while though things within the leadership changed a lot and I left to join a splinter corp called Halfwits.

Halfwits stayed in empire for a bit carebearing and actively recruited members. After a while some of our members wanted to gain access to 0.0 and we started going out to Pure Blind - 5ZKK-K.
Once I first took the steps out into 5ZXX-K the game really started changing for the better. The learning curve raised for me and there was a lot of fun to be had in the first steps of learning to PVP.
As with a lot of corps though, things change a lot over time and it's hard to stay attached. I left Halfwits and joined the Privateers in empire while looking for a more suitable corp to join.

This lead me to CAIN, I had flown with them in 5Z and after speaking with a friend from Halfwits we decided to apply as they seemed to be a good corp to join.
We were both approved and to this day are still in the corp.
I have risen through the ranks of CAIN and am now the lead Quartermaster and on the command staff of the corporation.
I have seen through a lot of things with CAIN, from tuning my PVP skills to empire wars, alliance wars, 0.0 sov warfare to factional warfare as well as being the team captain for our alliance tournament teams the past 3 tournaments (2x 4th District, 1x OWN.)

So this leads me to today. I consider myself a good pvper with plenty of experience, I much preffer small skirmishes over boring 0.0 sov warfare blobs.
Right now i've been sat in empire fighting the Orphanage alliance who have wardecced OWN Alliance. As of today they've retracted their war dec and although normally a 0.0 alliance doesn't run to empire to fight, CAIN decided they were going to this time for fun.
It's a pity that they've dropped their war dec, I was enjoying the skirmishes they were giving and I know that Abel was as well (our resident empire war dec enthusiast.)
I always enjoy a good empire war, the next one I get I will be looking to give some details battle reports.

See you in space for now,
Trony