The key to victory in Alterac Valley

After Sapphire took advantage of the Spirit of Competition and ventured in to Arathi Basin a few times, I took my rogue, Knifey, in to the battlegrounds on the last day of the competition. Quite a bit of PvP action was enjoyed, and I even won a gold medal for my efforts. Having indulged in some battlegrounds a couple of years ago, when there was just Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley to be fought over, and seeing that the Alliance still got soundly beaten in almost every battleground instance, I was left wondering why the Alliance performed so well in Alterac Valley.

I have won maybe a handful of Warsong Gulch and perhaps a single Arathi Basin battle, out of many dozens in each, yet the four instances of Alterac Valley I fought recently all ended in victory for the Alliance. And then it struck me. In Alterac Valley, the strategy has been to race down to a mid-point and kill an orc and his wolves, then race down to the bottom of the map, capture a base by killing all the guards, and once the base is captured and the graveyard secure the boss of the battleground is attacked and defeated. The defeat of this boss secures the victory. In the few times I've been in Alterac Valley, the number of PvP encounters could be counted on one hand. Alterac Valley is essentially PvE.

Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and the Eye of the Storm all pit Horde player against Alliance player, and there is no avoiding PvP fights. The flags in Warsong Gulch need to be defended or attacked. Bases in the others are held only for as long as your faction keeps control of them and, in a good battle at least, control can change hands several times in a single encounter. Only players can affect any of these changes; indeed, player characters are the only characters in the battlegrounds! But such a rush is there to defeat the opposing faction's boss in Alterac Valley that any PvP has become incidental.

I suppose it is something of a shame that PvP in such a large instance, where two large raid groups of Horde and Alliance can do battle, is reduced to a PvE experience. I imagine that it draws so many players to it because it offers PvP rewards without having to get involved in any messy PvP, and also because the Alliance can actually win in PvE. There is something to be said for the inevitable doom that awaits players in the other battlegrounds, where player versus player combat cannot be avoided. The cries of 'just let Horde win' may echo too often in those battlegrounds, but at least I know I'm putting up a real fight.

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Tags: alterac valley, arathi basin, battlegrounds, eye of the storm, knifey, pvp, sapphire, warsong gulch, world of warcraft

A disturbing turn of events

My lovely kitty, Kenickie, has the hunting instinct in him. It was not long after he was introduced to the cat flap, and the wonder of the world outside, that he was bringing home captured prey. To start with, this prey was only dead leaves, perhaps catching his attention as they were caught on a breeze, but I was still impressed with my little stalker. I also had to clean up a bit more, as my carpet was turning in to a forest glade in autumn.

A month or so back, Kenickie found a new prey to hunt and happily brought back some moths for my approval. I have to admit I was impressed, as catching a moth doesn't seem particularly easy and he brought them back in through the cat flap and dumped them on the carpet still alive. Of course, the released moths invariably flew away from the kitty, normally up to the ceiling, and Kenickie would chase after them again, but moths are quite manageable.

A couple of weeks ago Kenickie brought home his first real kill. I found a dead robin redbreast waiting for me next to my computer desk one Sunday morning. Poor little birdy, but what a good hunter Kenickie is! The cat didn't seem particularly bothered about his kill, though. Other cats I've known would have been upset at their prey being moved or thrown away, but Kenickie didn't bat an eyelid as I took the bird outside to the bin. My little boy is growing up.

This morning I found another present left for me by my computer desk, but it was a little disturbing. I found a collar that most likely belonged to another cat. There was no sign of a cat, nor of any fur. Has Kenickie turned cannibalistic? I didn't catch a glimpse of him this morning, so I don't know if he just found the collar and brought it in or whether he had maws glistening with the blood of another cat and that special glint in his eyes. I'm not sure what I should expect when I get home this evening, but as long as my neighbours haven't formed a rabble with pitchforks and torches in front of my door I should be okay.

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »
Tags: kenickie, kitty

Idiotic helmet policy

Esso staff have a few minutes ago denied serving me petrol unless I took off my crash helmet, ignoring protestations that I do, in fact, ride a motorbike, with some rather decisive empirical evidence. I'm not quite sure how taking off my crash helmet deters fuel theft, particularly as the same station hasn't had a problem with my helmet in the past few months.

Needless to say, I denied them my business.

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Tags: motorbike, petrol

Finger of death

I have picked up a bad but perhaps not unfair reputation of breaking something during pretty much every environmental test that I run. The reputation began quite early. When I first joined the environmental engineering group and was shown how to power on all the power amplifiers and cooling equipment for the main shaker, my first question after being allowed to do it myself was 'is that supposed to happen?' No, and it took a week of maintenance to fix a purely coincidental fault.

For the past few months, the various units under test have suffered my curse, with my aura causing them to fail and be in need of repair, which has led to some slipping timescales. On the positive side, there is a lot of repeat business, once the repairs have been effected.

Today I managed to break a charge amplifier, although I don't know how. It worked for one vibration run and then, without any changes being made, refused to work for a subsequent run not five minutes later. Because it had worked on the first run of the morning I couldn't even blame it on the test engineer who ran the previous test last week. At least this minor failure in our own test equipment could bode well for the unit under test itself, leading to a fault-free schedule. I hope so!

Posted in Work | 2 Comments »
Tags: vibration

Clearing up The Blockade

In a concentrated effort, I managed to run and complete my first level three mission, The Blockade, before it expired. It took buying and fitting a Drake battlecruiser, several retreats to recharge my shields and repair some scorch marks to my armour, and around 3,000 heavy missiles in total fired from my smoking launchers. It was an epic battle for me.

Even though I reported the mission completion to my agent there was more to be done. I had left what must be around forty wrecks floating in space, waiting to have some ISK-earning salvage pulled from them. The salvaging couldn't be done before handing in the mission because of time constraints on the mission itself, but some helpful advice gave me the option of returning later, having bookmarked the location of the wrecks.

I didn't have a dedicated salvaging ship, nor had I invested in a tractor beam at that point, with tractor beams costing around a million ISK each and I had been trying to save money to buy, insure and fit a Drake for the mission. However, one beneficial outcome of having fought a large number of deadly battlecruisers was the size of the bounties. Being used to getting maybe half a million ISK from a level two mission I was astonished to see the bounties I was getting for this level three mission. I pulled in over 5,000,000 ISK in bounty rewards!

Not only did the millions defer the cost of buying thousands more missiles to replete my stock for future missions, it also let Penny Ibramovic's Salvaging Operations expand a little, buying a dedicated salvaging ship. I bought a Cormorant destroyer, and fitted it out with four salvagers and a couple of tractor beams, as well as an afterburner and expanded cargo space. I still need to train in micro warp drives, but I am steering my learning towards that goal at the moment.

Naming the salvaging destroyer Flycatcher I take it out for a maiden voyage. Heading out to the location of the huge battle I start locking on to wrecks and trying out the tractor beams for the first time. The clear advantage of the tractor beam when salvaging is that the beam works out to twenty kilometres, whereas the salvaging module only works within five kilometres. The tractor beam can thus pull wrecks towards the ship, at a speed of 500 m/s, for quicker salvaging. The wrecks can then, of course, be towed with the tractor beam along the ship's route to pick up more wrecks, which greatly reduces salvaging times.

The multiple salvagers and tractor beams lets several wrecks be salvaged at once, with an added benefit. If fewer wrecks than salvaging modules are within range at any one time multiple Salvagers can be put to work on each wreck, increasing the chance of successfully pulling salvage from the wrecks, also reducing time needed to salvage. This is great! I am whizzing around in deadspace pulling and dragging wrecks along, Salvagers permanently at work, with almost no wasted time. The advice to get a dedicated ship was certainly worth heeding, and now that I've seen tractor beams in action I would say it's worth spending the money getting another two to fill out the remaining high slots.

The only problem I encountered was the wreckage disappearing. I was sure I had left far more wrecks floating in the deadspace pocket than I could see now, and I thought they didn't break apart in less than a couple of hours. What had happened to them? Ah, the answer was that they had indeed broken apart from the passage of time. Breaking up The Blockade had been such a challenging and involving fight that it had taken me almost three hours to complete, and by the time I had finished, handed it in to the agent, and bought and fitted Flycatcher to return to the deadspace pocket the wrecks had disintegrated.

Ah well. I had completed the mission, earned millions in bounty money, and had a new salvaging destroyer. The past week has been quite an adventure.

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Tags: cormorant, deadspace, drake, eve online, penny ibramovic, salvage

Another consequence of trying to afford a Drake

It was quite exciting to find that my standings with the Caldari Navy had increased to the point where I could move on from my high quality level two agent to accept my first level three mission. The level three agent only enjoyed a quality level of -18, but the step up in mission levels was the significant aspect of the move. However, my first level three mission proved to be rather more difficult than I had imagined, much more so than moving from level one to level two missions. I ended up returning to my level two agent of quality level 16 to run more missions to earn money to afford a battlecruiser to take on the level three mission.

The number of missions I ended up running afforded me not only a Drake but also an unanticipated consequence. After finally finishing my first level three mission I looked over the list of agents again. When I had previously looked I was only just acknowledged by level three agents, but after a week of heavy mission running the quality of level three agent that was willing to talk to me had jumped from -18 right up to a quality level of 3! It looks like future level three mission rewards will be even more profitable than the first.

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Tags: agents, drake, eve online, penny ibramovic

The Blockade

Having gained enough of a standing with the Caldari Navy to contact agents offering level three missions I accepted my first level three mission recently. I just as quickly warped out of my first level three mission, limping back to a station to repair extensive armour and hull damage, although I was keen not to abandon the mission if possible. Heading back to my high quality level two agent I started running missions back-to-back in an attempt to earn enough money to buy and equip a ship that could take on the third level mission successfully before it expired.

Trying to earn around 40,000,000 ISK within a week is a tall order, but with Penny Ibramovic's Salvaging Operations being able to earn a healthy amount in a short time I was optimistic if not confident in achieving my goal. With time getting short I wondered if a sly tactic might be successful, sniping from range one ship at a time, but this just led to my losing a Caracal and a couple of million ISK in the process. Even when I could finally afford my Drake I still needed to insure it, and that led to a race to the finish, with just hours to go before the third level mission expired. But I got there. I had a fully insured (after a momentary lapse of memory) and fitted Drake, ready to take on the mission properly.

My Drake, the Coiled Snake, was fitted with a shield booster, shield extender, four shield hardeners specific to the mission, and bristled with heavy launchers replete with Scourge heavy missiles. So confident was I in being able to complete the mission now that I kept my newly bought stock of heavy missiles in the cargo hold, over 2,000 of them. I considered that if I lost the ship losing the missiles too would be the least of my concern, and it also meant that I would be highly unlikely to run out of missiles during the mission. Feeling prepared, I jumped back to the mission's system and warped to the deadspace pocket to confront the hostile ships making up the blockade.

The rain of missiles began quickly, heavy and light missiles pounding against my shields with no respite between shocks. Both thermal and kinetic damage missiles were hitting me, but my kinetic and thermal active shield hardeners were doing their jobs, as my damage resistance with a pair of them active was around 80%. The constant barrage still took their toll on my shields, and with my own heavy missiles doing a surprisingly little amount of damage to the enemy I wasn't going to survive if I stayed in the deadspace pocket. I bravely fought on to take down at least one foe before warping back to a station to recharge my shields back to full and repair some small damage to my armour.

Taking down just that one opponent was terribly difficult! A Dire Pithum Mortifier, it had its shield booster running constantly so that even in the time between missile volleys from my Drake it had recovered some shield strength, and a full hit of six heavy missiles only put a slight dent in the shields. It took almost a full complement of thirty heavy missiles in all six launchers to destroy it. I had looked at the tactical readout on the hostile ships and realised that I wasn't up against cruisers and frigates but battlecruisers and destroyers. The worst I have encountered on level two missions is maybe a couple of cruisers accompanying some frigates, so this is a huge step up in difficulty. It doesn't help that my previous failed attempts to clear the blockade had called in reinforcements, so it seems I was fighting two waves at once.

With my shields and armour back at full strength, and all launchers reloaded, I warp back to the deadspace pocket. Oh, right, I forgot to recall my drones when I warped out in a rush, and they'd been busy making friends whilst I was away. Needless to say, they don't last for long and I watch as they explode as I lock-on to more targets. Missiles fly my way again, and this time I manage to take out a couple more targets before warping out. A third endeavour, and a few more targets are destroyed before making another tactical retreat. The fourth time I encounter the blockade, because their number is reduced by even a handful the constant rain of missiles has turned in to more of a drizzle, and my hardeners and booster are far more able to handle the smaller inflicted damage whilst I send my own missiles the enemy's way.

Another battlecruiser falls, and another, and my sole assault launcher is taking down the destroyers too. The fight not only becomes manageable, it seems I am going to be victorious! With a satisfying explosion the final ship in my overview is destroyed. I am left with plenty of time to start clearing up the salvage from the wrecks before handing in the mission as complete. Except my journal isn't indication success and... wait, another wave has warped in. Another nine battlecruisers and three destroyers have been alerted to the battle and are homing in on my location. I fire up my launchers again and have to make another temporary retreat to recharge my shields.

One thing I notice is that this second wave of ships is only firing kinetic damage missiles. Warping back in I only activate my kinetic shield hardeners, leaving the heat dissipation modules inactive, but for some reason I am taking an awful lot of damage when compared with earlier. Crap, it's a new ship and I'm not used to the new layouts, it turns out I have turned off the ballistic dampeners and the heat dissipation modules are the active ones. I rectify this and the damage taken is now actually reduced as expected. When I get back to a station I notice that the modules do not appear on the HUD in the order that I expect them to appear in relation to their fitting, and I had indeed initially turned off what should have been the correct modules. I'll have to look in to why the order may change between fitting station and HUD.

Having taken down two waves at once this third wave is not as problematic, although it is still a challenge. As if it isn't enough of a challenge, two more waves of battlecruisers and destroyers appear in sequence. Just when I think I've cleared the blockade more ships arrive, and the time it is taking me to destroy the battlecruisers I wonder if I'll ever end the mission. On top of that, the mission expiration time is getting ever nearer, with less than an hour left on the clock. With two battlecruisers and six destroyers left shooting me I finally manage to kill the leader of the rats and I am recalled to my agent to report my success. With all the wreckage, and its ISK-earning salvage, floating helpless in space I was keen to destroy the final few ships so that I could make a tidy profit.

The only problem with the plan to clear up the battlefield were the Despoiler destroyers. There are two in the deadspace pocket and they both are jamming my targeting systems. Normally this is a minor annoyance that can be tolerated, but at the moment it is a major frustration and impediment. By the time the jamming has worn off and I have locked-on to my target again the battlecruiser's shields have recharged all the damage my heavy missiles had previously done to them, so I was wasting all my missiles. On top of that, the destroyers are hardly affected by my heavy missiles and their own shields boosters were repairing the damage my single assault launcher was throwing at them. I need a new plan.

With only two battlecruisers in the pocket I jump back to where I had stationed my new Caracal, Red Panda. I fit kinetic shield hardeners and a full complement of assault launchers and head out to take on the destroyers. Concentrating fire on the destroyers and letting my shields suffer the Scourge missiles from the battlecruisers I am able to destroy the smaller craft. Once this is done I retrieve Coiled Snake and finish the battlecruisers. I am left with an battlefield empty of enemies at last. I am also left with about fifteen minutes before my mission expires!

I warp out and jump to my agent's system, before reporting in the completion of my mission. It was a big effort to prepare myself and complete the mission within the week, and I achieved it. I just hope that not all level three missions are as difficult or involved, as I quite enjoy doing things other than playing EVE Online.

Posted in Gaming | 3 Comments »
Tags: agents, caracal, deadspace, drake, eve online, penny ibramovic, salvage

In need of a detective

The packaging for the collected Columbo DVD box sets I bought recently leaves something to be desired. It looks like the individual series DVD box sets have merely had the internal cardboard sleeves repackaged in to a bigger external case. Not that there is anything wrong with this, because the important material is the shows themselves.

The outer case has a listing of all the series in the collected box set, series one to seven, and listings of the episodes in the individual series. The internal boxes have no explanatory graphics at all, so I only have the printing on the discs to work out what series and disc number I am watching. Luckily, all but one series has the series number printed on the disc, so by elimination I can work out the missing printed series number.

The episode listing for the first series has seven episodes, and the box set contains six discs for that series. This didn't prompt any questions until I had watched four episodes on two of the discs, leaving three episodes apparently spread over four discs. The case didn't list any extras for the series, or the collected box set for a whole, and it left me wondering what I would uncover on the seemingly 'extra' disc.

Watching Columbo has obviously perked up the detective in me, and I hit the internet to find the collected box set listed somewhere. I found from that simple investigation that the first series also includes two pilot films, Diagnosis: Murder and Ransom for a Dead Man, as extras. Of course, I could have simply watched the discs and found out, but I would have been none the wiser as to them being pilot feature-length episodes. Now I know, but don't call on me to solve a murder that can't be solved by a Google search.

Posted in Video | 1 Comment »
Tags: columbo, dvd, tv

The best laid plans of mice and men

Earlier I wrote that there was no way I was going to take my brand new Drake out of the hangar without getting it insured, and that was indeed the plan. It would have been the height of foolishness to pilot a brand new ship without having any means to replace it, even only to transfer it to a different station. I bought the Drake shortly after getting enough ISK to afford one, as it looked like I could save myself a million or two from buying early, spotting a bargain on the market, so I had to earn more ISK in my Caracal afterwards in order to afford the insurance.

My wallet bulks up enough to afford the platinum insurance package at last, so I head to the station where my Drake sits. I double-check my account balance, just to make sure, and I can indeed afford the best level of insurance. Satisfied with this, I head off to Jita to check out region pricing in The Forge to equip my new battlecruiser. ...without buying insurance before leaving the station. Yes, I can be that forgetful. I make a pitstop as soon as I realise and get the reassuring mail confirming the insurance package before leaving dock again.

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Tags: caracal, drake, eve online, jita, penny ibramovic, the forge

The platinum package, please

When buying insurance on a new ship, or renewing insurance on a current ship, it is often advised by many sources to get the platinum package. For a new space cadet advice is always welcome, but often the advice isn't fully explained and you are to take it as face value, from the voice of experience. This is all well and good, but can lead to learning lessons the hard way still.

The problem is that it may seem sufficient on face value to get the gold or silver insurance plan. It pays back at least the cost of the ship, and if you're running missions you'll probably have some spare modules kicking around the hanger, so why pay more? You can replace the ship and you won't need to pay for many modules to reequip it, and if you do they are generally pretty cheap at the low-end anyway. But there is a cost of buying a new ship that can be overlooked: the insurance itself.

I only fully realised the extra cost of insurance when buying my Drake. I have lost a few ships, mostly on the Kobayashi Maru simulator When Worlds Collide mission, and then foolishly threw my Caracal in to a nest of vipers, so there was no way I was going to take my brand new Drake out of the hangar without getting it insured. I couldn't afford the platinum package right away so I considered a cheaper plan, enough to cover the cost of the ship should the worst happen. But if I can't afford to insure it now, I won't be able to insure it with the insurance payout only covering the cost of the ship. This is why I've been busy running missions to make some quick ISK.

If you realise that you might lose a ship and need to replace it you will buy insurance. If you buy insurance you need to realise that the cost of a replacement ship is the cost of the ship plus the cost of the insurance. This combined cost is effectively the payout you are ideally looking for in the insurance plan, and this is why the platinum package is generally the best option and recommended. It costs more, but it pays for itself.

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Tags: caracal, drake, eve online, penny ibramovic