While I was listening to the Podded podcast (http://podded.libsyn.com) this morning, I learned about a rather interesting website being put on by Bin Juice, the EVE Stealth Project (http://www.hacksplat.com/main.html).

For those of you who listen to the Podded podcast, you will know that the phrase “Stealth Bomber” is often said with lots of love.  Bin Juice has created a website to chronocile his life as a Stealth Bomber pilot, from initial training to the engagements he will encounter.  It should be an interesting read and I looking forward to reading about his adventures.

Why am I mentioning this?  Well, the website is very well done and unfortunately for me, he does not have an RSS feed setup.  It’s a great site and I would hate for the EVE community to not be able to follow this project of Bin Juice’s, so, I am putting in a shameless plug for him.

So head on over to the EVE Stealth Project (http://www.hacksplat.com/main.html) and enjoy!!!

UPDATE 8-6-2009, He now has an active RSS feed for his site and it’s been added to the OPML download!!!

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No, it’s not what you think…well, perhaps, if you are that twisted.

I have been busy as a beaver with writing projects, enjoying summer movies, recovering from vacation and of course, playing EVE.

For those of you who have followed the ongoing conflict between The United and The Neo Spartans I will say that the fight goes on.  For the latest stats, you can view the stats on the campaign, Ding Ding! Round 2! I missed a good portion of the combat as I was on vacation, but I had a chance to engage a volley or two.

Yes, there is a new look here.  I went over to Podlogs (http://podlogs.com) and downloaded the ‘Angry Amarr’  theme (http://podlogs.com/themes/?preview_theme=Angry%20Amarr).  It’s a nice theme and I like how it looks.

OPML update, I have an update post going live this Friday listing the recent additions.  If you have not already done so, please send me your requests to be added to the OPML no later than downtime on this coming Thursday.  Hopefully I will receive enough responses so that I don’t have to update the post multiple time after it’s gone live.

Speaking of new blogs, I have a few words on the concerns the blogging community have expressed.  As with all things, the more you have is not always better.  Our community recently hit a major milestone with a record number of 535 blogs.  This is a major achievement, however, with all things in nature, there is a balance between the positive and negative.

With the larger number of blogs comes increased administration on the part of myself and Crazy Kinux with regards to the OPML and the EVE Blogroll.  It is a bittersweet thing since both of use love to read the diverse postings of our community.

With all this growth, we must admit that there will be some ‘dead loss’.  CCP and GameScribe had a major promotion going on to get people to blog about the community.  Many blogs were created in that push and to be honest, I see some of those blogs simply dieing out as the promotion ends.  Rest assured, the EVE Blogroll and the OPML download will be revised to reflect those inactive AND inaccessible blogs.

The OPML download has always had blogs listed that were no longer active for the sole purpose of providing a ‘historical’ listing of those who had contributed to the EVE Blogging Community.  So please do not be concerned if the OPML download count of blogs varies from CrazyKinux’s EVE Blogroll.  Many of these older inactive blogs had a lot of good content that any new blogger and member of the EVE Online gaming community may find benefit.

See you out there!!!

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So, what are some major milestones or achievements for the EVE Online player?  Depending on your play style, they can vary a lot.  Some people see mining their first million units of Veldspar as a wonderful goal.  Others see obtaining the skills to finally fit those large Tech II guns to their battleship as a major event.

One of my goals was to actually see a Titan in game and yes, die to it’s Doomsday weapon.  Saturday night, I finally achieved both and it was epic.

Some background.  We were on a “Drunk Op”.  Now, a ‘Drunk Op’, for those who do not understand what that means, is a roam, usually into 0.0 space where you are expecting to die a horrible death.  You are supposed to be drinking to the point of laughable intoxication along the roam, based on some rules that were agreed upon before the roam actually starts.

We are only a few jumps into 0.0 when out of nowhere, a Chimera lands on the gate.  Yes, a Caldari Carrier lands on at a point off the stargate, roughly 30 kilometers.  We are all in frigates, Tech I crusiers and a few heavy assault cruisers.  This is going to take a while.  We say what the heck and we lay into this poor soul.  To add insult to injury, a local chancer in system offers to assist with his falcon and neut Domi.

So, for the next 20 minutes, we are laying as much damage as we can put down.  We are working very hard, we have broken this guys tank and he is roughly sitting at 50 percent structure when someone calls out “Avatar on scan”.  I hit my scanner and sure enough, I see an Avatar.  A moment later, I actually see the Avatar, 60 kilometers from me.

AWESOME!!!  I have finally seen a Titan in game.  What luck?  Well, as luck would have it, we were not finished yet.  I see a pulse come from the Avatar.  No, they are not going to fire off the Doomsday weapon for a bunch of T1 ships, are they?  Well, before I can warp out, the whole screen lights up, I am able to warp my pod off and as I do, I see everyone who is still there instantly pop, except the Chimera, he survived.  It seems that the Avatar pilot only had the DD weapons skill trained to level 1, or else the Chimera would have fallen.  Funny, they brought a Titan to a gate to save a Carrier that was stuck at the same gate?  Got to salute the dedication between alliances in that area.

So, yes, I finally saw a Titan and was DD’ed,  http://www.nspta.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=64510.

We were all so giddy about the encounter, that one of our directors made a medal and awarded it to all those in our corp who were there.

So, what major milestone have you recently achieved in game?

Tags: 0.0 Roam, Avatar, Discussion, Doomsday, Drunk Op, Titan

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Last night was a lot of fun.  I logged on to find that all my corpies were engaged in a 80 on 80 man fig.  Cry Havoc and Noir jumped my corpies while they were on a POS bash.  So, what did we do?  We fought.  We stood our ground and when we lost ships, we went and got more ships.

The first kill was logged at 22:05 game time and the last kill was logged at 23:29.  Yup, over an hour of going at it.  In the end, there were heavy losses on both sides, a battle report from our killboard can be found at http://www.nspta.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=59268.  In a word, it was epic. This is why we play EVE, for the fights.  We have all learned a lot about how well our tactics are working and we have had a lot of fun.

So, who won the fight?  We all did.  Noir, Cry Havoc, Neo Spartans, Negative Ten.  We all had fun in an all out fight even with the gameplay crippling lag.  Lag.  Epic lag like you used to see on Sundays in Jita before Stackless I/O was deployed.  CCP has worked very hard to address the lag issue, but they are still a very long way away from having the issue resolved.  When a 80 person fleet engages another 80 man fleet, things should not simply come to a crawl.  Loss mails after the engagement kept coming for another hour after the fighting was over.  Epic lag still lives in EVE.  CCP, you still have a long way to go, keep working on it.

In the mean time, many thanks for the epically good fights and see you out there!!!!

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I have been a member of the Neo Spartans for almost 8 months now and I have to say, if you have not joined a player corporation yet, you are really missing out on a great part of the game.  We are a tight knit pirate corp, living in low sec and loving every minute of it.

So, how does a pirate corporation determine how successful they have become?  A killboard with billions up on billions of isk destroyed?  A kill count in the thousands?  A reputation for our piracy that strikes fear in those who cross out path?  Well, we have all these things.  We are successful and we have a lot of fun.  As of late, it seems that we have become victims of our success.  The small low sec pocket we live in has seen a dramatic drop in traffic as of late.  It’s no worry, we just go out on longer and longer roams into other low sec pockets or into 0.0.

So, we thought we were a successful pirate corp, but one thing had been missing.  We had not been the target of a mercenary corporation.  Well, at least, we HAD not been a target.

Noir/Duty has been contracted to “make violence upon us and do us great damage” .  Yes, we have been Yarring about and shivering enough timbers to get someone to pay mercenaries to attack us.  So, we are now a truly successful pirate corp, we have done enough damage to warrant the hiring of mercenaries to do someone else’s dirty work.

It’s that or Noir/Duty decided that they wanted some fun and engaged in a mutual contract to war dec us.  Either way, we have grown and gotten someone’s attention.

So, how has the fight been going?  It’s not been dull.

We engaged them one day and dealt them a good blow.

A few days later, there were just a few of us online and seeing that they only had 8 people in system, we thought we would have a go.  We stood at the “Hot Gates”, we engaged them and then saw their support log on.  We were out numbered 3 to 1 and we stood and fought to the last man. We did not run and hide, we did not back down and yes, as you don’t often read in a regaling of a PvP engagement, we did die, Neo Spartans to the end.

Now, contrary to what you would normally hear about some poor soul loosing to a larger force, you will not hear about this was a ‘blob’. This fight that we lost was not a blob.  It was simply a larger gang using login trap support engaging a smaller gang.  It’s the mercenary way, bring bigger guns.

Since that engagement, we have had our POS put into re-enforced and successfully defended it from a Noir second attack.  I say second attack as they brought a force to attack us again, but seeing that we were not outnumbered by Noir/Duty this time, they decided to withdraw rather than risk their contracts stats showing that they did not “do us great damage”.

Lame some would say.  Spending the time to try to bring a POS down and then not finish the job.  Well, no, it’s not lame.  It’s the nature of mercenary corps.  They will hit you when you are vulnerable, when you don’t have the resources to mount a proper defense.  Honestly, it’s their job to go for an easy kill.  It’s what they are being paid to do.  You can’t be upset with them for that.  We all hit our targets when we think we can win the fight, we all use the same numbers tactics against each other.  We frustrate them, they frustrate us.  As the saying goes, “Some days you are the pidgeon, other days you are the statue”.

Neo Spartans live for PvP, it’s what we do.  I must say thank you to whoever it was who hired Noir/Duty if they were in fact hired.  They have brought us some fun and challenges for us to meet.  It’s not been the normal day in the life of a pirate where everyone runs and hides from a fight.  It’s made us use those skills that we have not used in a while.  It’s also allowed us to grow as a corporation and expand our knowledge.

Yes, knowledge.  Whether you win or loose, you should be learning something new about PvP.  Your knowledge of tactics, planning and execution of plans should always be growing.  If you find that you are not learning something, then you are not engaging in challenging fights and it’s time to step it up a bit.

Noir/Duty, thank you for bringing the good fights.  We have enjoyed ourselves.

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