One More Second

From flickr user Sean T Evans

I still have video/text to post about the last half of my Eve immersion week, but real-life is keeping me too busy for that just now, sorry. But I did have a really cool couple of hours in Eve last night, which seemed to have a different flavor than what I usually get up to.

It was a proper small gang rolling stream of fights; nothing unusual for most people in low-sec, but it was different from what I usually see. I usually log in around 9pm as our regular fleets get set up, and we form a fleet big enough to scare off smaller groups of one or two enemies. This time, though, I logged in at 6pm and there were only 2, 3 or 4 of us at a time, in cheap Tristan/Incursus fits to start off with and no logi. Later someone added a Maulus and Dramiel to the mix as this pesky Garmur pilot kept putting pressure on us to step up our game.

We ran several plexes in Deven, taking four or five fights across a couple of hours. I got some valuable PvP lessons (mostly by losing, of course) and watching the videos back (I record with Overwolf) and seeing where I could improve. In two of the three fights I lost I could see where I made a mistake that cost me my ship.

In one encounter with the pirate Garmur pilot, I was able to to warp out with a smidgeon of structure and armor, just as a war target Cruor joined us in the plex. In my haste to Just Get Out, I warped to a stargate which, of course, did not let me jump through. Unfortunately for me the Cruor had followed and he caught me as I tried to warp away again. I feebly engaged him and got in a few shots before going down. Luckily for me, the Garmur had also followed us, and he killed the Cruor, so I got on the kill mail :)
The other memorable fight was with the same Garmur, who came into our novice plex with 1 minute to go on timer. He fought the 2 or 3 of us, down to just me. With ONE SECOND left on the timer the rat respawns, halting the timer. I quickly decide that if I can just kill the rat I'll get the LP for the plex which more than makes up for the probable loss of my ship, so I send drones and guns after the rat but, under pressure, choose to chase the Garmur instead of closing on the rat. I don’t even notice there’s a few seconds where the Garmur loses his point on me, so I could warp out, so I neither escape nor kill the rat and claim the Tier 4 novice plex LP.

Having video of these events is very useful and I'd urge everyone to install Fraps or Overwolf or whatever works for you and review your fights.
Overall got good fights, 56000 LP (and with Gallente Starship datacores fetching almost 150K a piece, these are worth about 150M ISK!), got on 76M of kills (Cruor), lost 20M ISK of ships and at one point correctly executed a maneuver to web/scram the Garmur as he entered the plex. Had another of my fleetmates been in range too, we’d have double webbed and finished him, but he was able to get out of my web range...since I forgot to overheat my MWD. There's always something, isn't there?

On top of all that I got to have a nice chat with some corpmates I hadn't spoken to yet and do the usual discussion about Eve (making ISK, comparing fits etc) that is always enjoyable and educational.

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Trade/manufacturing is going steadily well. The arrival of Crius doesn't seem to have affected PI prices much...if anything they've gone up slightly, so I'm putting out small buy orders for m'lovely P3 inputs to make m'lovely P4 outputs again. I'm also buying faction ammo (for small charges buy around 300 ISK, sell in the high 500s) and have sold off most of my datacore stores. It's interesting that Gallente datacore prices are so high, considering we're in Tier 4 and the market should be flooded with these things by now. Selling doctrine fits to corpmates through contracts is a good steady business and I'm keeping my T1 rig production lines going flat out. My total assets across two characters is around 18B ISK now, which is starting to get comfortable :)