War, ATX and Minor Surgery

The past month has been full of some crazy times.  After departing Amarr Faction Warfare and joining Eclipse Navy, I pretty much had 3 days in the corp before we went to War in Delve.  After being somewhat bitter about large scale war from my previous nullsec experience, I have to admit that this deployment was really a lot of fun.  Sadly, all good things must come to an end and (after a massive 100+ frig/cruiser friendly FFA) we have been called back home.  Time to relearn what non-war life in nullsec is like now.

Hopefully this also means my posting will increase.  I have found it to be rather awkward when attempting to write posts during war time.  Either I'm not too sure if I should be posting information or something is already posted everywhere.  I risk either getting booted from the Alliance or posting yet another take on a subject that already has a lot of coverage.  This peace time should give me a chance to find my "groove"

I feel like I've found a really good crew to fly with.  All of the Eclipse Navy fellows have been very helpful and a blast to chat with on Mumble.  If any of my thousands of readers are looking for a null corp to join, we are currently accepting apps now that the war is over.  App forum can be found here: http://forums.eclipsenavy.ca/

ATX.....  I don't even know where to start.  This has been the first year I've found myself knowledgeable enough in Eve PvP to feel like I could not be lost the entire time.  I really surprised myself with how much I've learned over just the past year.  I was even comfortable enough to put money against HUN in the finals, knowing their VargTrain couldn't last forever and Verge of Collapse having some extremely impressive matches.

I'm going to do a breakdown of all the finals matches from my Super Not Pro Vision™!  Look forward to that in the next day or so, should be fun to write about.  I will say two things though.  1) I really expected Pandemic Legion to go all the way especially after taking out DarkSide., who took PL out of AT9.  2) I was really hoping to see Rote Kapelle make it further.  If you're going to go out, might as well be from the opponents that end up taking it all.

Actually, three things: 3) Anyone else got a bromance for WarGod?

Hopefully someone else remembers Rocco

And finally, this past Wednesday saw me on the operating table.  Tuesday around 9PM, my side started to hurt.  It kept getting worse and I wasn't able to sleep until around 5AM when my girlfriend ordered me into the car.  Fortunately she lives like half of a mile from a very good hospital.  We got to the ER, got a bed immediately and they pumped me full of pain killers that would make an angry rhino take a moment to REALLY enjoy this Pink Floyd track.  Like... really enjoy... maaan.

After a CAT scan that caused a crazy copper taste and some not nice prodding by the nurses, they informed me that my appendix wasn't looking too great and they were going to take it out.  The first thing the nurse asked after giving me the news was, "Didn't your doctor come to talk to you about all this?".  No, in fact he had not.  This would be a reoccurring theme for the day with 5 people asking me if I talked to my doctor before I actually talked to my doctor (which was about 2 minutes before my surgery).  Not a big deal but I thought it was funny.

So the past week has been me recovering from that whole mess.  Been doing well, just having issues getting to sleep still.  The nurses mentioned that it might take me two or so weeks to feel 100% like my surly self again so Eve will be taking a back seat until I can spare the extra mental bandwidth for it.

It did allow me to watch the final weekend of the Alliance Tournament unimpeded though, I guess that can be the ray of sunshine.

Moseyin' on Down That Dusty Trail

After somewhere around 2 years of loyal(ish) service to the Amarr Militia, I have departed from the Amarr Retribution and all of Faction Warfare for greener pastures.  That's not to say that Faction Warfare isn't green, it's just not the type of green that I'm looking for at the moment.  I had a lot of good times and a few not-so-good times but all good (and no-so-good) times must come to an end.  



So what caused this sudden jump out of Faction Warfare?  There are a number of things I have been frustrated with over the years.  I was really disappointed that when the entire revamp for FW came, NPCs were left untouched.  It's one of those obvious issues that players have been complaining about for years and not even a slight change but now those NPCs have to be dealt with for system control.  Minmatar wasted no time strapping some 10mn ABs onto frigs and speed tanking Amarr plexes.  And when a change finally does come for FW NPCs, they just remove all EWAR from them, allowing everyone to speed tank.  That single change was the one that made me say to myself, "Self, it's time you did something else."

And something else I did.  I went to freaking WAR!


My future, I head out to nullsec again.  My previous venture there was when Vitha was sub 10M SP, making it rather difficult to be effective at anything out there.  I have joined up with Eclipse Navy, a corp in the Get Off My Lawn alliance.  LAWN, as you may know, is a part of the CFC which has gone to war with just about everyone who currently lives in Delve.  I've bought a few ships in the area and I've been on a few roams now.  Still getting used to everything and slowly getting over the new corp jitters.  They seem like a bunch of good guy, it's been a nice fit so far.  


After I left Amarr Retribution I started moving all of my ships from lowsec/Minmatar stations that I have been locked out from for the past month or so.  Jesus do I have a lot of crap!!!  Everything from Frequency Crystals that have had a single shot put through them to corpses I have collected are taking up space but, more importantly, taking up stack counts.  I quickly learned that Eve has a 200 stack count max on all courier contracts, making my two contracts blow up to four because of this "feature (there are a lot of "features" in Eve).  I cut that down to three contracts, deciding I don't need THAT many small non-faction laser crystals.  People need to stop using those on pvp ships I shoot at.


Seriously, that's pretty lame.  It would be nice to either get rid of that stack count or allow damaged crystals to have their own stack system.  I know some will mention that you can add items to a container and that will count as one stack.  While that works A) I know a good number of freight services frown upon the use of containers and B) when a system is that easy to circumvent, why bother having it at all?  The 200 number just seems a little arbitrary to me in the day and age of Eve that we live in.