The past few weeks from Christmas have been busy for me, but i'm throwing up a large update now.

If you're following the "50 Deaths" i'm now at 31 (I would've posted at 30, but 31st happened straight after the 30th). The last 3 deaths were pretty annoyin

g with only 1 kill between all of them. But such is the way.

The first of the 3 was the Omen. I'd left this back in Aldali when I made the move to join The Tuskers, and finally got round to bringing it to Hevrice, thi

s meant 23 jumps through high-sec in a pod followed by 40 jumps through low-sec in the Omen. To lose it not long after I got back. To a Hurricane that we were trying to catch. I landed on it in a belt, but I was fitted with a disruptor and it quickly got out of range then killed me in 3 volleys while I was aligning to get out.

Next up was the Punisher, it was set up to tank, with 10

k EHP and 61DPS, neut, scram and web. This thing would kill close range frigates without too much hassle. But i've been a bit broke lately, so I took it missioning with the local NPC corporation and got caught in a faction warfare blob when I was returning to Hevrice on my way back, and then podded. It lasted a good amount of time considering how many people shot me, but it was still lost.

Then the Rifter, I was back in station, with no clone and a nearly fitted rifter. I bought the last 3 modules to finish fitting it, took it 2 jumps away to buy a new clone, and then lost it to another gatecamp on the way back. Which meant I then had no money or ship. Which was fun.

Now i'm back in a Punisher funded by my friend Comrade Bliss who loaned me 10mil to get a properly fitted one, and i'm doing missions again to get some sort of cash flow. Not long until I get access to the Level 2 agents in the area, and there's about 10 of them which is good. But it's ruining my sec status, which is annoying me no end...

I figured i'd throw up my skills chart and start doing this every now and then to see where my progress is going, a couple of other bloggers do this and it's interesting to see where skills are going and which sections are left neglected. So here's mine, at around 8.2mil SP:

I've got around 2mil SP each in Spaceship Command and Gunnery. I can fly all 4 race's Frigates, Minmatar and Amarr Assault Frigs, Amarr Cruisers and Battlecruisers, And all 4 race's Destroyers at the moment. And most of my Gunnery skills are in Autocannons, with lasers not far behind. Right now i'm getting my armour compensation skills up, then i'm going to finish up small lasers and start working on Drones and Cruiser skills. My Frigate skills are pretty much complete, and any more time after what i've got planned will just be a long wait for not much more extra bonus, so learning how to fly bigger ships properly is a much higher priority.

In other news i'm nearly at 200 kills total, and in my "50 deaths" i'm up to 141:31 Kill:Death. At 20 deaths I was at 5:1 kill:death ratio, and that's gone down slightly lately, hopefully it'll go back up soon.

Also - check out these wallpapers - they're made by a russian in Goonswarm, i've currently got the Avatar Mushrooms as my background. Here's the link to their blog, I constantly get issues connecting to it, which is why I linked somewhere else that has them.

And here is cool video showing how big the ships in EVE would actually be in real life. It's run in the Half-Life Garrys mod, so it uses Half-Life models for scale, but don't treat it as a comparison between EVE and another game, just think of the NPC model used as 6 foot tall(2 meters) and you'll get an idea of how big the ships are.

That's all for now, so until next post, Fly Safe.

- Noir Avlaa.

And... 20!

I've held off posting until I had 20 deaths on the clock. And now I have them! At the moment i'm at 100 kills to 20 deaths, so a 5:1 kill:death ratio, which isn't too bad I don't think. The Tuskers have had a massive contributing effect to my kills with my wolf getting 28 kills to it's name before finally popping. So then...

Highlights:-

- Affording a Wolf, then losing it. These ships are loads of fun, and definately worth the expense. Next time I can afford to fit one i'm getting another.

- Flying a Thrasher. Even though I only got a few kills before losing both of these, they had no tank at all and full gank. So when they did get targetted, they pretty much died. But still loads of fun to fly, might try a gank coercer next.

- Fleet fights with the Tuskers. Alot of these fights are basically just jump in and hope, which suits me perfectly. I've lost a couple of ships from baits or "blobs" going wrong and having another fleet land on top of us, but we always took a couple of them with us.

- Watching Ka Jolo get primaried, just because it's Ka Jolo. They even brought a Thanatos to make sure he died.

- Commanding a Fleet for the first time. I've never FC'ed before being in The Tuskers, and now i've done it twice. It's a good experience getting a kill as an FC, though i've got a few people sent to their deaths, but it's a learning curve and there's only 1 way to learn.

OUCH

Alexia Morgan has started her Open University for Celestial Hardship (OUCH) and has quite a few members learning the ways of null-sec now. But she needs teachers! Check out the following recruitment posts and see if you can help out! Recruitment for students has been put on hold until January because there's not enough teachers to meet the demand!

Alexia's Blog Post.

Alexia's EVE-O Recruitment thread.

Tuskers Bloggers

Turns out there's a few people in The Tuskers who blog. Go check them out:-

Onslaughts of an Outlaw - Jaxley

The Bald Buccaneer - Bourreau

Do I Dream of Electric Sheep - Rael Valen

Life Among Pirates. The Romance and the Reality - Romeo Blakstorm

Rifter Drifter - Wensley

Your Money or Your Life! - Tuskers CEO Ka Jolo

Also there's The Tuskers Public Relations blog with posts from a few Tuskers.

I'll do a proper post at some point. Possibly in the new year, who knows? Until then...

Fly Safe.

- Noir Avlaa.

100!

I've hit 100 kills in EVE now! Hurrah! About a day after Kirith Darkblade hit his 100 as well! Here's the lucky guy who gave me the 100th kill, thanks!

In other news, Alexia Morgan has started the Open University of Celestial Hardship, or OUCH for short. I went on about this in my last blog post, and now that it's up i've added my help and will do so when possible. Read up on it, help out, it's a worthy undertaking and by no means will it be easy for Alexia. So good luck!

So recently I've been killing a lot more than I've been losing. The last loss on the board was a Rifter with 16 kills under it's name, now I'm flying a wolf with another 17 so far, but you won't notice that on the kill:death ratio as I only update it when I lose a ship. I've got a lot more kills now and I've got the Tuskers to thank for it. I did a bit of fleet warfare before but never like in a pirate corp, and it's a lot of fun in here doing fleets. This is definitely the move I should have made a long time ago because it's definitely worth it.

So far I've earned a nice ransom of a POS thanks to another blogger Cyberin, over at Hands Off, My Loots, who joined the Tuskers recently as well. I've been in a fleet with 00sage00, and I've helped kill Spectre3353 who kept coming back for funsies! I'm at 34 kills so far this week, and I'm loving every minute of it.

So until I lose my 20th ship...

Fly Safe.

- Noir Avlaa.

OUCH

Fellow blogger Alexia Morgen from Punishment is putting together a new group in EVE called "OUCH", the Open University of Celestial Hardship. The point of it will be to train new players how to survive in null-sec and low-sec, by operating completely in null sec.

Unlike the EVE-U this means getting involved in fleets, roams, alliances at a starter level and learning the hard and fast rules of EVE. And I fully support it. The EVE-U is based in high-sec, and thus the members will rarely be in danger, where in OUCH the player always has the potential for danger, and so will learn hard lessons pretty early on in the game when the loss isn't that much to worry about.

I learned the hard way. I started EVE, read the Piracy 101 guide, strapped a missile launcher, scram and web to my Inquisitor and went straight out to low-sec space to forge a name for myself, and I would have loved to have some support with me to teach me the works, even if I do solo most the time. I've learned my lessons the hard way like most people in EVE, and as such i've learned them first time usually. The element of danger adds alot to a learning curve, if you don't do A then you'll die. If you forget about B then you'll die. etc.

I agree there should be a some way of learning if not in a safe environment, then in a structured environment. Hopefully people will join the corp and will die. But dying is a lesson that must be learned at some point, and I hope it's learned first time how to avoid being caught like that again, or what targets to go for with certain ships and such like. How to scan down ships and see if a ship is scanning you down will be immensely valuable knowledge to learn from the beginning, learning to warp immediately if your ship is destroyed to avoid being podded. Learning how to fit an effective PVP ship and what ships are used for solo, support, RR, tanking active or passive/buffer, the list goes on.

EVE is a hard game outside of Empire space, and players need to know how to survive, and the best way to learn is to actually try.

I'm going to wish Alexia good luck on this venture, as it's one of the better enterprises any capsuleer can undertake, sharing knowledge without expecting a reward for the services. I'm going to try to make donations every now and then to help this, and hope others will do the same. Now I just need to figure out where to make any donations :D

Fly Safe.

- Noir Avlaa.

10 losses closer and a new environment.

I've lost 10 ships now in my "50 losses" campaign. Honestly I thought I'd lose them faster, and the first 4 ships went down with only 1 kill. So in the next 6 ships I've got 23 kills, which I think isn't too shabby. So then, here's the highs and lows so far:-

The fail fit Abaddon. - Yes. That's right. Quad tank. Don't know how it didn't win. We found this sitting at 0 in a belt, and after taking out it's drones I just kept it pointed while backup arrived. We thought it might be bait. Turns out it was just fail.

The hide-and-seek Blackbird. - We must have spent the better part of 2 hours chasing this, and when we finally caught it, it jammed 1 of us and warped out from the other point with it's stab as a third was warping in. So a couple of hours later it turns up again with a small fleet. Well there was a couple more of us on at the time, and we just thought what the hell, let's get him this time. I only lost a cheap punisher on that one, and damn it was worth it :D

The newb Maller. - This guy was 16 days old when I found him ratting in a belt, so it took me all of 0.001 of a second to decide to go for it in my Rifter. I forgot that Maller's could be a pain to take down in a frigate. Nothing to do with the damage, he didn't hit me once. But it took 3 reloads and over 10 minutes to finally kill him, and I was even trying to ransom him at the same time, for less than the market value of his ship, but hey, maybe he likes spending more than he could. Shame I couldn't catch his pod as well.

The suicide Punisher. - I lost this ship during a roam with 3 others. We'd scanned a megathron down to a belt, and were debating whether to engage or not. We knew it was most likely going to be bait considering where we were, and we knew we'd most likely die. But no one was in anything particularly hard to replace, and we'd not found anything after a couple of hours roaming. So hey, why not see if we can take it down before his support takes us down? So 4 frigates aligned, warped and started unloading into him. We got him into armor when the support arrived, the first of us popped when we had him down to about 60%, another popped very quickly after. I think we managed to get it to about 30% armour before we were all popped, laughing all the way back to Aldali.

That was one of the most fun engagements I've ever had. We all knew it was suicide, we all knew that we could get podded, we knew that there was a very small chance of actually popping it, yet we didn't care and just went straight in. 100% pure fun, and we even got the "gf"s over local :D

The mistake. - This loss was the stupidest mistake I've ever done. I entered the system and saw a neutral Merlin sitting 10km from me. So I moved and sat on the gate. Me being flashy red and him not meant I had to try and get him to attack, so I targeted and set up an orbit without my afterburner on, don't want to give away too much do I? Well he warped away, then returned a minute later and decided to engage. It was a pretty even fight for the most part. He got through my shields quickly enough, but was having trouble with my armour, I had trouble with his shields, but his armour was starting to go quickly. Then a blue exited warp and started shooting me.

I was quite confused now, so I opened up a conversation with the pilot and asked what he was doing. Turns out he was with the Merlin, and that apparently I wasn't blue to him, turns out I hadn't been set blue to his alliance yet which I thought I had. But after a short conversation we all disengaged and apologised, and straight afterwards a myrmidon exited warp. Instead of aligning and warping I just brought up his pilot info. What I was thinking I don't know, I mean, I had no shield, my cap was low after the fight and my armour was only half repaired. So yeah, the myrmidon pretty quickly killed me. And I can't even say there was nothing I could do. There's always something I could have done, such as not just acted like a fish in a barrel. That's the worst mistake I've done so far, but hey, every mistake is an opportunity to learn.

The Tuskers.

I decided it was about time to join another corp again, and after searching around the forums, reading various blogs and asking a few people, I applied to join The Tuskers. The way they operate looks exactly like how I operate, and a look on their kill board shows a lot of them use Frigates, Cruisers and Battlecruisers. So there's no massive 0.0 capital fleets to worry about, no BS required roams to trouble my skill points with, and a lot of kills to be had.

Well I've been accepted, and given a proper welcome from Wensley of Rifter Drifter in a Dramiel, who promptly relieved me of my Rifter shortly after arriving in system to hand in my application. Was a good fight that don't think I could have won, I got him to 50% armour when I popped, and a Ferox finished him off shortly after, so I still got a final kill mail from Hartcraft's Revenge.

But that's got to be a pretty good welcome for a pirate corporation, kinda sets the mood for things to come :D I'm just waiting on my stasis period after leaving my own corp to end so I can officially be part of The Tuskers now, I think a lot of fun times are coming :D

That's all for now.

Fly Safe.

- Noir Avlaa.