Wednesday, April 29, 2015

C4 for sale

As I previously mentioned, I have been in the process of wrapping up my occupancy of the C4 system, J213139, in which I have been living for the last year and a half.  It's been a good run.

J213139 is a great system for a medium sized wormhole corp.  It's got good PI, which is a great income source in wspace.  It's a pulsar system, meaning it gives a huge boost to shields and capacitor.  This makes running local sites a lot easier than normal if you are using a shield tank.  (We used several fleet comps over the years, finally settling on Rattlesnakes after they got their huge buff in summer '14.)  J213139 also has a great moon for siting a tower at, if you want to make a devilish tower trap, which I did.  I don't know, but I'd guess my tower is among the most prolific killers in wspace.  Finally, C4 systems are pretty good to hunt from, due to their dual statics.  With its C4 static, there are always at least six system within two jumps; usually there are considerably more due to incoming K162s.

Why am I leaving?  Well, in part due to gaining a second static in Hyperion.  This made it much harder to close up our system for running sites.  It would not be a problem for most corps to close an extra wormhole, but I have just a few guys.  It becomes tiresome, cutting into our already limited time in our corp nights.  On the upside, we did get access to C5s, and started running sites there.  Great ISK in that, much better than running C4s.

Another factor was my corp mates drifting away from the game.  It has been gradual, but by now I am the only one of us that is very active.  But that process started a year ago, and it did not cause any problem because I was still actively hunting every night.  I did not really realize it then, but as a side effect of hunting I was always finding enough good highsec connections reasonably close to my Jita alt, that I could keep my tower supplied all by myself.   However, over the past six months I have started to tire of hunting in wspace, so I started hunting less.  And that meant that I found fewer connections, making it hard to run in and out with supplies.  Then maintaining my tower (and hence occupancy of my system) became a chore.

When EVE becomes a chore, you should stop doing what you're doing.  It's a game and supposed to be fun.

Anyway, all that is just an explanation of why I am leaving.  I am not quitting the game, at least not now.  And therefore I am not about to abandon my tower and leave its contents for the vultures.  Rather I am trying to extract all the value from it, leaving with as much as I can.

I've been slowly moving stuff out for two months.  I took down and exported my reaction tower.  By this point my mates and I have flown out all the ships of substantial value, and we've moved out almost all of our considerable collection of crap other than a dwindling supply of PI goods.  So, we're ready to leave just about any time.  I am finishing up the PI in a few days.

If you are interested in a nice C4 system, please let me know via email, in or out of game.  (My gmail address is in the upper right of this blog.)  I want to sell, at minimum, the six POCOs we have constructed in the system.  These I will sell you at the build cost of their components.  The system location itself is free if you'll buy the POCOs.  I have a large Minmatar POS with a full complement of POS parts.  I'd be happy to sell that to you at cost.  In addition we have a Chimera and a Moros, currently with full parts on them.  These we will strip and insurance-fraud if I cannot sell them.  I will sell you either or both hulls at a cost halfway between their normal kspace value and their insurance fraud value.  The parts I will sell at Jita prices, since I can get them out.  Finally, we have an assortment of cheap ships (gas mining Ventures, a few rock miners that we barely used, Epithals and Iteron Vs).  These I'll also throw in for free if you buy the POCOs.

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Hat Trick

I have not been feeling like writing, and not playing as much EVE as I have in times past.  So that's what's up with the lack of posting.  I am in the process of winding down my occupancy of the C4 I am in.  The logistics have become unfun.

But enough of that.  The thing that broke through my writing torpor today was a nice little kill.  My system had many connecting wormholes, and I wanted to get my Jita alt in with a few last PI goods to pump into my pipeline.  My system had an unusually high number of connections: its normal static C4 and C5, but also three other C5s connecting via K162s.  Thus I had been scouring nearby systems for exits in my trusty Manticore.  I found only a single lowsec exit, not near to Jita.  Oh well.  I tried.  After that I had returned home, and was just sitting around in my system, watching a wormhole just in case someone came in.   I was in the room, playing other games.  But occasionally I'd come back to sit at EVE, tweak prices on my Jita alt, and with Von check a dscan, and look at the probe scanner to see if there were any new wormholes.

At one point I returned and dscanned and what's that?  Probes!  The guy came in a different wormhole, but I figured maybe I could still ambush him at my tower's decloak trap.  So I warped back there.  I landed on grid and barely had time to rotate my camera to face the bubble, when -- bingo! -- an Astero appeared in my trap.  Astero vs bomber in most places is a win for the Astero.  But any ship on grid with me at my tower, and I will win that fight.  Go time!  

I uncloaked, and got all systems on, locking the unlucky Astero up.  I even hit her with a round of torps before she was evaporated by my tower's guns.  Unluckily for her, her pod was cleanly in the bubble.  So I terminated her -- the tower won't do that -- and returned her to highsec the fast way.

It turns out she was pretty new in EVE, so I opened a chat, told her about tower traps and how to avoid them, and we had a nice little chat.  She had some questions about stealth bombers.  I hope I helped.  Anyway, one question was what can one hunt in a bomber in wspace?  I listed some ships, but as a part of that I refreshed my corp's killboard at zkillboard, to remind myself of what I had killed recently.

That's when I noticed that not only had my tower killed once today, it had killed three times!  (Others are this and this.)  Yow!  My tower is a better EVE player than I am this month.