Ships & Modules

11) Off-grid boosting alts. Risk-free, mandatory and incredibly broken unbalanced.

Once again, a net boost to, err... "soloing" and small gang since many don't have the ability to drag around (typically clunky) command ships for bonuses, while the blobs they fight do.



I have literally no idea what you're saying here...?

I agree with most of Wildcat's points.
But alas, I solo 10 out of 5 times and often dont find it hard to get a fight. To get a fight I am confident I can win on the other hand is the hard part. However, I couldn't care less if I win or lose as long as it is fun and / or I learned something from the engagement.





Yes, I is Newbz, I know.

Woohoo! Shitposting nonsense from my phone!

The first part was answering your "why aren't more people making fun of them?" question.

The second goes directly against my first statement by making fun of someone who considers a Drake blob to be genuine PvP experience, when in fact it is a manifestation of the low risk, low skill (push F1 to get killmail) attitude prevalent amongst those "risk-averse" people whom we are discussing. To give more context, my question regarding his PvP experience was a reaction to him insisting that having a few cruisers and battlecruisers sitting among Hulks for hours in a lowsec mining op would provide adequate security/deterrence from gankers.

You may argue that it's a simple typo, but the fact that you don't even know which ship run the links that boosts the range of webs and points to the desired range (not scrams), does not make for a good platform to argue from. That you seem oblivious to the general cost-to-survivability application, the warpable distances and the mobility of the ships involved just add insults to injury. You're not being very credible.

Nearly 80km is achievable for anyone with simple bonus backing, tech II mods and a touch of heat. Not particularily expensive given the life expectancy of booster alts, nore especially SP-intensive either.



The thing is that you have the option to make people commit to a fight - by playing offensively. Doing that usually mean you are opening up yourself to risk, which will lead to more explosions and less stalemate.

Your idea of commitment seem to be that the smaller side should simply come to you in standing honourable formation. Feudalism centered around castle-warfare, deal with the walling-in and you deal with it's result of standing armies and boring sieges.

In today's climate (with people learning how to apply Recons and Logis to numbers) old nano would be as dead as new nano. An 11km/s Vaga caught by a 90% - 80km dual-web Rapier would be going 600-700m/s and be caught by any Drake as well. The importance of support over Drakes would be magnified but it wouldn't deal much with the numbers issue or blapping either way.

What was good with nano was the momentum and effect it had in it's time and day, creating balance of scales and making more people go out there to stir things up.

Today, most people just reminisce about the ideal of nano - just like Wildcat admittedly did with this thread.



Now, how about you focus on the real issue of waning existance of various smaller scales that i raised a page back?

Consider the "more actors" argument and give me some worthwhile commentary of that instead of spending that much time defusing some lopsided arguments you made up yourself to project on others.

I love how the blob managed to wry the concept of e-honor though. Clearly it's the ninjas who vie for bushido, surely not the feudal lords nore the rice-patty peasant that are you.

I'm not really sure how I went from solo roaming exclusively to being the lead counsel for 0.0 alliances, but I'll try to respond to your post.

I look at it from a historical perspective. You are essentially the Last Samurai. You have superior individual skill. I'm willing to accept that you will probably beat me in a "fair fight" (whatever the **** that is, cause I sure as hell don't believe in that). A good 0.0 alliance is a nation state. It has numbers and organization. How do you defeat numbers and organization? You don't. You die.

You die unless you can fight asymmetrically. In order to evolve, you have to become the equivalent of a special forces team - well-trained, mobile, and capable of calling on enormous amounts of firepower at the enemy's critical vulnerability. The problem is that there is nothing in Eve that you can destroy by surprise that constitutes an existential threat to a 0.0 alliance. No small roaming gang can pull off the Eve equivalent of 9/11. Hell, you can't even dent the production of one Tech moon without the full resources of a coalition. That's a problem, but hell if I know how to solve it.

The other problem is that nothing stops us from fighting in the same style. If CCP added objectives that small groups could accomplish, a good 0.0 alliance would still have more people who could be organized to accomplish those objectives more effectively. Let's say you got rid of POS timers - you'd just encourage global coalitions and even less political diversity. How would you propose to solve this?

As you mentioned, effective use of recons, logistics, and hotdropping started out as small, elite PvP. Now, with the maturity of Eve, many more people can do this. After five years of Eve, I have multiple accounts that can fly any subcapital ship with near perfect skills (and two who can fly supercaps). I'm not saying this to brag - but to point out that even I, a lowly rice-patty peasant, have enough Eve skill and RL skill to be as good as the best players I ever saw in 2008. In any ship. How would you propose to solve this?

In effect, in 2008, a good small gang was like a good football team. You had speedy wideouts, power backs, smart quarterbacks, and some linemen. A typical 0.0 alliance had lots of linemen, but few specialists and the coaches were terrible. Now, the 0.0 alliance still has lots of linemen, but they also have all the other specialists. And it seems to me that they are better organized than my initial foray into 0.0 (2007-2009, followed by an extended absence caused by training and a trip to the real sandbox).

A good 0.0 FC has the authority to say "We won't go out and fight unless 30% of the fleet is in logistics ships. Now go get in logistics ships or we don't go play." Four years ago that wouldn't have worked because not that many people trained for logistics or used them effectively. Hell, for that matter, 0.0 alliances had trouble getting everyone out there in homogenous fleets - you'd have people showing up in all kinds of random trash.

I don't actually disagree with you about the problems of scale. It's just that I no longer care about what I as an individual can accomplish in Eve. I've never been a fan of fighting for the sake of fighting. When I played FPS games, I was all about developing good strategies to dominate maps. Sure, we had individual skill, but everyone in my old FPS clan knew their role on each map. That's what being part of a good fleet in Eve is like - whether it has 10 pilots or 255. You can mock it all you like, just as I smile at your e-honor and desire to be an individual, but it's why I love this sandbox.

Oh, by the way... I'm not a rice-patty peasant. I'm a self-sufficient citizen soldier in an all-volunteer military. If I don't want to join up and press F1, I don't have to. But if I want to be more than some wandering ronin, petty criminal, or terrorist, it's the most appealing option to me.

Edit - and to answer the original OP. I'll say again: solo and small gang PvP is not dead. It's just harder to find fights you can win. And that is a fine thing by me.

Of course, if we can't be civil and have a sense of humor on these forums, what do we have left?

Sleep is for the weak, you noob. If you can't alarm clock a forum post, you'll never make it in 0.0.

Sure you can't "kill" a 0.0 Alliance or bring someone like Goons to their knees by doing quick hit and run tactics but that's not really the point. I'll give you an example by a said Nulli Secunda pilots jeer to us in local as we gave their little band the slip.

He said "At least we hold Sov." Now let that sink in for just a moment. Here is a null sec pilot saying to a bunch of small gang Pirates that he is somehow superior because his Alliance has a stamp on a star system.

This pretty much sums up the Null Sec mentality. I personally could care less about who owns what. What Tech moon they have, what little ice operation their pulling etc. Null sec politics to me is not only dull but probably one of the most self absorbed means to promote ones self I've seen.

Need further proof? Just read Eve news and the level of drool that just drips onto the floor from responses. At one point such things interested me. Probably back when Goons and BoB had their first slug fests which interested me greatly simply because bigger risk and a Single Titan loss was huge back then.

Now blobs have gotten bigger, supers are commonplace and it just feels cheapened. Point being is unless It's a juicy kill or I can't steal it and reap the spoils it interests me little except in the form of intel.

What does actually interest me like I stated earlier is the harassment part. Sure engaging a fleet 4 times our size and coming our unscathed while popping a few of their drone kiddies behind a computer may not in the long term effect them. But for the moment it angers them.

It's like poking a beehive (no pun intended) and hearing all the angry buzzing. That pretty much sums up what happens in local when you engage their "superior" null sec pilots and the tears are oh so sweet.

It is quite surprising to read something like this thread from a Alliance wich perfectet Covert Ops Hot Drops. ^^

QFT bar one part: I was there for the nanoera, have the t-shirt, it was after all a good friend and corpy who fitted and used the first nanophoon (and made a vid about it) and I can tell you that the nanoera was the only time in eve when a Vagabond was nothign special.

We had Phoons, Domis (and Machas oc) going 4-5-6k/s with bog tech II mods and a Vaga caught by L Neuts (and nos) was well and trully toasted....

Heck my NanoIshatar (with the 19km corp,-a Nos's') and Nanocurse would bbq a Vaga too in many cases...

There is nothing in eve (IMO) before or since like a corp of 50 people dismantling a 3000 people alliance and forcing it to disband in a couple of months...

Ummm this IS the memory lane thread right?