EVE: Marauders and bastion module

I was working on a long post about my goals for Rubicon and how I felt about all the new features.
Well forget about that, we crossed into Rubicon territories a long time ago.

Most of my Rubicon experience so far has been with marauders, running the gallente epic arc in a golem and now working the minmatar arc in a golem and vargur.



Battleships are noticably slower in warping across star systems. Cruise missiles on the other hand surprised me with their speed. Over 13 km/s, so in most cases the missile will hit the target before the next volley launches.

Since it's a cruise golem my dps is relatively low, 600 vs 580 for my hamgu. But I was suprised by how well it's damage applied to frigates and cruisers.


The shield amount repaired in the fitting screen does not adjust for the bastion module so you'd have to double that.

My vargur tells me it is capable of 850 dps or so, in practice it's only lightly more as the cruise golem, tank is much better though.

If you need to move more as a couple of kilometers between gates or onbjectives just use the MJD to jump in a triangle. Jump up or down and after a minute you can jump to your target.

Once I enter bastion mode I deploy a mobile tractor, speeding up the process of pulling in wrecks.
Eve though the bastion module more than doubles local tank I still found myself refitting for more tank.

After the first few missions I now also remember to turn my module red when I am almost done instead of giving a warp or approach command and wondering why it is taking so long.

EVE: a day in the hole.

Four anomalies and four signatures that need scanning down in our C1. Ten minutes later I have scanned down one relic site, one gas site and two wormholes. I leave the wormholes alone and hop into some ships to run the relic site.



Three containers contain nothing of value but the sleeper wrecks leave behind about 20m in loot and salvage. Most of the salvage is worthless though, melted nanoribbons is what everyone is after. I finally understand what wormhole loot is all about.

I start on the gas site next, it contains fullerite C-50 and C84, I mine a couple of cycles in a venture and realize the gas is pretty worthless. Maybe next time I will clear the site but for now I leave the gas alone. So much for my first venture into gas mining.

Eve is then rudely interrupted by some real life activities. When I get back I log in again and start on the three Perimeter Camps, 30 minutes later only wrecks remain.
While a catalyst salvages the three sites to collect 52m in salvage , 50m of which is in nanoribbons another character hops into a mining vessel and collects an ore hold full of Arkanor.

Somewhere in between I find time to refresh PI planets and pick up some goods while my FW alt cries itself to sleep again without seeing any action.

Lesson of the day: you can only queue 50 skills.

Link of the day

XKCD somehow triggers me into sharing. I blame his alt texts..



From his alt text: 'There is only one group that comes out of this looking smart: everyone who pirated Photoshop'

Bonus link: http://xkcd.com/792/

EVE: Wormhole life

Yesterday we had an inbound C2 wormhole with a lot of sites. Since the wormhole didn't appear to have any active occupants we decided to run some sites.
One site was completed together with a corp member, unfortunately he had to leave but afterwards I completed another three Perimeter Hangar sites by myself, collecting about 50m in loot and salvage for my time.



Ships posing in a relic site, ready to hack some containers.

Today our C1 offers very little in entertainment. A combat and relic site were quickly cleared but no new signatures spawned leaving only the high sec static available.



Wormhole acting as a lens amplifying sunlight.

Short post but I want to move on from the previous topic.
Pvp is fun and all but exploration, getting loot and iskies still manages to get priority.
Planet management is suffering from neglect and needs some attention also.

EVE: Somer Cashout

5 Billion isk in Somer bonus credit and 63m deposited 15 months ago converted into:

1 Golem
1 Basilisk
1 Rokh
1 Drake
Delivered in Jita.

1 Implant set +4
1 Golem
3 Plex
Converted to 3.272m isk

230m bonus credit from achievements turned into:
1 Plex, awaiting contract.



13 PLEX blinks total.

• 7 times with 1 ticket, 1 plex isk buyout.
• 2 times with 2 tickets, 1 plex isk buyout.
• 1 times with 3 tickets.
• 2 times with 4 tickets, awaiting contract.
• 1 time with 13 tickets, isk buyout

What are the odds?



In the past my win percentage was about 10 percent so my expectations were I would end up with something like the 4 ships contracted to me. What I did not expect was winning four plex blinks.

EVE: SOMER GTC Promotion

So SOMER is now offering 1 billion bonus isk. I took advantage of this offer and bought 4 GTC's through Somer and Markee Dragon.

Why? Because I would be stupid not to.

One month of account time costs € 12,95 a month if I use account management to directly pay CCP for blocks of 3 months. Eight months worth of account time costs me € 103,60.



If I buy 8 months worth of account time through CCP by buying PLEX it costs me € 127,94



This morning Markee Dragon offered four 60 day GTC cards at € 102,16 total.
This evening Markee Dragon offered four 60 day GTC cards at € 103,56 total.

The dollar price did not change as far as I can see so obviously SOMER has affected international financial markets and euro-dollar exchange rate! This RMT thing must be even bigger as we imagined.



Comparison:
€ 103,60 gets you 8 months of account time directly through CCP
€ 127,94 gets you 8 PLEX that I'll value at 4,8 billion ISK on the market.
€ 103,56 gets you 8 months of account time and 5 billion in SOMER credit.

Subscription time through third party resellers, depending on exchange rates is cheaper as directly through CCP.

End of story. The rest is whining about paypal service.

I have an issue with paypal though. I transferred € 105,- to my paypal balance to pay for the GTC codes. Paypal however does not allow me to pay Markeer in euros but forces me to pay in dollars at their exchange rate. Thus forcing another paypal money transfer because at their rate of 1 euro = 1,31171 dollar I had to pay € 106,70 to paypal.

When I called Paypal about the trouble I had paying Markee through their website they were very unhelpful and simply explained that Markee forced users to have a credit card associated with their paypal accounts. This was despite the fact that the error was after leaving the Markee site when already on the paypal site trying to verify payment.

When I sent Markee an (angry) email I received a reply within 10 minutes.
In answer to my questions/accusation they stated what paypal told me is not true and that it would make no sense for them to force customers to add a credit card to their account.
Their advice was that I should cleare my cache (no effect) and otherwise contact paypal again and perhaps ask for a supervisor. (not needed but I doubt paypal could have offered any serious help in identifying the issue).

The issue was that my paypal balance did not cover the Markee fee at paypal exhange rates so I was not offered the option to pay through my paypal account, instead I was forced to add a credit card to my paypal account since there'isn't one associated with my account.

Markee answered my question quickly and they offer better dollar-euro exchange rates as paypal does.