Never bend the knee!

 With everything packed and valuable stuff moved out to high sec, I'm about to engage my previous coalition brothers from CVA. I truly liked Provi and to be honest I'm not keen on leaving this place we've called our home for a long time, but when things take a turn for the worse I stick by my alliance (of sound mind) and my leadership's decisions and we don't give into pressure put on by our coalition leader CVA if it's not justified.

Let me  explain a bit. I'm in Of sound mind, a small alliance who are part of the CVA block. We don't rent any sov but we've been very actively defending our territory from reds and we hold on to our NRDS agreement. The tensions with one of the blue corps "Volt" has been rising for quite some time now. It started when one of their guys made a mistake of putting up a public jump freighter contract for 0 isk which our CEO picked up. We got accused of stealing that jump freighter when we refused to give it back for 0 isk because stupidity should not be rewarded. After all the JF got returned for a pretty low amount of isk because of all the drama this event was causing.

Things calmed down for a while but the resentment from Volt towards us was very obvious. Nothing significant happened and we tried to stay out of the Volt territory and just minding our own business, trying to defend Provi from reds and helping out new players and neuts entering the region.

Nothing really happened for a while, but yesterday we got reset and set KOS by CVA
supposedly for killing the Volt player 'Heinrich Hoss' who was reportedly killing not-kos neutrals and excessively smack talking in local. Because of this our FC refused to reimburse the player and a shit storm started building up.

The Volt player started to cry to his diplos and the whole situation got out of hand from that point on.
In my opinion, it should have ended there, with the diplo explaining the player about his behavior, but it didn't. Volt launched a full on diplo attack and started nagging to the CVA coalition leaders.

The fact that CoreBloodbrothers, one of Volt's main FC's, ran for CSM8 and did not get elected when   one of our members, Ali Aras did, plays probably also a part in this whole story. We refuse to bend our knee just because of some power trip and jealousy.

Yesterday we received a mail that we were set neutral and had 24hours to leave our sov to CVA and get the hell out. We responded that we would stay in our home system until it wasn't accessible to us anymore and that fire would be returned to anyone shooting at us. 12 hours later we got set to red and Kos.

We won't win this fight, but we won't bend the knee!

Adventures in Provi

I really like my new home in Providence, it can be quiet sometimes but you never know when something is right around the corner ready to strike.

A few days ago, the scenario was just that. 
Everything was nice and quiet and an excellent time to do a little ratting. 
While dropping off my loot in station a friend of the alliance logged into our teamspeak and asked for immediate reinforcements. As there were only 4 people logged in I responded asap. So I hopped into my Hurricane and got updated on the situation while jumping towards the destination not really knowing what to expect. My targets were 2 stranded PL carriers of the Nyx type who got attacked by a bunch of blue frigates and everyone was calling in reinforcements to take these two giants down before more PL ships could arrive. After a few minutes of blowing away we managed to get one of them into half armor when suddenly space turned red. Carriers as far as the eye could see dropping out of multiple cyno's slammed on us as I was hanging there in my cane being baffled. I did not even try to escape as I was just amazed about the event folding before my eyes. I kept on firing, crossing my fingers that we could still take one down before being obliterated but alas. Still amazed of the sight I just witnessed I moved my pod out and headed home feeling dazzled and excited about what just had happened not even caring about losing a battlecruiser. 

The Killmail

Slamming on the breaks

Patience is a virtue, especially when you play Eve online but it's a trait I don't possess. I'm trying really hard but I keep on stepping over the limit of my abilities and paying for it. It all started when I just moved to Providence. I had the idea that making huge amounts of isk would be fairly easy by ratting as I heard the value of the loot was significantly higher than in high sec. So after moving I set off to the closest asteroid belt in sight. I was in my hurricane battlecruiser which was very badly fit but I felt confident as they were just rats and I had just about 10 million skill points. Fittings was still something totally unknown to me. Having spend very little time and interest in it as I was mainly focussing on industry and trading and had very little experience with pvp and pve. I managed to take down a couple of sansha lords and cruisers with a quick repair station detour but no big loot to be found only a few million and it took me some time to take them out so it wasn't that profitable. After repeating the same scenario for a few belts I asked around for a pve fit which was way better in tanking the sansha but I still had no clue what modules I had fitted. A while later my interest wandered off to the signatures i could find as my new pve fit was able to tank the belt rats easily. Hoping for a better loot, I warped to zero to a forlorn hub as a regular hub didn't seem that profitable. No need to look anything up on the wiki as they were just rats and I should be able to complete them easily by now, no? 
Seconds after landing, my shiny newly fitted pve cane got obliterated to space dust. This vessel had been with me for over the past few months and with no recent losses I was left feeling shocked. Then a lot of weird things happened simultaneous in my head also known as brain farts. I was feeling the regret of losing a ship that had been with me for a long time, but I also realized I didn't have the pve fit saved, so I couldn't just fit another one without acknowledging my derp to my new corpmates. So how was I able to loot my wreck the fastest way possible? I did have a cloaky probe lying around with some tractor beams fitted and the rats were about 80km off the wreck so I figured I had a good chance to do it. Don't forget that all these thoughts happened in a few seconds and my mind was overflowing with bad ways of solving this issue. So seconds after undocking I was in my pod again and feeling dumb like I've never felt dumb before. What the hell had just happened? It was clear that this plan wasn't going to work from the start and still I went trough with it being overconfident again. After experiencing some lessons in being humble I still seem to forget them in the heat of the moment, only to face palm about my decisions later. 

So here I was, two ships lost and still not much isk made ratting. I decided to grind the asteroid belts until I had enough skills to pilot a battleship but after a few days of constant belt ratting I was suffering from the daily grind. I made a little profit selling the loot and salvage combined with the bounty payments but it still wasn't much and a lot of hard (and boring) work. I even took a break from the game for a few days, to get motivated again and to have some extra time to continue reading the Eve novels. When I started playing again, I tried the focus less on making isk and isk per hour and made the decision to variate between solo pve and pvp/group pve so I wouldn't get burned out this fast. I still had my eye on the anomalies and after a few significantly more fun days I was able to fly my own battleship. Yet again pushing my limits I warped in the Forsaken Hub but this time at a distance of 80km. Unsurprisingly by now I received another spanking, but managed to warp out in time. Not giving up just yet, I started going for the regular Hubs, but it still took a whole lot of time to clear and again the bounty and loot wasn't that amazing. But I kept grinding while skilling up my artillery and large weapons skills. Days and weeks went by and the shameful event with the Hurricane was storaged in the back of my head and I felt much more experienced and even started to understand a bit more about fittings. It became clear quite early on that I couldn't to much besides regular hubs on my own and even while in group doing sigs I had to warp in the latest as I was the most harmful one of the bunch. As I already mentioned I had been focussing mainly on trading and mining so my skills weren't up to date to say the least. Still I kept on pushing the limit, trying to do sigs with just two battleships resulting in various forced warp outs for repairs and trying to complete Forlorn hubs on my own which took me ages to complete. So I kept going for the regular hubs as I put my skills under review still not earning the amount of isk I was expecting. One particular quiet evening an alliance member asked for some backup because he scanned down a combat sig. I volunteered and we met up outside on the gate. It was a Sansha combat site which (I don't remember the exact name) and we read the wiki page about it before activating the first gate.  The wiki page said the site had the possibility to completed solo except for the last room so we figured we might as well go for it with just the two of us. 
A few minutes in, my wingman started losing shield quickly as all the rats focused their aggro on him. I was doing fairly well but as the damage intake wasn't equally divided my partner had warp out not much later. Soon I had all the aggro on me as I was the only one left and my tank broke pretty easily. Still my armor repper was keeping up and I didn't think about warping away yet. A few seconds later I saw the Sansha battleships coming into range and what happened next happened in a flash. My armor went down in an instant but it kept stuttering back up in bits and pieces so I figured I had enough time to recall my drones before I jumped back for repairs but forgetting to start alinging was my demise and my tempest was transformed into spacedust. 

Again, feeling to confident, thinking I'd have enough time got me killed... The isk I lost didn't have much of an impact on my wallet, but still I was pushing my limits to far forgetting about all the thing's I've learned. So finally I slammed on my brakes and changed my way of playing. Isk per hour wasn't my main focus anymore and I started my trading alts back up to make some profits without having to rat for hours on end. I try to do much more diverse things and as much group based ops as I can and trying to wait patiently for my skills to increase and I must say I had the feeling something felt off my shoulders and I didn't feel the pressure to make isk constantly and was having way more fun playing in general.