My Loot, Your Tears

"Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you." - Elwin Charles Roe, major league pitcher

Paul and I have never made any illusion that we are invincible, amazing players. His best line on this was, "We don't claim to be good PvPers. We just kill mission runners in hilarious ways." Like everyone else, we sometimes have a Really Bad Day. Yesterday was one of those days.

I moved to Ammold system, as Taru was getting used to my presence. I soon found a pair of mission runners running a Gone Berserk mission; an Abaddon and a Vargur. They brought in a third player in a Noctis, so I stole everything the Noctis tractored to himself, and dumped it into a jetcan. Near the end of the mission the Abaddon targets me and aligns to the station. I warp in my Orca to pick up the jet can and so I can swap into a gank ship if he fires.

With all the wrecks gone, he fires, and I jump into my Sacrilege. I had expected him to warp off, but I put a point on him and start firing. After a solid three minutes, I'm realizing that my single energy neut is not enough to break his tank. My alt looks at him with a ship scanner, and he has three Capacitor Control Circuit rigs and his midslots are full of cap rechargers.

It takes another ten minutes, but I manage to get my Orca back in range, and start adding more energy neutralizers to my ship, while also using my alt's ship scanner to monitor his capacitor level. I add a second neut, then a third, and finally a fourth. This severely gimps my DPS, and he still has enough capacitor recharge to pulse his armor repper to hold out against my DPS. I start trying to figure out how to get my Bhaalgorn out to me so I can swap into it.

While I'm planning, the Vargur pilot has returned and starts dropping ECM drones for the Abaddon. This is a fairly clever move, and I approve. I have to shoot the drones before he recalls them, and hope that the doesn't get a successful ECM cycle, breaking my lock.

Then, as I'm shooting the ECM drones once again:

Khalia Nestune, criminals are not welcome here!

What the hell? CONCORD arrives in scene and melts my Sacrilege. What just happened? My first assumption is that an aggression timer bug has happened, because of the passing of drones back and forth between the Vargur and the Abaddon. I even file a petition for this. Later I realize what actually happened: I shot one of the drones that the Vargur had dropped and not yet abandoned for the Abaddon. I had no aggression against the Vargur.

"But Khalia", you say, "didn't you get a pop-up warning about attacking a neutral?". I did not. Several days prior I had been attempting to suicide gank T3 ships as they undocked from station. I had disabled the warning, as the short delay could mean the difference between a hit and a miss due to warp.

I'm pretty ticked off at this point, so I dock all my characters. A few minutes later I realize that I could try to extend the aggression timer against the Abaddon by shooting the few wrecks that were left in the mission. So I board my Bhaalgorn (only ship I have in station), and undock.

The few people reading who have kept careful track are now screaming "Nooooooo!" at their computers. Because I had invoked CONCORD, I didn't have a regular aggression timer, I had a GCC. As soon as I undocked CONCORD spawned again and destroyed my billion ISK faction battleship. Fortunately I was able to get an alt to scoop the drops.

"But Khalia", you're asking, "didn't you see the bright red GCC timer in the upper left?". I didn't. I run three or more clients on two monitors, and client space is often at a premium. I had moved the chat window bar to the far left, over the aggression timer, system name, etc. I needed the extra space to work with the target indicators for all of the drones that I was targeting.

At this point I did the smart thing: I closed the client and went to read a book.

Losing the Sacrilege was annoying, but I was more upset because I thought CONCORD had spawned due to a bug. Losing the Bhaalgorn is painful. I have enough ISK to replace it several times over, but it's still a big expensive loss, and by my own carelessness.

What are the lessons to be learned here? First, don't turn off your CONCORD warning. Secondly, when you lose a ship, take a deep breath, stand up and walk around for a minute to clear your head. Mistakes are easier to make when you're upset. I also had some personal drama going on in real life, adding to my loss of perspective.

I'm not going to replace my Bhaalgorn immediately. To remind myself of this, I'm going to use a T1 battleship as my backup gank ship for a while. I have dozens of mission runner kills in my past with battlecruisers and T1 battleships, and I think it will be good to remember that an expensive tool is not always the best for the job.

You may recall the Longest Route contest I did a week or so ago.

To my pleasure, Planet Risk has done a nice two-part series with more interesting details about the Eve universe -Living On A Graph. It's a good read, particularly for math geeks like myself.

Last week I asked for the longest hisec and lowsec/nullsec routes, with a 25M cash prize for the winners of each.

The results:

Hisec - Jorus to Bashyam, 51 jumps, by Archentar Symonia. It is to be noted that two other equal length routes are Jorus to Chamemi and Jorus to Balanaz.

Lowsec/nullsec -

Edit: Due to misreading the posts, I incorrectly put Robotis' route of
BU-IU4 to 373Z-7 as the longest.

Archentar Symonia posted this route prior to Robotis; the correct length is actually 99 jumps (100 systems covered). Congrats to the double winner!

Thanks to all for playing!

This question has been asked frequently, so I made this tutorial.

Based on some conversation in The Ninja Alliance, I'm offering two rewards, of 25M ISK each, for the following:

1) The longest hisec to hisec route, by number of hops. This does not include hisec 'islands' which require 0.0 or losec to access. It also must be the best-path route - the same type the autopilot would use.

TL;DR - What's the longest path you can plot in the autopilot from hisec to hisec without crossing 0.0 or lowsec?

2) What is the longest possible autopilot route in the entire game? All areas/regions allowed (0.0, lowsec). Best path-route.

Just to be clear, this does not mean "put every system into the autopilot". It's the route the AP will generate itself when given system A start and system B end.

Post your answers here - starting system, ending system, number of jumps. At the end of 1 week - Tuesday 21 Dec - I'll email the winner to get their in-game character for the prize. Make sure you include a valid email address when you post.

I'm AFK from Eve, but I'm still paying attention to Eve-universe news. Which is why I jumped up and down with joy at this dev blog.

Short-range T2 ammo buff? SWEET!
Rocket buff? SWEET!
Faction ships on regular market (not contracts)? SWE... wait, that will kill contract scams for them.
Fighter-bomber lag reduction? Whatever. I'm sure those pilots are happy with it.

People are already bitching about the rocket buff not being enough. I partly agree - I would have liked to see the explosion velocity base at 250m/s instead of 150m/s. On the other hand, the reduced ROF and large capacity means less reloading and ammo requirements, and the explosion velocity bonus and damage increase make rockets *not* a completely lol-tastic option any more.

The T2 ammo buff seems aimed at reducing the penalties. I am mostly familiar with laser ammo, in this case Gleam. There was really no reason to use Gleam instead of Imperial Navy Multifrequency. Gleam gave a very tiny damage increase (4 dps on my Tachyon Laser II Apoc), but had less tracking, less range, and nearly doubles your signature radius. Dropping these penalties will at least make T2 short range ammo = faction ammo. Some other change to make them even more different would be nice.

Yes, another post today. Well.. it is 1:30 AM here... oh well.

I was just doing what I do occasionally to get a good laugh - reviewing old Jerks posts and their comments.

I came to my posted guide on corporate infiltration, and seriously laughed hard at two of the comments I found there:

A Thief:

Me and a friends joined one of the corps you listed and have already had 5 hulks plus fittings from the corps pos and now aim at taking a members deapspace fitted tengu and the corp also has an orca and an obelisk they leave sitting in the pos. this corp makes it easy they keep leaving ships sitting in the pos

This, my friends, is gold. The fact that this person took the name of a corp I picked  at random for meeting my bio outline on a possibly worthwhile target, and has successfully pulled off a heist based on my info is epic. I LOVE helping people. Whether it's helping newer players get some ISK, or teaching someone how to do what I do, I really enjoy it when I hear that I've done some good (from their point of view :P).

Paradox Federation Member:

It seems your post inspired our CEOs and got us raped till we bleed. Got everything including our ships, left us in 0.0 and left Alliance. Thank you mylootyourtears

Well. I R sorry 'bout that. Well, not really... My guide can be used two ways - to infiltrate a corp, and to prevent it. Both I like. Hearing that you've been a victim of it as a result of this guide... well... It's amusing, really. But at least you're not a sore loser about it. I enjoy those that cat go "lol, we goofed" and then better themselves. This is what makes EVE fun to play.

Anyway, I guess my point is that I do read all comments on every post, and make sure to respond to ones that stand out  - good or bad. As Khalia has quoted before - "if you're good at what you do, 95% of what you hear will be negative".

You may have noticed that My Loot, Your Tears has been rather quiet recently. Captain Charismatic is starting a new school semester, Khalia is working a 2nd-shift job, and Paul.... ok, Paul is just lazy.

Lacking any exciting ganks, POS destruction, or corporate infiltrations, I'm going to go public on a bug that has been discussed among the ninja salvaging community recently. For background information, read this Eve Forum thread.

The essence of this bug is the following: Aggression timers and damage counting is broken so that Concord may spawn and destroy someone in a way that appears to be 'at random'.

A simple reproduction of the bug is as follows:

1) Get an aggression timer by flipping a can, stealing from a wreck, etc.
2) The other party opens fire on you and does some damage
3) Warp off. Wait until the other party no longer has a timer on you (eg, can not shoot you any more)
4) Have a corp-mate destroy your ship.

Result: Concord will spawn and destroy the other party who opened fire on you. This behavior was independently tested and confirmed by me.

This appears to happen because damage to your ship is 'remembered' for some length of time, or until a session change. When your ship is destroyed, the server realizes the other guy did damage to you, but no longer has an aggression timer, and goes to WTFPWN him. This is also why you will sometimes see NPC damage listed on a killmail, even if that NPC is long dead by the time you start shooting the other player.

This can be avoided if the person who opened fire does a session change - docking up, changing systems, possibly changing ships. Also if the first party (the person who is fired upon), has a session change, this will not happen.

DISCLAIMER: My Loot Your Tears does not suggest or endorse that you make use of this behavior. CCP may consider this an exploit. If you use this behavior and get banned into the next century, it is not our problem.

However, if you're crazy enough to use this, and it results in tears, please send screenshots and/or logs to khalianestune@gmail.com so we can post it up here - these will be properly edited to hide identity.

We've received an overwhelming response from our readers with offline POSes to shoot - thank you! Keep them coming.

If you're going to send them to us, please include:

* Solar system, planet, moon
* Name of the corporation
* Type of tower
* Estimate of modules worth

We've had several mails of that say, "I've found a POS that's worth 700m, are you interested?". Yes, we're interested. Just send all the details in the first mail! =)

I got tired of opening Market and then looking up each POS module value, when trying to determine if a POS is worth shooting.

So I wrote this excel spreadsheet to do it for me.

Simply add the number of modules for each type into the 'Number' column and check the TOTAL row at the bottom. If faction modules are present, look them up and enter under 'All Other Mods'. I grouped many common module types together as prices are close to the same; and these prices are based on current Jita prices, lowest sell order.

Enjoy!