Content, Content, Content – Page 7 – The Purple-Father Muses

Winter Expansion announcement – Watch with Mangala

Sep 222013

Thursday 26th September 2013 is the day that CCP will publicly announce details of the next EVE Online expansion. This will be live streamed on the CCP Twitch channel from 20.00 UTC, hosted by the excellent CCP Guard alongside the EVE Development team.

While you can watch this alone, discuss it on the forums, or even brave the stream chat channel, I invite you to join me on the RvB Ganked Mumble on the day to talk about the expansion & its features as they are announced by CCP. I shall be online from 19.00 UTC for those interested in watching the announcement with me. Additionally for those unable to use a mic, please join the RvB Ganked channel ingame to discuss the expansion at the same time.

I am hoping any available members of the CSM will be there as well.

I’ll see you all on Thursday.

Ganked 100, Capitals & You

EVE, Fcing, Ganked, RVB 38 Responses »

Sep 062013

Attentive Ganked folks will have noticed a small mention about Ganked 100 on the Autumn/Winter schedule and started wondering, this post is mostly for you guys; However, the rest of you should read along as well, as this may interest you.

Long story short is that in working on the schedule for the next few months I realised we would reach Ganked 100 in January 2014 – the 18th to be precise – and it got me thinking about making it something special. And somehow I decided it would feature capital ships – preferably carriers & dreadnaughts. Initially Ganked 100 was to be a roam, although I – and others (thanks Daneel!) – soon pooh-poohed that as it is A LOT of organisation, even for someone as anal as me. After a wee chat with Daneel – who also made a handy post on the idea over on Failheap – it is now going to be similar to the Flight of a Thousand Rifters event that we crashed back in May – see my write up of Ganked 67 – but instead of a solo Supercarrier taking part, it will hopefully be large number of carriers & dreadnaughts undocking in some random low-sec system (incursion locked or not…) and inviting the world to “COME AT US BRO”, while other Ganked attendee’s attempt to stop them/whore the capitals/shoot blinkies etc.

Which is were YOU guys come in.

If you would be willing to take part in this, then say so in the comments along with what you are or could be capable of fielding as far as Capital Ships are concerned. If you have ideas on the subject, wish to maybe help out with logistics nearer the time, basically anything related to this event, say so in the comments. Any pertinent ideas that do appear from comments, will be added in to this post.

I know I am over 4 months early for this, but an event with the potential that this has to escalate beyond our wildest dreams/nightmares demands it don’t you think?

CSM 8 & CCP Summer Summit

CSM8, EVE No Responses »

Sep 052013

August 28th through 30th saw the CSM8 Summer Summit with CCP.

7 members of CSM8 got to attend in person: Trebor Daehdoow, Ripard Teg, Ali Aras, Mynnna, Mike Azariah, James Arget & Korvin, with the rest of us being able to digitally attend thanks to the magic of technology. Before I go on it has to be said that Chitsa Jason was easily digital man of the summit, he was there for everything & even webcammed in too, unlike the rest of us who are shy and retiring.

Over the 3 days of the summit we took part in around 20 sessions with a VERY large number of teams from inside of CCP – see a rough line up here:

Overall it is my opinion that the sessions themselves were very positive with just one or two exceptions, however even those finished on a good note, thanks in part to fellow CSM members really plugging our role as stakeholders.

The standout sessions for me were as follows:

Economy: EyjoG was as ever well prepared with a serious amount of graph porn related to numerous financial statistics, all of which kept the small time financier in my head happy;
Art: What can I say I am a sucker for pretty pictures, and the Art team did not fail to deliver, including new looks for various in game items. I would go further, but I could be breaking my NDA and Dolan will hurt me if I do that;
5-0 sessions: 5-0 is the team of the moment at CCP – helps when you feature the likes of CCP Fozzie – and what they showed the CSM was very well received, and I know you all will enjoy the content to come in Winter & beyond from this team as much as we enjoyed hearing about it;
UI: Spoke with reps from several groups for this session, and I came away very much looking forward to what the connected teams have to offer in the near future.

Every session that I digitally attended – and there was a couple I was not present for due to real life getting in the way – were just as good as the above, but the standouts were the ones that really made ME sit up & take notice for my own reasons. Each of us on the CSM had sessions like that, for examples check Ripard Teg’s daily writeups over on his blog.

All in all it was an excellent Summit, even with a few technical niggles for those digitally attending – bad sound on day one & unable to be heard for half of day three – and I do look forward to being on the in-room version of this picture during the Winter:

As for the minutes, we have started the task of working on those this week, now that we have videos of the sessions available. We will be doing a two paragraph summary of each session, as well as more in-depth minutes for those people who REALLY want to read every word said. I cannot say with any certainty when these will be ready, just that with Ali shepherding us around, they will be ready sooner rather than later. And to the members of previous CSM’s who I may have offended when it came to comments on how long the minutes took to be publicised: I feel your pain now, I am sorry!

Ganked Prizes & Notes on other things

Fail, Fcing, Ganked, RVB 14 Responses »

Aug 282013

Well what an interesting weekend we had guys, with Putting the BANS back together & Oh Look a Bank Holiday! both happening and what not. Thanks to everyone who attended, put up with whatever the hell happened, and generally dealt with a severely annoyed Mangala. We still managed around 200 kills between both roams over the weekend, so not bad considering that Saturday may have seen one of our more expensive whelps right at the start of the night!!! Although on reflection the tactics used by certain members of the Proviblock just shows that they believed themselves unable to beat us any other way! The Sunday session was interesting in that we found things that make Talwars not work, making our jobs as tackle that much harder. Anyway, the fights with BNI, PL & EUNI were pretty good so made up for the stuff with BALEX for sure.

As ever we had Somerblink sponsoring some prices, and additionally several people provided other items to be awarded over the weekend.

SomerBlink sponsored prizes went to:

Vexor Navy Issue: Lotta Vageena, Ravingone, Carathas, Ragnar Alestorm, Mandelbrot Fracture
Brutix Navy Issue: Lemming Malgalad, Captain Jonathen Archer
Dominix Navy Issue: Atlas Jaynar

Blink will get these to you as soon as possible.

Other prizes provided last minute went to:

Quake BPC x2: Abstemious & Waitangi

Sleipnir: Rebbeca Neresh

Machariel: Gyouzac

I will have these up on contract shortly.

In other news, I am currently working with our guest FC’s to fill in the Autumn & Winter Schedule for Ganked. We have our spreadsheet for this, but I have copied the contents to a publicly viewable one here. So keep an eye on that future dates, as well as the mailing list “RvB Ganked”. And yes, you read Ganked 100 right. It says Caps. If you have suggestions for a theme, pop them in the comments to this article, and maybe a Guest FC – or even little old me – will take it & run with it.

Finally, I would just like to talk about what makes Ganked fun for ME. Mostly its the feeling of 150+ pilots from varying walks of eve life coming together to have a laugh & kill some stuff along the way, with no real attention to ingame politics & allegiances. However it may seem to some that I have not been enjoying this as much lately, and I will say I agree.

And here is why:

I think that at times comms has been too unruly, yes its fine to speak up when we are free burning or waiting on a scout to find “something”, but try not to do it when action is on the near horizon, its a bad thing at that point. The same goes for singing, although Cal spends so much time working on his lyrics he can be forgiven (PS Anyone got those recorded?!). If you cant hold your beer enough to stay quiet at the right times guys, maybe you should drink girlie drinks.

Lemmings. Its getting very old now. Align doesn’t equal warp, hold does not equal jump, Primaries are not optional. Seriously guys, you can spook targets by warping/jumping too soon, you can prevent a gorgeous kill by splitting your deeps too soon etc etc. Fun can still be had by playing your A game you know.

Sebos. “Its Ganked” is NO BLOODY EXCUSE to feel that fitting more than a single sebo to something cruiser hull and above is fine. You gimp your fit, and you gimp your fleet in doing so. When fitting SEBO’s think about it first. As for you frig guys that do it, unless you are a scouting inty, do not bother. Arty thrashers/Talwars, its expected you fit them!!! While saying this, just note that users of extraneous sebos will be excluded from winning Blink prizes in the future, not that they win much anyway ;)

So yeah, I have been feeling a little burnout from things like that above, lets see if we can still enjoy Autumn & Winter, but without as much of those as the Summer held.

Going forward lets have a stunning few months in the lead up to Ganked 100!! I hope to see many of you there.

RvB Presents: 100,000 Airplanes

RVB No Responses »

Aug 232013

On September 25th 2013, RvB turns 4 years old.

And as usual we will be having several events to mark our birthday, the final of which is also the largest & most spectacular of them all!

Yes.

You read that right.

On October 26th 100,000 frigates will be set loose for RvB members to pilot & explode in what is going to be our largest Frigate Free For All to date.

I know many are wondering how to get in on this action, and to you I say simply join RvB prior to October 26th and you’ll be all set to take part in our largest event ever; In fact possibly EVE’s largest FFA ever.

If anyone wishes to donate, please contact Northern Misfit or Del Delvechio regarding any donations. Note that ships, modules & even offers of free time to help fit ships are all appreciated. Right now our dedicated fitters have set up over 40,000 ships for this event with 5 weeks left to go!

Thanks must go out to Sindel Pellion of The Angel Project for a sizeable donation to the cause, as well as to RvB members like Dracoth Simertet, Sylacx, Ringusworm for their donations of ships & prizes for the event, as well as to our many, many ship fitters for all the time they have given up to ensure this goes with a huge bang!

For a taste of what these FFA’s entail, check out these videos:

Keep up to date on the progress of both the event prep & the event itself by regularly checking this RvB forum thread, or by following @rvbeve on twitter.

Shhhh, we’re hunting Devs

EVE, Fcing, Ganked, RVB 4 Responses »

Aug 012013

The Tournament Team would like to announce a live streamed Developer and EVE TV Commentator roam that will be occurring Wednesday July 31st, between the hours of 13:00 and 16:00 UTC.

Members of the CCP Tournament Team, along with our commentators, Apathetic Brent, Bacchanalian and Shadoo will be heading out through Black Rise and The Citadel to take in the sights and sounds of low security space with the intention of bringing a little of the tournament action to your doorstep.

So, if you’d like to shoot at your favourite EVE TV personalities, including CCP Fozzie, CCP Rise, CCP Dolan and many more members of the Tournament crew, feel free to keep your eyes on the areas mentioned above, and maybe you’ll even see us around hotspots such as Tama and Asakai.

Prepare your spaceships!

The above was a notice put out with very little fanfare by CCP, but enough people saw it that I decided to run a roam with the intention of killing the Commentary team and so Ganked: Dev Hunt Edition was organised. Wednesday rolled round and CCP extended DT for an hour, but that didn’t stop us we just sat on comms talking about bee’s, until suddenly the server was up and it was go time. Fleet formed and we had 50 guys raring to go, by the time we burned to the lowsec meet up, we had over 120. Along the way, fleet member Phiksus did this to a stupid tengu… Kind of apt when you consider that the local spam for the day was this:

While in Kinakka we exploded a Vagabond, and then invited his corpies to fleet, before the CCP stream got going and we moved off towards them. We swiftly burned through lowsec until we ran into CCP in Ostengele & Alperaute where much chaos ensued, and CCP’s obsession with Roigon began. We took down Dolan, Logibro, Loxy & Rise in Alperaute and over in Ostingele we got tackle on Fozzie & Bro as well as rolling over a Moon Warriors gang camping the Alperaute/Ostingele gate. And that was the end of the first CCP outing.

CCP then trolled our fleet by appearing in Tama, so we burned once again in that direction and when we arrived we doubled the local count, & found Mad Ani’s fleet there too!!! Tama itself turned into a clusterfuck of epic proportions, we fought CCP, we fought Ani’s fleet, we fought randoms and we even fought a small Urine Alliance fleet that showed up too. All in all we had a huge amount of fun in system fighting everyone we fought – or simply exploded – until CCP bailed to reship for round three.

And again they moved elsewhere, this time to Rakapas. Moving there we dropped a few blinkies that gate jumped with us, and then found ourselves chasing CCP around various FW Plexes in Rakapas while killing various gangs over and over. We were doing so well, that a Bombers Bar gang in system joined the Ganked fleet as it was the only way to get on kills! Eventually, after much warping and burning and fighting, CCP ~~left the system~~ died and that was that.

[ 2013.07.31 16:04:40 ] CCP Manifest > Thanks all for coming out!

Now I have to say, yesterday was really good fun. CCP doing any sort of roam in that timezone was excellent, we had many Crims & Kiwi’s in fleet who for once did not have to alarm clock for a Ganked roam, as well as many people from other TZ’s who got up early, or put off the gardening etc to come along and fly with us. Even better was the many new people who joined us thanks to the word of mouth about the roam, as well as Fozzie retweeting my tweet about it!

What made it really special for many of us, was actually being able to take part in something like this without the “big dogs” of EVE hotdropping the event or similar. In fact, it has been pointed out that WE were the big dog this time.

To see the CCP point of view of the afternoon, check out the archived stream on Twitch:

Watch live video from twitchernest on TwitchTV

In closing I just want to thank CCP & the Commentators for doing the roam, especially Brent for inspiring our ship names, and to everyone we exploded for just inflating our scoreboard for this roam. We topped out at 300+ kills for 26.5 billion isk in damage done. Making this one of the most successful Ganked roams in our 2 year history.

Two

Fcing, Ganked, RVB 1 Response »

Jul 232013

July 22nd 2011.

RvB – and some friends – went out on a roam, the inaugural RvB Ganked roam.

The theme was Rifter hulls. And it was glorious.

Apparently I even FC’d part of it.

And now here we are Two years later.

82 roams under our belts, 7375 kills, 575 Billion isk destroyed & 10 other FC’s “discovered”.

In short its been epic. I have – regardless of views to contrary – enjoyed every minute of every roam I have either FC’d or attended, and its all down to you all. So thank you.

For our 2nd birthday roam, I settled on Gnosis – shield fit to go with our shield logi, and never once did I think we would get nearly 100 Gnosis in fleet. Yet we did, and all that while I was flying for RvB in our first Alliance Tournament Eleven match against Why So Serious:

The roam itself started pretty quiet, we rolled over a few guys in Rahadalon, wandered through a really quiet Providence and generally saw nothing much to kill. After a short break in HED, we heard about a couple of gangs that were around and tried to get them pinned down, however that didn’t work either. Then I joined a convo with a member of Severance, who had seen the intel of our gang and wanted us to come and fight a BS gang he was in. We assumed tarp, but said yes anyway as why the hell not. We arrived in the target system, hung around until suddenly “CYNO UP”, and the Severance gang cyno’d in to the other side of the system.

It was on!

We warped to 0 at the gate they had warped to from their cyno, our logis came in at range behind us, and as it turned out, their logi was also at 0. So it made it 100 times easier to fully commit to the fight. Their logis dropped before I even had time to call each one, swiftly followed by their deeps and anything else that caught our fancy. It was pretty much a whitewash, they lost 40+ ships to the 15 gnosis we did…

And that was that, we decided that once again we would end the night on a high, which for me was perfect as I had been on a high ever since the Why So Serious match in ATXI! 150 kills, 11.5 Billion exploded and a ton of fun had. Love it!!!!

We had numerous prizes to give away courtesy of our sponsors at Somer.Blink – including a couple for the winners of these polls – and here are the winners:

Spots:

Dramiel – Roigon, Bald Rikk

Succubus – Atlas Jaynar, Mirzam Tectrin

Daredevil – Cosmo Blink, Duckslayer

Cruor – Chester Waldron, Captain Jonathen Archer

Distinction:

Ashimmu – Tgl3, Daneel Trevize

Best Year 2 FC:

Bhaalgorn – Mangala Solaris

Best Year 2 Scout:

Cynabal – Green Gambit

Finally, a reminder that there are no Ganked roams for the next two weeks. We are taking the remainder of the alliance tournament off, so that various members can focus on the serious part of the tournament.

We return to our scheduled programming in August with the following roams both hosted by Guest FC’s:

Ganked 78: Cherry Poppin’
Saturday 10th August
TGL3
Artillery – BC and smaller.

Ganked 79: TBA
Saturday 17th August
Larkonis Trassler
Drakes>Talwars>Tackle>Links

Fleet-Up

EVE, Fcing, Ganked, RVB 2 Responses »

Jul 172013

Recently there has been some talk on the RvB forums about a website called Fleet-Up.com and whether it would be viable for a group like RvB to use it. Personally given the nature of how we operate I do not think so as frankly too few of the FC’s would use it, let alone the members. Also it’s a cost we really cannot afford in the long term if member uptake is low.

However, after having a look around the website, I thought that it could be something for Ganked to use, at least for the guest FC’s and more involved attendee’s. So I stumped for 4 months usage of the site for a group of up to 250 people.

The site allows you to create groups, set up “events”, upload fits and even add those fits to doctrines for group members to utilise. Additionally it can help you create fleets, track those fleets and even see how well those fleets do compared to previous roams and so on.

I would like to give this a go on various Ganked’s over the next 4 months, and so would love it if many of you would join the site, and the RvB Ganked group using this link. I’ll give other FC’s full rights to create roams and doctrines, regular members the ability to upload fits – SENSIBLE FITS – and everyone else, just basic access. This is not a compulsory affair, but I would appreciate as much support from you all as possible.

The RvB Ganked Awards: Year Two

Ganked, RVB 12 Responses »

Jul 112013

If you follow anything I write you will know that Ganked is two in a few days, and as with last year I thought it would be a fun idea to have some awards for various people involved in Ganked. This will include your favourite FC, who in your opinion has been the best scout this year, as well as write in votes for your top roam & most entertaining person in fleet.

Now the awards will be kept secret until I secure agreement from Blink, but please vote in the polls and use the comments for everything else. I’ll be throwing in some random prizes for best comments too, so remember to use your character name!

Also, note that following the 2nd birthday roam on 20th July, we will take two weeks off to allow various people to focus on the Alliance Tournament, including me. We will resume Ganked on the 10th August.

So here you go, the award categories are:

[poll id=”4″]

[poll id=”5″]

Which roam from Ganked 32 to Ganked 76 was your favourite & why?

Who would you say has provided the most entertainment in fleet this past year?

As an aside, I would love to see your ideas for themes for our Third year, so get to it!

Newsround: 8 July 2013

CSM8, EVE, Ganked No Responses »

Jul 082013

AT XI kicks off in 12 days with the matches below making up the opening games of the first day of the tournament. Below you find my predictions for these matches – my chosen winners are highlighted in BOLD:

Circle-Of-Two vs SCUM. (The team with an AT pedigree v some lowsec gate-campers? No contest.)

Of Sound Mind vs YOUR VOTES DON’T COUNT (While I like SOUND, I have had many more good times with & against the waffles.)

Curatores Veritatis Alliance vs R.E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N (T.O.O M.A.N.Y D.O.T.S. So I am favouring CVA, although will they form up before the match begins?)

THE R0NIN vs CAStabouts (Another team with AT Pedigree v ? Yeah.)

Goonswarm Federation vs Sleeper Social Club (I’d like to see Goons get far this year so I can take their scalp for the RvB scalp collection.)

Verge of Collapse vs Outbreak. (VoC riding a wave after last year, so totally favouring them.)

Wormhole Holders vs Rote Kapelle (I would love to face RK again this year, without them flying out of the arena.)

Perihelion Alliance vs The Fourth District (I like the 4th, and root for them every chance I get.)

D3vil’s Childr3n vs Late Night Alliance (Not a clue who either are, so I flipped a coin)

Clockwork Pineapple vs Rainbow Dash Friends (Ponies. Nuff said.)

RAZOR Alliance vs Babylon 5.. (I just finished a rewatch of B5)

Sicarius Draconis vs Test Alliance Please Ignore (Id like this scalp too)

Moist. vs Transmission Lost (Not a clue who either are, so I flipped a coin)

Surely You’re Joking vs Nulli Secunda (Scalps for the scalp throne)

Exiled Ones vs Choke Point (Not a clue who either are, so I flipped a coin)

JIHADASQUAD vs Exodus. (Exodus. seem like a pretty good group of small gangers, so I went with them.)

Noir. Mercenary Group vs Shadow Cartel (This was a hard call, both are good groups of pvpers, but in the end I also flipped a coin)

HUN Reloaded vs DarkSide. (HUN should do really well this year.)

Darkness of Despair vs Quebec United Legions (Lets see what these russians can do)

M.I.F vs Angeli Mortis (I have at least heard of Angeli, so I am going with them.)

Kill It With Fire vs Ministry of Inappropriate Footwork (Kill it could surprise me, but I know a few pilots in Ministry and totally will be rooting for them.)

The G0dfathers vs Urine Alliance (Urine are a scalp I want, and a group I want to do well, will they become Kings of Tourney space?)

SOLAR FLEET vs HYDRA RELOADED (Solar cant bot the tourney.)

End of Life vs Darkspawn. (Not a bloody clue.)

Heretic Initiative vs No Holes Barred (Fuck the franchise.)

WHY so Seri0Us vs RvB (Seriously, you expected anything else?)

W-Space vs Mildly Sober (Flipped a coin)

The Obsidian Front vs The Initiative. (Totally expect Initiative to take this.)

Confederation of xXPIZZAXx vs Dead Terrorists (Pizza will be great to watch I am sure.)

Sadistica Alliance vs Agony Empire (I like Agony, and know many of their pilots. Friendship, best ship.)

Pandemic Legion vs Synthetic Systems (Too easy a choice)

The Kadeshi vs Drunk ‘n’ Disorderly (The Kadeshi is a long term tourney participant, they should do this easily.)

If you have your own ideas, feel free to post them in the comments.

========================================================

Not really too much to say on the CSM, except that the past 3 weeks or so have in my opinion been really good for our interactions with CCP, I cannot say on what subjects, but I have felt like I have been contributing a lot more. Additionally the summit dates are the 28th to 30th August, I will not be “live”, but I will be there remotely due to work commitments.

Also, please join me on the EUNI public mumble on the 13th as per this post on their website.

========================================================

This past weekend Ganked 75 rolled over 120 talwars into space and scored over 120 kills. It was a strange roam, we had a quiet time in Syndicate, helped the blues of a fleet member defend a sieged POS, and got to Fountain were comms proceeded to break down enough that I got really annoyed and kicked everyone…

Now in my defence I had 2 guys giving varying intel, 1 guy rehashing a fight some slackers had just had, and a few other people continuing to sing – after an admittedly great fleet wide rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody – and someone else calling a cheetah on a gate as primary, just to see our own bubble go up as some bombers decloak while half the fleet is warping into our bubble and the other half is jumping away from the bombs, no wonder I was annoyed.

Anyway, I soon calmed down and we reformed around half the fleet in Stacmon – usual after a whelp – and went and fought an Agony Empire PVP Basics roam. Welcoming newbs to pvp always feels good.

We did have an array of Somer.Blink sponsored prizes too, and here are my winners for the night:

Spots: Hookbill (Rexanna Gold, Stian83, Rebbeca Naresh, Jeff Spartan, Saintcav, Lenier Chenal, Targan Yaken, mach eon, coat hanga strangla, kitty baugh)
Distinction: Navy Drake (Telemachus Rheade, FishySquirrel)
Excellence: Raven Navy (Ceofore Aideron)

Final Blow & Top Damage on our 7000th Mail: Osprey Navy Issue x2 (Redbad)

Older Entries Newer Entries