CSM 9 Elections

So CCP will be opening up voting tomorrow for CSM 9.  I haven't been as thorough in following the candidates this time around, though I think I've listened or skimmed almost all of the Cap Stable podcasts.  I have some suggestion for future candidates and then I'll list my top slots.

Future Candidates: Things not to say when you're running for CSM

• "I'm pretty terrible at expressing myself." - BadAssMcWhatever when being interviewed on Cap Stable.  One of the most important skills for a CSM is being able to communicate with the player base and then communicating that to CSM.  If you say up front that you're bad at communication is pretty much the same thing as saying "don't vote for me."  This wasn't just Mr. BadAss, I heard it in other interviews too.  Often that was when I hit the >>> button to jump to the next interview.

• "I don't know much about anything, but I know some guys." It's fine to not know all aspects of Eve; it's a huge game.  I find it fine for candidates to say "I'm an expert at PVP, but I talk a lot with the guy who does all the logistics for MyBigAllianceDot."  But it gets a lot weaker when your personal POV is weak and you can't really name a heavy-hitter in the other areas.  If your only claim is "I get along with people and can talk to different types of players" then you're on shaky ground.

Top 5 for My Ballot

• Sugar Kyle.  I've followed her blog (Low Sec Lifestyle) pretty much since I started the game.  As a "Pirate Queen" she is a natural for someone like me who plays almost entirely in low-sec, and then the bonus is her experience with trading and industry - which is what I do on my alt.  If you just looked at the blog you might think she's too unfocused to be a CSM.  She makes no bones about getting all rambly about topics.  But if you listen to her in interviews such as the indy panel for Declarations of War you'll hear the more complete story, which I think you can also see in her more recent CSM blog posts.  As a low-sec player we need a voice like Sugar Kyle's.  Yes, that's the reason you may have seen me flying a Jaguar around named "Sugar Kyle for CSM9."  I only wish I'd been flying it around more.

• Ali Aras.  I've been very impressed with her as an advocate and a communicator, though it sure has been tough hearing her have to take all the barbs on the Summer minutes and such on Declarations of War.  The way she's been able to handle all that, plus the positive comments from other CSM8 delegates on her work effort, make her high on the list for me.  I really do want to join one of her Space Hangouts one of these days, which might be one of the few new innovative communication channels recently.

• Mike Azariah.  There are some very serious bizness people in Eve.  People who dedicate hours and hours every week to strategic operations, titan bridge networks, and massive trading empires.  People who set their alarm clocks for 3:30am to meet a CTA or call in sick to work because a Jabber ping called for their Titan alt to log in and fight.  Those people have a lot of good CSM representatives out there.  Mike is a good representative for the largely quiet (I won't say silent) group of people who play Eve more casually.

• Steve Ronuken.  I was impressed by his appearances on podcasts and I want to hear him as a voice for industrialist, third-party developers, and everyone who uses the api (which is pretty much everyone).  To top it off he's also a FW guy on the side.

• DJ FunkyBacon.  Another low-sec candidate I was generally impressed with in what little I've heard of from him.  Where Sugar Kyle is the low-sec pirate, DJ FunkyBacon hails from the Faction Warfare side of low-sec. I'm hopeful he will be a strong communicator as well.

Notable but Not on My Ballot

• Mynnna.  I was not impressed with him during the CSM8 election run, but I have been very impressed during CSM9.  Let's face it though, Goonswarm will elect him without us independents so put your vote somewhere else.

• Xander Pheona.  Much like Mynnna, I expect there is no risk he won't be elected.  I like Crossing Zebras and what he did during CSM8.  He's got a great collection of minds he can draw on - he's a good exception to my "Things Not To Say" number 2 above.  Unlike Ripard Tag's endorsement though I don't think Xander can rise to be the arch-communicator Ripard was, if nothing else because of his RL work demands.

Appreciated or Not

Today is a random collection of items that aren't big enough to make a post, but I really ought to stop stalling on.  Let's call it Appreciated or Not.

Appreciated - YOLO Golem
Kudos to CASIO BRAN for bringing a Golem out to play outside a FW plex and taking on all comers with the massive power of fireworks launchers. (https://zkillboard.com/detail/37681848/) Rifterlings piled in and took a few shots at him, but then mostly kept fighting the waves of other people who came to join the fun.

Not Appreciated - Suggesting that a PC corp is better than an NPC corp
Apparently at least one person is a big defender of the honor of NPC Corps.  I have an indy alt that is still in an NPC Corp.  While moving from system to system I noticed a newbie question in corp chat and spoke up to help out.  Basically the person was misunderstanding stacking bonuses and ECM and thought that a couple sensor damps or a flight of ECM drones could guarantee breaking a tacklers lock.  I suggested that the newbie look at joining a group like EveUni or Brave Newbies so they could get some good mentoring.  One person in the NPC corp was apparently offended, saying that no PC corp was active enough that they'd always have someone around in corp channel that could help - as opposed to the wisdom of the NPC corp collective.  I disagreed and didn't want to argue, that alt was done with their job so I said good bye and logged the alt off.  Next time I logged on my alt had a bounty on them (1M ISK I think).

Appreciated - Continued Fights with Rifterlings

A month ago I mentioned how I was in on more kills in February than I had been on any previous month, barring ones were I got in on big events like FrigFest.  Recently I was despairing that it seemed like I hadn't been able to do nearly that much PVP in March because of real-life busy busy.  Turns out that actually March I was on more kills than in Feburary, and on a much higher total of ISK destroyed.  The latter is largely thanks to the shiny-fleet roam earlier this month.  These are all still pathetic kill numbers by the standards of serious-business-PVP, but I'm only comparing against my own history.

Not Appreciated - CONCORD doesn't love me

I tried slipping into some ratting between roaming in an attempt to keep my sec status up.  This was largely after I got surprised a while back when I found for the first time that I couldn't get into 1.0 systems - where a lot of my assets are.  But the PVP, it is too much, and my sec status keeps slipping down.

Appreciated - Tags4Sec

So I set a simple plan.  I will hunt down sec tags slowly over time and set them aside rather than selling them.  The goal is to have enough to get me back to 1.0 from -5.0 (or whatever depths of badness I sink to).  This is one of the reasons I like the low-sec "pirate" life better than FW - if I want to reset my life and do something else I can dig my way out.  With FW the only option would be to grind missions - preferably after finding someone with high opposite-side standings who could fleet with me on their L4s.

I also hear that ratting in nullsec is good for this, so if I can find a WH into null I might try some of that, though it will probably end me jumping on some nullbear ratter and undoing the benefits just prior to a local gang finding me and podding me before I can get back to sweet, sweet lowsec.

Appreciated - Bonus - Readers
I almost forgot.  I got a nice convo from a fellow I had met before.  He sheepishly admited he was part of the gang that had just killed me as I tried to race back to my supplies in a LASB Stabber which was out of cap charges.  Ooops.  Anyway, he complimented one of my blog posts.  That's always nice to hear.  So this Appreciated is for you readers, particularly those who leave comments on the blog or otherwise drop me a line.  You help encourage me to keep writing.  Thank you!

Shiny Modules: Value for Money

I've become curious about shiny module value and pricing.  There is a lot of art and ego as to when to use a shiny module, but I wondered if I could get something closer to a science.  I'll present here a means for analysis for comment and critique, and there are some good finds here.

I want to acknowledge the art up front.  If you're fitting out a Rapier, you may be looking for a webifier with the greatest range to be bonused up.  If you're fitting out a blaster Thorax, the sig bloom of the MWD may not be considered an issue because you're only going to run it long enough to scram the target.  But I think this analysis potentially gives us a way to find good value in general.  What you do with it from there still will need your best judgment.

Starting simple - Explosive Plating

Here is a simple module.  There are only two attributes we care about: price and resists.  All Explosive Plating has the same fitting attributes.  From the Resist value I derive the "Module Value", which is the ratio of the shiny module to the base module (in this case, the T2 module).  From the Price value I derive the "Price Pow" value - this is a bit more complicated.  The idea here comes from the guideline given in the ship rebalancing rationale from CCP that an incrementally more powerful ship should be exponentially more expensive.  So the Price Pow is that exponent (i.e. I'm using the log function).  The Shiny Ratio is the ratio of the Price to the Value.

Explosive Plating	Shiny Ratio	Module Value	Price Pow	Jita Sell Price	Resist
Explosive Plating II	1.00	1.00	1.00	300,250	26.40
Imperial Navy Explosive Plating	0.86	1.14	1.32	17,999,000	30.00
True Sansha Explosive Plating	1.15	1.14	0.99	250,000	30.00
Shadow Serpentis Explosive Plating	1.11	1.00	0.90	89,000	26.40
Domination Explosive Plating	0.97	1.00	1.03	425,000	26.40
Centii C-type Explosive Plating	1.07	1.20	1.12	1,379,991	31.75
Coreli C-type Explosive Plating	1.11	1.20	1.09	889,674	31.75
Corpii C-type Explosive Plating	1.08	1.20	1.11	1,208,520	31.75

So - if True Sansha and Imperial Navy have equal values why do they have radically different prices?  And since the True Sansha module has a better resist than the T2 module, why does it cost less?  If all of the C-types have the same value, then why do they have different costs?

The reason why they have different prices has to do with the cost of producing and the perceived value of the units.  Ideally in an economy that shouldn't matter - we should see nobody producing T2 explosive plating if it cannot be made at a price that competes with faction drops.  But since a lot of people will never open up the Faction / Deadspace submenus on the market, they never notice this.

These are differences that you as the smart consumer can exploit.

This continues into the higher range of the modules too:

Coreli B-type Explosive Plating	1.10	1.27	1.15	1,988,889	33.50
Centii A-type Explosive Plating	1.10	1.34	1.22	4,550,000	35.25
Coreli A-type Explosive Plating	1.11	1.34	1.21	4,000,000	35.25
Corpii A-type Explosive Plating	1.11	1.34	1.20	3,900,000	35.25

I'm guessing many of you wouldn't think anything of spending 2M ISK on a module for your ship.  You spend that for many of your T2 modules already.  4M ISK isn't even particularly shiny in terms of cost.

Now, this price to value gap is also showing here because of the limited use of these modules.  I've had an alliance-mate tell me he has dozens of faction drops like this in his hangar, but since they have a low demand they aren't worth taking to market.

I've seen some Gallente T2 fits that use these explosive platings - when you only have two rig slots, you may not want to use one to plug your explosive resist hole.  There is a similar price discrepancy for Thermal membranes that might be of use for people with Amarr T2 ships.

More Complicated - 10MN Microwarpdrives

I fly a lot of cruisers with 10MN MWDs.  When should I go shiny?  Only for T2s? For T3s?  The analysis here gets more complicated.  Let's consider three factors for value: Cap Penalty, Sig Bloom, and PG Fit.

10MN Microwarpdrives	Shiny Ratio	Module Value	Price Pow	Jita Sell Price	Cap Penalty	Sig Radius	PG Fit
Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I	1.00	1.00	1.00	17,139	0.81	500	150
10MN Microwarpdrive II	0.64	0.99	1.54	3,403,900	0.86	500	165
10MN Digital Booster Rockets	0.52	1.05	2.01	328,999,800	0.83	500	135
Domination 10MN Microwarpdrive	0.53	1.01	1.89	96,985,489	0.89	467	175
Shadow Serpentis 10MN Microwarpdrive	0.56	1.03	1.84	62,000,000	0.86	489	150
Federation Navy 10MN Microwarpdrive	0.54	1.03	1.90	115,993,000	0.86	489	150
Corelum C-Type 10MN Microwarpdrive	0.59	1.10	1.86	71,811,999	0.92	433	150
Corelum A-Type 10MN Microwarpdrive	0.57	1.14	2.01	334,489,744	0.97	411	150

I've equally weighted these three factors for this publication after playing with it a lot.  If I was flying a blaster ships I might change the weighting to emphasize the value of reducing the cap penalty.  I would expect that a projectile/missile kiting cruiser might want to increase the weighting of the sig radius benefit.  This is getting back to the art vs science again.  But what do we see here?

Why would you buy the Shadow Serpentis when you could get the Corelum C-type for a fraction more money, but dramatically better cap impact and sig radius?  Why would you ever buy the Federation Navy MWD?  Why would you buy the Digital Booster Rocket over the Coreulm A-type?  (Granted, I don't expect I'll ever buy either of those)

Bottom Line

So audience out there - what did I miss?  What should I tweak?  Do you have a favorite hidden shiny gem that you're willing to share?

I may come back to this topic in the future if there are good finds I see, but the message I want to put out is that people should take a peek at the faction and deadspace submenus on the market.  Sometimes you don't even need to be looking to spend 100M ISK to make a real savings.   I do admit that I'll be hitting the market before I publish, but I'm not trying to set up a real trade in these.  If you do and make a killing, I'd appreciate a tip in the old ISK jar. :)

So buy wisely!  Maybe it well help make sure that the next explosion is not your own.

p.s. Blogger's non-handling of tables is a pain.  Anyone have advice on that?

Get yer Whoop Whoop here - the future of Eve?

We've been teased about it for a while, but now it has been disclosed. CCP is piloting a program for alternative ship skins. First off the block is the famed Federation Navy Comet. How much would you pay to give your ship that Whoop Whoop Space Police action?  And did CCP make the right call on the ships for this pilot program?

The Program

First off, here's a link to the DevBlog if you haven't already read it. Here's the important part for this: "The Police Pursuit Comet blueprint will cost 3,000 CONCORD LP and 3,000,000 ISK and can be purchased in any station with a CONCORD LP store."  Note: This does not come with sound effects.

Second, so what are the costs?  This special skin blueprint will be applied to an existing Comet.  So the base cost there is about 18M ISK (Eve-Central).  Then the skin blueprint let's generously price at 6M ISK (3M in ISK and 3,000 CONCORD LP at 1000 ISK per LP).  So you will be increasing the cost of your Comet by a third.

Third, what happens when my Comet dies?  It dies.  The skin doesn't stick around.  This is Eve after all. Hmm - what if there was a chance the "skin" would drop, represented in game logic by salvaging the outer panels and special accessories (police lights).

The Analysis

So I'm predicting there will be two customer use cases long-term for this:

PVE ships.  Many people will be willing to spend 30-40% of the hull cost for a PVE ship.  First, your ship is expected to have a longer lifespan than a PVP ship.  Second, the skin cost will be small compared to the nice modules and rigs you're going to put on the thing.  On the other hand, nothing is going to scream "gank target" like showing up on the overview and D-scan as being a reskinned ship.

PVP ships flown by the space-rich.  Some people won't mind throwing away 30% on their PVP ships because they have so much ISK.  These may be the people who also don't mind putting deadspace modules on their PVP ships.  So once again, the skin is a target, an invitation to "Come At Me Bro."  For some of the top-end solo players, this might be an advantage.  I expect people may also quickly learn that Punisher Kador Edition means Bait Punisher.

Now long term CCP is saying that these skills will be available using Aurum and they show nine pilot program ships - four frigates and four battleships.  So in the short term "space rich" will also include people who have Aurum from years ago that they didn't spend on monocles and pretty blouses for their avatars.  I would have guessed that CCP did this analysis and was picking the frigates as the PVP case and battleships as the PVE case, but if so I'm a bit surprised at the battleship choices.  If you wanted PVE battleships I would have expected to see a Domi, for instance, rather than a Hyperion.  I'm not as familiar with what the ratting choices are for the other races.

We'll see.  I enjoy flying the Comet, but I think the only reason I'd get the Police Pursuit skin would be as a one-off if there was a themed roam.

Edit: Given this analysis, I'd argue that CCP would have been more successful if the small ship target had been Assault Frigates, but the skin cost was the same as we're seeing for the Comet.  People probably could accept a 10%-15% additional cost better than a 33% cost.

The Future of Eve

The most interesting part might be the end of the DevBlog. I'll quote here:

"If this pilot program reveals that the painting of internet spaceships is indeed popular and we are able to gather enough data and thoughtful feedback, we will put some very eager programmers and designers on the task of creating a system that allows us to change the skins of ships without us having to create a new TypeID to get a different color variant."

That expansion of the structure of Eve is potentially hugely powerful.  Don't think about just the skin, but what flexibility it could mean from there.  Today a TypeID 587 object (Rifter) has a fixed set of attributes.  If tomorrow a TypeID 587 object could vary in attributes then we open the door to thing such as custom manufacturing that I've discussed before (last paragraph of this blog entry).  That could be a very different, much more expandable Eve.  If skins are a means to open the door, I might be more than willing to spend a few million ISK (or Aurum) to encourage it.

Candymen drop a Capital, and other Shiny Explosions

This weekend there were two Alliance shiny roams, both to celebrate the anniversary of the CandyMan Cartel's formation.  Shiny is the opposite of most of the Rifterlings / Point Blank Alliance gangs, so I was curious how it would go.  I was only able to make the second of the roams (titled "Fuck Your Killboard"), which was planned to be Faction BS, Faction BC, T3 Cruisers... and once we found something to fight there was an Archon to be dropped.

How it Went

We stumbled around a bit to get people together.  Most of the corp/alliance fleets I've been in have been more standing fleets, so it doesn't surprise me that as a group we weren't well coordinated for go-time.  From what I read this is normal for many groups for whom scheduled ops are a more regular thing.  We ended up with the majority of the fleet undocked (including the Archon) and doing a conga line around the Sosala station with neutral ships on grid watching us.  Opsec wasn't really a goal though - apparently word had been put out that we were going to be bringing out a bigger fleet than usual to try to make sure we could find a fight.  I'm not sure if the fact that we had an Archon to drop was intentionally leaked or not.

We didn't get too many gates out before we had word of a Shadow Cartel gang of Absolutions and Guardians.  Can you think of a tankier opponent composition?  We landed on a gate with them and bailed back to a FW plex for a moment while we got people together, then jumped right back into them.  As soon as we engaged the cyno went up and our Archon dropped in.  My memory gets fuzzy fast here, but I think we tried to break a Guardian and failed, switched to a Pilgrim and killed it, and then never killed anything else.  After our Archon came in an enemy cyno went up and Shadow Cartel dropped in two Moros.  The Moros as called primary and we piled it on.  We drove the Moros into structure before we had lost so many ships that it started coming back up through our dps.  The Archon went down and we scattered to the winds.  Fortunately I only was pointed at the end, so after some overheated MWDing I broke tackle and warped off.  Comms was a happy jumble at that point.  A lot of people were exicted about the whole thing - I think most of us hadn't been involved in even seriously trying to take down a dread before so just hearing "J-A-Y in the Moros is Primary" and "Overheat all guns on the Moros" was pretty cool. (Battle Report)

I headed back towards home station and heard there was a small flashy gang on the gate in Frerstorn.  I saw Rupture, Rupture, Crow, Comet and piled in to attack.  I thought there were other people coming down the way behind me, but mostly I was thinking that since I expected the Proteus to die about 5 minutes ago I was willing to engage anything for fun.  Turns out that the people behind me were much farther out than I thought and the Sentinel soon had my turrets ineffective and my cap draining fast.  On counsel of the nearest friendly guy I tried to deaggress to take the gate and get closer to reinforcements, but I didn't make it.  Sadly I also didn't get my shiny pod out either.  (Proteus, Pod)  Congrats to Blind Warp, and I'm glad to see that two of my shiny mid-slot modules dropped so they got a nice loot out of it.

After-Action

I thought it was fun, though I wish that we'd had a chance to kill some more before Shadow Cartel smacked into us.  I'm not surprised we got jumped so fast since this was done pretty much the opposite of opsec before the roam.  Though if I'd know that we were going to leak about it so much I probably would have let some of my non-alliance friends know so they could come join the fun.

True to the name of the op, my ISK Efficiency dropped by 5% or something.  But as everybody knows, killboards are nonsense anyway - mine is really only high because I'd gotten in on a supercarrier kill in a FrigFest sometime back, so by killboard logic that is as good as if I'd solo'd it personally.

Lessons Learned

• If I'd known that we were pretty much going to go straight to a gate and then brawl a logi-heavy fleet I probably wouldn't have bothered with the shiny scram and web, since they weren't relevant to my ship's contribution in the fight.  For the same money I could have contributed more by putting on another shiny magstab perhaps.
• Given how T3 cruisers can stand up to overheating, I probably should have been overheating my guns on the Moros long before the command went out on comms, and should have been overheating early on the later gang that killed me.  Once I was capped out of course there wasn't much to do.  Which is also a good reminder about the difference between a buffer-fleet ship and a roaming ship - if the Proteus had been meant to fight solo I probably would have gone with a configuration with the fourth mid slot, a cap booster, and a drone bay so I could have tried to get ECM drones on that Crucifier.
• Leroying my Proteus into the gang on the gate heading home afterwards is all on my own head.  I've noticed this before - I think that when I'm on an op when I expect to lose a ship, there is a mental coasting effect that makes me throw away the ship too easily.  That could have been a good ship to have a more fun shiny moment with than dying to a cruiser gang on a gate with no kills to show for it.
• This was a good reminder that one shiny ship can get taken down by a cheap gang when that gang can do things like apply scram, neut, and TD - and especially good lesson since usually I'm going to be on the cheap gang side of things.
• I found that losing the ISK value of the Proteus didn't affect me emotionally.  Losing the pod was annoying.  But having to queue up Gallente Propulsion Systems V at 3d 8h 44m is a real bummer.  I could have gotten my Medium Autocannon Specialization from 2 to 4 in that time.  This makes me more likely to want to fly HACs when doing something shiny, and saving my surviving Proteus for more PVEish things.

BTW, Point Blank Alliance went into AWOX event week as soon as the last shiny roam finished, so if you're looking at our killboards and wondering why there is suddenly so much blue on blue violence then that's why.

Rifterlings/PBA and analyzing shiny mods

I haven't blogged much due to combination of RL and having too much fun in Eve.  The short sumary is that joining Rifterlings has been great.  I want to share some of that experience here and give a bit of a teaser on a side project I'm working on to analyze shiny modules.  If I wait till I have more then I'll never post again.

Rifterlings / Point Blank Alliance Experience
My play hours haven't changed (may even be less) and yet I'm getting way more fights.  Mostly small-gang with some solo.  My killboard may look terrible compared to "serious peeveepee" players in terms of number of kills, granted.  My February is shaping up to have the kind of kills only previously seen when I've participated in a FrigFest type event.

We've had some great fights over the past few times I've logged in.  We've run into roaming gangs our size (or even bigger) and brawled until one side is dead and then reshipped and done it again.  A couple nights ago we brawled with ( ) and we knocked them down, they came back and we knocked them down, and they even came back one more time.  Our fleets tend to run to around a dozen pilots, generally in the frigate hull space since that lets us get into most plexes.

Fights aren't always fair (welcome to Eve).  Rifterlings take great pleasure in killing stabbed FW plexers and even moreso for the ones which appear to be bots.  Faction Warriors in plexes can expect to have a small gang drop into their plex - and we hope that they'll shout for their brothers in arms to form up give everyone involved a good fight.  Of course we're commonly not the biggest group - last night our T1/T2 frigates had to spend some time running away from a larger fleet of Cruiser/HAC/Recon ships.

We have a very generous corp members who has been sharing around a lot of shiny hulls for anyone who asks for them, so expect to see some shiny lossmails on my killboard soon!  The only thing slowing me down there is getting the fittings in, since I've specifically pulled some hulls that I'm not as familiar with.

We also have some fun alliance ops coming up, so hopefully I'll find time to blog about those too.

Side Project - Shiny Modules

When to fit something other than T1 and T2 modules?  Some "shiny" modules are surprisingly cheap out there and I think people are missing using them because we just don't think to look at faction / deadspace type modules.  I want to be more complete here, but as a start:

Officer 10MN MWDs look amazing - cap penalty almost eliminated, signature bloom just over 400% instead of 500%.  The top of that line will set you back 380M for the Corelum A-Type 10MN.  But if you’re looking for about 70M ISK worth of MWD for your T3 or HAC, the Corelum C-Type offers you better stats for basically the same ISK.

M4 10MN Microwarpdrive (fitting 10/180, -19% cap, +500% sig) - 20K ISK
T2 10MN Microwarpdrive (fitting 10/198, -17% cap, +500% sig) - 3M ISK
Fed Navy 10MN Microwarpdrive (fitting 10/180, -14% cap, +489% sig) - 70M ISK
Corelum C-Type 10MN Microwarpdrive (fitting 10/180, -8% cap, +433% sig) - 70M ISK
Corelum A-Type 10MN Microwarpdrive (fitting 10/180, -3% cap, +411% sig) - 380M ISK

What would  you want to see in an analysis of shiny mods?  Drop me a line or comment.

Landing Reps on Rifterlings

I realized that I never posted that I had joined Rifterlings, so there's that.  As I mentioned in other posts I've been looking for small gang PVP, but I didn't want the faction standings consequences that come with Faction Warfare.  Rifterlings has already been great for that, even though I've had pretty limited time.  I've roamed about solo, joined an impromptu frigate fleet and ended up being the heavy hitter (me?!), and even starting learning a bit about frigate-level logistics.  More on that Logi bit in a moment.

Why Rifterlings?

I wanted lowsec but not faction warfare because of the faction standings bit.  I wanted fleets but I wanted them small so I could contribute and learn more.  Winning some PLEX recently freed up one of my earlier concerns about funding myself that had previously been making me think wormhole.  And a couple weeks spent focusing on exploring wormholes and talking to WH and ex-WH pilots convinced me I didn't want to live there.

And then there was the people.  Fintarue, who I learned about through the High Drag podcast and his own twitch stream (KFIN 0.4 FM).  I felt like I learned more from listening to him talk through a topic on the podcast than I had in weeks of teaching myself solo.  HippoWhisperer was one of my first (if not my first) real PVP after I joined RVB long time ago.  He kicked my butt and then gave me good advice.

So when I was solo roaming in an Omen and ran into HippoWhisperer as a Rifterling he killed me again, and Fintarue and a small gang landed right after.  I opened a convo with Hippo and found him just as friendly and helpful as the first time I met him.  That pretty much sealed it for me - and reinforces my view that in most cases if you chat with the people you fight you find they are decent people, despite Eve's reputation.

Frigate Roam Logi

So the idea of Logi has appealed to me for a while.  With a Navitas fit recommended for noob logi on the Point Blank Alliance forums I joined up with a frigate fleet led by Fintarue.  Milton Middleson grabbed a Navitas as well, so I followed him as much as possible and asked a lot of questions.  Our fleet was pretty kitchen sink, so don't be surprised at what you're going to read here in a minute.

Logi has a more overwhelming information stream than fighting.  In a gang as dps I figure I lock up the primary, get to my optimal, and mostly listen on comms and pay attention to what's happening to me.  As Logi you put everyone in fleet on your watchlist, try to lock up a number of important people in the fleet (fellow logi, FC, key/vulnerable ships), and decide where those reps need to go.  Somewhere in all that you probably should fly your ship too, though as a noob I cheated on that by just anchoring on Milton.

So we get into a fight on a gate against some heavier ships - but the plan is that if we can break their only logi (Oneiros) it'll work.  I see one of our Thrashers is taking damage and their shield is about gone, but I already have them locked up so I apply all my reps right away.  That fails to hold him as you might guess on a shield-tanked destroyer and the Thrasher goes down. My cap is empty and I fire the booster.  I spread reps on a couple frigates that are showing shield damage, figuring if one starts to drop I'll move the others to them.  More enemies are landing on grid and I see Milton's Navitas start to get hit, so I move all reps over to him.  He dips into structure and I overheat all the reps.  For a brief shining moment I'm holding him.  My cap cycles and the booster does into reload and somewhere about there I lose him.  A moment later I'm primary and it's time to a quick trip to the pod.  What do you mean a kitchen sink frigate gang can't take 4 T3s and 3 Command Cruisers?

I rejoin the fleet for a bit in a Slicer and get a killmail for my trouble shortly followed by an escape in said Slicer in 4% structure.  That was a thrill too, let's hear it for fast ships in MWD.  We reship as a group and Milton throws me a Burst so I can try out the shield logi side.  Things get a bit quieter then, so I don't recall anything thrilling in the Burst, but I'm sure I'll get it blown up soon enough.

Much to learn as a Logi - I definitely need a new overview, since I was using one that got cluttered with enemy drones and such.  Keeping a cool head and focusing on who needs priority help seems to be the key.  A big thanks to Milton for his advice through the fights.

So another thing off the checklist, and much more fun to be had in the Rifterlings!