Yesterday I posted my first-ever EVE killmail. Here is how it all went down.
I logged in and was informed a few Corp members were planning a little convoy into low-sec. Having a bunch of PvP-ready ships just sitting around, I figured why not. We got everyone into a fleet, everyone into Vent (which was very helpful, and good to see), and meet up at the first gate prior to entering low-sec. Our little gank included a HAM Caracal (me), a Thorax, a Merlin, and a Rifter. We were escorting three haulers.
The first few jumps of low-sec were uneventful. One of the hauler pilots was also scouting on another account, and most areas had at most two people in local.
Our first encounter was my killmail actually. That Cynabal was sitting at the gate, and (I learned this after the fact), he popped one of our haulers. Two of our haulers, and the Thorax/Merlin, had already jumped to the next gate, while the Rifter tackled the Cynabal. I locked him, started shooting missiles, and after a few volleys he went boom.
Some fun facts.
I had no idea we were fighting a pirate cruiser. No idea. I knew it was a cruiser-sized ship by the icon in the overview, but that was it. No idea about the fit, what tactics he would use, his tank, nothing. Just a ship in space I was going to shoot. Broken clock and all that, right?
I’m pretty sure, had he switched his fire over to me, I would have popped before he did. I’m not certain on this, and maybe I could have warped away, but knowing me I most likely would have gone down. I’m sure EVE-vets can confirm this for me based on his setup and mine.
I had no idea he blew up one of our haulers. Zero. This theme continued later in the trip, when I did not notice another hauler getting popped.
Overall we flew poorly as a group. We did not wait for our haulers to enter warp, we did not jump as a group, and we were semi-lost at times. We also had no FC. I was sorta-trying, but um, the guy who misses haulers getting popped might not be the best option here. I think I’d like to be a FC at some point though, so hey, another goal!
After we blew up the Cynabal, two jumps and one hauler later, we got into another fight. This one was fatal for me, as seen here. (I’m amused that my ship+fits were worth less than the loot I picked up from the Cynabal. And is it just me, or was my death very generous in terms of what was destroyed and what dropped?) The fight started when one of our haulers went down. We tackled the Stabber, I started shooting at it, and then the Vagabond jump in and blew me up real fast. It all happened pretty fast, so I’m not sure how close we were to taking down the Stabber or anything like that. And again, the fight was 2v2, instead of 4v2 like it should have been. I’m still not sure where our other guys were (my fault more than anything, being the FC (sorta) of the whole thing).
And the overall end result? One hell of a fun night for all involved, despite the fact that not a single hauler made it, two of our combat ships went boom, and all the mistakes that were made. We collectively learned a lot, had a good fun night as a Corp, and got out there and mixed it up. Good times.
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Hardcore Casual 
I don’t understand. You didn’t get a reward, and it seemed like you may have inconvenienced yourself somehow. Furthermore, you appear to have been grouped with other people, and despite communicating with them, you still failed as a group.
These factors do not sound very fun to me.
Pretend the Cynabal killmail is an achievement, and you basically just described WoW raiding, except +1 bosskill.
in general, as long as you’re being smart, losing ships in Eve is only slightly more inconvenient than running out of health potions in other games.
Ships are just consumables that tend to last a little longer.
As long as you having fun, it really doesn’t matter what you are doing, let alone if you get a reward.
Afterall, in the end, it’s just a game.
There is also a good deal of tension creeping though space when there is potentially a hostile force waiting for you at the next jump.
And then you see that flashing red ship on your overview and you get a sudden adrenalin surge and your heart starts racing and unless you’ve got a plan ready, you just start doing whatever comes to you first. It is good to find a game that can drive your emotional and physical responses like that. That is a sign of being immersed, which often means you are having fun, even if you are mostly just skulking around.
And while losing a ship isn’t the end of the world, as said above, it can be annoying on par with getting killed in original EQ. You still get that sense of danger when out in places CONCORD does not patrol.
I’m sure Dril is being tongue in cheek.
But, but, but… he didn’t use the tag to indicate he was being facetious!
I had an instructor in college who told the class on the first day that since his humor was on the dry side, we probably wouldn’t get when he was kidding, so he would help us out by holding up a little sign when he was being facetious.
People were asking about that sign for weeks, not getting that he was, of course, being facetious already.
Syncaine, you sexy fluffy bear! 24 million SP whatever and this is your first ever EVE kill-mail? And I start playing EVE 2 months ago, and already whored dozens of carriers, supercarriers, battleships, pods, POSes, etc, and mining barges (especially mining barges!). What are you doing out there?
I know right?
I mostly just spin my ship in the hanger. Going for the world record!
But there is a big difference between getting kills and getting on killmails. Stick with big fleets and you’ll get a great kd ratio even if you munch paste while you play, but it’ll be extremely rare that you contribute anything meaningful or that the outcome would be different if you didn’t show up. This kill, on the other hand, wouldn’t have happened without the rifter pilot and Syn. That’s worth something.
I’m guessing that your rifter had that cynabal webbed and scrammed, which will cut his speed by more that 10x. That’s a big deal for a fast nano fit ship. In that situation most pilots will try to take out the tackler before any more hostiles show up, which is hard to do if he’s in a nice tight orbit. It was probably a mistake not to attack you first, but an understandable one.
One small correction, that wasn’t a stabber that got you. It was a fleet issue stabber, which is yet another overpriced faction cruiser. Depending on what was in those haulers your isk efficiency is probably really good for the outing. If you care about that sort of thing.
And do learn to keep your fleet jumping/warping together. It really helps.
Hahaha the Stabber is a Cruiser? Yea until I read this comment I thought it was a frig. /shame.
Not JUST a cruiser (but yah definitely not a frig). It is a navy faction cruiser and an extremely capable PvP ship in its size class.
Very very nice work on the Cynabal kill. That is a very very respectable takedown in ships where most vets I know and play with would say there was no way in hell you should win. One of these days when Agony teaches one of our Basic PvP classes I am going to do my best to convince you to sign up.
The Rifter (me) did have the guy webbed and scrammed… several minutes prior to the kill.
That Cynabal ate me alive :(
I was already in station hopping into my shiny insurance-gifted Reaper by the time the kill happened.
Even “l337 PvPers” fuck up sometimes, man. If you had fun, awesome. Do it again. Get more people involved. Try to improve the gameplan, or hell, change the gameplan completely (instead of escorting ships, go on a roam)… only way to learn is by doing.
Really, if you had just said, “Hey fuckheads, listen up, align where I tell you, warp when I tell you, and shoot who I tell you,” you would’ve been THE FC, instead of “semi-sorta-kinda”…and chances are things would’ve gone a lot better. Pasable plan violently executed vs perfect plan too late in the game, whatever that Patton quote is. ;-)
I’m lost here. What was the point of this action? Did you went for some loot? Trying to get territory? Killing members of an enemy company?
I can easily be wrong but it seems like you just went into no-mans-land, and attacked random guys, killed some, killed by some.
Would you please clarify the aims, goals and rewards of your mission?
That’s exactly what a low/null gang roam is. A bunch of people go into no-mans-land, with no destination set, and shoot everything that isn’t on blue standings that can be killed. Or another form is a gate camp: a bunch of guys sit next to a gate for hours on end, kill everything that passes through that isn’t blue standings.
Why would you do this? Any reason one can/cannot think of. So far it seems mainly just to display their heads (literally) on you killboard. Ain’t ‘world PvP’ hell?
There were sort of three different goals, which were not all directly related. The first was to move the stuff in the haulers out to a system in low sec, that obviously failed. The second was to move the individuals out to a station in low sec, so they could create jump clones there, that for the most part succeeded. The third was to get some PVP experience, which, since we all needed to learn, even a total loss of everything would have been a win from the experience point of view.
The rewards for Goal 1 would have been manufacturing equipment in a place where it needed to be, for goal 2 it makes it easier for people to get back out there, as they can leave equipment there, and just clone jump to get out and use it rather than having to slow boat the whole way, and for goal 3 we will hopefully handle everything better next time, and thus be able to more successfully implement other goals.
I’d like to thank you for telling the story as requested and to congratulate you again. You may not realise just how good a kill that Cynabal was.
The Cynabal is one of the most dangerous ships in Eve and is one of the few that can solo roam. Your victim was well-fitted and had repair paste which implies he knows how to overheat and does so frequently )a big pvp advantage). This guy wasn’t a noob, was flying a very deadly ship with a good fit. Well done!
Regarding FCing can I suggest you take an in-game class. Agony offer classes for isk that will teach you more about pvping. The basics of FCing are that you call the jumps and people stick to your calls, practice that together as a minimum.
Good luck!
Hehehe, good for you on the cynabal… Those ships are worth ~200M it was a good trade. :) cutting the speed on a cynabal amounts to it’s death 9/10, can’t believe your rifter died and you still got him…
I need to correct the person who said it was a stabber fleet issue, what you faced off with was a Vagabond. A tech two heavy assault cruiser, actually it is a lot like the cynabal in many respects built for speed and agility rather than direct damage absorption, in terms of differences well the fleet issue stabber is does not have the same resistances as the Vaga, isn’t as quick and isn’t as leathal. The vaga in the hands of the right pilot can do over 4,000 m/s and apply 400 DPS from ~28km.
To be honest, you should not have stood a chance vs either I’m afraid, and the fact you got the Cynabal is more credit to you.
Something to be aware of for future reference, speed tank ships, they rely heavily on capacitor to survive, if you neut them, they become easy prey.
Either way congrats on the kill, as a first kill it is one of the best I have ever seen.
Ahh, my apologies, for some reason I am as blind as a bat, and they had a fleet issue stabber too, I’m sure that wasn’t their before when I looked ;)
Double the nastiness… however, looking at your fleet composition in your post, even 4vs2 you would have likely lost to 2 speed tanking ships.
Your Rifter would have been their biggest threat and would have been taken down first, the Thorax is likely to have been blaster fit, he was absolutly no threat, leaving you as second target and the second, the merlin being the other tackle next, and the Thorax, who couldn’t hit them at range they would be engaging last.
Still live and learn :) I always have most fun in a fleet that is disposable, takes away fear of losing stuff. Lots of potential there, I’m just impressed you didn’t freeze when you got into the fight as a lot of new players do, even if you weren’t very organised.
Oh and I enjoy the blog btw.
Syn – any idea if Eve will run on the generic macbook pro my wife bought last month?
No idea. Grab the free trial and find out. There are a lot of graphical options though, so I’m guessing you can scale the game back a good bit to get some performance going.
I can confirm – it runs great. You can also run the windows client via boot camp. Either way is good.
I can confirm as well. I ran on a 2008 15″ Macbook just fine, was even able to double-client, albeit with a frames per second hit.
When I upgraded to a late 2011 17″ Macbook, I started running 3 clients at once, all windowed at 1680×1050 overlapping and all of them run great.
Awesome story and a sweet kill!
When I saw “caracal, thorax, merlin, rifter, 3x haulers” my first thought was “oh no, in ships like that they need at least three times as many escorts.” Little T1 ships in a gang can be formidable, but you need maybe a dozen of them to deter the usual tiny (one guy dualboxing, one guy and his two friends) flashy gangs in expensive gankships you’re most likely to encounter in lowsec.
What I like best about the story, though, is the way it illustrates just how confusing and hard to coordinate EVE combat is for folks who don’t have years of experience at it. “I’m not quite sure what happened next, I was doing this one thing and I didn’t notice that other thing somebody told me later happened, but I do know that I was shooting at this one guy and he went boom in a most satisfactory way, but looking back I don’t see quite how it all went down like that…”
This *still* happens to me, and it’s one of the reasons I don’t FC. My situational awareness is absolutely TERRIBLE. I’m good at following orders under stress, but maintaining the big picture (or even noticing when the tactical picture changes) is hard.
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Nice Cynabal kill.
I think there is a typo at the beginning of the post: “I locked him, started shooting missiles, and after a few volleys we went boom.” I had the impression that the Cynabal killed your whole gang (which likely would have happened if he wasn’t sitting in web/scram range).
Edited out the typo, thanks!