Van Hemlock.com

The Agony guys really know how to throw a roam!

Are you planning on trying their Wolfpacks PvP course? T1 destroyers this time (aka: "OMG, it's full of Thrashers!) - slower, but twice the firepower. Also lots of fun.

Nice episode. I guess I never really realized how inexperienced you were in PVP.

A couple points:
- Dont feel bad about popping those gate camps. Remember if you had been in a smaller fleet they would have no qualms about popping you.
- You mentioned the unattended sling bubbles. Those were probably attended until all 100 of you jumped into system and the bubble campers warped to safe spots. Bubble camping is very common in 0.0 and pretty effective even for small numbers.
- Avoiding sling bubbles isnt too tough. Just always warp to a celestial near your outbound gate before actually warping to the gate itself and you will typically avoid any sling bubble.
- You probably were on a number of the kill mails even if you did not actually received those mails. Only the member with the final blow actually gets the mail.
- In smaller gangs (particularly HAC and BCs) ECM drones are great for when you need to escape, You just put them on the tackler chasing you and you have a good shot at getting away. If you have neuts you're even better off. This isn't really important for T1 fleets but for more expensive ships it gets to be much more important and valuable.

Anyway I hope you put some of what you learned into practice soon. It gets to be addicting. I have never found another game that gives me quite the adrenaline rush that EvE pvp does.

Fly safe!

A great listen. It reminded me of my time in EVE Uni and my first faction warfare fleet.

In case you're more interested in T1 pvp, Factional Warfare has more of that. People tend to fly cheaper there. Though you'd have to investigate yourself about the state of FW these days, I haven't been very active in it lately.

Warning: Wall of text incoming, please wear your safety gear!

Woohooo, e-lebrity podcast mention! Good to hear you had fun on our class and roam. It was the first class I instructed, but thanks to our great instructor material and fellow instructors, I managed not to make too much of an ass out of myself.

PVP Basic is really only the starting point of a PVP carreer. You get overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge and then dumped into combat the second day, and especially when it's your first time doing something like this, it feels like you''ve been put on a ferris wheel that is spinning almost out of control: you know you had fun, but often didn't know what was up or down. The more you get into combat after, the more you get used to the pace, the adrenaline rush, and you get more in control of what is happening. Also, everything you've been taught starts to fall in to place more and without that knowledge and experience of PVP Basic, the learning curve would just be much steeper. I can really recommend repeating the class as alumni and then move on yo our more advanced classes. And to get some real life action, consider joining Red vs Blue or Factional Warfare.

Ewar, logistic and command ships are force multiplier ships: on their own, they are quite weak, but in a good fleet, they double its capabilities. This is why any good fleet commander consider these good primaries. With ECM being probably the most powerful ewar in most circumstances, it's not wonder they will target your Griffin first. That is why in ranged ewar ships, you should always employ the GTFO tank: don't orbit, but manually adjust alignment to a celestial object to keep in ewar range and if you get targeted, hover your button over the 'warp' button. Depending on what's on grind, at which range and the state of the fight, you either leave immediately or warp out as soon as you start receiving damage. No ewar on grid for a while is better then dead ewar on grid.

And the Hydra concept is indeed more a large gang tactic: although the basic concept of relying on distributed ewar works well in smaller groups, you don;t get the level of redundancy that really makes it shine. And yes, the basic fleet is in a sense an elaborate way of zerging (or blobbing, as EVE players would call it), but as an introduction to PVP, that is not so much a bad thing. If your first experience of PVP would be in a small group of T1 frigates, it would almost certainly become a discouraging experience, defeating the purpose of the class, which is for you to associate PVP with fun and wanting to actually do it and learn more. And in EVE, there hardly ever is a fair fight: you sometimes accidentally stumble into one, but that usually means both you and the opposing FC have made a mistake: perhaps a seredipidous one, but a mistake none the less.

For those interested: the roam was in Syndicate and we only fought in 0.0. I only joined the roam halfway, but from the time I was there and what I heard before it, it was quite hectic. We usually get some nice fights on class roams, but rarely so many with so little space in between. We fought (amongst others) Drunk ganG, IT Alliance (yes, the alliance formerly know as BoB) and GoonSwarm (which by now doesn't exist anymore).

O great Van Hemlock!

Since you have single-handily destroyed Goonswarm, I beg you to please bring your massively destructive aura to the Catch Region in order to destroy AAA Alliance.

And, please do not focus your powers in destroying Eve completely. That would be bad.

Thank you.

Interesting stuff. Very much.

EVE continually fascinates me. It's always great to hear about the much of the stuff that happens in-game. When I've did the trial I've always found the game extremely boring.

But after this show I'll have to try it again. What Tim describes sounds a lot like playing Falcon 4.0 in multi-player. One have to know a lot of things, and the learning curve us steep. Well up that hill it is glorious.

Great audio. I enjoyed listening to it. It's great to see agony still doing this.

-- Rells

Hi there mate, awesome podcast, was actualy very nice seeing it from the other side. My name is Hammereds from agony and i was the skirmish lead for the roam you went on. The lag on that roam wasn't usual for an agony roam CCP made some response regarding it, it actualy caused us no end of issues on the skirmish end of things. The lag was causing us to lose skirmishers going through gates and getting traffic warnings and lag far side which cause us to be undermanned as we were reshipping repeatedly for the entire night, i lost 3 intys myself (We don't normaly lose this many =P) Also when enemies see a an agony basic class they actualy tend to target agony members due to the fact we fly more expensive ships and we're running it. So its not abnormal for our FC to get droped.

http://agony.skrewed.me/pvpu-kb/ if you want to view the pvpu killboard.

- Hammereds

p.s. killmails require final blow.

Jon saying I prefer "lasers" for some strange reason gave me a Doctor Evil flashback. Are you actually an evil mastermind in real life?

Just listening to the episode now, thanks for the kind words so far:-)

Regarding your vent issue: If you run it as admin, that should sort it so it doesn't need to be on top. Not sure why, but it worked for me.

Larg Kellein
Director, Agony Unleashed.