On the home world

Monday, I spent a lot of time placing various items looted from other planets onto auction and TTing a few that did not come up to spec.  I would prefer to auction things locally but often this is not practical due to the low population of other planets.  Afterwards I paid a visit to the Drones at Jason Centre, they are definitely not as friendly as they have been in the past but the skill gains were quite good.

Tuesday, I was short on welding wire and rather than buy some decided to make it, I already had some BPs with about 350 clicks but bought another giving me nearly 450.  I had in store only Lysterium so had to purchase the Alternative Ingots and the Ospra Ingots at auction and then find a sweat seller. Once I had more than enough ingredients I soon rattled through the clicks and now have enough Welding Wire to last a few weeks, I hope.
I bumped into Feyn An Talitha, we had been waiting to exchange some pixie parts and did this. She has found a niche creating face tattoos and the one I have seen on her website is pretty cool.  She is interested in acquiring my old apartment at Sakura and we are negotiating a deal.

Wednesday, Only 2 of the items placed on Auction on Monday are still for sale, quite surprised, maybe I should be looking at auctioning some of the stuff in the shopkeeper. I made some more welding wire with BPs acquired at auction, Also managed to add a piece of Hoplite chest armour to my set, only a couple of bits left to get now. That was it, just too tired to hunt!

Thursday, I was still tired, I just wandered about from TP to TP forgetting why I was going there and then going somewhere else. I think I did this for a couple of hours before realising the futility of it.

Friday, off to Boreas to visit the Drones, these where much kinder to me, they even dropped some Aurora armour parts. I could not remember which suit of armour I had used against them before, the Musca +6a or the Viceroy +5b, I tried both, the Musca was better but not by much.

Saturday, The Drones at Boreas were so kind yesterday that I decided to visit them again, this time I made a loss but including yesterday’s result I was still ahead of the game but only slightly. During this hunt the Karma Killer clawed it’s way up to tier 5.1, this looks like the hardest level to tier so it will take a long time before I reach 6.

I decided to create a new armour set for Drones, I took the 6a plates from the Musca and added them to the Harrier set I acquired in the pack I purchased the other week, the Musca went into storage. I had been wondering what I should do with the Harrier, I think with the metabolic increase it provides it may help in backing away a little. Time will tell. I would prefer just swap the plates onto armour as when I see fit but in truth it’s a bit of a ball ache, I would like to see a way to add them that is similar to the method now available to equip a whole suit of armour in one go.

Come about 90 minutes before Space Skilling Saturday and the servers were experiencing all kinds of woe, I logged out as I could  not access a vehicle inventory but could then not log in again. I managed to get back on line with about 15 minutes to spare but could not then spawn my quad or use a TP. I logged again and contacted Wolta by e-mail, we decided it was best to cancel skilling this week as the servers where again down. I spent the time creating a Sleepyheads section on the site, this is for the core crew to use. I hope in time it will contain some useful content, at the moment it just gives those with access the chance to vote where we should go after Space Skilling Saturday.

Sunday, I returned to Boreas twice coming away in the black both times. The Harrier + 6a combination was effective and slightly more economical I think, During the second session which was in the evening the servers were once again suffering, there was a notice on the Loader stating that:-

“Support message

We are recovering data from yesterdays database backlog, this infers extra load on the servers and that is the reason for the exceptional lag. We are sorry for the inconvenience and are working as quick ad possible to get back to normal operation as soon as possible.”

Nice to know they can keep the service running while doing this kind of thing.

I reached almost 20k of the 30k killpoints to finish the Drone Stage IV mission, I should be able to complete it if I make an effort this week. Also getting very close to level 54 Laser Pistoleer (Hit), I expect to get that before I finish the Drones mission.

Hunting returns for this week were almost 102%, nice to see a profit no matter how small.

 

Advertisement

On the Rock.

I started the week thoroughly enjoying myself on Rocktropia, I was serving the nation again working toward the completion of stage 3 by the end of the day I still had about 250 werewolves left to kill. The Skill Pills are great, I can see my skill increasing quicker and have been working out how much ammo I need with what set-up on the Karma killer for it to last an hour and thus get the most I can from each pill, so far it seems that with werewolves and no enhancers 250PED of ammo lasts just over 55 minutes. It’s a pretty intense 55 minutes though, not sure if I can keep it up. The loot has not been terrible either, managed a small global with a 20PED ESI and another loot contained a generic fuse which is always good as it saves me buying them to make warp drives.

Wolta and I finally got around to a team hunt, we tried werewolves first and then Motorhead Security, it was short hunt, I only used about 90 PED of ammo, we did score a small global, team name of Sleepyheads. We need to do this more often unfortunately we do not seem to be on line at the same times very often, I guess it’s a summer thing.

Tuesday, I continued to serve the nation, financially a less rewarding day but the skills are still improving with the skill pills, this hunt consisted of 250 PED of ammo, an un-amped and un-enhanced Karma Killer and un-plated Viceroy lasted slightly longer than the pill but I had lessened the pace a bit. Most of the time I do not need the armour but with werewolves being as aggressive as they are I several times found myself up against 6 or 7 so it definitely saved my bacon.

Wednesday, much the same as Tuesday except I tried the harrier armour with 5b plates, this provided more than adequate protection, unfortunately the returns were slightly worse. I did complete the The History of Vampire Helena #3 (kill 1000 werewolves) , I am not sure what the reward was I think I was told at mission start. I did start The History of Vampire Helena #4 (kill 5000 werewolves) the reward for which is first aid, a long mission and one I probably will not start on this visit, only a few days left before we move on and I would like to try a few more mobs.

Friday, I didn’t forget Thursday it’s just that I did nothing. Motorhead Royalty at Lemmy’s Castle, these were tough for me solo, I had to heal a lot and on several occasions I did not heal enough so had to TP back to the mob to finish it. Often I was trying to heal but the lag was delaying it until it was too late which I found very frustrating. I did manage a small global and another loss.

Saturday, I went to Wet Wolf Creek in search of wolves, I did not care if they were wet or dry, I just wished to finish the Vampire Wars #1 mission, I was at about 40 of 100 when I started and it did not take long to complete. Once done I visited Evil Cathedral to take on the next mission. Whilst there I used the rest off the 100PED of ammo to kill zombies, Hell Week has lasted me at least a year and I am not near to completion. Later I heard the call on #Rocktropia that Zombie Kong was going to be summoned so I asked the location and tooled up. I had not done this before, it seems that there are several waves of Zombies to be dealt with before Kong manifests. I really enjoyed this and hope to be able to do it again, didn’t do bad on the loot either got a Tommy Gun of some kind, looks kind of cool. After this I did the first 2 waves before it timed out on me prior to a mad dash to prepare for departure. I TPd a lot of low MU stuff before heading to the Pathfinder for Space Skilling Saturday. After which Nocturaline and I went to the surface of Monria.

Sunday, Monria, I did some of the noob mission sequence and hunted some Yog Scrub and Arbitrator the Vermin, it did not go very well but I did get an increase in Evade. Monria was pretty deserted, other than Nocturaline I saw only 3 other avatars there, maybe it will pick up after the migration on Calypso (I think this takes longer every year). Late in the day I took the ship to Calypso.

At Cyrene

Monday, an appalling hunt of Oratan Miners Underground resulted in me being very pleased we were leaving Arkadia, which we did late that night.

Tuesday, I descended to the surface of Cyrene in my quad, there was no one else visible in the vicinity of the space station though there was one other Vega class ship docked.

On the surface things have changed greatly from the early days, it seems almost civilised now. I accepted what missions I found throughout my wanderings and ended up hunting some Mang Chang with very little success. I could quite easily cope with Young, a Mature required some concentration and at one time I tried a Guardian which was definitely a mistake and involved more return trips via a TP chip than I can remember, they do regenerate quite quickly. I did try a Rhino Beetle Young but my armour was not up to the job.  Talking of Armour, my Viceroy Shin Guards reached tier 1.9 and are ready for upgrade to tier 2, the required materials for this are stored on Arkadia so it will have to wait.

Wednesday, Stalkers were tonight’s hunt, a standard hunt (250 PED of ammo, this is basically what it takes to completely use my A105, with damage enhancers in all 5 tier slots of the Karma Killer). I found these to be a reasonable mob for me to hunt, not doing too much damage to me and being killed quite quickly, the return was reasonable as well.

Thursday, I was low on funds, having only enough for a small (100 PED of ammo) hunt, I decided to try Skyshatter, these were a little on the difficult side, I tried swapping out plates on the Viceroy from 5b to 6a but it seemed worse! I did loot an Enkidd  but other than that the loot was unremarkable. Due to the amount of damage I had taken and healing I had done my repair costs were higher than usual and I found I did not have quite enough PED so I TT’d a little loot.

Clearly I have spread myself a little think of late, the upshot of planet hopping is that loot gets left in storage on the various planets and the PED card balance goes down. I need a different approach to loot if I am to continue such frequent travels.

Friday, I was broke but found a couple of stacks in my inventory at login, I checked my latest downloaded item list, the stacks were listed as being on auction, I guess this was from 1 year ago on Rocktropia! I TT’d them along with some Cyrene Stacks and got myself some ammo, I wanted to try some Tide Claw, not the tiny ones something bigger. So I checked Entropedia and headed to the various locations there, biggest I found was an old (I had noticed a couple of dominant globals) after about 2 frustrating hours of searching I gave up and logged off.

Saturday, the search for Tide Claw continued, I had  noticed on the loader a link to a Cyrene specific site, after searching on a rather difficult map I found, with Wolta’s aid, a couple of locations. I tried both of them and found that I could take the providers quite easily, the guardians were a bit difficult but doable most of the time. Once again I managed to half my money!

In the evening it was time for Space Skilling Saturday, so I saved a few PED by not hunting. Afterwards I got my feet on Rocktropia for the first time in quite some while.

Sunday, Rocktropia seems like it’s been hit by the Borg, vast swathes are no longer there, buildings are absent, mobs have moved to new locations. I was eager to “Server the Nation” and had to resort to planet chat to locate both the Lady Helena (now sadly in her grave) and the werewolves. That done it was time to kill werewolves, loot was quite poor on the first run but good on the second, I still find the amount of makeup that werewolves carry to be quite disturbing. Between the two hunts I had purchased the Gold Starter pack, solely for the skill pills and I popped one of these before the second hunt, the skill gain results were a big improvement though it seems I need to buy more than 250PED of ammo if I am to make use of the full hour, at least at the rate of fire I was achieving.

The pack contains a few other items, the armour makes me look like RoboCop, it gives an 8% increase in metabolic rate, I think that just means I can run faster, I need to test if I can get more swings with a sword when wearing it but I doubt it. The gun could work as a tagging weapon, I will need to test that once my current one expires.

In the evening roamed a little with Nocturaline, had a look around the Zeplin and had a play in the car that came in the pack, a lupus 4×4.

The week ends with a return of just over 62%, not good but I’ve known worse.

At Toulan (mostly)

Log Entry for July the 6th 2014

The week began on Tuesday (at least for me). I had enjoyed Sunday on Toulan but was not sure if it would sustain my interest for the rest of the week. I went hunting Jeef Zajer and did rather badly but I did complete the Jeef Zajer 100 and the Jeef Qaher 100 missions (for the first time). I found I still liked the style of the place and felt quite happy to be there.

Wednesday, Mostly Duhol for today’s hunt with a few Jeef Zajer that just happened to have gotten in the way, completed the Duhol 100 mission for the first time and had an exceptionally nice return from the hunt almost doubling my ammo investment, 3 globals (none of them logged by tracker) and 15 weapons. The tracker thing is a tad annoying, I did submit a support ticket and was told that they want at least 3 people on the planet running the client to validate the data feeds, that explains why Toulan, Ancient Greece and Next Island showed only one of several globals over the past few weeks. unfortunately tracker support did not update my results. For this hunt I also tried an auto loot pill for the first time, I must say this was quite useful though it took a while for me to not do this manually, I can definitely see a use for this.

Thursday, A low ammo investment hunt with an equal amount of mining probes, both of which yielded results over 95% return, I like Toulan and it seems Toulan likes me. I do not normally mine but decided to try to get some of the resources necessary to try crafting some of Toulan’s basic items, unfortunately I was unsuccessful in finding enough variety of ores and en-matters to achieve this. It seems a bit of an odd thing to do, I would have thought that in order to encourage people to craft it would be sensible to make the finding of the right materials, even in just small quantities, a relatively easy task.

Friday, I found the mission broker that provides the back story to the planet and sets people on the introductory mission chain, he is not by the TP but near what appears to be a small stone landing pad. I did the mission chain as far as it would let me using my blades and some looted ammo and still managed a 86% return. Mining on the other hand did not go well, it seems that mining finds are near to where mobs are spawned and I managed to recoup only 40% of the investment.

Saturday, I had less than an hour to explore the PVP area (it was not long enough) before our recently scheduled departure for Arkadia, any figures for this would be meaningless as I spent almost nothing. On arrival at Arkadia I hunted some IFN Defence Bots and a few low end Smugglers, with my normal poor return. Later it was some Smugglers and some Oratan Miners with about the same result, I did get half way through the Oratan IFN Killpoint challenge 5 (80,000 points to complete). I can see the need for events in Arkadia Underground (where the Smugglers were), the return on the deeds has been poor and they are now selling for less than people paid for them. Underground is effectively an LA and needs to be managed like one but there is no one owner to do this. I personally did not like the Smugglers, they have the annoying feature of the lock failing and as you are firing your shots are at large intervals as you slowly creep nearer and nearer to the target which is reported as being out of range! I would have thought more conventional LA management would have been better with simple month long competitions to get people there for an extended length of time as opposed to just a weekend but then what do I know?

Sunday, A couple of Oratan miner hunts the first giving a decent return of 86% the second a poor 54%, still they were easier to see and hunt than the Smugglers. Wolta, Nocturaline and I decide we should visit Cyrene next but could not decide if it should be tonight or tomorrow night so I flipped a coin and we leave tomorrow night.

I shall be returning to Toulan, hopefully quite soon, I did enjoy the experience and I have lots of weapons to try to auction even though I TT’d a lot of low value ones whilst on the planet. I even joined the forum but have not had a chance to post yet.