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Zephyr Song
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Posted - 2009.12.22 14:03:00 -
[1]
With the exception of using the directional scanner and looking for cosmic anomalies I have never done any exploration and have only ever entered a wormhole three times; all of them on orders from my FC, usually to the misfortune of some hulk capsuleer. None of my characters even had astrometrics one trained.
As such I decided after receiving the awesome looking Zephyr and watching the scanning tutorial narrated by StevieSG decided to go exploring and keep a log of my efforts and adventures in some distant 0.0 system or previously unvisited wormhole.
In the Beginning:
All stories need a protagonist, a main character with whom the audience can focus on and hopefully, empathise with. Thus Zephyr Song was born, with the (currently) sole purpose of exploration, to spend as much time in wormhole space as possible and see what there was to see, to boldly go where no person in a pod has gone before. And not get blown up in the process. It will be hard to replace these ships all too soon I fear.
My first step after training astrometrics to level two, thus enabling me to use five probes was to pick up my Zephyr and the probes. However rather concerning to me at the time I had stored the ship in Jita. I was worried that suicide gankers would be about, in particular the ones blowing up Zephyrs for their daily lulz intake.
With the exception of a battleship targeting me at Jita 4-4 undock I had no problems once I jumped out of that wretched hive of s****and villainy.
Noob Mistakes
After jumping through five or six systems with no luck finding a wormhole, or any cosmic signature for that matter, I realised that the default setting for the probes 4AU was way to small and after clicking around for a few seconds I managed to get the probes set to 32AU. Very quickly I found a cosmic signature in Sivala and narrowed it down without much trouble. Luckily for me it was a wormhole, thus upon reaching 100% I recovered my probes and warped my ship, Anemoi, to the entrance and jumped in.
With that note I properly began my adventure.
Day One: Maiden Voyage
Rather naturally for any eve player my first instinct upon entering J164938 (B274) was æIs there anyone here that wants to kill me?Æ After bookmarking the wormhole I created a safespot and activated the directional scanner. There was no one else is the system as far as I could tell, however there was one POS with a couple of warp disruptors. I have no idea who it belonged to, with the exception that the Amarr control towerÆs name was in Russian. Either way I decided to leave it alone and see what else there was.
Now even though CCP said that Sleepers wouldnÆt attack Zephyrs I was half expecting to be podded and back in some station faster than you can say Petition GM. Fortunately for me CCP didnÆt screw up and I made some new friends at the Perimeter outpost. It was a pretty awesome place to check out, with sleeper ships flying around oblivious to my existence and hovering around what looked like the Gallante version of Deep Space Nine. I figured it was probably one of the safer parts of the solar system and started looking for a new wormhole.
Easily enough a new wormhole was found and I jumped into J171420 (0477) remembering to bookmark both sides. Scanning within this system proved harder than before, there were several cosmic signatures with most being Ladar or Gravimetric sites, full of gas clouds or Veldspar asteroids accompanied with frigate sized sleepers. It also appeared to be completely empty of other players, as none of the moons had a POS around them, which seemed strange to me as people on the forums had been complaining about all the moons in WH space occupied.
After a lot of messing around I found another wormhole but this one emerged in Fasse, a low-sec Gallante system. Although it was empty this wormhole didnÆt look like it would last long so I jumped back into J171420 and logged for the night.
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Zephyr Song
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Posted - 2009.12.22 14:08:00 -
[2]
Damned character limits and posting restrictions :(
Day Two: RAEG!!!!
I logged onto Zephyr Song about an hour and a half before downtime and found that the two wormholes had collapsed. That is when the trouble started. I again had lots of cosmic signatures to dig through and slowly and surely my agitation grew as they turned out to gravimetric this and ladar that, I eventually just started ignoring hits that werenÆt unknown.
I opened up Firefox at that point and re-watched that youtube tutorial along with some light Googling. After 20 minutes or so I started probing out an unknown cosmic signature that I felt was finally a wormhole. With about 10 minutes to Downtime I got the unstable wormhole to 90.11%, but nothing I did got it to 100%.
I kept moving probes closer and closer, always in high 90 percents and at that point I took middle probe away, getting slightly better hits but no cigar, downtime is only ten minutes way so I was getting annoyed. Put the fifth probe back in and put it under the other four, below and in the middle. 99.08%, five minutes before DT. Put it slightly closer, no luck. Put it above the four other probes this time. 99.62%. 6 minutes left. Kept moving the probes closer and further away. Down to 99.05%, 5 minutes left, with cluster shutdown message up. Moved one of the other probes below still no luck 99.83%, 2 minutes 20. One minute left last chanceà.and failure, so I recovered my probes and wait the last few seconds before DT.
So now I need to know, why couldnÆt I get the WH to 100%? Is it skills or am I just not good enough personal skill wise?
I hope to continue this blog of sorts for some time to come and especially see how long I can last. Also If you find me in a wormhole please be kind and at least give me a head start before trying to pod me. :D
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Vyktor Abyss
The Abyss Corporation
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Posted - 2009.12.22 14:30:00 -
[3]
A nice read, been meaning to try this out myself...
As a veteran of 1 wormhole jump I can only offer this advice:
""
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Attia Wyn
Amarr Mindstar Technology
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Posted - 2009.12.22 14:34:00 -
[4]
Skills definately affect your ability to focus in on those last few percentage points!
Good read! - keep it going! :)
----- Onwards Ever, Backwards Never |
el caido
School of Applied Knowledge
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Posted - 2009.12.22 14:42:00 -
[5]
As shiney as the Zephyr is, you really want a cov ops if you want to do any serious exploration. The Zephyr is a toy, the cov ops is the genuine tool. But good luck on your adventure.
/me hums the Zephyr Song for the rest of the day
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Miranda Cho
Caldari Ammatar Free Corps Curatores Veritatis Alliance
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Posted - 2009.12.22 16:29:00 -
[6]
You were screwed by a confluence of two factors. First, low scan skills, and second a ship without bonus to scan strength. A standard core scan probe has a strength of 40. A bonused probe ship, good probe skills, and faction scan probes puts my probe strength at 104. That has a huge impact on the radius of probe you can use to scan down any given site, and at the hard end of the spectrum what sites you can scan at all. Technique counts for a lot, that's why you were edging ever closer as you tweaked your probe positioning, but skills help a lot. If you want to keep exploring in a Zephyr, see about levelling your scan skills up, particularly the one that increases your scan strength. Otherwise, look into your race's probe frigate, the one that has a <racial> frigate skill bonus to probe strength.
And have fun, I love me some wormholes. :) |
Transmit Failure
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Posted - 2009.12.22 16:39:00 -
[7]
This was really well written. I look forward to future posts about your adventures in wormhole space!
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Zakarazor
Amarr Inadeptus Mechanicus
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Posted - 2009.12.22 16:57:00 -
[8]
I would recomend traying the scan strenght skill a level or two. Might be hard if you havent already bought it though
My best advice in that case is to keep trying. Sooner or later you will get a hit.
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Igus
M. Corp Mostly Harmless
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Posted - 2009.12.22 18:13:00 -
[9]
Edited by: Igus on 22/12/2009 18:13:49 Getting your skills up will help a lot. There are 3 skills I think that are very important to have to 4 or 5.
Also you probably want to get your self a full set of sister's core probes. They are pretty cheap now, and make a pretty decent difference. -- Uhg, I think I need a flux capacitor
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Bel Amar
Amarr Paragons of Order
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Posted - 2009.12.22 21:42:00 -
[10]
Originally by: Miranda Cho You were screwed by a confluence of two factors.
Three factors actually, if the OP was following the probe layout given in the guide. The 5 probe layout makes easy sites easier to find, but hard sites harder to find, due to the way signal strength diminishes when the angles between two probes is less than 90 degrees
Get rid of the fifth probe, push your remaining four probes closer to the signature bit by bit. If you still can't get a hit that way, you need to put your probes in the shape of a tetrahedron, and surround the signature with it
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Pesets
The Hunt Club
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Posted - 2009.12.22 22:23:00 -
[11]
You can use "Sisters Core Scanner Probes" instead of regular ones. They are much more expensive, but can help narrow down those last few percent.
Being able to launch six or seven probes at once helps too.
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Miranda Cho
Caldari Ammatar Free Corps Curatores Veritatis Alliance
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Posted - 2009.12.22 22:38:00 -
[12]
Four probes, one tetrahedron. The One, True Path.
In all seriousness, a tetrahedron pattern is very easy to set up on the fly, and produces very, very good results. Even with a ton of scan probe skills, the only time I ever space more than four probes is if I'm trying to get an overview of a very large system. Whenever I get around to training Astrometrics V, I'll probably keep a brace of combat probes watching an area while I scan with another 4 core probes, but that's because I'm paranoid like that. |
Zephyr Song
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Posted - 2009.12.22 23:59:00 -
[13]
Thank you all very much for the replies and advice on solving my current conundrum.Looking through evemon I think that the skills I need to train are Astrometric Rangefinding and Astrometric Pinpointing. Astrometric Aquisition seems to only speed up scans but that would be useful as well I suppose.
I did consider at the time getting sister probes but they are expensive and I didn't know if I would survive the day at that point. There should be a new update later today, or tomorrow depending where you are on the world.
Now if you excuse me I need to go find out what a Tetrahedron is.
PS. Does anyone know how long it takes before I no longer have an exclamation mark for a face?
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Pesets
The Hunt Club
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Posted - 2009.12.23 00:19:00 -
[14]
Edited by: Pesets on 23/12/2009 00:20:07 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahedron (a.k.a "triangular pyramid").
Octahedron formation (one probe in each arrow's direction) is arguably easier to set up, and can help if your scanning skills aren't as good.
Also, shift key is your friend.
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Admrl Cain
Caldari Unbound Incorporated
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Posted - 2009.12.23 02:07:00 -
[15]
I very rarely troll... but I will this time:
I hate each and every one of you noob wannabe explorers. Train for a cov-ops exploration ship or gtfo. You're just introducing more chaos into an already chaotic game feature known as W-Space, a LOT of us that live in W-Space don't want you there, and I PERSONALLY have killed 8 Zepthyr scanner frigs since they were released. They are annoying and they must all be blown up. STAY OUTTA MY WH! =P grrr. ----------------------------------------
Admiral Cain. Yep, that's right.. mmhmmm |
Triethylene
Minmatar Native Freshfood
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Posted - 2009.12.23 02:19:00 -
[16]
Originally by: Admrl Cain
I PERSONALLY have killed 8 Zepthyr scanner frigs since they were released. They are annoying and they must all be blown up. STAY OUTTA MY WH! =P grrr.
Thats odd, I don't see a single Zephyr kill on your Battleclinic record?
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Zeredek
Gallente Red Federation
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Posted - 2009.12.23 02:22:00 -
[17]
Originally by: Triethylene Thats odd, I don't see a single Zephyr kill on your Battleclinic record?
Originally by: Admrl Cain I very rarely troll... but I will this time
_________________ rawr |
Triethylene
Minmatar Native Freshfood
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Posted - 2009.12.23 02:38:00 -
[18]
Originally by: Zeredek
Originally by: Triethylene Thats odd, I don't see a single Zephyr kill on your Battleclinic record?
Originally by: Admrl Cain I very rarely troll... but I will this time
Ah. My bad.
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Fishsticks Fred
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Posted - 2009.12.23 02:52:00 -
[19]
Needs moar autonomous orcas eating things.
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Zephyr Song
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Posted - 2009.12.23 03:12:00 -
[20]
Originally by: Admrl Cain I very rarely troll... but I will this time:
I hate each and every one of you noob wannabe explorers. Train for a cov-ops exploration ship or gtfo. You're just introducing more chaos into an already chaotic game feature known as W-Space, a LOT of us that live in W-Space don't want you there, and I PERSONALLY have killed 8 Zepthyr scanner frigs since they were released. They are annoying and they must all be blown up. STAY OUTTA MY WH! =P grrr.
Admiral Cain I understand exactly what you mean. You're threatened. Threatened by these upstarts who with a free toy promise by their very nature to destroy your way of life. You are proud of your exploration abilities and have attached a great deal of emotion to this profession, I can respect that. Zephyr fleets sailing throughout the vast emptyness of Wormhole Space increases the number of people who possess your hard earnt skills and as a result makes you unimportant. All these alt characters learning how to scan, how to explore reduces your profession from something honourable, something to be aspired to, into a basic skill that is expected of every pilot like knowing how to make a safespot.
This is not just a challenge to your livelihood or even to your place in your community, in your corporation; It is a threat to your manliness. With the rusty scissors of change I have removed your manliness for the entire world to see, and for you to watch as what defines you drops and bounces around on the dirty floor of mediocrity.
But you are not without hope. Gather what remains of your manhood in your hands and with effort you can stitch yourself together again. Your hope lies in becoming the finest cov-ops pilot in Eve. Become the Chribba of scanning. let your reputation spread far and wide, your abilities making any potential target to surrender upon seeing your greatly feared and respected name enter local. Be a god among men.
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Zeredek
Gallente Red Federation
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Posted - 2009.12.23 03:25:00 -
[21]
Originally by: Fishsticks Fred Needs moar autonomous orcas eating things.
_________________ rawr |
Pesets
The Hunt Club
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Posted - 2009.12.23 03:36:00 -
[22]
Originally by: Zephyr Song Admiral Cain I understand exactly what you mean. You're threatened. Threatened by these upstarts who with a free toy promise by their very nature to destroy your way of life. You are proud of your exploration abilities and have attached a great deal of emotion to this profession, I can respect that. Zephyr fleets sailing throughout the vast emptyness of Wormhole Space increases the number of people who possess your hard earnt skills and as a result makes you unimportant.
It has more to do with the fact that by scanning out entrances to "their" systems you invite potential trouble for them, and by warping to the sites you may trigger the spawns they don't expect when first warping there, or kick off site expiration timers, or stuff along those lines. Of course wormholes were supposedly never meant to be settled in the first place...
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Zephyr Song
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Posted - 2009.12.23 05:50:00 -
[23]
Edited by: Zephyr Song on 23/12/2009 05:50:02 Day Three: I Want to Break Free
Am I doomed to float through space like some ratting fleet mourning the passing of its only probing ship? Will I have to trust in the kindness of strangers to deliver me from my prison without walls?
With the system still empty of any other human life and protected by the ever-present Sleeper bodyguards I continue my task. One by one I discover Ladar and Gravimetric sites, ignoring all those that are not what I seek. I need a wormhole, but this time I desire to return to empire space for I am not prepared for the rigours of exploration, I need more skills.
Success! A wormhole, even though it leads into low security space hopefully it shall be safe enough for a trip into a high sec trade hub. I emerge in Vitrauze (X702), a low security Gallente system in the Essence region. This system seemed quiet and sleepy, eight people in local, possibly all docked up. I had intended to leave low sec in search for the skill books I seek (the Astrometric support skills) but the local station most conveniently for me seeded all the books. Training I one I could and putting the other two in my cargo hold for later injection I prepared for my next trip. I decided to go to the system next door and the relative safety of 0.5.
I docked up in the Creodron warehouse station in the Droselory system for a short break and reflection. At this point I have weaved in and out of highsec, probably a good thing in hindsight, but I need to go deeper and emerge not in the centre of the galaxy barely 10 jumps from Jita but on the edges, in Omist or Outer Pass and see what there is to see.
I jumped into J151431 (B274) from Droselory and after book marking the WH (ALWAYS bookmark the wormhole kids!) I warped to planet IX. I admit I was rather surprised because I didnÆt expected habitable looking planet in wormhole space, it really looked nice, like Caldari Prime. Turns out that it was a temperate planet and there were four more Temperate planets and two Oceanic planets, the rest were uninviting. If CCP were ever to release a sim city/civilisation expansion J151431 would be an excellent spot to send some colonists.
Once again this system appeared empty with no POSs at the moons, and I was feeling like it was time to move on.
Most regrettably I have yet to find the Orca or its herd of hulks feasting on those rocks of the stellar plane. But hope springs eternal and in time I shall sail alongside those majestic and terrible beasts.
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Zephyr Song
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Posted - 2009.12.23 13:07:00 -
[24]
Speaking about the Sister probes I looked through the attributes and compared them to the normal core probes, I must be going blind because I couldn't see the difference between them. What makes them worth the extra isk?
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Pharago
Gallente Piratas Leprosos Guineanos
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Posted - 2009.12.23 13:19:00 -
[25]
Edited by: Pharago on 23/12/2009 13:22:27
Originally by: Zephyr Song Speaking about the Sister probes I looked through the attributes and compared them to the normal core probes, I must be going blind because I couldn't see the difference between them. What makes them worth the extra isk?
don't know exactly how much but i think is a 5% bonus to the scan strengh
also, surrounding the signature in a 'perfect' squared shape with 4 probes helps to overcome that pesky 99% hits, the point is, if you can get to 99 or 97 or something like that, the you can get to 100% if you place well those probes.
astrometric rangefinding and pinpointing skills are really, really worth training at least to lvl3
happy exploring
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Miranda Cho
Caldari Ammatar Free Corps Curatores Veritatis Alliance
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Posted - 2009.12.23 13:44:00 -
[26]
10% scan strength bonus (40 to 44 base strength). The only better ones are the RSS probes from the Minmatar epic arc, which are 45. ________________
Miranda Cho, First Church of the Azure Carrot (Reformed), Reconnaissance Division 'To convert, one must discover.' |
Zephyr Song
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Posted - 2009.12.24 06:46:00 -
[27]
Day Four: A New Day a New Adventure
The wormhole from J151431 to Droselory has disappeared and once again the system is empty, I had really thought I would have detected someone else by now. Found a new wormhole that emerged in Nadohman in the Domain region.
I was at that point that I noticed I was missing four probes and I had no idea what happened to them. I jumped back into J151431 and used the directional scanner around the wormhole in search of my AWOL probes but no luck, I activated the æReconnect to Lost ProbesÆ option and waited five minutes but once again no sign of them. I still had six probes left so I wasnÆt in any danger of being trapped should the current wormhole collapsed but still I have no idea why I am missing four probes.
They were just run-of-the-mill Core Scanner Probes so very little isk lost but still I felt it was prudent to acquire many more backups if the lives of my probes are so temporary. Two jumps away in Ebo I bought fifty brand spanking new Core Scanners, perhaps a bit overkill and they did take up half of my incredibly massive 10m3 cargo hold that I hoped will one day hold various little titbits from my journey but better safe than sorry.
Strangely enough Ebo didnÆt have any cosmic signatures of anomalies as far as I could tell and Esteban the next system over was being particularly annoying in getting anything better than ten percent signal strength. So I went back into Nadohman and jumped once again into J151431 and enjoy its awesome planets.
A new wormhole was discovered and this time it appeared to go deeper into the Wormhole systems. And yet J223853 (D382) is another empty system with no Player Owned Stations. So at this point I decided to find a new wormhole and I had my first facepalm moment in this little trip.
I detected what appeared to be another wormhole and so I spent 10 minutes trying to narrow it down. After a little while I realised it was pretty close to the bookmark for the wormhole I just came through but I thought it was just a coincidence. At 100% I warped to this ænewÆ wormhole and was very pleased that in the info it said it lead to a deeper part of unknown space. I had assumed that the scanner would show up or at least ignore wormholes that wee showing up on the map but no, I wasted my time scanning down an old wormhole.
Nonetheless I did find a new wormhole, and once again IÆm in Gallente lowsec! This time it was Adeel in the Everyshore region. And once again I jumped back into my wormhole, although less aesthetically pleasing than the previous one, to await a better system.
I seem to be having bad luck finding my way out of empire, does anyone know if wormholes are random or is there a pattern to their spawning locations?
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Pesets
The Hunt Club
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Posted - 2009.12.24 07:14:00 -
[28]
It is somewhat of a pattern, wormholes tend to link to systems of similar "difficulty", so if you're scanning out in hisec you're most likely to find a wormhole to an "easy" w-system, in which you will most likely find wormholes to other "easy" systems or back to hisec.
This may also be the reason you aren't seeing many POSes - easy systems are not very profitable, and at the same time are riskier to settle in some ways (everyone and their mother scans stuff out in hisec, including people who wouldn't mind simply disrupting your activities for giggles).
Wormholes to "dangerous unknown" (deep w-space) are most likely to spawn in 0.0. Of course wormholes from "dangerous unknown" will tend to open to random parts of 0.0 as well, so don't plan on returning to hisec easily.
Also, you may consider not posting the names of the k-space systems with wormholes to space you're currently in.
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Amitious Turkey
Gallente TarNec New Eden Retail Federation
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Posted - 2009.12.24 08:02:00 -
[29]
Originally by: Pesets Also, you may consider not posting the names of the k-space systems with wormholes to space you're currently in.
This...
Haunting the forums since '03 BECAUSE OF FALCONDUST!
Originally by: CCP Navigator We love you all as well <3
GO NAVIGATOR <3 |
Zephyr Song
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Posted - 2009.12.25 11:58:00 -
[30]
Originally by: Amitious Turkey
Originally by: Pesets Also, you may consider not posting the names of the k-space systems with wormholes to space you're currently in.
This...
I considered this but didn't think it much of a threat as the wormholes have changed by the time I log on again, although i'll probably censor out what system i'm in if I get stuck in lowsec or 0.0 until i'm somewhere else. Besides having people stalking me would liven up this blog.
No update today as it's Christmas but touch wood i'll have an update tomorrow.
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