Eve Online: Now Living In Null Sec

It's been over a week or so since my last post. I was in Las Vegas on vacation half the time (lost about $500), and have been getting adjusted to Null Sec life the other half of the time.

So much to talk about, I don't even know where to start. Our Corporation and sister corporation recently moved to the Catch Region in Null Sec. It's been a difficult but very rewarding transition and everyone is loving it. We have our own outpost and the ISK has been flowing rather nicely. This is however a very chaotic time in our sector with lots of sovereignty changes taking place lately.

Our system is not in deep low sec, less than 15 jumps from high sec, which can be good and bad. It doesn't take much time to get to high sec if you need to, however it also creates a very high level of traffic through our area. Our corp is not a very experienced PvP corporation, however we're learning fast because we have to. There are two decent trade hubs within a few jumps of our location, which makes it easy to find what we're looking for as long as what you're looking for is Tech 2 modules.

When it was time to move, I decided to only fly out my covert ops frigate and to buy everything else I needed out in Null Sec, rather than try to figure out the logistics of moving all my stuff to my new home. Some members of our corp did hire a jump freighter to carry a bunch of stuff for them, however I was in Las Vegas when that was happening so I missed out on that opportunity.

For the first few days we only had 5-6 members living out there and we mostly just got used to the new chat channels, enemies and neutrals passing through our system and how to handle that, gate camps that include interdiction bubbles, creating observation points around our gates for safer travel, and testing our ship fits on the asteroid belts on the Sansha pirates.

The beautiful part about running sites in our system is that 95% of the time we're only dealing with Sansha pirates, so we know that we need to tank our ships against EM and Thermal, and do not need to worry about the other damage types as long as we're only doing PvE and not PvP. Asteroid Belt ratting is definitely more difficult than high sec asteroid belts, but a well fit cruiser or battlecruiser can handle them without any problems, battleships have zero problems at all doing the asteroid belts. We have groomed a few belts in our  system to always spawn 2 battleships and 3 cruisers to help increase the bounties of those belts, and other belts we completely clear out hoping for some faction spawns.

Running the cosmic anomaly sites can be much more difficult though than just ratting the belts. I've got a 85% tank on EM and Thermal and there are a few sites that I still can't solo. Two to three of us working together can handle them just fine though, so we frequently form small gangs to run the sites, if the gangs are too large the bounties are split between too many people so 2-3 has proven to be the perfect number for now until we raise our skills enough to solo them.

Most of us don't leave our system unless we have to run over to one of the trade hubs for something. At the moment we're all gathering tons of loot from the Sansha ships we kill, but selling it and getting your money for the mods is not as easy as docking at your station and selling it. Buy orders for tech 1 mods are rare and not fairly priced when you do find them. In about a month we'll have access to a jump bridge that will take us one jump from high sec, so from now until then we're just hoarding our loot and we'll cash in big as soon as we can safely move it to high sec to sell.

Although our group isn't very experienced with PvP, we're not completely ignorant either. Two members of our corp left and joined the enemy alliance when we told them where we were moving. They said we were being stupid and had no clue what we were doing. Yesterday they both showed up in our system in an Atron and a Tengu looking for a fight. I insta-popped the Atron with my stealth bomber by dropping a bomb on it, and the rest of our corp lit up the Tengu without losing a single ship. It was the sweetest moment I think I've had since joining Eve. I loved that they came into our system, talked smack and ask for us to fight them, we obliged and ended up looting almost 600 million in ISK worth of loot off the Tengu. Then he had the nerve to fly away screaming "That's it, game on!". Whatever douche, you came to us looking for a fight, saw that you were out numbered and now you're angry because a bunch of noobs owned you? He was so over confident that he would walk all over us with his pretty Tengu, that he didn't think that 2 blaster fit thorax's, a Vexor with tech 2 drones, an Oneiros logi ship, and a Stealth Bomber couldn't beat him up. His Tengu popped in less than a minute and it was beautiful.

We know he'll be back and be bringing a lot more people with him next time, but if there is one thing I've learned since living in Null sec is knowing when to fight and when to just dock up. I'm not stupid and I'm not going to go fight a fleet of 30 ships with only 3-4 of us online. I'll call in reinforcements from our alliance and jack stomp him and his fleet instead.

All that being said, I've probably lost 10 ships since moving to null sec too, half of them to stupidity, half of them to just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. One stupid and fun experience was on day two living in null. Me and 3 of my corp mates were out testing our fits in one of the Sansha sites when a single neutral entered the system and a few moments later said in local "why isn't this station letting me dock? It says it's a friendly station"...... I check out d-scan and he's in a Exhumer Mining ship. I tell everyone to quickly warp to station so we can blast him for being so stupid. HA! He was not the stupid one here, it was me.

We warp to station and all start shooting this lonely mining ship. Two seconds later he drops a cyno and a  fleet of about 30 ships jumps through with interdiction bubbles, warp scrams, webbers, and blows up our ships and pods us in about 10 seconds flat. Ok, who's the stupid one now? Yeah, it's me. I fell for the stupid bait trick in textbook style encounter. Oh well, lesson learned, I won't make that mistake again.

Overall we are loving null sec. It's 100 times more exciting than living in high sec. My PvP skills are training and I'm hoping in a month or two I'll actually be able to be more of a fox than a rabbit. Until then, I will keep training, practicing and learning everything I can.