Welcome to the twenty-first installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month topic comes to us from @ZoneGhost who a few month ago asked “Is Low Sec the forgotten part of EVE Online?” Is it? I’d like us to explore this even further. Is Low Sec being treated differently by CCP Games than Null Sec (Zero-Zero) or Empire space is? Can one successfully make a living in these unsecured systems where neither Alliance nor Concord roam to enforce their laws? What’s needed? Or is everything fine as it is?

This couldn’t have come at a better time as I can almost be counted as a full blown pirate know (Just a little bit remaining before -10).

Now is low-sec being treated differently, I’d say yes, but this is because there isn’t a whole lot of content in low-sec and it is the least populated region of EVE.

Yet this shouldn’t be taken as me defending CCP’s current activity regarding low-sec, see it as points of improvement.

I have had a lot of fun the way low-sec currently is, but the periods in between these fun moments are simply too large because of the lack of population, thus an increase of population would equal more fun.

Now what is needed to make it more exciting, I know these probably have been mentioned already but let’s go through them anyway:

• More reasons for the high-sec carebear to risk his ship in low-sec in search of profit
  • Fix the risk/reward ratio for missions
  • Add more exciting exploration sites (Well more rewarding)
• Pirate only items/services for the people that have a negative status
  • Items
  • Booster Production
  • Pirate Scripts (Possibly)

Mynxee has been pushing this with her Making Low Sec Matter Ideascale and Forums and they will push some ideas onto CCP, so let’s hope we will see some of this get implemented.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post even though it was a short one, and stay tuned for the next blog banter.

Xeross out.

Participants

• CrazyKinux’s Musing: The Lure of the Wild
• Banter 21: Low-sec- Chocolate Heaven
• Subs’ suds: Forever a noob in Eve: Low-Sec – the forgotten part of EVE Online
• Blog Banter XXI – Lo-sec = Low Priority? | I am Keith Neilson
• In the Ghetto | A Mule in EvE
• where the frack is my ship?: Blog Banter 21: What’s good for the goose…
• Blog Banter #21: Change? | Sarnel Binora’s Blog
• Low Sec = Wild West ~ Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah
• a merry life and a short one: Low Sec: I Wanna Talk to You
• Low Sec = No Sec | Diary of a Garbageman
• EVEOGANDA: Blog Banter 21: Friggin’ Low Sec
• Drifting through the Stars: Blog Banter #21: Low-Sec – The Forgotten part of EVE Online
• Captain Serenity: Eve blog banter #21 – Low Sec, The Forgotten Part of Eve
• Low Sec: the Best part of EVE Online | Nitpickin’s
• Aeroxe’s Assault – “Is Low Sec the forgotten part of EVE Online?”
• Eve Blog Banter 21 | A Scientist’s Life in Eve
• Latro’s Bunker: Eve Blog Banter 21 – Low-sec
• A “CareBears” Journey » Blog Archive » EVE Blog Banter #21: The Low Sec Conundrum
• EVE Blog Banter 21: Low Security Space « The Nomadic Gamer
• EvE Blog Banter #21: Where Now?!? – EvE Blasphemy
• Low-security space is for people who care « EVE’s parity bit
• Blog Banter 21 – Fish Heads and Baby Ruths
• EVE on Real Life: Obsession with Lowsec
• Stand by to Repel Boarders (Blog Banter 21) | Interstellar Privateer
• EVE Blog Banter #21: Location, Location, Location « The Lathspell of Mithrandir
• Blog banter #21: Stuck in the middle with you « Diary of a Pod Pilot
• Persephone Astrid’s YarrJournal » Blog Archive » Living la Vida Lowsec
• Freebooted: BB21: Low-Sec – If it Ain’t Broke, Introduce a Law-man
• Flashfresh – The Pirate.: EVE Blog Banter #21 ‘Low Sec Needs Fixing? Yes but not too much…’
• Nashh Kadavr’s EVE Blog: EVE Blog Banter #21, low-sec love…
• New Eden History Student » Blog Archive » Blog Banter #21
• Blog Banter 21: No Man’s Land « Yarrbear Tales
• Omnis Arcanum of EVE: EVE Blog Banter #21: Is CCP indifferent to developing Low Sec??

… well for my main that is. In the past weeks we’ve been actively roaming, camping and suicide ganking resulting in my security status being below -5 now (It’s below -7 actually).

And as it seems I always have to learn things the hard way. I had some loot I needed to sell in Jita and I completely forgot that I would get popped as soon as I entered high-sec with this as result.

One of my new corp mates also learned the hard way that you shouldn’t use an Ashimmu in a gate camp especially not when you are engaging a bait Maller.

Well that’s it again for this status update.

Xeross, out.

As you can read in my previous post I’ve applied for Hellfleet and I’ve been invited to fleet up and roam around with them, so here’s a report of the latest one.

When I joined the fleet I had no idea what we were doing, all I knew was what the mandatory fitting was (cruiser, remote armor reppers and some other stuff).

So when the briefing started it turned out as a sort of remote repping course, the basics were explained and after that we set out learning while we were roaming about.

As soon as we undocked someone immediately managed to get gate aggro by remote repping someone else, resulting in a perfect training environment of the gate guns rotating targets and us keeping up with them.

After this we continued to roam about with the gate guns still aggressive to us so the learning continued.

After a while we managed to spot what I think was a Zaelot, we warped back and forth between gates at 100km for a while however he kept warping to the gate at 0.

After the last warp he started approaching us, and we decided to approach him, we locked him up and started orbiting, while keeping a close look on our watch list to make sure no one would get blown up.

After a while it became apparent we weren’t going to break his tank (Cruisers don’t do that much damage), and one of us even died because we ran out of cap.

After this the Zaelots friends warped in so we decided to jump. After this we somehow encountered them again, however this time some of us had trouble warping out and didn’t survive.

Finally we decided to dock up to refit, however as everyone was getting a bit tired we decided to call it a day and go home.

So my first steps into the realms of remote repping, it’s quite hard to keep up with the RRing while still putting up a fight, however it’s powerful so good thing I get some experience with it.

~Xeross

Captain’s Log, 5th of January 112yc.

After getting my Rifter assembled and configured yesterday she was ready for her maiden flight today. Flying without any crew on-board takes some getting used too, however the silence is nice for a change.

First thing today was getting familiar with the Directional Scanner, I’ve read a manual on it recently so I understand how it works. So we flew to a random Empire system to try and find someone in an asteroid belt.

After 3 minutes of scanning I found someone and 30 seconds later I arrived at the belt to see the person warp away just as I left warp myself.

So now it was time to  head into Low Security space, after trying to find a target for a while I found a Caracal but I made the mistakes of hesitating whether to attack and the Caracal took off. After moving around and scanning again I traced him down again but he had some company this time. After rescanning a few times I found the Caracal was gone and a wreck had taken his place.

After this I decided to send a system wide message containing the text: “I see you got the Caracal”, after this I got a confirmation that they indeed successfully killed it. And after looking at the public info of these people it’s apparent they were pirates.

After this 1 attempted to scan me down and attack me, however I’m not too sure if this was indeed the case. I managed to get away quickly before they got near enough to disrupt my systems.

After this I continued my journey and a few systems further I requested the list of people currently in that system to find there was a group of pirates that were all part of something called “The Bloodmoney Cartel”, after seeing them destroying some ships again (Through my scanner) one appeared next to me I instinctively docked at the station.

After a while I decided to undock and this pirate was still floating near the station, I think I somehow panicked or something because before I knew it I had locked on to him and opened fire. However after a short while he burned through my shield, armor and structure without me even burning through his shield.

After this I docked at the station again because he would get shot if he podded me, in the 30 minutes after that we had a conversation on ships, ammo and other pirating related things (See Attachment A) , thanks to this I now have some more knowledge about PvP.

After that I headed back to get a new Rifter assembled so I could continue my journey, but still a loss is a loss.

Computer, save secure file, end recording.