I have spent some time thinking about a recent comment Benedict made, and my response. To save anyone tracking them down, here they are:
- While targeting non-combat ships makes for safer kills, I have to say it's also making for less interesting stories. The problem is that there's no suspense - as soon as we see the ship type, we know how it's going to end. Your combat writeups are much more exciting, because we don't know who's going to win until we see the killmail!
- I totally agree. Of course, I have only a certain amount of control over the opportunities that come my way. Other bloggers deal with that by posting every week or so, picking out the most interesting fights to post about. Because this blog is as much a learning journal for me as it is entertainment for the rest of the community, I have decided to exclude only a narrow range of fights (suicide ganks and lol fights), and so I post pretty much everything, dull periods and all. The upshot (I hope) is frequent posts and a fairly honest view of a beginner pirate's life in New Eden.
When I started the Punisher Plan, every fight was important. I had so much to learn, and even ganking a hauler gave me much needed practice in hunting and fighting. But now? Not so much. A Crusader ganking a T1 hauler is not really worth writing about, and almost certainly not worth reading about.
So from here on out, I'm only going to post battles that actually involved a meaningful fight, or had some interesting feature. This means that my posting rate is almost certainly going to slow, but I shall try to post at least three times a week; Monday, Wednesday & Friday. Hopefully, though, my posts will be more consistently interesting and useful.
Of course, that means my blog will be even less representative of what I'm actually doing, but I suppose that anyone who is really interested can just look at my BC record. Battle Clinic has my API, so all wins and losses are automatically uploaded.
It also means that the numbering convention I started in the Punisher Plan will be redundant; the number is meaningless if there are kills that are excluded, so I will adopt a simple "Myship v Theirship" naming convention for my posts. This prevents my brain from exploding trying to come up with interesting names, and should also make finding particular battle records easier. I will retitle the pre-existing Crusader posts for consistency.
Finally, I will merge my "Post battle review" and "Lessons for the future" sections. During the Punisher Plan these sections deserved their own space as I had so many basic pvp lessons to learn. Now, however, I think they can safely be dealt with together.
I found something similar when I started to get into PvP. To begin with, every fight was a huge deal, no matter how one-sided, because I was learning so much from each one. After the first 20 or so kills, though, you start to get the hang of it.
ReplyDeleteMind you, I do FW rather than piracy, so the targets are generally shooting back, which changes the odds a bit. Once you've pointed a non-stabbed hauler the battle's basically over, but even outnumbered and outgunned a Battlecruiser can quite easily kill two or three interceptors before dying if the 'ceptor pilots make a mistake.
Too bad, I actually enjoyed reading about how you found those targets, regardless of the actual fight.
ReplyDeleteI understand what you mean, darmwand. There are loads of little things that I don't post about because there is no point to them, but which were interesting experiences.
ReplyDeleteOne of the posts I was intending to write was about ganking a T1 frigate. I did not know it at the time, but he was set up to generate cynos, so there was no "fight" to speak of.
But what I found amusing was the fact that while I was hunting him he was chatting to another pilot in local about how their dead-end area of low sec was so safe, and that pirates never visited!
Things like that are less likely to make it into the blog, now, but even so I think that the content will be stronger and more consistent for having the new policy.
lol, nice.
ReplyDeleteAbout the posts: what about just briefly posting about the more interesting non-combat kills like once every couple of weeks, i.e. how you tracked them down etc? This way those of us who care still get interesting input while the ratio of combat to non-combat doesn't suffer significantly?
Anyway, I enjoy your blog and I'm pretty sure I'll keep doing so, regardless of what you decide :)
Yeah, I could probably do something like that. One of the advantages of cutting out the easy ganks is that I will have more time for editorial style posts because I'm not trying desperately to keep up with my kills and losses.
ReplyDelete