The Year That Was 2012 for Drackarn

Well its 2013 and there is another year gone! Crikey! So what did Drackarn actually get up to in 2012? Well there was some PvP.....

Back in January I was still in Shadows of the Federation, founding members of the Drunk 'n' Disorderly alliance. It wasn't a busy month for me with only a handful of kills. However that was about to change. In the 2011 December expansion CCP fixed the bug where remote repping a pirate gave you a faction standings hit for those in the militia. Therefore there was no reason we couldn't go back to Y'aaaaarrrring through the space lanes and still be in faction war and still use logistics. The yoke of minimum sec status was thrown off and I went back to shooting all the things!

February was a better month with 54 kills and plenty of Caldari militia battlecruisers padding out my killboard. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, just lots* of shooting spaceships for fun and profit!

March was my favourite month of the year and it was also one of the most frustrating  I got a convo early in the week from my CEO "Have you got a dreadnought?". I replied no but I could get one if needed. He replied "Get it, we're going to gank a PL titan at the weekend!". That weekend we did just that. We dropped PL in their home system of Amamake. We got unlucky as PL had a capital fleet ready fishing for targets so the 'Quick in, gank, out' didn't go as planned. We did kill the Titan but my dread went down in a blaze of glory. Not long after that I was in Iceland for Fanfest for a long weekend of important internet spaceships and drinking! A great month but was tinged with frustration - the Eve Online Launcher launched! For about 6,000 of us this was a nightmare as something in the launcher made our ISP's go "NO!". CCP insisted that you must use the launcher and wouldn't release manual patches, but they didn't know what the problem was so couldn't fix it. I had to beg corp mates to manually export the patch, upload it to a file-sharing website so I could download it. What a PITA!

April saw the start of the Jita Ripper fan fiction series here on SC&S and a road trip for the alliance. Nothing really interesting happened to be fair in that month. However, I did find a way around the launcher issue.... change ISP!

May made up for a quiet April with the squids bringing faction battleships to the fight and this rather epic fight in Kedama which resulted in multiple capital kills. Worst bit was the aftermath using an alt in an industrial to go fetch all the discarded fighters and fighter bombers and scoop them up. So many fighters and fighter-bombers to loot! May was also the month which saw the Kamela Incident. This was when we went to help Wolfsbrigade defend their home system which they were in danger of losing. A Gallente Militia alliance assisting an Amarr Militia alliance to defend a faction war system! It started out as just logi assistance and soon escalated as the Minmatar open fire on us first**. The roleplayers cried loud.

June brought us Inferno and FW went to pot. Suddenly space was full of speed tanking frigates with no guns and militia's organising "cash out" days were people dumped their LP's into the iHubs to gain tier V for a few hours so everyone could rush to the LP store and cash in. However, I did get a shiny new PC to play Eve on after two years on a laptop!

July saw my new dreadnought unloading it's guns into a Nyx supercarrier. I also did proper chained-up logi for the first time and FC'd a roam. It was also the month I became sick of the serious, serious, competitive e-sports internet spaceships SoTF and DnD had become. So in a few clicks I left being a Director of SoTF and joined, as a simple rank and file member, QCats. The Jita Ripper series on here finished with a capsuleer capturing the protagonist in the system of Notoras and being given the choice of handing him to the police or to the powerful father of one of his victims. He chose the more darker option and pocketed 1bn ISK! Shock! To be honest I'm not even sure why I bothered to roll the Inspector Avi character. The chance of someone going the lawful but less well paid route was rather low! In fact, he really wasn't needed!

August was all about "Cockbag Thrashers". I was having fun with throw-away destroyers, I started the Vengeance fan fiction series and this blog won "Blog of the Month" at the Eebee's. That made Drack a very happy boy!

September and October saw me embracing more Cockbag Thrasher fun and getting back to more solo roaming.

November say me get back from holiday to find the QCats were now part of the Drunk 'n' Disorderly alliance. I'd only left them three months previously! I thought to myself, this is not going to last. The reason I left SoTF and DnD was my play-style wasn't compatible with the serious, serious fleets they were running and had joined QCats as their play style was much closer to my own eg Cockbag Thrashers. I stayed quiet and hoped QCATS wouldn't get too drawn into the serious, serious, competitive e-sports of DnD. By the end of November I was having some decent success in solo'ing. Practice makes perfect I guess!

December was not a good month in real life. First couple of weeks were a right-off and I had to return to the UK following a death in the family. But when I did back to Eve, Retribution had deployed and was a resounding success. Also I found on my return that QCATS had left DnD (I never did say "told you so" aren't I a good boy). But generally December was a shit month for me until Christmas came. Santa obviously decided to turn my December around given what had been happening in real life. I finally killed Quake590 in a 1v1! I also took part in the battle for Rakapas which left me one Dreadnought down, but three carrier kills up plus many, many, many, many kills!

So the year in numbers for both me and Drackarn.

Kills - 641
ISK Destroyed - 193.2bn
Losses - 91
ISK Lost - 12.3bn
ISK Efficiency for the Year - 94%
Fanfests attended - 1
Changes from Wanna-be to full-blown pirate - 1
PL Titans Ganked - 1
Capital Ships Lost - 2
Corporations - 2
Alliances - 3 (well technically only two, one twice!)
Number of Sindel Pellion's legs on lap - 2
Good fights had - A lot!

Reached 150,000 views on the blog - 1

Look forward to blowing you all up in 2013!


*lots for someone in my poor TZ anyway ;)
**well that's what our pilots said anyway!