I love how creative the players of EVE Online can be – see a need, fill a need. Which brings me to my next adventure. High sec PI tends to be expensive (via taxes), lacks resources (vs. other areas) and not a lot of fun. Someone told me about Wormlife Freeports over on Mastodon and I looked into what that was. Simply put, it’s some folks who have taken it upon themselves to create structures in wormholes with high sec connections, placing a fairly low tax on the POCO, and allowing anyone to utilize the docking privileges so long as they adhere to some pretty lax rules – the main one being, leave people alone in that system to do their thing (ie: don’t blow them up). Of course not everyone cares / respects / knows these rules, so combat does happen, and they do have a militia set up for certain situations like if someone is attempting to evict. Camps can happen, and hostiles like to make their presence known. Not really a big deal so long as you go about things in a safe way.
I joined their discord some time ago just to watch the happenings and to figure out which wormhole I might want to settle in. Yesterday I finally requested access to the entrance (I’ve stumbled into a few while traveling but not on purpose) and I’ve set up shop with an alt who is going to do PI within the wormhole. The taxes are only 4.5% – around my area of high sec they’re typically 20% (that’s 10% for the NPC and 10% for the players who set their own tax rate). Losing out on 20% each transaction when I’m already earning lower-than-normal PI components simply from being in high sec – sucks. Taking my time to decide which wormhole would be best for my needs also gave me some time to train up cloaking and a few other QoL skills on that character. I know I keep saying I’m going to downgrade from 3 accounts to 2, but now I’m contemplating keeping all 3 active. It makes sense, in Warcraft I also have 3 active accounts, I enjoy multiboxing but I don’t have a lot of experience with it in EVE (yet). The alt was never meant to do anything more than PI anyway, so I figure when the high sec exit is in a good location I can drop off my bits or even send my main in to go collect them. By ‘good location’ I mean close to where I currently live, and not a billion jumps away through shady neighbourhoods. For now I just have 1 of my PI characters at the Freeport, plus two characters doing PI in my suitcase challenge.
Let the adventures continue! As always, fly your way. o7