I’ve been trying to find some Eve streamers to watch throughout the day, but there’s a lot of ‘bro culture’ for lack of a better word, so it has been a slow process. CCP has offered some pretty nice rewards for watching during the weekends, and I’ve tried to make a point of catching those as often as I can. The EverMarks I could do without, but the ship skins can be traded to other players, and are usually not too bad looking. The mysterious crates have been meh – but it’s nice to get the skinr items, I’m hoping I eventually collect enough that my purchases will be minimal.
I have been working away at the dailies on my main only, I honestly can’t be bothered to do it on alts. None of them do any mining, or scanning, or manufacturing, and that makes the majority of the tasks unobtainable. I don’t think we should be expected to do all the things on each of our characters per account, and I wish CCP planned this better. Still, I AM looking forward to the skill points that I’ll get tomorrow. I’m very close to finishing up my training on drones V, and my main just crossed over into 51,000,000 skill points. My alts are all much lower than that, but that’s OK, what they do, they can do pretty well (minus that new LP farming character who is horrible. I’ll get there). As always, fly your way! o7
I haven’t had very good luck lately with relic/data sites, and I think that’s because it’s the weekend. From Thursday to Sunday afternoon, EVE gets pretty busy. I’ve come to expect it (let’s not get into the player numbers since Equinox has released and the disappointment people are feeling with that) – any way, I was out exploring down the chain of WH from where I’ve set up my Orca, and happened to walk right in to some conflict going on between a tengu, gnosis, astero, and three or four other ships (maybe alts). In J164104 They were fighting on a high sec entrance and I wanted out, so while they were all preoccupied with each other I slow boated (cloaked) my way around the other side and manually flew my ship out. I checked the zkill and it was pretty populated, a lot of WH that I explore don’t have much displaying. It looks like Pillars of Liberty might be set up there, I saw quite a few deaths from their side since May 27th or so. Before that it looks like they spent some time in J144956. Which has just a huge amount of combat. The Astero in the fight made it out alive, but I saw that some others didn’t fare quite as well – an Epithal being one of the fatalities (it looked like it was empty).
I’m not a huge fan of PVP game play, but I understand and respect that this IS a (mostly) PVP game, so if someone engages with me in a WH I will at least provide them that content. My goal though is to avoid being seen / found / detected at all. I picked a very quiet WH for that exact reason.
I have been watching a really neat video from someone who lived as a ‘nomad’ and recorded his adventures, and he made some great points about picking a system to live in that I didn’t really think about and that’s making me consider changing my home base system. I was concerned about finding a system that had a high sec connection – but if I’m looking for quiet, it might actually be better to find a quiet system with a C1-C3 connection, and a C4/5. The C1-C3 systems have a very high chance of having a high sec connection. High sec connections means busier (usually). Lots of day trippers and lots of hunters. Anyway, it’s something for me to consider.
I’d like to have proximity to gas & ore, with the option of finding a high sec connection “easily” (within 2-3 jumps). My second account has been training up a blockade runner, and I think that would help when it comes to moving stuff around. I plan on continuing my PI adventures at the Wormlife Freeport, honestly that’s a fantastic set up already and I wouldn’t be able to improve on it. Their 4.5% tax is incredibly reasonable, and having others around works to my advantage – I’ve got two alts who have been living in one for almost a month now. The system is too busy for me for ‘regular’ life, but it works well for PI.
Much like real life, I just seem to be getting an itch to move to some place else. In my day to day I’ve moved over 20 times, rarely living in one location for more than 5 years. My family was military, and it was just normal to frequently move. My spouse now is a first responder, and we still move every 4-6 years. I’ve never minded this, and I think it carries over to my experiences in game. Doing ‘the same’ for too long starts to wear on me.
I’ve been using my Helios almost exclusively for exploration, but I did win the fully fit Astero from Signal Cartel a few weeks after I joined, so from time to time I like to dust that off and fly it around too. It’s fit for sub 2s warp which I really like, and it has a bit more room than the helios, plus a few drones that I like to keep around in case something jumps me and I need to put out a distraction so I can get away. Everyone seems to like the way it looks, which I think is OK but I’d like to pick up (or design) a skin for it in the future.
Really though, the Astero is just a stepping stone to the Stratios, which I also own but for now I cannot fly it with my Signal Cartel character. I know both ships were pretty expensive due to some specific components, I’m not sure if it’s coming down in price, but that would be great to see. I built my Stratios after winning the BPC on hypernet, and like I mentioned, I won the Astero. I don’t take them out very often, especially since I can fly a T3C already (on my main, at least) but it’s still also fun to switch things up. I see a lot of “why do you fly abc123 ship, this xyz ship can do all of that and BETTER!” – sometimes, you don’t really need a ‘why’ – the answer is “because I can.”
It’s day 43 of living out of an Orca in a random wormhole with a HS static. Things are going well! ISK making is down from last month but honestly that was very expected. I’ve had less time to play, and less luck with exploration. I’ve also only got 2/6 of my characters doing PI – I’d like to get that to at least 4/6 this month but time is a rare commodity.
I’ve been killing sleepers to get the ‘blue’ loot (sells to an NPC). did a lot of gas huffing, a little bit of mining (this was mostly for my own industry needs and not for selling), and spent a lot of ISK on BPO & skills. I’ve gotten some good data/relic sites, but the lower ISK this month is due to a lack of time, and nothing more.
I had gotten a few rig BPC from a site, and also had to pick up the skills that let me craft them. Sold them for a nice profit. Like I thought, regular skins have gone down a lot in price which I expected with the release of the skinr tool. I still have not explored that yet, but I can understand how people who fly the same ships for years might be interested in a new look. My industry is still being completed in high sec, so I have to keep a close eye on profits and taxes and all the rest of it. FUN!
I am not a fan of the new daily goals. I dislike that it is more of a monthly combination of actions, and I really dislike what CCP wants us to go after as goals. Today it’s scan down 2 relic sites, damage other capsuleers, and earn 50 LP for any corporation. The simple one was to destroy 25 non-capsuleers, which is what I did. Hunting down relic sites in specific is annoying, and while earning LP is ‘easy’ it’s also something I would need to go out of my way to complete. The goals are character specific, another issue I have with them. They used to reward 10k sp daily, and were brought back down to 5k sp daily because there’s ‘goals’ now, after 3, 6, 9, and 12 days. I feel more obligated than I was before, and more resentful. I’m hoping this isn’t the final iteration of the dailies, and maybe CCP gives them some extra attention (again) in the future. It would be nice not to have to leave the WH every time I want to complete a daily.
Right now I only have 2/6 characters doing PI steadily. I’m extracting P0 and turning it into P1, and I would usually then take it and turn that into P2 (robotics & guidance systems) but I’ve been trying to get things sorted so I’ve let it lapse for now while I figure things out. I use a wormlife freeport for the 4.5% taxes, and every Monday I collect my PI and then when it’s quiet I’ll scan down the HS connection and drop it off. My PI characters are not very fancy, but they are Omega, and they can fly ships with cloaks, which is nice. It’s not mountains of ISK each week, but it is pretty passive, sells well, and is very minimal effort. I don’t mind logging in to re-set my extractors each day, and collecting PI once a week works out well. I could attempt to collect it less frequently, but the Epithal I’m flying fills up quickly and I don’t want to make more trips than I have to.
Ideally sometime this week I’ll set up the other characters who need to get their PI off the ground. I spent some SP last week unlocking the various skills required, and while they can all use the command centers at V none of my PI characters have 6 planets. Setting up PI itself is pretty simple once you get used to the clicking, and you can do most of it docked once you place the command centers. You can even gate to a safe, cloak, and place command centers without being anywhere physically near your planets. Seems a bit OP to me but who am I to complain.
Industry / Market wise, gas took a huge dip in value this week, I imagine it’s because of the pirate faction ship changes. Some of it might be because of people panic dumping, so we’ll have to see where the numbers go from here. I’d like to branch out a little bit in my station trading, I’m even contemplating switching to Jita to just see how different it is from where I currently trade. Things are slower where I’m at, but there’s also less competition and I’m OK with that. It might be interesting to see how the bigger fish play.
Speaking of bigger fish, I got to finally catch one of Oz_Eve’s streams live this weekend! He’s on the CSM team this year so he’s not actually doing any trading due to his NDA, but he still offers updates and support to other traders. It was fascinating to listen to him talk about the ins and outs of marketing, and listen to the speculation on where things are going. Of course there were the usual doom/gloom people, but that happens in pretty much any game ever. I am a big advocate of constructive feedback (ie: mention an issue – give a few solutions, in a constructive way that doesn’t death threat the developers..) and I think a lot of people miss the fact that they can actually voice their opinions without having it devolve into something violent. Tomorrow, a suitcase challenge update!
stargrace 
