EVE

Day 12 (Still Flying)

I’ve fallen into a comfortable routine in the mornings now when it comes to World of Warcraft & EVE. I check my industry, put new stuff in if I’m able to, check my PI, and then do a bit of ice mining until the two belts in my system are depleted. Once a week I travel to my PI planets and shuffle bits around, and once a week I head to the market to re-list and sell. In between all of that, I’ve started ‘ratting’ which basically just means killing NPC (I kill the ones I find in anomalies / signatures). In 4 days I can start flying my newly fit Tengu (hopefully an improvement over the one I was flying in 2015) and in the meantime I’ve been flying a perfectly apt Gila. I did end up losing a Helios this week to a data site when some very nasty NPC spawned and 1 shot me. Helios is not an expensive ship though so I replaced it and moved on. Ships are just ammo, as the saying goes.

For the past week I’ve made more ISK than I’ve spent, so that’s good. I’m experimenting with industry quite a bit, seeing what sort of markets I can find myself in. I’ve also joined a corporation, although I am not entirely convinced that they’re a good fit for me I think it’s more to do with being awkward and not necessarily a ‘them’ thing. For now I continue to lurk and learn, and explore aspects of EVE that I know I enjoy.

A fight in Perimeter

To start things off, I have to say that as a newly returning player to EVE, I have absolutely no horse in this race. I was not a part of the political reasoning to this battle, and I had not even heard about it until this week when someone posted a few PSA about removing items from the structure. There are, of course, two sides. I learned the basics. An alliance put up a trade building in highsec, a few months later CCP changed the rules so that you can no longer do this. As time went on, some drama ensued (as it does in EVE) and one side decided this structure should cease to exist – because it was funding a few large nullsec corps (though from my understanding at the beginning many people were benefiting from it and then things changed) with highsec earnings as they would collect tax. This war would have permanent side effects since you can no longer place this building, and honestly, as has been said a few times over the course of this battle, it’s not actually about removing the building – it’s about the story. You can read about this really long feud over on TAGN, who explained it much better than I could since he has way more experience.

Anyway, at one point there were over 5.1k people in local. It was INSANE. Probably one of the best (and by far the largest) events I’ve ever seen take place in a video game. I learned many new terms, like TiDi, and that it was not in fact lag, but TiDi that slowed actions down so that the servers could cope with so many players being in such a concentrated space. EVE became a literal spreadsheet game, almost turn based. I’ve honestly never seen anything like it before. No one enjoys when TiDi happens but everyone adapts and goes along with it because let’s face it, a space battle with 5000+ people is something to talk about. That’s how I felt, at least.

It took over 5 hours, but both of the structures fell, and I learned things like how timezones play an important role in these battles because of the way TiDi stretches out the fights. I lurked in a few streams, and listened to the community, something I truly enjoy doing. The community of EVE is.. unique. Friends and enemies alike came to twitch to chat, which I wasn’t expecting.

It feels like I came back at a great time to be able to watch this happen, and while I know EVE isn’t all sunshine and roses (anything but) it was still a neat feeling to be ‘part of’ something on this large of a scale. For now, it’s back to my quiet area of space to scan down some more relic/data sites.

Compression is the Way to Go

I’ll be honest here, most of my ship builds are *ancient*, the Tengu fit that I used to use was from 2015, and the game hasn’t exactly stood still while time marched on. Some people have a lot of fun playing with different fits, but me, I tend to stick with one until it’s no longer viable to stick with it or until I lose the ship and need a new fit.

That’s how I found out that there’s a new fit I should be using when it comes to mining with the Orca. Especially ice mining, which I do in my home area quite frequently.

One of the banes of ice mining is that it’s SO large and takes up an incredible amount of room. That is apparently no longer the case if you can fleet up with an Orca (or other ship that can fit a compressor, there’s a few types). So I trained the skills, picked up an industrial core, and an ice compressor, and now all the weight of ice mining is a non issue. It has never really been that much of an issue for me in the past because I live in the system and dropping off the ice hasn’t been a big deal, but I can see the appeal. There’s also a lot of regulars who ice mine in my home system, and I’ve gotten to know them over the past week. They’re pretty friendly, offering to fleet up, offering advice on more up-to-date fits, and just chattering. I explained I was newly returning after a long break, and they completely understood (one of them mentioned that they had also just returned after a 10 year break).

It’s not exciting (well, unless someone unsavory pops by) and it’s not huge amounts of ISK, but it’s certainly better than regular mining in high sec, and my home area has quite a few ice fields to pick from. Yes, there are 20+ of us in there at any given time, but I’ve been enjoying this low key aspect of gameplay. It gives me time to read through the Rookie Help channel and get familiar with my new corporation. Plus I’m close to home, in case I need to log off for RL or I have a sudden urge to explore a new signature. I understand that mining is certainly not for everyone, but for now, this is exactly what I was looking for.

The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

I’ve been killed more in EVE this week than I have in the previous 12 years I played – and that’s what feels like it has changed (to me, at least). Yesterday caught me off guard. I plotted a route some where and one of the sectors it had me go through (even though I do have ‘high sec only please’ turned on the mapping – was 0.4, which was in the middle of a huge war that I absolutely had no place in. I wasn’t expecting it at all (in hindsight, I should have probably expected it). 0.4 is lowsec, and dangerous even on the best of days, let alone days when there’s massive amounts of people all over the place (hello weekend).

Now, ideally, I could have just turned around and left right back to the safer side of things, except I wasn’t expecting a bunch of people to be RIGHT there all pew pewing at one another – so I panicked, and of course just sat there like a lump on a log until I was blown to smithereens. Bye bye Tengu 2.0. I think the kill thing said I was shot by 7 different people. Nice. Thankfully I was not carrying around anything of value this time around.

The famous motto in EVE is to never fly something you can’t afford to replace. I know this, and I could afford to replace it, so I did. I decided to go with a different fit this time around though and it’s going to take me a few days to get my skills up to snuff (14 days, in fact). In the meantime, I decided to get some ice mining done. Nice, quiet, high sec ice mining (just watch out for the diamond rats). After, I did scan the sites around my home hoping for a WH with a gas site, but I didn’t have any luck. I did find a high sec relic site, but it had less than 100,000 ISK worth of stuff, gross. I still stand by the opinion that being in WH is far safer than being in lowsec.

As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself.

Organizing Those R&D Agents

Today I decided it was time to look into my R&D agents, see who I was working with, what rating I was at with them, and shuffle things around so I was working with the highest levels that I could. Right now I’m using R&D to craft drones which I then sell for a bit of income. I personally only have 1 ship fit for drones and I use it very rarely, I prefer the missiles I use with the Tengu. Anyway, two of my R&D agents are L4, one is L3, and one is L2. I want to raise up the faction that’s at L2 so I can work with a higher level agent, but the ONLY agent I could find is in a 0.5 section, and of course I tend to have horrible luck with those places. It’s 9 jumps away from home, which isn’t horrible all things considering, but I did want to be cautious. I only managed to do two security missions there before I had to head back, but I do plan on flying back out later today to get a few more done.

I also started making a chart for my ISK earnings & hangar value. If I want to pay for game time with PLEX, I would need to earn on average 83,000,000 ISK a day for 30 days. Right now I am obviously in no shape to do so but long-term it seems like a neat goal, since I’m all about the gold making in World of Warcraft, some of those skills should transfer over to EVE too. We’ll see. It has been a VERY expensive month so far because I had to insure my ships, and while I am making more ISK than I’m spending, it’s not by that much at all.

Hopefully getting on a schedule for PI & industry will help that out. I also started doing some gas mining, which I’ve never done before even though I had trained for it. Yesterday I was flying around trying to find a gas site (instead I settled for a relic site in a C3 wormhole) but I haven’t had a lot of luck. I’ve also been working through the application process to join a new corporation. I had been in my last one for 12 years, but it’s no longer active, and while I know it’s not absolutely essential, an active corporation is something I wanted to experience. I’m still waiting for an invite now that I’ve gotten through security, but I’m hopeful.

I still feel much safer in a wormhole than I ever did in ‘actual’ space (hi, lo, or otherwise). Maybe it’s just because I can’t see local and it’s an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ sort of situation. I don’t see that changing any time soon. In any case, fly safe and happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.