EVEOnline

What’s Going on?

A lack of blog posts – but instead I’ve been posting video of my adventures over on YouTube. They’re not fantastic quality, but it has been fun posting stream-like episodes of my adventures in space. I keep trying to fit into games like World of Warcraft, but since I have almost zero community in game, I haven’t been able to make it stick. The same can be said for GW2. I love playing, but I have limited time, and in EVE Online I belong to a handful of communities. I think that’s why I’ve been sticking with it for so long now.

I’ve been slowly (very slowly) working on my Crimson Harvest points. I’ve looted a number of ship skins, including a few for ships I actually fly. I’d love to find a helios version (does one even exist?) since that’s what I fly most of the time. The hacking sites are quite simple for me to do these days, though I have failed a can or two along the way. Things have fallen back into a familiar pattern that I’m enjoying quite a bit. When the servers come up from their daily restart I do PI on all my characters (that’s 5 characters, 6 planets on each), and then I start doing dailies on whoever I can before I have to tend to real life (I usually have just shy of an hour, which is enough to get dailies done on all 9 of my characters). Once I’m finished with whatever real life dailies I have to tend to, I decide if I want to do some exploration, mining, working on missions, gas huffing, or just flying around exploring. I’m getting more comfortable with multiboxing, and running 3 accounts seems to be a nice balance. I know there are people with far more (and others adamant about keeping just one) but any more and I think my attention wouldn’t be able to keep up. I normally do mining with 2 retrievers + a porpoise for boosts, and I have everyone with mining / boosting augments. Some days are better than others as far as ISK return – I did find a really expensive faction module this week that was worth 300,000,000 ISK which I promptly sold.

I’m usually flying a Helios for exploration, but I also venture off into the Astero. I fly a Vexor, Ishtar, or Typhoon for regular combat stuff. I fly a Tengu for C1-C3 sleeper sites. I fly a Wreathe for distribution missions, and a Squall for hauling PI, an Epithal for hauling PI around the wormlife freeport. I do have a stratios that doesn’t get much use at all, and since I’m no longer backpacking with the Orca, that has been sitting in the hangar collecting dust. My Jita alt can fly a Viator, but I haven’t purchased one yet.

There’s an announcement coming today which I assume will be about the next expansion. CCP had mentioned months ago with the release of Equinox that the Sov changes wouldn’t HAVE to take place until the following expansion – and that transition date is October 29th, so I can only assume that we’re going to be looking at some sort of expansion in three weeks. What will be changing? No idea. Equinox has been lackluster to say the least, and I doubt anyone would call it any sort of revival.

In any case, I’m really happy playing EVE, and I hope folks are not too upset at the lack of updates here. Fly your way! o7

New Videos – Stargrace in Space

If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you might remember that I used to do a fair amount of streaming over on Twitch, but my schedule is difficult to work with, and I often feel absolutely exhausted in the only ‘free’ moments that I have. I feel that streaming is an activity that you need to spend at least 1-2 hours steadily doing in order to allow people who want to watch to drop by. If you’re only streaming for 15 minutes, chances are no one is going to watch.

Because of this I decided that I should try my hand at creating YouTube videos, instead. I’ve got one series on the go right now called ‘Stargrace in Space’ which is (of course) all about EVE Online, with other series in mind for other games. I’m fairly confident that I’ll add a RimWorld series, and probably some World of Warcraft content (maybe not right away). This isn’t the same as streaming, but it is some content creation that fits within my sporadic play times. I can easily record a video here and there, with no pressure if I have to step away. I can edit in the moments in between, too. If you’re interested in watching my EVE series you can find it on my channel here. The quality right now is not the greatest, I’m having some growing pains with OBS & my microphone set up, but give it time and things should go smoother. We’re just about in October, and all sorts of in-game events will be popping up all over the place, and I’m looking forward to sharing that with everyone.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Suitcase Challenge Day 63: Finally

When I returned to EVE online in March, I had no idea what I was looking for or what I hoped to accomplish. Normally when I “play” EVE, I jump in for a month and then would find myself at a loss on what to do, and I’d wander off. This time for whatever reason the game has staying power (combined with the fact that no matter how much I try, I just can’t seem to get interested in Warcraft these days, Plunderstorm really did a number on me) so much so that it’s 4 months later, and I’ve just picked up 6 months of game time on two of my accounts. That’s pretty neat.

Anyway! My Orca is still safely living in her wormhole. I’ve been doing a little bit of mining, a lot of PI, some anomalies, and I continue to work on my market character along with my ‘main’ who is doing industry. I was thinking of trying mercoxit mining, but I have no idea what sort of ship fit I need for that, I just know that when I run into it, I can’t collect it with my strip miner II modules. It probably has special ones. Also something about spawning gas that harms you as you mine it? Interesting!

I’ve stopped trying to fly the biggest and best ships out there (note: I’m not even close to flying anything big anyway) and instead focused on flying what I can, well. I finally finished training biology V on my Signal Cartel character, which means I was able to pick up the Neural Lace ‘Blackglass’ Net Intrusion 920-40 implant, and oh my this thing is lovely. It lets me basically 1 shot any of the bad virus’ that show up on the mini game when you’re doing hacking. My helios is still my ship of choice. That little ship is amazing. I’m also still really enjoying my Tengu for C1-3 and while I know there’s more ISK if I were to do harder things, I’m happy and having a lot of fun with what I’m doing so far.

There’s less than 1 month left for my Suitcase challenge! I can hardly believe where the time has gone. As of today, I’ve been to 198 systems, and visited 143 unique wormholes. I’m not sure what I’ll do once the challenge is over. I might just continue to live in the wormhole, or I might try something new. Maybe I’ll sell the Orca. It doesn’t get a lot of actual use, since I don’t want to lose it. It feels strange to keep a ship around with such high value but with very little use. I guess we’ll just have to see!

Fly your way! o7

Suitcase Challenge Day 43: How’s it Going?

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.

As always, fly your way! o7

Monday’s Are for PI

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!

As always, fly your way! o7

Nomadic Gamer