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Moving (an alt) to a Wormlife Freeport

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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

EVE Gaming

Suitcase Challenge Day 18: My First C13!

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For exploration purposes, I stick to the C1-C3 range of wormholes. I’ve entered a few C4/C5 but don’t stick around as there is usually someone living in them (or someone being evicted). I prefer to keep a low profile, especially since I am casually living in a wormhole myself, out of an Orca I have parked at a safe. This week I managed to find myself in my very first C13 wormhole – which is a version of Shattered that only allows small size ships to pass through. Thankfully the Helios I’ve been using to explore fits that qualification no problem. There’s no moons and all planets are shattered in these WH, which is pretty, but useless for anything like PI.

The wormhole was filled with signatures. My usual method is to scan the entire hole and then proceed from there – but if there’s a site I want, I’ll stop scanning, go do the site, and then return to scanning. I’ve already posted about using the ‘perch’ method, and then I turn these perch bookmarks into a safe bookmark after the site has expired. This C13 had 7 relic/data sites for me to complete, and in about an hour I had 270,000,000 ISK in value in my ship. I never saw another soul, whether it was because of the C13 status, or because it was close to downtime, I’m not sure. My usual game play happens around 5am my time (Atlantic) until 7:30am, and then I get another hour at the end of the day. Some days I’m not in the mood for exploration, or there’s no good sites within range, and in those instances I’ll spend the last 1h before I go to bed doing something with guaranteed ISK reward, like ratting.

I haven’t been selling my exploration loot because I’d like to use it for crafting. In specific, I can save almost 100m ISK by crafting myself a zeugma analyzer instead of buying one off of the market. The thing is I’m not so certain I want to justify the additional ship value by adding one. I certainly won’t bother on the Helios, but maybe for the Stratios so I can free up the mid slot. I’ll probably sell the other two (the bpc comes with 3 runs). In any case, it was a very exciting morning, I ducked into the ice field just to nose around, and then spent some time jumping from hole to hole to find one that had a static HS connection.

I’ve finally gotten the hang of using pathfinder – and I love it. I tried Tripwire briefly, but didn’t really understand anything about it at the time, so I’ll try that one again when I’ve got some free time, but pathfinder makes mapping very simple. It tells me statistics about my wormhole at a glance, and you can see the C13 I went through, along with the connections it had. These connections of course won’t be the same any more at the time of this post, they change every 24h roughly, which is why mapping can sometimes be a bit of a pain. I just like knowing the path back home (you can also flag WH as EOL so you avoid it if required) and I like knowing what connections I can count on. I can also usually figure out if a WH is going to be busy or not based on those connections and where they’re at in kspace.

Any way, it was a great day for exploration, and my little helios has paid for itself over a few times now with plenty of profit to spare. This little ship might not be able to do any combat, but some days, that’s exactly what I’m looking for.

Fly your way. o7

EVE Gaming

Suitcase Challenge Day 17: The Little Helios who Could

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In case you’d like to read about my suitcase challenge from the beginning, here are those posts:

It is now day 17 (remember I’m posting these after the fact, so whatever I’m writing about has already happened, security reasons and what not) and things are going well! Every day it’s a different adventure. One of my first small goals was to cover the cost of ships that I might lose along the way – and I have to say, this little T2 ship, the helios pictured above, is cost effective and super great at what it does. I don’t quite have max scanning skills, and I also don’t have implants at the moment (I’ve just never bothered) but my scan range is 109 which should be more than enough for anything I want to scan down.

The total cost of this ship is around 55m ISK, and when I took it out I attempted to earn at least that amount in loot, then everything else I made after would be profit. The ship does have some downsides, I can do zero combat with it at all, I have one tiny EC-300 drone just because there’s enough room for that, and that’s about the extent of things.

This is the current fit I’m sporting:

I love how speedy and cute it is, and the fact that I finally have a skin for a ship I fly is a nice little bonus. I’d expect a good amount of posts involving this little Helios, let’s see what trouble we can get into together!

Fly your way. o7

EVE Gaming

Thoughts on Security Space

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I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been playing EVE off and on since 2009 (mostly off) and during that time I basically exclusively played in high sec content. To be honest, that’s probably one of the main reasons that I never stuck with the game longer than a month or two at a time. Since returning, high sec has become a thing of the past, and I spend a majority of my time elsewhere. Here’s some bullet point thoughts I have on security systems:

High sec: It’s not really safe. I’ve had most of my deaths occur here. The bottlenecks that head to trade hubs are almost constantly camped by gankers, and there’s nothing more frustrating. I dislike these types of players who prey on people who have no interest in combat when there’s an entire game filled with pvp hungry people out there. I know, no place is safe, EVE is a pvp game, etc. That doesn’t change my mind. High sec is also low ISK vs. other security space, and while there are certainly quiet areas there’s also a lot of competition.

Null sec: This place is still scary to me. People ‘own’ land there (sovereignty I think it’s called), and they don’t like me much. I’ve used some filament to port around, and while I can at least see who is in local that doesn’t really give me any relief, they’re normally huge systems called a bloc, all owned by one alliance with lots of little corporations under their umbrella. I normally spend most of my time in these systems scanning down a WH so I can find a HS connection to get home.

Wormholes: This is where I’m most comfortable. I’ve spent most of my time this play through in a wormhole, and I’ve never lost a ship in one – I know it WILL eventually happen, but whether it’s because I’m *extra* cautious while traveling in them or because I just have a knack for picking quiet places, this is where I feel most at ‘home’. Hence the 90 days suitcase challenge. I love wormholes. I also am aware of a gigantic C5-C6 eviction war going on at the moment, but it doesn’t affect me except to stay out of the way.

Low sec: I’ve spent the least amount of time here. It feels like there are always others around, and since there’s no concord response I may as well just be in a wormhole, which I already prefer. Is there some secret to getting anything done in these systems? I’m not really sure. I’d like to take a cheap exploration ship out and about for a while to learn more about what makes it a popular place to hang out.

What are your favourite systems to hang out in? Where do you spend your in-game time? Let me know in comments, and as always, fly your way! o7

EVE Gaming

Suitcase Challenge Day 11: Statistics (of course)

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Since I’m using Pathfinder (and a few spreadsheets) to track all of my adventures in this suitcase challenge, of course it’s time for a few statistics.

This is day 11, and I’ve visited 77 systems, with 58 unique wormholes. I’ve dipped out to high sec 5x so far, and made 2,476,517,197 ISK. Note that I do leave the Orca in the WH when I go to sell, I’m not risking taking that in and out. What I’ve been doing is confirming the WH is ’empty’ (who knows if it’s actually empty, given as there’s no one on local), parking a character at the HS entrance 100km off gate cloaked to watch the gate, log the Orca in, warp to the bookmark, drop off/pick up whatever it is I want to deal with, and then leave the WH (and log the Orca out safely in space). If anything at all changes, I log out the Orca first. That’s always my main priority. Once the Orca is logged out, I breath a sigh of relief, lol.

I do tend to take smaller bundles of items off to market rather than taking large expensive trips. I’m more paranoid in high sec than I am in the wormhole. I don’t sell in Jita, but I do price at Jita prices most of the time. So far? It seems to be working out.

Fly your way! o7

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