There is kindness is EVE!

It might be a dog eat dog universe where internet anonymity can bring out the worst in people, but there are still players out there who choose not to hide behind the mask and will gladly lend a hand when you’re down.

If you take a look at the very bottom of this post from a few months back you’ll see that I was 177mil isk to the good with some minimal investment in trading and blueprint research. You’d be forgiven for expecting my wallet to either be a little heavier or at least as full as it was 3 months ago. You would also be wrong.

In recent months I have heavily (and by heavily, i mean spending most of my isk) invested in BPOs and used alts to add to my available research slots. I also (after the debacle detailed below) bit the bullet and buy/fit a tech2 Drake to take into level 3 missions in an effort to gain the 0.5 Gallente standing necessary for faction warfare. Mining with my alt hasn’t proved to be very profitable when compared to missioning so I have let that fall by the wayside a little. About the only thing that has kept me afloat is daytrading, which has and probably always will be my number 1 money earner.

So here’s the situation, with my remaining millions (roughly 50 of them) sitting in escrow on the market I was treading a fine line between bankruptcy and profit. Imagine my dismay when I try to put up a buy order for the value of 3mil isk and hastily throw an extra 0 into the mix before hitting enter, draining 30mil isk from my account in a heartbeat.

I was left with only one course of action, grovel. The transactions tab in my wallet showed that I had bought the item from a less than 1 day old alt who had no doubt been created to add more trading slots to an account. This guy could have kept the money (it was rightfully his at this point after all), deleted this alt and never be seen again. I wouldn’t even have the option of using locator agents to hunt him down for the rest of his EVE career, not that I’d have followed through on that plan.

At this point I was resigned to never seeing my isk again, but I soldiered on and sent the alt a eve-mail offering to let him keep double the market value of the item I had purchased if he would return the difference to me. I cancelled my buy order for that new Drake (I have no idea whether it would have gone through and bankrupt me or not, and I didn’t want to find out), then I waited.

An hour later I received this:

There I was, scratching my head over how I sold the damn thing for 30mil, and just when I figure it out and start feeling good about it, I think to check my mail and find this polite and well-worded appeal to my good nature.

Hrmph.

Yeah, double market order sounds fair to me, I don’t mind paying a 20mil karmic debt. Tab-check your orders!

You sir, are a legend!

I sent my eve-mail of thanks and retired, pleased in the knowledge that I survived breaking EVE-Online’s cardinal rule #2 (right behind ‘don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose’).

Check your market orders folks!

APB, My Wallet, They Will Meet.

I’m still a million miles away from my PC, the suspense for Empyrean Age is killing me! Unfortunately, I’m going to need to put a bit more work in before I can sign up for the faction that I intended to. It turns out that you need a positive standing of 0.5 ignoring any social skills you may have trained. I knew this was the case when you wanted to advance in rank, but not to sign up in the first place. Woe is me, I’ll have to mission some more when I get home.

Seeing as it’s impossible for me to blog about my gaming experiences this week, I feel no shame reblogging something I just read over at Rock, Paper Shotgun. I’m fairly sure I’ve seen the APB character creation video before, but it doesn’t hurt to gush a little about a good thing.

With a character creator this good, I feel no shame in admitting that I’ll be buying the game when it comes out and giving it a shot for at least the free month. Maybe they shouldn’t give us a public beta, because if the gameplay’s not there, a few weeks of messing around with that tool will have satiated my urges for the game.

I already enjoy making new character portraits in EVE and I have high hopes for ambulation, but unless there’s a good reason to walk in stations (or station services are as quick and accessible by your avatar as they already are when docked) then I doubt I’ll be getting out of my pod all that often.

When The Servers Are Down, Uncertainty.

Under normal circumstances I would be taking advantage of the living legends offer and touring Norrath while Trainquility goes under the knife. Unfortunately, I’m roughly 100km away from home and don’t have access to a PC that is even capable of running EVE classic. Downtime for me started a little earlier than most.

In the meantime I’ve been doing a lot of planning and theory-crafting with EVEMon and the EVE Fitting Tool. I love these two tools, and I probably spend as much time toying with them as I do running missions or manipulating the market. There are, however, times when the sheer amount of information provided by these tools is enough to boggle the mind, and their utility pales in comparison to the knowledge gained from experience. Boy would I like some of that experience right about now.

I came across my first bout of uncertainty when using EVEMon, trying to pick the skill that I would train while Tranquility recovers from a 24 hour operation (there will be bugs and loose ends to tie up as always). I’ve mentioned before that my character is a fairly competent pilot in anything up to a Battlecruiser. If you imagine a character, nearly trained to level IV in everything without any tech 2 specific skills you’ll have a good idea of my main’s capabilities. The problem here is that I haven’t specialised in anything yet, and now is the time to start training tech 2 ship skills for use in level 2 and 3 factional warfare situations.

Upon browsing tech 2 frigate specs I decided that I wanted to fly them all, which wasn’t any help at all. Then I went searched for opinions and happened upon some scathing reports of assault ship PVP viability. In the end I plumped to train Gallente frigate to level 5 so that I may fly the Ishkur and Taranis interceptor, believing they will both prove useful in level 2 missions. Though, I can’t help wondering whether the time would have been better spent training for a frigate that I already use like the Punisher or Rifter.

Despite reading around I still have many questions about how useful I will find these ships in PVP and how regularly I’ll be able to field them with my budget. Does the insurance pay out as well for tech 2 ships as their tech 1 counterparts? Would I be gimping them by not avoiding tech 2 fittings? How much more isk should I expect to lose when I do tech 2 fit them? Perhaps most importantly, will Assault ships be more or less useful/expensive when cruisers are also available for selection? I’m sure all will be answered in time, and at the cost of a little isk.

My other, lingering sense of uncertainty can be attributed to my complete lack of PVP experience. I have no idea what I’ll be up against, who I’ll be flying with or how we should set ourselves up when we get out there as a group. I’m secretly hoping that level 1 PVP turns out like the frigate free-for-alls that I have attended, where everyone turns up with no ultimate objective and chaos ensues. Far fetched, I know.

When I sit down and open up the EVE Fitting Tool with the aim of churning out some good gang setups I come a cropper when faced with the myriad of possible enemies. More often than not my small gang grows progressively larger as I anticipate more tactics that would challenge it’s dominance on the battlefield. Eventually I end up with something similar to this monstrosity. At the moment I can definitely see packs of destroyers dominating level 1 bunkers, after all, they’re specifically designed to destroy frigates.

I really can’t wait to see what the opposition fields, how many organized opponents we are likely to come up against and how quickly gangs can be formed in the militia channel. With that knowledge in hand I’ll return to the fitting tool and knock out some adaptable gangs for whatever corp I may have joined by then.

Interestingly, I’ve only found one Gallente FW corp that I’d consider joining, and that’s a bit on the small side for my liking. I know of another 3, but they’re even smaller. I know Gallente are the underpopulated underdogs on the test server, but I was hoping for a bit more of a ramp-up from our side before the expansion hit Tranquility. It will be interesting to see who starts aggressively recruiting when we get our militia channel. Maybe I should relocate again and sign up to fight for my character’s true race

 

On Empyrean Age, Part 2: More On Rewards

I’m having troubles getting on the test server, so everything I write below is likely to be hideously uninformed. To soothe those soon to be seething with anger, I offer this pretty picture:

It seems the devs were keeping quiet on factional warfare rewards beyond loot for a reason, there are none to speak of. This dev chat over at mmorpg.com clears things up a little.

MMORPG_Taera: wells asks, What rewards are we to expect from Factional Warfare, And what benefits are there to rising in ranks?

Greyscale: Going to do this backwards, if it’s ok

Greyscale: The biggest bonus from the ranks is that every time you rank up you gain a fairly substantial chunk of Faction standing. This is the main way to achieve Faction standing in the FW mechanics, so it’s fairly important

Greyscale: On the subject of rewards in general, the current target for the initial release is to have a reasonable but not huge reward mechanism in place. The biggest bonus is probably going to be the amount of NPC dogtags you can pick up, which are needed for a lot of LP Store exchanges and are in pretty short supply for a lot of people right now

Greyscale: On top of that, you’ll get any payouts from missions, and of course the loot of those you kill!

Greyscale: The rewards area though is something we’re definitely keeping a very close eye on, and it’s likely that we’ll ramp them up further as time goes on. We’re anticipating that a lot of older and more experienced players are going to want to have a play after the initial release, and we don’t want to be giving rich experienced PvPers lots of free cash! Once the system settles down and we figure out exactly where the balances lie we may well tweak things

Greyscale: But initially at least, the biggest payoff should be the fact that the PvP is fun. If you’re having fun with the game then that should be its own reward!

So ranks are largely superficial and there are no rewards for attacking or (more importantly) defending control points. Granted we can make a little isk by looting our enemies and collecting NPC dog tags, but when it comes to PVP there will ultimately be a net loss.

I agree that PVP shouldn’t be a path to wealth and that losing ships and isk is all part of the game as well as being essential to the economy. I just worry that dog tags and player loot wont be enough to offset the massive losses that those sitting on the PVE/PVP fence might come up against.

I still have no idea what the benefit of owning and defending complexes is. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

MMORPG_Taera: mairon asks, Will the FW mission have a higher base payout? I know that they will all adjust as time goes, but I fear that they will share the fate of lvl 5s.

Greyscale: I believe they’re still using the same basic formula, which scales based on the average completion time. Given the number of jumps you’re usually being asked to run this should result in higher payouts, but there’s no hardcoded boosts yet. We do now have the capability to tweak these values in more detail though, so if we do find problems we’ll be addressing them

Greyscale: That said, the issue with level 5 payouts should also be resolved in the Empyrean Age patch – there was an extra variable that was missed the first time round that we’ve now corrected

Greyscale: So you can expect L5 mission payouts to be noticeably higher after the patch

Here we have a reason to ignore capturable complexes altogether, the risk/reward ratio will probably be a lot higher for missions thanks to a monetary reward upon completion. A reward that can’t be looted from your ship as you return to base, might I add.

So the worst case scenario from my last post has come to pass, though I’m still quietly optimistic about the expansion. I just want to get out there and shoot some ships alongside some randoms from my militia channel. Rewards and incentives to spread the player-base out will come in time as CCP continues to tweak and add to EVE. Heck knows, my lack of experience could be clouding my vision and these worries may simply fade come June 10th.

Lastly, if I fancied a rant on accessibility then this next quote would be first in line for a berating:

MMORPG_Taera: mench asks, What will deter large numbers of gatecamps in the FW areas so that less experienced players have a chance?

Greyscale: Directly stopping, nothing. EVE is still a sandbox and it doesn’t make sense to have deterrents to this sort of thing out in free space. The ways to deal with them are 1) have a fast ship – no warp disruption bubbles in lowsec space so if you’re quick enough you can just run away, and 2) good co-ordination with your friends and allies to clear out enemy camps. Again, it’s something we’ll be monitoring once it goes live, but it’s not something we wan

I don’t fancy a rant though, and I’m glad that the sandbox is still in effect. You probably won’t find me camping gates, it’s not my cup of tea, but I’d love trying to run a group of frigates and destroyers through one on the way to a mission. Heck, finding a gate camp and plotting it’s demise would probably be more fun than doing missions or complexes.

On Empyrean Age.

I haven’t yet had chance to play around with Factional Warfare on the test server, what with having to mission my way out of negative Gallente standings before the expansion goes live. Therefore, I’ll be gleaming information from the recent dev blogs (links apparently not working at the moment) as a basis for this post.

At the moment I’m perusing the blogs, firm in the belief that Factional Warfare is both everything I wanted and everything I expected from CCP. We are being given:

• A system where characters can sign up to one of 4 militias and immediately target any opposing militia members, Red vs Blue style.
• Agent missions that will take us into the opposing militia’s space.
• Dynamically spawning control points for those after a less directed approach, very similar to what Nuyan described a few months back.
• What sounds like a final battle for sovereignty of systems once the attackers have pooled enough “good deeds”.
• Faction NPCs policing your home systems.

Excellent stuff, no? It makes you think, though. If the above 5 bullet points can summarise what I needed from faction warfare (put lots of small, easily found groups in low sec who are targetable without consequence), what’s taken CCP so long to get this point? Ignoring the fact that CCP clearly had a lot of work on their hands putting out all the previous expansions, I can only imagine that the devil was in the details. It’s the details that scare me..

As you can see from the screenshot above, CCP have put a lot of effort into giving militia members all the information necessary to get out there and make a difference for their faction. Great stuff! I can’t wait to get my hands on that menu and start planning strikes. I did, however, notice one omission from the militia menu, any mention of rewards (accumulated LPs or something similar). So far, beyond the mention of ranks, which at the moment sound somewhat superficial, I haven’t read anything about incentives at the individual level. A system that would entice new players to the scene and help direct their efforts in the war.

Will we be rewarded for shooting down opposing ships? If PVP doesn’t offer a way for players to make back some of their losses I’m afraid that new players will be turned off by the drain on their finances. Where 0.0 gives you access to high quality ore and rats, PVP sounds like it could offer little more than a new way to get shot at. That’s fine by me, I have other sources of income, but if factional warfare is meant to bridge empire and 0.0 space then I’m hoping the incentives will be there for others to get involved.

Do PVP missions pay out like normal PVE missions and is there any reward for successfully attacking a control point (complex)? Assuming that these are equally dangerous endeavours, if missions have a payout while control points have no immediately tangible rewards then there’s always the possibility of players flocking towards agent missions and largely avoid each other.

Quick Edit: I’m going to assume that opposing faction NPCs in the complexes drop some nice loot. The Empyrean Age features page states: Militia pilots that successfully scan for a complex and hold it uncontested for a set amount of time will claim it for their faction, and be rewarded with corporate standing-as well as more tangible benefits.

Is there a substantial reward for successfully defending a control point? Defence is boring, nobody likes sitting around waiting for something to happen. The Dangerous Systems list above will hopefully direct defenders to appropriate areas in dire need of reinforcements, but if the system doesn’t recognise their efforts then I’m afraid the attackers will see little resistance and always prevail.

Another Quick Edit: I’m having a little trouble getting my head around this one, compounded by the fact that I don’t have any experience with the complexes that are already in EVE. Will rats with high quality loot continue to spawn here to make the complex worth holding and hopefully make sure someone’s around to defend it?

I’ll be giving CCP the benefit of the doubt on this one as I’m struggling to imagine how much of an impact rewards (or lack of) would have on the battlefield without any experience with the system proposed. They’ve had a lot of time and no doubt given factional warfare plenty of thought. Whatever happens I’ll be doing my best to get the most out of factional warfare with little regard to my finances.

Here’s a shot of the new login screen. As you can see, curiosity has got the better of me and I am about to have a quick mess about on the test server. I’m already disappointed with what I’m seeing, not enough brown!

Where I’m At With Games.

Like I said in my last post, the stars have aligned for a return to blogging. Strangely enough for this time of year there’s an abundance of topics to write about. We’ll begin with a pleasant surprise:

No I’m not advertising for SOE, I just like to break the page up with pretty pictures. I do however applaud their decision to give former EverQuest and EQII players nearly 2 months of free play time! I doubt I would have returned to EQII for a long time, having just forked out a fair amount of cash for 90 day EVE time codes while they’re still cheaper than a normal subscription, but this offer has me thoroughly excited. My last stint on EQII’s PVP servers was a largely frustrating experience and this offer will give me a chance to level a few of the classes that I really enjoyed on PVE servers.

It looks like EVE Online will be satisfying my PVP urges for the foreseeable future.

Forget Trinity and Ambulation, this is the most important expansion EVE will see for a long time. Faction warfare is coming and I don’t know about you, but it will fundamentally change the way I play EVE from now on. Who knows whether it will actually become the half-way house between PVE and 0.0, whether it will devolve into a blob-fest, whether it will be all it could have been. All I know is that I’ve been consistently frustrated looking for targets and I’ve been aching for some directed frigate on frigate PVP. To that end I’ve been investing heavily in frigate and small module blueprints with my alt and missioning for the Gallente Navy so that I may fight for the nation that I’m based with. I’m hoping for big things on the 10th.

Where would I have been this month without Guild Wars? It’s a rare occasion that I’m not subscribed to any “land-based” MMOGs, but with most of my gaming budget being split between EVE and the impending purchase of a new laptop (for work only, sadly) I have found solace in collecting skills for quick PVP matches in Guild Wars. Selfishly I’m hoping that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t see the light of day until 2009, I wouldn’t want the population to dwindle before I’ve had my fill.

That should give me plenty to write about for the time being.

You may notice that I’m not one of the 400,000 people who purchased Age of Conan. For once I’m going to sit out on launch and let others shape my opinion of the game for me. There will be plenty of time to give it a go when my finances have improved/the EQII offer ends/I tire of the excellent non-MMOGs I’m playing.

It’s “hangArs”, you illiterate moron.

More on that later..

Only seven posts into a new blog and I’ve already taken a naughty hiatus. You won’t hear any excuses from me. I aimed to commit myself to writing regularly and am disappointed with how quickly I allowed myself to ignore the blog. With that little admission out of the way, allow me to resume normal service.

It seems the stars are aligning for my second attempt at blogging. Just this morning I read a post titled “On Writing Well” over at Random Battle where Cameron neatly sums up why I’ve decided to write again today with his final paragraph:

Writing well seems to be a lot like learning to ride a bike. You fall on your face a lot, you wobble quite a bit, and if you do it in public everybody gets to see and laugh at your mistakes (hint: blogging is often learning to write well in public). Eventually, you start to get the hang of it. Sooner or later, you’re zooming around having fun. Most importantly, it looks a lot easier than it is. But if it was easy, everyone would do it. The important thing is to keep at it until you get it.

As I said in my first post, this blog is primarily a venue for me to practice writing and communication. Writing didn’t come easy to me first time around and I’ve already fallen off the bike once, let’s hope that by keeping at it, this ride will go without a hitch. Once I can be sure of regular contributions to the blog I’ll probably begin to link to it in comments I leave elsewhere, until then the training wheels are still on.

Quick Edit: Looks like wordpress has gone and told Cameron’s blog about this post and linked it for me of its own accord. Kind of defeats the point of me not linking ’til I’m satisfied with the place. I believe the culprit option has now been deactivated. Also, I love the edit button, RSS readers be damned.

Without many readers I doubt I’ll see much in the way of feedback. But, if you cast your eyes back to the first comment of my last post, and indeed the title of this one, you will notice that one chirpy soul has already lent a hand.

Anyone know how much editors cost on an isk per article basis? Probably more than I could make in a month.

Good hunting all.

Relocation Relocation: Planning For The Future

My brief dive into the low sec area around Hek got me thinking. I wasn’t at all well positioned in the universe. While I had a nice trading base just outside Jita and 2 ship hangers in Caldari Navy mission hubs, I was living my virtual life in an overpopulated area of space that lacked action! I wasn’t close enough to any exciting areas of low sec that weren’t dogged by intense choke points and gate camps. I needed to relocate!

Last night I came to realise that Red vs. Blue, two empire corps with permanent war decs on each other, were based around the Hek system. How convenient! My original plan was to get some solo pirating experience before committing myself to their was to further my pvp education. Seeing as the area is both ripe for solo pvp and future corp action I set out to find a safe nearby system to call home. This wasn’t going to be a simple operation as my main’s “family” were vehemently opposed to any sort of upheaval.

My efforts to fully explore EVE Online: The Complete Experience™ were always going to require a second account as I am loathe to train any more non-combat skills on my main (who can only field tech 1 cruisers at best). So with a view to the future I subscribed to another old account sheltering a character proficient with skills in the learning category. I’ve mentioned before that the majority of my income comes from playing the market (in Jita specifically). While Oursulaert and Dodixie provide ample trade opportunities, I simply couldn’t leave such a lucrative market behind. The original plan was to house both of my characters in the same system, instead I have left my alt behind to fend for himself, training his own trade skills in between his industrial jaunts. Whether the two can hack the strain of a long distance relationship, only time will tell.

At least my alt was kind enough to help with the move.

It amazes me how much time I spend in EVE dealing with logistics. Half the game is moving stuff from place to place. As an industrialist you can easily spend most of your time hauling ore back to the station, shifting produce to your preferred trade base or shuttling blueprints to vacant labs. As a mission runner you spend immense amounts of time hauling loot and salvage or traveling in search of replacement ships and equipment. To alleviate the problem (for my main at least) I had begun stock-piling replacement frigates and modules, hauling them to mission hubs every couple of days. Little did I know I would soon be relocating all of it 15-20 jumps south. Stubborn as I am I refused to put it all on the market and start a-new in Gallente space.

The haul required 2 rounds trips (on autopilot of course) for each character with multiple stops at various stations in Caldari space, leaving nothing but a few cruisers and station containers behind. In all it probably took 4 hours on and off while I worked on something else, the 2 clients running silently in the background. If I had to do this during my prime gaming time I would have been severely ticked off, but as it turned out I wasn’t inconvenienced at all.

Now that the job is done and I know I can run 2 clients simultaneously I hopefully wont have to waste time hauling with my main. He will be getting down to business, destroying ships (mostly his own), constantly whittling down his supply of modules while my alt earns money (and occasionally hauls south) in the background. I’m settled and all set for action!

I’ll leave you with a screeny from my first hauling trip. Somehow my poor little Bestower warped in behind a hulking Minmatar freighter, then proceded to mount it. Neither of us could move on our autopilot trajectories until I manually piloted around him. I wonder how long we were stuck before I spotted it.

Current Status

Main: Venturing beyond Hek to lose some frigates, solo PVP style.

Alt: Researching Tech 1 blueprints. Trading. Mining.

Wallet Balance: 177 million isk

Forays Into Low Sec: Looking For Trouble!

My first visit to low sec last week was largely uneventful, a quick exploratory dash in and out looking for easy prey. Failing that I wanted to get a feel for the difficulty of the rats in the area and the income I could expect from hunting them. Little actually happened, the area was underpopulated and I eventually start hunting rats for 80k a pop. Eventually a player piloting an Enyo assault ship (a Tech 2 Gallente frigate) warped to the belt I was hunting in. Fearing for my lowly Tech 1 Rifter I fled the scene, a decision I eventually came to regret.

I fled because I didn’t understand what I was up against. Had I realised that the Enyo was a turret-based ship with no drone bay and only 2 mid slots I would have given it a go. You see, I was flying a speed equipped micro-warp-driving Rifter with a nice passive shield tank to boot. The setup is vulnerable to missiles/rockets (as activating the MWD vastly increases damage done taken by these), small drones fast enough to keep up with me and perhaps the biggest thorn in my side, anything carrying a stasis webifier. The worst I could have come up against with the Enyo was one rocket launcher and a sizable armour tank. It would all depend on whether his blasters could track me. They probably could have, but I didn’t stand to lose much and I regret not taking the chance to experiment.

I needed a new plan, a positively suicidal attitude if I was going to get the experience I needed to become a proficient PVPer.

First things first, I needed to find a well populated area of low sec space to sink my teeth in to. Being based in The Citadel and having failed to find trouble before trouble found me somewhere in the north western regions I decided to look elsewhere. Looking at the map I soon noticed a fairly large area of low sec nearby, bang in the middle of the universe. The cluster fell to the south of a 0.5 system called Hek (I imagine this place is fairly well known to others) where a large number of players were currently docked, taking refuge carnage scattered throughout numerous systems nearby. “Perfect!”, I thought and quickly made preparations for the flight south.

The map’s “ships destroyed in the last hour” statistic helped in dodging gate camps on the way in (and it looked like there were many) but while it was an excellent tool at helping me avoid trouble, it certainly wasn’t any use when I wanted to find it. I quickly came to realise how useless I was at using the ship’s scanner, unable to scan down any reasonable prey before moving on to the next system and trying again. Eventually I grew bored and started shooting rats in a belt when waddya know, trouble found me again. This time my foe would be a fellow Rifter pilot, though he would have to wait for me to warp out and quickly warp back to the belt as the rat I was engaging had eaten into the majority of my shields.

It turns out my fellow Rifter pilot lacked patience and wasn’t even kind enough to finish off the rat who was on his last legs. I put the poor thing out of it’s misery and almost immediately a new pilot warped to the belt, his flashing red status on my overview warning me of impending danger. I quickly warped out again to regain shields and returned to the belt to wait for my opponent. Soon enough he returned in a Stabber, a Tech 1 Minmatar cruiser with which I had no previous experience. This time I wasn’t going to run, throwing caution to the wind I locked my target, scrambled him and began to orbit.

My shield seemed to be holding up fairly well but it was readily apparent that I was fighting a losing battle. The logs show that while my autocannons were hitting roughly half the time, his barely touched me. He had the upper hand thanks to two Tech 2 light missile launchers which hit me for 103 damage a piece every 8 seconds. His impressive speed also meant that I couldn’t have turned the tide by deactivating my MWD. At one point he ran close to some asteroids which I collided with as I orbited him (smart play) and his guns successfully caught me a couple of times, and again when I turned to escape his warp scrambler. Eventually he was ransoming my pod for 10 million isk and promptly shot me down when I told him that my clone was only worth a tenth of that (a fact the age of my character belies).

Reawakening in The Citadel I continued to converse with my murderer who turned out to be a fairly affable person. While he wouldn’t tell me his precise setup he did give me a few tips for the future. Maybe if I was packing an afterburner, a webifier and some defender missiles in my single lowly launcher things would have turned out differently (I doubt it). At least now I have knowledge on the kind of fight that Stabber pilots will put up. Useful knowledge in a universe where choosing your targets wisely is the key to success.

More PVP stories to follow, but first.. relocation relocation!

EVE Online: The Complete Experience™

EVE Online is a vast game with incredible depth. I doubt anyone would begrudge me the first part of that statement, with hundreds of thousands of players piloting in the same universe. On the subject of depth, I fully expect many to hold the opinion that I am confusing depth with complexity.

I imagine most new players on the free trial sat beside an asteroid, activated a mining laser and waited a few minutes for their cargo hold to fill up. Every new player will have highlighted a pirate ship, clicked orbit, activated their lasers and waited for their target to die. Most new players will have sampled the logistical side of the game and AFK traveled to a station to perhaps find an agent, buy a shield repairer or a speed modifier and the proceeded to repeat one of the first 2 tasks. I’d agree with anyone who tells me that these actions aren’t inherently fun.

The problem new players face at this point is a lack of clear goals and a harsh learning curve obscuring the route to those goals. In my opinion the beauty of EVE is the ability to set your own goals (today I want to blow up a player in a more expensive ship than mine), plan your approach (choose the right ship for the job and set it up appropriately) and execute it successfully (find your target, avoid unnecessary dangers, blow up opponent) confirming that your plan was indeed flawless.

The number of options available when deciding on goals and the multitude of ways to achieve them is the biggest draw of the EVE for me. Ultimately the game is about 2 things, making money and the putting your assets (i.e. ships, stations) into dangerous situations but ultimately coming out on top. In order to get the most out of the game and in order to avoid repeatedly running missions (which quickly gets tiresome) I aim to investigate and take part in every area of the game. Over the course of my subscription, however long that may be, I aim to experience EVE completely. Hence the title.

Trade options available include:

• Mining: Sure I’ve roved high sec belts in search of scordite but I’d like to see what I can do to maximize my output and take a mining ship in search of more lucrative ores in high risk low-sec.
• Hauling: I have never tried NPC trading. So far I haven’t found any trade routes that are worth my while, but I feel I should give it a try as many people have seen success in this area. Sounds like a nice way to make safe AFK isk.
• Trading: Buying low and selling high to the player base is currently my main source of income. I will relate my experiences with this at some point on this blog.
• Manufacturing: I own only a single blueprint and have never gone through the process of manufacturing something. That is something I want to change! It’s actually a lot more simple than I first imagine, but reading guides was still the order of the day when I decided to take up this challenge.
• R&D/Inventing: As an extension to manufacturing, the process of creating Tech 2 items is unknown to me. Time I had a look into the market and see if I can carve out my own niche.
• Banking/Investing: Thanks to the Warp Drive Active Industry Podcast I recently realized that there are opportunities for investment within EVE. I’d like to understand what is involved in Banking and IPOs and possibly invest a little cash somewhere.
• Station Ownership: Probably something that is out of my league at the moment but there are ways to pull in cash by owning your own station in empire space. I know nothing of how this works, maybe this would be a good loooonnnngggg term goal.

Money making combat options include:

• Mission Running: It’s time I bought myself a battlecruiser and got to work on level 3 missions while I train to fly Tech 2 frigates. Up until now I have found level 2 missions fairly easy in cruisers, however my second attempt at level 3 missioning nearly saw the death of my Maller.
• Cosmos Missioning: Apparently there are various storyline missions for each faction in select systems. These missions apparently take you in to multi-room complexes with rare BPOs as mission rewards. I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.
• Exploration: The developers recently added “hidden” points of interest in space that must be scanned down to be found, often with valuable rewards for those who find the.

The above are interesting pursuits in moderation, but ultimately I will be taking part in them in order to fund the PVP fun below:

• Pirating: After a few ventures in to low sec and gaining a fair amount of knowledge on frigate setups I feel I am ready to try my hand at more regular PVP. My character is skilled enough to fly all of the tech 1 frigates effectively and has a large enough bank balance to fund some outings where I take on prey much larger than myself.
• War Waging: I’d love to do some gang PVP with a few corp mates. Red vs. Blue looks like my best option here and after a short try at solo piracy I will sign my main up to this new PVP initiative.
• Soldiering: My final goal is to join an alliance in 0.0 and see the frontlines, maybe catch a glimpse of a titan.

In the short term I will be experimenting (and therefore writing about) manufacturing, cosmos missions and solo PVP. I will be concentrating on using all the popular frigates and writing about the setups I’m using. I  spend nearly as much time toying with EVE Fitting Tool as I spend flying around in game. I will then move on to popular cruisers when I have enough money to consider them regularly disposable.

There’s plenty left for me to see in EVE. Time to get to it!