Journey to New Eden

First impressions of null sec

2011-06-26T19:24:00.001-07:00

Well, we've been in null sec for about 2 weeks and things are going pretty well. We've had a quite a bit of fun and excitement out here, including:

An SBU being dropped into our main system we had set up two days. We managed to kill it before things got too ugly
Getting hot dropped by a titan while we were jumping a jump freighter to our POS. The JF managed to jump back out before it could get destroyed (phew!)
Mining like crazy with the alliance to get our our industry level up (I love mining...)
Playing cat and mouse with a cloaky for a full evening. The cloaky got the better of us, unfortunately, but I didn't die...

We are getting a lot more participation from some of our corp mates who had drifted off as well, so on the whole, I'd say 0.0 has been a big success so far.

OMG! He's back (for another week or two...)

2011-05-22T19:38:00.001-07:00

Yeah, I've been gone from blogging for awhile, I'll admit it. But that doesn't mean I can't come back, and that's exactly what I'm doing now. Things are starting to get interesting in my corporation, and this seems like a perfect time to start doing a bit of blogging again.

As far as what's been going on for me, I've recently celebrated the following milestones in my EVE career:

Been to 0.0
Been podded
Learned to fly my first capital ship
Learned to fly my first T2 combat ship
Been promoted to a "leadership" role in my corporation

In my personal life, I've gotten a new job, sold my current house, found a new house in a new city, and made arrangements to move my family halfway across the country

I'll keep this posting brief, but look for more in the future.

EVE Online and the eternal noob

2011-01-09T11:24:00.000-08:00

Something that amazes (and confounds me, quite honestly) is how EVE can regularly make you feel like a rank beginner. It happens to me all the time. I've been playing this game for over a year and a half, but I regularly run into things in the game that I simply have no idea how to do.

It happened most recently yesterday when a corp leader asked me to stop reacting one item and start reacting another in one of our POSs. I'd been tending the POSs for a while now, so this seemed like it should be pretty easy, but it actually turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than I expected. Now maybe this was more difficult than it needed to be, and perhaps CCP could have designed this feature to be easier, but on the other hand, the fact that you do have to put a bit of thought into things and that the game won't hold your hand is one of the things that make it fun.

Other areas where this has come into play for me include scanning, planetary interaction, and POS management. I'm sure there are many more that will pop up as I continue playing the game. And quite honestly, I look forward to it!

What I've learned about high sec mining...

2011-01-09T08:27:00.000-08:00

Not too long ago, I got ganked in high sec while mining. In fact, I've got a draft post that I just haven't finished describing the whole sordid affair. Anyway, I've learned a few things about high sec mininig from the experience:

If you can, use an Orca so you can avoid jet canning. The way that griefers can kill you without getting CONCORDed almost always involve cans, so generally speaking, no cans, no grief.
If you do jet can, pay attention to your overview. The bad guy can't can flip if he isn't close to one of your cans.
If you see someone approach your can and get within 2500m of it, it's best to just consider that can gone. I would not try to salvage anything from it and would just leave. Remember, he wants your ship, not your ore.
If you are going to ignore the 3rd thing I've learned, then always grab stuff out of your can all at once, and only after making sure the can is not yellow. He will be sitting there with the can contents open, and the second he sees something disappear, he can drop something in, flipping the can and making you the thief the next item you move.

I'm sure there are tons of other rules for high sec miners, but these are the ones I learned from my little adventure. If you have any others, I'd love to hear them.

Announcing the "What I've learned about..." series

2011-01-03T22:24:00.001-08:00

Over the next few weeks or months, I plan on writing a series of posts covering things I've learned about Eve. Most of these will posts will be nothing new for many readers, and some things that I think I've learned may not even be true, but what the heck, I'm going to post them anyway. Maybe they will help a new player...

Toon update

2011-01-02T21:35:00.000-08:00

I guess today I'll take a minute to just explain what's up with my toons.

Radd Trigon

My main toon is Radd Trigon. He's an Amarr capsuleer, and currently is sitting on 21m skill points. I have also about 800k+ of refunded learning skill points to spend, but haven't really decided where I want to put them at this point.

Radd is very much an indy focused pilot, but has a fair amount of skill points on being able to fly a few combat ships. My top 3 skill categories are:

Industry: 8.3m skill points including the following Level 5 skills: Industry, Mass Production, Mining, Mining Upgrades, Production Efficiency, Refinery Efficiency, Refining, Ice Harvesting, and Advanced Mass Production (that last one is about 10% of my total skill points!). In addition, I have all ore processing skills trained up to level 4. Basically, if it has to do with mining or construction, Radd's got it covered pretty well.
Spaceship Command: I have trained 3.3m skill points in this category, including Level 5 in the following: Amarr Frigate, Amarr Industrial, Mining Barge, and Spaceship Command. I am exclusively an Amarr pilot, and can't fly any other ships. I can currently fly Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battle Cruisers, Battleships, Covert Ops Frigates, Interceptors, and Exhumers. I am currently awaiting delivery of my first stealth bomber, and can't wait to be able to cruise around nearly invisible. I spend most of my time in a BS, BC, or Hulk.
Electronics: I have trained 2.2m skill points in Electronics, with four skills trained to Level 5: Electronics, Electronics Upgrades, Propulsion Jamming, and Targeting. I have spent a fair amount of points to be a decent fleet tackler, but as I don't spend much time in fleets, my abilities here are mostly book learning without much practical application.

Radd is pretty much focused on mission running and mining these days, and spends half of his time in high sec and the other half in low sec. He's been in 0.0 only once, although when we was there, he dropped off jump clone in the station. Now that I have my new alt, he does not get involved in POS tending anymore.

Radd is currently focused on bumping up his combat skills, and is in the process of training up skills to improve his DPS at this point. After that, it's unknown, but I might get started on some capital ship skills. Who knows?

Tel Radic

Tel is new enough that he is still in his speed learning mode, with 1.5m skill points. He is a Caldari because I want to get him into a Drake eventually, but spends most of his time in a Merlin (a Caldari frigate) or an Iteron Mark V (Gallente industrial).

Tel is currently primarily focused on POS tending. He is fully trained up to Gallente Industrial V (his only Level 5 skill), and is able to fly a rigged Itty V which makes POS tending a lot better than it was for Radd in his unrigged Bestower. Unfortunately, by racing straight to Itty V, he has almost no other skills to speak of!

Tel is in the process of becoming a better Itty V pilot, and then will move on to become a Gallente freighter pilot. After that, I see Tel focusing on supporting other pilots, both in indy operations and in combat operations. I see him getting into an Orca and possibly a Rorqual, and then possibly moving on to train for flying logistics or command ships. I also expect Tel to train up leadership skills along the way. Obviously, this training is WAY in the future, so I fully expect this plan to change.

Anyway, that's a bit about where my toons are now, as well as where they might be going. Hopefully I haven't given you so much information that you will be able to waste me the second you see me, but if you do, I'd appreciate it if you'd at least let me know you read my blog after you've podded me...

POS bash-o-rama

2010-12-30T15:17:00.000-08:00

It's not every day that you find fruit as ripe for the picking as my alliance mates found on Christmas day. While flying around in low-sec, one of my alliance mates found that a corporation had set up two POSs on valuable moons. Of course, they had anchored dozens of modules around the POSs in an arrangement that definitely made it look like they knew what they were doing. Numerous guns and other defensive modules deployed to keep out bad guys.

Unfortunately, there was one problem. Apparently, whoever was setting these up ran out of time when they got to onlining the modules. I'm guessing that the missus was calling from the front hall that it was time to go to a Christmas get-together or something. Whatever it was, there they sat: 2 faction large towers worth billions, surrounded by a bristling array of various turrets that could defend neither the towers nor themselves because they were offline.

If this strikes you a bit like the Maginot Line prior to WWII, you'd be right on target, and the call went out on Christmas day that we needed to put together our own little opportunistic Blitzkrieg attack. While turnout was understandably sparse on Christmas, we got the word out to start bringing battleships and other support vessels out to low-sec in preparation for the assault.

That assault came on Boxing Day, as we formed our fleet and headed out. We'd kept eyes on the targets pretty much around the clock, and since nothing had changed by the time our fleet formed up, out we went for a little POS bashing. There were a few moments when we thought we might be getting set up for an ambush, but in general things went very smoothly. No owners showed up that day, and no white knights flew in to the rescue which meant we were able to put the towers into reinforced mode in about 2 hours each. After reinforcing each tower, we incapacitated the guns just to make it harder for the owners to make the tower defensible when we came back.

Two days later it was time for the towers to come out of reinforced mode, and we formed up our fleet once again to go take them down once and for all. As you can imagine, we had a lot more concern about encountering resistance this time around as the corp had almost two days to get word of the attack and pull together a defence. In addition, we were concerned that a larger fleet might drop by to kick us out and take over the operation.

With scouts watching all the necessary gates, our fleet moved out and approached the first tower. After aligning to a safe location to help ensure a speedy getaway in case of emergency, the command went out to open up on the tower. Those first few moments were pretty tense, but after a while it became clear that we would not meet resistance that day either. After about another 2 hours per tower, they were gone, and we received two lovely kill mails with the details. We then popped all the silos and offlined and scooped up all the modules that we could. After that, we had to send out the repair crew to fix all the guns we had incapacitated so we could put them to use. All in all, a very successful operation.

As I've said many times, the things I really enjoy about Eve involve groups of people coming together to accomplish something, and this was a really big operation for me. It was lots of fun, and has really given me a taste for getting more involved in PvP. I know it's just Internet spaceships, but because Eve is such a merciless environment where all your actions have "real" consequences, it really gets your blood pumping when you are out there in space knowing that at any second a capital fleet could hot drop on you and really ruin your day. World of Warcraft can give you a similar sense of accomplishment when your raid finally downs a tough boss, but you will never get the fear in WoW that you get in Eve. How worked up can you get about wasting a flask or having to spend an extra 25G for a repair bill?

Anyway, it was great fun and I look forward to more alliance operations in the future. And to the owner of the POSs we took down, I'm really sorry if we ruined your Christmas holiday. I hope the party was fun though!

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm launches tonight

2010-12-06T08:51:00.000-08:00

That's right, I'm excited about a WOW expansion, have already bought the digital download and will be playing it starting tonight at midnight PST. Feel free to abuse me as much as you like. Note: I will be playing Eve until that time though, so do I get some real MMO gamer points for that?!

My new toon

2010-12-05T22:32:00.001-08:00

As I mentioned a little while ago, I started a new character. His name is Tel Radic, and he's a Caldari capsuleer. He's joined my corporation, Phoenix Propulsion Labs, and has finished all the starter profession missions, plus part of the Epic storyline.

I was wondering what I should do with this character, and even got some suggestions from readers (Thanks, folks!). Now that I've been tasked with POS maintenance for my corp, I've decided what he will be learning first. His first order of business will be to get qualified to fly an Iteron V. Right now my main toon, Radd Trigon, is tending POSs using a Bestower. Only being able to carry 14.6k m3 of cargo makes moving fuel and materials around very inefficient.

Getting an alt out there the skills to fly the Itty 5 will make a big difference. In addition, this will also free up my main to spend more time doing things that are more useful for the corporation, like running missions, doing builds, and mining.

After I get him set up for POS tending, I think I'm going to train him to fly an Orca, complete with all the leadership skills to give mad mining bonuses. This will allow me to do some efficient mining solo. Mining is something that I enjoy, especially since high sec mining is pretty low stress.

After Itty V and Orca, I'm still not sure. Fortunately, the Orca training should keep me busy for at least 6 months, so I've got some time to think about it.

Wow, this is really amazing...

2010-12-02T22:43:00.000-08:00

I am fairly certain that if you are reading this blog post, you've already read the official Eve Online Dev Blog (surely I'm well down toward the bottom of the pile of Eve blogs!). However, if for some reason you have not seen the Dev Blog post entitled Celebrating the Creative Player II, go check it out here: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=826.

The character creator demo videos are amazing, and I expect a lot of new players might spend a good while playing with their character before saving and jumping into the actual game. In addition, the "Raise the Flag" videos are unbelievably good. Watch all four, as they give you a bit of a feel of the mentality and character of each race. They are actually quite stirring, and I found myself getting patriotic watching the Amarr video (which is strange because a) being Amarr has almost no impact on me except that I use lasers and run out of cap, and b) the Amarr are a bunch of bastards!)

Do youself a favor and click all the links.

POS tending for fun and profit (but mostly profit...)

2010-12-01T16:22:00.001-08:00

Okay, I spent my first night tending the POSs for my corporation. It took considerably longer than I expected and I'm still not quite done, but we do have quite a few POSs to take care of so maybe I'm not surprised. In addition, my character can't fly the Itty V, so moving stuff takes longer than I would like.

Anyway, I did manage to accomplish the following last night:

Visit each POS and document in a Google Docs spreadsheet (I would have done it Office Web Apps document, but it wasn't my choice!) how much of each fuel type was loaded into the tower.
Inventory all the fuel at each of the stations we have in the area to make sure we are ready when refueling time comes around.
Checked the status of the moon mining and reaction silos to make sure the output silos were not full and the input silos where not empty. Turns out that several of the harvesters and reactors were sitting idle because of a full or empty silo.
Checked the Corporate Hangar Array (if there is one) at each POS to determine if there is anything in there that needs to be moved to the main stations.

Anyway, we have quite a few POSs in the system and I am not the fastest person, so this several hours to get done. I still have a few POSs to check the silos on as well.

I would like to do a bit of analysis on these things so I could figure out roughly how long each POS can go before I need to visit it. I even checked the API documentation to see if there was a way for me to see information about a corporation's POSs from outside Eve but unfortunately this info is not available.

Anyway, I have a bit more POS checking and straightening up tonight and I will be in good shape. Oh, and I think I found a good job for my alt!

New responsibilities

2010-11-29T22:43:00.000-08:00

Well, as part of my plan to jump back into Eve with both feet, I have asked for extra responsibility in the corporation. As I have probably said, it is important for me to feel that I'm really contributing to the overall success of the corporation. As such, I'm very excited to be able to help out in keeping our POSs fueled and busy mining those sweet moon minerals.

I've done a little learning about this and will be talking to our current POS tender soon to make sure I fully understand this responsibility, and then I will be on my own.

Oh, and I'm sure those of you who have had to do this for your corps will tell me that it is a huge pain in the butt, and I'm sure that's true. However, it is something that is important for the corporation and I'm happy to help out.

BTW, feel free to ask me if I feel the same way six months from now...

I finally did it...

2010-11-29T10:06:00.001-08:00

I have to interrupt my review of past activities to let you know that I finally did it: I created an alt on a second account. I guess I just wanted to be one of the cool kids!

Yesterday, I signed up for a second account, taking advantage of the 3 months for the price of 2 offer that CCP is running now. I created a new Caldari capsuleer named Tel Radic. Tel is busy running through the storyline missions for each of the professions and getting trained up on basic skills. My goal is to have him ready to fly a Badger Mark II by this evening so he can at least be a hauler alt. Other than that, I'm not sure exactly what this toon's function is going to be, so I'm open to suggestion.

So, readers: here is the question: Now that I have a second character, what the heck should I do with him?!

Welcome Back, Part 2

2010-11-28T09:10:00.000-08:00

In the previous installment, I explained how I got out of Eve for awhile. Now I'll explain how I got back into the game.

While I was out, I mentioned that I was playing a fair amount of WoW. In addition, I was trying out some new games, such as Pirates of the Burning Sea and Lord of the Rings Online. I really liked the concept of both games, and played them pretty extensively for a month or so each. LOTRO in particular was really cool in the way that it wove the game around the story of The Lord of the Rings, but each game left me feeling like something was missing. After awhile I just stopped playing PotBS, and really slowed down on LOTRO.

It was at this time I started getting the Eve itch again. Even with all the negative feelings I'd been having about the game when I stopped playing, there was something about it that made me want to come back. As I'm writing this I just realized what it is: teamwork.

The games that I love are those games that require teamwork, especially with the same group of people over the long haul. World of Warcraft has it in the endgame raiding content: you have to pull together once or twice a week with the same group of people to accomplish something that is hard to do, could not be done on your own, and requires teamwork. Eve Online is the same in that for most people, working with your corpmates is the way that you really get ahead in the game.

After being out of the game for several months, I decided to check out my corporation's forums to see what they were up to. I read up on the comings and goings of the various corp members and the activities that they were up to. Seeing that some of my corpmates were spending time with other folks out in 0.0 doing PvP, I decided that that was the itch that I needed to scratch. I reactivated my account, hopped in a shuttle and headed out to our 0.0 station.

Once I reached the station (which was quite exciting for me as I'd never really been out there before), I clone jumped back to high sec to pick up some skillbooks. While I was there, things changed dramatically (as they often do in Eve).

Basically, my alliance decided that being in 0.0 was not working out, and opted to vacate our null-sec station, which they did during a time when I was not logged in. Fortunately, I had nothing out in that station but a clone and an Amarr shuttle. By the time I logged on again, the station was vacated, and my poor clone was stranded in 0.0. I suppose at some point I might clone jump out there, hop in my shuttle and try to make it back to low sec. In the meantime, if you happen to see my clone in your station, say hi to him for me.

Anyway, I was now back in high-sec and getting back into the swing of things. I was out of the wormhole which was awesome, and I was running some missions for standing and chatting on corp chat and things were getting back to normal. In addition, the corporation decided to move its primary base of operations back into high sec for awhile which was great news for me.
Finally, we had some corp mining ops pop up and participating in those really helped cement things for me: I was officially back in Eve. I realize that mining might be the least exciting thing to do in the game, but there is something really cool about your whole corporation out there in a belt, tearing down asteroids in a mammoth mining operation.

And that's how I got back into Eve after my absence. In my final installment, I fill you in on what I've been doing recently...

Welcome Back, Part 1

2010-11-25T20:46:00.000-08:00

Wow, that was a long break! It's been forever since I posted here, but I'm back, at least for a while. My voluminous following must be wondering what I've been up to. Am I still playing Eve? Am I still in the same corporation? What have I been doing in game? Sit back and all your questions will soon be answered.

Long story long, here's what happened. Many months ago (maybe 10 or so), the corporation decided to make a big push into wormhole space. I went along, and got myself trained up to Amarr battleships to help kill sleepers. We had corp members that would scan down the various anomalies and we'd get together every so often to go kill sleepers every few days. That was pretty fun, because it required teamwork to bring down the sleepers. We'd also did a fair amount of mining in the wormhole which was very lucrative, and the corp was able to get into T3 production which was cool too.

The downside for me was that I spent most of my time stuck in the wormhole with not much to do most of the time. My scanning skills are not great, and I'm not very good at scanning to start with, so there were many nights where I was basically stranded in the WH, spinning in the POS. When we got together and mined or ran sites, it was great, but that was not often enough to keep my interest.

Compounding that was the nature of the WH exit. I was part of the build crew for the corp, so I needed to get out of the WH once a week to do my builds. But as you know, the WH exit jumps around, and I would often find myself coming out of the WH with 35 jumps to the system where we do our builds. Ugh!!! I spent significant time every week travelling to and from the wormhole which is not my idea of a fun gameplay style.

After a while of this, I began to hate the wormhole with a burning passion, but since that was where our corporation was operating, I felt I had to be in there. It was at this time that I started to lose interest in the game. After a while of this, I talked to one of the corp leaders that I was going to back off playing as much, and was going to take a pseudo-vacation from Eve. The plan was to move to our build station, and hop on once a week to update my skill queue and put in builds. I did this for about a month or so, and while I wasn't playing the game too much, I was still contributing to the corporation which I liked.

Around this time, I had gotten back into World of Warcraft more heavily, and started raiding Icecrown Citadel with my guild's 25 man group. I was enjoying this quite a bit, and was not missing Eve too much. When I had to cancel the credit card that was paying for my Eve subscription because of a little fraud situation (don't ask...), CCP couldn't get paid and my Eve account went inactive. I figured that since I wasn't really playing all that much, I'd just leave it as is, and it was the end of an era.

In my next post, I'll explain how I got back into Eve, and what I've been up to more recently.

What I love about Eve #4: Freighter Kills

2009-12-10T13:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a story that demonstrates one more thing I love about Eve. As we all know, the Dominion patch has changed how alliances can claim territory in 0.0 space. Now, they must deploy various structures in their systems to claim them and upgrade them to support things like jump bridges and so on. One item that needs to be deployed is something called an infrastructure hub, which is an enormous structure that must be moved by huge freighters out to the alliances' systems to be deployed.

Now huge freighters filled with expensive cargo regularly move around New Eden, but not usually in such numbers at the same time as is happening now when the alliances are upgrading their territory. This has provided an opportunity for mischief, which in typical Eve fashion has not been neglected.

In an ISD post on the Eve Online web site, there are reports that dozens of freighters have been ambushed and destroyed as they deliver the infrastructure hubs needed by their alliances. One alliance reportedly lost 17 freighters when an opposing alliance attacked a fleet of freighters moving equipment out to null sec. As a freighter may cost 1 billion ISK, and the infrastructure hub it was most likely carrying costs 500 million, the losses from these ambushes is significant to say the least.

Just one more reason to love Eve...

PPL featured on CrazyKinux' web site

2009-12-07T18:42:00.001-08:00

Check it out! My corporation, Phoenix Propulsion Labs, is featured on Crazy Kinux' blog. You can see the article here: http://www.crazykinux.com/2009/12/phoenix-labs-few-proud-industrialists.html.

The means of production

2009-12-03T12:44:00.000-08:00

According to some communist leader back in the day, it was he who controlled the means of production who had the real power in society. Well, I have now been given control of the means of production for my corporation, having been granted access to the corp hangars where we keep the blueprints we use to build tech 1 stuff. In addition, I've been added to the roster of builders, and now will be assigned stuff to build every week.

The funny thing about production is how easy it is, and yet how nice it feels to be a bigger part of our corporation's main money making operation. While all I can build right now is tech 1 stuff, by providing extra build slots to the corporation, the higher skilled builders can concentrate on building more interesting stuff. And since the tech 2 stuff starts life as tech 1 stuff, I'm providing the base items that get our who production process started. It's just one more way to contribute to the success of the corporation, and it feels good.

So while I am no more powerful than I was before, there is still something to be said about having access to, if not control over, the means of production.

D-Day Arrives...

2009-12-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the launch of Dominion, and overall I would say the launch was remarkably smooth. I know that a lot of the update was around 0.0 changes, but there were a number of changes that were really cool for any player.

The new browser that it built into the game is fantastic. It is not only usable (unlike the previous browser), it is actually quite fast and renders pretty well. Previously I would have to switch to windowed mode if I wanted to surf and mine at the same time. Now I can just use the in game browser to give me something to do while I am mining.

"X-ing up" looks like it will be a thing of the past with the new Fleet Finder. I used it last night several times and it really works well.

Finally, the mail looks much better. Our corp doesn't do much with mail, probably because the in game mail system was so bad, but the new system looks pretty good.

It was a successful deployment in my book, especially considering the fiasco of the last patch I went through when doing a gate jump was a crap shoot!

Way to go, CCP!

Share your most embarassing ship loss

2009-11-06T15:07:00.001-08:00

Hey, I just shared my most embarassing ship loss. I'd love to hear some of your embarassing ship losses. Perhaps it will make me feel better to know I'm not the only one who has lost a ship in an embarassing manner.

Please leave a comment to this post with your story.

Oh no!!!!

2009-11-06T14:31:00.000-08:00

Ok, first off, I know it's been a while. I've been pretty busy at work, and I've been using my limited Eve-related time to play the game rather than blog about it. That said, I'm back, and have some new things to blog about.

The biggest thing is that I lost a battleship the other day. Fortunately, it was a tech 1 ship with all tech 1 fittings, but it still was an expensive loss for me, and my first loss of anything bigger than a destroyer.

The sad part is that I lost it in a L3 mission, and in the most noobish way possible. Here is the sad, sad tale...

I was running a mission where you have multiple waves of frigates and cruisers that spawn and attack. The goal is to reach a station in space, blow it up and take the inhabitant.

Everything was going fine, except the fact that the fast ships were difficult to kill by anything except my drones, and I there were so many of them, they were starting to go through my drones after a while. I was tanking everything fine, and with my supply of drones dwindling, I decided that I'd just blitz the habitat, grab the hostage and get out of there. With that in mind, I recalled my drones, turned off my lasers and make a beeline toward the station which was about 55km away.

As I said, the ships attacking me weren't making a dent, and I probably could have stuck around all day with my armor repper and DC going, so the damage was not a big problem. However, that's were the first of my noob moves came in: I decided it would be a good idea to start softening up the habitat from range so that I could pretty much pop it as soon as I got close. I figured this would save me a bit of time and get the mission over sooner.

With this plan, I loaded up some longer range ammo (see last post!) and focused my bank of heavy lasers on the structure. Right here would be a good time to add one more bit of data: Eve Survival had mentioned that the habitat was a trigger for 6 cruisers, 6 frigates, and 1 more ship of some sort (I can't remember what). Therefore, I knew that I should only soften up the target, not kill it, as I would really need to warp out as soon as I did so to avoid a large pack of baddies that could take me down.

Anyway, back to my story. I let loose the first volley from my lasers. You can imagine my surprise when the target was into structure after one shot! Holy crap, I thought, and hit the F-Key to shut off my guns. Of course, the second cycle had already started, and when it went off, the habitat popped, the can appeared, and a bunch of new friends showed up. An aside: does anyone know a key that will abort a cycle in progress?

So now I've got about 20 guys on me, including a bunch of guys that can actually do some damage. The DPS started coming faster than I could rep it, but not too much faster. At this point I made a fatal decision: I was about 45km from the can and decided to see if I could make it to the can anyway. Armor was still high, but started dropping bit by bit. Still, it looked okay, and I thought I could ride it out. Then I noticed the wierd effect on my ship and realized someone was webbing me (by the fact that I was going about half my normal speed).

Now that I was making such slow progress toward the can, I realized that I would not be able to make it and decided that as much as it would suck, I was going to have to warp out. I tried to warp to a nearby station and nothing. Crap, I thought, I'm being warp disrupted! And this is where I had my second noob moment: I had no idea how to get out of the warp scramble! After it was all over, my corpmates pointed out to me the little icon on the overview that shows who is webbing and scrambling you, but at the time, I was completely at a loss. Instead of fighting back and trying to kill the guys holding me, I instead sat there trying repeatedly to warp as I watched my armor then my structure melt away. It was excrutiating!

Eventually, they popped me. I just sat there in my pod next to my wreckage stunned that I'd just lost the best ship I've ever had to a bunch of NPCs. It had been ages since I lost a ship, and I was really mad and bummed out. I will admit that I had potty fingers for a while after that in corp chat!

Anyway, I guess in the end I learned a valuable lesson, but it is pretty sad/embarassing that it took me all the way until I was flying a ship that cost tens of millions of ISK to learn that you can find out the person webbing or scrambling you.

Anyway, that's my tale of woe. Feel free to razz me now...

Hey, Amarr pilots: Don't be like me!

2009-10-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, I had one of those super noob moments tonight. (As an aside, super noob moments seem to happen pretty frequently in this game!) I was in a gang getting ready to run a site in our wormhole (did I mention I love our wormhole?), and I asked some of the experienced players what type of laser crystals I should be using. They said "It depends on the range", to which I replied "Oh, really?" They explained how each crystal trades off damage for range and vice versa. This is actually all stuff that I knew. What I didn't know is that the preferred approach for laser packin- capsuleers is to actively manage the crystals rather than just load them up and leav them.

Based on this info, I stopped by the corp hangar and grabbed some Microwave L and dropped them on my guns. Holy crap! I went from 45km optimal to roughly 70km optimal! Yes, my damage went down, but basically, I might as well not even shoot at 70km with the multifrequency crystals loaded due to the difficulty in hitting.

Anyway, you new(ish) Amarr pilots, here's what we're supposed to be doing: we should carry a bunch of different laser crystal types for our guns, and swap them out as needed depending on the range of our targets. I know 99% of you already knew that, but if I can help just one other noob such as me, it will all be worth it!

Ratting is fun (so far...)

2009-10-12T12:17:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned, our corp has moved into a wormhole recently. We have run some sleeper sites and have done some mining, but there are times when things are quiet in the WH, which leaves me looking for something to do. A corpmate suggested ratting in the belts outside the WH, which I tried out last night. So far, it's actually pretty fun.

The WH is in low sec space, so I've been going out in a battleship fitted with 3 big guns (for long range targets), 3 medium guns (for medium and short range targets), drones (for medium and short range targets), a tractor beam and a salvager (for salvage, of course). This set up seems to be working out for me in killing and cleaning up. I also keep an eye on local to determine if I need to warp out to safety.

I seem to be able to keep myself pretty busy in this way, while making a bit of ISK, accumulating salvage for our T2 builds, and building sec status. All in all, a pretty good thing.

Wormholes are cool

2009-10-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

Over the past weekend, we set up operations in a wormhole and are having fun getting used to living and working in a wormhole. From a miners perspective, the WH has been amazing with some incredible asteroids to mine. On the downside, it is pretty easy for someone to sneak up on you, since you can't see them in local.

I leave it up to my corpmates to find baddies in the system, while I focus on mining. This is mostly because I really don't know how to find them other than running the scanner every so often.

Anyway, we're pretty well set up now, and I have even moved a battleship into the WH so I can even help out with some sleepers if needed.

Long story short, I think we're going to like it here!

Amarr Battleship Qualified

2009-09-22T12:29:00.001-07:00

'Nuff said.

The Reverse Butterfly Effect

2009-09-21T18:08:00.000-07:00

I think everyone has seen the CCP video called "The Butterfly Effect", so I'm not going to go into it in detail here. What I am going to talk about is something that happened to my corporation that was sort of a reverse Butterfly Effect.

As you know, the butterfly effect is when a seemingly small incident can cause a cascade of knock-on effects that have a major impact on events. There are many examples of the butterfly effect in Eve Online. However, I'd like to recount a little example of a reverse butterfly effect.

As you may know, Goonswarm was at war with BOB (or KenZoku, their new name) for ages. While this war was going on, it kept both alliances busy, leaving small corporations like PPL to get on with their business. Not long ago, because of the boring and painful nature of POS warfare, KenZoku basically gave up and let Goonswarm "win" the war.

Shortly after that, Goonswarm showed up in our low sec systems, with eyes on some moons that we owned. Apparently, with their enormous war over, Goonswarm needed to find something else to do to keep themselves busy, and taking our stuff was one of those activities. We battled valiantly, but when Goonswarm showed up with 60 capitals, it is way more than a little indy corp like ours can handle. You can imagine the results. They put two of our POSs into reinforced mode, then came back later to destroy them when then came back out. In light of our little portion of space suddenly being of interest to Goonswarm, we decided that the better part of valor was to take down the rest of our POSs and vacate the area rather than risk having them destroyed.

Thus, a little bit of reverse butterfly effect: the end of a huge war between two giant alliances resulted in PPL having to tear down all our POSs and move to a different part of the universe.

And that's another thing I love about Eve...

Skills: what's next?

2009-09-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

In about 20 hours or so, I will have trained all the skills I need to be qualified by my corporation to fly all Amarr battleships. This is a goal I've had for quite some time as it means I will be able to comfortably run Level 3 missions and be a reasonably useful addition to any wormhole operations that the corp undertakes.

However, the end of one thing is the beginning of another, and now that this I've reached this goal, I have to start thinking about where to go next. The first thing I need to do is get right with my corporation which has mandatory skills that they've let me slide on a bit. I have to finish Anchoring 5 and then Starbase Defense Management 3 to be have all my mandatory skills done. That will take a bit over 2 weeks.

After that, the question is do I get qualified for another ship type or something else (research, production, refining, etc.). As I am in an indy corp, it feels like it is time to "choose my profession". Moving on toward being qualified to fly even larger ships really doesn't help the corporation that much. Therefore, I am going to start focusing on production skills. Our corporation makes its money building and selling, so I want to get firmly into the revenue side of the corporation.

So that's it: starting in about 2 weeks I will be focusing on production skills, first on being able to produce Tech 1 ships and equipment, then moving on to Tech 2. I'm guessing I will deviate a bit from this plan (I'm getting the impression that remote repping and cap transfer is going to be needed for wormhole ops, so I'll probably train that real quick along the way), but in general I will be learning how to build stuff.

Who knows: the next time you buy a destroyer or cruiser, it might have been built by me!

Alliance Tournament VII Final Day

2009-09-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the Alliance Tournament VII since 8:00 this morning and it has not disappointed. There have been some incredible matches, and this is coming from someone who has never really done PvP.

The star of the show so far has been Pandemic Legion who have torn apart two of their opponents today. In one match they smartbombed their opponent into armor within the first 10 seconds of the match starting. That's a hell of a handicap to start off with.

In their semifinal match, they lulled Manifest Destiny into coming with a setup that was targeted to counter PL's previous setup. Unfortunately, PL came in with a setup designed to counter the counter! It was an absolute blood bath.

If you aren't watching the AT7, get over there for the last few matches at http://www.eveonline.com/events/alliances/tournament/t7.

New blood

2009-09-18T06:22:00.000-07:00

PPL is on a bit of a recruiting binge, and we've recently had 3 or 4 new members join. I don't know what it is about new members, but it always makes me happy when we get new blood. It was the same in my old guild in WoW. I guess part of it is just more people to chat with in corp chat. It is also nice to have more people available to group with if you need a hand. Corp ops are always more impressive when you have more people involved. Finally, new players joining your corp means it's not stagnating, that it's moving forward.

I don't advocate recruiting anyone and everyone just for the numbers, but I do think that, just like in business, if you aren't growing you are losing, and PPL is growing.

If you are interested in learning more about PPL, check out our web site or get in touch with me in game. My character is Radd Trigon.

The worst thing in the world

2009-09-17T12:15:00.001-07:00

The worst thing in the world happened to me last weekend. In short, I wasn't training anything for almost 3 full days. I know, you're saying to yourself "How did he let this happen?". Well, let me tell how a bunch of different factors combined to make me do one of the most unforgivable things in Eve: waste training time.

So it all started last Friday when I was contemplating a clone jump back to my corp's primary base of operation. I had jumped a few days before to one of our low sec bases to do some mining with the corp, and was thinking about heading back to high sec to grind some standing.

In preparing for my clone jump, I paused my training queue and left my ship, but then I reconsidered the jump. I contemplated using a shuttle to get back instead, and after a while I just decided to stay where I was. I got out of Eve and did some real life stuff. Notice the step that I left out: unpausing my skill training.

Under normal circumstances, I would have logged in a few hours later and noticed my paused training, but last weekend I was out of town and while I took my laptop, I could not find usable Internet access. Net result: over 2 days wasted training time.

I discovered the problem on Sunday night when I got back home and logged in. I expected to be done with Amarr Cruiser 4, a 5 day training skill, and instead I still had 4 days training left. Ugh...

Anyway, long story short: if you are going to be away from the game for a while, make sure that you are actively training a skill with a long training time. Don't do the worst thing in the world like I did.

Non-Eve Weekend

2009-09-15T06:39:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not posting over the weekend; I was doing something more important than flying Internet spaceships. Instead, I participated in the Bike MS 150 bike ride in Mt. Vernon, Washington. I rode 160 miles over two days, and helped raise a bunch of money to fight multiple sclerosis.

If you would like to donate, please let me know and I will provide a link.

Low-sec mining...

2009-09-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

We recently had to move our base of operations, but last night the corp was back mining ore in our old stomping grounds. Since we were in low-sec and didn't want to risk them, we left our big boys in the hangar and instead did some good old jet can mining, tearing through one huge belt and one regular belt last night. It was good to have a bunch of people on Ventrilo just chatting and mining. Scheduled events like that are one of the things I really like about Eve...

No more exclamation points!

2009-09-09T19:15:00.001-07:00

I just reviewed my last few posts and I'm averaging 1.5 exclamation points per blog posting title. I think I need to tone it down a little...

Martha Stewart went to prison for the same thing!

2009-09-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

A member of the CSM resigned yesterday for using information he gained during the CSM meeting in Iceland to do a little insider trading. It's not clear exactly what he was speculating on, but according to the story (found here), he purchased 5 billion ISK worth of certain items he had reason to believe (based on NDA information) would increase in value a lot, apparently with a future patch or upgrade.

In Eve, scamming inside the game is all well and good. In fact, I heard stories of alliances in the AT7 offering to throw matches for ISK, and I guess even this is not considered cheating as there is no specific rule against it (although this could change next tournament!) However, insider trading of this sort is apparently beyond the pale.

Oh, well. One good thing I can say for the perp: he had already gotten his all expense paid trip to Iceland by the time he resigned!

Hooray! Level 3 missions: here I come!

2009-09-09T07:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I finally got my standing up to 3.15 (with Connections) with one of the local corporations, which unlocks some Level 3 agents. Last time I had a Level 3 agent available, I was flying a cruiser, and was not hugely successful. Now I'm in a battle cruiser and have better skills, so I am hopeful I'll do better. I'm also getting closer and closer to being ready to fly a battleship which should really help.

Hot player on player action!!!

2009-09-08T14:34:00.001-07:00

Okay, it's really "Player versus Player action", but that doesn't make as good a headline. If you haven't checked it out yet, there are tons of great high definition videos of the Alliance Tournement VII up at www.youtube.com/ccpgames. I've never been involved in much PvP. I've been on some roams with the Eve University Uniblob and killed an AFK mission runner with a 5 man gang, but other than that I'm a PvP virgin. I really don't know much about it, but if it is anything like the videos up on YouTube, it looks pretty freaking awesome.

Scoot on over to YouTube and check out the action, and then tune in the next two weekends for more PvP.

Training Level 5 skills

2009-09-08T11:31:00.001-07:00

If you are anything like me, you have some skills out there that you have no choice but to train up to Level 5. Most recently, I had to train Drones to Level 5. This skill has a 1x training time multiplier, and it took me a bit over 5 days. The worst I've trained is Mining Barge which has a 4x multiplier and took over 20 days. I've browse through EveMon and noticed skills that have a training time multiplier of 12x. One example is Fighters. The Level 5 skill for that (with my current implants which quite honestly are terrible) takes 65 days to train!

I understand that Level 5 skills are the creme de la creme and that they shouldn't come easy. But I've got to admit, it is hard to put those suckers on your skill queue knowing that they're going to be there for so long. A case in point for me is Anchoring. It has a 3x multiplier and is about a 15 day training slog for the Level 5 skill. I need this not because I do a lot of anchoring and want it to go faster. No, I need this so I can train Starbase Defense Management so I can shoot you guys if you try to attack our POSes. I keep procrastinating on this skill because I have skills that I can get done faster that I want, when I know that I just need to drop this thing on the queue and get it over with. If there's anything worse than taking 15 days to train a skill you need to level 5, try training a skill to level 5 that you don't need!

Here's an idea! Perhaps CCP should create a super skill injector system that speeds up the skill learning process dramatically. Perhaps this device could be used to increase the training speed of 1 skill by a factor or 10 for a single level, and could sold it for real money like PLEX. How much would you pay to speed up training for a skill? I know I would seriously consider it for certain skills...

Mining like a banshee (Well, not really, but still mining!)

2009-09-07T23:45:00.000-07:00

Tonight we got some corp members together to tear apart a couple belts back in our old stomping grounds. We are loading up on materials to build new ships for corp members rather than for selling, so this requires a bit of additional ore and salvage than normal.

One interesting tidbit: the head of our corp's mining operation always tells us to leave one asteroid in the belt rather than clearing every asteroid. She says it helps make the respawn better. It sounds like a load of hooey to me, but who knows. Anyway, it's just one asteroid so it's no big deal, but has anyone else heard of this?

Drones!!!

2009-09-07T12:09:00.000-07:00

I've learned something recently: drones rock! If you haven't trained Drones and crammed as many as possible into your ship, you should stop everything and do it immediately. Go ahead and log in now and get that started. I'll wait....

Okay, now that you have Drones on your training queue, I'll tell you why they are important. Drones really add a lot of DPS when running missions, PvPing, etc. In addition, when you are fighting small, fast ships and they get in close, I've found it difficult for my larger guns to track them as they whiz around my ship. My drones, on the other hand, have no difficulty keeping up with them and firing away. I've had fights where I could not hit with my guns at all and my drones had to do all the DPS while I sat and armor repped.

For miners, if you stick combat drones in your drone bay, you won't be helpless when rats arrive in the belt. Clearly, you will have to bug out if something big jumps in, but for most situations, have 3-5 combat drones available will take care of business.

One other suggestion: I strongly recommend getting cheap drones. If you are anything like me, you have about a 30 to 50% chance that you'll forget to grab your drones as you leave, and going back to get them is a pain in the butt.

Moving to ISKSense

2009-09-07T11:58:00.001-07:00

You may have noticed that the Google ads are gone. Bombarding readers with ads for character and ISK sellers just didn't feel right. Bye bye, AdSense! We hardly knew ya!

On the other hand, I imagine there are readers out there like me that are interested in new services, etc. that don't mind seeing a few reasonably unobtrusive advertisements that are well targeted. I received a comment regarding my previous Google ads post that recommended ISKSense, an Eve specific advertising service that work entirely on ISK rather than real dollars.

You will notice that I have replaced the Google ads with ISKSense ads. If you see something interesting down there, feel free to click on it or not.

If you are interested in advertising your Eve-related services or corporation on Eve-focused sites, you should check out www.isksense.com.

My first near gank

2009-09-06T22:14:00.001-07:00

Well, I almost got ganked today in low sec. I had accepted a mission that required me to courier some goods to a station in low sec. I successfully made it to the station to drop off the cargo, and was heading back to the original station.

When I undocked, I was immediately targeted by two ships lurking outside the station. I started to try to warp off to the gate when I noticed that one of the dudes was trying to warp scramble me while both were wailing away with their guns. I went through shields pretty quickly, and started into armor. I flipped on my armor repper while I waited to get aligned. Since it was taking a long time to get aligned so I tried to dock again, which thankfully I did instantly. It was all over in about 20 or 30 seconds, but it really scared me. I was afraid that I was going to lose my ship and my implants.

I guess I learned a little bit about Eve tonight: always pay attention, but especially when in low sec.

My new battle cruiser and L2 missions...

2009-09-06T15:42:00.001-07:00

I've been running Level 2 missions for standing for the past week or two in my battle cruiser. Having run missions in my frigate or destroyer that were very challenging for me, using my Prophecy to run these missions is a breath of fresh air. I don't know if it's me (it probably is), but I've run missions where I had to warp out 3 and 4 times to repair or restore cap, and that makes running missions even less fun than it already is.

Anyway, I don't mind being over powered. Let's face it: I'm not running these missions for fun, I'm running them because I have to for standing. Anything that gets them over sooner is a plus!

Woot! I'm part of CK's Blog Pack!

2009-09-05T17:36:00.000-07:00

Well, I got the word today that I'm now a part of CrazyKinux Eve Blog Pack! Now the pressure is on to keep the blogging going!

Thanks to CK for the honor! And you should definitely visit his site at www.crazykinux.com and see what he's talking about over there...

Damn you, ISK sellers!

2009-09-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

Well, as you may have noticed, I turned on Google ads on this blog. As you probably know, Blogspot.com is owned by Google, and turning on the ads was really easy, so I figured "what the heck, I'll put them up but put them in an out of the way location, and if anyone clicks on something, I'll make a few cents."

Well, thanks to the ISK sellers and their paying Google for ad placement on Eve-related web sites, basically every ad ever shown is a freaking ISK seller ad, and I know that no self-respecting reader of my blog is going to click on one of those things. So basically, there is little to no chance for anyone using Google's AdSense service on an Eve-related site to ever make any money because of the ISK sellers. I know that that is not a big deal for me since I'm just blogging for fun, but other folks out there are trying to run a business and the ISK sellers are damaging that as well.

I'm going to go ahead and keep the ads up for a bit longer to see if Google will realize that the ISK ads aren't working and show something else. I hope you don't mind...

Alliance Tournament VII Thread

2009-09-05T07:43:00.000-07:00

I will be posting comments on this thread regarding the Alliance Tournament VII. Feel free to chime in as well...

Wow! The Alliance Tourney is just about to kick off!

2009-09-05T07:41:00.000-07:00

Turns out I'm really bad at reading a calendar! The AT starts today in about 15 minutes, not yesterday as I posted. Duh!

Anyway, people are getting pretty excited as the battles get set to begin. I'm listening on the Eve Voice channel which is actually less troublesome than New Eden Radio or Eve Radio at the moment. Oh, and grinding standing too!

Alliance Tournament begins today!

2009-09-04T06:24:00.001-07:00

The 7th Alliance Tournament begins today at 11:00am Eastern/8:00am Pacific. You can listen at www.eve-radio.com. I believe that they will also be posting videos on YouTube the next day. Learn more at http://www.eveonline.com/events/alliances/tournament/t7/.

Eve Blog Banter #11: Introducing the T3 Strategic Mining Barge

2009-08-31T19:37:00.001-07:00

This month's banter comes to us from Joe Brusati a long time reader of CrazyKinux's Musing, who asks the following: CCP states that T3 Strategic Cruisers are just the start for the T3 line-up. In future Eve expansions what would you like to see as the next T3 ship type. Please be specific on details about what role this ship would play, cost of manufacturing, and the different modules that would be available for it, and of course you must give your T3 ship a name!

CCP Announces New T3 Option for Carebear Corps: The Strategic Mining Barge

With the introduction of T3 ships, CCP provided a new toy for the pew pew set: strategic cruisers that can be pieced together like Lego building blocks. However, CCP have realized that it's not the PvPers or mission runners that build the T3 cruisers. No, it's the carebear production corporations that do. And after doing all that hard work, they can't even use high tech ships they just built. Is this fair?! I don't think so, and neither does CCP, apparently. Or at least that's the impression I get from planned introduction of the new T3 Strategic Mining Barge.
With the introduction the new T3 Strategic Mining Barge, the carebears will finally have a T3 ship to call their own. The SMB will be capable of operating in extreme conditions in 0.0 or W-space on high-risk mining operations, or on extended solo mining ops in Empire.

The SMB will be able to fit many of the same defensive and utility modules that their more combat-minded brethren can. However, the Strategic Mining Barge will be optimized for fitting specialized high-tech mining and gas harvesting modules. For instance, the Enhanced Nanotech Strip Mining Array, based on advanced sleeper-inspired nanotechnology. This array is capable of turn one ore type into another by unleashing tiny nanobots to tear down and rebuild an asteroid at an atomic level. Staring at a Veldspar asteroid outside Korsicki and wish it was Mercoxit? Unleash your nanobots to rearrange those atoms and mine what you want, where you want!

The Phase Shift Cargo Expander Array will dramatically increase your ability to store ore or other cargo. The Cargo Expander Array uses one of the first practical applications of string theory to "shift" cargo into another dimension, leaving room for more of the valuable ore that you are mining. No more jet-canning with the T3 Strategic Mining Barge!

While CCP has yet to name all the races' versions of this new ship, it has been leaked that the Amarr version of the ship will be called the Journeyman. As far as price is concerned, as with most carebear corporations, the T3 SMB cost is measured in time to build rather than ISK. A typical carebear corporation with access to worm hole space will be able to construct the SMB in around 2 to 3 weeks.

Radd Trigon, 3 month old noob miner for carebear corporation Phoenix Propulsion Labs, had this to say about the new ship class: "I am very excited about the possibility of flying the Journeyman! It will be exciting to have such high-tech gear sitting idle while I'm alt-tabbed out watching CCP trailers and reading COAD!"

Other Posts for Blog Banter #11:

A Mule in EvE - ‘Thor’ the Minmatar T3 ~ Banter #11
One Man and His Spaceship - Blog Banter 11 - The many heads of the Hydra
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah - Strategic Capitals
Achernar - Strategic Battlecruisers: the Spiders
Kyle Langdon's Journey in EVE - Strategic.... EVE Blog Banter #11
The Captain's Log - Blog Banter 11: Increasing our knowledge of the universe
Deaf Plasma's EVE Musings - Eve Blog Banter #11 - a ship called Starfury
More to come...

What to do with those 2 extra characters?

2009-08-31T12:41:00.000-07:00

Over on Massively, they have posted an interesting article on how to make use of the two extra character slots on your single account. As I mentioned in my Altaholics Anonymous post, most people don't use alts in Eve the way you would in another MMO. However, Brendan Drain posts some good ideas on how not to let those 2 extra slots go to waste. Read the article, One Account is Good Enough, here.

Eve news sources

2009-08-28T22:47:00.000-07:00

One good thing about WoW was that there was a pretty constrant stream of WoW related news and information coming out on a regular basis. WoW Insider (www.wow.com) provided many articles every day on WoW topics. When I played WoW, WoW Insider was on my daily rotation of web sites to read.

Now that I've switched to Eve, I find that the sources for Eve-related information are much more scarce. I read www.massively.com which covers MMOs in general and which has some Eve information, usually something each day. In addition, the dev blog (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp) can provide some interesting reading. Unfortunately, that's about all I know of for providing Eve news.

Anyone out there know of any good Eve news sources? Please post them in the comments...

Altaholics Anonymous

2009-08-28T12:04:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that it is very uncommon to have a traditional alt in Eve, unlike in WoW or many other MMOs out there. For instance, in WoW, I had a main (level 80 dwarf priest), and tons of alts (a 73 human mage, a 69 gnome death knight, a 20 night elf shaman, etc.). In Eve, I did create one alt, but I never play her. I created her during one of Eve University's numerous war decs to avoid station spinning. As soon as I could stop playing her I did.

Obviously (at least its obvious to me), the main reason that people do not play more than one character on an account is the skill training system. You can only have one character on an account training skills at a time. When faced with the decision of having an alt taking up valuable training time for Energy Grid II or working on Amarr Battleship II for your main, it is an easy choice. The skills for your main will always trump the skills for your alt.

So having multiple characters on one account does not seem to be common. However, I'm amazed at how many people in this game multibox (i.e., have more than one account and login in and play more than one character at the same time). In WoW, this is done, but it is fairly uncommon. In my guild in WoW of over 100 active players, only one person that I know of multiboxed. In Eve, it seems over half my corporation are multiboxers. In fact, there is one person in my corporation (who shall remain nameless) who has 4 accounts and 4 characters in the game. Whenever one comes online, you can expect the rest to follow!

In some ways, Eve is well suited to multiboxing. Of course, for certain play styles in the game, multiboxing is not going to work (I think, but I really don't know). For instance, I am guessing that certain types of PvP encounters would be difficult when you are trying to control 2 or 3 different ships. On the other hand, multiboxing is perfect if you are a miner. You can have one character mine and the other character haul, reducing the time it takes to gather ore and get it to a station. In addition, neither of these two tasks requires a huge investment of concentration to accomplish, so it's easy to control both pilots.

Whereas I was a bit of an altaholic in WoW, I am happy with my single character in Eve. This is for a number of reasons (the single skill training queue being a big one). But the biggest reason is that Eve does not limit your choice of play styles based on character class. When you can do anything with the character you are already playing, there is no reason to play an alt. In Eve a miner doesn't have to reroll a new toon to get into PvP; just have him train some new skills.

Anyway, it seems that alts are fairly prominent in Eve, but in the multibox sense, not in the single account/multiple toons sense. We know that CCP boasts 300,000 active accounts. I wonder how many actual human beings are represented by those accounts. I think we might be surprised by the answer!

Wow! A mention on PODDED!

2009-08-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

I was listening to PODDED last night in my car and I was shocked to hear a mention of my little blog toward the end of the podcast! Hooray!!!

I'll say it again (and not just to get another mention): PODDED is a really good time and I highly recommend it. I must warn you: if you are offended by 2 guys drinking beer, talking about Eve, and occasionally using adult language, PODDED is not for you. All the rest of you get over to http://podded.libsyn.com or search on iTunes to check it out. Oh, and Dillon and Warchilde, I'd love to give you a review on iTunes but I listen to you on a Zune!

Jack of all trades, master of none?

2009-08-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

In some MMOs (WOW and just about every other major MMO except Eve, I'm looking at you!), the decisions you make when you create your character dramatically impact what path you will take in the game. If you choose to play a warrior class, you will not be able to heal, for instance. If you are a mage, you can't pick up a sword and duke it out in melee combat.

Eve is different, as I'm sure you know. You can train any skill and (eventually) fly any ship in the game, no matter what decisions you make when you create your character. You can become a PvPer, miner, industrialist, market player, pirate, explorer, mission runner, etc. no matter what kind of character you start as. In fact, if you have enough time, you could become all of the above assuming you have enough money to train the appropriate skills.

This is both a blessing and a curse. For a new player, you can jump into the game and start training one set of skills for one play style, then find out you don't like it and change without too much of a penalty. This is a definite plus since new players (myself included) have absolutely no idea what you can do in the game let alone what play style they are going to enjoy. The downside is that the plethora of options can make it difficult to decide what skills to train next.

For a more experienced player, the biggest problem comes in the old saying "Jack of all trades, master of none". It is very easy to get yourself into this position in Eve, where you try to train skills to support 2, 3, or more play styles that don't really complement each other (think pirate/miner). Unless you have a huge amount of time, you are never going to become really good at either role.

I guess the question is: does it matter? I'm asking because I'm looking at my EveMon training plan and it is quite a jack of all trades extravaganza. I have trained tons of mining, up to exhumers and would even love to fly an Orca. However, I'm also actively pursuing battleships and want to fly a combat capital ship as well. Does this make sense, or would I be better off focusing on one play style (i.e., mining) and get really good at it?

I'm not just asking a rhetorical question here. I'm really open to suggestions. Please post a comment and let me know what you think.

Outfitting my battle cruiser tonight

2009-08-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

Well, thanks to having all the qualifications for Cruiser done, I was able to train very quickly for Battle Cruisers in just a few hours. Tonight, I'm going to pick up my shiny new BC at one of our stations and get it fitted out. I am hopeful that I will be able to fully load it up with lasers, and really put out a ton of DPS with this thing.

I'm not sure about using it for solo missions or not as I don't want to really risk having it blow up. Back when I was flying my Coercer (the Amarr destroyer), I was going through those things like water. I must have lost at least 4 or 5 of those things. It should be pretty useful for group mission running as a pure DPSer.

I can't wait: it is always exciting to get a new ship!

Eve raid night!

2009-08-26T14:02:00.001-07:00

Most raiding guilds in World of Warcraft have scheduled at least one raid night per week, and often two. These raid nights are scheduled to occur every week and usually last for two to four hours, and are the time when the raiders in the guild run one of the large instanced dungeons in the game.

If you aren't familiar with WOW, raids require either 10 or 25 players, and the composition of the group is very important to the success of the overall raid. Each player has a role, and you cannot easily substitute different players for certain key roles (main tank, main healer, etc.). What this means is that if you are a raider in the guild, you are making a pretty strong commitment to be there for whenever the guild is raiding.

For some reason, from my experience talking to other Eve players, listening to Eve podcasts, and reading Eve blogs, Eve does not seem to have the concept of a "raid night". There does not seem to be a specific night where a corp or an alliance gets together to do a big task that requires a lot of manpower. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing. I think that instituting something like a raid night in a corporation could actually be very good for the overall health of the corp.

On raid night, the corporation could have everyone (who is available anyway) get together to work as a team on a task. For some corps that could just be a huge ore, ice, or gas mining jamboree. For other corporations, it could be putting together PvP gangs and running around looking for targets of opportunity to kill. Whatever the corp decides to do, it would probably be useful to get people together on Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, working toward a common goal.

In fact, because Eve is a bit more flexible about roles than WOW, raid night is probably even easier to pull off in Eve than in WOW. For example, if your Orca pilot can't make it to a mining raid night, you don't have to cancel the entire operation. This is not the case in WOW, where if the main tank or other key player can't make it, you might have to scrap the whole run.

Anyway, I strongly advocate the institution of Eve corporate raid night. If you are in a corporation that has something like raid night, please let me know. I'd be very interested in how it is working out for you...

What I love about Eve #3: EBANK Collapse

2009-08-26T11:17:00.000-07:00

I guess I don't actually love the fact that EBANK has lost 1.2 trillion (!) ISK, although since my corp and I don't use their services, this doesn't impact me. But what I do love about Eve is that it provides an environment where someone could set up something like EBANK and have enough people deposit enough cash that you could lose that much money. Try that with a guild bank in WOW!

Anyway, I am cheering for EBANK to recover just because I think the concept is cool. I guess maybe it's my MBA background, but I was always interested in finance and banking, and the fact that Eve allows you to do these sorts of activities is awesome.

Good luck to all those pilots and corporations who have deposited money with EBANK. I hope that you eventually get your money back.

Lesson learned

2009-08-25T20:36:00.000-07:00

I learned a valuable lesson about missions last night, and this is this: Don't take every mission that's offered to you.

Here's the situation: I accepted a mission without really reading the mission text (we all do that, right?). Then I went out to perform the mission. It turns out that the mission was for a corp in the Amarr faction, and required me to kill lots of Minmatar rats. The mission was going to give me lots of standing with the Amarr and several corporations, but at the expense of losing standing with the Minmatar. Unfortunately, in my corp (and I'm guessing in other corps), we try to have high standing with all the major factions.

When I think of it, the only real reason I run the missions is for standing (and salvage), and raising standing with one corp or faction while losing it with another is hardly a good tradeoff. Therefore, sometimes it is better to decline a mission than to take it. Lesson learned.

Here, then, are two suggestions:

Read the text of the mission to find out who you will be killing, and
Don't take missions that require you to kill NPCs in the major factions.

Oops! Disabled my hit counter...

2009-08-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

Not that it's a big deal, but I accidentally deleted the HTML for SiteMeter (www.sitemeter.com), the hit counter that I use to see if anyone's reading my blog. Now I won't know about the million hits I got last night.

Retiring my tag line...

2009-08-25T00:27:00.000-07:00

Now that I've been playing the game for a bit, I think I will still be posting topics that are interesting to new players, but I am going to take the focus off exclusively catering to new players (was it ever really that way?)

Anyway, I'm removing the tagline and am not sure I'm going to replace it. If I do, it will be something like "The random scribblings of a newish Eve player as he tries to figure out how to get ahead and have a good time in the wild and wooly world of Internet spaceships". Or something like that.

Status Report - 8/24/09

2009-08-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

I guess I could give you all an update on where I stand after my hiatus...

Radd Trigon Status Report for 08/24/2009

Skill Points: 5.1 million
Skills in Queue: Science V (3 days to go)
Skills at Level 5: 6
ISK Balance: 4.7 million (Hey, we're a socialist corp, so I'm not supposed to have much cash!)
Currently Flying: Omen cruiser
EVEMon Training Plan: Battle Cruiser then Battleship interspersed with PPL requirements
Corporation: Phoenix Propulsion Labs

Summary: Finished getting qualified for Amarr cruisers. Did a fair amount of mining with the corp. Ran tons of L1 missions with the local NPC corp. Now have moved my personal base of operations to a new system where I have access to a Level 2 agent.

Why do I like mining anyway?!

2009-08-24T17:56:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I have decided to make mining my primary "career" in Eve, at least for the time being. I have spent many weeks training up skills to help me be a more effective miner, including Astrogeology, Mining, Industry, and Mining Barges to 5 in order to be able to fly an Exhumer. However, the question remains: "Why do you like mining?!" with the subtext that it has got to be the most boring thing in the game to do.

I guess the short answer is that it is easy. It doesn't take a huge amount of effort or concentration to do it reasonably well. In high sec, especially in a fleet operation where someone is hauling for you, you can go mine all night long while watching TV, talking to the family, or even reading a book or newspaper, checking in every minute or two to move ore out of your cargo hold. Even if you go AFK and are gone for a long time, nothing bad is likely to happen to except that your mining lasers will shut down when your cargo hold fills. Not a big deal.

In addition, mining is something that is highly valued, especially by a production corporation such as PPL. Without raw materials, a production corporation is pretty much a social club, so the folks who are willing to put in the time mining are highly valued. Whether it's mining ice to power your POSs or mining asteroids for ore, miners are what make production possible, and are a valuable link in the supply chain.

And don't think that mining is always mind-numbingly boring either. If you are doing jet can mining with a large fleet and don't have an Orca or two to drop your ore into, mining can actually keep you pretty busy (even if the activity is not that exciting). Popping new cans, renaming them, tractoring them to the the hauler, hauling back to the station, etc. can keep you very much occupied if there are lots of miners working a belt. In addition, mining in low or null sec or in a worm hole can be exciting when you need to be ready to warp out at the drop of a hat.

Anyway, yes, it is not as exciting as forming a gang and going on a mission hunting bad guys, or firing up your scanning gear and discovering new belts and wormholes, but mining has an allure all its own. I compare it to fishing in WOW: something to do that doesn't require a lot of attention, with the difference being that in Eve you actually have something worth having when you're done.

Training Battle Cruisers

2009-08-24T15:08:00.000-07:00

Hey! What do you know?! In my corporation, if you are qualified to fly a cruiser, you are pretty close to being able to fly a battle cruiser too. Since this is the case, and since flying a battle cruiser is cool, I'm going to take part of a day and train up to get BC qualified.

Now, I am no guru on battle cruisers, they seem to be similar to destroyers but bigger. They carry tons of guns but don't have much tank. I guess you just need to make sure you kill whatever you're shooting at before it can shoot at you and everything will be fine.

I am going to be very careful with this thing. The reason I say this is that when I was flying my Coercer (the Amarr destroyer), I had a hard time keeping my ship in one piece. This was not as big a problem when I was financing my own ships and they were cheap. Now that PPL is footing the bill for my BC, I absolutely don't want to have to get more than one of these things, unless I have a darn good reason for getting blown up!

Anyway, pretty soon you will see Radd Trigon flying around at least some of the time in a shiny new battle cruiser. If you do, say hi!

What I love about Eve #2: The Butterfly Effect

2009-08-24T13:19:00.000-07:00

I know this has been out there for a while and if you are reading my little blog, you've probably already seen it, but CCP recently released a video called The Butterfly Effect that sums up the second thing I really love about Eve. You can see the video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08hmqyejCYU.

What happens in the video is perhaps a bit out there, but the fact is that little things can have big impacts in this game. However, it also works in reverse: huge events in which you are not in the least bit involved can have a way of becoming very personal and can impact you in a big way. I will be posting about one such instance in a future post. Until then, if you haven't checked out the video, do so, as it is very entertaining.

The standings grind

2009-08-24T06:51:00.000-07:00

My corp recently moved to a new location, and as part of that move, we need to gain standing with a new NPC corporation. This means running missions, and because my standing is low with these guys, I can only take on Level 1 missions. Of course, they are very easy to complete (I've been running hard level 2 missions successfully for a while), so not successfully completing the missions is not a problem. What is the problem is how little your standing increases for each completed Level 1 mission. I know I turned in missions yesterday that didn't even move my standing on the standings page because of rounding! Ugh...

Anyway, one way to beat this is to find someone in your corp who has a higher standing and who can do higher level missions and group up. Make sure they share the cash and standing increase when they turn in the completed mission. I did this yesterday with one of my corp mates (Thanks, Sil!), and it was just what I needed to get me qualified for a Level 2 agent. Another thing to remember is that if you look around, you may find a lower quality agent of a higher level. An invaluable resource for locating agents that you can work for is www.eve-agents.com. As you start turning in harder missions, your standing increases faster, so getting into Level 2s and Level 3s is really important to getting the standings grind over as quickly as possible.

Anyway, hopefully now that I'm running L2s I will start to make some real progress with these guys. But it was quite the slog to get to this point, and one that I hope to not have to do again soon...

What I love about Eve #1: Options, options, options

2009-08-22T21:33:00.000-07:00

One thing that I really love about Eve is that there are very few things that you can't do. You have so many options for things to do. In fact, there are so many options that it can paralyze you as a new player, and I think this is part of the difficulty of getting started in this game.

Eve is different that many (most?) MMOs in that you start as a blank slate and there is nothing keeping you from going into any play style no matter how you begin. In WOW, if you start as a warrior, you will be a DPSer or tank, period. If you're a mage, you pew pew from a distance, period. There is no changing your role after this initial decision.

In Eve, your initial decision of race, etc., only really impacts the type of ship you will be flying at the beginning of the game. Beyond that, you can decide what you will do, i.e., you have options. You can mine, PvP, be a pirate, be a builder, explore worm holes, etc. There's nothing you can't choose to do because of your initial character decision.

Right now, I am trying to figure out what I want to focus on, and I have a bit of analysis paralysis myself. There are so many choices, it really is difficult to decide what to focus on. Up to this point I have focused on mining, but I would also like to consider some other roles, including:

Exploration - finding worm holes, etc.
PvP - getting qualified to fly a battleship and then a dreadnought
Production - get qualified to build stuff to be sold on the market

The cool thing is that in the end, I will eventually be able to do all these things, but the question is which to do first. And having this choice is one of things I love about Eve.

Yes, you can fly it, but...

2009-08-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

I learned a valuable lesson not too long ago: just because you can fly something doesn't mean you can fly it well! My story is as follows...

I had been training to be able to fly the big mining ships (the Mack and the Hulk), and running missions to earn a few ISK and grind out standing. I was running the Level 1s in my frigate and destroyer, and things were going okay. Then I reached Level 2s. I really started to have trouble with these to the point that it wasn't even fun and was sometimes even impossible to finish these missions on my own.

Therefore, I decided I had to get a cruiser if I wanted to keep running missions, so I got hands on the Amarr Cruiser and Medium Energy Turret skill books and started training. As soon as I could, I trained these skills and jumped into my brand new Omen ready to fit it out.

Let me tell you, it was a rude awakening! I could barely fit anything on that ship! Because my various skills were so low, I couldn't fit the armor I wanted, and I could only get 2 turrets online at a time because of power grid limitations (I think, I'm no expert!)

Anyway, I figured I'd try to use EveMon and the Battleclinic load outs to figure out what skills I should train and how I should fit the ship, but that didn't help either. Every one of the loadouts there that I found is loaded with Tech II and/or high end faction stuff that requires tons more skills than I need. As great as EveMon is, this capability is not well suited for the beginner. I needed something else.

Fortunately, my corporation, Phoenix Propulsion Labs (www.phoenix-labs.net), has a solution. They have developed a very cool application on their web site for members that lays out "qualifications" to fly various classes of ships. In fact, because it is a socialist corporation where you are going to be given a ship by the corp rather than pay for it yourself, these qualifications for the ship are pretty much mandatory. You typically won't get your hands on a ship that you aren't qualified to fly (although they apparently made an exception for me with the Omen and we see how that worked out!)

Anyway, these qualifications don't mean you are going to be the best pilot of the particular class of ship, but you will be able to fit it out in a way that won't totally suck, and you should be able to hold your own in a fight with those skills.

I don't know if other corporations have anything as sophisticated as the qualification application, but I'm guessing they have something like a system of recommendations to help new pilots. Of course, my corporation's system is best! :-)

Anyway, I am now Amarr Cruiser qualified and am having a much better time piloting my Omen. I am now using the qualification requirements to train to be able to fly an Amarr battleship next.

If you would like to know more about PPL's qualification system (or anything else for that matter), feel free to convo me in game at Radd Trigon, drop by the "SHOP@PPL" channel, or post a comment on this blog.

Check out the Podded Podcast

2009-08-20T18:07:00.000-07:00

Regularly produced Eve podcasts are hard to find these days. My not so recent post about the Drone Bay returning turns out to have been a bit of a false alarm, although I'm sure they have the best of intentions, and when it comes out again I fully expect that it will be great. Warp Drive Active is pretty spotty these days as well, but well worth a listen when it does come out.

The podcast I've been listening to a lot recently, and which comes out regularly enough to keep you satisfied is the Podded podcast (http://podded.libsyn.com). It apparently is two British guys sitting around a table together, slowly getting drunk and talking about Eve once a week. It is really a lot of fun to listen to, and because both hosts, Dillon Arklight and Warchilde, have a tendency to ramble as the beer flows, the podcasts usually end up being pretty long. Definitely check it out if you, like me, enjoy listening to podcasts about our favorite game.

I'm Back!!!

2009-08-20T13:37:00.001-07:00

Alright! I'll admit it: I fizzled out big time on the blogging front. I was going like gangbusters to start and then just stopped. I am sorry about doing that.

Anyway, I've decided to get back to it, but with more realistic goals. I am not going to be posting everyday, but I will try to post at least a few times a week. In addition, I'm will be focusing on stuff that our corporation is up to and just the stuff I think is cool in the game.

I will say this: I really like the corporation that I'm in as they are a bunch of really great people who take the game seriously, but not too seriously. I also love this game for the grand scope of things, and how everything is interconnected. I'm going to be talking about all of this in future posts.

Anyway, I'm back and will be more active than I've been recently, but probably less active than I was right at the beginning. Hopefully, you'll find something interesting in what I write...

The Drone Bay is back!

2009-06-24T11:03:00.000-07:00

The Drone Bay podcast is back after a long hiatus. I'm sure if you're reading my little blog, you already know this, but who knows. Anyway, I have a real soft spot in my heart for The Drone Bay because it is the podcast that really helped me figure out how to play Eve Online after floundering around on my own for my first few weeks on a trial account.

You can learn more about The Drone Bay at http://www.virginworlds.com/podcast.php?show=17. Enjoy!

The great skill-up slowdown

2009-06-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting things about Eve Online is that there is no experience points. All skills are learned by studying skill books, and the learning goes on around the clock, whether you are playing or not. This has some advantages and disadvantages. One advantages are that you can continue progressing even if you are not able to play very often. On the downside, there is no way to "power level" a character by working hard and grinding.

Anyway, something interesting happens when you hit 1.6 million skill points that I didn't realize: you slow down by a lot! It turns out that you earn the first 1.6 million skill points at double the normal rate. I don't know how to put this information to use for a new player, but perhaps this might work. If you have several skills to train and you are about to pass the 1.6 million SP mark, train one that takes the longest. I think that you will train at double speed for the whole skill, even if the majority of it is over 1.6 million points. There: advice...

Anyway, it kind of sucks that skills take so much longer now. I will have been training Astrogeology V for over 2 weeks now!

New Corp!

2009-06-09T03:01:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I applied for a position in Phoenix Propulsion Labs. I'm happy to tell you that I was accepted into the corporation a few days ago. I am officially a cadet in PPL.

So far things have been going very well. The other corp members are very friendly and helping me along quite nicely. It is a whole different ballgame, though, working in a corporation that has actual work to get done to service its external customers. In Eve University, the corp members are the closest thing to customers for the most part.

Since joining a few days ago, some of the highlights since I have been a member have been helping out as a sentry for a low sec ice mining operation and participating in a pretty extensive mining operation for a discovered asteroid field.

Being in a "real" corporation is really different, and quite a bit different than Eve University. So far I'm enjoying it much more.

Out of the University

2009-06-01T00:57:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I was thinking of dropping out of Eve U. Well, I dropped from the corp a few days ago when I was finally able to fly my Retriever. I just couldn't stand not being able to take my new toy out and use it!

I also started to look into other corporations that might be a good fit for me. I contacted CrazyKinux about his corp, Phoenix Propulsion Labs, and it sounded like a good fit. I went through the interview process today and hope to get accepted soon.

I feel a bit guilty about leaving Eve University (if it happens), especially given that this feels like exactly what the griefers are trying to accomplish. On the other hand, I pay money every month to play this game, and would like to have some fun doing it.

We'll see how it goes with the app. In some ways it feels like applying for a real job!

Status Report - 5/27/2009

2009-05-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

I'm a day late on my status report, but here it is. Honestly, the holiday on Monday threw me off!

Radd Trigon Status Report for 05/27/2009

Skill Points: 1.6 million
Skills in Queue: Astrogeology IV (1d 5h to go)
Skills at Level 5: 1 (Industry V came this week!)
ISK Balance: 17.8 million (+10.1 million since last week)
Ships: 5 (Crucifier, Tormentor, Punisher, Sigil, Coercer)
EVEMon Training Plan: Retriever then Orca
Corporation: Eve University

Summary: Another week of limited activity owing to the wardec. Seriously considered dropping corp, but have not done so yet. Decided to train for a Retriever first, then move to Orca, and should have skills and ISK to buy and outfit it by Thursday. Flew in some uneventful fleet ops. Reached out to Phoenix Propulsion Labs as a possible corp to join after I'm done with Eve University. Will stay in the University a bit longer to see how the wardec situation plays out.

Vote Dierdra Vaal

2009-05-25T22:36:00.000-07:00

The CSM election is ending soon, but all new players of Eve Online would appreciate a vote for Dierdra Vaal. Dierdra is a major force in Eve University, the corp that has helped so many new pilots over the years get a solid foundation in the game. The students of Eve University, many of whom are too new to vote (like me), would appreciate your vote for Dierdra.

Dropout!

2009-05-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned that I was getting tired of station spinning due to wardecs. I have decided to drop out of Eve University in order to get on with my life now that wardecs appear to be the order of the day (week?) for Eve University. I know that sucks and I wish I didn't have to do it, but until CCP makes changes to the game to prevent these nusiance wardecs, I'm afraid it is always going to be this way.

My drop from the corporation will become permanent tomorrow evening. Until then, you can find me spinning in Korsiki.

Eve Blog Banter #8: What new mechanic should be added to Eve?

2009-05-25T19:45:00.000-07:00

Well, this is my first posting as part of CrazyKinux's Eve Blog Banter. The question this month is:

What new game mechanic or mechanics would you like to see created and brought into the EVE Online universe and how would this be incorporated into the current game universe? Be specific and give details, this is not meant to be a 'nerf this, boost my game play' post like we see on the EVE forums.

Now, granted, I am new to the game and have not seen all the various mechanics already in the game, so it is hard for me to write about something truly new since it might not be new at all, but just something I haven't seen yet. So instead, I'm going to focus on a game mechanic that I think needs to be changed, and give my reasons why and suggestions for how it should be different. You can certainly disagree with me and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

My suggestion is that there needs to be a way for truly neutral corporations to avoid frivilous war declarations. As I wrote previously, I am a member of Eve University, a truly valuable resource for the Eve universe as a whole. I don't see how anyone could have an issue with the university in a true political sense in that they really stay neutral. Their entire goal is to train new Eve players through the generosity of the more senior members of the corporation. Eve U. is a valuable resource and should be supported by other companies who benefit from being able to recruit pilots trained by Eve University for their own corporations.

Unfortunately, Eve University has been regularly wardec'd on a nearly continuous basis for the past several months, with no end in sight. If we assume the best possible intentions from the aggressors, they wardec the Uni because there are lots of noob pilots to target for a week. However, Eve University rules require all pilots to stay in base until the hostilities end, so while there is the ocassional target of opportunity that didn't follow the rules, for the most part a wardec on Eve U. brings nothing but the Uniblob of 30+ noob pilots with nothing to lose attacking single targets until the war is over. Why would someone pay 50 million ISK for that?

This leads to what I think is actual reason to wardec the Uni: simple griefing. There is no good reason for this sort of activity, other than giving people trouble and making their lives miserable. It seems like there is someone or some group out there that does not want the University to exist in its current form, and the constant stream of wardecs is a way to kill it. Why would someone join a corp if you have to spend 95% of your time doing nothing?

Therefore, I would like there to be changes to the game to prevent these sorts of grief wardecs from being declared, while still staying true to the fact that the Eve universe is a dangerous place. Here are some suggestions I'd like to submit:

Make wardeccing MUCH more expensive. From my understanding, the cost for a wardec has been 50 million ISK since the game began. It seems like this is a pretty paltry figure, given that it is easy to make this much money in a day. Change the cost to something more reasonable, like 500 million or a billion and we could get a feel for just how important this war really is to declaring corp.
Allow a corporation to pay protection money to CONCORD. Obviously, the wardec payment to CONCORD is a bribe to get them to look the other way while you illegally attack another corp. Therefore, the target company should be able to pay a bribe to either keep a wardec from being made in the first place, or a bribe to end the wardec early.
Allow a neutral status. CONCORD is the currupt cop in the neighborhood that is happy to take a bribe. But it's one thing for a cop to turn the other way when one gang is beating up on another gang, whereas it's another thing to let that gang rob defenseless old women. I think that the same principle should apply in Eve. It should be easy for one corp to declare war on another if the second corp declares war on others or is in an alliance that is regularly involved in aggression. If, on the other hand, the target corp does not declare war on others and is not in any alliance, it should be significantly harder (i.e., more expensive) to declare war on that corporation.
Allow a corporation to buy/get protection from another corp. It should be possible to create an agreement between corporations such that a smaller, weaker corporation can obtain protection from a larger, stronger corporation. This formal agreement would give the stronger corporation the ability to attack and kill members of any corporation that wardecs the smaller corp. The smaller corp would not be embroiled in any conflicts of the stronger corp.

Personally, I think the fourth option would open up lots of new play styles and conflicts in the game:

Strong corps with lots of firepower could fight over the right to "own" turf, and be able to collect the protection money from the weak corporations in a certain part of the galaxy.
Weak corps could choose to move to new neighborhoods if they don't like the "terms" being offered by the neighborhood tough guy.
Strong corps could threaten the weak corporations if they don't pay the protection money.

Let me know what you think about these suggestions. I'd love to hear from you! And thanks to CrazyKinux for setting up blog banter. Please make sure to visit his blog for more discussion at CrazyKinux's Musing.

Other Blog Banters:

CrazyKinux's Musing, EVE Blog Banter #8: Care for a little game of SecWars?
The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, Wow, that new thing is so shiny!!!
I am Keith Nielson, EVE Blog Banter #8 - Return of the Top Gun
Once More from the Beginning, 8th EVE Blog Banter May 2009 Edition
A merry life and a short one, EVE Blog Banter #8: In the Year of Our Awesome
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Planets
Helicity Boson, Bantering the blog
Achernar, Unique adventures
Ecliptic Rift, OOC: EVE Blog Banter 8: Standings and secondary factions
The New Edener, EVE Blog Banter #8
Journey to New Eden, Eve Blog Banter #8: What new mechanic should be added to Eve?
Life, The Universe and Everything, Blog banter 8: mentorship
EVE Guru, EBB 8: Yarr! Prepare to be boarded!
The Ralpha Dogs, Greed Is Good, Greed Works
Rifter Drifter, Blog Banter 8: Strategic Gunnery
More to come...

Can you believe it?!

2009-05-24T10:48:00.000-07:00

A 3 person corporation called Forge Monster Inc. has wardecced the University this time. This is absolutely ridiculous, and is making me consider other options in the game.

I honestly don't see why you should be able to easily declare war on a neutral corporation like the University. Fifty million ISK is nothing, so there's hardly any incentive not to wardec the University.

Profession chosen

2009-05-22T09:11:00.001-07:00

I have decided that my first "profession" in Eve is going to be mining. After chatting with some miners in the Uni, I have set my sights on my first true mining ship, a Retriever. This puppy runs about 5m ISK, and requires a fair amount of training to be able to operate. So, using EVEMon, I pulled up the Retriever and added all the required skills to my plan. I've been training them for a couple days now, and by next week I should have everything I need to fly a mining barge.

Now when I go out on fleet mining operations, I won't feel so guilty about not pulling my weight!

War is over (for now)

2009-05-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the war dec against Eve University expired. It was great being able to get out of the dock and do something other than hunt for enemy ships.

Status Report - 5/19/2009

2009-05-19T11:30:00.001-07:00

As a progam manager, do my share of status reports. As such, I'm going to be giving a brief weekly status update every Tuesday (the day after my status reports for work and WOW's patch day!). Here's my first SR:

Radd Trigon Status Report for 05/19/2009

Skill Points: 1.1 million
Skills in Queue: Iron Will 4, Clarity 1, Focus 1, Clarity 2, Focus 2, etc.
Skills at Level 5: 0
ISK Balance: 7.7 million
Ships: 5 (Crucifier, Tormentor, Punisher, Sigil, Coercer)
EVEMon Training Plan: Orca
Corporation: Eve University

Summary: A week of limited activity owing to the wardec. Developed a number of skills useful for fleet operations including High Speed Maneuvering, and am now a (theoretically) qualified tackler. the week started with a really fun mining operation that was extremely profitable. Based on this experience, I've decided I want to work on my mining-related skills, and eventually fly an Orca. Flew in a few fleet ops that were uneventful.

Noob to Noob #4: EVEMon

2009-05-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

If you're a new player like me, you have a basic idea of what you might want to do (I think I'd like to be on the production side of the house, but I'm not sure...) and you know you need skills to do that. Unfortunately, there are tons of items, ships, etc. out there that each require skills to use them, and those skills often require other prerequisite skills, etc. And don't get me started on skills to help make learning new skills easier. It can be really confusing.

Enter EVEMon. This handy tool will help you figure out what skills you need, and how to get you to them as quickly and painlessly as possible. For instance, say you wanted to be able to fly an Orca. You can look up the ship in EVEMon, and it will tell you the skills required to fly that ship. In addition, you can review buildouts for that ship that will show suggested fittings. From there, you can even add the skills for the equipment to your training plan.

For me, the biggest utility for EVEMon so far is the way it optimizes your training plan. For instance, if you take a few hours training some of the learning talents, you can cut those hours plus off your overall training time. This is stuff that is not really obvious to a new player (and in fact is counterintuitive), but comes in very handy when you are trying to get your skills up.

Oh, I guess I should mention that EVEMon has tons of other handy features too, but I really don't have time to go into them all. Suffice it to say, if you are playing Eve at all, you should probably be running EVEMon.

EVEMon can be downloaded from evemon.battleclinic.com. Go check it out!

First PVP fleet operation

2009-05-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

Last night I went out for the first time in a fleet operation. As I mentioned, we were wardeced a few days ago, and rather than sit holed up in our docks, we decided to take the fight to the enemy, Eve University-style! That means about 40 corp members getting in ships that they don't mind losing and going hunting for one of the six members of our enemy's corporation.

We grouped up last night, and I ended up in a squad being commanded by Sagacious Z, who did a terrific job getting me squared away. As this was my first fleet op and I'd never even had any training, to say I didn't know what I was doing would be an understatement. I learned such abbreviations as

AL XXX - Align to stargate XXX - Aligning to a stargate helps everyone to warp at the same time, keeping the fleet together
JJJ - Jump Jump Jump! - This one I had no idea of, and is a bit of a funny story. I got the align part down, and when you are aligned, the fleet commander (FC) can cause all ships to warp at the same time. I guess I kind of took that to mean I was on autopilot and didn't need to do anything. However, we'd get to a gate and I would look around and notice there were none of my fleetmates around. Apparently, I have to jump, the FC can't do that for me!
JOC - Jump on Contact - This is a good way to travel quickly, where the second you come out of warp at a stargate, you immediately jump to the next system. It is safer and faster than hanging around out of warp.
WT - War Target - A ship we can kill!

The good news is that we found a WT at a system not too far from us and were able to take him down. I wasn't exactly in the thick of the fighting, being about 85km away when he went down according to the overview, but still it was exciting to be hunting with the corp.

Thanks to the various leaders of Eve University and the Ivy League Navy (ILN) for having me along on this operation, and helping me learn a new set of skills!

First mining fleet operation

2009-05-17T08:13:00.001-07:00

I went out with Jen Loo (big shout out!) from the University on my first mining fleet operation. Strangely, it was a lot of fun! For about half the time, I was the designated can popper. Basically, the way the mining fleet works is this:

One person jettisons ore, creating a cargo container floating in space
That person names the can with a time stamp
Everyone puts their ore in the can
When it's close to full, the can popper jettisons the next load of ore, making a new can which he names with the new timestamp
After the first can is full, the can owner renames the can to indicate it is full
A transport ship uses a tractor beam to grab the full cans, empties them and ferries the ore to the station

We had about 7 or 8 miners going for a few hours and cleared out a couple asteroid belts. I'm sure that more experienced miners with better equipment (most of us were noobs) could do this a lot faster. And while it was not action packed, it actually required more thinking and work than I expected. This is partly because I was the can popper and was mining in a frigate with a tiny cargo hold, so I had to stay on my toes (relatively speaking) to make sure the mining lasers never turned off.

The best part about it was that I made over 4 million ISK out of the deal, which is huge for a newbie like me. I know this is not because I actually pulled in that much ore, but because of the way Jen calculates the payout, but I am not going to complain. I plan on getting back out there with a better ship next time and I will come closer to pulling my weight. I actually think mining might be something I really get into.

Anyway, I'd like to say a big thank you to Jen Loo, miner extraodinaire, and the rest of the Eve U. mining crew for having me along!

All moved in and getting ready for war

2009-05-16T08:46:00.000-07:00

I finished my move last night and am now happily based in a station in the Korsiki system. Now it's time to get ready for the upcoming war. The corp that declared war on us is pretty small, so me might not have as many restrictions as normal, but that is not decided yet.

When war comes to Eve University, they pretty much go into full-on lockdown mode in order to make wardecing us as undesireable as possible. There is no mission running, mining, etc., only PvP fleet operations.

I plan to participate in the war effort by training skills and outfitting a ship for tackling. I didn't know what this was 2 days ago, but apparently tackling is pinning down a ship so your buddies can kill it. It is done with warp disruptors and stasis webifiers that keep the ship from getting away. Anyway, I got necessary skill books from the University and am learning them right now. I also bought a new Crucifier frigate and stuff to outfit it as a tackler. Hopefully, I will get to see some action before the war is over.

Leaving for college

2009-05-16T00:20:00.000-07:00

As the Uni prepares for war, I figured this was as good a time as any to move my operations to Korsiki and its environs, which is where Eve U has its headquarters. I've got a fair amount of stuff spread around Amarri space, and I'm going to get it all to one central location.

When I told someone in my corp what I was up to, he suggested thta I just sell stuff in one place and buy in the other. However, I wanted to make it more fun. I decided I would do things the old fashioned way, by moving everything myself in my own Sigil industrial ship. So if you see me driving by in my Orange U-Haul Sigil, wave to me!

War, again!

2009-05-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, it looks like another corporation has declared war on my corp, Eve University. Since I've been playing Eve, there has only been about a week during which E-Uni has not been at war! Oh, well, I guess I will get a chance to see what being in a war is like...

Hello to new visitors!

2009-05-15T13:04:00.000-07:00

Hello to all the new visitors coming from Crazy Kinux's Musings! Just to let you know, I am a brand new Eve player, blogging about my experiences as I learn more about this game and become a contributing member of the Eve Universe. Hopefully, new players will occassionally learn something from my posts, while experienced players may get a chuckle out of my noobish exploits.

I hope that you come back and visit on occassion. If you have any thoughts or feedback about my blog or about Eve in general, I'd love to hear from you. And finally, a special thank you to Crazy Kinux for the link!

Noob to Noob #3: Getting better missions

2009-05-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

Missions are one of the key ways to make ISK in Eve. However, it is kind of a pain to run missions that pay 40k ISK (including the bonus) when you know there have to be more lucrative missions out there. In the Eve Uni chat channel I was told that to get better agents to talk to you, you have to increase your standing with them and their corporations. I was also told there were several ways to do that: run missions for the agent or other agents in his/her corp, or train some skills.

Well, I decided I'd run missions, since I was happily training away on my learning skills and didn't want to disrupt them. So there I was I was running missions like crazy for several days, seeing repeated missions coming up and generally getting bored to tears. And the sad thing was, my standing was barely going up at all. I think the corp I did the most work for went up less than 1 point during that whole time, and barely a new mission was made available.

So I asked my fellow students and got two bits of advice that really opened up lots of new mission opportunities: train Social and Connections. These two skills took way less than a day to train to Level 3, and they immediately opened up better quality agents almost immediately, including my first Level 2 agents. This was the best 4 or 5 hours of my training schedule I think I ever spent.

So if you are looking for new missions and new agents to give them to you, get out there and train Social and Connections. The skill books aren't too bad, the training (to level 3) is pretty short, and the pay off (at least for me) was huge!

WoW Time

2009-05-14T23:11:00.001-07:00

I went out raiding with my WoW guild tonight, and I can see how people would have disagreements about which game is more hardcore. In many ways, with Eve you have to "want it" more to get something out of it. In WoW, you will eventually make it to 80 even if you aren't very good, just because there's really no way to go backwards in the game. In that respect, Eve is more hardcore than WoW.

On the other hand, with WoW, you really have to commit the time if you want to REALLY progress at the end of the game. There is no way around raiding if you want to get the really good loot, etc. And raiding, even "casual" raiding, takes huge chunks of time. There's no getting around it. In that respect, I suppose you can probably be a serious Eve player without having to commit to it in quite the same way.

Anyway, I'd love to hear the thoughts of others out there. Which game is more "hard core"?

By the way, who are you?!

2009-05-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

I guess I haven't actually told you anything about my character in Eve. Sorry about that! My character's name is "Radd Trigon", which now that I think about it is an amalgamation of valley speak and pidgeon Greek that means "cool three-sided object". I actually spent approximately 15 seconds coming up with that name, and I guess it sort of seems outerspace-esque enough for the job.

My character is an Amarri, and is currently based out of the Nakri/Youl area. I'm about 15 jumps away from Korsiki, home of my corporation. I'm currently flying a Punisher frigate for my missions, and combination of a Tormentor and a Sigil for jet-can mining.

If your in my neck of the woods, feel free to look me up! (By the way, that's "look", not "blow"!)

Noob to Noob #2: Skills

2009-05-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

Eve is a unique game in that you don't have levels or experience points. Instead, you train skills by studying. To learn an ability, you need the appropriate skill book, which you can buy on the market, and time. Given enough time and skill books, your character will be able to learn everything he or she wants to learn.

There are a number of tips to help make sure you are progressing and learning as quickly as possible. Here are some tips:

ABT (Always Be Training) - Okay, it's not a great acronym, but it is still true. Make sure you are always training something. Training continues even when you are logged off, so make sure that your training queue is always full enough to get you to your next login at least.
Maximize the amount of training in the queue - One thing about the queue is that all training in it must start in the next 24 hours. Note that the last training can end days later, but it must start today. To make sure you're always training something, put a skill at the end of your queue that takes a long time to train. That way, if you get hung up or real life keeps you from logging on, you are less likely to not be training, which is a cardinal sin in Eve!
Train you training ability - There are a whole set of skills that improve your attributes or learning ability. These skill books are all under the Learning category in the market, and have names such as "Iron Will", "Instant Recall", and "Learning". These skills help you train faster, and will pay off huge over the long haul. I would definitely train these up to level 3 pretty early on to give yourself a training speed boost. You will want all these up to Level 4 at least at some point.
Do the starter mission chains for free skill books - When you are doing the starter missions, you will recieve skill books either as mission rewards or as part of the tutorials that pop up. Do all three chains even if you are not interested in that profession, if nothing else but to get the skill books.

Note that these are just the tip of the iceberg on training, but they have helped me. There's tons to know about skill training. Check out http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Skills_%28Useful_threads%29 for links to useful threads about skill training in the Eve forums for more information.

Good luck, and happy training!

Attending an Ivy League University has its advantages...

2009-05-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

Most corporations in Eve belong to an alliance, and Eve University is no exception. Eve is a member (and perhaps the only member) of the Ivy League. Therefore, I suppose you could say I am attending an Ivy League institution!

I can say that being a member of Eve University has a number of perks that are pretty great for a new player just starting out. In my short time as a Unista, I have:

Received learning skill books subsidized by a member of the University to the tune of 2.25 million ISK. Considering that 2.25 million ISK is about all the money I have at the moment, this is HUGE! A big shout out to the generous Uni member who makes it possible for us noobs to get our hands on the advanced learning skill books that otherwise would be out of our reach. I won't call you out by name, but you know who you are and I really appreciate it!
Received 1 million ISK about 2 minutes after I was made a member of the corporation. Again, that bumped my cash on hand by about 30% and was really appreciated.

I know that there are many other perks, including free skill books, free ship replacement, etc. that are all super helpful for a broke bugger such as myself getting started. And this is on top of all the great instruction that I've gotten and will continue to get as a member of the University.

I can't say how other corporations treat their noobs, but I can tell you that the Ivy League is a great place to start for a new player in Eve.

You want Eve blogs? You got it!

2009-05-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

CrazyKinux has a list of over 300 Eve-related blogs that might interest you. You can find the list here: http://www.crazykinux.com/2008/04/eve-online-blogroll-lovefest.html.

It's official: I'm a member or Eve Uni

2009-05-12T00:23:00.000-07:00

The war is over and tonight I was officially made a member of Eve University. Over the next several months I will be working with the instructors and students of Eve University to learn more about this fascinating game. And as I do, I will be posting on this site...

Noob to Noob #1: Getting there faster

2009-05-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

In today's Noob to Noob (N2N #1), we'll talk about traveling long distances a little faster. One of the big complaints about Eve is that the game is so big and it takes forever to get anywhere. There is no doubt that this is true, and my tip will not make it that much faster to get around, but it will help.

Here's the tip: if you want to get between systems faster, don't use autopilot. Autopilot does one really dumb thing: it warps you to a point about 15km away from the stargate you are heading towards, then slowly approaches the stargate under normal propulsion until you get close enough to jump to the next system. It is this 15km distance that really adds to the travel time.

If you turn off autopilot and drive yourself, you can warp straight to the stargate so you can immediately jump as soon as you come out of warp. This speeds things up A LOT, although you can't go get a Diet Coke (or Quafe!) while you're traveling across the galaxy.

You may be thinking that that's great, except you don't know the route to where you're going whereas the autopilot does. Well, here's a secret that makes driving yourself much easier. If you set the destination you are heading to in the same way you would if you were using autopilot, the way will be plotted out for you, and driving yourself will be easy. Just look for the stargate in your overview that is highlighted in yellow. This will be your next stargate. All you need to do is follow the yellow stargates until you arrive in your target system. It's just that easy!

Basically, the process is as follows:

Set your destination through whatever means is appropriate (right clicking on the starmap, right clicking on the destination in a mission, etc.)
Left click the yellow stargate in the overview. This will put the stargate in the selected item box.
Click on the triple arrow icon (the 'Warp to within 0 M' button). You will start to warp.
As soon as you start coming out of warp (watch your speedometer), click the 'Jump' button.
When the jump is over, repeat steps 2 through 4 until you arrive at your destination.

Granted, this technique is not going to solve world hunger, but it will get you from point A to point B a bit faster, and since traveling doesn't earn anyone any ISK, getting there faster can actually be more profitable.

A new feature: Noob to Noob!

2009-05-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

In my next post, I'm starting a new feature that I call "Noob to Noob". In these posts, I will provide tips and advice that I have recently learned that may be helpful to other noobs out there. Think of it as the semi-sighted leading the slightly less-sighted. Keep on the lookout for these Noob 2 Noob posts, coming to a blog near you!

The war is over!

2009-05-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

I heard this morning that the war is coming to an end tomorrow, so Eve University will be back in business as usual. Hopefully within a couple days I'll be back in school!

The two suggestions...

2009-05-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

In my first post, I mentioned two suggestions that I think are going to be key to my enjoyment of Eve Online this time around, and have already made a huge difference so far. Those two suggestions are:

Join a corporation, and
Look into Eve University

These suggestions are very much related, obviously, in that Eve University is a corporation in the technical sense. However, Eve University is set up as a place with the primary goal of training new Eve pilots as they get started in Eve. Some stay for a while, some stay for a long time, but most if not all leave the University with a strong allegience to the corporation that helped them when they were new.

Anyway, I thought the idea of a corporation whose sole purpose was training people and sending them out into the Eve universe was about the coolest thing I'd heard of. They don't have any such thing in any other MMORPG game that I know of. There are certainly no parallels in World of Warcraft, where guilds most guilds that actively recruit newbie players are created by newbie players themselves.

After I finished the 3 10-mission chains, I immediately got in touch with Eve Uni through the recruitment channel. I read up on the University and was excited about what I heard. I checked out their web site and I was hooked. I traveled to their nearest office and put in my application. A day later, I was speaking with a recruiting officer who put me through a thorough interview. We chatted in game for about 30-45 minutes and afterwards I was accepted into Eve High.

Wait a second: you're probably asking where Eve High came from. Well, at the moment, Eve High is at war (through no fault of their own, I might add). When they are at war, all their members are targetable and killable by the alliances at war with them. Generally speaking, Eve University will not take in newbie members when they are at war because it makes them vulnerable to attack. In addition, when Eve Uni is at war, they do not allow their members to run missions, mine, etc. Everyone either stays docked or moves in fleets on offensive or defensive missions. This keeps the students safer and makes it less fun to declare war on the University, but makes it a lot less fun to be a member.

The way Eve University handles this situation is to allow new students to join Eve High. When you are in Eve High, you actually are not an official member of the corporation as far as the game is concerned, but you get access to all the out of game stuff that Eve University has to offer, including classes, forums, etc. In addition, there is a private chat channel that many Eve Uni people are also on that you can chat on. It is not quite as good as being in the actual corporation (I assume, since I've never been in a corporation), but it is a lot better than being out there in Eve all by your lonesome.

So that is how it has been for about a week or so: I've been a member of Eve High, an unofficial extension of Eve University. I've attended two classes, both of which were very helpful, and chatted with the faculty. I am waiting for the war declarations to expire (they must be renewed every week). When it does, I expect to become a full-fledged member of the U.

Anyway, affiliating with a group of people in a corporation has been extremely helpful. So far, I have had a member give me really good advice on setting up my ship (I was completely wrong!), and a member provided me with half price training books out of the goodness of his heart. I am really happy with my decision, and can't wait until this war is over so I can really get involved in the University and start running missions together, mining, etc.

If you are new to Eve, I strongly suggest that you check out Eve University. And if you don't join that corporation, do join a different one. I think being a corporation is probably the key factor in enjoying the game and getting over the hump in the Eve learning curve.

Subscription

2009-05-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

I've been playing on this trial account now for a little over a week. I have decided to go ahead and subscribe for a month as there were certain things I couldn't do on a trial account (e.g., create contracts, learn certain skills, activate my industrial ship, etc.). I think I will see how jet-can mining works which I couldn't before due to restrictions on the types of ships I could fly.

Anyway, I've bought into this whole Eve thing enough to spend real cash on it (albeit, only $20). Let's see where it takes me...

Welcome to my new blog

2009-05-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new blog. This blog, Journey to New Eden, will chronicle my experience as a new player in Eve Online. I honestly don't know what's going to happen on this journey. I am intrigued by this game, but am not sure if I am really going to stick with it or not. Therefore, this could possibly a very short-lived blog.

A little bit about myself (at least my gaming self): I started with MMORPGs back in the Ultima Online days. I played that for a year or two, then took a break. I tried EQ back in its very early days, but really could not get into it. I remember fighting bees for 45 minutes to make enough money to buy a new pair of gloves, then die and not be able to find my corpse. It was way too frustrating.

I took several years off online games until about 2 years ago when I started playing WoW with a friend of mine. I played for a few months on a human mage, then lost interest for about 3 or 4 months. Then, for some reason I started back up again on a new toon (a healer), and never looked back. I lived through the launch of TBC and WotLK, and currently have a level 80 dwarf priest specced holy, and my aforementioned mage, now level 71.

As much as I love WoW, I'd always been intrigued by this Eve game I'd heard about. I had some friends who played it and told me just how complex and "real" it was. I had really no idea what they meant, so I thought I'd give it a try. I downloaded a copy of the Eve client and got myself a 14-day trial account. I muddled through the first few missions, but after I was out of the basic starter missions, I was really lost. I found myself being killed over and over again on what should have been easy missions, and really had no idea what I was doing, or more accurately, doing wrong.

But while I was failing epicly, some things about Eve were starting to click in my head. I saw that on the market, everything was being sold or bought by real players, not NPCs. I got a glimpse of how a player could play as a miner, pulling resources out of asteroids, an industrialist, manufacturing goods to sell on the market, an arbitrageur, correctly market discrepancies and making a killing at the same time, haulers moving stuff around the galaxy, a pirate, making things hell for all the above, and so on. As an MBA, I really appreciated how I saw the market at the core of the game.

Anyway, I gave up on that character because he was such a disaster, and decided I would give it one more try. I wanted to like the game, but I was being stymied at every turn. How much fun is a game where you wipe again and again on beginning missions. This wasn't end game raiding for crying out loud! So I got myself another trial account, and set about starting out again. This time, I was going to do it right.

I figured if I was going to do this right, I would need some additional guidance. I looked around and found a number of resources, but what I was most excited about an Eve-focused podcast I found called The Drone Bay. As I like to listen to podcasts on the way to and from work, I downloaded all the episodes of the podcast to my Zune and started listening to them.

The Drone Bay podcast has a segment on it they call "Don't Panic" that is targeted at new players. Bingo! I'd hit the jackpot! The segment had two suggestions that really helped me on my second attempt at Eve. These suggestions have made a big difference in my enjoyment of the game this second time ar0und, and may be the difference between me sticking with the game or giving up on it.

And with that I'm going to stop for the evening. I will save those two suggestions for my next blog post...