Descalation

I tried clearing some highsec anomalies to see how often the escalations and faction spawns occur. So far that they did not happen even once, after about ten or so. So that is essentially useless for anyone. At least I played around with a destroyer, but seriously, what is even the point? Doing anomalies in highsec makes few hundred thousand per hour at most, which is less that L1/L2 missions. And unlike missions anomalies are a limited resource, in that they spawn on their own time are there are rarely more than one per system. And so far there was no mention of anything getting done with highsec anomalies in Odyssey. Which is a pity, because anomalies paying better than missions would encourage travelling around, rather that sitting on a single agent.

I also found an unrated complex and followed an Angel Kickbacks escalation. In a destroyer, which might be reason why this took two hours or so. Unfortunately, no rare drops. The final overseer did not, in fact, drop anything at all, and I got a single piece of T2 salvage from the whole chain. I wonder how unlucky that is. The bounties were marginal, but I suppose it would be fine for a starting player. Although with a two months character I am a starting player by EVE standard.

I get the impression that the combination of low drop rate and high value damages the balance here. Judging by difficulty, highsec escalations are supposed to be early game content, but unless they immediately focus on exploration most players will outgrow the difficulty of these things before they see even a single actually worthwhile drop. So most people, if they do them at all, will do them with zero risk.

The fact that lowsec is not low security but essentially no security, doesn't help, since it puts a cliff for progression, especially if someone doesn't want to multibox a second account as a scout. I wrote about that last time, the rewards do not scale nowhere close with the risk of losing the ship. Actually, the problem might be that the risks are not granular enough, it's either no loss, or loss of the entire ship, its fit and maybe implants. Insurance doesn't really help that much. I suppose the solution here it to make enough ISK so that losing a ship becomes a granular loss. But PvE ships are relatively expensive compared to the money you can make from PvE. And are useless for PvP.

Rally points

That did not go all that well. I took my new cruiser into a nearby lowsec pocket, and at least I didn't get attacked by anyone. There even was an anomaly. The name was was, I am fairly sure, a Forsaken Serpentis Rally Post, but the wiki says it appears in null sec and the spawn was different. Maybe it changed, or I remember wrong. Anyway, there were two cruisers and a battleship in the initial wave. It turns out that, at least with my skills, a cheap Thorax cannot take that in a reasonable amount of time. I finally took them down just on principle, but it took an hour of jumping and docking to repair the armor and recharge the capacitor, so very much not worth it for a million bounty. A the second wave spawned multiple battleships, so I just left.

A smaller anomaly might be doable, but then it would be worth less than a L3 mission. A rally point might be doable in a battlecruiser, but I really don't want to take a ship worth more than twenty million ISK, and a my missioning battlecruiser is worth way more than that, into lowsec. Maybe with way more skills… more tracking would definitely help, right now I'm missing cruisers when orbiting at blaster ranges. But I doubt it would get me past the first wave.

Alas, the reward balance does not seem to take risks derived from presence of other players into account very much. Which is understandable, because that is way too fluid to balance against. Especially considering that a static measure is meaningless, since secure sovereign nullsec is much safer than lowsec no matter what the security level is, and a dynamic is too gameable.

Flying around

I finally decided to spend some of that ISK I have been collecting, and bought and fitted a Thorax. Didn't have much time to play today, and I spent good two hours flying around collecting parts. Probably a waste of time, which is money, should have bought everything at hub for slightly more. Oh well. Total costs ended up something like fifteen million ISK, maybe a bit more. Which is probably not a good idea, considering it will take several hours to make that back if I lose the ship. And I just remembered I forgot again to insure the hull. Maybe I will remember before I take that into lowsec.

I could fit a frigate, but I am not planning on seeking PvP, because I see no point in attacking random people. And you need more than one ship to bust gate camps. Which is something I would like to do on principle. Most games seem to at least try to disincentive camping, since it is pretty obviously terrible gameplay for both sides, but well, EVE. Anyway, mostly want to see if you can actually finish a lowsec anomaly in a more or less PvP-fit (probably badly) cruiser, without getting ganked, and how much ISK would that actually make. Which I don't think can be sensibly done in a cheap frigate with skills as low as I have. Why do I still have Medium Hybrid Turrets at two?

Also training Caldari Cruisers in the meantime, not sure why, since I have yet to look at Caldari ships. But, I don't plan to even try all four racial ship skills before Odyssey, but maybe basic two. Still not even trying for Battleships. Fitting for soloing L4 missions seems to require way more other skills. I might as well finish training battleships last. Or I could, in principle, join a corp and run L4 missions in a T1 battleship… but eh.

Bronze

Nothing too interesting have been happening, and I haven't been in a mood to ramble about salvage yet. Been just griding L3 missions, to build up ISK and standing. The latter mostly for the jump clones. I still have only level three implants, so I could probably take more risks with the current one, but I don't want to. Also I plan to chain wormholes to drop into random nullsec or somewhere, just to see whats there.

Anyway, the mission structure continues to be somewhat irritating by being too random, or possibly not random enough. Since I finally got Drones V and a bunch of skills requiring that, I can complete the majority of missions without losing shields, despite having an armor tanked ship. But I can't complete L4 in a battlecruiser, and according to guides only slowly in a basic fit battleship, which I don't have skills for anyway.

I wish there was something between "squadrons of cruisers" and "squadrons of battleships". Oh well. Another irritation was again with the loot, I got a 4 million ISK missile launcher and eight million Brass Serpentis Tag, which is good on one hand, but again, that was just completely random loot from wreck as any other. This low probability drops make it difficult to figure out if looting everything is worth it.

Wormhole junk

I found a wormhole right in the system I am based on, inside a ladar side, the Token Reseirvour, so I tried my destroyer plan. It didn't quite work, the frigate sized Sleepers were easily destroyed, the cruiser sized on not so much. And they were of a weaker tier than the ones I encountered before. So yeah. I finally decided to ignore caution, and entered the wormhole without probes in a cruiser. That worked, and I even left successfully. Unfortunately just after I was finished salvaging the Sleepers someone turned up in a CovOps frigate and started dropping combat probes, so I got out without a chance to mine. Although C60 and C70 appear basically worthless anyway. The Sleeper drop are worth maybe half a million total, the salvage seems worthless, so basically that was an efficient use of time. Still, learning things. Like, if I am going to try this again, I need a Thorax or something.

Wormholes and rigs

Since I have not completely recovered from a cold I had last week I spent more of the weekend watching other people play video games rather than playing myself. Not the most auspicious launch of the blog, since I rather hoped to do something in EVE I could write about on the weekend. Still, I did some things, even if in more cursory way than if I was able to focus longer.

On Saturday I finally decided to do something with all those wormholes that were annoying me by not being radar sites. Recently I trained Cloaking III, and while I promptly lost one Improved Cloaking Device II on that Iteron, I actually bought three of those, because why not. So I put one on my scanning Imicus, replacing a mostly symbolic blaster. Scanned down a wormhole, and I didn't even forget to check its status, and after seeing that it was I the last quarter of its life found another one, leading to a C2 system.

Inside there were a POS and some ships under it, but I assumed they were offline or AFK and started scanning for sites, obviously while cloaked. While sitting very near a wormhole, which probably is a terrible mistake, but without a covert ops cloak I would have decloak to warp back. Anyway, nothing happened and I located a ladar site.

I jumped a Venture with gas harvesters, started a stopwatch and started mining. According to what I have read the Sleepers should spawn after twenty something minutes. And they did. So I jumped out. Before that I saw on d-scan someone poking around the system with core probes, but didn't leave since even if they jumped on the same site the clouds are over 30 km from the warp in point, and anyone serious about hitting a Venture ninja-mining would use combat probes anyway. Probably. Anyway, nothing happened.

I harvested 840 units of Fullerite-C72. Nominally worth about five million, but the fullerites seem to have fairly low volume in most places. I actually flew all the way to Jita to place a sell order, which haven't sold since yesterday. All that wasn't exactly worth it, but it was interesting. If I am reading the stats on the Sleepers that spawned they should be trivial to take down with my Myrmidon, but I really don't want to bring it into a wormhole. A Celestis, maybe, but it has only three high slots, so I would either have to go in without a probe launcher or drop one weapon. And it is a bit too expensive still to lose.

So I started thinking about destroyers. With only two sleepers that spawn on a ladar site this might be doable, and the forums claim that those don't respawn, so it might be possible to actually mine the site out, which would be worth considerably more than a twenty minute run. Or it might not be. But I decided to try, and bought for a few million a Corax, outfitted with launchers and a MWD, which, if the number mean what I think they mean should make it possible to kite the sleepers while hitting them from outside their targetting range. Quite slowly, but such is life in EVE if one cannot afford to fly a T3 ship with T2 weapons.

I didn't actually get to try it though. On Sunday I almost completed the fit, but I wanted to put Small Auxiliary Thrusters I to get bigger speed buffer, but there were very few locally sold. So I checked how expensive the blueprints and components were. And they were cheaper than the rig itself. Actually, the small versions of astronautic rigs build around the Burned Logic Circuit, Charred Micro Circuit and Thruster Console seemed to have prices, even if at very low volumes, that were considerably bigger than the cost.

So I decided to build some of those. I don't expect a lot from them, since the volume is extremely low, at least in the region I operate, but I am still at the stage where every five million do matter, so why not. So I spent most of my game time on Sunday flying around picking blueprints and some more of those components, setting up production, in the meantime adjusting PI, and so on. So I haven't actually flown the Corax anywhere.

Well, I tried scanning down a wormhole, but apparently either I was really unlucky, or black holes don't have sites. I saw some guy leaving the hole in a capsule, followed by a Mammoth, so maybe its better I didn't try anything with active people inside. Still sitting on the hole while scanning. I mean, what is the possible risk? If I move a few kilometers off the hole then it is highly unlikely something will accidentally (or not) uncloak me. Maybe.

On missions and PvE in general

The general opinion appears to be that PvE in EVE is somewhere between not very good and bad. After my six weeks of playing I can see there are definitely issues, both in PvE combat itself and mission structure and rewards. I don't think they are particularly terrible, though. Of course any change would have consequences which might make things worse. Also I have only done L3 missions and below and some exploration, so I have no experience with more advanced forms of PvE.

One issue that is somewhat subjective, but become apparent to me early, is that individual enemies are typically much weaker than a player ship of an equivalent class. This means that typically in a mission the player would be significantly outnumbered. Rather than give an impression of being powerful this mostly knocks me out of any immersion because I have to wonder, why are even the NPC navy ships so bad? More practically this gives combat somewhat 'whack-a-mole' feel. And makes looting tedious, especially since the wrecks tend to be spread out in an area dozens of kilometres wide. Salvage drones really help with salvaging, but even with a tractor beam looting stuff takes a relatively long time.

Of course, looting is optional. The irritating thing about loot is that it is very random, and as far as I can tell there is no way to know what the value of the wreck is without opening it. Or I suppose filling a mid slot with a cargo scanner, assuming that it can look into wrecks and/or containers. I really wish there was some indication of high value loot, or at least a stronger correlation between a type of enemy and possible loot, other that faction commanders.

Which wouldn't help with navy tags. I stopped doing missions against major faction navies partially due to wanting to avoid standing drop, but the other reason was that every single enemy ship wreck was marked as not empty. And almost always it was just a tag. And they gave no bounty, so to get anything for destroying them you had to loot every single wreck. Which is annoying and I suppose a reason why tags are relatively scarce on the market.

Another issue is that most NPC enemies are tank heavy and low on DPS. Especially effective DPS, because they seem to have no concept of group cohesion and are easily kited into separate, easy to destroy groups. This also makes missile based NPC groups disproportionately powerful. Of course, they have to be if they are to seriously outnumber the player.

Unfortunately, the effect is that once your tank gets good enough there is essentially no risk when running missions. I read that before NPC started to sometimes target drones, it was possible to just leave a good enough ship inside a mission and leave, and drone would eventually kill everything without the risk of your tank getting breached. Once you have sufficient tank the only factor that remains is how fast can you destroy enemies. Or at all. I remember I got a single battleship in one L3 mission, which couldn't even hit my battlecruiser reliably, but I couldn't get through its shields (Myrmidon without Drones V being perhaps a sub-optimal idea). Eventually I just left, refitted with five blasters and finished it, but it was still tedious.

I think missions would be better if they were more of a DPS race. Which would be more similar to how I understand, from what I have read, PVP usually goes. It would certainly be more exciting and require closer attention. On the other hand, the problem with low, but significant risk, is that the expected payout value necessary for profit varies wildly with small changes to risk, which makes it very difficult to balance without getting serious advantage to people who overpower the difficulty rating.

The lack of granularity in mission difficulty is a bit strange, too. There are five levels of missions, and the missions themselves appear to mostly scripted, as far as enemy strength goes. They seem to vaguely correspond to ship classes. But the power level of players is much more granular. Especially if you are not focusing on getting to next class of spaceships, there can be long period where the missions become trivial, and the only progress is that they get completed slightly faster, while next tier missions are still impossible or glacially slow.

I have seen an opinion that mission do not encourage playing them with multiple people, but that seems false. Due to the healing based tanks in EVE double DPS means being able to finish them more than twice as fast. Even with split rewards, this should be worth it, at least for groups of two-three people. Unless I am missing something, I have yet to try running a mission cooperatively.

Most LP store rewards appear to be wildly imbalanced. Especially modules. Even apart from the tag issue exacerbated by the tediousness of looting them one by one, the static base prices seem to be very high when compared to modules T2 counterparts. Especially considering that most of the faction modules are only marginally better. Or, in the case of Federation EANM and suchlike, no at all, attribute-wise. The only way it is better is a slight fitting advantage and lower skill level required. The former is situational at best, and the latter is useless to anyone except characters that can't really afford faction modules. It is just easier to train a bunch of levels required for a T2 module, which is around five to ten times cheaper.

I am not sure what the balance is with guns… they are weaker than T2 variants since they cannot fire T2 ammo, but requirement for T2 weapons seem to be much higher than other T2 modules, so maybe they have a niche.

Generally the situation with missions in EVE is not that terrible. I can see how they can become boring after being ground excessively, but then they were somewhat clearly, if I may try to divine the design intent here, designed to be an introduction to EVE, rather than main gameplay. Although if they do require a fit that different from effective PVP one as the internet seems to imply, then perhaps something should be fixed.

Glorious stupidity

Lost my first ship, other than the tutorial ships which don't really count. In the most stupid way possible of course. In my defense, I have a cold and slightly elevated temperature. Not enough to cause this sort of brain failure, but just enough to make the situation even sillier.

I lost a hauler. Not just any hauler, one with an Improved Cloaking Device II worth about eight million ISK. Which even dropped. And did nothing, because I got caught at the customs office. Not that, thinking about it, it would do much on an industrial anyway… it looked like an idea, but in retrospect it seems pointless. Maybe you could escape (very slowly) a small (and icompetent) gate camp with it, but probably not. And why did I got into low-sec without any Warp Stabilizers? I even had some lying around from rat drops. And the cargo expanders were all offline. That was dumb.

The silly part were the other eight million in Transcranial Microcontrollers, which had no reason to be there. I just wanted to pick up a load of Superconductors and ship them both to Dodixie. Fortunately I didn't have time to transfer them. In retrospect I should have put the Microcontrollers in the Customs Office. Alas, way too late. Even better, I should have picked Superconductors first in a cheap, unrigged industrial. Oh well, lessons learned!

The story so far, part 3: Ships, also space

After random frigates from the tutorial I picked a Catalyst destroyer and loaded it full of small railguns. Which all fit, even with low skills. No wonder that hull is used so much for suicide ganking. For L1 missions you don't even need a tank, because everything dies before it can use its weapons properly. Which is a good thing, because my understanding of tanking was at that point somewhat nebulous.

After that moved up to Celestis cruiser. As it turns out an EWAR platform is not very good for solo missioning. At least I like the name. I put two medium railguns and a rapid light missile launcher on it. And I think mixed reps with no resists. Despite that, it worked reasonably for L2s. Recently I refitted that ship to attempt running some low level DED complexes with a triple heavy missile launcher and a more proper active shield tank. It turns out it kills frigates just fine.

Then I built my current main mission ship, a Myrmidon battlecruiser. It is a mixed drone-DPS ship. Or some the wiki claims. Which worked out well, the mixed part, since I to this day don't have Drones V, and hence any advanced drone skills. So I mostly used light drones to kill frigates and mediums as supplementary DPS against cruisers. I played with an autocannon as a point defense weapon of sorts, but its DPS was pretty meaningless. So finally I mostly settled on three medium 250mm railguns, which with a damage rig consume most of the power grid, a capacitor drain and a small tractor beam. Defensively, double armor repairers and an Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane, because I am too lazy to switch fits between missions. Also a cap recharger, and power diagnostic system, weapon booster.

In middle slots, other than a cap recharger, web, target painter and a tracking computer, which might be overdoing it, but I got annoyed with missing early on after switching to medium turrets. And they do improve hit quality. Target painter even for drones, which can still miss.

Thinking about giving up on the NOS module, since usually if I am getting low on capacitor there is nothing in range anyway. And the NOS has range lower than optimal for railguns even with antimatter ammo, and they even start missing target painted/computed cruisers. But I don't really have grid for a fourth weapon. Maybe I will add a remote repairer one I have heavy drones or sentries or something. Unless it won't fit.

The other ship I often use is an Imicus frigate. Fit for exploration only, with salvager, codebreaker and analyzer, obviously probe launcher, and basic shield tank. Most highsec non-compex sites can actually be cleared with just drones, so that works out fine. I put a single gun on it, but I should probably replace it with a cloak or something. I have an Inner Shipping Imicus reskin from the first month promotion, but I am not using, partly because I don't want to lose it, partly because I got the one I am using earlier, and can't be bothered to transfer the fit, especially since it contains scanning rigs. Which are amazingly cheap, but still I would need to get some more.

I still have a single account and a single character. I though about creating an alt, if only one can safely ruin its other faction standing and get some tags, but my skills are already spread out and training a second character would only make it worse. And I don't plan to pay more than I am paying now. Not that I can't afford it, and a second concurrent character would be useful. On the other hand, it would encourage playing MMO as a single player game even more. And I hardly need that.

Still sitting in the newbie corp. I even looked around for an existing corp to join. But nothing really presented itself. Small corps are either insular or seem unstable. Large corps are large and kind of intimidating. Also most of what is presented as incentive isn't really one for me, because I want to get things like L4 access for myself. Also I got used to CAS chat channel, with is several hundred present people and stuff…

Actually I thought about creating my own, one person corporation. Both to get rid of NPC corp taxes and to try to build a POS. I wonder how viable it is to solo a POS actually. I tried to count the costs, but the prices for most of the needed things are market driven and it is not that obvious what the actual requirement are. Not that I have standings for a highsec POS anyway. And after leaving CAS there is no coming back apparently.

I could create a corp and try to recruit people, but there is not way that would end well. Not to mention probably wouldn't work at all.

Hopefully once I am more established I will decide to join someone, because while I am having fun so far that is not quite sustainable, and it would be a pity not to explore the depth EVE has due to… not sure what. Remnant social fears. Although I do note that the prototypical major alliances are based around communities external to EVE. Maybe it just doesn't lend itself to social formation?

Actually I see a fair number of single character, or what appears to be a single person with multiple characters, corporations. I wonder how many people play EVE in relative isolation? Not that a single character corp means isolation necessarily. But, EVE still is in many respects better than, say X3. And there is no other competition in this niche that I am aware of. Maybe for some people liking spaceships is enough?

The story so far, part 2: Messing around

So I started moving. Fortunately I realized you can pack a ship into an Iteron. At third skill level in an Iteron Mark III, I think only two frigates fit even with three cargo hold expanders. Maybe three? Can't quite remember. It took a few hours to move all the things to the chosen station. At least they were uneventful. Although I guess if I got ganked at that point I would grow less attached to ships.

Once everything was safely on board the station, I started to try things. Somewhat intermixed, but I will just describe each of them and the results as a whole.

One of the first things I tried was creating some Planetary Interaction bases. Only trained planetary management skills to three. Which limits options. Especially in highsec, where base resource concentrations are really low. And it turned out that noble metal prices were high because the levels of that were particularly low. Same with silicon. Which, by the way, even has in description that it is one of the more common substances in the universe, so why is it so rare?

Focused mostly on mining and processing materials to P1, because with fourth level command center an extractor with maximum number of heads, a launchpad and a few basic factories will use most of the power grid available. And a dedicated factory world would get eaten by taxes. Unless you skipped at least one, or even better, two fabrication levels, but then the amount of hauling necessary grows rapidly. Not really worth it. Although the taxes also mean that the low concentration mining is actually worth more than one would thing, because the margin partially compensates for a lower volume.

Lately I switched two planets to producing Transcranial Microcontrollers, mostly because I can, and for the lower volume. This is all hardly optimal, but for now I don't want to take time to rebuild it. One planet gets switched between fairly common Base Metals and Microorganisms every day, which fortunately doesn't require that much clicking, as long as the P0 resource is routed though a storage. They are processed through P1 to nanites, which I then transfer every week or so to a second barren planet, which combines Noble Metals mined there with imported Biofuels to create Biocells, and combine them with Nanites from the other planet. I am not entirely sure if that doesn't actually generate losses compared to selling the P1, but at least it looks cool. And other ISK sources overtook PI profits anyway.

And most ISK is really generated by the third planet in a neighbouring system, producing aforementioned Silicon. Planetary Felsic plasma levels are low, but fairly solid hotspots happen. Fourth planet is actually in a lowsec pocket and produces Semiconductors, again by rotating the extractor between Aqueous Liquids and Suspended Plasma.

Generally PI is fairly neat, even if it doesn't make a lot of ISK unless you also control the Customs Office. I though about writing a program to compute a fabrication chain with maximum profit possible including taxes, but have yet to find the time. Some basic numbercrunching gives me around 70k ISK per factory-hour, which isn't really all that much, especially considering the amount of hauling necessary for a pure factory world. Planet mining is nice in that it happens passively, so even if I don't have time to play EVE planetary goods accumulated as long as I have the time to reset extractors. And in highsec a launchpad can store the P1 output for around a week.

Trading. I tried it a little, but without being able to comfortably go into lowsec it is hard to find any good price differentials. I actually ran a route through lowsec, and it happened to be mostly empty. Something tells me the instant death in lowsec which the wikis talk about is somewhat overstated. The other problem was that hauling is somewhat boring, in some ways more that mining, since the autopilot is so much slower than clicking the jump destination that you need to touch the game every few minutes, and can't just read a book or something. Which is a good thing in some ways, because what is the point of playing the game without playing it? And trading by playing the market requires locking down a lot of ISK in stock and buy orders, which I didn't have early on and don't really have now.

Industry, thought about it, bough some blueprints to fabricate some ammo for myself, since it is a bit more convenient than searching for a market sell order nearby. Or maybe it is just the Minerals I Mine Are Free fallacy talking? Anyway, I checked the profit calculators and checked some of the numbers myself, and there is no point even starting without maximum production efficiency and a source of researched blueprints other than contract system, which is hardly reliable. And I have neither. Plenty of ISK for large mineral buy orders to capture the immediate miner market would help, too.

That did not stop me from building my own cruiser and battlecruiser. And Retriever. Not even sure why, I didn't mine most of those minerals, because that became rapidly boring. Not even sure why I trained Mining Barges. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Because well, mining. Mined a bit in a Venture. It is strange that a most boring and mostly risk free action actually makes most ISK. Well, market in action. Apparently industry in EVE is constrained by raw material supply right now. Maybe someday they will nerf highsec station industrial slots, and then… there will be massive inflation? Not sure where I am going with this. More recently I trained Mining Barges, build myself a Retriever, mined a single cargo hold worth of ore, and then… stopped. Maybe someday I will feel particularly meditative.

What made me the most ISK in these first six weeks was exploration. Or maybe it just feels like it, because the profit comes in big chunks? Anyway, it even feels somewhat sciency! And hopefully the upcoming expansion will improve it, right now the balance alone is not, well, balanced. And other issues that might make a post on their own. But, with being able to find a radar site reasonably often I made quite a lot of ISK to fuel other things. I even tried a bunch of times to explore a lowsec pocket nearby. One time a Drake warped in into a radar site I was clearing and targeted me, so I warped out. That was my closest encounter with spontaneous PVP EVE is famous for so far.

And of course, missions. I kept at doing mission for Federal Administration. Mission balance and rewards and stuff is a topic for another post as well. I got to level three missions after a few weeks. At a certain point I realized that shooting Navy ships will result in serious standing loss with owning faction, and decided I don't want that, so stopped doing those. And did two or so so called "storyline" missions for Caldari Business Tribunal. If Gallente and Caldari are at war, why are there stations for both in the same system? And not just some random civilian corporations, but government entities of both sides. Whatever the reason, they are there, which at least makes doing missions for them easier. I think I even have L3 access for both sides now.

Despite their problems the missions do involve spaceships shooting at each other, and I like spaceships. Also railguns. Speaking of spaceships, next time lets write about what I have been flying.

The story so far, part 1: Beginnings

Well, the title says story, but I am not planning to create game derived fiction. That would require way too much creativity. And I didn't really care that much about role-playing anyway. Not that the word "story" necessarily implies fiction anyway, story of the player is still a story. I just like disclaimers. So, another one, I write this forty-some days after I started playing, and my memory is, lets say, nonlinear. So if I say things which are clearly impossible, that is why. Although I suppose mostly it will result in lack of details. On that note, last disclaimer (of this paragraph): I am writing these posts as a stream of consciousness of sorts, and don't care enough to edit them much. Which is why I have no idea how much or what I will write while writing this introduction.

So, back in February one weekend I decided to try EVE Online trial. The client has something like 20GB which seems like a lot, considering there is no voice acting that I have seen other than limited number of computer notifications. Maybe I'm just old. I guess these days 20GB is nothing special. I guess textures are big. Especially if every star and every planet have their own backgrounds and textures… also moons. Maybe they are procedurally generated but baked into the client? Or maybe something else takes that space. In any case my Internet connection handled it fine. I feel like I need a bigger hard drive, but then, I always feel that.

After creating an account comes character creation. I have in the meantime looked at the wiki, and in fact multiple wikis, so at least I know that faction/bloodline choice mostly affects the starting system, since attribute differences were removed. Not entirely clear at that point what those do exactly, but good to know.

So I picked Gallente faction, Immigrants bloodline and Center for Advanced Studies as starting school. Partially because they look like the stereotypical 'good guys', and while as I said I don't care about role-playing that much, it saves on cognitive dissonance. Not that I did not expect for this to be subverted, since no doubt in the glorious space future of EvE everyone is more or less corrupt anyway. Other reasons were the color scheme and ship strengths. While I did get that you don't have to use those of the starting faction, I might just as well. And Gallente use green, railguns and drone ships, which seemed best. Well, blue I might have liked more, but I didn't pick Caldari for some reason. I don't even remember what their ships are supposed to be good at. Missiles, I think? In any case better, I like green and blue better than red and whatever colour Minmatar has.

Shallow reason, I know, but if faction choice matters little, then why not choose using factors that matter little too? The school I chose because it seemed the most science oriented, even if only symbolically, and I usually prefer playing science characters in sci-fi RPGs.

Character customization next. I heard things about that actually, even before paying much attention to EVE. At some point CCP planned to create a common area where player characters could meet outside spaceships. And apparently they added this elaborate character customization system before creating the station environment. And then added real money customization options for the characters. Still without common environment to actually see those other than on character portraits. And I note that that still doesn't exists. But the character exists and is fully animated, and you can walk around the so called "Captains Quarters", but there still is no common area. Not that it would make sense anyway, because it would still be purely cosmetic.

I was never very good at those character customization things. I am just bad at the sort of spatial reasoning required to know how changing one element would affect the final look. I don't remember any other game using the model itself as a control, rather than a set of sliders. Not sure if it makes things easier or not. Ended up with somewhat generic character by tweaking a randomly generated one.

Then, finally, the game. The tutorials were mostly fine. At a basic level at least. They were not very memorable, really. At least they gave a bunch of initial ships. Although I do remember that I actually bought a destroyer before finishing the tutorials, and then got another one in last Advanced Military mission, I think. It still sits in a hangar, never assembled. I could have sold it, but you never know. I do remember I sold an Iteron, replacing it with Iteron Mk III. Why are Gallente the only faction with industrial ship tiers?

I am trying to remember something more about tutorials, but nothing comes to mind. Is that a good or bad sign for a new player experience? I don't think I am very representative, considering that I like reading about complex game mechanics sometimes more than actually playing using them. So the tutorials were more of a semi-practical demonstration than a proper learning tool. But I am not sure how they could be improved, really.

After finishing the tutorials I decided to move away from the rookie systems. Not leaving highsec obviously, since that is pointless without already knowing someone in the game. Or I suppose being more aggressive with joining a preexisting corp. But in any case I didn't want to bother with PVP, just find somewhere quieter to learn the game more and collect more spaceships. Since I had no idea where anything in EVE is, I fell back on the mode of making decisions based on shallow factors, and started looking at the list of regions and decide which name I liked the most.

Finally settled on Everyshore. I liked the name, an it is mostly composed of lowish highsec with some lowsec pockets. Mostly Gallente territory and not very far from my starting location. Which was somewhat important, because I didn't want to sell all those ships you get from the tutorial. Even that one I never actually used, an EWAR frigate I think? Don't remember the name. Or a second Venture. Although maybe I sold that one. Anyway, I had about ten ships to move to my new base, once I chose an exact station.

I thought about Carirgnottin system. As I said, I prefer science based characters in sf RPGs, and Duvolle Laboratories NPC corporation is headquartered there. But further reading shown that science itself requires multiple level V skills, which would not be happening for some time. Especially considering I decided to ignore common advice and not actually focus my character. Which a bit scattershot approach to skills I still am nowhere near capability for research. And it doesn't really achieve anything, since it more or less generates passive income and hence the market is flooded with datacores. And invention has even higher requirements. And science lab NPC corps in EVE apparently have very few agents.

I pretty much decided to run missions at this point. At least as a fallback thing to do. Other options would be explored once I got some ISK, but spent some time looking at agent lists looking for a good missioning base. Finally I picked Federal Administration as main standings target, and the Jurlesel system, since it had a level I agent and was near higher level agents. And it was low population by both active players and jumps number, and had good mineral class for a highsec system. Not that it matters these days, with all minerals more or less equal in worth.

Ships in Space

Sometime tomorrow the first month of my subscription for EVE Online will run out. Which means I have played one month and fourteen days. Since trial counts fully as game time. Do you only get a month if you buy a subscription outright? That would seem unfair. And why does on Steam EVE costs five euros more than a first month subscription? No matter.

In any case, I decided to keep playing. I also decided to start this blog. At the very least it will be an exercise in writing English, since I somehow doubt that anyone would care about newbie ramblings. It will be mostly composed of describing what I am doing in EVE and what I am trying to achieve, and aforementioned ramblings on game mechanics and balance. Perhaps the former will result in some form of loosely defined narrative. The latter I suppose I could have written on the forum, but since no one would care and the game ater ten years has way too much inertia to change anyway, I am putting those in words more to get them out of my head rather than for anyone to read.

So, why did I start playing EVE now, rather than anytime in the last decade? I have always liked science-fiction, and space-opera, or at least some subsets thereof, and indeed, spaceships. And computer games. I spent way too many hours playing X3. And before that… I actually don't remember anything spaceship related between that and Privateer and Frontier: First Encounters. That seems strange. I was aware of previous X games and Freelancer, but never bothered to play them. Maybe my liking of spaceship games comes in waves? Now that I think of it, it is a good few years since I gave up on X3. Mostly due to collision damage. Why would you put collision damage, high-inertia spacecraft and dogfighting weapon composition in a single game? Anyway.

What I didn't really play until fairly recently were MMO of various description. Or any multiplayer games at all, really. Some combination of being relatively bad at video games and self-conscious about it. And not being very social at all. Or whatever. And I don't really like pure skill-based games, with no persistent systems. Which eliminated FPSes and RTSes. And back then MMOs were almost all subscription based and I didn't make my own money, and didn't want to make time extended commitments. I did play Discworld MUD for a bit. I think my character still exists there, even. Somehow I failed to talk to anyone. Part being asocial, part being overloaded with English text I guess… In principle I read English fluently, but that does not necessarily mean fluidly.

Then the era of free-to-play MMOs started, and eventually I picked up some of those. And then gave up eventually. I played Star Trek Online for some time, and even joined a random fleet. But after hitting the level cap I realized that the primary game loop in that is not really satisfying, because even if you could get marginally better stuff, there is nothing to use it on. And I really like Star Trek space aesthetics (I don't care how silly beam weapons which feel heavy are, but I just like them), but there are limits.

And then I finally finished my not-so-slightly overdue master's thesis and got an actual job. So, when next wave of liking spaceship games hit me, I realized that I now have enough money to actually pay a subscription without it relatively mattering and remembered that EVE still exists. And is apparently doing fine subscription-wise. And, I don't actually like spreadsheets, since I think for most applications they are applied to a proper programming language would be better, but spreadsheets-in-space, as I often heard it called, actually did have some appeal. And since there was a free trial, I trialed it, and here I am, still not bored. Despite the fact than I didn't really talk to anyone once again. But who knows.

In the next few days I will write some posts about thoughts accumulated after forty-something days of playing EVE. After that I guess the pace will slow down. Especially if I spend time writing about EVE rather than playing it. I wonder now how long will I actually keep at both EVE and this blog. Well, only the future can tell.