Saturday 18 May 2013

Flying under the lasers

So, during the week I created a new character and switched the training queue to it. Accumulated around two hundred thousand skill points in basic frigate operation. Gallente, because I know at least basics about their ships and it near the base of my main character, which saves training and operating the hauler on character in faction warfare. Transferred some ISK, put together an Atron fit as good as I could with so limited skills. Which is probably not optimal anyway, but I don't really see a way to improve it.

Today, that is, Saturday morning local time, I flown around the FW area trying to do some plexes. I have not seen a lot of militia pilots on either side. Mostly, there is what appear to be typical between one and five neutral pirates of lowsec, which apparently have nothing better to do than attacking low level FW pilots. Well, to be fair, it involves glancing at local every five minutes or so, so its not as it is a waste of time as such. Although wouldn't most pilots running complexes just run away, when six year old pirate drops on grid?

I had three frigates with fittings prepared. The first I lost when I decided to charge the pirate who warped on grid to see what happen. Or, well, first to warp off to station to drop ammo, since I had way too many reloads. Mission running habits. Then returned and promptly died to T2 rockets.

With the second frigate I got lucky and actually found an Ammar militia pilot running a plex in a system with no pirates, I suppose because it had no stations to idle in, and actually managed to catch and destroy them. They were few days older, and could not hit me with their beam lasers, since I fitted for a blaster brawler. And then literally seconds later a pirate entered the system, or actually entered a bit earlier, but warped into the plex seconds after I got my first PVP kill, and destroyed my ship. With T2 autocannons. I'm beginning to see a pattern here.

The third one was the last one I had a complete fit for, so I tried not to risk it, fly around the area to see what is going on, not much apparently, although it might be the time of day, and run away when someone hits the plex I try to sit on. Not very interesting.

Where do the pirates get the money for all the T2 equipment anyway. And why don't the plex gates lock out neutrals. I mean sandbox and everything, but if they limit ship types… Well, frigate level T2 equipment is not actually particularly expensive anyway. I mean, I actually finished about three plexes in various systems before I got hit by a pirate, in one case around ten seconds before, which even considering two of those were defensive means I could buy and fit faction frigate with full T2 fit. And I couldn't use it, because the FW character doesn't have the skills.

But, after playing around in EVEMon is see that I can get the skills to use all those things in less than a month, and after two-three months of fully focused frigate training the solo frigate capability seem to cap out. Of course, that is more than half the time I am playing EVE at all. But then MMO are supposed to be long term. I don't want to suspend the training on my main, which is not very focused but I want to get some battleships or something, so it will have to wait until Odyssey anyway. I might buy a plex or three, and train it that way. A second account might be marginally cheaper, but I still don't want to mess around with character transfers. And definitely not committing to paying for two accounts.

Although I wonder if that makes an actual difference. There thing about PvP in EVE is that it doesn't really matter how much your ship is worse than that of the enemy, since once you are in point range there is no running away. And then percentage points matter, and all five skills six year old characters will still kill my twenty something million frigate, and then what is the point? I suppose I could ran away only from multiyear characters and hope the others are not purely specialized in frigates.

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