learning « Our EvE

Mad Rant

On Being Angry With CCP and/or GMs

I’ve read a lot of rants in my life. Everything from cats eating neighbours’ birds, gimped drone bay on Rokh, dogs leaving their calling cards on the lawn, cans flipped, presidents sleeping with interns, GCC timers, GUI problems [or complete and utter failure at Human Interface Design 101] and letting people talk to Mr. G. Brown. But all in all, I’ve always assumed the majority of them are emotional responses to complex issue that don’t particularly affect me directly. So I smile, nod my head and move on.

Until Now.

[caption id="attachment_806" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Banned Wagon"]

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I’m on the bandwagon. No, wait, I’m on the Banned Wagon. Persona non grata in EVE. I go to log in and I’m greeted with – “Login Data Incorrect” and no explanation. Huh, fair enough, I must have mistyped my passw… nope. 0/2 on login attempts. Quickly check SpaceBook, er, EVE Gate. It’s more informative, “This account has been banned.” To quote a corp-mate, “Bweh?” What is going on here. I quickly double check my email in case I missed something. Nothing I can find. I check the spam folder, nothing there. Check the servers spam que – AHA! A very generic message from a supposed Mr. GM Something or other indicating that my account had been hacked and as a security measure the account had been banned. Ok, fair enough, I’m all for them trying to run a tight ship and protect us from the evil account hackers and keyloggers.

As indicated in the email, I replied and asked for the account to be reset so that I could reset the password and survey the damage. As a corporate director, I was a bit fearful of the damage that could be wreaked on both our corporation’s wallet, our assets and those of our alliance mates. I quickly checked with them as well as the CEO. Interestingly enough, my character had not logged in since my own last activity. Additionally, the millions of isk in the corporate wallet were untouched. This is one very incompetent hacker…

24 hours pass… no reply to petition, no reply to email, no status indication at all. Additional petitions are made from other accounts to try and get some semblance of a response, acknowledgement, update. My last skill training ran out 20 hours ago [which was why I was trying to log in to begin with]. 36 hours. 48 hours, a reply to one of the players petitions, “Your account has been reset as per the email sent in response to your original petition on ….” First things first, reset the password and get to training again while surveying the damage to my personal wallet. Ok, skill set, wallets – Full. In point of fact, there was more isk in my wallet than when I logged off 2 days ago [several large contracts had cleared as well as personal donation from a very dear friend upon the loss of a close personal ship. What? Where's my 0 isk balance? Why are there still assets in my name? Why didn't the evil hackers strip my assets, post offensive pictures on the eve-o forum, offline all our towers and kick everyone out of the corp?

Hmm. Sure their must have been a reason they Fort Knox'd my account? The sheer paucity information released leads to my rampant speculation wherein I have then two broad scenarios that I can imagine [help me if I'm missing something]:

My account was hacked in such a fashion as to easily alert prescient CCP/GMs to it’s compromised status and they reacted so quickly that no damage had been done while incompetent third world sweatshop hackers failed to capitalise on their access and steal the millions, nay, billions in ill-gotten gains from myself and corporation.

CCP/GMs are clicking buttons at random over there in New Hawaii and wouldn’t know a hacked account from a large cloud of volcanic dust if it blew up in their back yard.

If scenario one is correct, I encourage everyone to take a moment and give CCP/GMs a little golf clap for their supernatural ability to ferret out RMTs, hacked accounts and macro miners/ratters with ease. I would be momentarily happy to be a part of their Unholy Rage. If you’re right, everyone is happy and the experience gets better.

If scenario two is correct [and I'm more inclined to believe this given that I can just about find macro miners in every system with ice and macro ratters everytime our wormhole exit pops up in null-sec coupled with my own recent experience], then I am just sad. OK, angry and sad. I lost 48 hours of training time for someone else’s mistake? I missed out on 200-500m in revenue and cost my corp-mates the opportunities to do so as well, due to contributing to group activities? If you are wrong, admit you made a mistake and set things right.

Don't Bubble My Cool

On Running Out To High-Sec For Some Groceries

As I slip into my ship, I get an incoming com from one of our pilots. He’s actually the only other pilot right now. He mentions that there’s a four jump exit to high-sec and he’s going out to grab some Quafe as it’s getting dry here at home. I am also rather keen to grab a new book or two to read as I’m nearly finished with the current series I’m reading, Recon. It has been a really good series with lots of fun times and some new information along the way, but by the fifth one in the series, it was getting a bit long winded. I am usually patient about finishing the books I start, but for some reason Recon drug by. The Exhumer series seemed to go much faster and even finishing up reading the Astrometric Rangefinding series rather quickly, though it was published under another title.

[caption id="attachment_799" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="New Mini Game?"]

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As the other pilot hit the last system before k-space, he reports back that there is small bubble on the hole but poorly placed. Knowing that he’s intending to bring a ship back through, I volunteer to do some bubble popping. I decide that since it is not absolutely essential that I clear the bubble out quickly [other pilot has several jumps to get his ship picked up] and I do not really want to waste any ammo on the stupid thing [sig-rad is tiny on those things] I opt for a pulse Coercer. For those that maybe know some of the ships I usually fly, this is a fairly wide departure [not because it is Amarr] because I am exceptionally unskilled at laser turrets. This almost seems counter culture to flying ships in space, but the reality is, they just never appealed to me all that much. So I trundle the three jumps to the bubbled hole and jump through. Sure enough, a bubble greets me, but I am immune to its psychological effects and uncloak and lock it up. I start flying with the beams of light and watch as the shields on the bubble start to melt satisfyingly, albeit not too terribly fast.

Suddenly, there is a sound, a flash of light [or darkness], and there is a Tengu sitting 10 km off my stern and beginning to lock my ship. Ack, alas and alack, I am in a destroyer fit with racks of heat sinks and some cap rechargers. This is not going to be a fight, it’s going to be a little blip in the pond. Salvo 1 and the shields are gone. Salvo 2 and I am trying to remember if my clone was up-to-date. Salvo 3 and at 30% shields it dawns on me that I have not moved since I jumped into this system and the wormhole is still right there. I start spamming the jump button hoping that my poor ship [actually someone else's poor ship that I borrowed] will hold together until the session change starts. Lo, there is sound and light again and I’m sitting in a distinctly different location though with about 2% of my armor left and thankfully no structure damage.

Not waiting to see if Mr. Don’t Harsh My Bubble decides to follow for the kill, I immediately start heading back home to rethink my strategy in light of the change in situation. I update the pilot out on his shopping spree and he is easily swayed into agreeing that we should ‘defend’ ourselves [ignoring the fact that we may have, um, started things] and try and catch the sneaky, wormhole camping strategic cruiser.

[caption id="attachment_802" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Strats on the Brain"][/caption]
As a bit of an aside, I have been thinking a lot about the ‘strats’ both from the perspective of picking one up myself as well as their reputation. Though they deserve the kudos they get for being good at a lot of things and their ability to quickly specialise at something extremely well, they are still ships. They can and do die with increasing frequency. From this I have a couple of electrifying bolts of insight:

There are a lot of really bad ship fittings in the universe.

Everyone and their clone is buying ‘strats’.

The sheer number of possible fittings is confusing to say the least.

Someone is bound to get it wrong, sometime.

and

How much of their reputation is based on fear.

So we decide to ship up in something suitably pointy and head back and ‘defend’ our right to fly through a system they are living in. The ship shopper contacts another pilot and he slips into our well crafted bait ship to draw the Tengu pilot into engaging. In this case it is a Harbinger that we managed to forget to refit before heading out. It has lasers… well, it has lasers. Ship shopper jumps in a Lachesis to get the long range point and damp the Tengu’s range. I waver between using the Pilgrim that I just finished studying up for or something else. In the end, my rather uncommon sense wins out and I opt for a Rook because the Tengu did not have any turrets when he attacked me. We move out, hoping that we can still catch him and that he does not have a scout on our side of his wormhole [we would have] or backup [we are not likely to think about having backup until we see structural damage].

At the wormhole, things seem quiet and so we engage in some tribal war calls and Bait is sent through to begin bubble burning and we sit in quiet contemplation of the swirling colours around us. In a few seconds we get the call, “Tengu uncloaked at 60km and locking,” to which we indecisively wonder if that is within our engagement range. Bait is ordered to try and kite him in the other direction for a few seconds and we prep to jump. As Bait’s shields finally disappear, we jump in and begin racing for the Tengu. He’s closed to within 50 of the hole and Ship Shopper is able to get a point. I’m able to lock but the first round of jams all fail which causes a bit of distress for Bait. About this time a fourth pilot joins us in his Curse. His neutralisers are welcome, but I’m unsure how effective. His drone on the other hand are very good at what they do.

In order to keep this from going too well, Tengu’s tango partner, Dr. Maelstrom lands 100km off an starts pinging at Bait as well. The ECM kicks in on round two and I try one on the Dr., and manage to get off a lucky strike [Caldari racial jammer on a Minmatar ship] which saves Bait who by now is flaming. Tengu has not been able to do anything since Ship Shopper and I got him damped and locked down and we begin to see his shields crumple. At about 10% shields the Maelstrom warps off just as Bait returns from the nearby planet to get in range of the wormhole [which was still bubbled, but remember, poorly]. The rest of the skirmish flashes by as the bubble-baitings, cloaky camping, terrible Tengu shatters in a sparkling shower of light and we fail to get a lock on the pod. Curse, Ship Shopper and I manage to loot the wreck on the way out of the system. Fearing a larger reprisal, we opt to not target the bubble and head back to our own home. Before we jump, the Tengu pilot lets fly with a ‘gf’ in local and we respond by thanking him for sticking the fight. As we’re warping through another system, Curse asks what a ‘Smokescreen’ Covert Ops Cloak is.

Not Always Shiny

On Making Stupid Mistakes & Learning

As I looked over the last year or two of posts, I realised that I very often only present the upside to the efforts and events that we go through. I don’t often mention some of the accidents, problems and outright stupid mistakes that my colleagues or I make on a seemingly regular basis. To further entertain you, I’ll try to recall some of them and tell you what we’ve learned in the process.

Hmmm…. Nope…. Can’t think of anything.

I’m quite sure I could come up with more examples of our incompetence, but would likely ruin our reputation for flawless execution.

A Slight Change In Perspective

On Going Backwards For A Bit

First, a Public Service Announcement from WHEN. Pro-Tip: Cloak, THEN scan. Recently while scanning, two of my corp-mates cornered a day-tripping scanner in a nearby class 1 wormhole and sent him home, express postage paid. Even in a Tech 1 frigate, fit a cloak if you are going to be scanning. Additionally keep your eyes peeled and on the d-scan. Your first sign of danger shouldn’t be the sound of ammunition pummelling into your hull!

The Wormhole Engineers have done a fabulous job of clearing out the anomalies and signatures in our home system. The standard mode of operations is:

Scan out the static exit.
See how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Prioritise the resources located.
Secure the area.
Collect as much as feasible given personnel, skills and equipment.

Numbers one and two happen almost automatically now. It’s become an engrained response to the place we choose to live. Number 3 is somewhat amorphous and can change dynamically [It's the nature of priorities.]. Number 4 can be difficult as there are times when we can easily tell we are out-matched and our best course of action is closing the w’hole as quickly as possible. Sometimes number 4 involves shooting other ships, as was seen in the recent expedition into the nearby class 1. In addition to the uncloaked, and possibly AFK scanner, a salvage-Stabber was chased down and shown the door.

Second, a Public Service Announcement from WHEN. Pro-Tip: Don’t leave a salvager behind to clean up. Especially don’t leave a salvager behind to clean up when:

A Corp-mate just got podded,

the wormhole you came in through is end-of-life,

The poor salvager doesn’t have a probe launcher fit,

The straggler doesn’t have bookmarks for the other w’holes in the system.

Having done all this, we eschew the neighbouring class 4 system with its relative dearth of anomalies and sites to pursue the cheap candy covered thrills of the class 1 conveniently left behind by the previous, unfortunate visitors. A few minutes are spent debating the relative merits/demerits/benefits/challenges of flying various fleets to best capitalise on the class one in the most efficient manner. In the end, efficiency really becomes less of a concern when dealing with things that can be handled solo. We each hop into our preferred ships and head off to clean up the Sleeper detritus infecting said system.

With the static highsec exit left unscanned/warped, we are able to work in relative safety. Our motley crew ends up being a heavy missile Drake sporting siege warfare links, a heavy assault missile Drake equipped to both hack and analyse [2 magnetometric sites and 1 radar site present] and an Ishtar we half-jokingly refer to as the Salva-Tar for it’s ability to clean up the wrecks as we go along. After a few quick moments we realise that we are not only overkill for a class 1, we are way over tanked as a fleet and begin to split up. Salva-Tar goes back and grabs a specialised salvage boat,the HML drake goes on to the next site and hack Drake finished up on the cans. Joining the HML, the hack-Drake helps make short work of site two and the scenario is repeated for site three. All-in-all, the Drake really proved itself as a wonderful jack of all trades for cleaning up a class 1 wormhole.

In the end, the spoils were average for a class 1, and seemingly low in comparison to doing the same sites in our home class 4, but the evening was in reality a resounding success. We tracked down and killed two defenceless carebears, avoided reprisal, ran several combat sites that were quite beneath our level and left with all of the candy. It was good to feel confident, in control and powerful – if only for a moment. I know that soon we’ll be podded by bigger boys in badder boats and ganked by girls with guns.

Re: If You Must Mission In A Battlecruiser

This is in response to a post by ASTRAL DOMINIX. His Harbinger fit will have a hard time running any level 4′s alone. The incoming damage is often at or above 400 dps and medium rep and resists alone aren’t going to get it. I agree with some of the commenters that the Drake can be a great mission boat, but after having run several hundred level 4′s in it and later in a Raven, I learned one very important fact: I can blitz multiple level 3 in a gank fit drake faster than I can run a level 4 [in a Drake].

I’m not going to suggest that you switch to running in a Drake unless you have a specific desire to become a full-time mission runner, and even then I would probably just suggest that you skip the drake and head straight to training for a Raven. I love the utility of these mid-sized ships and prefer to be in a battlecruiser hull if I can.

For example:

Average Level 4: 5-10 million
- Payout: 300,000-500,000
- Bonus: 300,000-500,000
- Bounties: 1.5-4 million
Average Level 3: 1.5-3 million
- Payout: 100,000-200,000
- Bonus: 100,000-200,000
- Bounties: 700,000-1,000,000

Then if you fit a drake to run the level 3′s in say, 10-15 minutes each, you can really clean up. It is fairly easy to blitz them for about 10-15 million per hour.

Obligatory Drake Fitting:

[Drake, LVL 3 Blitz Drake]

Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Shield Power Relay II
Photon Scattering Field II
Heat Dissipation Field II
M51 Iterative Shield Regenerator
Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron
Large Shield Extender II
Large Shield Extender II

‘Malkuth’ Heavy Missile Launcher I, Scourge Heavy Missile
‘Malkuth’ Heavy Missile Launcher I, Scourge Heavy Missile
‘Malkuth’ Heavy Missile Launcher I, Scourge Heavy Missile
‘Malkuth’ Heavy Missile Launcher I, Scourge Heavy Missile
‘Malkuth’ Heavy Missile Launcher I, Scourge Heavy Missile
‘Malkuth’ Heavy Missile Launcher I, Scourge Heavy Missile
‘Malkuth’ Heavy Missile Launcher I, Scourge Heavy Missile

Medium Warhead Rigor Catalyst I
Medium Warhead Rigor Catalyst I
Medium Core Defence Field Purger I

Hobgoblin I x5

Fitting Comments:

1. It’s a tight fit CPU-wise. You may end up needing to drop back to named modules for the tank to free up a little more.

2. The shield resits are interchangeable depending on what you are hunting [fit for Sansha].

3. The ‘Arbalest’ heavy missile launchers are expensive [16 million!], but can usually be resold for the same amount when you move up to a bigger/better ship.

4. Tech 2 Launchers are perhaps a bit to tight to fit here. ‘Malkuth’ are used to cut down on CPU requirements.

5. The dual-rigor catalyst rigs are key. They are the equivalent of having two target painters built into every missile you fire.

The Little Things

My corporate compadres, denizens of Domnion, wanton wormhole wanna-be’s are relentlessly reminding me that it has been ~~a week~~ ~~two weeks~~ nearly three weeks since I posted any information. I’ve been sorely remiss in spending much time posting information here, as I’ve been busy trying to live life in a pod out in the wilds of Apocrypha. Dominion brought some changes, but nothing overly significant to the capsuleers who fly here the wormhole. So then the question I need to answer to myself is, “What has happened?”

We’re still in the same system and we’ve managed to pick up another regular engineer. He really seems to be settling into the opportunities that exist out here in the unknown and is always eager to learn more. He laughs at our attempts to explain that living out of one or more metal boxes powered by a large metal candy cane is a “Lifestyle Choice,” but is excited about the future. We’ll have to revisit the idealism when he’s been ganked a coupled of times, podded and otherwise thrown under the bus [bus being a euphemism for Tech 2 ships with overwhelming firepower and numbers.]

The ability to run sites has picked up some as well with a fairly balanced effort at participation from all involved. We have tried [and been fairly successful] in making everything a concerted group effort, though the industrial side of things is still a bit of a struggle. The new guy has been very giddy about not only mining Arkonor, Bistot and Crokite, but being able to be compensated for it without having to worry about the market, hauling, refining, et cetra. We’re excited about his excitement too. Along the way we’ve become very adroit at operating together as a unit and understanding each others’ strengths and weaknesses. In many ways our efficiency is finally picking up and coming together.

The flip side of this situation is that we are also beginning to realize just how isolated we are. Our jargon and vocabulary has shifted significantly and we communicate in seeming nonsense to some of our corp-mates. We haul our “bloot” to market, we talk about our gases and our pre-warps, we know that “@#$@” and “aoliv89#*&” mean someone is about to die. We have reached the point where we know within a few million isk how much a particular site is worth. We can judge approximate time frames for running those sites. We have become fairly comfortable with suggesting fittings and I would go as far as to say know what should work. We have established procedures for scanning, scouting, bookmarking, mining, fighting, etc that aren’t really written down in electrons anywhere.

This is all to say that as we add new people to our endeavor out in the uncharted realms of otherwhen, we’ll be struggling not only to bring them up-to-speed, but also even just communicate.

Technorati Tags: old players, new players

How To Fail

Hip, hip, horrific are the words we sing
Hip, hip, horrific is our thing -(TMBG)

As I look around and back at the posts I’ve written for the last year or so, I am reminded how well things have gone, but also how spectacularly I’ve managed to fail. If you are looking for pitfalls to avoid – you’ve found them. If you want to see how not to train for something; look no further. If you would rather have less isk at the end of the day, then this is your lucky blog!

Seriously, the posts that inhabit these pages are filled with the heartache and misery of a pilot bashing her head against the same asteroid day after day after day. At the end of the day there is a hangar full of veldspar and tritanium, some trash modules and a ship that desperately needs a tune up. Along the way the pilot has learned that you shouldn’t trust another pilot but you have to trust the other pilots until they fail you. You can’t put 4000 m3 in a GSC and there’s no way to get a station container out of a station. Overheating missiles is not so effective and skilling up adequately for boosters is going to be very expensive.

There are a few bright spots along the way. Namely, the ships and modules that have been opened up through a varied training programme that includes tech 2 mining equipment, logistics cruisers and some command ships. This is easily countered by the fail combat skills that barely allow for named heavy missiles on a Drake and some lame, unsupported rails on a Moa. It’s rather comical sometimes to be able to fit a full Tech 2 tank on every ship in the game, but then realize you still only have the equivalent of light weapons for armaments. Fear the fail firepower of 150mm rails on a Ferox! My heavy missile Drake of Dewm causes fits of laughter when people can safely orbit at 55 km and pick off my drones and then me.

Other suggest that I should be proud of the fact that I can invent nearly anything possible on the market, but even that seems to fall flat. I have consistently managed to lose money or break even on Tech 2 invention and production. My volume approach is low and slow, so as to be moving backwards in appearance. I can train people to use the towers, labs, production facilities, but seem to fail in doing so myself. What was I thinking! Science is for smart people. Production is for people who are actually motivated.

So what have we learned from all of this:

Train all the skills you possibly can [let's start with 231]
Train a wide variety of skills to level 5 [53 is a good number]
Science skills help you store lot’s of SP [9.6 million and counting]
Collect ships [So you can collect dust]
Every 3-4 months spend everything you have on one ship setup and then poke a pirate.

And I think I’ve rambled on enough for all of us today. And that is how to fail.

Guardian of the Week

32 feathers in my brand-new Indian headdress
32 new moons shining in 32 skies -(TMBG)

So finally I finish the long walk to Amarr Cruiser level V. It’s been a rather arduous journey toward a predefined goal that I set for myself and managed to talk another into. The completion of AC-V represents one of the milestone events that we discussed as being a relevant stepping stone along the heavily wooded path. It allowed for a bit of shiny in the midst of an otherwise long journey. Hopefully the last 10-15 days of training will fly by in comparison.

The upshot of AC-V is that it opens up the line of Tech 2 cruisers from the Empire for exploration and exploitation. Now I can fit and fly Her Highness‘ [no real devotion mind you - she just owns the flim-flamming Empire of Squirrels] logistics ships and can fly the Amarrian recons, but only with a Tech 1 fit. It seems rather pointless to fly a T2 ship with T1 gear. It’s rather analogous to giving special forces commandos Nerf® battle gear [That's another post!]. The T2 remote armor repairers and energy transfers will find a use, and only become more so as soon as I wrap up training for Logistics IV.

So I hit the shops and find a sweet deal on a Guardian that someone was trying to dump in Lonetrek [Amarr ships are cheaper in the State?] and flitted over to pick it up. After picking up the ship, I used some fairly ugly, low-meta, named, mission looted, gear to fit a tank on it for transport to my main hangar. I flew it quickly as I could from gate to gate, desperately hoping that anyone looking to bite into a yummy T2 cruiser would prefer ganking a Hulk to my new shiny. The trip was uneventful and I was able to even snap a couple of touristy images from the camera drones.

The whole exercise might be one in pointless futility unless I can settle on a more tanky fit that I think will allow for WH survival. Maybe the dual Guardian-lock could survive incoming Sleeper fire given the higher resists. If any of you have used Guardians in fleets against the wormhole denizens, I would be interested in your thoughts about what to slap on it.

Addiction and Mediocrity in Ubiquity

I know, I know, I said that I would quit
All right, I promise, no more after this
You don’t know how I’ve tried
To forget what it was like – (TMGB)

So things have been busy and I’m at a bit of a loss where to start. Who knew that managing a bunch of raving lunatics with delusions of insecurity could be so much like running a corporation. All that time at the asylum is finally paying off. [Warning, excessive use of <sarcasm> makes my hands overly tired so just apply liberally where you feel it's appropriate to make it interesting for you to read.]

Towers: Apparently you have to keep putting fuel in them. Otherwise minor details like shields, guns, labs all go offline.

Labs: Mostly full of jobs, except for when something happens to a tower.

Wormholes: Much fun. I hope to stop running errands and get back in them.

Combat: I think I remember fitting a ship with something other than cargo expanders once upon a time. It was cool. I died.

Skills: Battlecruiser V was cool and the implications are still settling in. Though it’s nice to be able to jump in all the racial BCs, albeit without being able to weaponise them currently. I can fit a whopper tank to them all, but not so much DPS. I blame the ferrets.

Corporation: Growing. Leaps and Bounds. More people means more annoying opinions opportunities, but also more things to manage. Need to train Delegation [5% workload reduction per level] to level 4 and start handing off some of this stuff.

Organisation: What? Hmm? I filed that here in the stack of papers on my desk back in the tower that went offline. I’ll get back to you January 4th. Some year.

Mining: See combat. [I think I warped to a belt in a NOS Drake. Sadness.]

Invention: Lot’s of invention going on. Need to get some of it finished.

So a little bit everything goes a long way toward getting nothing accomplished. Happy times!

I Should Be Allowed To Think

Crimsoneer, over at Pods And Pills has let fly with a recent article following up on some forum posting about the efficacy of the learning skills in EVE. I had started initially to comment on it, but decided that given the sheer length of the comment and the thoughts I had, it was worth of a post in and of itself in response.

tl; dr; The game is full of choices. Everyone thinks their choices are right. Everyone else is wrong.

To begin with, full disclosure – I have all of my learning skills maxed. It was and is something I chose to do, fully cognizant of the the time, effort and results of such a decision. I have another character that doesn’t have the learning skills to find his way out of a wet paper destroyer. Both of them are more fun than a Minmatar in a leotard in a traveling Gallente circus. Ok, on with the show…

There is a lot of posting and controversy and heated words flying around about the status of carebears, game changes, felt/perceived needs and I really have to sit back and chuckle. The same people who routinely say, “It’s just a game, lighten up.” also seem to want everyone to “HFTU” at the same time. This is not directed at Crimsoneers article, but applies in the sense that we all have preferences about how we want thing to be.

In response to Crimsoneer, it seems a bit of fallacious to say on one hand,

No matter which tough choices you make, who pops you, who you get scammed by, where you get your PLEX from, every choice is designed to promote you having fun.

and then turn around and say:

Forcing you to make the choice between training your learning skills now, and thus boring yourself to death now, or training your skills later and getting bored then, isn’t a choice between option A and option B: it’s a choice between sucking now or sucking later.

It seems then you want there to be hard choices in EVE, but you don’t want there to be hard choices. I realize you said hard choices and ‘suck(y)’ choices, but ultimately isn’t that a matter of perspective? To play the advocate for a moment, how exactly does choosing someone to pop me or scam me promote me having fun? Isn’t boredom a relative concept as well? To me it seems like the learning skills fall squarely into that hard choice category. Thus you end up asking yourself the difficult question, “Am I willing to do this? Is it worth it for that extra skill point I earn?” If the answer is no, move along, nothing to see here. However, some people might actually think it’s fun to train the learning skills. Sure, they’d take them free if you were giving them away, but the same could be said about Heavy Assault Cruiser level V.

There is nothing to force you into training those skills. No guns against your head. If you wanted to just ignore them, you are certainly able to. Heck, it will even save you money so that you can buy another cruiser or four.

I can understand that it might seem/feel/be boring to train something that doesn’t seem to/feel like/be able to give you another ship or module or combat edge in space. I am worried where reasoning that such-and-such skill is boring will lead to. What about Science skills, will they be next? Many of them only let you earn datacores more quickly from agents and are a legacy to a former time. Is it really worth it to have them in the game? What about social skills? They only increase the rate at which you increase your standings or loyalty points with a corporation. Surely they should be eliminated too.

How about we replace it with two skills that are mutually exclusive [if you train one the others are blocked]:

Ships
Other

Then we still have a really hard choice and you don’t have to mess with anything that doesn’t make the game fun for you.

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