fun » Our EvE

Transfer of Power

After several abortive and/or unsuccessful attempt to get all of our stuff moved in to our new little circle of space that we are calling home, one of our most adventurous combat pilots found a wormhole. As Letrange mentioned recently, sometimes the best place to look is in the wormholes that connect you to other wormhole systems.

It was only 6 jumps from where we started.
It was in high security space.
It had a local station.

As we’re quickly learning, there were things that obviously needed to be weighed in the balance, namely:

The high-sec wormhole had less than four hours of life.
The high-sec wormhole was over half depleted due to some other group exploring it.
The only ships we had to move stuff was an Iteron Mark IV and an aging Iteron Mark I.

So at approximately 18,000 m³ between us per trip we started taking bites out of the supplies we wanted. The modules our pilots had been requesting to refit with for encountering sleepers was fairly easy to fit. The real challenge was definitely the defensive tower arrays that had not made it in the first round.

After five or six trips, our other non-industrial, combat-oriented pilot had to head out and I decided to make as many more trips as I could. I managed about five more before the wormhole decided that it has been awake long enough and in a final surge, expunged the last of its cosmic energy.

This time though, I was on the unknown side and headed toward our tower.

Nerds Away

Slightly disappointed in the lack of questions about internet spaceships. :/

A Carebear’s Carebear

How we conceptualize the universe around us plays an important part in determining what we find enjoyable. I once commented to a friend that I am that most detestable of all MMO participants. I am the carebear’s carebear. I find an enormous amount of fulfillment and satisfaction in helping people out and even more so if that person is an industrial ship flying, mining & manufacturing, POS-building, spreadsheet yield calculating fool of an EVE player. I see EVE as a relatively inhospitable, cold place that takes new pod pilots and tends to mount their broken, lifeless corpses on the ends of blasters and auto-cannons while simultaneously spreading any remaining biomass all over the scrap metal shavings to gum up the salvage scavengers.

From this point of view it a short jump to utter fatalism, that if we’re all going to die, we might as well go out with a bang and take any poor pods we meet along the way with us. There are some people who do this very well and with aplomb. They warp, web, point, shoot and pod all in the same breath. They tend to speak loudly and carry large sticks. The are only two options, death and victory. May the gods forgive any poor pilot who happens to escape their wrath. Anyone who runs is then inept and unprepared for life and will obviously meet their end in a quick and hopefully painful manner. How dare someone not engage them in combat! What lowly, incompetent fools to think themselves above an encounter. They should be vocally and wildly ridiculed from the com channels so that everyone else can look on in disgust at their craven behavior.

Or you can decide that this is a place that obviously needs your kind and patient touch. Your isk can make the difference in a young pilot’s life. They might decide that there’s nothing worth the time and energy when the world is out to get them. Oh, how extravagant the gift of a new frigate seems to the player who loses 2 in the first couple of days. The bonds of fraternity forged on the sharing of information and piloting proficiency are strengthened by the application of liberal amounts of understanding and redemption. What uncommon operators and precious pilots lie beneath the common dross of humanity waiting to be refined?

There is a balance that must needs be reached between the pain and providence of new players. Heavenly help does not replace the harsh reality of hell in space. Neither does being beaten bloody mean better basics. If we are to watch our world continue to grow, we need each other. You pirates shoot, maim and kill. However know that I will be teaching other to run, hide and if necessary crawl.

Finding Beauty

Keeping up with all the goings on this week has been a trial in and of itself. And what has been going on that needs so much energy? Well – nothing! That is I just have gotten back from some much needed R & R in Kamio. I was getting a little burned out with all of the missioning I was having to do to get my standings up for refining and really needed a break. I love the Kami system with it’s grand cloud sweep and the way the colors play back and forth across your display as you warp around. It’s one of those systems I pass through quite a bit on the way to and from The Forge and I always think to myself, “This would be a cool place to live.”

I have several of these systems, but Kamio was the first. to really drive home the beauty of the omniverse that we all fly in. I’m not Amarrian, but I’m almost tempted to support their nonsense of some divine action in it’s formation. It evokes some of the images captured in the Gallente heritage museum data streams.

What systems do you love to look at? Where did you fall in love with the beauty of our EVE omniverse?

Mining for Players

This is a topic that I’ll probably come back to at some point. Apparently at somepoint in my career, I made the following statement to a good friend. “I am that most dreaded of MMO players, the care bear.” I tend to upset the natural order of things by needlessly throwing resources at things that could be better put use wiping the virulent infection of my fellow humans from the universe. I constantly waste isk, time and other things to put people that I hardly know into new ships, get them started training new skills, help them get set-up for mining/research/learning/pvp/pve/et cetra.

Case in point: Today I happened across a young Caldari pilot fresh into the SAK and had an overwhelming desire to just throw help at him. He really didn’t seem to know a PDS from an SPR but that only further spurred me to fill his wallet with my isk. To top it all off, he was genuinely interested in learning the game and getting over the learning curve. I almost couldn’t contain my enthusiasm at finding someone so ready to play the game and learn the ins-and-outs of a complex system like EVE.

We talked a length about skill training, mining, missioning and the general accumulation of wealth and power. In the end, I gave him over half of my net isk worth in new skills and equipment that would have taken him a couple of weeks to obtain on his own. I pointed him toward such perennial favorites as EveMon and EFT so that he could begin planning for his own future and make educated decisions [or at least ask educated questions]. By downtime I had made a new friend, had helped a new player and lost over half my isk. Sheesh, what was I thinking

Startling Training Realization

Like Robin Williams in “Hook” I have finally found my Happy Thought. I had just docked the Lou Ferrigno and was finishing up some post belt ripping administrivia when the coms lit up. It was the director and our POS was looking to be in need of some fuel soon. He was moving a freighter out to the ice system and was going to need to mine some to insure he came back with a full load. I checked my flight time and saw that I still had a few hours left before my biological support systems crashed so decided I could lend a hand.

I enjoy icing a great deal and helping out the corp even more, so it was only natural. The last time we had needed fuel, I had went shopping and come up with a Mackinaw, and fit it out with Ice Harvester II’s and Ice Harvester Upgrade II’s and left it in the system where we generally go icing. All of this as a lead-in for the fact that I decided this was the perfect opportunity to put the old Jump Clone to use.

It had been several months since I had body hopped and can’t really recommend the experience. But the benefits far outweigh any temporary queasiness from transcribing your consciousness into a data stream and waking up light-years away. The first order of business was to get a clone out to the same system where the corporate icing runs. I wasn’t quite ready to trust the jump clone manufacturer’s recent announcement that their system supported same-station jumps. I flew to the station next door and pulled up the jump clone interface. As it had been awhile, it took a few seconds for the information I was seeing make sense. I pulled up the menu on the clone I wanted next door and jumped.

Well, almost. The system screamed and spit out errors. I had forgotten to offline the current mnemonic skill training regimen before the jump. I quickly jumped over to the skill interface and paused my Mining Laser Upgrades learning and then bounced back to the jump menu and jumped. Huh, what happened? Where am I? Oh, wait, that’s right. Clone jump. Different system/station. I quickly onlined my skill training and charted a course to the ice field system. I flew out and fired up the autopilot (it was a high sec route) and went about reviewing my market orders and research projects. There was something I was supposed to think about remembering to think about but it just wouldn’t solidify into a coherent thought. I finally got to the destination and loaded the Bobby Drake into the station dock and began checking the systems. Everything checked out and I was soon out of the station on my way to the top of the ice field, but there was something giving me a nagging sensation in my newly formatted brain. I tried to shake it off and just convince myself it was the jump that had me rattled.

I arrived at the bookmarked navigation point and locked the nearest ice cube. I cycled the harvesters on, sat back and tried to reconcile whatever it was that was bothering me. After a couple of trips back to the station to store my ice I realized that it was my skill training that was bothering me. By jumping into this clone I had added another 24 hours to my skill training. Sheesh!

This is when it hit me, what is it that I enjoy more than ghosting rats, stripping roid belts, out witting pirates? Training skills. My greatest joy comes when I hear, “Skill training complete” come over the coms. Floating out in the ice field I pulled up the market list and quickly grabbed a set of +1 implants. They aren’t great, but they’ll have to do for now until I manage to get some cash after buying the Bobby Drake and still owing for the Lou Ferrigno.

Our EvE

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