14/06/10 11:39 PM
| Jaspet | 47.03 |
| Omber | 47.14 |
| Hemorphite | 55.62 |
| Pyroxeres | 57.70 |
| Hedbergite | 66.18 |
| Veldspar | 66.67 |
| Kernite | 70.01 |
| Plagioclase | 72.02 |
| Scordite | 75.25 |
| Spodumain | 80.33 |
| Dark Ochre | 98.81 |
| Gneiss | 100.86 |
| Crokite | 185.46 |
| Bistot | 232.34 |
| Arkonor | 288.02 |
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From an early age, listening to my parents wax eloquent about the physics behind their Micro Warp Drives and the best way to insure success when inventing various tech 2 ships, I was hooked on science. I received my first home-datacore set when the rest of my playmates were still tinkering with frigate models. I was far from the only Achuran to be born to in Inventor enclave, nor the only one to like science and pursue that as a career. But on the other hand – I also had a great passion for the way the universe was knit together and was determined to understand it all!
I quickly graduated with advanced degrees in a broad range of science fields related to capsuleer endeavors and knew that to continue to learn and explore I would need to get out of Saisio and be able to visit the stars. I managed to barely scrape through training and prepare for the transition into the life of a “pod-pilot.” Don’t let anyone lie to you, the necessary pseudo-suicide, transneural burning scan to jump into the waiting pod-clone was painful [and it still is]. However, now I was free to swim through the stars in a super-massive space fish.
My parents, through good investments with and years of working for the megacorporation, Lai Dai, had managed to accrue a significant sum of interstellar credits and fitted me with a modest Bantam frigate and some direction to pursue. I headed for the stars and began working toward my dream as a free-lance inventor. I left the construction details to various station-side facilities, sales were done by other representative and I left the ship in the care of the knuckle-draggers. I knew how to fit a mean scanning ship or mine with the best of them, but even the thought of combat was something that was endured as a means to an end. To that end, I was spending every last ISK that I could generate on buying the skills to train and learn.
In a recent meme-sharing, eve-blog-wide, map-a-thon sharing session, many of us who post articles about their lives in the pilot’s pod, gave account of the places they’ve visited via the NeoCom map computer’s tracking of “Systems I’ve Visited“. For one reason or another, I skipped that part of my map and never managed to actually post anything about it. If you are interested in that still, you can look at the SIV link above and see the ground I’ve covered.
In an unrelated post, but similar theme, Godless Wanderer, recently posted a look at his skill training allocation in a graphical chart. This strikes me as a very similar meme. What are the skill breakdowns by size? Have you been spending your time in missiles or guns? Do you have support skills or just skimming along by the skin of your teeth? Where have you been?
[caption id="attachment_211" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Where I've Been [Training"]“]![Where I've Been [Training]](http://eve.finkeworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Skill-Pie-150x150.png "Skill Pie") [/caption]I’ve used both EveHQ and EveMON to track skills in the past and don’t really have a preference. I would most prefer a native client solution for the Mac, but would settle for a platform agnostic web version or similar. Having said that, I’m posting my current skill pie for your perusal. I don’t have anything to gain by hiding the numbers, so like the maps, you know where I’ve been. The extremely high imbalance toward Science is directly related to our current activities in wormhole space and the desire to get Tech Three production up and running.
Regardless of what I managed to get trained, there is always something else I want to do and no less than 4-5 new skills [plus several that need raising] to get it. I only wish EVE gave you more choices on what to train!
So feel free to jump on the bandwagon and share some of your skill distributions. I would guess that most of you probably aren’t so wildly disproportionate in your skill sets, but I could be wrong.
I don’t have all my ducks in a row. If I did, this wouldn’t be only second notice after a big dry spell. I’m trying to get caught up and re-arrange a few things. In the midst of all of this, I think I have determined what caused the previous communications outage.
Sure there was the tragic loss of hardware, resulting in an inability to connect to the interweb. Sure there were a lot of changes going on around me. I think that the real reason is much more insidious. As I looked back over some of the last pages that I had written and the information I had disseminated, one particular piece stood out. I mentioned something about trying to get caught up.
What was I thinking? More about that later. First a look at some possible methods things could have come to the horrible state that I found them in.
Had I become so cavalier with my time that I felt it necessary to provoke that God the Amarrian Cape Covered Corps keep babbling about [Just kidding Empress Jamyl. Don't suicide bomb my Hulk.]. I only meant that I intended to catch up. I in no way meant that I had it easy and needed a strong dose of hardship to bring me back to reality.
Perhaps I had pissed off the pragmatic capitalist pigs, er, Caldari. They knew I was beginning to get into a swing with my medium hybrid ammo store. It could have just been a case of warranted market pvp that resulted in my whole system of work getting screwed up completely. I was only making an average of 300-500,000 isk per day, which is hardly worth a kingdom.
I really didn’t have the Gallente or Minmatar on the radar. Mayhap it was just that little slight of attention that warranted there subtle interference. They could have always just let things be as I fully intended to sell them hybrid and projectile ammo too.
Regardless of the method, the reason was always the same. I had tempted fate and destiny had rained down ruin and distruction. Well pain and suffering. Well really just inactivity and boredom. I danced with destiny and she trampled all over my tulips before passing out drunk in my ship maintenance bay, obscenely blocking the airlock safety sensor. I’m to blame.
If you got this far, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get caught up. I will always be behind.
Je suis le ténébreux,- le Veuf, – l’inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie:
Ma seule étoile est morte, et mon luth constellé
Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
Among all the recent changes that have been announced coming to the galaxy, I’ve tried to hold my tongue and just let others discuss the to death. I’d like to think I had learned from experience after crying foul for the Quantum Rise Apathy Patch [personal code name QRAP!] that really did nothing more than introduce 1 new ship, a couple new ways to build it and some rear-end servicing [oh, wait, I mean "back-end, database and hardware upgrades]. The combined effect was not only under-whelming, it was quite frankly disappointing in that a supposed ‘industrial’ upgrade for EVE was little more than a collection of little patches and a mini-Rorqual. Thanks for the ship but don’t try to… Gah, have to stop going there.
So, coming back to the Apocrypha changes, I’m trying to remain more detached and aloof. I know I’ll continue to fly my ships, mine/mission/manufacture my way to dominance and generally let any changes wash over me like Trinity, Empyrean Age and QRAP have done before. I look forward to new things becoming available in the form of exploration [never mind that a Sisters' Launcher now seems like an over-investment] and wormholes [Sleeper NPCs will severely hurt me] and adding a RAM disk that just makes my mouth water. I am even excited that they are revamping the character creation process and experience. Hopefully gone will be the crazy decisions about locking yourself into something that you have no idea what it entails. New players will have a greater freedom to really explore what is possible in the galaxy before committing to a given career.
But what about the over-all experience? My burning question relates not to how well a new capsuleer can find his way out of the loading bay and into a microwarpdrive fitted Rifter, but more along the lines of, “Mistakes made early on help define all of us as pilots and who we are.” If we just let things float and allow everyone to flip around at whim, there goes some part of our ships’ souls so to speak. Don’t you want to learn as you go? The arguments against the New Player Experience [NPE] changes so far have come down to two basic points however, that completely miss the experience as I’ve defined it.
The GoonFleet, ah, goons, are upset/worried/troubled that reducing the starting pilots to 50,000 skill points will result in capsuleers being unwilling to train for 2 days to get into the aforementioned MWD Rifter for 0.0-sec PvP ops. I’m more inclined to think that people are just shocked by the appearance of the change from 800,000 average skill points to 50k. Nevermind that a new pilot will learn skills at an accelerated rate until they reach 1,600,000 skill points, it must be just plain wrong to reduce the amount of skill points you start with.
The second discussion surrounding the NPE is strangely not about the NPE at all, but about the efficacy of the Learning skills themselves. There are two distinct camps that either want them abolished/banned/nuked/removed/plastered all over the asteroid belts OR they like them and think they are a positive aspect of the game. The first crowd views them as a unholy time sink that are only trained because they are forced to do so if they want to be competitive. They are angry that they train for something that doesn’t make their ship fly faster, guns track faster, missiles fly farther, manufacturing go smoother or mining more lucrative. They just want them gone because they are a, “kick in the balls to players” who want to train real skills. The second, somewhat less vehement group either acknowledge that the learning skills, “aren’t fun” but want to keep them, or they whole-heartedly love them as one of the things that make EVE great.
I have to admit my own personal bias here, and state that I think the choice to train your learning skills or not is part of that fundamental ethos that helps the galaxy of New Eden be what it is. Pilots that fit a shield booster on a Vexor or autocannons and artillery on a Typhoon are generally laughed at for making poor decisions, but there isn’t a cry to change the system so there is one tank system, one weapon or one propulsion option.
TL/DR; The Learning skills are about choices and reward. Grow-up, make a choice and live with it. Don’t demand that something be removed because it doesn’t fit your specific style.
With the plethora of skills, ships, modules, options, directions, et cetra available in the galaxy, I am constantly torn between heading off one direction and then another. I’m sure you’ve all face similar decisions: choosing to train for a little bit more missile damage; ship agility; drone speed; construction efficiency; mining yield; scanning speed [eek]; better tank. The list goes on and on forever! An acquaintance of mine has focused on frigates and frigate related combat skills since he started playing three years ago. He estimates that in another year, he’ll have all Tech 1 and Tech 2 frigates and their associated skills trained. He is looking to possibly move into cruiser level skills then for the next 3-4 years. His comment, “What other option in the galaxy even allows for a 5 year plan?”
This got me to thinking about what I wanted to do for the rest of this year. I began by looking back and taking stock of how far I have come since first hardwiring into the capsule as well as where I am currently. Corporately I’ve managed to be part of a dead and dying corp, a new alliance and finally a solid industrial corp as part of a silent, unspoken alliance. Job-wise I’ve transitioned from a mainly mining pilot to one that also does a fair amount of research and manufacturing, scanning and hauling, missioning and mining. I love the jack-of-all-trades mentality I’ve developed and really want to pursue that.
So in reflection, I’ve come across a goal of sorts: Everything. I like being utilitarian and having efficacy. I wonder what that will look like. In looking ahead, I have some more general goals like keeping my training rate high [another 20,000,000 skill points], earning money, having fun and flying ships. Given that it looks like you will be able to change your skill point specifications for the new update, a whole world of possible career options open themselves up to exploration. The more specific goals about which I might have are proving a bit more elusive. So, I wrap this up with a quick question about your goals for the year?
Well, there’s been a complete dearth of posts from myself as I’ve had a very busy two weeks. Though I’ve been able to fly around a lot, I haven’t had much time to sit down and compile a coherent thought. [Those of you who are reading this, stop laughing at the last statement about coherence.]
We removed a couple of no-shows from the corporation. It’s always a tough decision to make, but after only popping in once after joining, you begin to wonder at their future potential. We’re about as laid-back as you can get in an industrial corporation, but we do prefer at least some warning that you might be scarce for the next couple weeks, months, years. On the flip side, we’ve had three new people join us that are shaping up nicely to be good support for the corporation.
In a comment to a previous note, someone asked about the exact difference that the training skills made in terms of skill training. I’m working on adding all of this up and will try to get a more complete answer calculated. I know for instance that training your learning skills can reduce the time to get into a Hulk from over 90 days to slightly less than 60 days [including time spent on the learning skills. Similar calculations are true for PvP, PvE and Market Mavens. I'll try to have a more complete answer for you in the future. Have to spend some quality time with my trusty calculator.
On a related note [calculations], I’ve managed to rebuild my spreadsheet [with kudos to Letrange for an interim sheet while mine was reduced to electrons] to a pre-crash state. It’s a good thing that the School of Applied Knowledge trained me well to handle this sort of thing before I started piloting around the rest of the galaxy. I can now reliably pick various BPO’s that we own and run the numbers to see if we will make a profit on them. Given that we mine almost all of our ore, the manufactured products are technically all profit, but realistically only if we make more off the pieces than we make off selling the minerals outright. We could undercut a lot of markets to move merchandise, but would only be hurting ourselves. By giving the inventory full market value, we cut into our profits as well as weaken the overall market by potentially providing a cheaper source of refinable ore. I’ve done the same thing to others by buying large quantities of items that were more profitable when refined and either resold or manufactured into to more valuable items.
I’m working at slowly rebuilding my wallet as well after spending a lot of getting some production underway. I’ve got a fairly decent supply of various T1 drones on the market and they are providing a steady [if somewhat low] amount of income. I’m also working on doing a lot of jobs for the FedMart corporation out in Everyshore. I need the ability to refine my ore out there more than I have loyalty to my Caldari upbringing.
More to follow…
The Musings
Some pilots may be a big overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available to them in this day and age. By New Eden 105, systems have all been settled, contested and resettled, some of them many times over. The standard, accepted methods and mechanics for doing just about everything have been codified, argued, bugged, nerfed and buffed [not necessarily in that order]. Guides, opinions, thoughts and aphorisms abound on every conceivable subject.
Through most of that, one particular pilot has posted his thoughts and the thoughts of others on his own personal information portal. Most of us would have to be crazy to generate the amount of connections and keep up with them all that he does. Which actually goes a long way toward explaining the name. Crazy Kinux, or CK for short, goes the extra mile to keep a whole lot of information, people and reviews connected. By way of analogy, think of CK’s site as an autopilot for the New Eden Pilots’ Blogerati Class ships. But even with one person collating all that data, it’s easy to get lost in the deluge. “What To Do?” Let me be of assistance.
Click to continue reading “Pod Pilot’s Guide to The Musings”
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![Where I've Been [Training]](http://eve.finkeworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Skill-Pie.png "Skill Pie")