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.

New Mini Game?

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.

Strats on the Brain

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:

1. There are a lot of really bad ship fittings in the universe.
2. Everyone and their clone is buying ’strats’.
3. The sheer number of possible fittings is confusing to say the least.
4. Someone is bound to get it wrong, sometime.

and

5. 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.

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.

Ouch! I usually add a title after I’ve written something up. It stems from a long habit of writing without titles and basing them off of either the content that has been produced or some obscure, arcane reference made in the article that is only tenuously tied to the rest of the content and thus only understood by my psyche and perhaps the asteroids that I spend so much time talking to [apologies to the gas clouds, I've just been busy lately]. However I thought that perhaps I ought to stop and take stock of the last month or so of output and see what I can learn and where we’re headed as well. Back to the title; I thought perhaps after adding it that it might appear like I only manage to post information monthly, but upon review realize that it only seems like that because I’m sad that I just don’t get more up there for you. Thus, I will mix in some information you might be interested in about my activities along with some information that you might be interested in about the statistics related to my postings.

Visits

I had been trying to get the WordPress Stats plug-in to work for several months, but managed to repeatedly get results of zero visits a day [sorry Mom, I know you were reading!] and once I even had -4. I’m not sure what happened, but as of September 13th, the whole contraption started reporting visits as well as the other reference information. I wouldn’t have even noticed that, but for a mis-click on “Blog Stats” instead of “Dashboard”. So I started perusing the results and checking back from time to time. There were several surprising things that I just wasn’t expecting when I started looking back at the visits, searches, references and onward traffic. I printed the daily views graph all to include in the post and quite by accident the median daily post number was highlighted.

It seems that for the half of September that I was able to get statistics for I managed to get 674 visits. I have to admit a certain amount of joy in this. I fully expect that half of that was Mom trying to see if I had finished training for a Command Ship yet. The average number of visitors was 39 and the median was 32. If those just seem like random numbers to you, let me put it into perspective. I didn’t know of more than four people who had visited the site and to find out that nearly 8 times as many visits had occurred as shiny [please help me with the illusion and don't mention unique page views, etc].

Another odd number I’d like to point out is the number 1. Apparently that is how many of the same search results led to my page being located and served. At no point in the last 17 or so days did people search for same terms to find my page. Again, the number doesn’t mean anything. I just like things that are different.

Posting about fittings and ore prices appeared to be my niche, without really trying to hit anything in particular. I have no intention of trying to replicate something you can find somewhere else like the fittings of BattleClinic or Scrapheap. They do fittings better to a certain degree, but they also aren’t the one in my ship and have little to lose by suggesting an alternative that may or may not work. I appreciate their feedback, but also like the fact that my fittings are my own.

For the postings ore prices, I have noticed that they have been steadily coming down across the board as I update the page. I don’t have enough meta-data to extrapolate anything as interesting as causality [a slippery, dangerous area to tread into with the best of information], but I really am kind of surprised. I don’t rely on ore as the primary means for my income as much as I once did and only sell a Charon-load or so a month of tritanium these days.

Finally, as I realise this post is nearly as long as my skill plan for a carrier, I’ll wrap up with some training thoughts.

• Learning skills suck, but boy am I glad I have them. For now I’ll lump them in the same category as whiny pvp pirates who can’t handle changing mechanics, I’d rather not deal with them, but I’m glad they are there to provide more depths and aspects to the universe I love to swim in. Train them well and they will change your world.
• Support skills does not mean the ability to fly an industrial ship full of capacitor charges. Train electronics, engineering, WU/AWU [I hate you too!], science, mechanics, navigation. Just because there isn’t another module or battleship attached to the skill doesn’t make it worthless. I know none of the readers would fly without having these trained, but share with your new corp-mates.

• Training for a command ship has actually been a really gratifying long wait. It is a destination that becomes so much more along the journey. By the time I finish up the training for the command ships I will also have gained the ability to fly logistics and heavy assault ships along the way. In point of fact, after the first command ship, it will only take about 3 weeks to fly any other race’s set of logistics, HACs and command ships. I will still need to cross-train for the weapons systems, but the broad, hit-or-miss, seemingly random training to this point is actually paying off at this point.

• I believe in doing things well if I can. Training something to level V is not a sign of weakness or stupidity. Ok, it’s not always a sign of an idiot, the author might well fall in those categories.

Ok, I’m done till next month. [Ok, really I'll probably try to post something tomorrow but will fail miserably, feel bad about it, mope for two days and then rinse and repeat until next month rolls around.]

I‘m staring down a long dark hallway that is only dimly lit with some bioluminescent globes that are spaced much too far apart to give any sort of definition to the length or features of the corridor. I cannot see the end, nor can I see any distinguishable openings or portals either. My choices now are to turn around and abandon this path or proceed onward to see what will become of it. Where will it lead…? What have I begun…? What have I become…?

And so my thoughts on beginning the journey towards my current skill objective come to the fore. I’ve had long training plans before. They got me into my Covetor and my Hulk and have helped me max out most of my core skills [AWU - I love/hate you]. They are not pleasant to watch, but they are fun to achieve. Kirith Kodachi has kept many people entertained with his own regales of routines passed on his way to the Ninveah and later a ill-fated Nighthawk.

My own plans are much more modest. I am working toward the skill set needed for the Amarrian Fleet Command Ship,  Damnation. The die has been cast and the decision made. Currently I’m just getting rolling on my Battlecruiser V training. Then it’s a relatively shorter time to Amarr Cruiser V, Warfare Link Specialist IV, and Logistics IV. I’m already excited, but trying to temper that elation with the knowledge that it will still be awhile. I’m also trying really hard to ignore the results of my rather Scientific Background which includes such minor details as having pants for offensive skills. I’ll need to pick up some more training in heavy missiles and heavy assault missiles to be an effective fleet member.

The impetus for this impulse is the desire for our fleet to be able to run sleeper sites more quickly and efficiently. With the added range for HAM’s, I think it might even be useful to fit them. With a couple cheap [it's all relative right?] rigs I can fling a HAM out to 40 km for approximately 260 DPS and just a smidge over 1,000 alpha strike volley. This is modest damage, but coupled with the ability to be cap stable while running both RR and links is too hard to ignore. In the meantime, I’m an entertaining myself by pasting pictures of my new ship all over the inside of my pod. [In case you hadn't noticed them all over this post by now. I'm also playing around with fittings for Al Abd [the name I've already chosen].

And so it happens. There is the past that is always with us. There is the present that is always running away from us. And finally there is the future that never quite manages to get here. There will always be another ship to build, another system to swim, another skill to train, et cetra. From my past I have trained to be a good scientist. For the present I am working on a few small projects, but the future draws my eyes to the misty veil of time. What then shall I do and where shall I go? Do I need this or that skill to get it done and how best to proceed in that direction? The future is always full of questions.

One of the things that has changed radically within the universe that we all swim through is the way new capsuleers join us. As technology has improved and the cloning and pod-pilot technology matured, we arrive at our current place where not only can you improve yourself towards any desirable end, you can also improve and train in what would seem like no direction at all. Now a pilot can not only improve her ability to learn skills that improve her ability to pilot ships that improves her ability to learn/earn/kill/thrill, but that same pilot can utilize the new technology available to rearrange the very fabric of the brain to enhance certain basic attributes or reduce others.

The veil around my own future has grown quite thick, and I am left without real pictures of what it will look like. There have been some things that I have always wanted to do, but given the lack of direction, I let them wander. I also know that sitting here in this present and expecting to get a clearer view of the future will never cause the past to go away or said future to become clearer. I have decided then, to walk off into that veil of mist. I have been to the new technology, and drank deeply of its mind altering draught. I am now as balanced in ability as any and only break down and cry a little about my slightly slower skill training in science on days that end in “Y”.

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.