skills » Our EvE

Where I Am

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"]“][/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.

Freighter Fritters

I’ve been in the freighter a lot in the last couple of days, moving stuff from whatever place our wormhole [WH] system pops out at back to on of our main high security stations. It gives you a lot of time to think while your ship spends several minutes aligning and then a little bit longer getting up to speed and finally several minutes to actually warp across the solar system. I had always felt like it was the “align-and-warp” bit that took so long, but after several trips back and forth across the galaxy, I am becoming convinced it is the sheer distance to be covered at less than one AU per second.

While I’m speaking of time, the skills I’m training continue to accrue steadily, regardless of whether I’m in a combat ship or the Luxury Yacht. I bought the Mercoxit Refining skill and started training that up a bit as well. It was the only ore I didn’t know how to refine and honestly didn’t think I would ever be in a position to mine any of it. And here I am faced with regular deposits in our WH systems that need someone to give them some attention. I shall step up to the plate again I suppose and eat my fill.

Too Many Wormholes

Borrowing an idea from Letrange, I’ll break the following into some sections.

Old Business:

It’s been a wonderful run in the current wormhole [WH] system, but it’s time to move on. We were consistently getting Gallente and Minmatar high-security [high-sec] WH openings that made logistics a bit harder. We found another, very similar system that we are going to give a try. We had bought a second tower and wanted to switch it out for the medium one to upgrade our processes and home. The best way to handle it turned out to be set the new tower up in the new system and pull the old medium tower down to be a more transient base that moves around from place to place.

On the skills front, I’ve managed to finish up most of the science skills associated with the tech 3 invention and production. I didn’t realize how much I was specializing in science until I noticed that I had 8.5 million skill points. I also did a bit of training in electronic warfare. I have most of my engineering skills finished up and want to work on my electronics skills. I seem to have a real addiction to finishing things up in sets.

On the industrial front, we’ve started amassing a fairly large stockpile of salvage, artifacts and wormhole memorabilia. We’ve started working it over and managed to get our first blueprint copy for a Tengu electronics subsystem. We have a reactor up and are excited about the opportunities to get started.

New Business:

The new WH system has a lot of sites for us to run and we need to get started. One of the things we’ve also noticed about visitors to our systems is that they will often move right along if they don’t get signatures when they scan. So we’re going to wipe the sites out get ready to start roaming to other systems too. The benefit of having a static high-sec WH is that the logistics is greatly relieved. We now have three new [well, new to us!] recruits who bring an extensive amount of combat experience to the system. From the rest of the corporation there is an increased level of interest in the whole wormhole project.

For skills, I’m excited about getting more science skills and increasing my ability to actually manufacture these arcane things we’ve been looking for. I would like to get back to training my electronics skills and armor tanking abilities, but I’m happily putting them on hold for some more science. At some point I will need to get some combat and ship skills, but they seem so very long to complete in comparison to the skills that I’m good at [I have low perception and willpower].

We are looking at starting our T3 production in the coming weeks and getting some of the pieces to market.

So that pretty much wraps up the time to this point.

Getting Caught Up

While those in the western hemisphere are busy getting some rest and the little island of former Vikings is busy patching the universe, I am finally taking the time to get caught up on some of the little things that needed doing around the universe. Not the least is a bit of formatting help for the industrial spreads that I use for mining, manufacturing and invention. I have been a little bit like the hermit crab sticking an anemone on my shell. Picking of bits and pieces of useful information from here and there has resulted in a very useful, but somewhat unorganized spreadsheet.

I was also thinking this would be a good time to get some extra rest and take a long nap. This plan worked well until my boss decided that sleeping on my desk was not really the professional approach to time management. So it’s ok if we play FPS or EVE and such at the office, just not sleep.

Other agenda ideas for the downtime included going to the dentist, getting the car washed and waxed, semi-annual visit to the gym, window shopping for a new computer and finally sending Mum an email. I’m still hung up on the nap idea personally.

So what do you all do during the long patches. I especially like browsing the forums after they come back up and reading all the “OMG I forgot to set a long skill”, “Why is the game not up?” and “Can’t they hurry up! I need to log back in so I can idle in the station and whine about CCP never improving things!” posts that invariably occur with an extended downtime. It never ceases to amaze me how many times GMT confuses people. If they’re going to already confuse people, let’s make it complete and use @internet time or some such to thoroughly bamboozle them.

Ok, off to work on catching up with myself.

Capsuleers Hate Learning [or How Change Gets People All Whiney]

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.

Making Plans [and Shooting Plans Down]

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?

Always Another Skill

I finally finished up what I considered a fairly good set of mining skills for a high-sec carebear-ette. All I’m lacking is the full set of T2 mining crystals. Additionally I thought I would start working on getting started on some production skills. I finally got that rolling along and realized I should be inventing as well.

I had decided at about three to four weeks into my pod-pilot career that I should focus on running any missions with one particular NPC corporation. I looked around at what I wanted and decided I like what Lai Dai had to offer. They covered a spread spectrum of endeavors and didn’t seems to rule anything else out. I wanted to fly for them as well, but it seems their rigorous application and acceptance procedures excluded me because of a technicality of my Achuran heritage or some such nonsense. I liked their spread of stations and coverage as well as the offerings from their LP store, not the least of which was the much vaunted ‘Highwall’ HX-2 mining implant.

So after specializing for a long time and even catching some flak from my then corp mates about not using ‘their’ corp and agents, I managed to get enough standings for a perfect refine. A couple of weeks later I was able to get a jump clone. And finally last week was able to afford my much coveted implant.

All of this to say, I have a lot of standing with them and was curious if there was a way to continue to leverage that to my benefit. Well, it goes back to one other reason I had selected Lai Dai originally. There are a lot of research and development agents within the Lai Dai corporation and they cover a large area of space and range of research endeavors. I looked at the spread and realized I have access to all off their R&D agents and was only lacking the prerequisite skill areas to begin earning research points for datacores. The datacores are requirement for invention of all kinds of various modules.

I started with Hydromagnetic Physics. Why? Well, my study of Ice Processing had required that I gain more than a passing familiarity with Hydromagnetic Physics and so I could immediately access high level agents by training Research Project Management. On a side note, RPM is a charisma heavy skill in the science field that for an Achura is painfully slow to get trained. I’ve stopped training it after four rounds as it will take another month to maximize it. In the mean time, I’ve also picked up Caldari Starship Engineering so that I can possibly work on some of the ship invention as well as sell some extra datacores.

The final skill endeavor has been to get some exploration work done. I had learned enough Astrometrics to use all the various exploration probes and some of scanning speed training, but knew that at some point I would need to move into a tech 2 ship to take full control of exploration. So I embarked on a journey to train Electronic Upgrades V I could train for a Covert Ops frigate. On a somewhat related side note, it turns out I need that for something completely unrelated. Manufacturing. Really, Manufacturing? Apparently you need various encryption methods for invention which require some skill at hacking which in turn relies upon… Electronic Upgrades V. So coming full circle, I’m training for scanning again so I can invent the T2 mining crystals so I can train for level IV of the various ore refinement skills to be able to use them in my modulated strip miner 2’s. Whew. I sure hope I don’t need to train any other skills along the way…

In Search of Perfection

I’m always trying to make the best of both what I have and what I can do. In some cases that means being as efficient as possible and cutting costs and corners. At other times it is a matter of training that last skill to level V. Currently I’m working at wrapping up Production Efficiency to level V so that the stuff I manufacture costs less and I’ve been slumming [mission running] so that I’ll have enough LP to purchase an Inherent Industries ‘HX-2′ mining implant and then the ‘HY-2′ ice duration implant. My clone out in the Ardalabier ice fields will get the HY and the main high-sec mining clone will get the HX. I’m about half way there. If I get those all squared away, I’ll consider a set of implants for the mission clone.

On other progress fronts, I’m getting closer to having some good R&D agents with Lai Dai. I have plenty of standings, but the skills are still by major road block. For someone who likes to do a little bit of everything, getting your skills up to a sufficient level can be maddening. So in four days I’ll shift from production training to research training all the while I’ll be missioning to be able to mine more efficiently.

On the sales front, I know I’ll need more order slots, but that has also fallen in terms of importance to the other options. I’ve been putting my LP from Amarr corporations into faction laser crystals. This has been fairly profitable as they would otherwise just be collecting dust and the crystals additionally required for purchase have all been from mission loot.

Summary:
Perfection is painfully slow in coming sometimes.
Implants are worth the cost [sometimes].
LP should be available to sell/contract/trade.
Clones allow for specialization without alts.

Addendum:
Apparently magnetic cable flux disruption from a small planetoid in some far distant system is playing havoc with my pod’s electronics and it’s taking hours to accomplish little tasks like docking, warping, jumping or even just using the coms. [Some numbnut cut two major under sea cables in the Mediterranean Ocean and all of my connections are being routed to Venus first which further results in a ping of something on the order of 4800 ms.] I think the term is Sad Panda™.

Search of Heartache II

So hot off my recent successes with exploration, I fired up The Pogues and headed out to try and find some more hidden belts. This time I jumped two gates downstream to the last system in the constellation and figured I’d work my way back toward home. If I failed to find any results in those systems, I’d then move on up toward the other end of the constellation. Needless to say, the first three systems were busts. I didn’t get a single signature hit on any of them. (It is a good think I’m making these probes on my own now.)

On the fourth system I managed to pull up a single gravemetric signature on my Multispectral probe. I was excited, here was some yummy asteroid goodness to find and feast upon! I pulled up the system map and gauged where would be the ideal locations for my next set of probes. I wanted to get as much coverage as possible without wasting any probes. The problem is that this particular system is small and the five inner planets are all within a couple of AU of each other. I worked out a system I thought would work and started warping around laying my Quests out get a warp-able destination. The first set of probes didn’t return a signature which I had read on the datasheets wasn’t unheard of. I fired off another Multispec to make sure the hidden belt was still around and hadn’t been mined out by a competitor.

The trace still showed up, so I went and laid out another set of Quests to try and get a fix on it. I varied my pattern a little bit this time to see if a slightly different layout might get a result. On the third scan a weak signature popped upon my HUD and I was grateful to see it, even if a little bit tired by now. I was putting a lot of time and isk into this venture, as was excited to see it begin to pay off. I was still a long way from operating in the red on exploration as the first small site had more than paid for additional probes and skills, but I knew I couldn’t just rely on that. The signal strength was a paltry 0.019 and about an AU away. I warped to destination, destroyed my existing probes and popped some Pursuits into the launcher. I figured if I could get a solid hit here, I might could afford that sweet little SoE probe launcher I saw in the contracts catalog.

The net result of the evening of scanning was, I scanned with my mid-range probes for over 2 hours and never got any closer than .6 AU. Almost every scan came back negative, and those that didn’t were very unreliable. My one consolation is that the site must have been very good because I couldn’t locate it. [Note: Given my skill set, it could be that I just didn't have the ability to narrow it down.] This following hard on the heels of my earlier scan triumph, was disheartening and depressing. I still like scanning, but I’ve also seen his dark side and will be ever more scarred by it.

Search of Heartache I

Having recently wrapped up Astrometrics IV, I headed out in my trusty Heron. I really like the ideas & mechanics behind exploration and I was excited to put it to work while I was working toward training the rest of the skills on the List™. My home system was empty so I warped next door to see what they had to offer. After my unskilled 431 second scan, what should appear to my multispectral probe but a Gravimetic site. Nearly lost in excitement I warped off to the first planet, simultaneously destroying the first probe and pulling up the system map to chart out the Quest probe layout.

The tiny system had two outer planets and a group of tightly bunched inner bodies. I figured out the best way to use four probes to completely cover all of them & then began another unskilled 431 second scan. On the very first run up pops a signature with a 0.6 AU accuracy. As I warped off to the point, I again bid goodbye to another set of probes & loaded some Gravimetic Combs to track it down. The first scan returned nothing, as did the second. On the third I could scarcely believe my eyes. A signature with an accuracy of 0m!

Flush with success, I cheekily warped to 0m and scanned the asteroid contents while aligning towards my home system. It was a small to medium belt of 15-20 rocks with about 175,000 units of various Omber derivatives. Arriving back home, I jumped into the Lou Ferrigno, loaded a fresh set of Omber I crystals and cleaned out the cargohold. The rest of the corp had long since docked and headed off to other pursuits. I knew this was going to have to be a one woman show. I opted to go with jetcans and risk the flippers as I was on a role as well as a bit of a time clock. Approximately an hour and fifteen minutes later I was busy loading the last of the ore and heading off to refine the whole mess.

Then I got a bit proud and maybe a tad cocky… (to be continued)

Our EvE

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