Category: Gaming

Yesterday and today were glorious days for me in EVE Online, and I’m learning a bit more about the language of the game and how to operate. I managed to bring my Helios to the wurmhole my corp is set up in without dying, that was step one. Wurmholes are awesome, and scary, and awesome. I’ve been in a few on my own and you have to remember some pretty important things. First of all, bookmark, bookmark, bookmark. Also checking to see when a wurmhole is about to collapse is pretty important. In fact the more information you can learn about the wurmhole the better.

So I made it in one piece, and started getting myself familiar with it. The helios is a perfect little ship for this type of operation. I’ve actually never seen a POS before, and had no idea how they worked. For example, I learned you don’t actually dock at them like you do regular stations. You log out within the shield and a minute later you’ll leave the world. Interesting.

This morning came my new challenge, finding the way out. Preferably to some place that wasn’t going to eat me when I left. Probing is getting much easier the more familiar I get with it, and inside of an hour I had located an exit that lead to highsec (you can right click on a wurmhole and get information from it, it will tell you in vague terms whether the hole leads to highsec or some place dangerous and unknown). Found my way out, and back to my ‘home’ in highsec without any issues.

For those who are familiar and comfortable constantly living on the edge in EVE Online, it’s probably not that big of a deal but for me personally, it was an amazing accomplishment and I was quite proud of myself. Next I’ll be trying to bring some POS bits over to the corp for them to use, in specific all those consumer electronics I’ve been producing in my PI routine which are then used in robotics. I went and read through the huge wiki on POS to try to learn exactly what goes into one and how much work they are, confusing, but I’m grasping it.

So far I’ve still not reached out into the pvp side of living in a WH, but I’ll get there. I still prefer invention / manufacturing / PI to the sound of lasers across the sky, and I doubt I’ll ever really be the bloodthirsty sort, but one never knows!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

The past few days I’ve been spending a lot of time probing, scanning down sites and then exploring whatever it is I’ve discovered. I started off looking for grav sites for mining, but they have been incredibly rare as of late – and (I know, gasp) a bit boring. Instead I’ve spent most of my time hanging out in the NPC sites, battling serpentis. I still haven’t worked my way up to pvp quite yet.

That being said, a few exciting things happened yesterday. First of all, I joined a corp. Yep, my first ‘active’ corp besides the NPC default one that I was placed into. Listening to them in channels is like listening to a whole other language, and so far I don’t quite understand that language – mostly because I’m a ‘carebear’ in game who doesn’t partake in pvp. That’s alright though, there’s no pressure for me to jump right into things and I like that. In fact it’s nice to simply have other people around to communicate with and since I’m a fast learner, I bet it won’t be long before I figure things out.

While scanning down sites yesterday I ran into a few issues. First of all, my Dominix isn’t allowed in a lot of the sites I scanned. I love my Dominix but I feel like I’ve outgrown it some what. So I’m training towards an Ishtar. In the mean time I picked up a Myrmidon which is a Battlecruiser and was allowed through most gates. Of course then I came across a gate that wouldn’t allow the Dominix OR the Myrmidon, so I picked up a simple Vexor which is a cruiser, and completed the system in that. Then I came to a third gate that wouldn’t allow any of those ships through. So I decided – not to bother. I had done enough ship shopping for the day. None of these ships are particularly impressive, but they do really well when they’re fit properly. Playing the Myrmidon is quite fun, it’s completely different than playing my Dominix. It’s a close range ship, and incredibly fast. Of course I’m still pretty dependent on my drones, but that just happens to be my play style.

Mean while, I’m still knee deep in invention and manufacturing. I need to focus on raising my standings with my R&D agents so I can continue moving up the chain and earn more RP/day. There’s so much to do in EVE, it certainly keeps me busy.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

As much as I enjoy scanning sites in Eve Online, I rarely give it the patience it requires, and have fallen behind in my ‘skills’ for probing (har har). I take a lot of pleasure in finding sites of my own to explore, so last night I decided to do a revision on how scanning works, and I took my Helios out for a spin.

It’s always hit or miss when it comes to scanning, some times you’ll find things, and some times you won’t. That’s where the patience comes in. It also takes a lot of time to narrow down the search, but there are some pretty awesome tutorials and videos on how to do this. I didn’t travel far from home (because I was expecting to need another ship or two depending on what I found) and in my first session I narrowed down a Serpentis Den. I flew back to my ‘home base’, switched out the Helios for the Dominix, and headed back. It was a bit messy because I was still getting back into the swing of things, but I didn’t do too badly, and before long all of the bad guys were dead. I spent a bit of time salvaging the wreckage (I could have switched out for my salvager, but didn’t bother) and then switched back to the Helios.

My second run resulted in a radar site, I took my codebreaker (I have my Helios fit for radar sites as well as probing) and opened up the containers with glee – no NPC to defeat here. Inside I was rewarded with an item that boosts manufacturing stats, and is worth a few million ISK. YAY!

Continuing on (I was actually looking for mining sites) I found a Serpentis Lookout, so I once again switched out from the Helios to the Dominix, and proceeded through the acceleration gates. This time things went much easier – except that I completely forgot that when I removed the inventory from the Dominix on my last combat round, I also removed all of my ammo. Before I could pass through the second acceleration gate I had to head back to home and pick some up. Not being able to attack anything was proving to be difficult, especially since my drones were the ones getting aggro and it was going to be expensive to replace them all. I scooped them up, flew home, grabbed ammo, and back out to the site where I finished up killing the NPCs. I didn’t get the bonus spawn, but that’s alright. I still got a lot of bounty for killing and I also came back with a lot of salvage material.

All in all it was an incredibly productive night. Before I went out probing I also put in some production runs for invention and manufacturing, turned my PI runs on, did a few mining missions for faction, and picked up some datacores that my R&D agents have been holding for me. Now, all of this may not sound exciting to the dedicated long term EVE player, it just sounds like yet another night – but for me, it was incredibly exciting. It was my first time actually scanning down a site and then defeating it on my own. Hopefully tonight I have better luck with mining sites though, as that’s what I’m really after. I did also find a few wurmhole entrances, and I may check them out in the future, I do love wurmhole exploration, it’s just not something I typically want to do all by myself without a corp to back me up.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!