Tag: EVE

It just doesn’t feel right to be playing MMO’s unless one of them happens to be a sandbox, and since I was lacking the soft feeling of sand running between my toes I decided to sign back up with EVE Online. It’s been a few months since I’ve played to any extent, and when I left the game I was working heavily with industry and PI, creating drones to sell weekly at the market as well as POS components and fuel. All of which netted me a fair amount of ISK, and kept me out of trouble (for the most part).

Since I’ve returned I’ve noticed a few changes – most notably would have to be the changes to inventory. That’s right, players now have an actual inventory – sort of. It’s a drop down menu on the left hand side along with the usual tabs (wallet, assets, etc) and when you select it you’ll see more drop down menus with your items (hopefully). It took me a bit to figure this out, I was expecting a hangar, and couldn’t find it anywhere. Couldn’t find my corporate hangar or any of my ships, or figure out how to move items about. Of course once I learned we have an inventory, things became much easier. It’s still a bit of a pain but there are ways to filter it now which are nice. It does take some getting used to, but I think I can manage.

Of course the first thing I did was fall back into old habits, take a trip to Jita and sell off the merchandise that I had collected last time I played. Jita was as busy as ever which was comforting. I haven’t decided quite yet what it is I want to do this round – there’s so many options. If you’re unfamiliar with them you should really check out this amazing post by The Ancient Gaming Noob – and in specific this image.

I’ve always stayed on the PvE side of things, I enjoy spending my time in-game mining, scanning (which I’m not good at but I’ll get better with practice) exploring, and the occasional mission run for faction. I love salvaging, and I still enjoy research and development but I’m unsure if I want to keep producing drones or move on to something else. They’re good income but I’ve been crafting them for so long now it’s getting a bit boring.

No matter what I decide to do, it’s nice to be back flying the skies. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the way that skills work in EVE. In more ‘tradtional’ MMOs (ie: most themepark) I would log in to ‘grind’ skills or levels. I’d work on tasks that would better my character. In EVE there’s no way of doing this. Your skills come from books that you add to a queue, and automatically learn in a number of hours/days/months while you’re in game or not. You’re only limited by the amount of time required to fully learn a skill, and the price of the skill book. That means the ‘main’ thing to work on is gaining ISK so you can afford those books / ships / etc. How you decide to earn your ISK is completely up to you.

Above is my current ‘planned’ queue of skills. It will take around 49 days to learn them all. This is the Dominix fit I’ve planned out on Battleclinic, and then I’ve uploaded the skills I need for that fit. It’s drone heavy (obviously, almost everything I have left to train is drones) since that’s how I enjoy playing. I love sending my drones out into combat while I hang back and blast things from range or tank the heavier hits while they do the bulk of the damage. Picking a fit for your ship is unique to the type of gameplay you enjoy so be sure to spend a lot of time browsing fits. You don’t have to go with what everyone else dictates is the best, either. You should always focus on how YOU enjoy playing. The dominix makes a great drone ship, although I’d like to upgrade it eventually. Since the only real combat I do is for missions, I’ve never been that focused on my PvE combat ship.

One thing I wish were a little easier to do in game is probing. Normally Kasul would scan sites and then drop off the mining locations for me because I’m just not good at it. He’s moved on, so I’m left to figure out probing for myself. It’s not THAT difficult, I’ve watched videos on how to do it and I’ve even managed to scan down a few sites myself. It’s just that I’m not very good at it, and I prefer to spend my time in game doing things that I’m good at and that I enjoy. Problem is I enjoy mining (I know, how wrong of me) and if I spend my time mining just the regular asteroid belts, that can become a chore. I really enjoy the excitement that the other sites bring, especially if there are rats around. So, a large portion of my time in-game must be spend dedicated to learning the finer arts of probing. That sounds completely wrong.

How do you enjoy spending your time in-game? Let me know in comments! As always, happy gaming no matter where you are.

 

There have been a few changes since I last played EVE, and I haven’t really kept up to date with any of them (it’s just the way I am, I rarely keep up with any of the game ‘news’ out there). Of course some changes were unavoidable to notice, like the graphics that have been updated. As soon as I pulled out of the corp hangar I noticed the skies have changed. They’re far more richly detailed, and have a lot of depth to them. It was beautiful.

Even though it’s been a while since I logged in, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I had been working on finishing up a new fit for my dominix, my mission running ship. My plan was still saved in EVEMon, so I loaded that up to see what skills I wanted to add to the queue next. After that it was time to check on my PI, set the new programs running and make sure the locations still had room for new produce. I’ll have to pick up the cargo some time this week and ship it out to Jita.

I had some jobs on the go when I stopped playing as well. My copy job completed, I now have a nice selection of hammerhead blueprints. I’ll turn those into hammerhead II blueprints (hopefully), and then produce hammerhead II’s. My research agents have been neglected as well, and I have to go pick up some datacores from them.

From there it’s mission running. Working on my factions so that I can work with better datacore agents and buy nifty faction items. I have been contemplating signing on with a new corp, there are some that are offering a signing bonus to haulers, and it would put my Orca to great use. I’ve never really been part of a large corp before and I’m still trying to decide if it’s something I’d like to try, or if I’m better suited to continue in the smaller corp that I’ve been apart of since I started playing EVE. I did try to give another corp a try, but that didn’t end too well, as they sent me threatening letters when I died, implying that if I were to fly where I shouldn’t they may even simply fire on me so that others could not. Really not a place I wanted to be.

In any case, it’s no surprise that my attention has turned back to EVE at the same time that I’m fully engrossed with Wurm. Last night I was mining in both games, and while they’re at completely different ends of the spectrum, the end result was the same. In Wurm I use a pickaxe to harvest ore to use for items, and in EVE I use a ship with guns to perform the same actions and end up with the same results, ore used to make other items. I’m looking forward to getting back into mission runs, and outfitting the dominix. It’s been a while.

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

 

 

It doesn’t matter what game I play, I love getting new things. Some times those new things are gear, weapons or even crafting supplies. In EVE one of those things is ships. Ever since I heard that there was a little war on ice miners I decided that I wanted an ice mining ship. Technically I could use my hulk (as I’ve already mentioned) but the Mackinaw receives a lot of bonuses for ice mining in specific. Today I decided to purchase one, and I’ve got three more days before I can finish fitting it, but it’s coming along nicely. I gave it the name ‘Cyrosphere’ which I think suits. I was a bit sad when I looked at the insurance value of the ship. The maximum you can get back is 26 million ISK, and the ship is going for roughly 115 million in Jita. That’s not including any money you spend fitting it. I took it out for a spin and was incredibly happy with my results, but I was also very paranoid that I’d get shot out of the skies, even if I was in .7 HighSec. After a few circles of the mining guns I decided to head back to the station and refine my goods, which is where the real money comes from.

Hopefully things will calm down for ice miners before too long, and I won’t have to be constantly looking around for people flying in all of the sudden. Of course it’s better to be safe than sorry, but after losing my hulk last week I really wasn’t in the mood to replace a 2nd ship quite so soon.

It’s almost time for me to upgrade my research agents again. I’ve been working on missions for Creo and my standing is almost high enough to warrant the change. I’ve been with my current agents for a long time, and even though I only visit them when I need a bunch of datacores you sort of get attached to them. Plus they’re in a nice location that’s easy for me to reach when I’m en-rout to my factory outpost.

Once I finish training the ice harvester, I’m going to complete fitting the Dominix (I sort of stopped half way through) and then work on my other crafting skills like mining different types of ore and refining them. Maybe I’ll do a little wurmhole exploration, and eventually I’ll finally get the hang of probing. In the mean time I’m still bugging corp mates to help me with that.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself! I hope all my friends down south stay safe with the storms that have been passing through. No sign of any snow up here in Ottawa.

o/