Tag: EVE Online

Suitcase Challenge Day 63: Finally

When I returned to EVE online in March, I had no idea what I was looking for or what I hoped to accomplish. Normally when I “play” EVE, I jump in for a month and then would find myself at a loss on what to do, and I’d wander off. This time for whatever reason the game has staying power (combined with the fact that no matter how much I try, I just can’t seem to get interested in Warcraft these days, Plunderstorm really did a number on me) so much so that it’s 4 months later, and I’ve just picked up 6 months of game time on two of my accounts. That’s pretty neat.

Anyway! My Orca is still safely living in her wormhole. I’ve been doing a little bit of mining, a lot of PI, some anomalies, and I continue to work on my market character along with my ‘main’ who is doing industry. I was thinking of trying mercoxit mining, but I have no idea what sort of ship fit I need for that, I just know that when I run into it, I can’t collect it with my strip miner II modules. It probably has special ones. Also something about spawning gas that harms you as you mine it? Interesting!

I’ve stopped trying to fly the biggest and best ships out there (note: I’m not even close to flying anything big anyway) and instead focused on flying what I can, well. I finally finished training biology V on my Signal Cartel character, which means I was able to pick up the Neural Lace ‘Blackglass’ Net Intrusion 920-40 implant, and oh my this thing is lovely. It lets me basically 1 shot any of the bad virus’ that show up on the mini game when you’re doing hacking. My helios is still my ship of choice. That little ship is amazing. I’m also still really enjoying my Tengu for C1-3 and while I know there’s more ISK if I were to do harder things, I’m happy and having a lot of fun with what I’m doing so far.

There’s less than 1 month left for my Suitcase challenge! I can hardly believe where the time has gone. As of today, I’ve been to 198 systems, and visited 143 unique wormholes. I’m not sure what I’ll do once the challenge is over. I might just continue to live in the wormhole, or I might try something new. Maybe I’ll sell the Orca. It doesn’t get a lot of actual use, since I don’t want to lose it. It feels strange to keep a ship around with such high value but with very little use. I guess we’ll just have to see!

Fly your way! o7

Suitcase Challenge Day 50: Backing Away… Quickly

OK, I know the screenshot above is really messy, but I wanted to make an attempt at showing what a typical game play period might look like for me when I have nothing really in mind and want to explore data/relic sites (non combat). I’ve been contemplating trying to move to a new wormhole but I am pretty specific about what I want. This day was a whole lot of ‘NOPE’ and some close calls. So I left my ‘home’ wormhole (it’s covered up, and this post is postdated so none of these connections will be this way when you read about it) and jumped into a C2 with a C1 / H connection. There was nothing much going on there, so I jumped into a C1 that had no statics at all. Maybe I’ve just never paid attention before, I didn’t know there was any such thing. There was nothing there, either – but it did have a connection to a C3 that looked promising. Unfortunately that C3 had a nullsec connection – and they had been hot and heavy on the combat. Kitchen Sinkhole, Fraternity, and Salted Fish Alliance. I accidentally ran right into their little war going on, so I immediately popped back into that C1 with no statics. From there I popped into a C5, which is a fine wormhole if you’re looking to go after gas, mining, or combat anomalies, but the data/relic sites are actually combat sites and not cans – not what I was in the mood for. I knew I’d have to scan my way out of there and find something better.

It had a C4 static, but there was also another nullsec entrance, and I decided what the heck I’ll pop out – YIKES. Immediately I was in B-7DFU which had 44+ Goons just.. there. I popped right back into that wormhole so fast, I was terrified that someone would have spotted me and followed. Thankfully I had already scanned down the whole C5, so I was able to pop over to the C4 static instead. No one followed me (to my knowledge). This new C4 had a C1 and a C4 as statics. I wasn’t interested in the C4 because I knew there wouldn’t be any relic/data sites to make use of, so I decided to explore the C1. No recent kills to be concerned about, most of the deaths on dotlan looked like NPC kills. There was also very little of interest there. Shoot. I was starting to get tired and really had nothing to show for my adventures. I decided to pop into the LowSec connection and see what was around. It was empty! Unfortunately there was also only a single relic site with a few million ISK worth of items. After a few minutes, a marauder popped in so I cloaked and waited to see what he was up to. He dropped some drones so I figured he was ratting, and as soon as I uncloaked in my relic site he scooped his drones and left. I took that as my hint that he might be back in something that was meant to smush, so I once again dove back into the wormhole.

This time I went into a C2 that had a C5 and a nullsec connection. Neat. Also highly valuable as far as wormholes are concerned, there were people living there. FOUR buildings set up – but they haven’t been active lately. In fact, it looks like they had a bunch of people griefing them in early June, they lost a bunch of POCO in the system, and then The Initiative and The Tuskers Co. had a bit of a brawl in there too. No action since June 14th. I wanted to go nose around the buildings, but instead I was distracted by the EIGHT relic / data sites that were in system. EIGHT! FINALLY! Jackpot.

Finally, almost 300 million ISK in my haul, it was time to find a high sec connection so I could dump it off to my market character. Then I’d have to use my scanning character to figure out where my static HS lead to, and make my way back to my orca suitcase. All in all, it was a pretty profitable day, a nice break from gas, and I got to see some cool people doing cool things (and then I promptly flew away before I was discovered, as is my way).

Fly your way! o7

Suitcase Challenge Day 43: How’s it Going?

It’s day 43 of living out of an Orca in a random wormhole with a HS static. Things are going well! ISK making is down from last month but honestly that was very expected. I’ve had less time to play, and less luck with exploration. I’ve also only got 2/6 of my characters doing PI – I’d like to get that to at least 4/6 this month but time is a rare commodity.

I’ve been killing sleepers to get the ‘blue’ loot (sells to an NPC). did a lot of gas huffing, a little bit of mining (this was mostly for my own industry needs and not for selling), and spent a lot of ISK on BPO & skills. I’ve gotten some good data/relic sites, but the lower ISK this month is due to a lack of time, and nothing more.

I had gotten a few rig BPC from a site, and also had to pick up the skills that let me craft them. Sold them for a nice profit. Like I thought, regular skins have gone down a lot in price which I expected with the release of the skinr tool. I still have not explored that yet, but I can understand how people who fly the same ships for years might be interested in a new look. My industry is still being completed in high sec, so I have to keep a close eye on profits and taxes and all the rest of it. FUN!

I am not a fan of the new daily goals. I dislike that it is more of a monthly combination of actions, and I really dislike what CCP wants us to go after as goals. Today it’s scan down 2 relic sites, damage other capsuleers, and earn 50 LP for any corporation. The simple one was to destroy 25 non-capsuleers, which is what I did. Hunting down relic sites in specific is annoying, and while earning LP is ‘easy’ it’s also something I would need to go out of my way to complete. The goals are character specific, another issue I have with them. They used to reward 10k sp daily, and were brought back down to 5k sp daily because there’s ‘goals’ now, after 3, 6, 9, and 12 days. I feel more obligated than I was before, and more resentful. I’m hoping this isn’t the final iteration of the dailies, and maybe CCP gives them some extra attention (again) in the future. It would be nice not to have to leave the WH every time I want to complete a daily.

As always, fly your way! o7

Monday’s Are for PI

Right now I only have 2/6 characters doing PI steadily. I’m extracting P0 and turning it into P1, and I would usually then take it and turn that into P2 (robotics & guidance systems) but I’ve been trying to get things sorted so I’ve let it lapse for now while I figure things out. I use a wormlife freeport for the 4.5% taxes, and every Monday I collect my PI and then when it’s quiet I’ll scan down the HS connection and drop it off. My PI characters are not very fancy, but they are Omega, and they can fly ships with cloaks, which is nice. It’s not mountains of ISK each week, but it is pretty passive, sells well, and is very minimal effort. I don’t mind logging in to re-set my extractors each day, and collecting PI once a week works out well. I could attempt to collect it less frequently, but the Epithal I’m flying fills up quickly and I don’t want to make more trips than I have to.

Ideally sometime this week I’ll set up the other characters who need to get their PI off the ground. I spent some SP last week unlocking the various skills required, and while they can all use the command centers at V none of my PI characters have 6 planets. Setting up PI itself is pretty simple once you get used to the clicking, and you can do most of it docked once you place the command centers. You can even gate to a safe, cloak, and place command centers without being anywhere physically near your planets. Seems a bit OP to me but who am I to complain.

Industry / Market wise, gas took a huge dip in value this week, I imagine it’s because of the pirate faction ship changes. Some of it might be because of people panic dumping, so we’ll have to see where the numbers go from here. I’d like to branch out a little bit in my station trading, I’m even contemplating switching to Jita to just see how different it is from where I currently trade. Things are slower where I’m at, but there’s also less competition and I’m OK with that. It might be interesting to see how the bigger fish play.

Speaking of bigger fish, I got to finally catch one of Oz_Eve’s streams live this weekend! He’s on the CSM team this year so he’s not actually doing any trading due to his NDA, but he still offers updates and support to other traders. It was fascinating to listen to him talk about the ins and outs of marketing, and listen to the speculation on where things are going. Of course there were the usual doom/gloom people, but that happens in pretty much any game ever. I am a big advocate of constructive feedback (ie: mention an issue – give a few solutions, in a constructive way that doesn’t death threat the developers..) and I think a lot of people miss the fact that they can actually voice their opinions without having it devolve into something violent. Tomorrow, a suitcase challenge update!

As always, fly your way! o7

My first C3 Ghost Site

Despite the (what I consider) large number of relic & data sites I’ve completed in jspace – today was the very first time I came across a superior ghost site. I was absolutely NOT equipped to fully complete one and handle the onslaught of rats & explosions. I do have a stratios that I can fly – but – since I can’t fit it the way I’d like quite yet, I haven’t taken it out much. The helios has been more than enough for what I’m trying to handle.

Anyway, that doesn’t mean you *can’t* do ghost sites, it just means you have to be fast, and you have to potentially leave a lot of loot behind. I decided to do the ‘egg thief’ tactic, I warped in, hacked a single can, looted (more about that in a second) and warped out. I could have probably hacked a second can (the helios is speedy) but I was already sweating and even though losing it wouldn’t have put a dent in the wallet, I have some emotional connections to the ship and wasn’t willing to take the risk.

The one can I opened was filled with Isotropic Deposition Guide which I had never seen before, a few other bits and bobs, and a Wetu mobile depot blueprint copy. I didn’t want to risk things by scanning down the cans first, so I just grabbed what I could, and fled. Once I was at my safe, the site imploded and vanished from the overview. It was pretty exciting, I honestly didn’t even know that these sites could spawn in jspace, I have only ever seen one before, and it was in high sec.

The ‘problem’ with the loot, is that it was HUGE and filled up my entire hull. I couldn’t even take all of the isotropic deposition guides, I had to leave 4m worth behind. I suppose that is one downside to the helios being so small and nimble.

Still, it was a good amount of ISK when I was finished, and a nice relaxing morning in jspace. I headed back to kspace after, dropping off the loot to my marketing character, and the bpc to my industry character. Yesterday was the release of Equinox, and it’ll be interesting to see how things shake up. The cost of PLEX has gone through the roof (at the time of this post I believe it’s around 5.5, it was 4.5 for the longest time) and hopefully people enjoy the new content. I’ll comment on it further in a few days.

Fly your way! o7