I’m not sure of when, but from the looks of it I stopped playing Eve sometime late 2010, possibly early 2011. Reasons are probably many, but chief among them being my tiny personal clone, that is, my son that was born February 2011. He’s big enough to grasp a Xbox controller now though, so perhaps it is time for me to get back in the game?

I’ve been following Eve and its development, mainly through the dev blogs. The game also has a knack of sometimes breaking into various news media, thanks to in-game shenanigans and scandals. That said, I’m aware a lot of changes has taken place, and that’s a a serious understatement. I didn’t have a grasp on the political map when I left, and I surely don’t have one now. I reckon somewhere internet spaceships are being blown up in the pursuit of making bigger and better internet spaceships.

While waiting for new hardware (come on tax return!) I’ll be doing some research. It looks as if I’m a lot richer in Eve than I would remember, due to prices having gone up on some stuff I own. Nice. But I suspect the same goes for stuff I would like to own. Ho hum.

With that I mean, I had a goal, which was to get an Orca, but now that I have it, I fumble with what to do next. EVE is open-ended, and I love that. But at times it’s just hard to decide on what to aim for next. Atleast that’s the way it is for me. There’s no real “goal” in collecting more isk, and watching the skillpoint total tick away. I need something new to aim for.

I’ve been pondering a Marauder. Yeah. That costs a lot of iskies, and I’d have to get Battleship V, atleast. Also I need to round up some Drake skills for WH raiding.

…and I could always roll up an alt an try my hands at PVP. A cheap Rifter set-up is, indeed, cheap. Anyone have an opinion about how to create a decent PVPer straight out of character generation? It’d be on the same account as my main so no skilltraining here, no sirree.

Does anyone recognize this phenomenon?

No, really.

I suck. I suck at it bad.

I’ve been playing more or less (subscription has been on hiatus a couple of times) since August 2007. That’s three years now. I’ve got 36 million skill points. I’ve never been rich in terms of isk. What money I earned I earned quickly and suddenly from writing for EON. (gods I love mentioning that I’ve done that once. I’m like a one-hit wonder trying to pick up co-eds who were fetuses when I was a big rockstar…)

I bought a lot of stuff for that money. A freighter for one thing. A hulk for another. A battleship. A second battleship. A lot of expensive skillbooks. I haven’t been rich since. By rich I mean “around a billion isk”. There’s no reason to stockpile cash, I mean, after you have 1 billion isk in the wallet, are you gonna start saving up for another billion? I suppose there are players who do that. For them the game is about earning iskies. The richest fella wins. Hey, it’s EVE. We all have to find what’s fun for us in the game.

But about my suckage. I’ve lost not one, but two battleships in missions. In level three missions. Level. Fucking. Three. Because that’s how much I suck. That’s how I roll. So with this in mind, imagine that I’ve been postponing going solo into level fours for some time.

Although, in my senseless and mindnumbing grind in level threes (partly for standing with a new corporation for me, but still, that’s an excuse, not a reason) I’ve found that they’ve been seriously easy. There’s been little more for me to do in those missions aside from assigning new targets for my lazors. So I decided, that once I’ve got the skills for t2 lazors, I’m gonna rig my Abaddon up as well and off I go into level fours. Come what come may. Into the jaws of hell!

So I did.

And it was easy. Like, so easy I loled. I don’t do that a lot. And I certainly don’t type “lol” in my blog. Ever. I think. I hope.

And the money, oh my sweet little baby jesus the money. The loot. The salvage. From one mission I got enough salvage to built a large capacitor control circuit. That’s huge. And a nice bonus from the rest of the stuff. It definitely takes a lot longer to do any one mission (I’m pondering switching to t2 pulse instead of the beams I’m using), but the isk/hour is almost ten times more than for level 3s.

I’m in childlish awe over this. And at the same time kicking my metaphorical ass for not going into level 4s earlier. Ho hum.

That’s not a lot of money. If I lose the Orca, or my yummy lovely Hand of God III with that kind of money in the bank I’m not able to afford a replacement. And that breaks the first law of EVE: Never fly anything you cannot afford to loose.

So I think I’ll hold off for a while, run a few more missions, dick around with manufacturing and offload it unto the market. It wouldn’t take me that long to earn a safety net that’d let me buy that Orca without crying in fear everytime I go through a gate (in frickin’ high sec for crying out loud).

But have you ever gone all in? Thrown caution to the wind for that special ship, or fit, or implant, or even skillbook? I’ve been utterly and completely broke more times than I could ever remember iRL, so why am I so careful in an internet spaceship game?

One reason to blog is that my vacation time is soon over, and that means less time in-game. However, blogging is something I might be able to do from work. Surfing the blogosphere works at work, atleast sometimes.

It’s easy to get overloaded with information from the so called blogosphere, even if you only concentrate on blogs dedicated to EVE. There are tools out there, various new media thingamajings and feeds and aggregates and whatnot. I’m feeling very old, confused and lost. I spent a good hour or so clicking this way and that and generally copying from other peoples’ blogs various technical solutions. Needless to say I felt awfully lost with the jargong and the various software and services.

I dunno. Does it matter? A lot of the stuff seem to be just another intricate method of shouting “Hey, look at me and what I’m writing!” – but then that pretty much sums up blogging in a way.

And it’s a forum where one can unhindered by (sometimes lack of) moderation say whatever one likes or thinks about EVE, its community and its developers. Far away from the cesspools that make out the game’s own forum, what with the trolls and that shitslinging and the e-peeness.

Not that I have much to say about the community drama or the 18-month wait debacle, but atleast this looks interesting.

Time to log in.

Time to undock.

Anyway, I’m still alive. So nyah!

So Shaun will be put into a clone vat for a while, until the time when (not if) I return to EVE.

Until then, fly safe.

EVE: Conquests can probably be bought from a number of gamestores, but now it’s atleast in stock at both EVEonline.com and over at white-wolf.com.

I’m still hoping the rules will be made available online in one form or another. 75 USD is a pretty steep price, and I really prefer to get to know a game by reading its rules first.

At the above link there are a few pictures of the game in case anyone’s interested. I’m still waiting for someone to upload the rules so I can have a proper look-see on the gameplay.

EON ran a competition in issue #13 where you could win a copy of the boardgame. I participated but I guess I came up nil