Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Eve Online: Finding your place in this universe

Ok, I'm into my 2nd month of playing Eve now and it definitely has not lost its luster, quite the opposite actually. The longer I play, the more I discover is possible, and the more I want to play. Albert Einstein said it best "The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know".

I've joined up with a good group of people in a Corp and things are going good so far.  Membership consits of about 20 members ranging from a few veterans with years of playing, a few with 9 month characters, and the rest at about 2-3 months of playing under their belt. Everyone in the corp with the exception of 2 or 3 are between the ages of 25-45, which is great since I fall smack dab in the middle of that range. Our corporation recently decided that we would move out to Wormhole Space and set up a POS and attempt to make a living there. Wormholes come in 6 different classifications from C1-C6. The lower the number the less dangerous it is to live there when it comes to NPC's killing you, but the more likely you'll end up with your wormhole connecting to some place that will attract a lot of people coming in and out of your home (which you don't want).

Right now we have two POS's (player owned stations) in two different wormholes. We have one of them set up in a C2 wormhole and one in a C4. Only some of the players are living in the C4 since it's much more difficult to get in and out of it since it doesn't connect to any High Sec system directly.

Up until now I've been doing mostly mission running out and earning ISK, occasionally fleeting up with some corp mates and tackling level 4 missions and I'll run in with a Noctis and clean up the salvage for everyone and then we all split the loot. I'm not able to do a lot of DPS (damage per second) right now, unless I fly my Talos, which requires me to have a logistics ship nearby to help me repair if things get too rough. Mission running can earn between 10k in ISK up to a million in ISK for a single mission, add in Salvage and you can earn around 50-100 million in ISK (as a group) on a level 4, per mission. Not bad ISK at all, but nothing compared to potential wormhole money.

Killing sleepers in wormholes can be very profitable. If you add up hacking, or analyzing, plus loot and salvage materials, you can easily earn 500 million ISK in a few hours of killing sleepers (and then split among the group). Some of our guys can do most of the killing without any help, but they allow us noobs to tag along and learn the ropes by getting a few kills here and there. I mostly focus on killing the frigates as fast as I can so that they don't warp scram our fleet. I should point out that sleepers are much harder than running missions in High Sec. They don't hold back at all, use any and all available tactics, and they hit like a ton of bricks. Tough sleepers are only part of the danger in wormholes though.

Another HUGE danger of living in a wormhole is someone else coming in to kill you. There are two things that are needed to survive in wormhole space. A Probe launcher and a cloaking device. Both of which take up high slots on your ship, hence why we set up some POS' so we can have multiple ships on site incase we need to perform a different function. One moment you'll be killing sleepers and the next you have a fleet of ships uncloaking 30km from you and stealing all the loot you've been collecting. There is no CONCORD in wormhole space and nobody will come to save you or get revenge for you if you are attacked. You have to be able to fend for yourself or die. If you aren't familiar with Directional Scanner, figure it out and get good at it before you ever bother trying to live in wormhole space.

I haven't lost any ships to gankers yet, but members of our corp have. Right now I'm training up to be a stealth bomber pilot (13 more days, plus a few more days to fit it properly). A few more guys in our corp are doing the same. Soon we'll have 4 stealth bombers and be able to run some pretty awesome covert ops missions.

All in all, I love living in wormhole space. Highsec was fun for the first month to learn the basics, but if you can find a good group of people that you can semi-trust (ultimately you shouldn't trust anyone fully), then I definitely recommend giving wormhole space a try.

Unfortunately with all my Eve playing, I've been drawing what's commonly referred to as "Wife Aggro" by spending too much time on the game, so I've had to cut back a little bit and tend to more real life concerns. In the end, it's just a game, but it's an awesome game.

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