Hitting the wall

I went and bought the Orca, and all is well financially. But now I’ve hit the wall.

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?

Level fours – or, how I began earning money and stopped worrying

I suck at this game.

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.

Should I go all in?

I’m about to buy an Orca, because the carebear in me must be sated. It hungers. Problem is I have barely enough isk to afford it and all the mods and rigs that I want with it. With “barely” I mean that if I skip the rigs I’ll be left with less than a 100 million isk.

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?

Putting it all together, again

I’ve been pondering about taking up blogging again. As you might be able to see, it’s been a while. And before that, it was sporadic as well.

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.

Five Days and a Free Gift?

Finally I got the mail from CCP that I’ve been waiting for. Five days of free activation, and that free ship.

Time to log in.

Time to undock.

Podlogs?

I was fooling around with Twitter (of all things) and stumbled upon a site called Podlogs. Looks like a blogging community for EVE-bloggers. I haven’t been following the “scene” as it were much since I went on my hiatus, mostly just checking the occasional Dev blog from CCP (which are few and far between). So, uuh, yeah, I guess that’s all old news for you guys.

Anyway, I’m still alive. So nyah!

Goodbye for now

This hardly comes as a surprise for those who have been following this blog and noted its recent inactivity, but I’m taking a leave of absence from EVE. I recently found employment and between a job and a family it’s hard to find time for EVE. Ironically, that now when I can afford the monthly fee without trouble, and possibly could invest in a new rig to get my Premium and pew-pew on, I find myself unable to do so.

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, in stock

Well well well, it’s finally out there, somewhere. Taunting me. Wooing me. Tempting me.

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.

EVE: Conquests should be released today

The EVE-themed boardgame EVE: Conquests should be released today, according to various internet sources. However, I have yet to find any information on it from what could be called official sources. White-wolf.com and EVEonline.com are both very very quiet about this, which bothers me.

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

Penny Arcade & PVPonline & WotC – and some podcasts too

Right, so now for something completely different.

For promoting the new edition, the fourth, of D&D, WotC asked the much talented people over at Penny Arcade and PVPonline to come and play some tabletop rpg, recorded it and then published it as a podcast. That was season 1. And recently they released season 2, this time accompanied by none other than Wil Wheaton.

I really don’t feel like these guys need more promotion, and certainly not from me, but I figured that it might be of interest to someone out there who happen by this blog and kind of just has their eyes closed the rest of the time.

So links a-coming:

Season 1

1. Episode
2. Episode
3. Episode
4. Episode
5. Episode
6. Episode
7. Episode
8. Episode

Season 2

1. Episode
2. Episode
3. Episode
4. Episode
5. Episode
6. Episode
7. Episode
8. Episode

Or hell, just go WotC’s podcast archive and look for them yourself.

Each episode also has one or more illustrations by the aforementioned talented artists. So yeah. Well worth a look-at.