The times they are a-changing

I went on holiday and was busy at work after returning, so regretfully haven’t posted here for a while. I have been playing EVE on-and-off, but mostly off as I spent nearly a month training to get a Covetor on my main and only picked that up last week. I did go for the ‘power of two’ offer by the way and so I now mine with an alt in an Iteron MarkV. I also bought a second monitor for my computer to make this even easier.

The main reason for this post though is to update you on big changes which are happening in EVE over the next month or so:

Tue Nov 30: The next expansion of EVE ‘Incursion’ is released
Tue Dec 14: Learning skills are to be scrapped in EVE and replaced with attribute boosts instead.
Jan 2011: The promised overhaul of the character portrait and creation system will happen

As for me: Despite playing for nearly 3 months now I am still finding my feet. I have resisted joining a corporation (corp) as I don’t have the time to dedicate to one. I have been thinking about joining EVE University for some time, but haven’t yet applied. My current idea is to start a new combat only alt and join the corp with that, allowing me to fall back on my mining character if/when corp life doesn’t appeal.

The power of two

CCP are running an offer at the moment where you can subscribe a second EVE account at a greatly reduced rate.

6 months for 49.99 Euros

It is a full account and at the end of the 6 months you can choose to extend (at the standard subscription rate) or move the character to your first account and terminate it (transfer fee will be payable).

This offer is available until November 7th 2010. It seems they only run this offer once a year around this time. So if you dont take advantage now you will probably have to wait until October 2011 for the offer to come around again.

Follow this link to learn more.

CCP Announces the new "Incursion" EVE expansion

Recently CCP announced details of the next free EVE expansion which is due to be realeased in November 2010.

It will be named Incursion and more details can be found here.

One key feature will be a reworked character portrait design system. This should get rid of the problems I had creating my portrait (more details in this blog post if interested). However, I hope they dont change the race styles too much. I like the way my avatar looks and choose the race for the look.

Leaked details have already stated that existing players will be able to redesign their portrait but will not be able to change race, so I hope they do a good job with the male Amarr...

Rookie Skill Training Bonus

My skills were around 800k by the time I even realised I was receiving a rookie training bonus. New players get a 100% bonus to training time until their total skills reach 1.6 million.

CCP Quote: “Newly created pilots will train skills 100% faster than older pilots, until they have reached 1.6 million skill points. The first skill that will train past 1.6 million skill points will not receive the training speed bonus.”

Up until that point my plan about what to train next had been pretty random. I hadn’t even noticed that some skills had training time penalties (that’s the x1, x2, x3 etc. you see in the descriptions). It’s a good idea to try and squeeze in the skills you most need before you hit the 1.6m point.

So for the first time I started to think about what I actually wanted to train and this meant thinking about what I ultimately wanted to do in EVE. I gave up on that quite quickly as I still didn’t have much idea of what I wanted to do.

Mining? Yea, its OK
Missioning? Yea, its OK
Exploration? Sounds interesting
Industry? Maybe
Pirating? No thanks, well maybe

I decided the best bet was to just training the learning skill (for now anyway). I followed this guide, although I didn’t follow the implants as that was too much to spend at this point in my career (I felt).

So my short term goal became training learning skills, mine and mission whilst I work out what I want to do. The missioning and mining lead to a desire for a few skills and so they got mixed in with the learning plan along the way. Evemon is a tool that helps you plan your training, I recommend you give it a try if you haven’t already.

I tried to squeeze in as many skills as I could before I hit the 1.6m barrier and so as time went on more of the higher level training skills fell off my hit list as I was increasingly doing shorter and shorter skills so I could get eth maximum benefit of the skill bonus.

Inevitable I eventually lost the bonus. But continued training learning skills as a priority. I quite enjoyed mining. Would I become a miner? That’s boring right? I actually started to like it, but would my interest still be there after I had maxed my mining abilities and wasn’t chasing a higher yield anymore?

Time would tell…

Lessons to be learned

The huge trouble I had with the Kritsan Parthus and Dagan certainly taught me a lot about how weapon type and shield/armor tanking can make a big difference in a fight. My lessons were learnt rather by necessity though, as I was forced to learn to have any chance of killing of these super hard opponents…
 
To celebrate my success I decided to splurge out on better implants and a couple of expensive learning skills books. Up until then I had been trying to resist spending on anything unnecessary, but I felt like in a spending mood. My money went below 100m for the first time.

I received a couple of follow up sister missions, which I was informed about via EVE mail. I’m not sure when these come in, as I hadn’t been checking it, so they may have arrived mid-arc for all I know.

One was a simple courier mission just a few jumps away, but the second was a combat mission over 27 jumps away, back in an area I was in mid-arc. I made the long trek, but it was a real pain and I struggled against boredom on such a long journey.

The mission was over quickly and so I made the 27 (or so) jumps back to Arnon again... I crammed anything useful in to the cargo hold of my Omen and the rest I sold. I had decided long ago that when I finished the arc I would return to the area I started the game in and nothing had made me want to stick around the new areas I had visited.

So off I went on a 20 (odd) jump to get back ‘home’

Landing at my ‘home’ station I dumped my ‘loot’ and took a few days off playing EVE. Doing nothing much else than manually jump for the last few hours had turned my brain to mush. On the plus side a trip to a system 5 or 6 jumps away now seemed quite trivial, something I would have considered a long journey before beginning the epic arc.

Epic Mission Arc Part 4: The Conclusion

So finally I reached mission 50 of 50. Dagan was in my cargo hold and the walkthrough I had been following said the last part held no surprises, but it also said Dagan’s battle was pretty straight forward…

It turns out it was indeed a straight hand over of Dagan to the authorities who have been so keen to capture him.

The Epic Arc was finally over, but what should I do now?

Stupid is as stupid does

I havent been playing EVE that long, but I sure know what the consequences are of going in to system below 0.5 system security rating. To see what happens when someone tries to play EVE without taking any notice of system security ratings please watch the video below.

I cant quite decide if it is tragically sad or incredably funny. Most viewers seem to think its funny, so enjoy!

 
!Warning! This video contains foul language. Although it has been bleeped out of the audio, you can still work out what was said.