EVE Online

I didn’t write as many posts about EVE as I had imagined, but it’s a lot harder to write about an MMO that I have actively played for only a few months, compared to one that I played actively for over 10 years, hardly surprising.

As I wrote at the start of the month I joined Brave Newbies in NullSec again and so far it was a very good decision. People are nice and helpful, I’m learning a lot and having a ton of fun. They’re not annoyed by my noob questions that don’t sound like a 50m SP player, but I did play the offline skilling game for quite a few months of my ~2 paid years. And the rest of the time I was a poster child casual in highsec…

Anywyay, it’s been a great month and I went on a ton of fleets, often a few days in a row and sometimes with 2 things on the same day. I dove into PI (again) and tried to sell of all my remaining stuff in HighSec.

Now here’s a list of ships I have lost. As I’ve been flying a lot of Logi I don’t think my killmail ratio is painting such a realistic picture, but then again with BRAVE mostly flying cheap ships with a little bigger numbers, what kind of picture *does* it actually paint?

• 3 Osprey
• 1 Caracal
• 1 Crucifier
• 1 Catalyst
• 1 Scythe
• 2 Velator
• 2 Thrasher
• 2 Dragoon
• 1 Atron
• 1 Epithal
• 4 Pods

Also while it could’ve been more posts, there at least were some:

• joined Brave Newbies
• hauling some stuff, badly
• some fights
• reached 50m SP
• a big battle

Also some “milestones” I reached:

• can basically fly all our ships in our “Novice” doctrine, which means mostly T1
• can fly a Basilisk now (with Logi V) which used up all of the extracted skills I got
• I can fly Bombers now (well, one racial, but it counts)
• finished the “Estaplished Player Skillplan” with the exception of Biology V for Drugs
• close to flying a Dictor

Unfortunately I couldn’t play the last days, I would have loved to go on a stratop with a Basilisk, but I’m in high hopes that it will work out soon.

It’s Blapril and this is post number 19.

Yesterday I finally managed to have a stratop fleet available in my timezone, while not at work, and with a doctrine where I could join!

Of course I had no idea what was going on, but we jumped through a lot of gates and ansiblexes, finally arriving where a handful of Titans were waiting for jump bridges. One purple and 2 blue ones, plus a few extras.

The battle lasted quite a while and apart from the massive TiDi (yay 1600 people on grid) it was actually fun to logi in an Osprey. I somehow managed to be the last man standing (from the 2 cap chains) after we lost all Basilisks and then all other Ospreys, not sure if we had Scythes and/or Scimitars left.

As I heard later it was about a TEST Astrahus. We didn’t manage to defend it but I was told we won the ISK war. Even got a battle report this time. 12ob is quite number. Also I managed to take some screenshots this time, I’m absolutely happy with this day.

It’s Blapril and this is post number 11.

No new posts for 3 days? Something must have happened. Yeah, something happened.

As I had written I originally went to NullSec in a new char because I was still occupied with Mining and playing with friends in HighSec at the time, and I had a few bigger ships and didn’t really want to move away or sell my stuff. So I made a new char and tried to avoid some of my beginner mistakes of speccing all over, but just focus on combat. So a few days ago I actually sat down and compared the skills I had acquired on these 2 characters and how different they were. And apparently they weren’t very different at all. The ~15m SP char had only like 2m of skills that the 47m SP char didn’t have, basically 2x Racial Frigate 5 instead of 4 and like 3 other skills with 1 level more – for the rest the other char had a complete superset and could do the same things, just better in most ways. So maybe I should actually move him to NullSec and change mains? But wouldn’t my remaining 2.5 months of dual training be wasted then? Well first of all I kinda got them for free by subscribing for 3 months at the correct time and second, I remembered that Skill Extractors existed.

Maybe it’s clear now where this is going. Skill Injectors have diminishing returns, you always extract 500k SP from one char, but you only get 500k if you inject below 5m SP, or 400k below 50m SP – and as I wrote, I was sitting at 47.5m SP, basically the last chance to use them with a non-newbie character without wasting too much money (you only get 300k below 80m and after that only 150k). So I hatched a plan to actually spend those 45 EUR to buy 10 skill injectors and boost my main. I could reasonably justify that to myself by having saved up a full month of restaurant/takeaway lunch money by working from home. Gladly I asked around and got told that a key point is that while you can extract SP from an Alpha char (if it has more then 5.5m SP), it only works if you spent those SP in Omega-only skills. For some reason the Alpha chars on my second account have over 6m SP (I guess mostly from shooting rats in events) but it had never been paid to be Omega, so those were out. Fortunately my hauler alt also had more than 6m and actually had a few useless SP. So in the end I bought 7 skill injectors for 36 EUR combined, used 2 on my Hauler alt und 5 on my original NullSec char. This got me 2.8m SP for my main and he’s now at 50.2m and I got him into the Alliance today and managed to fly safely to our staging system, with all expensive training implants intact. And I have a taxi Interceptor now, which wasn’t needed because I didn’t see a single non-blue on the way.

Now I just to get everything I didn’t contract to my Hauler for storage/selling shipped to our station, which will probably take a few days and cost me ~20m, but I think it’s worth it. But I guess I’m now fully a NullSec dweller in a fighting Alliance. And I can fly stuff bigger than a Destroyer. Fitting them is still kinda costly for my wallet, so I guess I’ll stick to Cruisers for now, but the official doctrine ships I can fly has now doubled I guess, just not sure yet how many I want to lose.

Wilhelm has often posted milestones and now from 50 on I’ll try to do that as well, because I find these kind of lists really interesting, and I would’ve reached this milestone in roughly a month or two anyway.

Skill category             Points     No. of skills
===================================================
Drones                     7,482,040  18
Spaceship Command          7,358,478  43
Gunnery                    6,433,121  25
Engineering                5,708,315  14
Navigation                 4,129,060  10
Armor                      2,545,805  10
Shields                    2,260,080  10
Missiles                   2,232,395  19
Targeting                  2,154,040   8
Electronic Systems         1,977,794  11
Resource Processing        1,015,545  15
Science                      491,025   4
Rigging                      455,530  10
Social                       434,510   6
Scanning                     335,765   7
Trade                        285,020   8
Production                   276,743   4
Neural Enhancement           167,765   4
Planet Management             96,000   4
Fleet Support                 10,500   6
Subsystems                     1,000   4
Structure Management             750   1
Corporation Management           250   1

Skills at Level 5: 59
Skills at Level 4: 82
Skills at Level 3: 66
Skills at Level 2: 9
Skills at Level 1: 22
Skills at Level 0: 4

It’s Blapril and this is post number 7.

Today I saw a pre-ping for 19:00 EVE time that sounded interesting. A FUN fleet (which means nothing else than “not for complete beginners” and not “totally important strategical op”, so the majority of fleets. So I came on and was pleasantly surprised they were handing out ships (I got a Dragoon for ~8m ISK, I guess the Talwars were a little more each) and we were already around 50 people and were about to undock when shit got real really quick and everyone was told to get to the Coalition comms and in an important fleet. We all? kinda did and then some other newbros and I noticed we had no idea what to *exactly* do. And of course the other Mumble server hadn’t remembered my password, so I had to fiddle with the Password manager on one screen, with the route planner tool on the other and I’m kinda surprised I arrived in time…

At least I wasn’t the one being told to shut up in comms, but as I sat there at the staging undock, probably in a wrong ship (it’s cool that they announce “X fleet” but if you’ve never been on one of those because you can’t fly it you probably don’t know which Logi and Tackle are ok to bring) I missed the Titan jump bridge (actually no idea how you’d activate it, or if you need to be near the Titan and I didn’t even see the any Titan in the overview… as I said it was very hectic). So I just stayed on comms and listened and flew back to our staging in hopes that our original fleet would be reformed.

It seemed I was lucky because just 30mins later it indeed reformed and we undocked and went hunting for… something. Oh, of course I got lost before something big happened (I blame some people talking over the FC and I jumped a gate I shouldn’t have) and was killed, so I bought a second Dragoon, minus 2-3 fits that weren’t available and try to catch up to the fleet. That took a while, I avoided a few neutrals and actually managed to find them again. Not sure if there was a real plan but after a lot of jumping (definitely more than usual) we actually got into a fight and maybe we even won the ISK battle. I got on 5 kill mails as a Neut, and only spent like 7m of my own money, yay.

But there’s definitely some things I need to relearn:

• Listen closely and get to know the damn NullSec system names in Catch
• Not overlook broadcast for reps, and actually get into Logi again
• Sort overview “better” so I can lock/align/jump quicker

Anyway, it’s 1 am and I was busy for roundabout 3h and had a lot of fun. As I write this some stratop ping goes out, I think I’d be kept more busy in USTZ or AUTZ, but such is life.

It’s Blapril and this is post number 5.

Phew, getting back into EVE isn’t as easy as getting back into a fantasy MMO where you run around and mash buttons, but it’s fun.

Last night we did another small fleet with a few Arty Thrashers and actually managed to get 2 good kills in before most of us died. (80m + 70m versus our combined ~20m). Yeah, I know, this is kinda ridiculous but it’s nice for total beginners and people who feel like total beginners.
Today I wanted to get rid of some Ore I had mined back in 2018 (I guess?) and as my main reprocessing contact doesn’t play right now and my HighSec alt only gets a ~68% yield out of 87% I was advised to not reprocess myself. I had totally forgotten how tedious hauling is though and so I first noticed that I didn’t even have a Miasmos handy (with the Ore hold) and that it would take like 30 trips to Jita, which is kinda ridiculous. So today I learnt about compressing ore, no idea how long it has been ingame, but I had never heard of it because I had always gotten my ore reprocessed directly in the system I reside in. So the only problem was that there was only 1 POS in the next system where I could do it, but 30x 1 system is a lot better than 30x a few into Jita. Fortunately I had to do some work-related reading to do today so I could (maybe for the first time in my life) do a few clicks in a game while reading on the second monitor, with a clear conscience. Awesome. Also I spent my lunch break doing just this. Oh, and did I mention that I found several tutorials that told you how compressing should work, but not how to do it?

Intermission: How to compress ore in EVE Online

Go to Utilities -> Structure Finder, uncheck Stations, see which POS are close, fly there, unload your Ore into the Item Hangar and then RIGHT CLICK the Ore and choose “Compress” and don’t try to use the “Reprocessing Plant” icon on the right side menu. Not all POS that have the “recycling” Reprocessing Icon in the Structure Finder allow you to compress, so if there’s no menu point when right clicking, load your ore and find another POS.

OK, back to the story:

Then I only had to take 3 trips to Jita. My old rule of thumb was only packing ~75m worth of goods in a badly tanked Industrial but I was told a better formula was 3k or 5k ISK per EHP, so with a 10k EHP ship that would be 50m worth of stuff. As I didn’t have the fits handy and didn’t waste any more time I just packed 70m worth of stuff, flew to Jita (it worked), and then bought some better stuff for my Nereus (compressing is awesome, didn’t need to use neither the Miasmos nor the Extended Cargoholds), so that it had 20k EHP. In the end I actually made ~250m but that’s about it now, no more old stuff and resources just idly sitting in a station that I can sell. Now I have roughly 1b to spend on NullSec fun and then I’m completely out of money as I don’t have any income except one (probably badly setup) PI thing. Might get a second one

It’s Blapril and this is post number 3.

I’ve never actually written much about EVE Online, despite playing on and off. At the start of the year I forgot to cancel my 3-month sub, so it was supposed to end in April and I only flew around a bit in highsec, running missions, shooting rats, getting skill points. Wouldn’t say the money was wasted, but it wasn’t spent well either. So then I actually remembered to unsub in February or March, but then CCP had this offer of free 3 months of double character training with a 3 month sub… and because I’d probably spend most of March and April indoors anyway I gave in.

But this time I actually wanted to get back in action, so a little over a week ago I submitted my application and have been a member of Brave Newbies again for a few days and today I finally managed to undock and die in a bubble. Interesting how much you can forget in 2 or 3 years, but I only lost my fleet once. And found them again. Then we died in a gate camp and only 2 of us survived. And then I died while trying to reunite with the folks in new ships. Ah well, it was fun and I hope there will be a few more training runs with free handout Thrashers or something cheap, because I was actually i bit surprised that even the “total beginner” fits got to 10-20m easily. And I’m absolutely not space rich.

It’s Blapril and this is post number 1.