20090327

Infinite impossibilities

The mission arcs left me with a feeling that some agent would soon ask me to do something. But they don't. I have to go ask the agents for something to do and so far what they propose has been something less than challenging. Compared to the epic arc these level 1 missions seem all too easy and repetitive. I'm ready to take on more challenges, but the level 2 agents I want aren't available yet. There are some short mission arcs with a more robust plotline and backstory, but mostly it's just standalone missions which fail to deliver a feeling of true involvement. Grinding through 16 missions gives an important storyline mission with increase in faction standings, but the gain in standings is double-edged, no matter what faction you chose to work for some other will like you less for doing so. Limited implants are a typical reward for these level 1 storylines, but they are of little use since I already have all except charisma at +2 and the plan is to get the standard +3 implants for most important attributes as soon as I finish training the required level of cybernetics.

The wormholes and tech 3 ships are certainly going to be out of my league for a long time. However, in league or not I did see a wormhole last week. Someone who had scanned it down left a bookmark at a station undock point and of course I just couldn't resist taking it and having a look 15 minutes later. The possibility of losing a ship to pirate campers or just being stranded in W-space didn't entice me, though, so I chose not to enter.












Besides missioning, hunting NPC pirates, also called ratting, is an option for collecting bounties, loot and salvage. NPC pirates can be found in the asteroid belts, unless the system security is very high. The rats in 0.8 security are suitable for a complete newbie, but the rewards of hunting there are low. For a two weeks old flying a destroyer 0.5 seems like the place to be, plenty of rats and almost decent bounties on them. Occasionally a pirate commander spawns at an asteroid belt. Commanders are tougher nuts to crack and have a significant bounty on them. The loot is better too, quite often 1000 rounds of faction ammo among other things. My salvaging skill isn't high enough to salvage commander wrecks so it is possible that the salvage is particularly juicy. The rewards increase as the security goes down and apparently the rats in lowsec would offer a decent fight for someone of my caliber. I'm just not ready to take on the player pirates I would be bound to meet should I venture there...

20090315

The Blood-Stained Stars

The length of this arc is indeed epic! There is a total of 52 missions divided into 7 chapters and scattered around all four empires. I'm not going to spoil anyones fun by blurting out a synopsis for this mission arc, no worries, this will be all technical.

The missions start out rather easy but slowly get more difficult. A couple of the missions gave me a formidable challenge, but I managed to go through them without losing any ships or having to ask others for help. I had to warp out of missions to save my ship a few times. Agent mission rewards for completing the arc sum up to 8 million ISK. Mission time bonuses are pitifully low. Loot and salvage are good compared to the tutorial arcs. End of chapter missions weren't harder than the others and didn't offer any special rewards. Completing the arc didn't yield any epic rewards either, which is a shame.

When I started the arc there were nearly 100 pilots in Arnon and someone asked what are they all doing there. He told the system used to be sleepy backwaters, with local counting around 10. Not all the people were newbies, the novelty had attracted older players as well. Some of them were helping out those having difficulties in their missions, some were recruiting or otherwise advertising their corporation. Soon more came and the can baiting and duelling right next to station formed a constant spectacle. I marked some of the griefers by changing my standings towards them so I could be wary of anything they had jettisoned. When I managed to finish the arc there were already over 200 pilots buzzing in the system. Today local peaked at 300 and lag started to rear it's ugly head.

First one of the more difficult missions was Lair of the snakes from the Automaton impediment chapter. I completed it succesfully in my rifter, but the serpentis pirates gave out a tough fight. In fact, so tough that I started to think about upgrading to a destroyer right away. Soon I bought and fitted the Relentless Kitten (thrasher). Sporting that fine piece of killing machinery I didn't encounter any serious problems until Burning down the hive from the Queens and drones chapter. I closed in on the drones and found my destroyer webified and warp scrambled. I couldn't move or escape and they were eating my fat shields at an alarming rate. I thought I would soon lose the ship, but didn't give up. I concentrated on taking out the scramblers which weren't exactly of the lock and pop variety and warped out as soon as I could, shields completely gone and a dent on the armor. The next run was more manageable and I didn't go into armor.

By the amount of help requests I had witnessed in local chat I thought that Chasing shadows from the Closing in chapter was going to be tough. Nevertheless, I decided to go bravely in my destroyer and found myself facing a battlecruiser supported by a group of frigates! I kept my cool, closed in quickly and started peppering the beast with autocannons. It's shields came down disappointingly slowly. On the bright side, I was orbiting so close it had difficulties dealing damage to me. It used an energy neutralizer and the capacitor was soon empty. My afterburner shut down but luckily the autocannons weren't affected. I was still orbiting fast enough to avoid getting seriously hit and the frigates didn't pose a problem. The battlecruiser went down under my relentless assault.

Learning the ropes

I spent some time honing my overview settings. I made tabs for different things, one for navigation (showing the gates and stations and nothing more), one to show everything (so I can find things which are not shown on other tabs) and one for combat. Using the overview to quickly identify and lock targets is so much easier when there's no useless distracting debris in there.

The Knowledge Base and EVElopedia are real treasure troves of EVE knowledge, but digging up what I need to know can take some time. The search function seems to give better results in the wiki, but the knowledge base is far less cluttered with links so the text is easier to read.

There's certainly a steep learning curve involved in this game...



I have learned that scamming and baiting are part of the game experience. All over the market people are trying to sell items at ludicrous prices and buy them at ridiculously low prices and no matter where I go, at some point someone in local chat is trying to trick people into donating him ISK promising they get it back doubled. As if! I have seen a hapless newbie fall for a dirty trick: he took from a container named 'needed for mission' and got shot. Clear-eyed newbies are not safe from pirates either, not even in high security space. I have also seen a wreck of a battleship at a gate and looted large smartbomb modules from it. Losing a battleship, taking a blow in security status and giving someone kill rights was probably worth the loot on that someone's hauler. The space is a very cold place with pirates waiting in front of every safe haven.

20090314

Ore theft

After breezing through more than 20 missions I wanted some excitement. I headed back where I started to see if there was anything interesting. Someone had left a container at the station so I checked inside. Some loot, nothing fancy, but why not take it? There was a popup explaining that if I did that it would be stealing and thieves could be dealt with. Overview told me the station was at docking range so I took the loot anyway and docked immediately. I got free stuff, but there was a 15 minute aggression timer. If I undocked the person I stole from could start shooting at me without CONCORD intervention. I had seen corpses around the station before, could I share their fate for this? I spent the next 15 minutes reading EVE Knowledge Base while feeling a bit like a criminal, but not at all in a bad way.

Now that wasn't exactly what I would call exciting, so after the timer was up I undocked and warped to an asteroid belt. As this was in the high end of high security space there were no NPC pirates to be found. Just a couple of miners in there drilling the rocks away. Most were newbies like me. They were just snailpacing onwards on their path to prosperity while I intended to find the fastlane to fame and glory. I even found a hulk in one of the belts, stripping the asteroids bare with it's huge beams...

I continued to go through the belts until I saw another container, right next to a mining frigate. I was curious so I looked inside - there was more veldspar in there than I could possibly squeeze into the rifter I was flying. The container was owned by the guy right next to it, the one flying the the measly mining frigate. I bookmarked the can, took some of the ore and then quickly warped back to station just to be sure. It wasn't much, but stealing it was a bit exciting. I went straight back to the bookmark to take some more. The guy stopped mining and warped off. He wrote to the local chat that there was a scary pirate flashing red at the belt he just left. I wasn't sure what was going to happen so I headed back to the station and stayed in there for a while thinking about the whole thing. Stealing in a frigate wouldn't be profitable. I would need a vulnerable industrial ship to commit the Grand Theft Ore and that could be risky. A full load of dense veldspar on a wreathe would be worth around half a million ISK. Would that be worth ruining the day for a complete stranger? Could I do that all day long? Probably not.

Getting started

So, on the patch day I already had the character created and the unpatched EVE installed. Out of curiosity I tried to login to EVE some hours before the downtime was due to be over. I was offered to download and install the Apocrypha so I did. It was a huge download, well over a gigabyte. While downloading I took a look at the EVE website. There were lots of event news coming in all the time. Having already read a couple of the recent chronicles which had foreshadowed what was on the news it felt like something big was happening in New Eden at the very moment. I enjoyed the immersion this unraveling story gave.

Then the downtime ended. There was another patch to download, but it was small. Finally, the game! Logged in and went through the Aura tutorials that popped up. After wondering a bit what to put in the skill queue I did the tutorial missions in the starter system and received more popups from Aura. Next I was given a choice about my character path: industry, trade or combat. Mission agents were referred for each of them.

I chose combat and contacted Fykalia Adaferid at Republic Military School in Hadaugago. I was given a 10 mission arc 'Cash flow for Capsuleers'. Many of these involved dealing with Angel Cartel pirates. After shooting my way through the missions I had gained only little loot from the wrecks, the real rewards were important skillbooks to inject and even implants for which I didn't have the skills to use yet. Since implants speed up skill learning I made it top priority to learn the skills required to use implants. Realizing that learning skills would be useful for the same reason I put a bit of them on the queue too. In the end of the combat arc I got a rifter - nice combat frigate.

I was suggested by an agent to sometime go see Sister Alitura at Sisters Of EVE Bureau in Arnon. It is the start for the epic mission arc, one of the new things in Apocrypha. Before heading there I decided to continue going through these tutorial mission arcs so I would be ready for any epic challenges ahead.

Next was the 10 mission trade arc 'Balancing the books'. This was given to me by Latorfani Aldimund, also residing at Republic Military School in Hadaugago. The few enemies that appeared were nothing more than target practice for my rifter, the autocannons teared through them like they were made of hot air wrapped in tinfoil. However, as easy as this was for someone from the military school, the trade arc was obviously more profitable than the combat arc. Rewards were similar to the combat arc, but more valuable - I was given implants and skillbooks, including the skillbooks for salvaging and hacking, worth 900000 ISK a piece. I also got to try out the mini-professions (salvaging, archaeology and hacking) and tried a little manufacturing by making some ammo with a single run blueprint copy. The final ship reward for this arc was a wreathe - small industrial ship with a cargo capacity of 3300m3.

At this point I was getting tired of missioning and didn't go for the industry arc. Apparently it is called 'Making Mountains of Molehills' and looks like an introduction into mining, manufacturing and invention jobs. Maybe some day... or then again, maybe not.

All in all going through at least one or two of these mission arcs seem like a very good primer to the game. The missions aren't hard and the lessons learned are useful. Some of the rewards are substantial, at least for a newbie. I have to say the time bonuses on missions I've ran after these arcs are regularly a joke. In most cases, spending a couple of minutes salvaging the wrecks from the mission considerably increases the profits even if the time bonus is lost. As the missions start to get more difficult the usefulness of salvaging profession gets more pronounced too.

20090313

Character creation

Meow Morta came to be just before the Great Patching called Apocrypha because I thought it would be the best of both the new and the old. I would get 800000 skillpoints immediately and the next 800000 at double speed. Only problem would be to know exactly what I wanted to do. If I chose the wrong path in character creation I could have a head start at doing things I might actually never do...

What did I want from this game? Fun and excitement of course. Mostly independent play but not alone all the time. Slowly growing to become part of an economic backbone for other players... would be tedious and boring. This exciting fun would have to involve shooting, dying and cries of despair and victory. I needed a character who could fight.

I googled and skimmed through search results, read the forums and then googled some more. To be a fighter the character should have high perception and willpower and there would be very little need for charisma. Powergaming seems to be a strong trend among the players and particularly Achura of the Caldari were mentioned in more than one place. But I wanted to consider the roleplaying opportunities the different races of New Eden would give. Besides I didn't like the Achura character portraits I came across.

Amarr: fervent believers with a long history of slaving and conquering. Caldari: emerging police state where money is god. Gallente: liberal democrats. Minmatar: self-emancipated tribes of slaves. For me this clearly ruled out both the Amarr and the Caldari. Looking at pictures there was aesthetic retrofuturistism all over the Gallente and a cyberpunk twist with a splash of grunge in the Minmatar, but that wasn't nearly enough to tip the scale all the way to Minmatar.

Another thing to consider were bloodlines and ancestry. I tried to take into account the influence they had on attributes, the character portrait and roleplaying aspects. Although both the Intaki and Vherokior look nice and both reborns and mystics seem somewhat interesting to roleplay, the attributes just weren't good enough for a fighter. Out of necessity it had to be a choice between a Gallente immigrant with most extra points in intelligence and a Sebiestor tinkerer with most extra points in perception.

I chose sebiestor. I chose Republic Military School. I was ready... or almost ready. Getting the character portrait done proved surprisingly difficult. I think I spent too long at it. Luckily I had found help from the web how to avoid disconnection during character creation. After the face and background were done and I was happy enough about them I tried turning the character to left and right and up and down and every way it ended up she just didn't seem to get on terms with herself. Either she looked too arrogant, hostile or absentminded. The eyes were just stupid most of the time. Finally I found a neat stance and thought it was good and then on the next screen it had been reset. The portrait generation is frustrating and in the end I gave up. Hey, it looks nice enough on the login screen.