Wednesday, May 5, 2010

When in a rut... wander a new direction

So I've lived in the same area of space for most of my 2.5 years in EVE. Well, to be more specific, I've lived in two areas pretty much exclusively. One is Gallente empire space, and the other is NPC 0.0 in ORE/Syndicate space. I've also (as mentioned before) spent most of that time in NPC corps, and one player corp (now two). The hardest part about living in the current region of 0.0 is that we are blue to practically everyone, and our alliance has a reputation for hot-drops and heavy-loss-inducing suicide fleets. This translates (loosely) into fewer and fewer options for good fights. People either safe up, dock up, or just plain leave when a scout from my alliance appears in local. This has made 0.0 boring. I never thought I'd say that, but when I can safely rat in a pipe system in 0.0 with only 1-2 safes because 90% or more of all traffic is blue, 0.0 has lost its lustre.

Fortunately this should all change soon enough, with some opportunities for good fights coming, but the last month (almost two) has seen a rut where we have to go 15-20 jumps just to find a fight. But what has happened is that some of my favorite pilots to fly with have either gone MIA (not even logging in) or rogue in losec. Now understand - I don't think there's anything wrong with going to losec and losing a little sec status, even though I am still too much of a carebear to pod someone in losec. This rut extends even to my game, as I find myself spending more time in my industry alt, getting into POS production, R&D work with datacore collection, ship invention and T2 construction. Unfortunately (for me) I'm not doing it right, as I'm not inventing and building to earn ISK - I'm doing it for the day my PvP character is interesting again.

Most interesting to me, as the fledgling industrialist, is the odd drops and fluctuations of prices as a major update to EVE approaches. The industry CEO is a wizard with this, and regularly modifies what we are building in our POS farm, based on market cycles and material prices. Since I'm just getting started, I'm not really one to say "buy construction blocks" or something, but as I'm learning more I'm realizing that sometimes, the path to success is far from straight. I've been collecting the specific datacores I need for my ship invention, via a decent (L3) R&D agent near my Losec base. A recent returning player to the corp was evaluating the datacore market recently, and informed me that we were better off researching some random datacore, selling them on the market, buying the datacores we want for invention, and still be turning a profit of several million ISK per week - with no real work involved beyond posting buy and sell orders. So rather than researching Caldari and Gallente Ship datacores, I find myself researching odd physics skills. Moral of the story - sometimes the end goal is best achieved with a winding path. I will have plenty of datacores for my invention work, I will be earning additional ISK since I'm researching popular and expensive datacores instead of the ones I need, and buying my starship datacores on the market.

No comments:

Post a Comment