Suddenly, War

EVE Online, ,

I haven’t written much about my EVE adventures recently. I spent most of my time at Low-Sec Camp, which means impromptu fleets and fun fights with pirates. In fact, I had enough fun that I rather played than wrote about it. I didn’t even mention the event where we killed two capital ships worth 2 billion ISK (and therefore 4 months of subscription time on the market) each. Some people have too much money… I also didn’t mention the dedicated PvP Drake I had bought just the other day, then nearly lost in a surprise gate camp. All’s well that end ends well, though; we got out unscathed.

I already had nice plans for the weekend (mostly involving shooting pirates), but you know how it goes when you plan ahead. When I came home last night, I found a notification in my inbox that told all alliance members that another alliance had just declared war on us. That sets into motion a 24-hour period until the war goes “hot”, at which point the members of the two alliances are allowed to shoot at each other everywhere, even safe high-sec.

Incidentally, that will also mean shopping for ships will get a lot harder. Coupled with the fact that I also might lose more ships, I went on a shopping spree last night and spend almost a quarter of a billion ISK on a bunch of blackbirds, drakes and a few frigates. Figured we’d probably have many pilots with fewer skill points that would fill the frigate roles on most fleets.

Oh yeah, the warmongering alliance in question is Red vs. Blue.  It’s the roof alliance for two corporations that are constantly at war with each other to learn and practice PvP in high-sec. (Though I assume they ended the war with each other before declaring it on us.)  The war declaration letter was a bit weird, I would’ve expected this to sound more like friendly banter between two training corporations, but oh well. Not quite Mittani level at least. I think Cyndre just said he joined the Blues of Red vs. Blue. I wonder whether I’ll get to shoot at him. Or, definitely just as probably, whether he’ll get to shoot at me.

No Heart for Shotacon

General Game-related Blathering,

The whole TERA debate isn’t over yet. After we’ve discussed sexualized costumes (everybody seems to agree they’re bad, just not whether hilariously bad or repulsively bad), the next topic is the Elin. A childlike race with the TERA-typical sexualized costumes. Oh, and they only exist as female versions. It’s like TERA is brinkmanship incarnate of questionable model design.

I’ll stay out of the moral implications and discussions. Too easy to sink in and not get out, plus I’m not good with conviction anyway. Instead, I want to look at it from a strictly intellectual point of view, at which point most of the discussion becomes quite boring. Lolicon has been discussed for years, so nothing new to get from there. I am interested, however, why there are no male Elin. (Yes, there are the Popori, but they don’t qualify.) Is shotacon so much less popular in Korea than lolicon that they didn’t consider it worth putting them into the game, too?

Non-MMO Weekend: Gray Matter

General Game-related Blathering,

I used to be a huge fan of Point-and-Click adventure games. What I could get my hands on, I played in the 90ies. Sadly, the genre more or less died when 3D came around.  (I hated 3D back at the time, not only because I blamed it for the death of adventure games, but also for the hideously blocky models that replaced beautifully crafted 2D sprites. It took years until the 3D models were even close. But that is another story, and shall be told another time.) Grim Fandango probably was the last masterpiece, though I remember Gabriel Knight 3 to be a lot better than people remember it for these days. Not that it reached the glory of the first part of the series. But I’ll attribute that at least in part to the 3D graphics, which just couldn’t tell a story as intensely as 2D for many years.

Which brings me to Gabriel Knight, and its main designer. Jane Jensen has done marvelous work, and if you’ve never played any Gabriel Knight, go and do so! Please. If you can stand the pixels these days. Take the first part, it’s probably still the best. Jane Jensen has a knack for interweaving science and facts with paranormal fiction, and it shows in many of her works, such as Gabriel Knight and Gray Matter. Religious studies, voodoo, and New Orleans; or history, templars, the grail, and southern France (years before Dan Brown).

The story of the production of that game is quite complicated. It was supposed to come out many years ago, in the early 2000s. After a lot of back and forth, and near-deaths, I lost track of it at some point, thinking that it had been scrapped for good.

I just can’t keep up with stuff. Gray Matter was released 18 months ago,  and I totally missed it. Thankfully, Jane Jensen is getting ready to start on her next project, and she set up a kickstarter, which I conveniently was pointed to by… I can’t remember who? It might’ve been spinks, she had written a post about Jane two weeks ago. So I went there, liked what I saw, and immediately pledged $30. A real adventure game by someone with a good track record? That’s worth the 20-odd Euros to me. It was then that I realized that Gray Matter had not been canceled, after all. So I ordered it, and had time to play it this weekend.I’ll keep this description spoiler-free, or at least free of anything you won’t learn in the first 30 minutes of playing.

I said Jane has a knack for interweaving science, facts, and paranormal fiction, and she does it again this time. The main characters (and the two you take turns playing) are Sam(antha) Everett and Dr David Styles. Sam took me a moment to get used to, she was a bit too gothic for my taste in the beginning. But it blends well with the story, and her history as girl with a troubled youth, and street-smart street magician/con-woman works out quite well. When her motorbike breaks down, she happens to end up in the mansion of Dr Styles, a neurobiologist who became a recluse after the death of his wife, and, as you will learn, is maybe a bit too obsessed with it, even several years after the fateful car accident.

Maybe a bit too large and pretentious for my taste, but I'd still take it if I got it for free.

Again, David’s model heavily relies on stereotypes: his phantom-of-the-opera-esque mask that hides the disfigured part of his face was maybe a bit too much. The game revolves around two main goals: get Samantha an invitation into the prestigious Daedalus Club for Illusionists in London, and find out what really happened the night of the accident, and what’s behind the mysterious sightings on David’s deceased wife in the mansion.

The characters are maybe not likable, but they work well in the story, and you can’t help but become at least a bit attached to them. The strength of the prior games, faithful representation of the town in which it plays, seems to show again: I’ve never been to Oxford, but I’ve seen photos, and the skyline looks very much like the real thing.

That's Oxford alright.

In adventures, story is the point that decides whether they succeed or fail (style can be a close second). The story, again I want to say in the case of Jane Jensen, works very well; and that’s coming from a person who’s neither in King nor Brown nor any such stuff.  It might not have the pull of the first Gabriel Knight, where around day 4, I simply could not stop playing any more, but I still liked it. It was captivating enough that I played through the game in two days.

There are a couple of smaller things that irked me. First, some things felt more American than English to me. Do they say “cell phone” these days in Britain? Then again, the Brits maybe just tried to be polite toward (US) Sam and used the American word. And second, sometimes it felt quite arbitrary whether you had to “do” things or whether “knowing” was enough. In many cases, you simply had to read or overhear things to use the knowledge later on. However, in other cases, that was not enough. For example, in one case, you had two lists that you had to compare to find a missing name. It required you to tick all the names on one list, so that Samantha would note how was missing. It was not quite clear to me I had to do the ticking; but you needed to do it to trigger the next puzzle. These are all smaller nitpicks though.

Difficulty-wise, it was about middle of the road. I only got seriously stuck twice, in which cases, I looked up what I was missing on the Internet after about an hour. One was a “how stupid of me” moment, the other a “that didn’t make that much sense to me” moment. I probably would’ve figured out both eventually, but I’m such an impatient person! I wanted to know how the story ended.

Overall, it took me about 12 hours to play through the game. I’d say it cost me about as much, per-hour, as a hardcover book, and it was worth that to me. That’s for the “Collector’s Edition”, which comes with additional goodies, one of them the soundtrack on CD. Which was worth it: the score is very atmospheric (done by Jane’s husband Robert Holmes, who also did the music for the Gabriel Knights) and well done, and I still catch myself humming the song “Safe in Arms” that plays a vital role in the story.

If you like adventures, and live behind the moon like I do, pick up the game now. If you don’t want to spend as much money, amazon.com seems to have a cheap digital download version. Oh, and definitely have a look at the kickstarter project. Of all those that I’ve pledged so far (ok, that’s not been that many), this is the one I have highest hopes for. After seeing Gray Matter, I increased my pledge to $50. That’s how much I liked it.

Pilgrimage to the EVE Gate

EVE Online, , , , ,

There are games rich in lore. The richest is without a doubt LotRO, because it can tap into back story filling tens of thousands of pages. Games that have been running for some time also tend to collect quite a bit of lore over the years. I was told Everquest has an impressive amount, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about that game.

In contrast, EVE Online’s back story is paper-thin. At some point, people developed interstellar space travel, by through a wormhole that opened close enough to earth. It was called the EVE Gate, and it led into the New Eden system. (As far as I can tell, the EVE Gate wasn’t a stargate in the game terminology, but rather a wormhole). At some point, the wormhole collapsed, took most of the New Eden System with it, and left the humans on that side stranded. From that point, the factions started to develop.

The remains of the EVE Gate.

Or something like that. It all seems a bit hazy to me.

Anyway, I had spent a week in the Uni’s Low-Sec Camp (LSC), practicing PvP in small ships. I managed to offset my embarrassing loss of an Industrial hauler with many kills of small and large vessels. What I missed though was large fleet travel. The LSC is mostly about small skirmishes, rarely more than 10 people. So the event last weekend came as a welcome change. The Uni organized a trip to the New Eden system in Low-Sec. The tradition is, once you’re there, to burn away from the entry stargate towards the collapsed wormhole as far as possible. You can never reach it because the object doesn’t actually exist, it’s merely a background texture. Once you think you’ve gone far enough, you anchor a can with a personal message at that point. (The anchoring means it’ll stay there for a couple of weeks instead of hours before it goes poof.)

[More text and pictures after the cut.] Continue reading Pilgrimage to the EVE Gate →

I love it when a plan comes together

Uncategorized

I said in my not-so-enthusiastic review about SW:TOR that I would probably buy the game if I could get it for less than 30 Euros. I’ve been checking amazon.de every now and then. The box price kept inching slowly, Euro by Euro, to the 30 Euro margin. Not without a few strange setbacks – sometimes, it would cost 3 Euros more than the day before. Finally, I found this price yesterday:

So I kept true to my word and ordered it. I won’t have much time to play at all in the next week or two. I might not even sign up with the free month until then. Actually, the main reason I ordered it now and not at a later point is logistics: there will be some troubles with receiving parcels for me, starting from next week. I won’t go into the details, because they’re utterly boring, but bottom line is, my convenient way of picking up orders that were delivered during the day on my way home in the evening is going away. The alternative would be to pick them up the next day in the main post office, which always has at least a 30 minute queue. So order last night it was.

Thuul: if you read this, I’ll probably be up for a bit of TORing soon.

In Which I Lament The Depiction Of Males In Computer Games

Even More General Blathering, General Game-related Blathering, Where The Dead Horses Roam, ,

I had sworn I’d never write a post about the topic of topics, the filler of comments with gall and spite, the one topic you must not write about as a male, lest be scorned…

Oh Boy! (or Girl, I guess, to genderize correctly.) In all honesty, I’m scared. I hope the relative obscurity of my blog will prevent me from the dreaded 100-comment discussions. Anyway, here it goes:

I’ve heard the question over and over again. Why do women complain about the depiction of women in computer games, but men do not about depictions of men? The often-cited reason is: Depictions of females in computer games are sexualized to fuel male fantasies, while depictions of males are empowered, to also fuel male fantasies. Hence, guys don’t have anything to complain about, that’s why you don’t hear about it. This is called “false equivalence”.

So I guess it’s my time to speak up and claim that, to me personally, this “false” is a “true”. I want to complain about the depiction of men in computer games. There are two points I want to look at and refute:

Sexualization is bad, Power Fantasies are good?

Maybe the problem is that the female stereotype shown is more offensive than the male one.

That would imply either a) sexualization is inherently bad in itself, or b) power fantasies are inherently good. Now, you can argue that “sexualization” is an over-reliance on sexual attractiveness, and this is bad as it is a stereotype. I will even agree, I hate chainmail bikinis with passion. But on the same level, “power fantasies” are an over-reliance on bullyism, and this is also a stereotype, hence bad.

Now, let’s reduce it from the stereotypes to the underlying concepts. Sex and physical prowess. Sex isn’t inherently bad. We all like it, we like to do it, and unless we cheat nature, which we also all like to do all the time, we actually need it to survive (as a group). Physical prowess also isn’t inherently bad. Back when we had to run 5 hours chasing a gnu, we actually needed it to survive. But we don’t need it any more. Physical Prowess is much more archaic than sex. Therefore, it often gets sublimated: the power of physical prowess is converted into more intangible power over other people.

If that is true (I’m not 100% sure, I admit I haven’t read more than a couple of introductory texts on psychology and psychoanalysis), the male depictions in computer games hint at having power over other people. I find that even more offensive than being sexually available. Why do I, as a male, have to subjugate others to fill my gender role? I don’t like having power over others, it makes me feel queasy. I’d rather “make love than war”. I reserve my right to be offended at those male depictions, because they pigeonhole me into something I find highly problematic.

There is no choice for women?

This has become less and less true over the years. Of course, there are still bad apples. The last wave of posts about this topics was motivated by the TERA demo. I looked at the youtube videos featuring the classes, and I see a problem there: about 90% of the women are scantily clad, about 90% of the men are heavily armored or at least properly clothed. But even in TERA, there are the occasional properly-clothed and even armored females, and the half-naked guys. Then again, the game is going to tank anyway, and we can get worked-up about it all day. What can you expect from a game that has a brainless muscle beating up your target audience as advertising campaign?

On the other hand, many games at least give you a token choice. And if you don’t like that one, you’re equally out of luck as woman or man. Don’t like over-sexualized females? (I don’t, so I follow the rules laid out here.) Better don’t play a Demon Hunter in Diablo III, or a Blood Elf in WoW, or a Norn in GW2. If you’re hell-bent on playing a female character, switch to the Barbarian, Orc, or Sylvari, respectively. If you’re hell-bent on playing the class/race, switch gender, and chances are you’ll be happy (with the exception of the Norn, I guess), because stereotyping in games seems to run along races rather than sexes these days.

Don’t like over-muscled males? (I don’t, so I follow the rules laid out here.) Better don’t play a Barbarian in Diablo III, or an Orc in WoW, or a Norn in GW2. If you’re hell-bent on playing a male character, switch to the Demon Hunter, Blood Elf, or Sylvari, respectively. If you’re hell-bent on playing the class/race, switch gender, and chances are you’ll be happy (with the exception of the Norn, I guess), because stereotyping in games seems to run along races rather than sexes these days.

So, is there no choice in female characters? No, there sure is. Is there less choice in female characters than in male characters? Hard to make a blanket statement, but I can’t see it. Elves are typically a great avoider for the male stereotype, and it seems we’re getting to the point where either evil-ish or hunky races avoid the female stereotype. In that respect, I disagree with Spinks; I think there indeed are different female models available in most games, and that there is choice.

The Final Rant

Stop reading here. Seriously. (Actually, I decided to delete most of it before I hit “publish”, because it detracted from my point.) Just one short summary:

I find many male depictions in video games offensive, because they imply I need to be a power-hungry hunk to be really male. I don’t like to have power over others, and I’m not athletic. Stop exploiting this weird gender image, it’s not working for me. Then again, most games give me a choice to avoid the stereotypes I don’t like. So get over it, all genders and sexes.

Post-Easter Rollercoaster Ride

EVE Online, ,

No, not that one, though the fair is in town.

I’ve been slacking a bit on my updates about EVE. When I last wrote about it, I had just gotten accepted into EVE University under the new and much simpler ruleset, and spent a lot of time setting myself up. After which I spent some time in the mining camp and made a decent amount of money. I should probably do that more often, especially with the expected rise in mineral prices that will happen after the next patch (when they’ll remove mineral drops from most of the NPC enemies). But, to be honest, while I like mining, it can get boring after a couple of days. I was looking for other things to do.

How I Got My Egg Basket Blown Up

How’s that for an Easter analogy? (Alright, alright, a Euro into the pun jar.)

I returned home from a family weekend on Sunday evening, just in time to catch a class. “Low-Sec Hauling”. Ooooh! The great outdoors! Running through the equivalent of countryside a couple of centuries ago, mostly empty and peaceful, but with the occasional highwaymen. That sounded interesting. We got taught a couple of the important basics (use a cheap ship until you know what you’re doing, fit it with warp core stabilizers so you’ll be able to get away from many gate camps, etc.), and off I went. I spent Sunday and much of Monday running back and forth between regulated high-sec and lawless low-sec, leaving pirates in the dust several times. I was invincible!

You know what happens after such delusions of grandeur take grip. You’ll be humbled, big time.

I started my Tuesday evening in Jita (the main trade hub of the EVE universe) with my low-sec hauling ship. I had gotten some good deals on courier contracts the day before, coming from Hek (a secondary trade hub). I was looking for something worthwhile to transport back there. Sure enough, I found a decent courier contract, and filled the rest of my cargo space with some commodities. I programmed the flight computer to get a route, and got going. I jumped, and jumped, and jumped. Jita, Sobaseki, Iyen-Oursta, … my after-work slump was setting in, but I was in the flow of hauling. Space Trucking, baby! Ambeke gate, warp&jump. Criele gate, warp&jump. Rancer gate, warp&… wait a second. Rancer? Rancer?!

… Oh crap.

Now for those of you who don’t know, Rancer is a well-known system in EVE. It is one of the maybe 15 or 20 I can properly spell, even though I’ve never been there. In fact, I know it well because I’ve never been there. Rancer is an infamous pirate system. It probably is the most infested system in all of EVE. You never go there, unless you bring a lot of guns, and friends with even more guns. How on Earth did I end up here?

  1. It is a low-sec system, so I typically have the autopilot set up to avoid them altogether. Flying a low-sec hauler, I of course disabled that safeguard.
  2. You can configure the autopilot with a handful of systems that it is to always avoid. I was absolutely positive that I had put Rancer onto that list. It should be the very first system on that list, right? Well, yeah.
  3. I had foolishly assumed that routes would be symmetric. I hadn’t flown through any dangerous low-sec areas from Hek to Jita the day before, so it should be the same reasonably-safe route back, right? Guess I learned that the autopilot doesn’t work that way. (Though I’m still not sure why.)
  4. I typically check where I’m jumping to. The last failure in the chain of events was clicking before reading.

When I realized mid-warp that I was about to jump into the pirate capital of the universe, I frantically clicked buttons… Abort, abort, jump to somewhere else, do anything! But to no avail. I dropped out of warp right next to the gate, and immediately jumped through before any of the other commands registered.

Sure enough, I was greeted by almost a dozen pirates on the other side. They were too many, so they scrambled my warp drive before I could get away, then played around a bit with my ship before blowing it up.

Ouch. I will not link the killmail, it’s rather embarrassing. I lost more than half of the money I had saved up with that mistake. I cannot really blame anybody but myself though. The loss was the result of a chain of stupid mistakes on my side. It’s not like the pirates came out of their system to gank me in high-sec. I probably would’ve been annoyed in that case. No, I jumped right into their backyard to say hello. It’s mostly annoying because I lost a large percentage of my ISK. I’m not that rich though, so if I want, I can just go and buy two PLEX for about what I would spend for a decent dinner, and end up with more than I had.

I guess “be careful” isn’t a lesson you learn by reading, but rather by doing.

My First Fleet, And How I Nearly Saw A Carrier For The First Time

The whole encounter left me with a bit of sour aftertaste. I decided the best to make out of that was to fit another low-sec hauler right away and get started again, to offset the bad experience with some more good ones. I did a couple of low-sec runs, but ended up in another heavily populated low-sec system. I was really happy when I managed to get out of there without any issues. I felt like I maybe needed a day or two to relax and not risk as much. The ship isn’t too expensive, but buying all the modules to refit it is annoying, and I tend to have expensive implants in my pilot that aid skill learning speed, but are lost when you get blown up. Thankfully, a class came by that evening that talked about fleet mechanics, with an extended practical part. So I jumped into the prepared implant-less PvP clone, bought a cheap frigate and fitted it with some even cheaper tackling modules, and joined the class. Blow up, get blown up, it doesn’t matter if all you lose is a million ISK or two.

There hadn’t been a lot of fleets out of the EVE University’s home station for some time. A lot of the more PvP-inclined people have moved into a special low-sec camp recently, so there was little going on in safer space. In no time, we had almost 50 people. It took a lot of time to get the fleet together, mostly because the professor went through all the steps of forming a fleet in great detail. I can’t say I followed all of that, because I was missing some basics, but I think I got the gist of it.

Then it was time to undock. Off went our kitchen sink fleet (no specific setup, everything was welcome except the proverbial kitchen sink). Some of us learned our first valuable lessons: the difference between an “offensive” and a “defensive” gate camp (never had heard of that before), and that “warping to a gate” is not the same as “jumping through the gate” (I got that right and didn’t jump early! Yay me!)

The EVE University Educational Kitchen Sink Fleet sitting at a warp gate. Well, at least the part that didn't jump through instead of warp to it...

After two jumps, our scout reported unusually high activity in the low-sec system we wanted to visit as part of the training. Ooooh, pirates! We gotta shoot pirates?

Sadly, no. It turned out that, while we weren’t quite sure what exactly was going on, it was definitely a size or two too large for our fleet. There were a carrier, another capital ship, and a lot of support gathered in that system. It seemed they were quite nervous when they realized there was a 45-people fleet sitting one system over – we got the occasional scouts checking in on what the hell we were doing sitting at that gate.

Our Fleet Commander made his discussions with the Scouts public to the whole fleet (not something that happens every time, I was told), and the way they went about figuring out who was in that system at which time, and why, was pretty impressive. Most of that went over my head at first, but our Fleet Commander did a really good job of explaining to us how they went about gathering the intelligence.

This is were we sat for almost an hour, listening to the class in space.

So, in the end, no shot was fired, but it was a nice first experience. Our Fleet Commander / class lecturer, Turhan Bey, was a very nice person, and my hope is that I’ll fly in fleets with such people for the most part. He was definitely the antithesis to the “ugly EVE griefer” stereotype.

I think I should read up a bit more on the introductory Fleet classes, to be prepared for the next time I might have a chance to fly around in a fun edu fleet.

OMG OMG Preorder OMG OMG

The Secret World

Hear ye, hear ye! Gather round, fellow Templars!

It has been brought to my attention that the preorders for The Secret World have started. With quite an interesting preorder system:

The basic game costs 50 Euros, with the by-now expected pre-release beta weekend events, a day or two of head start, and some in-game cosmetic fluff. In addition, you’re allowed to reserve a character name. You then have the choice of several additions:

  1. The Initiate Pack at an addition 15 Euros: some high-quality starter items and some more cosmetic fluff.
  2. The Master Pack at 60 Euros: 30 additional days of game time included, an additional name reservation, even more cosmetic fluff, and a lifetime 10% reduction on all items in the item store (yes, there will be an item store).
  3. The Grand Master Pack at 200 Euros: a lifetime subscription to the game.
  4. Additional character slots and name reservations at 10 Euros each.

To make this list even more intuitive *cough*, The Grand Master Pack includes the Master Pack, but not the Initiate Pack. So a lifetime subscription of the game, plus the maximum fluff, would stand at 265 Euros.

Breathe. Breathe. It’s ok, we got you. Breeeeaaaathe.

Now see, that’s much better.

Thankfully, it was already announced that the lifetime subscription will be available for a limited time after the official release. That will give me time to actually look at that game. So for now, it will be the basic game for me. I won’t have to do a leap of faith. Which is good, because I’m horrible at leaping. And because I know that, however excited I am about what I’ve seen of this game, there is a high chance I’ll be disappointed. Not so much because it’s Funcom, and they have a bad track record.

No, rather because, the last game I was so excited about before release was… Vanguard.

In which I work through long todo-lists and fly around in space a lot without actually doing much

EVE Online

After some more waiting on Sunday, my EVE University invite went through, together with what seems a large bunch of other people. I was proud of myself because I had been smart enough to haul (most of) my belongings the 24 jump from Isanamo to Aldrat already. Which takes time in a hauler. But I had saved that time at least. Or so I thought…

First Things First

Getting accepted into a new group of people always leaves me with this “and now what?” feeling. You might get a lot of “welcome!”s (I did, the Uni is a friendly place, from what I’ve seen so far, very refreshing after all these disturbing news about EVE the last week), but then you’re left to your own devices. Not that I can blame everybody. You see people joining constantly, you can’t throw a party for everybody.

So I started to work through the new member todo-list. First thing was setting up your UI to be at least only useless if you ever get stuck in PvP, and not actively harmful because you can’t see what’s going on. That wiki guide has an impressive 48 subsections. Took me about 20 minutes to work through it. Thankfully, you can then save your setup and import it on alts and such. (As I later found out, not everything gets exported, which means you still have to do some of the manual work multiple times. Cue rant about EVE’s horrible UI here.)

Then I decided it would be a good idea to get a jump clone. Jump clones in EVE are “copies” of you. You can jump between them once ever 24 hours. They serve two main roles: fast travel (you can jump from one clone to another one at the other end of the universe), and cutting your losses. You can put implants in your body to boost the speed at which you are learning new skills, and they can be very expensive. If you get killed in PvP, gone are the implants. So a lot of people jump into a cheaper clone for PvP.

It would make sense to have both clones at our main EVE University base. But, it’s not that easy! See, you can only create jump clones in bases that belong to corporations that really love you. (Strangely enough, once they’re created, you can store them wherever you want). Like NPC faction reputations in other games. And the nearest base I could do that in was…. 1 jump next to Isanamo, where I originally started from. Grrreeeat. So, I had to 1) fly 25 jumps back (this time, in a shuttle though, so it was a lot faster), 2) create my jump clone and fly back to Aldrat, and 3) jump into the the new jump clone (ending up in Isakano again) and flying the 25 jump AGAIN in a different shuttle. That’s traversing 75 solar systems, in case you lost track.

And what now?

All that, of course, only postponed the question of what to do next. I browsed the Uni’s forums, and found some information about an ongoing long-term mining operation. That sounded like my kind of thing!

Mining is one of the occupations in EVE that attracts more ridicules than most others. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t involve shooting stuff into pieces. It sure is a laid-back way of earning ISK. Fly your mining ship to an asteroid belt, set the lasers to “lick”, and let your cargo bay fill up.

There was just one problem with this. All my mining skills were concentrated on my alt, who was still sitting in Isanamo. If you now say “I know what’s coming! Another 24 jumps!”, you’re almost right. Just that it wasn’t 24 jumps. Because, see, the mining operation isn’t based in the University’s home system, but quite a bunch of jumps away. It was around that time I lost track of how much I traveled. But let’s say it was about 35 jumps from Isanamo. In a mining barge. Which is very good at mining, but also very slow and about as agile as an elephant with a heart condition and two legs in a cast. And the trunk too, for no other reason than that it would look funny.

Mandatory space picture: My mining barge during one of the countless warps. The ship looks surprisingly sleek for something that's designed for mining, isn't it?

And, of course, I needed to get my main over there too, because he’s the one that can fly haulers, and I needed to ferry equipment over and means to transport ore. When I finally reached our mining base, my second evening in EVE University was almost over. But tomorrow, I’ll be actually able to do something worthwhile, I’m sure!

Did I mention before that things take a lot of time in EVE?

Impeccable Timing – I don’t have it

EVE Online,

EVE is a slow game. You can spend weeks training a single level of a single skill. Combat (the PvE side, I’ve never done any PvP) can be drawn out, and you rarely go down in seconds, it’s more drawn-out battles of shield attrition. So it didn’t come as a huge surprise to me when I learned that joining a guild (I mean, corp! It’s corp in EVE, because it’s all about the money, right?) could take a long time too. After answering that long questionnaire, I patiently waited in the queue for two weeks to get my recruitment info with EVE University.

And then, I waited some more, though less and less patiently. Especially since I was number 1 in the queue (of all applicants logged in at that point) several times during the week, only to lose my spot to applicants who had waited even longer. Yesterday marked day 20 in the application queue for me. Yikes. In the meantime, a lot of unsavory things happened in the game, what with the leader of EVE’s most vocal and obnoxious alliance publicly inciting people to harass someone into suicide, being kicked out of the players’ representative council in response, and then learning that there are also disgusting fellows among his enemies, who don’t mind threatening his wife.

I am set on at least giving the game a chance though. There are horrible players in any MMO, plus, my subscription hasn’t run out yet, so I might as well look for decent people in the game until then. So yesterday, I was sitting in the queue again, finally hitting spot 1 again, when an announcement came through:

Eve University is changing its recruitment process.  This may result in you being accepted without actually being interviewed.  At this time unless you have been told to queue for an SPO, do not queue.

My invite came about 10 minutes later. Well, boo. That’s what I waited for in the queue for almost 3 weeks? I was actually looking forward to telling you about how the interview went. And now I won’t even be able to sit in the university, waving my walking stick and tell kids to get off my lawn, and that they have it so easy these days, because in my time, you needed to walk uphill both ways, through the snow, to your interview, and could only pray you wouldn’t get rejected.

I said I got an invite. That is true. I’m still not a member, though. You see, I have this private corp I was talking about before. I had officer rights in that. Turns out, you cannot just leave a corp if you have those. No, you need to resign your rights, and then you are in a 24-hour stasis period, during which you can’t leave the corp. So, the invite bounced, and now I have to wait until tonight to get my invite. Hopefully. If anybody is on that can do invites. So no EVE for me this weekend. Because I’m bored to tears of mission running by now, and solo mining is getting monotonous, too.

It’s the story of EVE and me, in a nutshell: I will always find a way to allow the game to screw me over.

edit: just in case (because I was asked), no, this post doesn’t contain any April fools shenanigans.