ForEVEr

So I spent all my game time this weekend playing EVE. I let the subscription on my main combat pilot expire so I have been limited to only my industry focused alt, Porter.

This weekend reinforced what I dislike most about EVE though... it takes forever. This is even more painfully obvious in the comparison to the speedy Guild Wars. I do like Eve, but I aways feel like it is just this close to being fun.

I was feeling eve-y this weekend so I logged in Porter. I had her based out of the Zoohan star system on the edge of Amarrian Empire space. This is a "safe" zone with high value asteroids for mining. But I was mostly alone and profits/motivation were low. Most of the other players I know were based about 30 jumps away (roughly 30-50 minutes travel) from where I was operating. But since I was sick of being on my own... I figured I might as well move over to them. I caught up with a pair of buddies that are power mining for enough minerals to build a pair of freighters.

A Freighter in Eve is the pennacle of raw volume shipping. It is a billion ISK asset and a long term goal. It is kind of cool. I say "kind of" because they really don't have a lot of great functionality. They are really, really big and they move really, really slow. They have no armament or defenses (they fit no modules) and in a small corporation like ours, they see almost no use. But hell... why not? I have trained Porter to fly the Providence Amarr freighter which while of no combat value, is one of the most majestic ships in the game (above). These two yahoo's in my corp were building the Charon--which can actually haul a bit more, but isn't nearly as cool.

Anyways, I packed up all my useful gear and moved the 30 odd hops to mine with them. The zone they are in is quiet and sparsely populated. It isn't a particularly valuable area, has no strategic value and is a blend of low security and high security. In low security zones you can be shot by other players anytime. In high security you can only be shot if you're in a war or if the attacker is prepared to commit suicide to gank you--rare, but it happens. This is not the same as 0.0 space or no security. 0.0 space has really high value asteroids and random belt "rats" (NPC ships you kill for bounty and loot). But this zone is not in (or even on the way to) 0.0. This makes about all activity in the zone harder (cuz at any moment some dork could kill you) but not high value... But whatever... we are not a power corp, but we are tough enough to scare away small groups of unmotivated gankers. Plus our territory is pretty worthless.

Regardless it was fun to mine with friends and it brought back the memories of why I play this stupid game to begin with. The team effort is amazing. When you finally find a way to make something work and profit from it, it is a boost to fun. In Eve, where that boost may be a loooong time coming, its like a double boon.

After they logged out, I moved more of my stuff to their home system and began mining and some production work. Since that's all Porter can do, I'll play around with it for a while and see how it goes. My account runs out at the end of May. I'll be on vacation the first 2 weeks of June. It will be interesting to see if I come back to Eve at all. But I probably will...

See ya later... til then... Game On!