Thursday

PC

Eve Online – Ship shopping for n00bs

I intended to write up a little AAR of some recent happenings in Eve Online, but I realize that a post I made this morning on QT3 pretty much sums it up so here’s an abridged version that should still make sense.

In short, I’m really starting to get into Eve Online. It’s starting to make sense and I’m starting to feel like I’m playing rather than just stumbling around. That said, I am of course still stumbling as detailed below and the lesson from which is… Always make sure you know where something is located before you buy it.

Lately I’ve been puttering along in my default Ibis doing some early mission story arc things for cargo hauling, and all is going well in that I’m at least absorbing things. I’m also interested enough to read a bit about the game a bit when not playing and one thing I saw was that it would be a good idea to upgrade your ship sooner rather than later. Nothing too extravagant, but something a little better than the default starting ship. I shopped around some and thought a Kestrel might be good since it can lug cargo while still being able to protect itself to some degree with all those missiles. I do like missiles.

I couldn’t afford one anywhere close by (not one I could afford to lose anyway, which is key) so being the n00b I am I went into the market and sorted the list of available Kestrels by price and bought one for a paltry $150,000 ISK “only” 9 jumps away. “Awesome!”, I thought, “I’ll just dash over there and pick it up!” How hard could that be? Straight forward trip there and back so it should be easy. Hypothetically. It was only after starting the trip that I noticed my new ship was parked in a 0.4 area. See Eve categorizes how safe an area is using this X.X notation with 1.0 being perfectly safe and 0.0 being a place you really don’t want to be as a n00b. Now even I am grizzled enough to realize that 0.4 is not 1.0 so there was some likelyhood of “action” (where action = me dying in an embarrassing manner). Despite that I went ahead undaunted, partly out of a sense of adventure and partly because I didn’t know how to get a refund on the ship I bought. I flew on.

Eight jumps later I was in 0.5 space and although I had seen the odd ship here and there, no one hassled me and I jumped the final time into 0.4 and my destination. As soon as I entered 0.4 however I was greeted by what must have been two dozen “red guys” in my list of ships and objects on the right side of the screen. Apparently these fellows all hated me a great deal from the outset. The upside of this was that I quickly got to figure out how cloning worked, and also about the value of having a good insurance plan (which I did not).

I respawned back in my home station, got handed another shitty AMC Pacer/Ibis and some complimentary ore and I resigned myself to owning a ship far away, that I wasn’t going to be able to acquire. Perhaps I would consider it my “summer ship” that I might hypothetically visit in the future sometime, despite clearly having no luck with hypotheticals to date.

This morning, I logged in to see how my skills were progressing and found Eve Offline and down for patching. While unsuccessfully spamming the launch button a few times, I resolved my intent on a cunning plan. “When the server comes back up, there likely won’t be too many people on and perhaps I can zip over and get my Kestrel unmolested.” That’s pretty cunning alright, and as it turns out it actually worked. The servers came up, I stripped my Ibis down to nothing and took off on my nine jump journey. Though I saw no one after leaving my starting system, it was a stressful trip. I didn’t breath at all for the last jump into 0.4 (where I was previously gang-raped) and it was in a mild panic that I docked, swapped ships, bought some insurance and got the hell out of Dodge. On leaving I did spot one other ship in the area, but I successfully got out and all the way back “home” again so woohoo for me.

I’m in the process of training up missile skills now, and casually looking around for launchers and whatnot. I think I’ll do my shopping a bit closer to home next time though.