Wednesday 14 April 2010

Down the rabbit hole...


It may not be exactly the same type of hole, but I believe the title is quite fitting for the situation that Marek currently finds himself in. But before I begin, let me share a little information about the mysterious Amarrian known as Ebon, Marek Ebon.

(Author’s note: as much as I would often love to drift into ‘in character’ commentary, and may do so in future, the majority of my posts will be strictly ‘out of character’ unless stated otherwise. I’ll most likely mark these with an ‘IC’ tag or something similar. If my writing style does drift between the two into a somewhat ‘grey’ area then I apologise, and hope it isn’t too off-putting. I’m always open to constructive criticism in the comments section, so please feel free!)

As a new player to EVE (prior to all that ‘New Player Experience’ jazz), I found the character selection a little confounding (heh, can you guess it’s my favourite word?). So Marek was a mish-mash of things that I thought were cool in EVE, things that I thought were cool from a bit of RP that I used to do in WoW and things that I felt would be cool if I got into the RP side of EVE, which I haven’t done as of yet. Also, at the time I was particularly drawn to the look of the Amarr ships.

Marek was created with that jumble of ideas in mind and flitted hither and thither between training for different things as I found my way in New Eden. He underwent many periods of inactivity whilst other characters took centre stage, but was also my go-to guy for a lot of my pondering moments when I thought ‘hmm, that’d be good to try… I’ll go get Marek’.

So, when the opportunity to enter the corp wormhole surfaced (finally a high-sec entrance that isn’t 20 jumps away!), Marek was naturally my first choice. So without wishing to rip-off a popular story that later became a popular film too much, there is a certain sense that I’ve been flung down the rabbit hole and now everything is… different.

For a start, our wormhole POS is actually the first one I’ve ever seen, let alone the first one that I’ve had to live out of on a semi-permanent basis. I’ve already started to miss the little things about station life, but the feeling of having that high-sec exit despawn was both peculiar and rather exciting. I’m making the most of Marek’s trip to Wonderland though and have been familiarising myself with wormhole life - scanning sites and exits, hitting the directional scan rather excessively, and finding a new-found appreciation for the Covert Ops Cloaking Device II.

Last night I fitted up a sturdy Harbinger and took on some Sleepers with a corp mate. It was certainly an experience, I can tell you. The Harbinger’s tank was impressive in the first instance, but soon became wholly inadequate, and my fellow pilot and I engaged in a tag-team sort of system to take the heat off. Eventually after a couple of hours I hopped back to the POS and fitted for some remote repair – this allowed my corp mate’s tank to hold out long enough for him (my DPS was severely lacking) to finish off the rats. Once they’d been dispatched, it was simply a question of the salvaging and the hacking, which I bravely stood by and watched…

It’s been a good first couple of days in the wormhole – I know exactly what skills I need to train now, so I’ll be looking at getting those within the next week, and then it’ll be a trip out to Empire space with a shopping list as long as this blog post to make sure that I’m fully prepared.

I just hope we don’t have any odd visitors wishing to involve me in an oddly skewed, sci-fi version of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Although it does raise the question of what the EVE answer to ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ would be – anyone know if the Caldari Navy are keen authors?

Fly safe, and I'll see you on the d-scan.

Friday 9 April 2010

A little more detail...


Well my last post was a little sparse in terms of the above mentioned and often appreciated detail, so hopefully this one will tip the scales back in the favour of you information lovers out there!

So, last time I mentioned that I’d made the move to a new corporation. But, in the interest of detail, let me tell you a little about my old corporation, which I was rather fond of. The short-lived Jucucu-Wix Inc. [JUCU] was home to myself and a good friend of mine, and served as our own little haven away from the hustle and bustle of the larger corporations. We ran some missions, we mined some ore and we had a good laugh. It was all fun, but a two-man corporation can become a little lonely, especially when one of you is out-of-game for a while or has other commitments. And this seemed to be the case for us. I was struggling to find the motivation to do things. I’m very much a team player, and I was seriously lacking a team.

In one of my regular ‘argh, there are 250 unread posts in Google Reader that I need to get through’ moments, I stumbled across this post over at Carebear in disguise. Intrigued, I resolved to get in touch in-game and see if we had similar goals. A few short chats later and the TransMiners [TM-50] corporation ticker was proudly displayed next to my jet cans as I filled them with ore. The corp is just what I’ve been looking for, really - small enough to retain that sense of community and team work, but with enough direction to give me a goal to work towards and give me a reason to log in.

Of course, I’m still settling in and finding my feet in my new surroundings, and my own play time has taken a hit recently with some awkward happenings outside of New Eden, but I do think I’m going to like it here. If you think you might be interested, I'd encourage you to read the post I linked to above, and get in touch to have a chat!

On a sentimental note, the [JUCU] banner still flies (albeit limply), with my friend choosing to remain in the corporation for now. And I have a rarely-used alt taking up residence there too, that’s when he’s not sitting in an Atron in-system with Maurice making sure that all of Mr. McPhee’s leadership and yield-boosting skills are being utilised to the full.

That's enough detail for now - I hope any of you who are reading this out there have been pleased with my attempt – hopefully you’ll see lots of interesting posts (packed with detail, naturally) from my new home in TransMiners now that I’m fully functional in EVE again.

Until then, fly safe!

Venture Adventures!

Recently I've been quite taken with the idea of hopping in a Venture and doing some gas mining. I've always liked the expedition fri...