Wednesday, October 21, 2009

A Sudden Change In Plans...

...but a good one.

In the comments to my previous post, Escoce suggested I forget about my trial toon and reactivate my old one. This got me thinking. I knew there'd be at least something of a tradeoff to be made here. When I gave away all my stuff to my brother, that included all of my ISK. I knew I'd be flat broke and to be honest I just wasn't sure that there would be a way to get back on track in this game with that toon after all this time.

After careful consideration and weighing the pros and cons, I decided to go for it. I reactivated my Bekka Jae toon (note old spelling) this morning, and logged in.

It was kind of like waking up from a bender the night before, having no idea where you are, how you got there, or what you were doing before you got there. I check my wallet. As expected, my ISK balance is 0.00. What is completely unexpected, however, is when I check my personal assets and discover I still have stuff all over Gallente and Caldari space. An ammo cache here, a shuttle there, an Imicus I didn't know I had, all kinds of leftovers from previous missions and lootings. Most of it is bits and pieces, far too strewn out in terms of distance to make it worth tracking it down, but some of it's loot from Level 3 and 4 missions I was running before I left the game. I begin to realize that while it will take a bit of effort to really get back in the swing of this game financially and in terms of ship capabilities, it's not by any means impossible.

The first thing I did was run a few missions with the Velator I fortuitously discovered waiting for me in the hanger of the station I found myself at. Then I took a ten-jump trip through high-sec to get to my Imicus. This is where I first noticed how nice it is to have all those skills trained up to 4 or 5 which would have taken me a long time to accomplish if I'd stayed with the trial toon.

Basically what I did for the next few hours is go from system to system, docking in each station I had stuff worth bothering with, and selling or reprocessing it to generate some extra ISK. There were also a few items I reclaimed for my own use, such as an extraordinarily conveniently unsold Small 125" Compressed Coil Gun, perfect for my little Immie, and allowing me to install a pair of them and not break my still-tiny bank.

As I did this, I also kept checking the market and buying new items, an afterburner, an overdrive injector, and a shield booster. As I traveled to pick up each of these items, I'd stop at the stations along the way, do my business to build up my ISK a little. Then I'd pick up and install the item, order another item I need with the ISK I'd generated one the way over, and repeated the process until I had my Immie fully outfitted well enough for now.

I flew back to where I was running missions with Velator. Yes they're the simplest of the simple missions but that's ok. Because of all my experience and agent loyalties I can write my own ticket on the lower levels as far as agent missions go and I want to be very careful about the missions I accept until I'm more secure financially and shipwise. I'll start at the bottom and work upwards depending on what my ship of the moment can handle.

Here's the really funny part. I'm having a blast. I don't think I've ever had so much fun in EvE (well ok maybe I have, but you know what I mean). I'm in a corp with four other members who haven't been seen in-game in a month or more. I'm literally my own corp, not even in an NPC corp. I have no corporate responsibilities (what, I'm going to tax myself?), nothing to concern myself with other than my own in-game interests.

I do want to join a real player-run corp again soon, but perhaps not right away. I think I want to take at least a week or two and just be a pilot again before I start thinking about who I want to fly with.

Y'know what's even funnier? The way I fall into a kind of abbreviated EvE-speak when I write for this blog, using words like "corp", "Immie", and "E-Uni". I haven't written in this style for over two years and somehow it flows as naturally as if it were yesterday. It's almost...not quite but almost...scary.

So I made the tradeoff, and now I've got a major advantage in skills but at the cost of a moderate disadvantage in ISK and ships. All in all, seems like a pretty good deal to me. The ships and ISK will take me a lot less time to recover (and surpass) than the skills would have.

Yes, I think this is going to get interesting.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

just found your blog via evebloggers.com - looking forward to hearing how you go :-)

Rebecca Jai said...

Welcome! Thanks also for the tip on evebloggers.com. I hadn't heard of it til now.

Cyberin said...

Welcome back to eve :D used to read you a lot back in the day and then magically..there you are again in my google reader :D

Rebecca Jai said...

Hi Cyberin!

Thanks and welcome back to the blog. Yeah, no one was more surprised to find me back in EvE than I was. I'm glad to be back. Even with having to deal with a week of not being able to log in it still feels like coming home. :)