A Bizarre Expedition and a Visit To Lagland

Last night, a comment on my last post clued me in to why I couldn’t warp to the Gurista hideout I’d found. I had indeed been offered an expedition in my journal. By the time I saw it, though, there were only about seven hours left to get it done so I wasted no time moving both my ships along with all my exploration mods and ammo to the system my journal indicated.

When I got there, I went in with the Thorax and found plenty of enemies, and quickly realized I was overmatched. I warped out, went beck to my staging station, and came back with the Myrm, but when I did all of the enemies took off. Gone. Poof. All that time spent moving everything over and suddenly there was nothing to do there.

As luck would have it, though, I found myself with all my stuff in an area I hadn’t explored yet, so I’ve decided to make that system my new temporary base of operations while I check out the local systems. Those that I’ve checked out so far have yielded about a million ISK in cargo and salvage, but nothing especially great in terms of profits.

And maybe it’s because it’s a Sunday, but when I warped to many of the cosmic signatures I scanned down today I’d discovered that someone had beat me to it.

I also did something today that I probably haven’t done in about two and a half years, and for the very first time because I had an actual reason to do it, not just to go be a space tourist. Reviewing the loadout on my Myrm I realized that some of the drones I was using with it were really far beneath the level it was capable of handling. So, I unloaded a bunch of Hobgoblins and Hammerheads and realized I only had two Ogre II’s, which are my favorites to use with the Myrm.

I have to admit I laughed a little when I went to the Market screen to buy five more Ogre II’s and found that the best local price, by at least 50%, was in Jita. I’d been to Jita all of once in my EVE career, very early on when I’d just made a trek out there just to see what the heck was so special about the system that everyone seemed to talk about it constantly. As I remembered, it was entirely unremarkable, other than that there were well over a thousand people in Local and the lag getting in and out of the system was by far the worst I’ve ever experienced in this game. Since that was almost three years ago, I hoped that by now it would be better. I bought my Ogres and set off for Jita.

I didn’t really notice any problems until I got one jump outside of Jita. First, as soon as I arrived it was pretty obvious that just about every ship in the system was headed in the same direction, toward the gate to Jita. When I got to the gate, there was fortunately no waiting line to jump in like there was the last time I was there, but the lag was definitely noticeable.

Once in the system, I docked and picked up my Ogres without much trouble, scanned through the offers in Local just to see if there was anything interesting, and then headed back to the gate to get back where I was exploring. When I clicked the button to jump out though, I didn’t go anywhere for several seconds, and then the screen went black and stayed that way. After nearly a minute, the phone rang and I stepped out of the room for a few minutes. When I returned, I found myself on the other side of the gate and headed back toward my staging system.

Y’know, maybe it’s just me, but I seem to remember CCP swearing up and down a while back that they were going to do something about the lag in Jita. Certainly, I have to say it’s better than the last time I was there, but by no means is it what could be called good. A black screen for well over a minute at minimum just to exit the system doesn’t indicate to me that CCP has finally got a handle on this issue.

Now, to be honest, I haven’t really given a shit one way or the other since I’ve only been there twice and I’ll probably never go back unless I have a really good reason like I did today, but nevertheless it would be nice if CCP could figure out a way to deal with the issue and make the trip a nicer and faster one for everyone who has to go there.