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.

This Ain't So Bad

I went out and did some more exploring today. Most of my attempts were pretty fruitless, except for one.

I managed to scan down a radar signature, but this time I remembered to bookmark it and then came back with my Myrm. I took out the couple of guards and then brought my Magnate back in to codebreak the containers and collect the loot. I scored about 15 million ISK for that little adventure, not too shabby.

I just can't escape it. I'm having a blast with EVE all over again. Earlier today I officially reactivated my account because I already know that whether I do it today or tomorrow, I'm gonna do it. One day, I'll learn.

In the meantime, I'm liking the income from exploration so far, and it's fun. I think I'm going to do a little more tonight. I'm enjoying it, but I clearly still need more practice before I can consider myself proficient.

See ya out there.

Space, The Final Frontier

A couple of nights ago, I finished the exploration career intro missions with my newly-created alt, but instead of taking her out for a spin, I decided to log in as Bekka Jae and see how feasible it would be to have her do the training as well.

Of course the last place I played as Bekka was out in the wilds of 0.0, and I quickly discovered that the corp I used to belong to had moved on and I was in what is now a hostile station. It was a slightly expensive if not difficult decision to leave all the ships and other stuff I had in that station behind to clone jump out of there and back into high-sec.

Once back in high-sec, I called up my Assets window and took a quick inventory. Aside from the realization that I'll probably never want for a Velator as I seem to have dozens of them scattered all over known space, I also discovered a few interesting things I had just lying around and gathering dust, such as a Tech II tricked out, combat and mission-ready Myrmidon. In all honesty, it had been so long since I'd used it that I'd forgotten I had it. I'd been running missions with it before I moved to 0.0 and I'd left it there, ready to fly, as a "just in case I need it one day" thing. Apparently, a smart move on my part.

As nice as it is to find myself in possession of a fully-fit and combat-ready battlecruiser, it's even better because it happens to fit perfectly with another decision I made the other night. Over the last couple of days, I completed the exploration career path missions with Bekka Jae. For some reason, even though Bekka is Gallente I was directed to an Amarr agent out in Kor-Azor and ended up flying a Tormentor (or "The Cosmic Shrimp" as I like to call it) to complete the missions.

Once I was done with that, I got my first refresher lesson in why you can't just go out there and play EVE like you do other games. I started scanning down cosmic signatures in systems near where my Myrm is, knowing that if I ran into something I couldn't handle in my Magnate, which I'd been given after completing the exploration course, I could always come back with the Myrm and (theoretically) deal with it. I did scan down and check out a few wormholes, but aside from one that lead to a system in the far reaches of Amarr space, all of these led to unclaimable void areas of 0.0. Since there was nothing in those places really worth investigating as far as I could tell, I'd jump back through after just a short time and move on.

Mainly, it was practice for what I want to do in EVE for a while, explore. Late last night, on my last scanning attempt before bed, I scanned down my first actual radar site. When I went in, I found pirates there and instinctively warped out immediately, knowing I had nothing on the ship I was in to defend myself with, but I forgot to bookmark the location before I left, nor did I take the time to see what kind of ships I was dealing with. Also, I realized that I hadn't yet installed a codebreaker so there was pretty much no way I'd get anything useful out of that site other than location and enemy force information until I did.


When I got back to my staging station, I bought what I needed and realized that I needed to train a prerequisite skill before even installing the codebreaker. I took the half hour to do this, then I went out signal hunting again. After successfully scanning down another wormhole that led to the void, I decided to pack it in for the night.

Exploration is hard and often frustrating, but it's also a lot of fun. I'll be jumping in a little later to do a little more. Should be interesting...