Wherein the reader is illuminated and amused by details of my fourth (and possibly last *gasp*) week back with EVE Online, or told how I played too much Diablo 3 and ignored EVE.
Day 22
To be honest I hadn’t planned to login at all today. But I made a slight miscalculation in setting up my skill queues which left me with gaps which I logged in to plug. Of course once I’d logged in I thought I’d do one quick mining run. But then I discovered that the system was largely empty and there was enough for four or five mining runs. So in between grinding out Key Warden quests in Diablo 3 and Descended Hera-Ur in Puzzle & Dragons I mined enough to fill my mining transport. With that full I headed off to the market to sell my delicious ores.
In the last post I mentioned that I was going to look into Planetary Interaction and I actually did. The bad news was that a) it would take 13 days to train the recommended skills, b) it would cost around 50 million ISK to set it up and c) it should really be done in low sec systems (which meant getting in and out would be a pain in the arse). So for the moment I’ve put it on the back burner. I did plan out what goods I would produce and which planets I would use to produced said goods, so if I do decide to do it all I’ll need is to train the skills. If I sub for a second month I almost certainly will.
Apart from a little mining and checking and then shelving my planetary interaction plans I also prevaricated over whether or not to plunk down the cash for a Harbinger. At this point I’ve decided to wait until I’ve trained the basic skills to fly and outfit it (the former is done the latter will finish sometime Saturday). Until then I plan to mine for an hour or so a day and that’s about it.
Though in preparation for buying it I decided that I might buy it, leave it unassembled and then transport it to the system I’d be running missions in. In theory it would save me some flight time. In practice it involved lots of titting to and fro in my main industrial hauler. Which I realised late (or early if you prefer) in the AM wasnt living up to its full potential because for some reason I’d only fitted four out of a possible six Tech 2 Cargo Expanders. I could also now afford to fit Cargo Expanding rigs as well (rigs are permanent modifications to a ship which can’t be removed). So a few million later and I had more than 10,000 m3 more space.
Day 23 – 30
Well I was planning to spend my mining millions but then something happened. There was a 100% XP boost for Diablo 3, but just for three days. So a lot of Diablo later and more or less zero EVE Online its Monday…and Reaper of Souls is coming out at 11 PM. And now my subscription is up in one day and the only time I’ve logged in is to update my skill training queue. So I’ve got a decision to make, I’ve got some projects (finally) starting in April so I wont have as much time for gaming and at the moment (and for the foreseeable future) Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls will be taking up the aforementioned gaming time. While I did make it through March’s ridiculous number of releases largely unscathed my backlog isn’t getting any smaller and two pre-ordered games are dropping next month (and both of them are quite long/infinitely replayable). On the other hand I do enjoy EVE and it does offer something unique, fifteen quid isn’t too much money and thanks to the whole buddy account reward I could get a month of training on two accounts for that price. But paying fifteen quid just for skill training, just to see numbers increase, seems a little too on the nose, a little too transparent. It’s what ultimately drove me away from World of Warcraft and MMO’s in general and I’m not sure I want to so transparently embrace it again. Fuck me thought I want those bigger numbers! And to buy my Harbinger and finally abandon mining for the sweet glory and lucrative income of blowing the shite out of pirates. No, I can fight the lure of bigger numbers, right? right?