Day 68 : The Lonely Planet Guide to EVE

No, this isn’t the guide. I'm just wondering where it is. It could well be EVE Travel where I’ve enjoyed some reading. Reacting to said reading, some recommendations, geeky desire and some good comments on the blog, the other night I headed off on my first sightseeing trip - the Titan at Luminaire. 

Being a Noob I warped straight to the thing without thinking, juddering out of the warp tunnel into a cloud of fat red crosses. Luckily they couldn’t see me through the monitor saluting, with the digitus medius - Gallente to Caldari style, so none of the ships that the Overview had emblazoned with the fat red crosses decided to get shirty and start something. Lucky for them too really, the flare from the engines when I ran away really, really quickly might have blinded them.

The Titan is so big that you can see it at a distance where its attendant ships are specks you can’t see without the Overview markers. You can approach until your engines cut out without antagonising the local swarm. At this distance you can see the running lights of what looks like some huge launch bay. Along the side some kind of trains run up and down, ferrying space blockading b*stards from one end of the Titan to the other. Its that large. They are quite animated over there, maybe it is rush hour, or maybe they’ve just seen a Space Noob astride the Pale Horse arrive and are in a bit of a panic.

Right. Enough trying to get in the Gallente character, I’ve enough to do without hating the Caldari for having slightly disturbing space stations or having parked this magnificent steel baguette in the way of Luminaire traffic. I've as much in common with them as the Gallente thanks to my desire to make piles of ISK.

People have told me you can actually attack the attendant ships. I’ll leave that for another day, but I’m thinking of trying a hit and run mission at some point. I wonder if I can get a fleet together and we could just gank the things? I'm looking forward to one day seeing one of these things in action down in null. That might not be for many, many months though.

The trip reveals more of the back story of EVE that I've been seeing glimpses of in the missions I've run, and in some of the (very minimal) reading about factional warfare I've done. I really want to get into this and read some more, flesh out the role of a space noob, but lets face it - my head is already stuffed full of other EVE topics. For now I'll confine my lore research to the occasional  sightseeing trip and reading things. Seyllin and the shattered planet next, a low sec run!
Thanks to Matt E,  Rhavas (http://interstellarprivateer.wordpress.com ), Mark726 for writing EVE Travel (http://evetravel.wordpress.com/), Tur (http://turamarths-evelife.blogspot.co.uk/), and everyone else who offered tips.

I'll be able to equip tier 2 guns tomorrow as I finally managed to resist altering the skill queue ahead of Small Hybrid Turret. Not that I am going to equip tier 2 guns just yet. I need to look and consider for quite a while. There is, like so many areas of EVE, room for a spreadsheet in here somewhere. The skill queue is getting filled with Exploration boosts as I’ve said before. I aim to spend some of the upcoming three day weekend out in the black, littering it with used probes. So, if you are mooching around Gallente empire space and find a patch so littered with dead probes that it rivals the local parks late night teen hangout, then it was probably my fault. The space that is. Not the park.

In other news EVE has a competitor. Not a game, more competition for my time. I’m normally an avid reader consuming fiction at a rate of somewhere between four and eight books a month depending on size and intellectual intensity (for example, two good books. “Wise Mans Fear” by Patrick Rothfuss, two days. “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy took me a week!). The rate of reading fiction has dropped slightly over the last couple of months while playing EVE. I’ve been reading the ISK guide, bits and bobs that I printed out, and lots of blogs. However, today I finished a book earlier than expected on the way into work and needed a new one for the journey home. I found Neal Stephenson’s latest, REAMDE, had come out in paperback. Thats a thousand pages of utter reading pleasure there, with the additional benefit that the the plot of this one explores the relationship between MMOs, “gold farmers” and Real Money Trading. If you have never read Stephenson, then this could be the one to start with if you are an MMO player, this or maybe Snow Crash. My favourite is Cryptonomicon, so far anyway. The latest is going very, very well.


EDIT: PPS - Thanks again to mark726 for having the link to http://overheardineve.tumblr.com on his blog. The funniest chat read since http://bash.org/?top. (NOTE: NSFW) Which now I've had to go and read again, wasting EVEn more time!