Gibbering madly about EVE for free as I was it still didn't take long for me to slip CCP some dollars.
What was it? The lure of shiny ships? Well I had a ton of fun racing a shuttle as far as I could, "demonstrating the sandbox". T2 hulls are shiny and fun but I had fun in something that didn't even have guns. Delving the depths. There are customs offices still owned by Interbus down there.... To be fair T2 hulls did give me interdiction free travel again and the ability to go pick up some junk in NPC null and get it back to Jita for sale.
Could I blame the lack of T2 covops? Despite the lure of jumpshock EVE, tootling around lowsec and darker venues while exploring in a T1 isn't all that relaxing. Yes, I play EVE to relax and experience fear. Don't ask, just think "hey this is some great game that can provide both ends of a spectrum". It wasn't the T2 covops. I made more ISK while racing around lowsec hunting Clone Soldiers and grabbing a couple of Garmur blueprints. I used a Fed Navy Comet, a fearsome hull that I think has a little too much drone bandwidth. I felt ready to take a fight even while orbiting under the point of a Clone Soldier.
Skills? They're limited but not so you'd notice with my level of faffing around. I suspect they came in handy while trying out Abyssal content but didn't stop me being surprised at how difficult it actually was and blowing 75 mill on the thing. I suspect I can also say goodbye to the Rupture, Omen and Caracal I have in waiting. Abyssal T2 was a near miss, something I'll try again. T3 abyssal in a T1 hull was like being spanked. Some people pay for it, but not me.
PVP? What would I know? I'm terrible at it anyway. I've had some great adventures in a brick tanked Punisher. 20k EHP in a 5M ISK frigate allows a lot of leeway in terms of time to learn. No more analysing 20 seconds of terror, more analysing a minute or so of utter confusion. I've been dropped by a Sin. I've crashed the gate on seeing a gatecamp and been chased across two systems by angry Russians. I've got bored of a system wide, DSCAN based, chase and triggered a medium FW trap, "nearly" bagging a kill and escaping pod intact with "gf" fired. I've even got a couple of kills, mainly thanks to local gate guns, but hey... I laid the trap. If you've ever tried PVP and thought I can't tell what's going on, it's too expensive to learn, then try wasting about 10 of these. I've still got about 6 of them fully fitted and ready to roll if I'm ever bored. I'm also done with my implants so not a care in the world. You probably won't kill anything but you'll learn a ton of things.
[Punisher, Brick Punisher] 400mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates 400mm Crystalline Carbonide Restrained Plates Damage Control II Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II Adaptive Nano Plating II 5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive J5b Enduring Warp Scrambler 150mm Light AutoCannon II 150mm Light AutoCannon II 150mm Light AutoCannon II 150mm Light AutoCannon II Small Trimark Armor Pump I Small Trimark Armor Pump I Small Trimark Armor Pump I
It's about 3 UK pence a go. For some reason I'm not wary about spending 500 UK pence on a pint in London that lasts half an hour if I'm lucky, yet I'm wary about losing less than 1% of that in a scrap I lost that I'll be bending peoples ears about for years.
So really in the end, what was the driving factor?
I hated the lack of industry slots.
I really am that much of a carebear nerd. The collapse of the Faction Warfare and Low Sec market really annoyed me. I knew people still had to be making cash from industry. I knew I couldn't do it with so few slots as an Alpha. So I zipped around potential markets, settled on one, switched to Omega and relearned the whole T2 small scale industry thing.
Half the time I'm sure that effectively I'm just optimising the amount of space required to transport PI materials. The Robotics burn alone is killing me. Even after all these years I don't understand why Gatling Pulse Laser II's require 5 Robotics a unit. I might have to deconstruct the elaborate and time consuming hisec Nanite Repair Paste thing I have going and replace it with boring Consumer Electronics. I'm just about surfing my needs for Transmitters and Miniature Electronics.
In the end I made about 5 billion in profit in a month by hammering it. It's labour intensive in terms of PI and build. Way more effort per ISK than the arbitrage pursued by marketsforISK. I don't care. I like the feeling of being a small scale local gun maker. I like managing the small things. I'm halfway through an Django app designed to automate my build and invention choices but unfortunately I've done the fun ESI integration work and now I've got the "boring" database, algorithm and interface work to do. Yep. Not that boring. I'll be playing the game in Visual Studio Code for a while.
The aim, of course, is the purchase of more BPOs. I'm a collector...
I'm not all that bad, there are a pair of Leshaks purchased and awaiting skill queues. I'd like to try them out on a structure, especially since that was kind of my last rage quit trigger. That's going to require anchoring something in a world of easy wardecs. There is a Raitaru in my hangars. It's a sunk cost. I'll see what happens at some point down the line.
Faffing around with Disintegrators might have to wait. The quiet in Low Sec is getting to me and things seems to be on a cusp in null. It might be time to finally try that experiment. It looked interesting in a shuttle. Imagine the trouble I could cause in other kinds of hull? Life woes are beckoning and I need some place to go that isn't random TV ( GoT aside because a man might have no name but it turns out he can catch up by watching 70 hours of TV in a month ).
Track(s) of the Day:
It's too easy to become stuck in care bear land, fighting industry slots and not people, so something epic and current to keep me going.
The Avengers : Alan Silvestri
And a travelling song in honour of shuttle runs:
Lake Shore Drive : Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah
And finally one for my friend Tur who also found himself back in the black, and so turned this return into a recursion.
Blue Ridge Mountains : Fleet Foxes (that was about as close as I could get to Virginia, hoist the sails!)
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