PvE Musings

May my remaining two readers forgive the break in communication, I actually took a few days off to travel, take photos and ponder.  Its been an interesting summer so far, full of real-life changes and adjustments and it looks like to shape up as a year that I won’t forget soon.

In EVE, when I go exploring, most of my time is spent on scanning empty space.  Its now a little routine but I do query why I bother, other than the occasional T1 exploration frigate I virtually never see anyone I can tackle.  By evolution, the remaining wormholers in EVE have become smarter (shedding the dumb ones into nullsec, I presume) and ratters either crush their connection for safety or rat in doctrines that my 2-character team can not attack.  And thus grow my plans to do something different in EVE.  Maybe PvE?  I know curiously little about PvE in WH space.

Conflict is life

The May release has dropped and for virtually everyone outside of Delve nothing has changed.  In Delve some NPC raid content is happening and just like all PvE content in history of gaming, everyone expects it to be “on farm” within a few days.  But hey, I don’t live in nullsec, so I don’t expect anything new to happen until at least winter 2018.

Back to the topic.  With the publication of the roadmap out of the way, the EVE community ceased to focus on hypothetical and large scale solutions and hones in on features in the game that could be improved in order to make the game more playable and appealing.  Upfront at the moment is the War Dec system that allows a corporation to initiate a time period where legal conflict is allowed between them and another corporation or alliance.  The target does not have to agree and hence the term “non-consensual PvP” is used.  Generally, the receiving corporation laments that their gameplay is now effectively stopped while the aggressor finds ways to maximize his return by wardeccing multiple helpless targets and selectively culling the dumb ones.  For the vast majority of EVE players, wardecs are useless at best and a nuisance at worst; virtually nobody sees the current system as adding satisfying content to their gameplay.

Back in the hole

Well, here I am, back in Z3R0 Return Mining, my ancestral home so to speak.  Run by friend and fellow blogger Oreamnos, the corp occupies a C4 (C5/C3, we call it “Tim”) and by attrition has collected a motley crew of space cadets that behave on comms more like a family during a Thanksgiving Dinner than a hard hitting PvP elite corp.  We have known each other for longer than really is healthy and when people break out into jokes about things that happen in space 5 years ago (really Orea, I still want my bomber back that you warped to ZERO km onto the hostiles) then you know you are in both a good place and a place that needs to pick up its recruitment effort.

But I digress.

Sources of Income

I am experiencing something rather unsettling, a net drain on my EVE wallet.  For me, this is unusual, I spent the last four years in a (very) well run wormhole alliance and making ISK was a matter of organizing / finding a fleet to blow up sleepers or to farm PI / gasses, hacking sites etc.  One can argue with CCP all one wants, the changes they implemented over the last year were a net bonus for us wormhole dwellers.

Now I left my hole and while my main character is in Noir Academy and hence flies only cheap stuff, its a lot of cheap stuff that I would like to have around me.  Details are of course Op/sec but suffice to say that interceptors and bombers are on that list plus a number of other ships that need to be procured.  There is a Ship Replacement Program – and I should figure out how to use it – but currently, each little interceptor, each new bomber or frigate is slowly draining me.

Wormhole Hobo

It really feels weird to be docked in a station – there is something unnatural about being invulnerable, visible and blind to the events outside.  Basically, its the exact opposite of being in a Wormhole.  But after 3 weeks of bumming with my team of alts through a myriad of holes, it is nice to take a break. I always imagine my Gallente characters visiting houses of ill repute while my lone Caldari character character is left inventorying the spoils of the trip.

A new experience

Well, my little ambush in a site-running C1 / Blackhole didn’t quite work out, the locals appeared to be online somewhere but were not considerate enough to show themselves in ships that I could take down. Or show themselves at all.  By now, time had severed our static connections and my little fleet of alts had floated away from their empire base like ants trapped in a soap bubble.  When I scanned down the new connection, I found myself miles and miles from nowhere.

Camping trip

 

And yes, I bought it because it is pretty…

I just made it back home after a work trip oversees and decided to spend the Saturday decompressing, doing laundry and getting over the jetlag – catching up with work emails will have to wait until tomorrow morning.

Intermission

Funny how this year shapes itself as a repeat of last year.  First 2 months were pretty quiet and then in March all hell breaks loose in my real life.  In 2014, I nearly threw the towel on EVE and almost to the day a year later, I am at the exact same point.  Worn out, with too many flights and conferences under my belt, I am just too wiped for spaceships.

There is a difference though, last year, my RL crunch coincided with me having lost faith into CCP, I didn’t think I’d come back.  This year its different, I am actually curious what the future holds and how the game will change.  So, you can’t have my stuff yet.

Why live in a wormhole?

So, my friend Oreamos and I mused the other day about the reason why anyone would want to live in a Wormhole.  Don’t get me wrong, Anoikis is great and the risk / reward balance here is still very good. Recent buffs to sleeper loot makes running C1/C2 sites actually worthwhile – add to this the sheer number of connections in/out and its a very lucrative region of space.  Non surprisingly, we see an uptick in activity especially in the lower wormholes while the higher ones (C5/C6) still seem to be mostly farming holes of nullsec alts and are fairly quiet during peak hours.

But while increased activity, good loot and many routes mean, Anoikis is a great space to be, it doesn’t mean its a great place to live.

Hyperion and Wormholes Part 1

Well, so our Icelandic friends dropped a little surprise on us.  The upcoming patch “Hyperion” will contain some rather significant changes for us wormhole dwellers.  The associated Dev Blog can be found here, a decent description is found here and Rhavas summarized his analysis here.

Lets start with the tl/dr – the changes are not really what the community wanted or needed but they’ll do and most of the changes will contribute to more activity in Wormhole space.  This is a good thing.

Considering that I agree with much of what Rhavas wrote, let me just add a couple of comments from my point of view.