What do you guys do in the game?

The /r/eve subreddit gets a lot of these questions, more so in the past few weeks than I’ve seen in the past. Maybe because I just browse it more often these days, who knows.

But there’s always people wondering if EVE is still viable a game to play, is it fun? Is there much to do? How do I start playing this game?

I answer them from time to time, tell them that they need to figure out if they want to PvE or PvP or do both. Do they want to kill NPCs, do they want to do industry (or crafting as they know it in other games). If they want to PvP do they want to do it solo, do they want to do it in a big alliance where they’ll be a number for a long time until they can make themselves more known.

Do it in a small group but probably not getting the big blingy kills?

All questions that a person needs to ask themselves when going into EVE online. In many MMOs really, it all boils down to “What do you want to do with your time in the game”

I myself realised a long, long time ago that I liked being in wormhole space. All because of the things that have happened to me in wormhole space. And mostly because of me joining a corporation back in 2016 that invited me to an expenses paid trip to Prague the day after I joined them and me just going “why not”

That corporation no longer exists in the way it did but I made some really good friends there. One of which poked me months ago to join the current corporation I’m in.

What do I do in EVE though? I like to think of myself as someone who mostly PvPs and just trades to make himself ISK to pay for said PvP.

And I do need the ISK because I tend to lose expensive things.

I do sometimes escape in cheap stuff

Less than 12 hours ago I lost a Loki and pod that cost me around 2.5b. For those of you that don’t know the abbreviation that is billion. 2 500 000 000 isk, which equals exactly one month of gametime.

It was a painful loss for about 30 mins, where I was wondering why I was so damn stupid to go into that hole. But in the end, it’s what I enjoy doing, and the battle itself was quite fun.

What happened you ask?

Well, this all started when we found a few prospects huffing gas in a neighbouring wormhole, we were setting up a gank. Me in my sabre, the two other guys in a sabre and a proteus themselves.

Unfortunately, before we were even able to set up the gank correctly a few of our targets decided to go back home and saw us.

We still tried to go for it but the prospects escaped. The guys that saw us came back in 3 other ships, Gnosis, Deimos and Proteus. We had them bubbled and I figured that I should quickly reship in a ship that could easily tank them and then some.

They did get my sabre killed but I was able to go reship.

So I came back in a Loki. At this point their 3 people fleet turned into a 6 or 7 people fleet.

But whatever, I could probably tank this, let’s go!

And tank them I did. Although it was close for a while.

We were fighting on our home connection at zero. Meaning that if anyone was about to die they could easily jump in the wormhole and quickly try to make it out.

Which basically happened to all the guys that we were fighting except one unlucky Legion who I think was polarized.

But we were happy, we killed one of theirs. They were now in our home hole and we were on the connection they needed to get back. A little Mexican standoff.

This took a bit too long to our liking so what do we do? We go back into home and start pretending to roll the connection. This is what you do when you put a bunch of mass through a wormhole in order to make it collapse.

All of this, from when we saw the prospects to us doing this was about 40 minutes. Plenty of time for people to get pinged. Unfortunately for us, my corporation had nobody else online, and it turns out that theirs had a few more people online.

The guys went onto the connection about 2 minutes after I jumped back home with my Loki, my two Corp buddies went after them. I heard them go “oh shit that’s a bit more than before” but didn’t really think much of it. If they were in cruisers I’d be able to tank them for a bit longer and we might be able to at least kill one of them.

Some of them were not in cruisers.

I died at zero on the wormhole back home and got podded too. Why? Well, one was because they brought a big bad Paladin to kill us, and two, because I was polarized for about 20 more seconds when my ship died, and 10 more seconds when my pod died.

Polarisation happens when you go through a wormhole, if you were to go back through the same hole, you won’t be able to use it a second time to go back to where you come from for about 4 minutes. It’s a little countdown timer that was made to make things a bit more interesting in wormholes. And some groups know how to use it well, others do not. Especially when it’s late and they are on a pvp rush.

I died, ended up in Jita, and am currently waiting for a few buy orders to be filled for a new Loki and pod.

It’s a good thing I can easily afford these things, it would hurt a lot more if I couldn’t.

But I can’t imagine myself doing anything other than wormholes anymore. Every other space is just too boring.

Safety is relative, but in wormholes you have no idea who else is watching.

My very first ransom

Every time I write here, it’s because I want to tell a story. I want to entertain my reader(s) with the words I put down. I like to think that most of the time I succeed in doing so. Mostly because 99% of the time I feel like I’m the only one reading my own blog and it does entertain me somewhat!

And sometimes I want to show you pretty things

Despite the fact that I’ve been playing EVE Online for more than a decade, I have never ransomed anyone. Until a couple of days ago that is.

I shall now regale you with what happened.

It was a Tuesday like most Tuesdays, working from home and reading up on the news and discord. One of my corporation buddies found a reinforced POCO and decided that he wanted to be there for when the new owners of the system would turn up and bash it.

What he had failed to say was that it would take about 9 more hours, meaning that today we wouldn’t be using our static C3 much. Luckily, we had a random pop up and were able to use that for some other content.

It turned around midnight eve time and the poco came out of reinforcement. We had not seen anyone yet but suddenly someone logged onto the POS and then another and another.

The first thing they did was scan our hole down.

We were ready in Leshaks but the moment we saw the scanner we decided to quickly dock and log of our leshak pilots. I had a sabre cloaked on the hole, waiting in case they would decide to roll it.

And they did in fact decide to roll it. 2 praxi and an onyx came to the hole. Little did they know that we were watching them.

Seeing that at the time I was only in a sabre and my buddy was with his eyes on their side, I was only able to catch one praxis.

We killed it with the Leshaks that had logged back on and then just stayed on the hole for a little bit, only to then decide “Hey, let’s see if we can have them fight us, let’s go shoot the pos”

While doing this I kept the hole bubbled seeing that I also wanted to catch the praxis and onyx. Another one of my Corp mates then decided “I’m going to see if we can get him to pay to stop us”

At this point we thought that the pos might not have any strontium in it. Meaning that if we would get through the shield, it would not even get reinforced and we could just grab everything in there.

But we’re nice people at heart and offered him a ransom. He had a Kronos floating around in the POS so we told him that if he gave it to us we would stop shooting.

I did not think he would, but he told us that he was ok with that, he just needed the Onyx back in the hole because that pilot was the one able to fly the Kronos.

Just like you dear reader, at this point most of us thought “No way, he just wants to try and roll us out”

But no, once I released the Onyx pilot and let him warp, he went into the Kronos, flew it back to our home entrance and went out of it. Only for me to get in it and it up.

Now to sell or fit it

We stopped shooting the tower and went our merry way, One marauder richer. A badly fit one, but still.

The POS was more than likely not stronted at all, but I don’t mind, we could have left with a lot more loot, but we left with a marauder and someone new in wormhole space, who can now bat phone us if he needs help.

If we come across him somewhere we will still kill him, but if he needs help, we will be there for him.

That’s the wormhole life. We don’t really do politics, we just shoot each other, but we will be there for the friendly people that need help.

I’m enjoying my time in the C4 quite a bit, and I’m certain more good stories will come.

There’s content everywhere, we just have to find it.

Stay tuned o7