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.
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.