Failed once more

You win some, you lose some. And these days I’ve been on a losing streak when it comes to trying out new things.

 As some of you know I was searching for a null sec corporation to join but didn’t really like the idea of CTA’s. And there’s a good reason for it. In general whenever I read about null, I don’t really like what I see. And my latest experiment only showed me that my gut feeling wasn’t wrong.

Please note, that in this blog I might seem extremely negative towards the people I joined. However this is negativity towards null sec and the mindset towards it. The people I joined were actually extremely friendly and fun to chat with. The mindset of the alliance however, was not something for me. You’ll see why.

I joined a null sec corporation/alliance about a week and half ago. In that time I haven’t done much at all. Not because I didn’t want to, but due to silly rules and the fact that I didn’t want to be on TeamSpeak.

The people in the corporation were nice when I said hi in the chat, I immediately got some help in getting set up with a ratter, told where to find contracts for their pvp doctrines etc. etc. 
It didn’t take long until I was ready in a Dominix to blow some rats and earn some isk. Once I undocked, I went on to one of the anomalies, released my sentries and got ready to blap. Not 5 minutes after undocking I noticed that people in corp were asking me why I wasn’t on coms. Prepare for ‘Strike one’

For my job I tend to have a a lot of meetings during the day, where I listen to people talk about what needs to be done, and where I tell other people what’s going to be done. This happens in live meetings seeing that I’m in Belgium, and the other people are all over the world. 
Wearing a headset gives me a headache due to me not enjoying noise much since I had an accident few years ago. So when I get home, I don’t really want to get on voice coms unless I join a fleet because you do need some coordination and just typing isn’t going to give you fast enough reaction times. But not when I’m just out ratting. 

That was my first mistake, figuring that people wouldn’t need me to be on coms because there was nothing going on. But for some strange reason people are so afraid of losing ships that I needed to be on coms so they could warn me if somebody came through to our systems. 

Somebody.. Not a fleet, no, just one person, one guy/girl who isn’t part of the alliance or it’s blues and I was expected to dock up. 
In the few minutes that they explained this to me I had cleared one wave of the rats, and then, as luck would have it, a neutral turned up in local. One lonely guy, probably just moving around in null a bit, but they told me to dock up, because who knows, he might be part of a bigger fleet, or drop a cyno on me.

Strike two.

If someone were to drop a cyno, on my 250m ratting Dominix just for that kill, I’d smile and tip my hat to him/her. I really didn’t understand what the big deal was for one neutral, but I docked up and seethed slightly, wondering what I would do in the meanwhile. There was no talk about hunting the intruder down, it was better to wait it out. 
After that I logged out for the weekend, not wanting to log back in. When I logged back in on Sunday evening, I had about 10-20 EvEmails about CTA’s. I didn’t really bother reading them because most of those were at times that I had better things to do. 

Yesterday, my friend joined in an operation with them. A big fleet was going to go out on a roam looking for fights. Turned out that my friend, due to the fact that he could only fly an inty, he was expected to just make pings, wasn’t even allowed to join in on the fight.

Strike three.. All of these things, are the reason why I flew back to Jita an hour ago.

I know that highsec “carebears” are something that null sec people like to laugh with. But isn’t ratting thesame? If you dock up as soon as a stranger comes into your system, doesn’t that make you worse than the carefree bear that doesn’t care. 

Null sec might be fun for some people, but not for me. I’d rather see some action or do new things. So on to the next project.. I’m going to go back to exploring wormhole space, but from my own little hub. We’ll see what happens. 
Wormhole space was entertaining because you only see who’s with you, once they uncloak right on top of you. It seems like I like the way that works.

Stay tuned o7

A fine line

There’s a fine line between EvE being just a game, or it being close to a second job, and I think that I’m threading said line.

When trying to make ISK in the game, there are a multitude of ways to do so. You can mine rocks until you’re cross eyed and sell either the rocks or the processed goods. You can go out and do missions, earning bounties, salvage and loot. There’s null sec ratting (which is supposedly something that’ll make you earn quite a bit), exploration, industry, piracy, trading,…

There are so many ways of making ISK that it’s hard to pick one that you like, especially if you’re like me and haven’t even tried half of it yet.
But right now, my way of making isk is with industry, I create T2 items. Which means that I need bpc’s for them, which I get by copying T1 BPO’s and then put them in one of my invention slots at the POS.

There’s only a certain percentage chance that said bpc turns into a T2 bpc, without using decryptors and such I usually get around 55% chance of a T2. Which is pretty good, datacores aren’t too expensive and I have all the chips. I make a nice profit doing so.

However, I noticed that when I make things that only take a rough 10 hours to make, I start thinking of EvE as a job. I need to log in to do my invention once every hour, click and click and click because of the POS mechanics not allowing me to create batch jobs. And then I need to make sure that I have all the material to create said items.
It’s not that hard, but all the clicking can get to you.

A friend of mine told me that I should slow down a bit once the invention starts to feel as a second job, I would love to do that. But doing so would make it problematic for me. I really, really don’t like seeing my manufacturing/research job queues empty.
It’s something that makes me feel guilty, not using the full potential of a character. Already I put a few ME jobs up just because I didn’t want those empty slots just sitting there.

It’s time for me to start looking into other ways of making ISK though. Mission running is fun and all, but it gets boring too. You can only do so many level 4’s until you get cross eyed.

Maybe I should try my hand at trading. If only I knew what I was doing, that’d make things a lot easier for me.
If someone feels like mentoring me in the ways of trading, be my guest! Your help will be appreciated and you’ll get a virtual cookie out of it!

Stay tuned o7