Of course not, but the rules of engagement have definitely changed a bit.
There are tons of EVE piracy related blogs out there. Hell, I even started one myself, though I'm nowhere near able to yarr effectively alone. If you read any of them, you've probably noticed the same thing that I have over the course of the past two weeks.
They've gone awfully quiet...
Factional Warfare in EVE has brought hordes of empire and 0.0 pilots into low-sec. You'd think that the pirates would be salivating at this, and initially, I'm sure they were. However, pirates are opportunists and danger freaks. They like to live on the edge, but at the same time, they try to stack the deck in their own favor whenever they can. It's a whole different ballgame when you are flashy red to everyone in the sector and there are 25 people in local instead of 5.
Gangs and proper fleets are invading these spaces and when they run out of enemy faction ships to blow up, they tend to go marauding. Anyone flashy red gets popped.
End result. I can go into low-sec again.
Also end result (and not quite so good for me) my horribly expensive shuttles aren't selling anymore since the pirates aren't hanging out in the red pockets waiting for people anymore.
I might have to find a more lucrative sideline. Perhaps I'll start selling 'second-best' named gear in contested systems..
Showing posts with label EVE Online. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EVE Online. Show all posts
Friday, June 20, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
piracy in EVE Online
So, I recently started playing EVE Online.
Despite the name of this post, I haven't resorted to piracy yet. I'm not sure that I will.
It strikes me as a terribly inefficient way to make money. I can make 10x as much money by being a 'carebear' than I can by taking it from other carebears. Missions are a decent source of income, but the real money is to be made in the market by capitalizing on the one thing that every MMO participant has plenty of - laziness.
MMOs are strange. They force a bunch of lazy fatassess to grind their way up a ladder for the purpose of bragging to other people climbing the same ladder about their position on the ladder and speed at which they reached it. In EVE, this is especially weird since one of the primary positions on this ladder is pure longevity. If you've been a subscriber for longer, you have more skills. Period. Full Stop. End of Statement.
There is seemingly no way to EVER match a character many months, let alone years older than you. Sure, choice of where to put your training time, intelligent choice of what to train (i.e. train the learning skills first people - but you should know that by now), and profession choice as you create your toon can make a big difference, but if I'm two months old and I'm in a battlecruiser, odds are pretty good that I'm dead at the fitting screen.
So, it would seem that unless I want to be a frigate pirate and max out the frigate skills, it'll be many, many months before I'm an effective PvP player. In fact, using the tools at my disposal, and knowing what I need to have to be an effective PvP player in, say, a Battlecruiser, I can say with no doubt at all that I'll need at least 71 days, 4 hours, 31 minutes and 25 seconds to complete this kind of training.
Granted, I started with a Trade build, and I can now conduct 57 simultaneous buy/sell orders from anywhere within a region, which would probably take a pure PvP toon 71 days, 4 hours, 29 minutes, and 43 seconds to train into, but I still contend that I make way more money doing what I do than he does.
So - why should I be a pirate?
Well, the rush, that's why.
Despite the name of this post, I haven't resorted to piracy yet. I'm not sure that I will.
It strikes me as a terribly inefficient way to make money. I can make 10x as much money by being a 'carebear' than I can by taking it from other carebears. Missions are a decent source of income, but the real money is to be made in the market by capitalizing on the one thing that every MMO participant has plenty of - laziness.
MMOs are strange. They force a bunch of lazy fatassess to grind their way up a ladder for the purpose of bragging to other people climbing the same ladder about their position on the ladder and speed at which they reached it. In EVE, this is especially weird since one of the primary positions on this ladder is pure longevity. If you've been a subscriber for longer, you have more skills. Period. Full Stop. End of Statement.
There is seemingly no way to EVER match a character many months, let alone years older than you. Sure, choice of where to put your training time, intelligent choice of what to train (i.e. train the learning skills first people - but you should know that by now), and profession choice as you create your toon can make a big difference, but if I'm two months old and I'm in a battlecruiser, odds are pretty good that I'm dead at the fitting screen.
So, it would seem that unless I want to be a frigate pirate and max out the frigate skills, it'll be many, many months before I'm an effective PvP player. In fact, using the tools at my disposal, and knowing what I need to have to be an effective PvP player in, say, a Battlecruiser, I can say with no doubt at all that I'll need at least 71 days, 4 hours, 31 minutes and 25 seconds to complete this kind of training.
Granted, I started with a Trade build, and I can now conduct 57 simultaneous buy/sell orders from anywhere within a region, which would probably take a pure PvP toon 71 days, 4 hours, 29 minutes, and 43 seconds to train into, but I still contend that I make way more money doing what I do than he does.
So - why should I be a pirate?
Well, the rush, that's why.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
theme parks and sandboxes
I have a few friends. Very few, really, but I tend to stick with the ones I have even when they do things like stab me in the back. Maybe I'm a masochist, or maybe I'm just not that socially smart, whatever it is, I am a pretty terrible judge of character.
Anyway, a preponderance of my friends play games. All kinds of games, and I think this isn't unusual, since games are entertaining and smart people tend to be good at them and I hang out with a lot of smart people. However, a little more disturbing is that the preponderance of the games that my friends tend to play have become MMOs.
MMOs are interesting. They seem to come in two basic flavors: the theme park flavor and the sandbox flavor. To be fair, I didn't coin this terminology. I've seen it used in many places, and I can't find attribution back to an original source, but it's not me.
The idea here is that most MMOs -- in the DikuMUD style -- are like a theme park, you show up, and they have a number of different entertainment options available for you, you pick one, and then you go on your ride until it's done. Some, like Project Entropia or EVE Online or even the old school Ultima Online are more like sandboxes. You hop in and then figure out on your own what you are going to do.
The theme park games are fun, and grab a lot of folks, even those that aren't hard-core gamers and only want to play for a few hours a week. You might not have the best gear, but you can always find something fun to do.
The sandbox games tend to require copious amounts of time, even if you aren't playing competitively. They tend to be much harsher. Losses are not replaced, and can be catastrophic. Hours, measured over several months, of efforts can be wiped out in an instant. And yet, these games have rabid followings. Why?
I think they more closely mirror society. They have more realistic economies, more realistic governmental (player run and initiated) structures.
I first started MMOs with a Star Wars based MUD that I can't even remember the name of sometime around 1992. I'd been playing BBS 'door' games for quite a bit longer than that, but they were all solo things. Only the biggest BBSes at the time had multiple phone lines, and I only phreaked my way into those to download porn. That was a much more valuable way to spend my stolen bits than playing multiplayer games.. at the time..
My first real MMO experience was Ultima Online though. That game stole 4 years of my life. Many of the staples of the MMO experience didn't exist yet. Eventually UO go in-game guilds, but it didn't start out that way. Eventually it got an in-game reputation system, but that too, was a novelty. In the beginning, there was no way to tell who was a good guy, who was a bad guy, and whether to stay and fight or run (running was often futile anyway) until the other player yelled 'Corp Por' and you died. The whole world (except the cities.. sort of) was a PvP zone. It was a very harsh place. And I loved it. I played both sides of the 'PK' fence. But out of nothing spontaneously came organizations of 'good' and 'evil' players working together because they needed the protection.
Economies are even more interesting, especially in games like Project Entropia (which doesn't like to call itself a game) where the in-game currency is tied to real world currency for value.
But that's a post for another day.
Anyway, a preponderance of my friends play games. All kinds of games, and I think this isn't unusual, since games are entertaining and smart people tend to be good at them and I hang out with a lot of smart people. However, a little more disturbing is that the preponderance of the games that my friends tend to play have become MMOs.
MMOs are interesting. They seem to come in two basic flavors: the theme park flavor and the sandbox flavor. To be fair, I didn't coin this terminology. I've seen it used in many places, and I can't find attribution back to an original source, but it's not me.
The idea here is that most MMOs -- in the DikuMUD style -- are like a theme park, you show up, and they have a number of different entertainment options available for you, you pick one, and then you go on your ride until it's done. Some, like Project Entropia or EVE Online or even the old school Ultima Online are more like sandboxes. You hop in and then figure out on your own what you are going to do.
The theme park games are fun, and grab a lot of folks, even those that aren't hard-core gamers and only want to play for a few hours a week. You might not have the best gear, but you can always find something fun to do.
The sandbox games tend to require copious amounts of time, even if you aren't playing competitively. They tend to be much harsher. Losses are not replaced, and can be catastrophic. Hours, measured over several months, of efforts can be wiped out in an instant. And yet, these games have rabid followings. Why?
I think they more closely mirror society. They have more realistic economies, more realistic governmental (player run and initiated) structures.
I first started MMOs with a Star Wars based MUD that I can't even remember the name of sometime around 1992. I'd been playing BBS 'door' games for quite a bit longer than that, but they were all solo things. Only the biggest BBSes at the time had multiple phone lines, and I only phreaked my way into those to download porn. That was a much more valuable way to spend my stolen bits than playing multiplayer games.. at the time..
My first real MMO experience was Ultima Online though. That game stole 4 years of my life. Many of the staples of the MMO experience didn't exist yet. Eventually UO go in-game guilds, but it didn't start out that way. Eventually it got an in-game reputation system, but that too, was a novelty. In the beginning, there was no way to tell who was a good guy, who was a bad guy, and whether to stay and fight or run (running was often futile anyway) until the other player yelled 'Corp Por' and you died. The whole world (except the cities.. sort of) was a PvP zone. It was a very harsh place. And I loved it. I played both sides of the 'PK' fence. But out of nothing spontaneously came organizations of 'good' and 'evil' players working together because they needed the protection.
Economies are even more interesting, especially in games like Project Entropia (which doesn't like to call itself a game) where the in-game currency is tied to real world currency for value.
But that's a post for another day.
Monday, August 20, 2007
hobbies
It's tough to keep up writing both a journal and a blog... I feel like this has become more and more disjoint and less informative (to me) and is probably nothing more than total inanity to anyone other than me.
So - rather than continue to use this blog as a forum for vagaries around how my life is going in general, I'm going to start to turn it into something else - something more like all the other blogs out there.. I'm going to try to be informative.
There are not a lot of topics upon which I am actually qualified to be informative. In fact, I can't really think of any.
I've spent a great deal of time lately playing Magic: the Gathering - Online in an effort to tune a deck to be ready to play in Grand Prix: San Francisco this weekend, but alas, it seems that either I'd be playing the same deck as everyone else, or I'd be losing more than I'd win. And I don't really want to spend the money either way, since I'm pretty sure I'd come out somewhere near the bottom. I just don't have the time, focus, or freedom to be competitive there anymore.
And my other interests.. well, they've been rather sparse as of late.
I could give you the super secret tech that made it into my almost-but-not-quite-competitive rogue deck, but I don't think anyone reads this, or could care. Suffice it to say, against a field of U/B/x Teachings or U/x Pickles decks, I can prove that Dragonstorm isn't dead. Against a field of Tarmagoyf and Blink effects, I can show you a good answer - Johnny Cash style - but this isn't an invention of my own. But against a field that I expect to be split somewhere between the two, with a smattering of reanimator decks thrown in, I can't lock down more than 50%.
I think it's time to get serious about golf and beer, and maybe something new.
Anyone know a good hobby to do in the hours between 7pm and 7am? Preferably something that is both interesting, occasionally engages with other people, and can be practiced alone most of the time.
Drop me a line if you read this.
So - rather than continue to use this blog as a forum for vagaries around how my life is going in general, I'm going to start to turn it into something else - something more like all the other blogs out there.. I'm going to try to be informative.
There are not a lot of topics upon which I am actually qualified to be informative. In fact, I can't really think of any.
I've spent a great deal of time lately playing Magic: the Gathering - Online in an effort to tune a deck to be ready to play in Grand Prix: San Francisco this weekend, but alas, it seems that either I'd be playing the same deck as everyone else, or I'd be losing more than I'd win. And I don't really want to spend the money either way, since I'm pretty sure I'd come out somewhere near the bottom. I just don't have the time, focus, or freedom to be competitive there anymore.
And my other interests.. well, they've been rather sparse as of late.
I could give you the super secret tech that made it into my almost-but-not-quite-competitive rogue deck, but I don't think anyone reads this, or could care. Suffice it to say, against a field of U/B/x Teachings or U/x Pickles decks, I can prove that Dragonstorm isn't dead. Against a field of Tarmagoyf and Blink effects, I can show you a good answer - Johnny Cash style - but this isn't an invention of my own. But against a field that I expect to be split somewhere between the two, with a smattering of reanimator decks thrown in, I can't lock down more than 50%.
I think it's time to get serious about golf and beer, and maybe something new.
Anyone know a good hobby to do in the hours between 7pm and 7am? Preferably something that is both interesting, occasionally engages with other people, and can be practiced alone most of the time.
Drop me a line if you read this.
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