I’m in a sort of MMO rut these days, and it’s not because MMOs have let me down. They haven’t; most of the MMOs I play regularly are extremely good, and if I’m not having much fun, I’m sure it’s not he game’s fault.
I’ve been thinking about the old Bartle method for classifying MMO players as having varying degrees of four attributes, a character sheet of sorts for gamers – Explorer, Socialite, Achiever and Killer. Everyone has each of those to a lesser or greater extent. Explorers like seeing something they haven’t seen before. Socialites like doing things with other people. Achievers want to have the most or be the best, and Killers want to hug puppies and donate to worthy charities. The Bartle test shows me to be a heavy Explorer type, with about equal shares of Socialite and Achiever, and lastly, far and away the least, a Killer.
But the games I have been playing are mostly either Achiever-focused games (EQ2 and LotRO) or Killer games (Spellborn). Wizard101 is a Social game and Free Realms an Explorer game, but they were the minority and suffer from being kid-focused. Realizing that my rut may come from playing MMOs that really don’t appeal to me (in EQ2, for instance, I mostly just make tableaux for comics instead of grinding shards and AAs as I am supposed to do), I downloaded EVE Online, the hardest core of all the Explorer-focused MMO I know of.
I hadn’t wanted to go Gallente again, but I looked at all the ships available and in the appealing looks department, it was either Gallente or the Mon Calimari-looking Amarr ships. Given racial histories of either liberty or religious fervor, I went with liberty and taking on a very old family name, entered New Eden as Tipa Pinneau (by the time my mother was born, the name had been Anglicized to Pineo. I went back to the original).
Yes, I am half-French on my mother’s side. You got a problem with that?
Since I played last year, the tutorial mission arcs have gone from a single catch-all mission arc to three, one for combat, one for business, and one for mining and industry. I had EVEMon to help decide on skills (three months to Battle Cruiser!) and Certificates to make sure I wasn’t gimping myself (thanks, Krystalle, for pointing me to those!). EVEMon (and every. single. person I talked to) suggested pumping up the learning and stat skills to start, so that was most of Saturday, with a couple of necessary skill training to progress through the missions. Sunday was focused on getting basic certificates going (and by the time I get home from work, I should have Resource Harvester, Resource Foreman, and a basic combat certificate finished). The combat mission arc dealt with the capture of the saboteur Wolf, whom I finally tracked to a base deep in Deadspace. The last mission, he halted my ship in space with a stasis field, that I had to destroy from less-than-optimal range as my shields were eaten away by enemies. I destroyed it and warped out seconds before my ship was destroyed, repaired, and went back to finish the job.
That arc rewarded me the Tristan above. I used EVEMon to browse Battleclinic for good Tristan builds, and I was only a couple of hours away from a really solid build, so I trained that up while I searched the market for the fittings I’d need. Isis’ Dark Laughter III is a speed tank – she zips around the battle at 800m/s while destroying things from 10km with 125mm guns and Flameburst missiles, with a combat drone to help out a little. In the missions I’ve run with her, most of her enemies have died in the first few seconds; I can’t lock target on them fast enough. Now that I have moved to Arnon, I expect things to be more difficult, but I’m liking it so far.
After the excitement of the combat arc, the business arc was a bit of a snore. The combat was depressingly simple, and though it taught the basics of salvage and hacking, the arc itself noted that it would be some time before we could use these abilities in real situations. I did peek in on the ship graveyards in some systems, with the salvagers buzzing around immense hulks like flies on a corpse. Someday… I didn’t, by the way, appreciate that these missions couldn’t be done usefully in a group. I flew them with my friend Kasul, and we ended up having to do most of them twice so we each could get the doodad from them.
The reward for this arc was the slow-moving hauler Iteron, which was amusingly destroyed in my only PvP incident of the weekend. I don’t want to say PvP battle, because it wasn’t. But I’ll talk about that more in the next section.
The mining arc! I remembered this from last year! The last of the three arcs has you mining the skies for ore and forming it into various things. This is the arc that teaches new pilots, like me, how they are going to be making their money to start. The missions alternated between killing a couple extremely weak enemies and then mine something (and for this I used a combat drone which had no trouble keeping me safe from NPCs), or make something.
Midway through the arc, I came across a rich asteroid belt full of Veldspar, Scordite and Azure Plagioclase and figured I’d see how much this stuff sold on the market, maybe make some money. I mined a little of each, calculated the volume per unit of ore, calculated how much of each I could fit in my Iteron with two Extended Cargo Expander Is, checked the market, and found a good profit with the Veldspar a few jumps away. So I happily mined enough with my miner to fill the Iteron when someone flew up to me, suddenly turned red, and then flew off. They were gone, but somehow, they had claimed my can and everything in it in an instance.
I made a new can and opened the other one to get my ores back, but the game warned me that if I removed any of MY ore from the can, that I’d be KOS by the thief and his corp. I did it anyway, returned to base a jump away and got my Iteron. When I got back, I saw the thief had come back and claimed my NEW can as well, I opened it to get what ore I could out, and he appeared once more and shredded my ship. In the end, he got everything.
I wasn’t that upset about losing the ship, it happens, but I was upset that my stuff was able to be instantly stolen without leaving me anything to do about it. I asked the newbie corp channel for help. (noobs are put in an NPC corp, apparently. The rookie channel is spammed by gold sellers and is unusable because of it, so it’s good there’s a channel new players can actually use). It turns out that jetcans belong to the last person who added something to them. So the thief had simply added one unit of ore to the can, and instantly everything of mine was his. This is called “can flipping”. I could have claimed my stuff back by adding something more into it, but of course, at the time I didn’t know this, and since taking my own stuff back is a declaration of hostile intent, I flew in to a noob trap.
It had taken about an hour to mine enough ore for the deal, so that was three quarters of a million ISK and an hour of time gone in a moment. And a ship!
One of the last missions in the mining arc brought me to a hidden pocket of space full of Kernite. I checked the market and found a good buyer for the stuff a few jumps away in low security space, but what the heck. I mined the belt bare, brought in a replacement Iteron, ferried it all to base in two loads, and then manually flew to the buyer at Old Man Star. The Iteron is FAR too slow for autopilot. I met no trouble on the way there or back, and managed to unload two holds full of Kernite for about 1.8m ISK.
That finished all three arcs for me (final reward for the mining arc was yet another Iteron), and the arc agents all pointed me to the Sisters of EVE station in the Arnon system for an epic arc, which Sara Pickell tells me can be farmed for big money. I spent the rest of the night ferrying my stuff and ships to the new base in the background while playing Free Realms. Now we’ll see how well the Tristan does in real missions…. and yes, it is FULLY insured.