So things in EVE are starting to pick up. Problem is, I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing. There is an endless amount of information out there, I just haven’t taken the time to read any of it. I’m simply winging it right now. It has lead to some tough lessons. Two examples:
After having my fill of “Fed-Ex” courier missions, I decided to branch out and try my hand (and my ship) at a little space combat. One of my contacts had just what I was looking for — a Minmatar scout had his ship destroyed by some pirates in a region of dead space near the current base. This called for swift retribution, which I had been recruited for. The mission was simple: Destroy the leaders habitation and take out any pirates who got in the way. I was also told to leave the rest of their installation intact. No problem, nice and straightforward.
I head out to the area and locate the target. It was quite a distance a way, and there was a group of three pirates between us. I dispatched with them with impunity and headed to my target. Off to my right (or starboard, I’m not to sure about spacecraft jargon) was a group of more pirates, about ten of them. They were about a 100 klicks away, so I figured they’d ignore me. I locked on to my target and started blasting away. My little pea-shooter blasters were doing very little damage to the habitation. It was slow going and in the meantime, the pirates had taken an interest in me. Before I knew it, they had closed the gap and all had my targeted and were unloading their arsenal on me with abandon. I threw up shield booster and tried to warp out of there, but I didn’t have enough power to warp. They had taken my shields down completely, perforated my armor to nothing and were currently working on my structure when the warp drive kicked in and I flew outta there like some kind of bat. I made it back to the station with about 11 HP of structure left, nothing else. That was close. Phew. I would have been really screwed because I skimped on the insurance and would have been without a ship if they had taken me down. I repaired my ship, headed back and took out the pirates before I took out my target. It was a lesson learned.
I then decided to take it easy on the combat missions since my current Frigate isn’t really built for battle. Me contacts told me I could check any available missions from any station, so I decided to check those out. There are a ton of missions I could do. I picked one that seemed reasonably easy to do. The reward was 100k ISK for a simple pickup and drop off. No prob. It never is.
In EVE, whenever you take on a mission, they take “escrow” from you as a form of collateral that you’ll actually do the mission. For all the missions up until now, the amount of escrow was small, on the order of a few thousand ISK. Well, this mission’s escrow was 2 million ISK! I about crapped my pants when I looked at my bank account and I only had 80k in there. HUH?! This was not good. I needed to finish this mission ASAP and get my money back. So I look at the mission and set up my destination. It was 29 jumps away! I have my routing figure the safest path, so I turned off that and it would still be 21 jumps, going through some low security areas. So I switched it back and when on my way. It takes over a minute to do each jump, so it took my over half an hour, real time, to get to my destination.
I get there, locate my cargo and then my heart sinks again. My current ship has cargo space for 330 m
So I’m slowly figuring out the ropes. Slowly being the operative word. So while I’m mining tonight I’ll be reading up on anything I can find about EVE Online. I’ve got to be prepared for the wild world of EVE!
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