Wear a helmet

About to set out on my commute
From Wikimedia Commons

While pedaling my bike last month, it occurred to me that there are some parallels between riding a bike and playing Eve. I somehow managed not to get hit by a car while in reverie thinking about this:

• Pick a route carefully
• A shiny, expensive vehicle only gets you so far
• Fit matters
• Don't put yourself on "autopilot"
• Learn by doing

Routing: there are two reasonable routes between work and home, and each has a major drawback. One is a low-traffic route that has a hinky and awkward-to-cross T-intersection, and the other offers a more direct route but more lights and traffic. I've taken both and prefer the former: one awkward spot is preferable to lots of stop-and-go at lights (and more exhaust to suck down). With Eve, too, I'm paying close attention to traffic levels and loss reports when wandering into and through low-security space.

Spaceman Spiff's pricey officer and storyline equipment didn't
compensate for fitting mixed guns and low Frigate skills.
From Bill Watterson (panel cropped and flipped)

Buying success: I bought a nice bike, but certainly I didn't splurge for a carbon nanofiber über-cycle. Besides cost, I don't have the skill to take advantage of one; a better bike doesn't make for a better bike-and-rider combination. Similarly, as I've learned with Eve, buying an expensive ship and giving it gear with better stats won't me a super-duper space cowboy. Even after spending time training up the skills to fly a nice ship, an expensive vessel can be stymied by equipping it with superfluous stuff, not adjusting the overview or other UI pieces to suit your needs, not training up important ancillary support skills, autopiloting, etc. As you may have surmised, I bought a couple of PLEX soon after I started playing to lay my hands on a couple of nice ships I'd like to train toward -- but, I've tried to be diligent, too, to try my chops with all the other littler and less-expensive ships I can get my hands on, and always keeping to the essential Eve adage of not flying what I can't afford to lose. In a broader essay about ship loss, Nonnak Severin also points out that "equipping the best item ... does not" make someone the best pilot in Eve -- for more, see below.

Fit: one reason my previous bike rarely got used was I realized after a few bouncy trips down the C&O Canal bicycle path that it was just a poor fit for my body. Ladening the bike, too, with unnecessary gear made it a pain to get it up and the down my apartment stairs. In Eve, fitting refers to what equipment you strap onto your ship: guns, engines, armor plates, etc. You want to fit your ship with an eye toward the types of enemies you might encounter, e.g. a pirate hunter will equipment weapons and protection against the type of damage a particular pirate type deals out and is susceptible to. You also fit your ship in response to your skills: my main character has higher skills for armor than shields; I get more benefit from fitting gear that helps my armor stats than equipment suited to shields. And fitting also refers to broader guidelines and principles: for example, don't equip both short- and long-range guns (because then you bring only ~50% of your potential firepower onto an enemy) and don't mix armor and shield buffing equipment (stick with one). The folks at The Mittani have a BINGO card for poor fits as part of their Awful Loss of the Day; here's a recent one, also by Nonnak Severin. But beyond that, and back to my ill-suited previous bike: the ship and gear need to be a good fit for what you want to do. With Eemiv, I prefer railguns at long range over combat drones, hence a Megathron over the drone-friendly Dominix. With Dengar, I'm enjoying quick movement and rapid fire, hence sticking with an Incursus frigate and not catapulting to something much bigger.

Armor buffer tank
From Giro

Autopilot: an actual thing in Eve, which has the downside of depositing you significant distance from your destination, making you vulnerable to attack. Just don't do it. On my bike, this is the metaphorical state of not being mindful of my surroundings, spending too much time thinking (e.g. about this blog post). My bike has only the most meager of buffer tanks against damage.

Experience: it matters. I now know the traffic sensor by the mall will, in fact, detect a bike; that the biggest hill is early on the commute home, so maybe I shouldn't pedal full-speed until I cross the train tracks; that most drivers will yield to me at four-way stops. And I've learned that even the people who blow me up are also very nice and offer insight; I'm not the only person who sometimes needs to drop out of a fleet to tend to family; and that there is never a want of something to do in Eve.