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I've created another alternate character to train up and get involved with player-vs-player combat. As I train her up, I'm remembering another refrain I encountered when I started playing and reading about Eve: some folks rush to pilot larger ships, but there's a lot of fun and even wisdom to be had with smaller vessels.

I'm certainly seeing this now. My main character for a while has been running level 4 missions in a powerful Navy-issue Megathron. It's fun to blow up so many pirates and other NPCs, and the loot is good: my station-trading character has made good money on his own, and selling off the loot has been a nice bonus. I've been good, too, about training up support skills to make sure I'm not flying a glass cannon.

But, the Megathron is slow. And in larger missions, I get tired of alternating between grinding down on enemy battleships and then micro-warping away so my big, slow guns can track more nimble frigates (even with drone support). Some missions have taken two hours to complete, and my completionist personality doesn't allow for blitzing missions.

My first forays into PvP with the new alt have been mixed: I enjoy the swiftness of flying Atron and Incursus frigates. Now knowing what I'm doing, the tutorial missions (which I did for some money and faction standing) flew by. It's nice to have a skill-training plan with a notion of what I'm aiming for. And training for small-scale ships and modules will be speedy compared to working away for large ships and modules.

I jumped into Factional Warfare and promptly got blown up twice. First, I went to a friendly industrial complex where my dinky Atron was promptly blown up by an enemy tier 2 (i.e. more kick-butt) frigate. Got a new one, refitted, jumped back in and really screwed up: I flew down a friendly complex, thinking I should just fly around defending it. Alas, I guess anyone flying into a complex triggers the defenses: a "friendly" vessel started shooting me. Oh, well. I shot back for a while. And then an actual enemy arrived and blew up my ship. I warped out in my pod, which his corp-mate promptly exploded. Dang.

Both of these stemmed from some errors on my part: I should have just warped out as soon as I saw trouble in both areas. But, I didn't. I'll do better next time. In the meantime, I've also joined the Blue Fleet [Corporation], in constant (fun) warfare with the Red Fleet. Red vs. Blue has hundreds of members with lots of stuff going on; I could see this as my lever into really figuring out PvB and getting the most out of Eve, especially on the community/group-play front.

I'm reminded of playing Dragon Age: I finished the game with my initial character, a bulky soldier who carried a big sword. But, I got the most from the game -- accessing quests, garnering rewards, leveling up to cause the most damage for my play style -- with my second character, a nimble dwarven sneak-thief. There was virtue in not being a tank and also, in the second go-around, knowing what skills and talents to allocate level-up points to. Ditto my preference for speed over brawn in the X-Wing games: give me a nimble A-wing over the stronger X-wing or lunky B-wing any day.

Blowed up again!

Got blown up again a couple of weeks ago, and it was awesome.

I was once again flying an Iteron Mark V, a cargo ship with a huge hold but, as I learned a while ago, paper-thin defenses. It's been my workhorse for gathering up money from courier/cargo contracts.

Unfortunately, someone cargo-scanned my ship with one of their character accounts, then used another one of their characters a few jump gates away to pounce on me. Before long, my precious cargo -- and a lot of collateral I put up for it -- went poof. Well, kaboom and then poof.

But here's what's great: the guy who blew me up -- Paranoid Loyd -- sent me an innocuous IM wave: some taunt, some thanks, and mostly "it's business, not personal." I sent him a message back and for about 20 minutes got from him useful tips for hauling in high security space. Some things he pointed out:

• I was flying in a "pipe," a heavily-trafficked route between major trade hubs. I knew the journey between the Dodixie and Jita systems is such a high-traffic route, but not between Hek and Dodixie (my route). No wonder that he and his alt were parked along the way and knew that I'd (almost certainly) pop up further down the route.
• 20 million in cargo value is a frequent threshold for a pirate to attack you: they will lose a relatively cheap frigate or cruiser when the space-police show up to kill you for your aggression, but their other character or compatriot who scoops up the goods will enough booty to offset the loss. And, yeah, I had several times that amount.
• My cargo didn't nearly fill the hold. (This is not often the case, but in this instance it was -- and, then again, maybe it's a blessing I had only a marginally-full hold.) There are better-defended ships with enough cargo space that might've let me get out of that situation if attacked.
• He suggested two ships, one of which I've flown before and liked (the Nereus), as a vessel that can faster align to the next jump gate on a cargo path -- which translates into warping away to safety sooner. It has a smaller cargo hold, potentially reducing income -- but, if I'm losing gobs of money in collateral from lugging too much in a weak vessel, well that's no good, either.
• He gave a couple of suggestions for ship modules to increase survivability, particularly if I venture into low-security space to schlep cargo.

Very instructive; nicest pirate since Jack Sparrow.

There are good folks in New Eden

After Die Hard, Scrooged is my favorite Christmas movie. It starts with a pair of promos for a TV network's rendition of A Christmas Tale: the first from milquetoast execs, the second from the boss, Frank Cross. The latter is meant to make viewers terrified to miss the special, and it sets the tone with a bevy of "similarly" terrifying issues: acid rain, drug addiction, international terrorism, freeway killers.

Ah, freeway killers. Ran into them. Twice.

The first time was kind of a stunner. I had picked up a contract to haul a bunch of stuff from point A to point B in the game's high-security (high-sec) area. High-sec is new-player friendly, a usually pretty safe if boring sandbox to figure things out. Alas, I was suicide ganked, i.e. my ship blown up out from under me, and then someone picked up all the precious cargo from the scraps (I'll explain the suicide part in a bit). I had a browser window open over most of the game and caught a flash of red, heard an explosion, but didn't see it happen. Dang. I did, however, get kill rights on the offender, i.e. I could later fight them without fear of retribution from the in-game cops.

My capsule docked, and I started puttering in the market, shopping for a new cargo ship with my insurance money and trying not to think too much about the now-lost collateral I had to give up to snag the contract. In the midst of this, I got a message from another player who'd been nearby, saw what happened, and followed the offenders. (Yes, offenders: the in-game cops showed up and blew away the guy who killed me, which was predictable, hence the suicide part of suicide ganking; however, he had an alternate account simultaneously logged in or a colleague in the area who scooped up my cargo, which is perfectly legal.) He sent me the location in case I was interested in sweet vengeance, and he also offered to just blow him up if I sold him those kill rights (a cool mechanic). Not being anywhere near my regular crash pad and combat ship, I just gave him the rights and, not too much later, got a notice telling me the attacker had been blown up. Nice!

Around the same time, I also got a message from another player. He offered condolences on my loss and offered me an invitation to join his tiny, four-player corporation. They're more into the player-versus-player (PvP) aspect of the game, which I'm not quite ready to jump into (of my own volition, at least), but it was a nice offer, regardless.

The other time I got destroyed, it was totally my fault: I picked up a contract that would take me into low-security (low-sec) space, where guns are freer to fire without repercussion. Sure enough, I blindly jumped into low-sec just hoping for the best. I was immediately warp-scrambled (i.e. I couldn't escape with my faster-than-light drive) and my poorly-defended ship was blown away in seconds. I completely deserved it.

And, I learned from it, too. I discovered a filter built into the map that lets you see how many pilots have been in a particular area in the last half hour, and also how many kills within a similarly tight window. There are some other useful views, too. This meant that before I picked up my next contract going into low-sec, I checked recent activity and made an informed decision about whether to take the contract. I did, and got in and out unscathed. And I now have, too, a new ship hull to train up for: the game has blockade runners, which can equip extra protections (even a cloaking device) to deal specifically with low-sec space. It's about 20 days of skill-training time, and I might queue up the long ones when I'm next on vacation.

Funeral dirge

As I began playing Eve, one refrain in the tutorials and wiki pages had me defiant, doubtful, and insecure: "accept the fact that you'll lose your ship."

Yeah, right, I thought. That's just for the folks who shoot at other live folks. I'm going to play it cool, conservative, stock up on overwhelming firepower before jumping into anything.

Um, no.

My pride and joy, the Brutix battlecruiser Lady Roso (somewhat named after my wife), got blown up last night. And it was completely unnecessary, stemming from inattentiveness on my part.

I was running a level II mission. "I hear some pirates are blocking a useful acceleration gate," said the agent who asked for help. "Flay them, and leave their vacuum-desiccated corpses as a reminder to all who follow!"

Good money and a quick fight; no problem for my tall ship and gallant crew. Generally speaking, level II missions can be knocked out by a cruiser-sized ship; taking a battlecruiser (a baseline hull for level III missions) is often overkill, i.e exactly what I want. Huzzah!

Unfortunately, it didn't take long before I started getting knocked around like a ragdoll. One of the dozen or so pirates consistently jammed my ability to lock a target. I could latch onto something to shoot if I got very close, but then it didn't take long for my shields and armor to get stripped away. Soon after I jumped in the first time, I frantically recovered my drones, jumped out, and repaired the ship. I thought, maybe, I'd destroyed one enemy vessel -- but, that might've instead just been me losing target lock again. There was a six-hour window to complete the mission, though, and it was decent money; I figured I could just wear this out through attrition, with plenty of time to walk and play with the dog between waves.

The second time I jumped in, I figured out what ship was jamming me, and managed to tear it apart. Things were looking up!

But then another ship began jamming, and I was pretty close to the bad guys. Shields and armor gone, and rapidly taking damage to the last line of defense, the underlying structure. I begged my drones to return and started the jump-out sequence. But, too late: before I could escape, Lady Roso disintegrated around me; there was a brief flash of explosion before my character's capsule -- a vessel within the vessel that, in this instance, acts as an escape pod -- jumped to safety. It reminded me a bit of the Odyssey's destruction in Deep Space Nine's second-season finale: a frantic battle with a big ship and tiny support craft getting torn apart by smaller but better bad guys. The show's producers used a ship of the same class as The Next Generation's USS Enterprise to stun viewers: "This could just as easily have been Captain Picard blown to bits." I was almost just as jarred by how quickly Lady Roso bit the dust.

Baffled, too. Two of the enemy ships were battlecruisers, just like mine -- I thought that was odd, not having seen any in previous level II missions. But other tough missions instead have twice as many enemies or strong missile and laser batteries. This wasn't the case here: those two battlecruisers aside, the others were all frigates or tiny fighters, and not too many of them. On the face of it, it shouldn't be tough; yet, the persistent jamming incapacitated my ship.

Fortunately, Roso was insured (yes, this game has insurance: six levels of coverage, in fact); I bought and fit a new battlecruiser, New Roso, and set forth. I had to hop around to a couple of stations to pick up fittings: railguns from one station, a pair of capacitor rechargers from another. Along the way, I trained up on the Electronic Warfare skill so I could equip an electronic counter-countermeasures module to diminish or eradicate the jamming. I read online that pirates and other non-player (i.e. AI) characters aren't particularly affected by jamming buster busters, but I hoped for the best and launched into battle.

I didn't last long, jumping out before recovering a pair of my intrepid drones. A fourth time, I at least got all my drones back before fleeing. The dog, on my lap during that last attempt, was quietly weeping into my leg.

I'm not sure what prompted this, but I checked the mission directions again. Maybe I thought there'd be a clue. Ah. The part of eviscerating those villains? Well, it wasn't there: all I was supposed to do was fly out, see whether there were bad guys (yes), and use the acceleration gate they were protecting to make my escape. Not for the first time, my recall might be wrong: it might've been sufficient just to get jumped and to high-tail it out of there. What I do remember is this: the mission description says killing the bad guys is optional.

Dang.