Playing the long game

My daughter was born a couple of weeks ago. There's a lame joke to be made about a frigate-sized baby requiring many years of real-world skill training to pilot. But, the more apt observation is that this noob is handily piloting a pair of Titan-sized tenders.

February 15, 2014, was my first day with Eve. Since then, my family has moved, we've had a baby, and my dog has doubled in size. In the game, I've churned through five characters, whittled down to three. (Yesterday, I briefly regretted getting rid of my stripminer, Rosy: picking at asteroids seems an easy, casual way to do something in the game while doing a 3:00 a.m. bottle feeding. But, then I remembered: I'd much rather sit in our nice corner rocking chair than this creaky desk chair. So, no sweat.) In that span, I've flown over a dozen types of ships, racing up to cruisers and battlecruisers, plateauing for a spell with a battleship, clawing my way into a marauder ... only to look around and wish for the speed and energy of a frigate. It's all been very exciting.

I wrote before about trying to squeeze in as much Eve as possible before baby's arrival, but alas that didn't happen. Spent more time playing X-Wing Alliance, plus a bit of Grim Fandango. All other things being equal -- or, unchanged -- I'd be jumping headlong back into Eve. While X-Wing games have been fun, their nostalgia and neo-novelty value is waning, but Eve is always fresh, and I have plenty of goals I've barely crawled toward. But: baby!

Soon after leaving graduate school, I made one of my first Adult Decisions: I took $100 and put it in a Certificate of Deposit. A year later, I'd made $6 interest! Well, Eve is about to become my next CD, with a minimum one-year term: no-touch (much), but with higher value when it comes out of the oven. And that's due to a big change in the game in November: CCP removed the requirement that all queued skills begin training within 24 hours, and players now can queue up to 50 skills regardless of when training starts.

Well, Eemiv has 50 skills lined up, training time to complete in about a year. (Technically, a bit sooner: in April, I'll realign Eemiv's core attributes to accelerate training.) Eemiv's core ship-fitting skills are pretty well maxed out; a year hence, he'll be maxed out in additional gunnery, maneuver, and ship types. Dengar's parallel queue isn't as long, only about 60 days: I've tightly trained her up for frigates and cruisers (around which she's well maxed out) and, more recently, logistics. In about a month, her parallel training (which costs extra money) will end; when Eemiv's queue is done, Dengar's remaining 30 days will wrap up. I'll continue to update Eemiv's skill planning spreadsheet as things tick off -- thank you, Eve Droid, for keeping me posted on these developments without me needing to log in or fire up Evemon in bootcamp. My final character, Talon, has a few market orders ending in about a week: I'll need to renew them, and that's kind of a blessing because it also means I can consolidate a few of them.

As I've thought about the changes that come with having a baby, I've realized that as much as I love games, I enjoy reading and writing more. Those two things are more compatible with being interrupted by an unpredictable child. (And, when there is time for games, titles kike Grim Fandango are a better fit than Eve in my current circumstances.) Still, I plan to continue to write about Eve -- I have a few draft entries begun -- but this may be coupled with a few other topics. I've given some thought to consolidating this blog with my blog on model-building, and perhaps just broaden it to be "a place to write about stuff" (such as the books I'm reading: I just finished Leviathan Wakes, which was pretty amazing). We will see.

o7, everyone.

I'd like to buy a comma

Almost four months after creating my station-trading character, his balance has cleared three billion ISK. Huzzah!

There are lots of little asterisks, though. For one thing, when I started playing Eve, I bought and cashed in a few Plex to buy shiny ships and some ridiculous modules. The ships I couldn't fly right away. However, some of the very high-end modules have the advantage of not requiring similarly sky-high support skills to use.

Glad I kept the receipt for this monster
From CCP Hyperion toolkit

As such, a chunk of the money here comes from selling back those unnecessary modules. Their inherent value just make me a bigger target. I've also trained up my skills so that I can almost always equip the "tech 2" variant of a piece of equipment. Tech 2 modules have steeper skill requirements to use, but their performance stats are almost equal to higher-performance, easier-to-equip, and silly-expensive modules I started with. I've also sold back a ship: remember my hauling alt, Laung? I sold back his freighter.

The majority of this money, though, comes simply from buying low and selling high. It happens in increments: tiny little day-to-day fluctuations interspersed with big spikes. For example, I placed a 500-unit buy order this weekend for one particular widget, and they've trickled in one by one. Last night, though, 424 of them showed up in my hanger. I'll log in soon to start selling them off before the high-low sales points get too close (i.e. profit margin either diminishes or, at worst, I have to wait for the margins to open again).

It's feels nice to be comfortably self-sustaining in-game. Really, some of that stems from not playing very often and not putting high-value ships at much risk. But, I'm hoping the change the latter in the near future. It's also nice knowing that I have enough in-game currency to buy back the Plex I initially cashed in. The utility of buying it back is that 1 Plex can be converted into 31 days of game time. This will be useful to continue to train up Eemiv and Dengar in parallel (you need to use Plex to allow a second or third character to train in parallel with an already-training character). Indeed, one of the things I most like about Eve is that it's possible to play well enough in-game such that you can cover your game subscription.

Ctrl Alt ... Delete!

I've written about secondary accounts I've set up to experiment in Eve's various career areas. Since starting in February, I've created four alternate characters, most of whom I've written about here. Finally, I've settled on the three characters I'm going to maintain. Here's the overall breakdown of who and what:

• Eemiv Tivianne: plugging along since February, this is my primary character. At zKillboard, you'll see an inglorious record of losing flimsy cargo ships and a couple of embarrassing losses to NPCs (um, plus part of some kill I have no recollection of). Right now, I mostly run level 4 missions with this fellow, bringing in about 10-20 million ISK each. He just finished training up to pilot a Kronos Marauder, which is a heavy duty battleship well suited to running missions. Indeed, I'd previously lamented how slow battleships move -- well, the Kronos mostly sits absolutely still, but wow! it cuts through bad guys fast. Next up is firing off some skills to use sentry drones, and after that I'm going to focus on getting more gunnery support skills up from level 3 up to 4 or 5. After rounding out my generic gunnery skills, I'll probably take a close look at taking a cruiser into wormhole space. 
• Rosy Tivianne: my first alt, which I'd made as a female avatar in response to feedback from my wife. I set her up as a miner, and got her up to snuff piloting a Mackinaw, one of the higher end strip-mining ships. However, the ship so quickly shred through asteroids that unless I paid rapt attention, there was a lot of idle time. It was a less engaging way to net about the same amount of money (and even then hypothetically: I'd still need to sell the ore) as mission-running. I strip-mined the character of its money and property and sent her to the biomass recycler. Creating and using this character was an practical lesson in weighing ISK per hour vs. "fun per effort:" in the end, mining just wasn't fun and not how I want to spend my limited time; I'd rather play the game than do the game.



Not to be confused with Long Haul, a Decepticon

• Laung Haul: This poor space-teamster was on the receiving end of my penchant for puns. I've written several times about Eemiv's inglorious outings hauling cargo, losing lots of collateral, etc. I trained up an alt to pilot Eve's capacious, sturdy freighters. And then I put him in one. And, wow, freighters are slow and boring. I considered selling the character, but it'd probably net nothing after paying character transfer fees. Recycler!
• Talon Morda: my station trader, buying low and selling high. I haven't updated his clone backup because this milquetoast will never leave his station. Started with logging in a few times per day to set up competitive prices and make a quick score, but I've been doing that less lately and am still doing okay. There are some ebbs and flows during the week in preparation for e.g. big weekend battles; market orders a few weeks old will suddenly get scooped up. He's trained up enough that I don't need to pay for additional character training, which is nice. Now that my main character is generally equipped for running missions, in addition to earning ISK Talon is buying ship equipment at good rates to keep my third and final surviving character geared up.



The bounty hunter Dengar is my
frigate brawler's namesake.

• Dengar Morda: the character I wrote about last time, my frigate-scale brawler chipping in with the perpetual (but fun-loving) war between the Blue Republic and Red Federation. With only a few weeks of training done, you can see she has single-digit percent contributions to a few kills. Dengar's mostly puttered in an Incursus frigate, but I recently tossed in some skill training to allow her to fly and fight with a medium-sized cruiser: in fact, I just bought her a few (because I expect some attrition) of the same Thorax-class I bought in March.

So, that's it. I created a second umbrella account to help my try on all these angles; it expires in a couple of weeks, and by then I'll have Eemiv, Talon, and Dengar consolidated under one account. It was worth the three-month subscription (plus a little extra to train multiple characters on the same account in parallel) to jump in, try on some career hats, and then pick what to stick with. Depending on few in- and out-of-game factors, I'll keeping Eemiv and Dengar training in parallel but not pay the extra to keep training Talon.

It's the economy, stupid

This MarketWatch story about games that teach "crucial life lessons" percolated up on my Facebook feed. It highlights Eve's robust, player-driven economy, quoting CCP's economist, Doctor Eyj­ólf­ur Guðmunds­son. (Also remarkable: CCP has a full-time economist. His reason for leaving? Becoming rector of the University of Akureyri.)

From The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck,
via dreamwidth.org

The article particularly caught my attention because I've increasingly turned my eye toward making money from the Eve economy. I started buying a bunch of widgets at a low price at station X, then hauled them a few jumps over to station Y where they're selling at a higher rate. Dealing with hauling stuff between stations was a pain, though, so I created another alternate character, have started training him up on trade and commerce, and parked him at a relatively busy hub. He is station trading: that is, looking for items that sell at a low price and then turning around to sell at a higher price. Station trading requires some patience, waiting for bulk buy orders to come through and then for the sell orders to trickle out. Also attentiveness: there's a lot of one- and two-cent elbowing to set the lowest and highest sell and buy prices, respectively. But, hey, it seems to be going okay. I'll let you know when I break a billion ISK.

Oh, and I stole. Again. 1.4 million worth of minerals. A miner ejected his haul into space, emptying his ore hold so he could continue to mine without having to deal with dropping his stuff off at home base. The notion, then, is to return later in a ship with a big hold (like the Iteron Mark V, several of which I've had blown up) or ask another player to get. Oh, well. I remember the game's tutorial warning against letting that happen to me.

What vexes me now is: what next? I generally still enjoy running missions, and those yield money. So, too, does mining with my mining character, and I'm seeing that happening with the trader. But, what to spend the money on? I've gone back to invest some skill training in smaller ships and weapons with a notion of getting into Incursions or Factional Warfare. Alas, my first foolishly solo stab at Incursions cost me a nice Brutix I'd named Ola T. Miza; its ending did not befit its namesake. There is some appeal in Factional Warfare as a chance to take a stab at player-vs-player combat; that may be something I take a swing at very soon.