Shipping invoice

Sorry for missing yesterday's newspost, therefore I'm putting this one up early, as you know...it's new year's EVE, and people have places to go and get wasted behave socially in a gentlemanly manner.

I had been thinking about relocating to a new home base, since my current station in Tash-Murkon is a bit noob-central, and it's time for me to shed that skin.
I spent about an hour looking at the star map in dismay...so many places, where to even begin? With some helpful insights of more seasoned players, but mostly by chance, I found a really nice system to live in, manufacture, mine, and run missions. For reasons of mild paranoia, I won't divulge these exact locations but if you see me in local, say hi!

Now I have three main stations to fly to and fro: my old home where most of my stuff still is, the corp base of operations, and my new home. They're quite a few jumps away from each other, in different regions, so moving cargo and more importantly, ships, was starting to become a problem.
Having Life Lessons and Tuggy the Tugboat for mining and fighting the occasional battle at my new home is all fine and dandy, but especially moving the slow and ponderous retriever takes an ungodly amount of time.

Fortunately, my corp's leader Mr. Skimore1 graciously built me a Covetor T1 mining barge that's great for mining in a fleet, with the adequate boosters and cargo-hauling. All I had to supply were the nullsec minerals zydrine and megacyte, and a BPC. the rest of the minerals were taken from the corp hangars, which we've been busy filling for our great secret corporation construction project for a while now.
In the end, I got a ship valued at 37million ISK for just 1,5mil. I hadn't intended to get another mining barge this quickly, and I will abide by my word and take my reader Eirik's advice in naming it: Daedalus.
I'll leave the ship unnumbered out of overt optimism it won't get blown up if I'm careful enough to stick with my fleet when using it.

A rather fitting name if using Stargate lore, as the EVE mining barges kinda-sorta look like the Daedalus class vessels of the Tau'Ri.

Next, I decided to have an efficient way to travel between my bases, so I bought a small, cheap, Executioner frigate, becasue I'd stupidly sold the one I got from rookie missions ages ago.With a default top speed of 410m/s, it's quite nice for travelling and I have no intention of using it for anything else (except maybe pick my teeth with it, that thing's damn pointy!).
Say hello to Speedy Gonzales!

Although those purchases were cheap, other were not. I was really looking forward to my fist 100 million ISK, but that dream was thwarted when I decided to get rudimentary training and gear in ice & gas mining.
From 80million, I'm down to 45...ouch. But it's all for the greater good. The greater good being personal profit on the longer term.


So in total, I now have:

• Magnet Magnate : pretty much only gathering dust at my old home by this point, but some day I'll get back to scanning and probing with it
• Ace Ventura V Venture : retired at my old home
• Fart Ventura Venture : for gas mining at my new home
• Life Lessons Coercer : my surprisingly weak combat vessel. PEW PEW LAHZURS!
• Tuggy the Tugboat Retriever : I sing a little song every time I undock it, I must be in love
• Daedalus Covetor : at my corp's mining base, for clearing out those pesky respawning asteroid belts with a fleet
• Speedy Gonzales Executioner : For travelling between all these other ships.

Shed my newb skin and embrace expenses

Oh lordy...I've been mining so much I can now actually recognise the asteroid ore type by looking at it in the world...not that it's of any use, since the overview works much more splendidly.

Through vigorous mining, I'm steadily increasing my wealth, about 10 million ISK worth per hour of pyroxeres with my retriever Tuggy the Tugboat, if my calculations are correct.
Some day I need to get working on larger construction projects, my ore influx is extremely disproportionate to its usage.

Through mission-running, and judicious social skills training, I unlocked level 4 mining missions today. the 1st mission took me an hour to complete, mining 48 000 m³ of ore, but the payout was worth it, about 1,5 mil ISK and 4200 loyalty points. To my dismay, however, the other level 4 mining missions require gas and ice harvesting skills... so I had to buy a 23 million ISK skillbook...eeep!
Still, at 80 mil cash and about the same in unrefined ore, I can afford it. I was just really looking forward to having 9 figures in my bank account.

During the 20 minutes of training I needed to get them operational, I picked up two T1 gas harvesters (yes, I should have gotten T2s if I were serious about it), and my backup Venture, now emblazoned Fart Ventura, because it'll be exclusively used for gas mining.
Since gas harvesters need turret mounts, unavailable on mining barges, I need to use a venture. It's only been a matter of days since I last mined in one, yet it feels strangely alien and "retro" to me. Such puny cargo capacity, such blazing speed.

Here are some bonus links for today:

Amazing maps

Everything you'll ever need to know about mining (some slightly outdated info)

Mining/refining calculator with real prices

WTB a blueprint of a blueprint machine to make new blueprints. ERROR: no trading in this channel

As pretty much everyone knows, the vast majority of manufacturing and trading in New Eden is made by and between players. This excludes a few vital items like skill books and original blueprints for space-crafting that player cannot create, for obvious reasons of recursion.
Allow me to bestow upon you several hours worth of experience with manufacturing and trading in EVE's world, and how I do things.
If you're a veteran Eve trader reading this, prepare your bib, because you'll probably be laughing at me so hard blood will splurt out of your nose.

The basics: what do you need to build stuff ? Only three things:

- Minerals

Even the most rookie player can quickly get a few million InterStellar Kredits (ISK) through mining, enough to buy himself a new pair of underpants...no wait, clothing items are bought with AUR, another currency. Where was I...sorry. I'm getting senile.
Since EVE:Retribution, the Venture mining frigate is a fantastic tool for beginners, just slap two mining lasers on there, maybe a mining laser upgrade module, don't bother with weapons or defenses, warp to an asteroid belt and get crackin'. Remember to train mining-related skills if you want to make a career out of it.

Now you have some rocks. Awesome! Whoo! space-rocks! Warp back to your space station of choice, and get refining! Immediately, you'll notice that you suck at refining: there's a lot of loss, and the station is taking a huge cut...so maybe you're better off buying minerals from the market early on, until you've trained up your refining skill (and subsequent ore-specific skills) and improved relations with the NPC corporation/empire owning the station by doing petty missions for them (assuming you're not in a player-owned station ..why would you try to learn from my feeble experience if you've got good enough connections to have access to a POS?)

Now you have refined minerals, hopefully the kind you need, and not only tritanium. Some wares like rigs reauire additional components you can only get from planetary interaction (a topic I know next to nothing about) and others from salvaging wrecks, but that's not important right now.

- a Station

Unless you've already trained Supply Chain Management, and I don't see a reason why just yet, you can't build anything unless you're docked at a station equipped with the proper facility. The blueprint and needed  materials must also be in that station's hangar. Just open the science and industry menu (alt-S), select your blueprint, from the blueprints menu, choose an installation for it, the number of items manufactured, and get a quote. If it seems acceptable, go for it, and pick up your finished wares when the job is done from the bottom-right corner button in the jobs window.

- Blueprints

Two types exist: blueprint originals (BPO) and copies (BPC). Only the former can be bought on the market, usually from NPC merchants, then you can make your own copies. although the copying waiting line in stations is usually several days long. Add to that the limited number of uses of a BPC as another nail in its coffin.
So don't worry about BPCs for now, maybe some day you'll want to build great amounts of a certain item at the same time, but for now you can just queue up a long production run from your BPO.

The most important things to keep in mind with blueprints when manufacturing for resale and profit are:

• How much the blueprint costs.
• How efficiently you can use the blueprint, ie. how much mineral will be wasted. Determined by skill and standing.
• The market escrow tax and transaction tax you will pay when selling them.
• What the usual market price is for the manufactured item.

Assuming you know how to do basic math, punch these numbers into a calculator, and voila, you have your profit margin per item sold.
I like to compare it to the cost of ores, and keep the margins as wide as possible. But of course, the free market is a harsh world for honest people, so you have to keep  a lookout on the shifting winds.
And remember, you're not making profit until you've paid back the BPO!

A year in wars

Credit where credit is due, I had no part in making this video (how could I, as a carebear?), the data was compiled and formed into this video by the good folks at netGameRadio.

I find it simply amazing how quickly the political landscape can change, the shifting of borders, how great giants can come to fall. Even-though it's all inconsequential to my personal Eve experience, it makes for simply awesome lore and metagaming. It's like 200 years of European medieval history condensed into one year. Amazing.

Tuggy lives!

name: Tuggy the Tugboat

class: retriever (mining barge)

pros: (compared to the puny venture)

• great mining speed (9m³.s^-1 up from 4)
• great ore capacity

cons:

• Uglier than a Minmatar toilet
• slow as a walrus on ice-skates in summer
• smaller capacity than a 9 volt battery
• fewer turret mounts than there are fish in the sahara

Ah, it was worth the wait.
It does one thing, and one thing only: gather vast amounts of ore without having to rely on auxiliary freighters or boosters (although help is always welcome). But it does it better than any other T1 mining barge, so huzzah! What a nice present for myself it was, to have it all trained up for my return from christmas.

There's no countering its hulking slowness, which might become a problem if and when I get dropped by an ingrate third rate irate pirate or a rat. However, with only a small cap recharge rate booster, I got it to be barely stable while mining...as long as I don't get fancy and try interrupting the 180 seconds long cycle.
The two modulated strip miner II I installed need to operate are further enhanced by ore-specific crystals to operate, that degrade over time (an average of 10 hours mining for my T1 pyroxere crystals, so it's not really a big deal in the long run), so mining is finally getting mildly strategic and interesting. I'll be sticking to pyroxeres for a while, get some jaspet gathering skills next, and the future is looking quite bright.

Already it's become quite handy in strip-mining the pyroxeres from my home system, and doing tier 3 mining missions. Although some of those missions are most easily completed by having my Coerce Life Lessons clear the rats first. All in all, it dwarves the venture in every aspect that counts.
It'll be such a sad day when it eventually gets exploded due to my carelessness.
So here's a little contest idea: invent a name for my next mining barge, which I hopefully won't have to buy for a long long while. Maybe I'll even have tier II hardware trained up by then.

Corporations, part 3/3

But, whoever-your-name-is-writing this blog, you ask, you wote about NPC corps and small player corps, but what about huge megacorporations and alliances?

Well, my curious internet acquittance, my internet name is Brumisator, I am in fact a sentient onion. My EVE character's name is Cesare Romero (no affiliation with the Joker). As for big corporatoins, well I've only read about them succinctly, so get ready for wild speculation!

screenshot stolen from the internet, because I've yet to see a fleet bigger with even double digit ship amounts

Eve corporations, like guilds in other MMOs can have between 1 and uh...  a bajillion member, I don't know if there is a theoretical limit, let's just say that Eve has 450 000 registered players, and some corps have thousands of members.
Now, in order to have gotten that far, they must have some pretty veteran player at the helm, probably so rich he can pay for his multiple subscriptions using PLEX without his wallet even breaking a sweat.

They float around in their more-than-likely low-sec or null-sec POS (player-owned stations) and on the weekends go cruising for pussy in supercapital ships (most of those look like dildos, it has to have some appeal to the women).
Waging incessant wars against equally large corporations, wrangling in lesser conglomerates into their glorious alliance, and altogether being badass gods in their own right.
Nine of theses veterans even have a real-life seat on the Council of Stellar Management, being able to weigh in on real issues regarding how the game evolves, which is quite mind-boggling to me. Some say they are mere strawmen, some say they are the elite of the elite, I for one don't really care, as it affects my life as a newbie very little...I don't even know what a wardeck is (Well okay, I can just look it up, jeez, a wardec is simply a declaration of war).

Still, through they are fearsome, even the largest player corporations are not completely free to do what they want. Even in arguably the biggest hostile act in the history of New Eden, uh...I forget its name...I wasn't playing back then...something about the destruction of a memorial in Jita. Even then, Players cannot destroy NPC stations, that is a mathematical impossibility. And as far as I am aware, player entities of any magnitude cannot practically invade high-sec space and fruitfully occupy it, the NPC CONCORD cops will eventually blow them up, that is a mathematical improbablility.

Wars have to be sanctionned by CONCORD, with its apparent army of virtual lawyers and bookkeepers, drafting contracts, allowing trade, what have you.
Some people seem to mildly regret the early days of EVE, several hundred years ago in internet time, only in 2005 by most calendars, where anarchy was the law. Players were in space...they had ships, and that's about it, stuff happened, then shit happeneed, then it hit the fan, and now we have cops all over the place...well...in maybe a third of known space.

I seem to have gone quite off track here, but this is pretty much all I know or can speculate about megacorporations. See you tomorrow, when I will teach you yet more misguided uninformation about another topic.

Merry Christmas!

Here's a special little something I recorded just for you dwellers of New Eden:


And to all of you who are offended by the concept of Christmas, go eat a dick and grow up, will you?
My attorney has advised me to rephrase that sentence: Have a merry non-denominational end to the Gregorian calendar year MMXII and please note that I have nothing but respects all contradictory theologies and ideologies to the extent that the law requires.

No blog post tomorrow, get off the computer and go spend Christmas day with family and/or friends.

Corporations, part 2/3

I'm away celebrating Christmas an other assorted things on planet Earth, so I let the blog bots post things from the recent past each day, until I return. Spooky!

Today's topic:

Small Player corporations

After one day in a corp, here's what I have to speculate:

Now, player owned corporations, they're quite another deal. See, they don't make you take out the garbage or do the dishes unlike those slimeball NPCs who think they're my mum.
These corps are like high-school cliques. You hang around together, and sometimes even talk to each other. Usually, nobody has any sort of grand plan for the corp, but eventually, something fruitful will come out of it, like building a nice big titan ship for the corp head to cruise around him while the puny underlings do the ground-work...much like real life corporations, really.
Of course, there's the benefit of fleet-flying. Even when you're doing something harmless like mining, if you're in low-sec space it's nice to have a buddy to help you keep a lookout for pesky pirates, or even better, haul ore or give mining boosters.
Yes, I do a lot of mining, so I talk a lot about mining. Maybe I should start referring to it as astrogeology, that makes it seems slightly less dreary.

Then of course there's the trading. As far as I know, making contracts with fellow incorporates does not lessen the listing and broker fees, but taxes sure are lower (in most cases), as any sensible corp will keep  a very low tax rate unless it owns a space station or is working on an expensive project...like building one of those monstrosities. Still, selling and buying in-corp is good practice, and one may often get lower prices than on the general market.
If one shows good enough manners and deference, one may find himself climbing the corporate ladder, and get more responsibility and privileges, like free access to corp storage, and pivotal roles in business, fighting, what have you. A famously sneaky player once infiltrated a major corporation wile working for an antagonist, and climbed the ranks until he was able to bring the whole edifice down. Thousands of souls cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, as their hopes and dreams were shattered.

Well that's about it, really, everything I know, and think I know about corporations.
Tune in tomorrow for something special!

Corporations, part 1/3

I'm away celebrating Christmas an other assorted things on planet Earth, so I let the blog bots post things from the recent past each day, until I return. Spooky!

Today's topic:

NPC corporations

Here's what I've surmised from from my extensive week-long stay in New Eden:

Corps are pretty neat (see? I said corp, like a true lingo-user, oh golly!), there are these people, who decide to make a club with other people, except that new kids don't get to play with them, instead they have to play with the computer-generated NPC-corps, vile autocratic places full of robots and greed.
NPC corporations  make you pay 11% taxes on everything you sell, and make you grind horribly tedious and petty  missions for them so they can pretend to be your buddy and eventually stop charging you so goddamn much for refining and manufacturing services. If you're a good boy for a very long time, one day you can get a jump clone, which I assume is some sort of rare space food dish, sounds pretty delish!

Then again, it's pretty handy and comforting being able to relish in the safety of space stations while protected by flying robocops. Especially for carebears (whoo! more lingo!)
You're also working for the greater glory of the Amaar empire, and that's presumably an honourable goal. Yeah, screw you, Miniature, Gallium and Caledonian players!
Then again, actually taking part in faction warfare is something that I'm only very vaguely aware of, I'll have to look into the details if and when I myself shed my colourful carebear fur.

Another point in favour of NPC corps is that they're pretty much rock-solid. They won't lose their leaders, nobody from the corp will steal common property (because there is none to steal), and as a new player, seeing tat someone is in the same corp as you are probably means that they're a newbie too, meaning that they're probably harmless. Even if they intend harm, their newbie tactics and firepower shouldn't cause problems.

Yet In the end, unless you want to be pointed and laughed at for the rest of your life in New Eden...and that of your many cloned lives to come, you'd better get in with a real human-led corp. More about that tomorrow!

Is there a failstate?

Since this is the 21st of December 2012, and by some accounts yet another end of the world date, I figured what would be a more appropriate time to speak about the dreaded failstate.

Dating back to text-based adventures of yore, videogames have had failstates, when the player has screwed up so badly that he can't recover from his mistakes and has to restart the game or load a save file.
Now of course in a multiplayer game, this is exceedingly rare. I'm sure there's a masochistic example somewhere out there but I can't think of one from the top of my head.
But in the freeform universe of Eve, is such a thing possible?

I was gushing over EVE to my non-capsuleer old pal RandyGandy, he asked me what happens when your ship gets blown up. I tried explaining to him that it's no big deal, no sensible player flies in a ship he can't afford to replace, you get an insurance payout to at least buy a cheaper ship, and if you get podded, you have a clone nearby. Even if you're stupid enough to not have any money in reserve, you get a rookie ship outfitted with a civilian mining laser and a civilian weapon...but it got me thinking...is there a way to lose so badly in EVE that you can't recover from it? is there a failstate?

I immediately made an alt-character, named her Testing Failstate, put as little effort as possible into her human appearance, disregarded the tutorial, and was on my way: jumping to nullsec as fast as I could, with one goal: get podded ASAP.
As a new character in the game, I didn't even have a rookie ship available to me, so this could only go horribly wrong, right?...or horribly right, depending on how you look at it.

After a few minutes of waiting  in my uncloaked pod at a warp-scrambled gate in nullsec, people weren't taking my bait, they weren't coming near me to brutally murder me, even after asking for it explicitly! They probably wisely figured that I was lying in ambush with a huge fleet, or something.
then I remember, oh right, I have a self-destruct on this thing!
(I did learn something very valuable for the future, though, warp disruptor fields don't stop you from jumping through gates)
80 seconds into my self-destruct, someone shot and killed me, bless his dark soul. My limp corpse was scattered around a nullsec gate, but who cares.

As expected, I get a new clone and a rookie ship...which I immediately undock and self-destruct... then self-destruct my pod. (Dammit, these are valuable minutes I could be spending training my main character's skills!). Again, a new clone and a rookie ship.
Bah! Even after scrapping the ship and donating all my money away to a stranger (5k ISK, whee, somebody's buying an ice-cream cone), still having a civilian mining laser and a civilian weapon makes it more than possible to rebound, making a bit of money mining while shooting rats, or even doing agent missions.

Well duh, you say, of course you always get a new clone and a new ship, and I was 99% sure too, but now I'm 100% sure. Even if you destroy all your possessions  and get murdered/commit suicide, a capsuleer is an immortal demigod, and insurance companies are run by idiots who give away free stuff to incompetent fools.

But maybe there's yet another way. Maybe one could act so damn annoying that he'd be ostracised by the entire player community, by harassing every single player until they all blocked him, and he'd be for all intents and purposes alone in all chat channels, forever. First of course he'd have to amass a fair sum of money to pay the default 2950 ISK anti-spam fee for every player he contacts, and the huge amount of time it'd take. That's not even counting all the new players that don't know how to block people...and the ever-growing playerbase.
Or one could simply get himself banned from the game altogether.
But, dear reader, please forgive me for not putting the time and effort into trying to prove those mathematical improbabilities.

Faces everywhere!

Eve can be a hard job sometimes, driving one to the brink of insanity. Paranoid insanity... it feels like you're being watched...all the time. Faces...faces everywhere! Staring eyes, never blinking, always watching! Oh lord, lord...I need a lie down.

And to top off this waste of your time, a little game: how many faces can you find in this picture?

Sociopaths

There's a breed of players apart from the rest, and I call them sociopaths, as I prefer to employ erudite phrasing and reject the typical appellation of "troll".

As you may have read, very early on, while mining for Jaspet in lowsec, my venture mining vessels were blown to smithereens...twice in two days, and I was pod-killed both times, once by a sec -9,8 from his Wolf's 200mm AutoCannon II, and once by a -10.0 Tornado tier III battlecruiser with 1400mm Prototype Siege Cannons.
As a side-note, I have to applaud how far bureaucracy has come in the x amount of millennia between our life and New Eden. I received messages about my new clone being ready to use and my ship insurance payout before I even saw my vessel start to explode.

These players had nothing to gain from killing me, as even if I'd had a bounty on my head, 20% of a newbie's venture would be very slim pickings, and salvaging my carcass? Pfft, pitiful lowtech gear.
Some time later, another would-be griefer set a 10 million ISK bounty on my head without ever even meeting me, and yet another one set a 20 million ISK on my entire corporation.

It's an endemic and well documented internet phenomena:
normal person + anonymity + audience = complete fuckwad.

image credit goes to Penny Arcade

Now, I could be angry at the fact that these people to even exist, I could mourn the loss of my ships, but frankly, they played me an instrumental role in teaching me a lesson: Don't go into low-sec unprepared  for people will fuck your shit up! Just like Hollywood has taught me to stay away from places where black people dwell, because they slouch while walking and talk using peculiar language. Something about caps in asses, and cracked coak ain, and peacey pea which I don't fully understand, but sounds delicious! I have to remember to not write while hungry.

Surprisingly, trolls and the general penchant of humans for evil and personal profit at the expense of others is a very well integrated mechanic into EVE's universe. Don't make verbal contracts with strangers, don't step over the line, keep your head down. If you want to be safe, don't ever trust anyone and don't leave 1.0 sec systems.
But where's the fun in that? Life, and by extension, Eve Online is about experiences. Adventure, even! If you stay cloistered up in high-sec space, and do drab NPC missions to no end, you'll be as bored as a cactus in a pot farm...okay, that simile made no sense. You'll be as bored as a dentist in a Hollywood movie (see, because all the actors have perfect teeth?)...okay, I give up on comparisons.

Moral of the story: evil people are more useful than you may think!

Mis(ad)venture

I'm grumpy because I lost yet another Venture mining frigate:
Here's a chat re-enactment of how it went:

t-2h :You know what's great about this little 0.4 sec system our corp visits? It never has any pirates in it. But just in case, I'm keeping an eye out for local chat. Sweet delicious Jaspet ore...

t-30m : Oh, a couple of German dudes jumped into the system, but they seem pretty harmless according to their sec rating.

t-20s : Yikes, looks like they mean business after all, but their weapons are on the weak side.

t-10s : SHITSHITSHIT! warp jammed.

T : *Kablooie*

T+2s *warp out in a pod*

...And that's what happens when you get greedy.
So here's a generic picture of something cute to make me less grumpy:

It's not working...still grumpy.
Oh , but some good news! Venture prices have stabilized and are now down from 775k to 450k. I'm buying two!
Introducing Ace Ventura V.

Yup, that's all that happened today, well everything that isn't classified as corp business.
Mwahahahaha. WE'RE GOING TO TAKE OVER THE WOOOOOORLD!
Well, New Eden has thousands of planets...so one world will barely be noticed...small corp, small goals.

Missionary

Today while mining my own business (<-- pun), I was offered a storyline mining mission. Hey, how bad could it be? ...My past mistakes have taught me nothing.

"Go kill this Gallatean ship"...wait...wasn't this supposed to be a mining operati- ...okay, fine!
I step into the cockpit of my Life Lessons (my Coercer with bad fittings)...hey how bad could it be? I warp to the designated spot in deadspace...I mean it's only one ship that I have to destroy, how bad could it be?

...Yes, a Battlecruiser, a vessel 3 times my size, 6 times better armed, and 12 times as ugly. Fuck. Not again. And this time it's a story mission, I don't have the luxury of screwing it up.

Good thing I have platinum insurance.

The ensuing battle is not of as epic proportions as my panic would have led to believe, as orbiting it at a suboptimal range for my weapons (10km instead of 16), his weapons seem to be completely ineffective, and miss me 9 times out of 10, but when they hit, they bloody hurt. Forgetting dual tanking, I rely on my armour repairer and all is going well.
Sadly, after a few minutes of this theatre, I notice that he's just repairing his armour faster than I can hurt him, there is no way for me to win this battle. A perpetual stalemate. Now I know how those high-sec rats feel when I just keep on mining in my venture while repairing my shields and not paying any attention to them.

But let's see...what has changed since my last bad battle encounter? My corp! fortunately, one of the 4-year leaders is avaiable, and offers me gladly accepted help. His cannons, drones and I turn the battlecruiser into scrap in short order, and then it's off to more adventures! Sadly the defense turrets surrounding us and who'd been leaving me alone until this point chose this exact time to start wailing on me, and I had to warp out within seconds. What an unclimactic end this would ahve been, completing the mission only to be blown apart by bloody robo-sentries.
What did we gain? a few hundred thousand ISK, and most importatnly, I received a 0,70 standing increase to my NPc faction of choice, catapulting me me up to 3,62 standing with Amaar Constructions.

Level 3 missions, here I come!
The sensible thing seemed to stick to mining, so I did a couple of those missions to gauge how much one difficulty level changes things. In a nutshell, they (of course) increased the required amount of minerals to bring home, and send me to drone-infested space...poop. the 1st mission, I could do okay, after quickly training up drone control to be able to use both my attack drones, and mined 6000m3 of worthless veldspar derivative for a bit. I should really wait for my mining barge training to be done.

The second level 3 mining mission I'm sent on asked for 9000m3 of some kind of rocks nobody cares about,  but this time, the mission area was highly defended, by some badass drones. No problem! I just used Life Lessons to mop them up, which was slightly more strenuous than anticipated, and then did two trips with Ace Ventura IV, my Venture-class mining frigate.
No blood, no tears, just a little bit of sweat.

Topping off the day with a bit of Kernite and Japet mining with my reliable corp buddy Mikheal, and it's a wrap.

Space Santa

Ooohoohhh, in this important story mission, I have to bring 3 giant cargo containers to a space station before Christmas eve...oh boy oh boy, I think I know what's inside!
Not that they explicitly tell me, but hey, I can take a hint. Doing my part for space-santa, oh yeah! Well, just in case of trouble, I'm taking my coercer with some cargo space enhancers to bring the 500m3 crates one by one. The pay isn't much good, but it's all for the greater glory of the Amaar Empire...and Santa Claus.

Also, only one more day until I'm certified to fly mining barges. You wouldn't believe how much I'm looking forward to being even less involved in direct gameplay. Just letting the ore pile up in my 24000m3  hold while I do other things in life...like write this blog, and watch Star Trek. Because nothing makes you feel more inadequate as a space-pilot than watching epic adventures of exploration by a competent crew.

Slightly deviating from my predetermined straight road to unlocking mining barges, I bought a skill book for 3 million ISK (EEP!) to learn marketting, so I can sell in 5 more systems around me...only to find out that obviously everyone can already immediately see my wares for sale in the entire region, and buy them from anywhere. I just made it possible for me to sell from my assets in station hangars 5 systems away. Live and learn. Fortunately, Eirik, one of my two regular readers gifted me a respectable sum of money for no reason  but being kind. Aw shucks. Thanks again, buddy, it wasn't necessary.
Frankly, I'm just writing filler here, because this wasn't an interesting day...so filler filler filler, and some day I'll have a bicycle Rambo turret magician with bosoms the size of Jupiter riding a hoverboard over the cliffs of Dover, England.

EDIT: Eirik* DOH! It wasn't a misspelling, I'm just a terrible terrible typist.

Pikatures

I'm taking a break from Eve today, before I get completely lost in its addiction, so here are some pictures for you hypothetical regular readers out there:

Full album on imgur

See you tomorrow!

Cesare Romero Incorporated

Today starts under poor auguries.

I log in to be greeted by a 10 million bounty on my head, from someone I'm pretty sure I've never met before...-10.0 sec rating, 1 year+ in his corp...yeah, I see. Evil people, grrr.
It's a good thing nobody cares about bounties, especially at 20% of the price of my venture.

I started mining Kernite in 0.6 space, and I figured it's safe enough, I have drones, and went AFK to prepare myself some delicious lasagne.
...Well, that didn't go too well, I was AFK for far longer than anticipated, and didn't hear the alarms go off all over my ship...3rd Venture down -_- yeah, I'm still an idiot.
But a quick jump to my backup Venture, and Ace Ventura IV is born, fitted with the gear I managed to salvage from my own wreck. 20 minutes later, I'd repaid my venture through mining...*sigh* I still hate being an idiot.

Chatting with the good fellow Raines, he offered me some protips, and some skillbooks he didn't need. I signed the deal without even readng the terms, because as bad practice as it may be, it's a dude who's shown he can be trusted. Still, I wasn't expecting this good of a deal. This day just got a bit better.

Some mining and chatting later, I finally got into contact with a human being from an actual corporation, huzzah! And coincidentally, just as I was chatting to this new recruit in their recruitment channel, a recruiter for yet another corp picked me up. I had to explain why I had a 10 mil bounty on my head, and why I got killed twice in lowsec...I am a newb, I dind't know!
Apparently that was enough to convince them, and I was accepted into Gneiss Shist mining corporation.
Yay! lower tax rates, fellow miners to fleet up with!...n shit.
Well it may be a small corp, and I've only really talked to one newish recruit for now, while doing some more mining, but I'm finally not a complete newbie in an NPC corporation anymore.
Instead of being a small cog in a big machine, I'm a small cog in a small machine! (oh boy! mining is fun!).

Life Lessons

Holiday giveaway! whee! snowball fight! ...nah, I'm too grumpy by nature and I don't know anyone to shoot.

Being tired of doing the same three lvl2 mining missions over and over again, I figured I'd sign up for a tier II security mission.

...It went exactly as planned, to a point. As soon as I warped into the rat lair, my ship was immobilised, but fortunately I was in the perfect 10km range to unleash hell upon those poor suckas. one. rat. at. a. time, usually managing to kill one and keeping my shield recharger running while everyone wailed on me until my cap was depleted, and I had to warp out to a nearby station to cry a little bit and run my armour repair module.

Things was goin' smooth for a while there, but then some jive motherfuckers started warping in as reinforcements. Dayum! The rat count shot from 6,5,4,3,2,1...to more than my puny brain could count in the seconds I took to warp the fuck outta that death trap.
My Punisher frigate may not be worth much, but my brain implants are...

Upon returning to the field of battle, I counted 15 new aggressors. Oh boy...I decided to use my wits for once, and attacked two outlying ones, easily exploding them to oblivion. My next target was the central stasis field generator hindering my movement, ALL BATTERIES FIRE! ...pew pew...dink dink. Barely scratching its surface.
Shortly thereafter, my Punisher was promptly destroyed by the 13 remaining rat bastards...fuck.
To alleviate my pain, I remembered that rats never pod-kill a player, so my implants were safe in my clone, so that's something.
How did I not remember this sooner? These intelligence and memory upgrades I got don't work for shit!

Most fortuitously, while I was getting my ass handed to me by those filthy pirates, my petition to CCP went through. I'd inquired why I hadn't received a Coercer destroyer as a bonus for signing up to the game as advertised. Sadly, as the subscription process had been completed, they couldn't give me a ship using that promotion. What they suggested instead was giving me 30 days more free game time and the Coercer I wanted.

Remember when I said that buying a mining barge at 30% its market value was the best deal ever?
Now. This! This deal, my friend, this truly is the best deal ever. Using  ingame monetary value of one PLEX and the ship, I got way over half a billion ISK worth of stuff just by complaining.
Remember, kids! If you're a newbie idiot, fuck up, and whine courteously, and you'll receive free shit!
That's why I decided to name my brand new Coercer Life Lessons.

But enough talk, I have some unfinished business with those mission rats! Good thing the time limit on that mission's bonus payout was 6 hours.
Some of my best fittings were lost in that battle, including several laser cannons I'd lovingly crafted myself, but fortunately I still had a few in storage. However, this beast of a ship (shut up,  a destroyer is a beast to me, okay?) can hold up to 8 of these bad boys, so instead of cancelling my sell order for 35 of them (selling rather well too), I just bought the four that are selling for cheaper than mine are... suckas! Now I own the nearby market!
Sadly the huge shield boosters I'd been manufacturing and selling at a tidy profit for a while were still too big for my destroyer...but some day I'll have a battleship, yes...some day.

My cash stack had been hovering around 36 million for several days now, as I was on average earning 10 million a day and spending the same amount on skill books, modules, what have you. I finally broke the 40 million ISK mark, thanks to the 400k ISK insurance payout on my punisher (which I won't replace, seeing as I still have two ventures and a magnate in the frigate class), and more importantly my manufactured goods are selling well. Huzzah!

Getting back to the fight...almost two hours after it started, my eight dual light beam laser cannons unleashed a fury the likes of...wait a second...

*slams head against spaceship hull repeatedly*

In the excitement of fitting out my destroyer, stupid ol' me had forgotten to equip crystals on the cannons. No ammo, no shooting...Life Lessons indeed.

A short trip to home base and back later, outfitted with custom imperial navy infrared crystals, Life Lessons opened a volley on two puny pirates, who died faster than I could type this sentence. However, there is tremendous strength in numbers, and my shields and armour were getting depleted, so I had to weed them down the same way I took on the earlier bastards, one at a time, warping out to lick my wounds.
6-7 jumps back and forth later, finally, I was down to the last mofo from the second wave...he was doing minimal damage to me, so I start crawling towards the stasis tower at 100m/s to take it down one and for all.
11 more bogeys warp in. FFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU, I'm getting tired of this goddamn bullshit.
Now if the 1st wave was an order of magnitude too hard for a frigate, but manageable  and the second wave was an order of magnitude too hard for a destroyer...the third wave...oyh...after 3 jumps to and fro, I was suddenly down to 15% hull integrity, and even firing all 7 cannons on a single target didn't do a difference.
I gave up.

DAMN! 3 hours wasted in this fucking mission.

Just to makes myself feel a little less inadequate, I quickly did a little level I security mission without even repairing my hull first, obliterating all opposition in my wake. Ah, that feels better.

...I'm sticking to mining and manufacturing from here on out...Life Lessons.

Mining the day away

December 12th

12/12/12: International sound-check day! One two, one, two...one two.
Oh how I amuse myself.

I met up with my new best friend Raines today. He yet again helped me boost my mining skill,down to 12 minutes to fill my 5000m^3 ore hold, compared to 22 minutes unboosted. Upon request, I jumped to a nearby system and bought him a tractor beam, many hilarious John Deere jokes ensued, and I made a cool 1,3 mil profit off that little fetch quest. that amount is nothing to someone who (allegedly) makes 3 billion a month in mining, but to my little frigateer bank account, it's a boon.

Speaking of contracts, to my surprise, someone jumped at the opportunity to haul my backup venture mining frigate that I bought after the destruction of Ace 2: Nature calls to my home base. That just shows that sensible contracts will be honoured, and it's not all scams.

I spent about 7 million on brain implants to make me be smarter and remember how smart I am, so I could train up to my fancy Retriever mining barge. I named it Tuggie the tugboat.
But now I'm too scared to go out into low-sec space to mine for Jaspet, sweet sweet delicious Jaspet ore, because I know that sooner or later I'll get pod-killed by an asshole.

In my Beginning NPC corporation's chat, I ecountered a peculiar fellow by the name of Doctor John Wallace, who is apparently in EVE as a real job, doing research on gold farmers and money laundering. A very well spoken and erudite fellow.
He also had this pearl of wisdom to impart us:

The 15/10/5/4/3/2/1 rule:
Before flying a destroyer you should be able to afford 15 frigates. Before flying a cruiser, you should be able to afford 15 frigates, 10 destoryers etc.

I finished off the day by doing drab boring and repetitive level II mining agent missions to get my standing up with the Amaar construction NPC corp while watching stupid crap on youtube for hours on end...yes...productive.

Not everyone is an asshole

December 11th

I start the day productively by doing a few more level II mining agent missions, and chatting with a nice stranger by the name of Raines about the hilarious scams I saw the night before.
Raines happens to be a miner himself and offers me bonuses...I have no idea what that means, but he seems friendly and we're in high-sec space, so I accept to join his fleet.
A grandiose view awaits me as I warp to his location: six magnificent mining barges gleam in the sunlight. Holy smokes...my puny Ace Ventura 3 mining frigate seems quite out of place here...but it's all good, the fleet commander is friendly, and we chat away until the asteroid belt is mined out.
As it turns out, this guy a pretty veteran miner, and gives me some good tips on our trade. In passing, I mention being excited about one day flying a "big boy ship" like they have, and leaving my puny venture behind.
He offers to sell me a retriever mining barge "for cheap"...Intrigued, I look at its market price, which has been shooting way up for the past 6 months, and now sells for between 24 and 28 million ISK...hell, I have that much money saved up. I'LL TAKE IT!
After checking its fittings when the day's mining is done, he very generously throws in over 6mil worth of tier II mining lasers and cap boost for free and sells it to me for 10 million.
Hoooly crap, that is one good goodamn deal! Never mind the fact that I won't be able to fly it for at least a week, a good deal is a good deal is a good deal!

Not long thereafter, while doing some more boring mining missions, yet another friendly pilot offers me mining boosts. His aren't as good as Raines', but we merrily mine the day away whilst discussing metal music and the horrors of the GEMA in Germany.
We get attacked my rats, but pffft...not even to my puny venture mining frigate are they a threat. I could just sit immobile while mining whilst repairing my shield and armour, but my new buddy's drones take them out easily.
At the end of the day? A nice 10 000 000 ISK profit, minus those dam taxes...grrrr, minus a few skill books, minus a 10 million ISK mining barge, yeah, I'll call it a win.

Mine Craft

December 10th

I finally got enough cred with the Amaar government and corporations to start level II mining missions. It's nothing exciting and the pay is mediocre, but it does net me continuous advancement in the empire as well as loyalty points.
Looking through all the menus, I found the contracts window, and a hilarious amount of scams, but this one takes the cake.
For kicks, I did two delivery missions with fair prices: hundreds of thousands of ISK with a collateral about 10x the payout, hey, half a million ISK for a few minutes of jumping around, I can dig that.
Meanwhile, my industry, refining and mining skills are getting trained up, so I can gather ore faster and refine it better...all leading up to the day, maybe in a week when I can be able a mining barge, with MOAR mining lasers and MOAR cargo space. Aaww Yisss.

Note to self: be less dastardly

December 9th

Well, that mining method got me pod-killed twice, and I was sent back to lick my wounds and fly some security agent missions for pennies a pop after manufacturing some good lasers for my punisher frigate.
Being grumpy and having a friend paid off, though, as RagnarectuZ gave me 20 million ISK to cover my emotional distress cause by the explosions of "Ace Ventura" and "Ace 2: Nature calls".
Buying a new venture and fitting it out costs abbout 900k, and half an hour of mining nets about 1 million, so it's all good in the grand scheme, as long as I complete at least 50% of my mining trips.
Mining in high-sec space works just fine as well.
With those 20 million, my total cash stack is at around 36, and that's pretty good.

A dastardly new idea...

December 8th

So I don't have any weapons apart from the bullshit civilian versions, and I want to keep manufacturing shit, I'm making some money off the market that way.

I go into 0.4 space...unarmed, and start mining the best ores I can find...with my ship aligned to the stargate in case rats arrive...which they always eventually do.
It's not effiscient, but damn, it's pretty pants-shittingly exciting.

Wormholes are doubleplusungood

December 7th

(day 3 of trial account, days 1&2 were spent tutorializing)

Whaoh dude, this is some crazy shit.

So I found that unstable wormhole after all, and it took me to an uncharted system.
I was rather confused, so I say hello in local chat, expecting some other people who got lost in there.
Instead, I get 3 toons who apparently live there telling me in a Mafioso kind of way: "this is our town, and it's a dangerous place"
EEP! I better be on my way back, then.
I see a wormhole way out on the map, but for some reason, I can't warp to it...so I'm stuck...shit. And the rookie help channel is of no use.
In my classy destroyer with my best lahsurs, I figured I could explore a bit, maybe.
I scan, and jump to some kind of datacore...and get obliterated by NPCs within 5 seconds of arriving...crap...there goes my destroyer.

I futilely try to get to get to the wormhole, warping close to it, but no dice, and in my pod, I can't even scan to find out what's going on.

I have no idea what I'm doing...

So hey...self-destruct seems my only option.
Self-destruct is, as you probably know, on a 2 minute timer, and ironically with about 20 seconds remaining, I get shot to bits
Well, shit happens, I lost my best ship, my best gear, and my implants...but it was all tier 1 garbage anyway, so no biggie in the long run.

So, it's 1 AM IRL by then, and I go to bed not angry, but a tad sad.

I was actually looking at officializing my EVE account, and lo and behold, some kind of bullshit special offer, I get a free destroyer when I do that, the same model I just lost in a fiery explosion of doom (in space)...well that's highly convenient! Okay, take my money, you evil CCP, damn commies (CCCP joke, ha. ha. ha.).

I log back into the game a day later and I read my ingame email...bla bla bla, insurance pays out, clone, bla bla bla, free rookie ship cuz I died...bla bla bla.
Man, this insurance company is the worst run company I've ever seen. I don't pay them anything abnd they just give me free shit when I fuck up.

Oh, what's this? An email from a player? "Told you it was dangerous in here... Sending some isk to replace your ship."
Whaoh, dude...that's really fucking awesome. He killed me because I was a tresspassing idiot, but he feels bad because I was obviously a noob. BAM! 4 million ISK.
Hahah, relatively, it's probably nothing for him, but almost doubles my total wealth.

Eve online: where being an idiot and getting killed is a winning strategy ;D

PS: I now have two rookie ships, which I can infinitely repackage, assemble, strip. So it'd only take me HALF the time to get that sweet sweet money now :P