The EVE Gate

Word of the day: regale: to splendidly and luxuriously entertain or serve, a word traditionally used for meals.

Bonus word of the day: myriad: ten thousand, or more generally, a fuckton.

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First things first: a bit of backstory: A long time ago...in our actual galaxy where we live now, and you're on the Internet, some people discovered a wormhole of some kind and jumped to the galaxy of New Eden. they named the fist newly discovered system... New Eden. Fast forward a couple dozen millennia and the passage between New Eden and the milky way collapses, stranding all the former colonists in their new home. Another few millennia after that, capsuleers like you and I are doing all kinds of crazy things in EVE. Short enough an explanation for you? Okay, let's move on.

The EVE gate, as I saw it

On Toyla's idea; he, Jackus and I mounted an expedition to the EVE gate in the New Eden system. Blog reader Erco was also invited, but he was pinned down at his nullsec station, unable to leave.
My corp buddy and blog reader Toyla had regaled us with stories about how you could see the anomalous gigantic star from two systems over, and the myriad of containers dropped by visiting pilgrims, touting slogans as varied as they were numerous.

The plan was to get from Amarr to New Eden, so we all jumped in small, fast and cheap ships, since the... OY!  Toyla! I said cheap! That thing is worth over 50'000'000 ISK, and there's a good chance we'll get gatecamped on our journey. Well okay, fine, it's your money...I'll just stick with my stripped Speedy Gonzales, a ship so cheap It's worth five times less than its volume in Tritanium, even when packaged. (no seriously, I did the math).
As I was saying, the plan was to go from Amarr, Toyla made us a fleet, and we started travelling. then we hit a small snag:

Indeed, since we'll be going through lowsec anyway, it's about 20 jumps faster to take the shortest route

After replotting our route, Jackus as the most experienced pilot took command of our fleet and started shouting orders.

"You! Cesare! Go scout ahead, and tell us if you get exploded"
...That sounds like a terrible plan. Why did I ask him to take charge? Well I am in the cheapest ship of the three, and my implants are not too expensive either, so it makes sense. So we hop hop hop from one gate to the next, not encountering any resistance on the way. No gate camps, only a handful of reds here and there, also just travelling along.
Some people even say hi and bestow blessings upon our sinful capsuleer souls as we approach the holiest place in EVE.
Being the scout, I double-jump ahead (little TF2 joke) to the New Eden system, and I'm greeted by a toon in a very ceremonious manner:

The second thing of note after those peculiar greetings is that the Eve Gate star-thing isn't taking up the entire screen, and wasn't visible at all from nearby systems either. Toyla, what gives? He swears it was like that when he first visited in April 2012. Well, nonetheless, we start approaching the star-like celestial anomaly...well Jackus starts approaching it, going much faster than the rest of us thanks to his MWD at 4km/s, so we trod along just wait for him to get 150km away and repeatedly warp to him. We do this for a while. And then another while, quickly noticing that the anomaly is not getting any bigger in our field of view, no matter for how long we approach it.

Sorry for the jitters. Encoding troubles. Thank Toyla for the voice acting

I started recording video about 10 minutes after we started approaching the anomaly. The end result? Well see for yourself: 16 minutes of the most boring footage ever recorded in any galaxy, at 666% speed for your viewing convenience.

After we gave up trying to get to the EVE gate and reach spiritual enlightenment, Jackus decided to troll another little pilgrim by following his through jumps and telling him to wait for him in local...so much for a religious epiphany. I of course did not partake in such unscrupulous behaviour (because I didn't even have any guns equipped).

Oh, and there was a huge gate camp at Djimame on our return trip, but it was on an outgoing gate so we were fine

Moral of the story: You didn't miss anything by not coming, but Cesare Romero's soul feels cleansed by this holy pilgrimage.

Get your ass to mars!

I tried my hand at planetary Interaction today, and it really reminded me a lot of Mass Effect 2's system, scanning, pinpointing, gathering phat lewt and all kinds of good stuff.

It's a bit of a hassle having to fly between planets in my Planet Cracker ship, and those planetary devastation missiles are really expensive too, but with some more skills in Mining Artillery and Celestial Body, it's getting better. Bafflingly, it's also much more profitable in high-sec than in low or null-sec, according to my calculations, since there are so many more planets, and they have more varied ecosystems that CONCORD's teams of environmentalists keep healthy.
It can be Especially profitable when you have several planet crackers working on the same planet in the same spot to boosts productivity. Yet another bonus is that planetary interaction tools make great weapons against intruders. I've heard that most supercapital ships carry planetary devastation missiles. and why wouldn't they? With their damage per salvo being over 9000, it more than makes up for their slow tracking.

Frankly the worst part is having to clear all those DUST 514 scrubs off the planet before starting the harvest,  that just takes too much effort. I think that sometimes they even kill off the aforementioned CONCORD environmental scientist teams, decreasing the planet's output.

By this point, all readers who aren't completely clueless have noticed that nothing I just wrote makes any sense. And that's simply because I've never tried Planetary Interaction, but I still had to write something today so I made it all up. Sorry. Hence the word of the day: gullery = trickery, fraud. This post is pure gullery, a big fat horrible lie.

Living on the edge

My manufacturing queue was full, I didn't feel like mining, ratting, scanning, and I can't fly my Cruiser yet, so I figured I may as well use my mint-condition Belly Beluga II and do courier contracts.

This is as close to playing Russian roulette as Eve can go

The Gypsy tradesman

Today's word: commence = begin.

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Ah, so DUST 514 has merged with Tranquility's ecosystem, eh? I think I know a handful of people who play DUST occasionally, so I bought morphite, the most expensive mineral in the game to build ridiculously cheap and weak small orbital lasers. I guess that shooting infantry with anything bigger would unbalance their puny run & gun game.
I needed 7 morphite, I figured while I'm Jita, may as well buy 13 more for a round number.
Then I noticed someone two systems over was buying at way over market price, so I bought 50 more and sold them to that sucker. bim bam done, I end up with basically 20 free morphite.

Oh man I'm a mean Omen

While I'm out shopping, I may as well indulge myself. So I bought the cheapest Omen I could find in highsec for 8.5 mil, why not. If I end up not liking it I can just resell it at a profit later on.
I narrowly avoided a stupid mistake: leaving base to buy the Omen in my pod, but I caught myself just in time  by remembering that I still have a day's worth of training before I can fly bloody Cruisers.

I toyed around a bit with EFT to get my Speedy Gonzales Executioner as fast as possible. In the end I just slapped 3 T2 overdrive injectors on there. Aligning speed would be slightly faster with nanomembranes to lighten the hull, but if I autopilot, raw speed is where it's at. 550m/s, aligning time 4,6s. Good enough. Maybe some day I'll get a covert ops ship and slap some warp-speed rigs on there and whatnot, but for now, Speedy will do fine. The filthy Minmatar have the fastest ship, ppffft, slaves, always running.

Speaking of slaves, I find a couple of blue & white destroyer wrecks at stargates. Just under a million ISK in random loot. Hey, free money, I'll take it.

Speaking of ISK, I noticed while looking though my wallet's log that back when I dind't know how to price things properly, I'd sold faction ammo for 400'000 ISK. Normal price: around 180'000. wahey! getting 100 more from the LP store and unloading them in the same place, at the same price. If suckers are buying, sell to them.

Speaking of selling. While emptying the last remnants of my old Homebase, I check online for good prices and where to unload the remaining junk. 16 jumps away, in lowsec, best buy price in the universe...is it worth it? I really don't know...screw it, let's go for it!

Adrenalin starts gently flowing as I get nearer. With every approaching jump, I figure, I could have gone to the other, cheaper, safer place. ARGH! I don't wanna die!

But NO! this is EVE online, Harden The Fuck Up, Cesare! ...I could say I'm roleplaying a coward, maybe? No! HTFU!... is it worth it to risk your ship and implants for cargo?...who knows, maybe since my cargo isn't incredibly expensive, they'll leave me alone in my Belly Beluga.
Let's see, about 1,5 mil for the ship + fittings...6 mil in cargo, a couple mil of implants...yeah, goddamnit, I'm gonna do it. I need at least 20 seconds to get to warp from a standstill...but I guess I can tank a little bit.

3 pirates in local in the 0.4 system..ARGH...okay, nobody at the gates, I'm alive. I jump to the destination system.
40 people in local at the 0.3 destination? AAARRRGH!...ah it's a contested system in a faction war AAAAAAAAARGGGHHHHHH! Okay, nobody was at the gate or the station. I'm alive. Nobody is paying any attention to me.

I make the transaction, everything is fine.
Want to know what my precious cargo was? 1 million units of tritanium. Bloody tritanium. But hey, everything worked out just fine. 6,2 million more ISK in my pocket. I'm alive.

What a goddamn pussy I've been. Now to do the same trip two more times. Gotta empty those tritanium vaults from ye olde home base.

As I complete the long trip back and forth in my slow but trusty Belly Beluga Bestower, everything goes fine until I arrive at the destination station, where 20 irate pirates lock me and commence shooting. But I nonetheless dock, with minimal shield damage.
6,2 million ISK more. Huzzah! This totally paid off!

Docking at the station, my ship is fine but I need new underwear

Now I figured I could use cunning and stay docked until just after downtime tomorrow, and probably escape the ambush, and it's bedtime for me anyway. But I decide to finish the story I started telling.
Oh the silly things I do for this blog. After a few minutes of deliberating, I undock and immediately start my warping sequence. In a fraction of a second, I see some kind of spider tanking going on above my ship, it's okay, The next fraction of a second in space, my shields are still at max strength  everything is fine. The next fraction, I'm in warp in my pod. Well poop.

The exact instant of my ship's death upon undocking. I highlighted the dead giveaway clues in fabulous pink

My bounty will never go away if I don't decide to get properly killed some day

HAH! That was FUN!

I lost my 2 day old Bestower in a very overkill incident, but I didn't get podded, and returned safely home with large profits in my pocket. Absolutely worth it! Even if I did sell 2 million minerals to the people who shot me. now that's just bad business practice.
The last times I'd gotten shot out of the sky was because of extreme stupidity and overconfidence, but this time, I died because of a calculated risk. Well my calculations were pretty wrong, but that's just my poor math-head. the point is, my space-splosion wasn't a surprise this time.

I'm learning.

Your sills are complete

Word of the day: stringent, meaning strict and/or demanding.

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Actually, Vader, that's a mining beam

You know who's beautiful and smart? You are. Yes you, reading this. Not because you are reading this, but because you just are that way.
You know what's profitable? What I'm doing right now. Writing this sentence.
Also this one. And this one. This one too. That one was barely a sentence, though.
Sensible people might think to monetize their blog and get rich off you poor sucker readers' backs, but no, that not what I mean at all. I mean you wonderful people already been helpful to my mental well-being by your mere existence, and some of you have even gifted me generous amounts of ISK. I have said in the past and I repeat: I am not asking for donations of any kind, but I'd be an ungrateful SOB not to thank  Erco and Azrael for getting me over the 100 mil ISK mark (although I have much much more than that in assets nowadays).

With DUST 514 coming to the Tranquility server today, I've been scouring dark corners of the Internet and clicking furiously on all those banner ads to win a free Playstation 3, but all I have to show for it are emails from singles in my area and more cheap penis enhancers than I could ever have time to use.

Email me if you're interested in v1agra for your pen fifteen two day

So, what's up in actual Eve? I've finally gotten my skills and NPC standing over 6.67, which means I am finally able to refine my 150mil ISK worth of minerals at 100% efficiency, and here's a little table to help you fellow newbies do the same:

Taken from Haladan's complete miner's guide
All NPC stations are classified as 50%

There's a small UI bug when refining that doesn't take into account the % gained from ore-specifig processing skills, but as long as you see your refining waste at 0, you know shit just got real and the galaxy is your oyster.
For the moment, I myself am at Refining V and Refinery Efficiency III as well as Pyroxere, Jaspet, Kernite processing III. That is a slightly overkill, since you obviously can't refine over 100%, but Tech 2 mining crystals unlock at around level IV ore processing, and rarer ores have more stringent skill requirements for effective processing. Also, reprocessing loot benefits from refining and Refinery Efficiency, and Scrapmetal Processing may be helpful for salvagers to get to 100%.

So I'm sitting on a big pile of potential cash, which I will convert into even more potent potential by building & selling Bestowers and other assorted goods.

Now that my mining skill goal is complete, I'll take some time to focus more on other things, specifically combat skills. Cruisers, Battlecruisers, weapons of mass destruction and opossum taming (I have to petition CCP to add that vital skill to the game).

IMPORTANT! blog MIGHT go on hiatus in a couple of weeks

Hello there, dear blog reader. It's been an eventful month of December and early January, hasn't it?

The word of the day is destitute, which means being so poor that you ain't got nothing no more.

I am currently unemployed, which explains how much time I'm able to be in Eve and write about it.
However, I just received a job offer that would start on Jan 28th. So hooray! But there is a catch, the job is 500km away. And since we don't have warp drives on Earth, that is a bit too far to travel every morning. So I'm relocating, and there'll definitely be a few days' lull in the blog while I'm getting my shit together, but RagnaR will remedy that...or be tossed out of an airlock.
I might have mobile internet up and running quickly, and might be able to continue enjoying the bliss that is Eve, but I may just have to live in a log cabin with no internet at all and survive by eating rats (no, not space-rats, actual rats, although they are also NPCs by human standards).
The most probable scenario is that I will have some kind of stop-gap in the form of mobile internet, and as a reader you'll barely notice a change. But just in case, prepare for the worst, that way you can only get happily surprised.

Damn, Eve is warping my mind. I'm apartment hunting and think to myself "hmmm...yes, I could afford to buy a 100 000 € apartment and probably jack up the price a bit on resale"...What the fuck am I thinking? It's for 8 months! and euros are not ISK!

Here's hoping for a bright future for everyone involved! o7

blogchat

You know what's great? Talking to strangers on the Internet! Is such a thing possible? Even in space?
Join the channel brumi-in-eve today or whenever you're online, and chat with RagnaR's and/or me, as well as fellow blog readers!

The only Eve chat channel guaranteed to have the sweet omnipresent smell of onions all year 'round and  >99% fewer scammers and spammers than local chat!

But wait! there's more! the next 4 people I meet in there will receive a free copy of DOTA2 for their Steam account. Azrael already got his. (this is not a joke).

So join Brumi-in-eve ! Simple to remember, it's the URL, after all.

I'm a trucker! Honk honk!

I'm starting a little side-thing with this post, the word of the day! So you can expand your vocabulary while the rest of your brain rots on the internet. these words will just be from the top of my head, so they may be completely useless words, but I'll endeavour to use them in context.Oh, endeavour, there's a bonus one for today: Endeavour a made up word named after a United-Statesian space shuttle*.Argh! United-Statesian, triple word bonus. I'll stop here.
Today's word is "Recuperate", which is basically a fancy way of saying "recover".
*this is in fact a lie, a warning to never believe anything you see on the internet

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I had to reschedule my trip to the Eve gate, but I'll get there eventually
As I mentioned last year (oh, the wit, the unbearable wit!), I'm relocating to a new home in a secret location in k-space. Following that logic, I really needed to get all my random loot, ships, minerals and such over from my old newbie stomping grounds. I could have asked a friend to haul it for me, or hired a shipping company, but it can't hurt to have my own industrial ship, can it? Also I have a cargo delivery storyline mission requiring 4500m³ of whatever carried across 3 high-sec systems. STOP WASTING MY TIME, AGENTS! I'm supposed to be the one who wastes that time!

Enter Belly Beluga the Bestower!

According to the calculations of my lovingly crafted spreadsheet, and savvy market analysis, getting a BPO and building Bestowers for resale would be quite profitable as well. My shield rechargers and afterburners are selling like hotcakes, but their low price in the tens of thousands means very slim profits:
I could just have used this handy dandy online tool, but doing my own calculations just feels more rewarding. It's not strictly playing the game, but it is much more than metagaming.

I'm glad I'm not in high-school anymore, else anyone who knew me saw this, I'd never live down the nerdliness
(funfact: Google corrects "nerdliness" as "lordliness")

Since our corp is still a bit too small to effectively mine in nullsec, I have to buy a few units of Zydrine and Megacyte, so I take my first ever trip to Jita, where all the good prices are. Holy smokes...this place is crazy when you're used to 1-15 people in local. While I'm all the way up there, I buy enough minerals to build 20 Bestowers, or whatever else may come to mind, and I'm off!

It takes me around two hours to build the Bestower, so I do a little mining mission for my standing to recuperate from that security mission fiasco.
When the mission ore is brought back,  Belly Beluga the Bestower is barely born and backended into bringing barrelfuls of boring brave bravado...okay abort the alliteration here.
tl;dr I take indy ship and carry shit from [location censored] to [location censored].

I quickly wrap hauling some ditanium bars for the storyline mission, and then moving all my stuff. In only two trips, I have everything except some unrefined ores brought home. Ah, now isn't this nice?
Well, it would be a lot nicer if I could organise my station inventory somehow, a long asked-for feature that CCP turns a blind ear and a deaf eye to. But I can just barely fit a station container in Belly Beluga's 10000m³ hold with 4 cargo expanders equipped. I find some for sale at way below the normal rate, mentally scan for scams and buy all three. I carry one to my new home, briefly chuckle at the irony of transporting an empty  container in a freighter, and presto, all my salvaged junk is now neatly organised in a makeshift station "folder".

The irony...

Reprocess or sell? I'd rather not think about it and just let it rot.

A productive day overall.

It's cold and lonely in space

Therefore I've taken to carrying my female Little Helper around wherever I go.

My next idea is to carry around rotting corpses, and drop them when I see a red, for intimidation.

Retrospecting

Well it's been a month. I started playing on December 6th, and it's already been quite a ride. Im actaully banned from the rookie help channel for being too much of a badass veteran.
Time for a retrospective.

When RagnaR bullied me into trying Eve, I figured I'd try and abandon it quickly, like I did every MMO since 2002, and also Eve itself a few years back. So I made a character named after a good friend of mine, just to mildly annoying him, but it all worked out in the end, Cesare Romero is a cool name.
Some in-depth time spent in the avatar creation later, I started the tutorials and agent missions. Tutorials? There were no tutorials last time I tried playing this!
As a side note, I've never seen such an intricately created system for something as inconsequential as human character details in Eve. Maybe someday it'll be used for something worthwhile, but CCP have since then refocused on more important aspects of the game, like ships.

As I may have mentioned in the past, RagnaR has been lending a helpful ear and hand all along the way, to ease my transition from puny fleshy real-life human to immortal New Eden demigod. I remember the first things I said to him upon receiving my rookie ship: "Wow, a civilian gatling laser, I'm going to pretend this is super awesome and powerful". Come on, think about it, to someone who's never played eve, the words "gatling laser" sound pretty damn impressive. And then I had no idea about civilian gear, or how to find out where DPS numbers were, or that small  T1 weapons are a bit poop in any case...good thing I decided to use that phrasing "pretend".

So, what have I learned since those scrub days?

• I've learned that even if an Agent NPC teaches you to scan, and that scanning can find wormholes, wormholes are doubleplusungood.
• I've learned that Eve is one hell of a drug. One day, I was the 1st person on the entire Tranquility server to connect after the daily downtime; at least according to the 0 playercount and 0 people in local. To be fair, it was purly by chance that I started my client up at 11:31 that day.
• I've learned that just like Dark Souls is a really hard videogame, it's not as hard as I'd expected. And Although it sometimes seems like everyone in Eve is there to gank, kill, steal or scam you, there are a lot of really helpful people, and even many of the lying, cheating, scamming bad people are gentlemanly in their manner.
• I've learned that if you're polite and friendly, good things will happen to you. 
• I've learned, and keep learning every day that there is more to learn, so much stuff to do, so many skills to train! AAARGRRGHHH! I'm not changing the title of this blog for a long while.
• I've learned to embrace Eve, and although I first thought " ' I wish I could get more information on this topic' - said no Eve player ever", I'm actaully starting to find little defects I'd like changed, nitpicking at the essence of Eve's grandeur...like many forum whiners do. Even going so far as to think of new and terrible meta-game ideas. Here's my best bad idea: what if frozen corpses weren't naked? What if instead, if you podded someone, you could literally steal the shirt off their back, thus creating an other layer of parallel AUR economy.
• I've learned to learn learning something new to learn every learning day, like yesterday: if people really want to find me, Cesare Romero, in the game, even if I don't divulge my location, they can potentially use agent locators to find me. But really now, taking the effort to track my little 1,5 mil SP dude would me more of a waste of time for the would-be griefer than for me. Shoutout to blog reader Mungus for that!
• I've learned that the most important thing is to have fun, but I don't think I've internalised that lesson yet. Mining is no fun, building things is not that much fun, playing the market is a bit of fun; but at my low level, it's low levels of fun. But dammit, it's all profitable. Long-time veterans will laugh at me for bringing in 10-20 million ISK an hour, saying they'll do 500 times that in wars, or ambushes, or what have you. And to those people I say...have you seen my Coercer? Who do you think I can shoot and kill with 45 DPS? In the end, money can't buy happiness, but enough money can rent it indefinitely.

Today I think I'll go check out the EVE gate, and if I survive the trip, I'll be sure to torture your souls with my vacation diaporama.