I don't mean that it is not a fun, intense and addictive game. I mean that it is not nice. It is not a warm, snuggly place to live and play. The game does not coddle you and the rules do not coddle you. It is a very ruthless place.
Hence times like Hulkageddon. When there is a contest, with prizes to shoot down the massive mining barges that eat the asteroid belts.
As I explained to my husband earlier, Eve is not about buying the biggest ship and being the biggest badass. It just does not work that way. Hulks are a great example of this. They are enormous ships. They are also slow and defenseless. I keep a few drones in mine to eat the little NPC pirates that swarm the belt. However, think of a cow in a field and you have a hulk. They are fat, efficient things with a major place in the world. They are now however, badasses.
And its hunting season for cows. Sometimes the cows sharpen their horns and lay traps. Its a fascinating aspect of the game.
So, I will spend the next week missioning and working on other skills. I go on vacation the week after and hopefully the game will have settled down and it will not be as interesting to kill my barge.
I don't have a hulk, I have a retriever. It is a smaller, cheaper less efficient version. Training to fly a Hulk takes about 2 months of dedication on the part of the player. Like many things in Eve, it is not a casual decision. They are amazing at what they do and they repay their investments off quickly. But, for the peaceful folk of Eve (known as Carebears) they are hunted by the not so peaceful side.
This is what makes Eve interesting. Out of game the competition is organized. They will give out prizes and rewards and give insurance payouts for the ships lost.
Not the ships lost by the miners. The ships lost by the killers aka gankers.
Eve has security zones. The high-sec areas are from 1.0 to .05. In these areas, the NPC police, Concord patrols. If you attack a ship unprovoked Concord comes and kills you. As the sectors go down from 1.0 to .09 to .08 to etc the response time for the police slows down. This gives people more time to kill you and makes each area more dangerous.
The high-sec area of the game is large because the game is enormous. However, its a small part of the game.
Anyway, people kill still kill you and then get killed themselves. Then their alt or their friends will loot and salvage both wrecks. Its a game of numbers and the end is a win win for them. They lost a ship but they didn't buy an expensive one in the first place and the end reward is greater then what they put into it.
In this game, that is okay. No one is going to replace the lost ship for the miner and scold the pirate. It is part of the eve universe.
I like it.
Even if I mine a lot.
Its adds such depth and texture.
So I am not mining this week. I am running missions. Running level 4 missions with other people is great. I fly in a Brutix.
Gate waiting
Eve is a cooperative event a lot of the time. Sometimes, you sit and chill for a few minutes before the mission starts. Running in because you are impatient gets you a nice graphic of your ship exploding.
I took shots of the battle without the brackets and highlights and with. I then noticed that my over view window was in default and is showing everything useless in the world. I've been playing with the settings across two different machines and I don't have it all synced up yet. Customization of the interactive displays is pretty important.
Anyway, purple is my fleet, red is bad, the white triangles are what has been killed. The green things are my drones that I'm also controlling.
My ship isn't highlighted but its a spec in the middle of the screen since the camera is focused on it.
And then, the cleanup. All the white triangles are destroyed ships. The sold ones have equipment in them. But all of them can be salvaged for an attempt at broken ship parts which are used to create new ships so therefore valuable and useful in game. Everything can be used, sold, or reprocessed to its base components. Salvaging is a lot of work and can take quite a while. This probably took me 20 minutes because the character I used to do it is not actually very good at it.
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