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Level 5 Missions

Level 5 missions are impressive.

I hung out with my pirate a bit in low sec to salvage his missions. Since I am so young I get hunted a lot. In Eve, you can see when someone started playing under employment history. I have just under two months on me and I'm running around LowSec so I am prey. Plus, I'm puttering around in a Noctis. That is a carrier below me. I can dock my Noctis inside of it.



It is an interesting game of cat and mouse. I hang out and watch my pirate eat the rooms and we both watch the directional scan looking for combat probes. When he is by himself, no one bothers him.



Add me to the mix and we get maybe 15 minutes before someone tries to find and eat me. Cloaky, cloaky Noctis.


This day the guy spent a good 30 minutes looking for me and hoping I'd flush out I guess. Someone might wonder why I'm willing to go still for 30 minutes instead of playing. There are several reasons.

Number one is ISK. My Noctis re-buys itself every mission or so in salvage. If I lose it, I can buy another.
Number two, it's good practice. Eve is about being hunted.

Number three, its the game. Eve can be fast and it can be very slow. If you want everything in your face now, now, now you can play that game. It's not my game however.

Eve is a flexible game. It has PvE (Player vs Environment) as well as PvP (Player vs Player) but there is also PvPM (Player vs Player Market) where characters completely work on market and trade skills and never even leave the station. They are litterly business giants and can make billions buying and selling. However, there is exploration, you can be a courier, hell people even make Banks (and then rob said banks) and never do 'game play' as we often think of game play.

I have no interest in some of that but its fucking cool. Everyone goes 'its a sandbox' but really it is a beach with two major sides and the ability to create what you want in it if you take the time.

We also play. Making isk is is what you do in Eve. Isk gets you lovely ships. Lovely ships you fly and do stuff with. Yet, we play. You can ram ships and sometimes we get a bit distracted and play with each other. No damage happens to the ships. Bumping can be very useful in combat as well. Its also just fun to ram each other and see what the game physics decide to do.

This is my Noctis spinning after a nice nudge from the Machariel. It didn't stop me from salvaging. But lets say I was aligned to a spot to run away quickly. My Noctis is an industrial ship. It has no speed, it warps slow, and its rather fragile. So, strategy wise when sitting still with lots of salvage close by I should set myself up to not have to turn around, align and warp to a safer location. However, come and bump me off course and you are adding time to my escape and thats time to catch me and eat me with ketchup.



Buying the Noctis and getting into salvage was a crapshot. Its been super profitable for me. I could go in my own mission ship and help out. I do sometimes. But really, hes a badass and he eats the missions and rolls out. Its easier for me to clean the battlefield of the delicious salvage and turn it into cash while hanging out. It is an interesting pyramid of social gaming. He does not need the salvage. He burns through missions so fast that salvaging them is a waste of isk for him in the time he'd loose salvaging it he could have done 2 or 3 or 4 more missions.



Yet, that is one of the many fun parts about Eve. You don't have to be a bad ass mission ship. You can make your own place. Eventually, I'd love to be the bad ass mission ship. For now, I tag along and learn and clean the field and make my isk. Some of my friends who started the same time I did from my own corp asked me how I make the isk I do. I'm not doing to bad for two months in and I'm not selling Plex or being given isk. I'm invited to situations that can be profitable for me if I want to do the work to make it so.

It's not glamorous. One guy loves running missions and shooting stuff. That's great but to run missions you have to buy ammo and ships and mods to fit the ships with. On top of that you need to be able to replace your stuff. That is the first rule. Don't fly what you can't afford. Someone could give you a 500isk ship and you could lose it 5 minutes later. That ships gone and you can't afford it because you have 10mil isk to your name.

This risk vs reward is highly intoxicating to some of us. It makes others quit Eve. That's fine, we all play the game we want to play. Eve is a strategy game, a vast complex one filled with other people, but a strategy game non the less. I had someone ask in a help channel if he should salvage his missions. He's been playing for about 4 days and the answer is always yes. He then wondered if he should fit two salvaging devices to his ship to speed up salvaging. I suggested that he fit a tractor beam and a salvager.

He said that the salvager is so slow so two seemed better. Yes, it is slow, I agreed, but the tractor beam will bring the salvage to him faster. You sit in a cloud of wrecks and drag them to you and salvage them. The salvage beam has a distance of 5k meters while the tractor beam can easily do 30k meters. So, while you are waiting for the salvager to cycle and hopefully pull something from the wreck you can also tractor in other wrecks. If not, you have to fly within 5k of each wreck to salvage it and within 2.5k to get any loot that is in the wreck. I have found that this is going to be slower then dragging it to you while you do something else.

Why not skip it totally? Sure, you can. But when you start eve you are dirt poor. You have very few ways to make isk. Mission rewards are like 20k a pop. The training missions leave you with about 5 mil. You can get another 5-10 from the Sister's of Eve epic arc. Beyond that, isk is very thin and painful your first few weeks. I remembered when I topped 10mil the first time. I felt space rich. I wasn't. I still am not. But I can afford my ships now. Not that many, but if I lose something I can go and buy another one of anything that I fly.
Finical responsibility in game for the win.

And I need it. My space lust for the Machariel is enormous and it sells for 800-1bil isk. Plus you have to fit it. And afford it. Thank god it will take me months to be able to fly it and perhaps a year to be able to fly it properly. Someone could give me one now and all I'd be able to do is stare at it in its hanger.






















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