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Eve is Social and Logistics V

It is anticlimactic to finish a skill you have been chasing after for months while asleep.

I woke up, and my Aura app told me that my skill training had completed. I was like, "Oh". I really just wanted to go back to sleep. The sad news is that I still need to touch up some other skills to become capstable. From what I can tell, I am just hovering under cap stability. Sigh. The progression is not endless but its a bit of a letdown after the initial excitement.

However, I must trot to the side to comment on yet another WTF moment in an Eve Chat.

Today, my argument with someone was about Eve being a social game. People made disparaging comments to Dagen, the NPC at the end of the Sister's of Eve Arc should be solable. The NPC is not. The point is to get new characters to fleet up and overcome him. Yet, this thick, persuasive attitude creeps through Eve that insists that all missions must be solo events.

Someone else said that level 4 missions are solo missions.

No. They are not. They are soloable missions with a proper setup. They also tend to take a lot of time. Eventually, you skill up into something that is blingtastic to the point that it blots out the sun itself sparkling in its shinyness. Then they are like eatting candy. But, if you are at that point should not you move on to harder things instead of milking low level security missions like an aged cow?

No. The curse of the isk per hour and 'it should be done solo' comes into play. Eve is a social game. Things are meant to be done socially. Things taste better that way. I hate missions but it is great fun to blitz through a dozen missions in a fleet of 3-5 people. It is great fun because of the socialization aspect. With the right combo of ships on the field everything melts and everyone has a great time doing something.

"I wish missions were set up to do them with other people," one newer player sighs.
"How are they not?" I ask.
He said (and I quote) "I mean people 'play' them together but they can't accept them together and turn them in together, get the same bookmarks, split the reward, etc"
I then vomited forth a wall of text about how I disagreed. The game gives everyone the tools and then expects people to use them. The person who accepts the mission is by default the Fleet Commander. They can have someone else coordinate it for them or they can do it themselves. They have all of the pieces, now put them together and lead the fleet into battle. Later, no one will be handing out bookmarks, you have to scan down sites. No one will tell the fleet where to go. You will need to know how to use someone as a warpin. You will need to know how to split up DPS, decide what to do, coordinate the missions and you will need to manually decide how to split the loot rewards. Just like you can select 'keep all rewards for myself' with a mission you can decide not to share with your fleetmates. However, that makes you a piece of trash and hopefully they'd hunt you down and kill you (unless prior agreed to). Bounties are automatically split. Considering the poor math skills often presented by players, this is a good thing.

While missions may not be "fun", how they are not geared towards social aspects is beyond me. The only thing stopping people from being social is their own greed. ISK per hour should be a dirty word. It rips people out of the game and into these tiny pockets of ISK focused isolation. They then define the entire game by their ISK per hour and miss everything else. That would be fine if they did not spread it to others.

Back to my initial commentary on my logistics training. Logistics may be the ultimate social skill. I can't use it on anyone else. My ship does not even have a weapon mounted. I depend on others to keep me alive. They depend on me to keep them alive. Its a beautiful thing.

Let us look at the difference in the ships functionality between Logi 4 and Logi 5.

Logi 4

Logi 5

The chances are pretty spectacular. It also took 20+ days of training to achieve that.

I'll have to ask the boys to shoot each other so that I can rep them tomorrow.

Now to finish some T2 training and turn around and start on Minmatar Cruiser 5 for the Scimi.

Comments

  1. You're right, the tools to make missions sociable are already there. Would just be nice if missions could scale depending on how many people run them, as an added incentive.

    As a point of order, Dagen is soloable. I didn't even know he wasn't supposed to be until he came up in our help chat months after I killed him. Turns out it's apparently impossible for a three month newbie to kill him. I just "cheated" by using a Thorax combined with drones to finish him off. There was something about how Dragen is always more resistent against whatever kind of damage the favourite weapon of the race your character belongs to has.

    I didn't know about this at the time but my Amarr character flying Gallente ships apparently had made my life easier in that mission.

    On the other hand, my way through the Sister Epic Arc taught me a lot of the basics. I started the arc with a droneless Amarr Dragoon carrying two different types of small lasers at once (so I could hit enemies at different ranges) and ended with a halfway decent, shield-tanked blaster Thorax.

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