Skip to main content

Fuzzy Productivity

Randomly interesting thing I found last night: China's Eve Online Server's Sov Null Map

I've been getting Eve Mail about my blog now and then. I get excited when my mailbox flashes. I've had some good conversations and met some interesting people this way.

Today, the the eve mail topic made me chuckle a little bit.

The general question was, "How do you make money to PvP and not self harm from PvE boredom?"

My unfun answer is, "You don't." I then went on to expound upon my comment.

We go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about eve being risk vs reward. To me, that expands into price vs reward. To buy a ship you have to pay the isk. To buld a ship you have to have the minerals. To build a ship you need the skills. To mine the ship you need the skills. Even if one does everything there are not really short cuts to bypass the unfun stuff. Even scamers and corp theieves hve to invest the most precious resourse of all. Time.

But this is Eve. My bio in Eve discusses my view of Eve. I have one section of it that defines playing Eve for me. This is how I view the sand in the box:

On the beach are trillions of grains of sand. Each one is a choice, a decision, a moment, an instance, a chance to be used or or discarded or bypassed or noticed. The ocean may pour over it and the land may shake it, but it is a a flexible, fluctuating, ever changing world.

The point that I am making is that there is opportunity and decision in every part of Eve. The game has left things wide open for the players. Where in many games, the grind is something you can not avoid, in Eve you can.

Right now, I explore a lot. If I were to break it down, when I run sites I shoot red crosses (NPCs) just like I do in a mission. Today, when I recieved the eve mail asking me how I made ISK I was running my very first 5/10 DED site all by myself (me and Sugar and Chella at least). Note, I did not say Solo. I said by myself.

(Playing with myself. What connotations...)

But there is something about the effort to find the site, scan it down, drag my ships to it, run it, almost die and then risk not getting anything but bounties while people try to scan me down and kill me that turns this activity from a mindless grind to fun for me.

Almost dead. Logi kept me up till I could warp out. Stasis towers and I didn't get along right then...

And then I might not get anything. If one were to be rational why would I risk running a site for the chance of not getting anything over running a site with fact of receiving a set amount of isk/reward/bounties?"

For the possible reward. No guaranty makes it more interesting to me. It is a gamble but a productive one. Sometimes, it pays off.

Two things happened here. I earned isk and I enjoyed myself doing an activity to earn that isk. Some people tried to kill me. I almost lost my ship because my setup is suboptimal for this endeavor. I learned that I can do a new thing thanks to the time and effort I have put into skill training my two accounts. If I had done level 4 missions to earn the same amount I'd be clawing at my eyes and debating how much more fun spinning my ship would be and not earning anything.

Fun is what you make of it. I'm not a min/max person when it comes to making ISK. I've walked away from projects that equaled good ISK because they bored me. I like to play Eve and I like to play Eve in many different ways.

Eve, to me, is very much a large strategy game. Gathering resources is part of the game.

Comments

  1. That is exactly what I think, but still here I am doing L4 mission, its secure ISK, but I am already scratching my eyes, soon I will do something worse (metaphoric speaking),because I have yet to make the next step, but I am close really close.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maybe one day!

 [15:32:10] Trig Vaulter > Sugar Kyle Nice bio - so carebear sweet - oh you have a 50m ISK bounty - so someday more grizzly  [15:32:38 ] Sugar Kyle > /emote raises an eyebrow to Trig  [15:32:40 ] Sugar Kyle > okay :)  [15:32:52 ] Sugar Kyle > maybe one day I will try PvP out When I logged in one of the first things I did was answer a question in Eve Uni Public Help. It was a random question that I knew the answer of. I have 'Sugar' as a keyword so it highlights green and catches my attention. This made me chuckle. Maybe I'll have to go and see what it is like to shoot a ship one day? I could not help but smile. Basi suggested that I put my Titan killmail in my bio and assert my badassery. I figure, naw. It was a roll of the dice that landed me that kill mail. It doesn't define me as a person. Bios are interesting. The idea of a biography is a way to personalize your account. You can learn a lot about a person by what they choose to put in their bio

Memoirs - Part Seven: The Taste of Scandal

Virtual Realities: Memoirs of an internet spaceship politician by Sugar Kyle CSM9, CSMX Viewers get some drama Is there any election that is scandal free? Virtual space politics are not excluded. Sometimes the scandals come from the people ruining. Sometimes they come from outside of that. “I can’t wait to enjoy the drama!” someone had said to me about the election. Those words would haunt me later as I fought not to be caught up and defined by the decisions another person had made. While I played the game and tried to convince people of my worthiness a dark drama was sweeping across the game. The CSM does not dictate game policy. CCP does that. It does not stop many from seeing the members as vocal representatives. It was a public post made by one member of the CSM that started a fire that would take years to go out. Eve Online is an interactive video game with few social rules. It is one of the games charmes. If you can trick another player into making a po

And back again

My very slow wormhole adventure continues almost as slowly as I am terminating my island in Animal Crossing.  My class 3 wormhole was not where I wanted to be. I was looking for a class 1 or 2 wormhole. I dropped my probes and with much less confusion scanned another wormhole. I remembered to dscan and collect my probes as I warped to the wormhole. I even remembered to drop a bookmark, wormholes being such good bookmark locations later. My wormhole told me it was a route into low sec. I tilted my head. How circular do our adventures go. Today might be the day to die and that too is okay. That mantra dances in the back of my head these days. Even if someone mocks me, what does that matter? Fattening someone's killboard is their issue not mine. So I jumped through and found myself in Efa in Khanid, tucked on the edge of high sec and null sec. What an interesting little system.  Several connections to high sec. A connection to null sec. This must be quite the traffic system.    I am f