Hello there.
This blog is a first for me, since I never wrote one before, nor posted stuff in a regular basis before.
Please, be aware that I'm not an english native speaker, nor writer for that matter. My writings may/will contains a lot of errors, misspelled words or strange syntaxes. I will do my best to improve it.
This blog will be about Eve Online, and my experience playing it. I've been playing games since the last 30 years, and I must say that I know only 2 other games with the same level of complexity.
The first one, or ones, is the Sid Meier's Civlization series. I still play Civilization IV games
on a regular basis. I spent thousands of hours on Sid's games since Civilization I. If you ever played
any of them, you will know that feeling:
just.. one.. more.. turn.. ah crap ! 4 AM already, ok, just one more.
The second one is Funcom Anarchy Online. I've played it for about 10 years. What'a about it ? Learn to twink a level 50 weapon on a level 10 character and obliterate everything in PvP and PvE with it. For such a toon, you could spend weeks in planing, searching for the correct cluster, the clean implant, buffs, swaping buff items, etc.
There is so much skills to choose from, to plan way ahead for weeks (when leveling was way slower than it is now.), spending hours shopping, then building implants, just to gain a few more points in such or such skills.
Of course, I've played a lots of other games, simulators, FPS, RTS, RPGs, a bunch of MMOs. But all of them have always the same issue: they were too simple, there was no complexity per se in them.
For MMOs, as time pass, the game was alwways made easier, faster to level, faster to reach the max level to do instances with high-end contents. An example ? World of warcraft. I remember leveling my first gnome mage at level 60, it took me around 6 or 7 months of playing, at 4-5 hours per day. My last toon was a warrior, a few expansions later, it took me one week (at the same rate) to level from level 1 to 70, alone.
I left WoW, for good, some times after that. There was nothing left in that game safe grinding factions
and running instances, with a tight schedule, to get better stuff.
I've never been that kind of player, I'm enjoying leveling my characters, building my in-game personna around them, taking my time to wander around, doing stupid stuff just to see it's possible, planing my next moves, etc.
In Eve Online, I found everything I ever wanted. The game is immersive, it could appeal to almost
everyone, for the impatients, solo missioning, exploring, pvp-ing, for the social ones, hanging around
in fleets for PvE or PvP, for the patient ones, mining, manufacturing, hunting, hauling, trading, etc.
There is so much things to do in Eve Online that it's overwhelming IMHO.
I started playing somwhere in summer 2014, on a free account, and got hooked almost instantly.
I tried a lot of things at that time: mining, exploring, missioning and of course, the most important: dying.
I was setting myself some easy goals: to have 10m ISK, 50m, 100m. My mid term goal was to have 200m ISK in my wallet, and to be able to fly a cruiser class ship (just fly, not being effective heh :-) )
To achieve this, I've started with the most easy activity: mining !
I've mined for days in a venture, making slowly my way to my goal, which I eventually reached and bought my first cruiser. While mining, I had plenty of time to read. The more I was reading, the more I was confused. And as confusion grows, my determination to understand Eve was growing too. I spent weeks reading, on my way to work, on my way back, at lunch break, and of course, while mining. Watching Youtube videos was a boon, there's a lot of informations there too. (Just a warning, there's a lots of outdated informations too, Eve Online is an old game, which has evolved a lot since its begining.)
That was it, I was completely fascinated by Eve.
There was so much stuff to do, so much stuff to understand, so much activities you could do to earn
ISk, fame or simply to have fun, it was incredible.
One year later, I'm still as passionate as I was, I spend around 2-3 hours per day playing Eve, sometimes more on the weekend. I've been experiencing a lot of different aspects of the game since then. I've been mining for months to fund some projects, and I still do some mining from time to time when I don't feel like doing something more involving. I have around 5B ISK in various assets, which is absolutely nothing compare to most players. I spend almost as much time actually playing the game than planing my next moves while out of the game.
I'm building a spreadsheet to help me plan my industrial activities: what to produce, where, and how much of them, what'll be my GPM (Gross Profit Margin) target ? What's the trend for the market for that item etc.
I have a master plan for months ahead, and lots of short-to-mid-terms plans which evolve as time passes, and as the political situation around New Eden evolves.
For now, I'm mostly involved in manufacturing T1 items (ammunitions, ships, rigs, modules), inventing T2 will be next. I'm still not sure about building T2 items, since I will have to buy moon materials from trade hubs, I will have to make sure it's profitable before investing in it.
When I have time to spare, I jump in a ship, and do some missions or do some ratting in anomalies.
For the next posts, I will focus mostly on tools I'm using. I won't explain most of them in details since
there's already a lot of informations about them around. I will have a specific post on a tool named LMeve, written by Lukas Rox (http://pozniak.pl/wp/). The tool is great, but safe if you have a good knowledge in databases, you won't be able to install it easly. Hopefully, Lukas is now providing a pre-built virtual machine (which could be run in VirtualBox and VMware) with LMeve almost up and running. (see https://github.com/roxlukas/lmeve for details)
Since I already run many unix VM machines, I was wanting to integrate LMeve in one of them, and it took me quite some time to do it correctly, since I haven't played with a database since more than 20 years.
I wrote a complete step by step guide to install LMeve on a brand new Linux, and I will post it here in a few days.
In the meantime, fly safe.
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