COMICAL RAGE!

Astral @ Astral’s eve trial by fire posted recently about a corp. mate who rage quit over losing a drake to a nasty LvL 4 Mission. I was around in the corp. public chat for the whole chain of events that ultimately lead to a rage quit!

We all foam at the mouth now and then about one thing or another. We are human and as a result we have anger as an emotion. Before we get too far into this for all you “I don’t get angry!” folks. If you don’t feel anger you need some serious help before you wake up in the middle of a shopping plaza wondering how you came to be covered in blood or end up like this dude in Big Trouble in Little China.

This anger is real even when we are playing a game for fun. The disappointment of seeing your avatar buy the farm and the sense of loss is real. You worked hard for that gear and now it’s gone. All the comforting and advice falls on steaming ears. You need to process your anger, then the sadness, and perhaps some embarrassment before you can rationally get back to the tasks at hand.

The down side to all this real and just rage is that someone else who is calm and watching it all will most likely be chuckling. Watching someone blow a gasket provides for some truly hilarious times. Why you might wonder. It reminds us of the last time we were consumed in fits of rage. Hammering at the desk without fists, yelling at the world, and looking for a nice plump house cat to punt. This makes us feel embarrassed and a natural reaction to embarrassment is to laugh it off.

To further this in EVE there are a large number of players who practice griefing. They find fun in harassing other players into fits of comical rage or extracting tears as they prefer to call it. So on any given day while playing EVE if you are not docked in a station you might fall victim to any number of methods to set that final spark in the tinderbox of rage within you. I recently asked Cyberin @ Hands off, My Loots! How he would counter his own game as a ninja. The resulting post is a great read even if I might not advise you to pay this man for protection, but check out GO AWAY NINJA! It’s a great example of how comical rage can be to others and how to defuse a griefer.

So back to the meat of it all we all NEED to pull a nutter now and then. I sure have and am bound to do so many more times before I shuffle off. All my life I’ve had a short fuse and the best thing I can say is learn from it. Half the time you are angry at yourself for not following advice or trying something risky that backfired. Simply put if something makes you angry find ways to stop it from happening.

So here are some great ideals I live by that help me reduce my comical rage in EVE:

#1 Don’t fly anything you cannot afford to lose!

HUGE RULE! Especially when you are new and ISK is not flowing. Trust me if you take out a 30M ISK Battle Cruiser to run level 4 missions and only have 10M in your wallet. You are setting the stage for some prime rage.

#2 Take advice as it’s given, even if you don’t like it!

Most people will give you advice based on them seeing you about to make a mistake they have in the past. If you ask for advice and get it then choose to not follow it. Great you’re a free thinking person who likes to blaze their own trail. Expect to fall on your face down that flaming path to glory and lots of anger as you figure it out.

#3 Know your skill and ship limits.

Just because you have opened up level 4 missions does not mean you can run them. The incoming DPS is a lot more in level 4’s than a level 3. The battle cruiser with the T1 mods that sailed through the same mission in level 3 mod will melt under your pod in the level 4 variant. Just like you don’t learn to PVP in a Navy issue Megathron that you can just fly and half fit. Guaranteed RAGE!

#4 Have fun and do things that make you happy!

The bottom line is this. If you try something and are getting horribly burned to the point of rage quitting. There is a good chance you are doing something you don’t enjoy and a change in activity is for you. You are in luck because there are so many things you can do in EVE that switching gears is only a matter of doing it. Don’t get me wrong though. Sometimes you have to take some lumps in the name of education. Just because it’s hard is no reason to quit.

Cheers and Fly Grumpy not Angry.

EVE SOB

Nostalgia

I was clicking around some other EVE blogs and came across a mention of “ELITE” over at Astrals blog. If you know me in game (all 3 of you) then you might clue in that my avatar SonofBraben was named after David Braben co-Writer of Elite.

Some 25 years later I still cannot look at hexagons without spinning them and trying to align myself to a rectangle in the middle. The Blue Danube Waltz gives me chills and joy of an easier life. Every time I warp or jump a gate I expect Thargoid traps to witch space to happen. I find myself looking for a Krait to shoot and scoop. Ah the joys of my days with a commodore 64 and Elite.

Just think of that a moment. Back then on 8-bit systems. We could engage in space combat, trade and mine(which was JUST as boring back then). We had 3D ships (wire frame at first then polygon) with upgrades for purchase. Jump drives, galaxy warp drives, cargo holds, fuel scoops, and automatic docking computers (Aura’s grandmother?). This was all in the early 80’s when I’d wager a good chunk of the EVE player base was not yet born (or at least just breaking double digits for age). There was no internet back then. People still wrote things called letters not emails. Digital was a watch type not a camera. We had Compact Disks (CD’s) for music if you were really well off. So before we had any of today’s standard technology (IPODs, Internet, Cell phones, 64bit PCs, Gaming consoles in HD, etc) there was a game that gave life to every space ship wanting fantasy a kid (teen or adult) could have.

Now in my mid 30’s I find EVE is my “Elite” where I can be a computer spaceship pilot. Pirates have replaced the Thargoids. There is no more manually docking to hexagons. MP3’s have replaced the Blue Danube. The cobra Mk III has been replaced with a TON of gorgeous spaceships. Most of all I find the fact that I am playing with and against real people the biggest step forward. However the open concept of elite and Frontier in the vast openness of space as a play field bear similar fond memories in EVE. If only Braben and Bell had networking in 1984. One can only imagine the multi player games we would have today. Now there would be something to WoW about… ;)

And that brings me to my closing thoughts. Frontier Developments and David Braben have been rumored to be working on Elite 4 for 5+ years now. The wiki states that once they release The Outsider Elite 4 is next. Knowing that it took over a decade between Elite and frontier I can only imagine that it will be quite some time more before this comes to light. However I do wonder how many of us old school computer spaceship pilots will be giddy the day Elite 4 as a MMPORP hits the stands. I wonder how EVE will evolve to meet the challenge of such an offering from the father of space combat.

We shall see…

For now I have many MANY more things to do in EVE.

See you around the gates and belts (warp bubbles and camps).

Cheers

EVE SOB

Hulkageddon II

So everyone has posted on this thing but to be honest it's a big enough event that you kind of have to blog about it.

What is Hulkageddon II you ask. It's an organized piracy event that brings all those pirates you don't want to encounter in lowsec and sends them into highsec (well anywhere) to target HULKS (well any kind of mining related craft). Said pirates (and anyone who has an alt with ~12 hours of skill training) try to pop mining vessels before concord serves them justice. This year prizes were given out for all kinds of achievement based forms of miner gankage for a week long event.

So how did this fair on a highsec mining newbie? I support the event to be honest and posted such (with a small bit about miners being like fat cows) on the site this year. However you look at it, there is good to come from it.

First good I see revolves around bot miners. Honestly I have toyed with starting an Alt JUST to rid my frequented roid belts of them. They are cheating bastards, provide no in game social value and are lousy at googling good information. Hence they deserve to die!

Second good I see revolves around raising awareness of new miners (and old complacent ones) to the fact that there is no safe place in EVE. At any time (other than in a station) you can be blown to shreds and loose your ship. Now there are things you can do to help yourself survive. Fit a tank to the mining barge. Sure a T1 barge is not going to offer much options, but there are plenty of examples on how to fit a hulk with a decent tank while still being able to vaporize veldspar and make tons of cash. Some even boast 300+ DPS. Oh yeah, and align to your warp out point please. Some might argue it's folly, but to be honest every second counts when some one with blasters is trying to shoot you. If they had rubber chickens, bah who needs to align.

Third good I see revoles around the market. How so you might ask. So ore prices for starters. Before the event I was selling tritanium at 4% under market (unless I wanted to haul it 10 hops), now I sell it for 2% over market. WOOT 6% gain baby! I also made a ton (well 40) destroyers out of mined goods and reprocessed goods that made me ~28M ISK while I did some thing else for a week. (TIP: Don't gouge the crap out of the gankers by doubling the price of destroyers. Price them well for a modest profit and make a ton of 'em. They will all sell that week.)

Fourth good I see revolves around me actually taking a break from mining and doing some thing fun. That week I got my mining account into a battle cruiser and up to level 4 missions. That week I scanned down 20+ hacking and 20+ salvage sites and made ~20M ISK worth in sold rigs. That week I took a walk (well I flew a ship...) into W space and killed my first sleepers and started a T3 (long way off for me) salvage stockpile. I could have mined and made more ISK perhaps, but man the energy drinks I would have needed to mine for the play time I logged that week (actually I played more that week than normal.).

So take a moment to take off your blinders and look around you. Look past the system you are in, the bookmarked secure cans, and the industrial jobs you have running. Look past your rage when you get ganked by 4 destroyers in your "safe" 0.5-1.0 system. Look beyond the ISK you could have made. Look to the horizons (all be them filled with folks with your ill fortune at hand) and step into the unknown for a week. Most of all, send Helicity Boson a little thank you. If 1% of us EVE players took the time to organize some thing of this scale. Oh how much more fun we would all have.

Oh and if you are still filled with rage from that hulk you lost or clutching your chest with stress over the Orca that is no more. I suggest you pour a bucket of water into the power supply of your computer and take up yoga or something. It be a game and games are supposed to be FUN people, mkaaay!

Cheers

EVE SOB

let's see how this goes...

For many years I have been involved with online activities. I've done everything from late 90's chat rooms to MMOGs. I am yet to BLOG and while I have spent a good number of hours reading blogs for both work and play. This is my first venture into what today is a increasingly common web past time.

This blog for the most part will follow the fun and games inside of EVE online. I recently set aside almost half a decade of WoW to join the pirates, carebears, scammers, shipbuilders, and salvage Ninjas in EVE (and many other flavors of capsuleers).

I bought into the game 26 hours into my first trial. I was amazed that you could mine rocks AND shoot things in the same ship. The tutorials had me do things that gave me free STUFF. Skills were trained in minutes to allow me to fly a different ship, or have a module that repaired my ships hull FOR FREE!!! I was hooked and this game was the best.

Reality hit about a week later when I realized that one ship could not really do everything. Skills took hours and then days and then weeks to roll by. At this point I ditched my NPC corp for a player corp. I was focusing on mining more as it seemed like a good way to make cash. I mined in a fleet with a hauler taking our rocks back to be refined. Life seemed good and ISK started to roll. I tried an alt in the same account. This led to frustration in only one active training queue at a time per account. That frustration led to a second account focused on combat skills and such.

I got a lesson in EVE principals when a mole inside the player corp locked up both my retriever and my hauler one day. Sent both my accounts to their pods and made off with all my T2 strip miners, cargo expanders, and all. At first I was shocked. Then I was angry. Then I was calm and actually found the event some what cleansing. Shortly after this I left the corp to find my own corner of space in highsec and found my own corp. I've also donated about 20M ISK to scammers to educate myself in how NOT to trade in EVE. Ah the life of a noob.

Today my two accounts sit in highsec in a corp. by them self. I mine and manufacture t1 ships and mods. I run level 4 missions and I salvage. I scan for hacking, salvage, and grav sites. I've found myself poking my little T1 scanning frig. into W space. I plan to start taking jump clones and t1 frigates into lowsec to start my schooling in PvP.

What remains in place the most after 3 months in EVE is that I still have a "kid in a candy store" like enthusiasm towards the game.

I know many folks blog about EVE, and all of what I am typing has been laid into text many times before. However, if you find interest in what I write leave a comment. I plan to blog for a while for my own records of what I do in EVE, but it's always nice to share.

Cheers

EVE SOB