And we're off!

Last week I announced that I had renewed my subscription to EVE Online, but I didn't do much apart from logging in to make sure my training queue was in order, and to gather together various ships I had lying around in places other than my usual hang-outs. Namely, my Orca which was docked up in Berta after my stint in Ushra'Khan, and a Taranis in some other system in Derelik (I probably got it because it was ridiculously cheap... why else buy stuff out there?!). I also got to re-acquire an arty Tempest I had left in a very deep Class 4 wormhole a while back. During my hiatus the AMC alliance has been put in stasis and a few W-space colonies have been vacated, including the deep C4. So while I was away my Tempest was being taken care of by the Black Line corporation, and upon my return a contract was made for me in the dung-hole called Jita. So my first actual log-in was one of hauling. Good that this is out of the way!

You'll probably notice that I've skipped my Incarna experience. Let's say that it was very short. At first I thought I was out of the woods because the computer was behaving itself, there was no lag to speak of, and I even got this nice screenshot of Cozmik standing by his Absolution. This lasted about 15 minutes, when all of a sudden my computer simply shut down. Awesome. So a 2008 3ghz Core2Duo with 2gb of RAM and a 1gb nVidia GF8800 is simply not enough to run Incarna. Sorry but I've got other much more interesting places to dump my money than on computer parts. Well, it's not like I care much about Incarna, so after a slight cool-down period I logged back in but this time turned station environments off, and also turned all graphics way down; as I'd say in Quake3 terms, "r_picmip 5 ftw" :)) Actually, I found that having the now-infamous Door isn't too bad: when you have no ship to actually spin, you lose less time and you can do stuff that actually matters.

Back on the getting-back-in-the-swing-of-things train of thought, I also needed to give my trade alt Cassy Winds a wad of ISK to do the buy low/sell high thing. A few items have been good to me in the past and most of them still were so it wasn't long before all the ISK was locked in buy orders. With nothing else to do with Cassy I went back to Cozmik and checked a few things on the Rens market. I had heard that the EVE market was all over the place but it didn't prepare me to actually witness it. The first weirdness was finding out that there wasn't any Light Ion Blaster IIs in Rens to fit to my Taranis. Okaaay... and on the next day the few that were there were ridiculously over-priced. Good thing that there were some at my missioning hub, so I bought a small stack. And then I checked the ships... 130m for Vagabonds, 140m for Rapiers, 200+ for Broadswords, 250+ for Sleipnirs... GOD DAMN! Did a whole bunch of T2 producers quit and now those things are rare? Then I checked the Cynabal... 190m... I felt like buying three! While I was checking the Angel ships I noticed that the Pirate battleships hadn't changed much, but the Dramiel... 53m... expected nerf much? So yeah, after 4 months, the failest expansion in the game's history, a weekend of riots and a slew of ragequits the EVE market is getting schizophrenic. Speaking of the ragequits, I've heard somewhere (can't remember where) that EVE has about 370 thousand active accounts. But what my numbers said was that at prime time on a Thursday night 28 thousand people were logged in. Summer's almost over, people are getting back online, so we can't say "because of summer" anymore. "EVE is dying™" ? This remains to be seen. I think she's taken a serious hit though.

So now that my parenting weekend is over I'll have more time to get active. I'll be spending a couple nights of ISK grinding but now all the pieces seem to be in place. Fun will be had soon. No, not "tm"! See you out there !!!

Fly with a purpose

o7


Edit: Oh damn! For the first time in this blog's history I've posted more than 100 times in a single year, and there's still over 4 months to go in 2011. Yay me !!! ^_^