(stories from) games you *would* play (if you even played games like that)

[stylo]

a short blog of my time back in eve so far.

disclaimer I would not get this committed if I didn’t already know I loved this game from the last time I played in 2011…

Jan 2025: logged in and started my skill queue back up. well, I tried to, but even though the game is free to play now, my character is advanced enough that I can’t train any more skills (i have 28m skill points. the max for a free account to train is 5m). I can’t even fly some of my old ships, since they require skills I don’t have access to anymore without paying for a sub. time to pay I guess. I get a 3 month sub for a discount.

wait, all my stuff is scattered around the galaxy? i guess my old corp mates evac’d my stuff from the wormhole we were living in and didn’t just steal it… nice guys … :') anyways I start the long trek to fly my ships from point A to point B and somewhat get them in one spot.

i’m in minmatar space near the old eve university hq (they don’t live there anymore). the local trade hub is Rens a few jumps away, a relative ghost town compared to the largest hubs in the game, but it has some containers anchored outside the station with Trans Rights messages on them, so that’s nice. it looks like i’ve got an old battlecruiser here (myrmidon, a ship that deploys combat drones as its main dps) with a silly “overpropped” PVP fit, shield-tanked and a battleship-sized afterburner… (fitting an oversized afterburner lets you go fast enough to avoid enemy guns and missiles, but requires you to downgrade other modules to meet the powergrid and CPU requirements.) anyways let me refit that slightly to start doing level 3 security missions for the nearest NPC corporation, Brutor Tribe.

Skill Points used to be the most precious thing in the game, since they represent real-world time you spent waiting for your character to acquire a particular competency. that’s not as true anymore, it looks like there are a lot of ways to get skill points now! 1. they have SP packages you can literally buy in the store with dollars. not really sure how to feel about that. but hey, there’s a really cheap bundle that come with SP and attribute boosters to help the skill training go faster. so I do get one of those… 2. you can also buy SP as an in-game item, “injectors”, with in game currency (“isk”) - except this is not newly minted SP, it is extracted from other characters who then sell them on the in-game market. I think this is innovative and cool, but way too expensive. CCP gets paid regardless, because they sell the tools to extract SP from a character. 3. like every other game nowadays, since going f2p they instituted Dailies that reward you SP (10k per day, 150k for logging in 12 days in the month). so I start working on those dailies.4. over the last decade, they removed some of my character’s skills from the game and refunded the skill points, so I have a bunch of free SP to assign to new skills. like any good RPG there are Attributes, and mine are currently max Perception and min Intelligence, so I use the bonus SP to chip away at the INT skills. 5. They added a feature called the AIR Career Program which awards you SP for completing introductory achievements, so I start working through those. actually, you can repeat the missions on an alt on the same account, and use those SP rewards on your main character, so I start that too.

what to train towards?.. well, level 4 security missions used to be the de facto money maker for everyone in the game: talk to an agent, load up a battleship, go shoot some NPC pirates (“rats”), turn in the mission to the agent and collect the copious bounties. Level 4’s are the most demanding missions most players will attempt. I have two battleships but one of them is a sniper unsuited for PVE and completely without modules fitted, besides. (I bought it because long ago I had a fantasy of flying this particular ship, a gray brick with railguns on it, screw the meta). the other option is a Raven, a slow-but-strong shield and missile boat. I have one that has a goofy fit - it’s utilizing armor tanking instead of shield, since I was running in a gang that used armor… and it’s fit to siege player owned structures, not missions.

so yeah, first order of business was to train my missile skills, while grinding level 3 missions in the myrmidon to build the agent relationship (“standings”) necessary to unlock level 4, and finally to buy new modules for my Raven…

at this point I realize, if I need to fit this ship I should do it at a bigger trade hub, which is Jita, in Caldari space. and if I’m going to be at Jita often, I might as well do my missions for Caldari Navy. So yeah, time to move my ships again… My Myrmidon and Raven are soon in a mission system a few jumps from Jita.

but I immediately got distracted. you see, for modules I needed isk, and level 3 missions are crap isk. so I start googling stuff like “easy isk eve 2025”, and hit upon gas mining. you see, mining in eve is generally boring and stupid. you fly to an asteroid, click a rock, activate your mining lasers, and then… sit there. for the full length of a YouTube video (10 minutes to way longer). until your cargo is filled with sweet sweet ore and you drop it off at the station. only to realize to your horror that it’s worth barely anything. and the only way to make more isk is to spend a bunch of time skill training until you can suck in whole asteroids in the blink of an eye, with an expensive slow ship whose main traits are its mining yield and massive cargo hold. oh yeah, mining ships have basically no combat abilities, and did I mention EVE is a PVP anywhere game? so it seemed for the birds.

gas mining is not like that. gas mining (or “huffing”) is… okay it’s sort of like that. you warp to a gas anomaly, click the gas, activate your gas module, and wait. the main differences are a) the gas is incredibly valuable (up to 40x the worth of ore harvested in the same period, depending on skills) b) the sites need to be scanned with scanner probes. so less chance of a random warping on top of you and blowing you up c) way less skill intensive, there’s only really two skills that matter. Gas Harvesting and Mining Frigate (which gives mining and gas bonuses to the Venture, a cheap and cheerful mining frigate introduced after I last left the game, whose cost and ease of use completely changed the value proposition of resource harvesting).

So yeah, a quick detour to train those skills, and a run of luck in finding gas sites in hisec space (quite rare apparently), and the patience to sit in them for hours a day nervously spamming my directional scanner to see if anyone is about to gank me… and I’m a few hundred mil isk richer and ready to rumble.

(I neglected to mention here, but as part of being a returning player, CCP gave me approximately 500 PLEX. The Pilots License EXtension is another in-game currency, which can be either redeemed for a month of gameplay for 500, or sold on the in-game market for about 6m isk each. So yeah, I was well off)

Feb 2025: Researching. researching. Fitting your shop is everything in EVE, and using the wrong fit for the occasion is a sure way to get blown up. Most NPCs will let you warp away, but some will warp scramble you so you can’t retreat, especially frigates in L4 missions. So I’m combing through dozens of Raven fits I see online, theory crafting. figuring which will be optimal. (for example this is a bad fit - too much passive tank, not enough damage or application modules. my goal is to kill everything quickly, which means damage boosting mods in the low slots, and target painters in the mids – otherwise, big missile + small enemy = lots of misses.) theorycrafting is a joy in itself.

Soon, skills are trained or training, the cruise missile Raven is fitted, and I’m off to do my level 4 missions.

The isk isn’t bad, but the grind is… grinding. EVE has always been a game where you make your own fun, and the mission content has never been particularly thrilling. it’s a lot of pulling up the mission walk-through in another tab, hitting the correct triggers, and basically just following the recipe.
Still, the new PVE opportunities they’ve added to the game since I last played feel too risky for a returning vet who’s still getting my feet wet. trying to figure out what to train next… for now I stick to maxing as many of my Raven skills as I can. But somewhere during the long train for Tech 2 Cruise Missiles (14+ days) I start to get distracted. Will I even use these skills if I want to PVP again someday? Most of the ones I’ve trained so far are broadly applicable, but Cruise V is a bit niche. I fill in random other skill gaps instead, procrastinating.

I guess a next step could be “blitzing”. If L4’s are the “normal” money maker, Blitzing L4’s is the hard-core and more involved way. You optimize your ships and fits, only accepting missions that can be speedran. Since you won’t get the bounties for killing all enemies, you’ll instead make your isk through the Loyalty Points that a corporation awards at the end of each mission. Speedrunning yields lot of LP, and LP can be exchanged for valuable items which you then sell on the in-game market. The only problem is the upfront isk and SP investment. The blitzing ships are expensive, you need a variety of maxed skills to make it work, and since you’re fitting for speedruns and not tank, you are more vulnerable to getting blown up by rats. And the blingier your ship, the more likely a random individual decides it’s worth the cost to gank you. It’s… a thought, for the future.

If I don’t want to blitz, I could train into a Tech 2 Battleship, a Marauder, which will make casually running L4’s incredibly easy. The only problem is, again, incredibly expensive ship, and the skill train is brutal. Cruise V is 14+ days, but Battleship V is nearly double that, and it’s required for Marauders. I’m getting tired of missiles - while guns are instant damage, missiles are relatively slow projectiles. And the pièce de résistance, I don’t even like the way the ship looks. if the Raven looked like its namesake, the Golem looks like they stuck a hammerhead shark head on a seagull body.

I actually find myself mining a lot more than I thought - it’s surprisingly chill, I can read a book or do a French lesson while making some isk, and I’m not too worried about it not being very lucrative. I’ve gained about 9m SP in the last two months, bringing me to around 38m. All the skills I’m training now take at least 3-6 days apiece. Things are starting to feel slow…

Mar 2025:…until I talk to an old corpmate. cliffhanger!!!

[stylo]

@stylo

Mar 2025:…until I talk to an old corpmate. cliffhanger!!!

where to begin…

before I proceed, a short prelude. In mid 2010, I started playing eve and was instantly hooked by the universe, the player driven gameplay, the stories people told, and the sheer volume of nonsense to learn. in short order, I joined EVE University, an institution of the game which exists to train new players, where I stayed for about 6 months. Some of the more veteran players who were Uni or former Uni were forming a new wormhole corporation.

one of the main things I value about EVE is the variety of content available. a lot of new players assume there’s this straight line - you mine asteroids for pennies, then you do NPC missions for dimes, then you join a nullsec corp and get to play The Real Game, which involves idk sitting in a massive fleet battle spamming f1 while the server lags and you can say “I killed a Titan* (was 1 of 2000 people doing 50 dps apiece to a Titan)”. I always found this one-size-fits-all path to be unsatisfying. to me, an MMO should emphasize player agency, and in EVE there’s all kinds of stuff you can do off the beaten path. 400+ ships to fly, dozens of ways to make isk, multiple types of pvp… it takes a creative mind, but if you set your own challenges and ignore the temptation to swipe credit card and win game, you can have a lot of fun here. it’s a game that rewards people who set their own goals.

Wormholes are one of the coolest parts of EVE, in my opinion. To understand why, we need to understand what the difference is between “known space” and “unknown/wormhole space”, or k-space and w-space. The fundamental difference is that k-space systems are connected by stargates, which are permanent fixtures, yielding a permanent map. W-space systems are connected by wormholes, which appear and disappear with time and transits, and do not make themselves obvious to the player – they must be scanned with a probe launcher, an in-game module – yielding an ever fluctuating web of connections, a “chain”, which can lead to k-space or deeper into w-space. Some intrepid players choose to make their livings inside w-space, scanning the chain for their daily content – whether that’s PVE (farming ancient NPCs with rare loot, mining rare gas or minerals), or PVP (surprising a neutral or rival corporation or alliance, blowing up their starbase, taking their ships and property). Lower skilled players in class 1-3 wormholes, and higher-skilled players in class 4-6, which allow much larger ships to jump into/out of them. Wormhole corps and alliances anchor massive structures inside their home systems to allow this player behavior.

But there are some key game systems with wormholes that incentivize a particular style of play.

First, risk. Every solar system in EVE has a security rating from 1.0 to 0.0 (or below). The systems from 0.5 to 1.0 are “high sec”, and if you aggress another player, powerful NPCs from the space police force CONCORD will warp in and blow up your ship. (No protection, but some deterrence.) 0.1-0.4 is “low sec”-- no space police, only a little warning flag attached to shady characters, who take a hit to their reputation if they attack you. 0.0 is “null sec”, no rules whatsoever.

Ironically, null sec is quite safe if you’ve negotiated the right to be there - it’s run by alliances, in essence warlords, who (for a fee, or if you’re a part of their crew) will alert you to regional intruders and/or scramble defense fleets to protect you. By keeping an eye on your local chat, which has a list of all characters in the local solar system, you can easily see if random people come into your system, and dock in a station to avoid unwanted pvp.

Wormholes are lawless free-pvp zones, just like null sec. But unlike nullsec, in a wormhole system, you can’t see who or how many characters are in the system with you - local chat is in ‘invisible’ mode. This is huge, because now you have no eyes on your surroundings. You have to use the directional scanner (which will simply notify you of any objects within a 14.3au radius of your ship), and then use combat probes to locate enemy ships, or core probes to find a wormhole out.

Secondly, the wormholes themselves change your freedom of movement. If you are lost in a wormhole without probes, you are properly stuck – many choose to simply self destruct their ship instead, waking up back in known space. Wormholes also have mass limits, so after a certain mass of ships pass through, they will collapse. A lot of small ships, or a few big ships. This changes the dynamics - instead of massive nullsec alliances filled with new players flying cheap and weak frigates, you have small gangs staffed with extremely skilled players in incredibly expensive battleships and dreadnaughts. The frictions of wormhole space force an incredible attention to detail when it comes to everything from what ships are flown, to what modules are on those ships, to how heavy your fleet is. (See earlier post in the thread about the Wormhole War.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1cikjxv/wormhole_war_history_and_prelude/

coming back to new player me, this all sounded very exciting, and the soul yearns for the sea, so I threw my name on the list for this new wormhole corporation. after all, I had some probing skills, and could fly some useful ships for this purpose. I was hilariously underskilled, probably around 15m SP, but somehow was invited to join.
For about 8 months I hung out in Class 2 and Class 3 wormholes with my corp, doing PVE against the advanced NPCs that live there, making boatloads of isk selling their salvage, and occasionally jumping onto the odd PVP group which would jump into our wormhole, or we would scan down theirs. It was a blast. Unlike Nullsec, where “bring one more ship” is the order of the day, in wormholes we generally fought smaller brawls - you bring 20 guys, we’ll bring 20 ish, similar fleet compositions, we’ll see who has the last laugh. The PVE rewards are lucrative, which was necessary to fund the blingy PVP battles. we were far from the top tier of C6 wormhole corporations, we were in mid-tier ships fighting mid-tier pvp in k-space and mid-tier wormholes, but it still felt like endgame.

(with the understanding that to the observer, a typical eve online pvp video looks like ants fighting over a dead fly)

11-27 Hard Knocks

It… was not endgame, as I found out. Coming back to the present, I found I had an in-game message thread going with the old Corp mates, titled something like: “Is anyone still around?” Said groupchat is probably like 10+ years old, although I just found out about it in January. Yesterday I sent something like: “what’s everyone up to these days?” And a guy replied he’s still in wormholes, currently in an elite PVP wormhole corp, duking it out with blingy ships in the highest class wormholes (technical term). We get to talking and reader, the rabbit hole goes deep… When I was playing, i flew tech 1 battlecruisers (~70m isk each, plus fit). Nowadays, the high level guys fly fleets of Tech 2 battleships (1 billion isk a pop), as support, to back up their dreadnaughts (6b maybe?? and three at a time). everyone in this corp my friend is in has 2.5x my skill points, and that’s with multiple year breaks. this is all impressive to me as a sort of dedication thing - they are spending as much isk as possible, really wringing everything they can out of individual ships, theorycrafting brand new fleet doctrines and spending absolute boatloads to build that fleet. we’re just talking in-game currency, although I’m sure some spend more dollars on this game than on a rec sports league. and with wormholes, there are natural game barriers to just bringing more people or multiboxing, so people are incentivized to go deep instead of spread themselves thin. EVE overall has decayed, but this part of it still seems quite alive.

so anyways, the guy asks if I want to get back into wormholes or what? I say, I have irl commitments, I don’t really have the time, but… and “he says well it depends on what you want to do,” and I say “i thought maybe nullsec, but it seems boring to only fight massive battles…” he links me a report from a recent battle, eye-popping fleet compositions… we get to talking about skill plans… Oh boy…

Despite feeling insecure about being “behind” in a video game – and no fault of his, but I did have this very distinct feeling I’ve often had in video game contexts in my life, where it feels like everyone else is really good at a game and I’m just the hanger-on who’s friends with someone there but really just an unwanted intrusion – despite that, I will say the convo brought me some clarity. I realized a few things that I had been pondering for a while:

1. I cannot afford to engage with this game that way right now, in any sense - time, focus, isk, money, SP, etc
2. I want to engage with the game that way someday
3. I want to train my character in such a way that when the time comes, I’ll be prepared to jump back into wormholes

I’m going to cross train Minmatar as I was planning - they use projectile turrets, basically guns that apply instant damage (no more waiting for missiles to hit), and the current meta really favors many of their ships. Specifically I’m going to train for the Tech 2 Minmatar Marauder, the Vargur, which will both crush a level 4 mission with ease, can be used to blitz missions, and is used constantly for PVP and PVE in wormholes. so I can have my cake and eat it too! My immediate goal being to become fully self sufficient for Isk through missions on demand, my long term goal being to get back into wormholes somehow. Maybe in the medium term I will join a “mom and dad corp” in nullsec which provides a community of 30-somethings with real-life commitments and irregular playing hours.

Now I’m torn between all the things I have to do IRL and daydreaming about wormhole PVP. no wormholes for me… for now. Maybe if I get laid off for some reason. Trying to play responsibly is a struggle (as with all MMOs), but I feel pretty good about this.

here it is, the Vargur:

How SOLO ship can kill a FLEET. Learn PvP tactics. Eve online 2023. AI generated comments.

[stylo]

I dont really like these videos but I saw there’s a Down the Rabbit Hole about Boatmurdered, the famous Dwarf Fortress let’s play from back in the day

Boatmurdered | Down the Rabbit Hole

Dwarf Fortress - Boatmurdered Part #1 - Intro by Evilslug

[Father.Torque]

Not To Be That Guy, but boatmurdered’s whole claim to fame was as a standard-bearer of the old Let’s Play format which, before it was yoinked wholesale to mean youtube videos (hey, I personally did it too, so I am no hero here) meant (in theory) thoughtfully edited hypertexts with meaningful screenshots, which is imo a far healthier way to engage with this content than some talking head’s video content mill.

In other words this is my plea to please click stylo’s second link and read it and forget the video exists god bless

[iguferon]

He’s just engaging in the Something Awful tradition of poorly recalling and summarizing famous goon endeavors years after the fact.

[stylo]

yeah to be clear I’m with you

[stylo]

just leaving this here

Permaband - Killing is Just a Means

[stylo]

newbie gives up on spreadsheets, tries eve pvp for the first time

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1jkap81/i_dont_know_how_i_got_here_but_i_aint_leaving/

…So I logged in and out day to day bored out of my mind. Decided to move the main back to my mission hub and remembered some old friend a few jumps away that always said they’d be happy to help me learn PvP.

Eh fk it I’ll try.

Tell me why…

Tell me WHY

PVPING IN EVE IS THE FIRST TIME IN LITERALLY A DECADE WHERE THE EXCITEMENT OF THE GAME HAS ME PHYSICALLY SHAKING

I had the best fight of my eve career the other day and it was a perfect mixture of a clever outplay and immense teamwork.

Summary

Me and a buddy are sitting in standing fleet on gate camp duty, just protecting our pocket.

Boom a gate flash, I’m already excited to see what it is.

A wild harbinger nuet pops up and instantly yellow boxes [attempts to target] me (HELL YEAH) we easily overpower him with the 2 ships we have. Comms start to get active but for now we’re just letting him attack us while we throw a few taunts in local

I get down to almost armor so I hop gate to go to an NPC station to recharge shields. ->SHIT<-

I was the one that was baited, jumped right into a Torp fit raven sitting at 0 , but strangely he doesn’t engage?

We remember my buddy is a few kills from a killmark goal, he wants my buddy - not me.

Buddy jumps himself into system to meetup with me and he gets pointed on warp [warp disabled] and red boxed [target locked]

I ask if he’s engaged and said no, scared newbro PvPr tries to make a call – burn back to gate and jump on the harbinger while the raven has a timer. [aggression timer prevents jumping through stargates]

My buddy jumps back in, gets the harbinger to Redbox again, (oh shit it’s working)

Raven can’t jump for at least 50s by the time I land and jump.

I hop right on the harbinger, overheating almost anything I can, the raven jumps and the harbinger is TAAAANKY and they both swap to me (HFI so I can’t blame them)

I’m getting extremely low as the fight wages on, discord comms are going crazy asking for secondary backup to minimize all, if any losses.

Shields gone

Armor 75%, 50%, 25%, gone

The harbinger dies and I’m already aligned out in case they drop point. [in case warp drive comes back online]

Point never drops. I mentally tell myself okay fk all of this and absolutely just burn everything I can to close on this guy, I burn right at the raven, hull now at half I’m not ready to go out running away

Than our of nowhere the only voice I hear in discord… Is our logi pilot. [healer]

LANDING NOW LANDING NOW

I think there’s no fucking way I live this

Hull ticks down until I’m at 30% hull, at this point the raven is about to go into armor

And than finally as quick as the battle started it was over.

My shields shot back to full like a scene out of a shitty movie and we got both kills

I didn’t stop shaking for like 5 minutes.

Holy shit.

If any of my newfound friends are in the subreddit just know I truly appreciate the last week or 2 I’ve had with you guys, you essentially saved my sub because I was clawing at every aspect of the game trying to feel this kind of rush.