No longer wandering New Eden

I never meant to quit.

But I went one week without playing.. and then two.  I had a long skill queue set so it was no big deal.  Pretty soon it had been a month.  I knew before too long my account would lapse if I didn’t add another PLEX to it.  That happened sometime February, I think.

I hadn’t paid for EVE for a couple of years so my credit card that was on the account had expired.  I wrote before about trying to change it and I was mildly curious what would happen when the PLEX ran out.  Apparently, nothing.  No credit card bill, no email from CCP, nothing.  At least nothing that I could see.  I wasn’t exactly watching like a hawk when it happened.  But I did go back and check through all my email accounts (and credit cards) to see if anything showed up.  Nothing did.

I still read EVE blogs from time to time, but EVE is starting to feel like a foreign country very rapidly.  I dread the thought of having to download a new patch.

And I am not playing any other MMO’s.  Crowfall looks mildly interesting, but I didn’t support the Kickstarter and am waiting to see how the whole thing turns out.  I really don’t know what I want right now, so I am just taking a long break.  Perhaps a permanent one.

My apologies to those that have emailed me and I didn’t respond.  Since I wasn’t blogging, I wasn’t really paying attention to the email account for the blog.

Thanks for all those who read my logs and posted comments, etc.  I enjoyed interacting with the blogosphere in my own way.  I also learned quite a bit.

I am not sure what would draw me back in.  I am not sure I want to be drawn back in.  I certainly have a lot more time now to devote to other pursuits.

EVE is game of goals.  Goals that you set for yourself.  In that, I think it can be a great training program for life – or a great substitute for it.  My goals were to fly a Tengu all over space and pay for my account with the goodies I found there.  After I did that for awhile, my goal was to blog about it and share the wealth.  After that, I ran out of things that I really wanted to do – at least in EVE.  So for now anyway, my goals are in other areas of life.

Fair winds and following seas!

There and back again

Things are busy at work, I am taking a time-consuming graduate class, one of my kids was sick, blah, blah – the usual life excuses.  I expect that you don’t really want to hear about them.

During the last 50 days, I have logged approximately 10 hours in Eve. Probably I have spent significantly more time downloading the updates than I have spent playing the game.

I had some excitement, but it passed before I could really blog about it.  I spent some time jumping around nullsec.  I can now confirm that despite all the changes, data sites still pretty much suck.  I think on my last cycle the ratio of data goods to relic goods was about 1:4.  At least they take up less space now.

I also lost another Tengu due to a dumb jump, a good camp, and my slow reflexes.  The Tengu loss combined with lack of playing and expensive PLEXes have taken a few billion out of the account.  I should really think about doing something to restock that.  I have scattered assets all of the place that I need to do something with – sell, use, research or something.

But for right now, I am “home”.  I have returned to my lowsec base and am working on re-consolidating some of my far-flung assets.  I (finally) tried out some of the new manufacturing and research interfaces and quite enjoy them.  So much smoother than the old ones.  I am setting up my PI plan and will perhaps return to my former exploits.

But I think that I have to accept the fact that my playtime is reduced for the forseeable future.  I am not quitting Eve (or blogging), but I need to settle into the new normal (which now involves 5-15 hours of homework per week).

Undocking and ending up who knows where

I had a copule of of hours that I could play EVE last night.  I had decided on the revised fit that I wanted to use and I had all but 4 items either in my current lowsec hangar in with my alt that was in the same system.

The 4 items that I needed were 1) Medium Rocket Fuel Cache Partition I, 2) Dark Blood Power Diagnostic System, 3, Signal Amplifier II, and 4) some kind of Squire Power Grid implant (needed at least 1%).  These are not exactly common items in lowsec so I had to bounce a bit to find them.  I picked up the last 2 pieces in a high sec system.  Fully loaded and ready to go, I scanned for a wormhole in the HS system.

I found one and warped to it.  Perfect – it was a HS-LS wormhole.  The colors were goldish indicating somehwere in the Amarr empire.  My guess was Genesis.  I entered the wormhole… and the EVE client locked up.  I waited a couple of minutes, but no repsonse.  I manually killed the EVE client and called it a night.

Worst case (and very unlikely) scenario is that I went through the wormhole and someone killed me on the other side.

Best case scenarion is that tomorrow I log in and am in a nice lowsec system with lots of signatures.

Or maybe I am still in the HS system and have to find another path to lowsec.

In any case, at least I am undocked.

One year in Exile

So, I guess today is my 1 year blogging anniversary.  It is a bit anti-climatic since I have fizzled out lately.

So this is kind of a half-hearted year-in-review post.

It started with this kick-off:  Not all those who wander are lost.  Kind of funny since there was just a dev blog out about “All that is gold does not glitter.”  I’ll be getting to that shortly.

Not too long after that I wrote a review of the Astero.  The title was “Say hello to my little friend.”  It was an inside joke because I published the post a few hours after my daughter was born.  She turns 1 in a few days.

In January, I published my (now severely outdated) New Player Exploration Guide.  It has been my most viewed post.

Later in January, I kicked off my first poetry contest called “PLEX for Parody“.  It was a lot of fun and led to some great EVE poems.

In February, I hit 10,000 page views and I felt like I actually had people reading the blog.  It was pretty exciting.

I did a Limerick contest in March, it did ok , but wasn’t as good as the parody contest.

In May, I attempted my first “In-character” blog post.  May was also the first month I received more than 10,000 page views in a single month.

In July, I tried my UNDOCK project.  It lasted less than 2 months when I died ingloriously.

In August, I launched a treasure hunt.  It was way too much work.

September was where I fizzled and I haven’t done much since then.

The blog continues to get quite a few page views.  I came up just short of 100,000 views in my first year.  I am sitting at 91,977 at this moment.  That is actually quite a bit better than I was expecting.  Thank you to all that read and commented and sent traffic my way.

There is actually a bit of interesting exploration news coming up.  I like some of the changes and will be writing about them eventually.

 

 

 

Returning from Exile

It has been about a month since I posted and about a month since I played Eve.  I bought a couple of PLEX and added 60 days of game time.  I queued up a couple of long trains (Advanced Weapons Upgrades V , Heavy Missile Specialization V, Gallente Cruiser V) and logged in just twice to update my queue.  I mentioned earlier that I just hadn’t been “feeling” Eve.  I’m still not, but I am getting closer.

I have been reading some of the blogs and dev posts and started to experiment with ship fits again.  That is usually a good sign of upcoming activity.  Also, winter is coming and I tend to spend more time indoors and gaming during the winter.  So I will probably be returning to the game and playing a bit in the coming weeks.  Returning to blogging is a bit harder.  Once you get out of the habit, it takes more discipline to get back into it again.  But with expansion news and my 1 year blogging anniversary coming up, I should have more to muse and ramble about.