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Welcome Aboard

I suppose Blaugust is as good a time as any to start my new blogging project. I have been thinking for a while about what to do with all of the notes and observations I have been collecting along my journey to Space Riches(tm) in EVE Online. For now, the plan is to publish as many of them here as I can without wrecking my own plans.

So first, a little about me.

I am a relatively new EVE player, with a little over a year of experience at this point. I picked up EVE and began playing at a point in real life where I was transitioning from a very high pressure, physically busy environment to one where I had a lot of time sitting in front of monitors doing things that required only 80% of my attention. That situation, coupled with an interest in building things and developing systems, led me to pursue the parts of EVE that can make ISK either partially or mostly "hands free". As I hope is obvious, I don't mean botting or otherwise automating the client, but developing systems and tools that automate a lot of the decision making, scheduling, and organizing that goes into playing EVE as a primarily PvE player.

I approach EVE as if it were a PvP version of Factorio. I am very interested in the ways the mechanics of EVE can be used to generate complex systems of production from publicly available information, and how to shorten the time between a causal event and it's positive economic consequences for an industrialist player. In short; how close to instantly can I make the phrase "already replaced" true?


EVE Online Careers Graph
I literally tried most of these things over the last year
Of course, I didn't enter the game with this type of approach in mind. Honestly, I didn't really have much of any idea what to expect or what I might enjoy in the game, so I tried almost everything. Literally. I spent most of a year trying out one thing after another, from small gang PvP to mining high sec ore to incursion running to exploration, wormhole day-tripping (and occasional camping trips in an Orca), market trading (and the mission running standings grind) to... well ,you get the idea. I exposed myself to as many mechanics, communities, and play styles as I could reasonably do so without locking myself into a single one.

Along the way, I kept drifting back to a couple of activities over and over. Specifically to mining and planetary interaction production. They were things that satisfied some conditions for me that other activities in EVE didn't. They were not time gated and they were not opponent gated.

By time gated, I mean that they were activities that I could almost instantly abandon as needed in order to respond to the demands of real life. When a client phoned, or a child fell, or I simply needed to shift 100% of my concentration to a project, I could simply hit the dock button and carry on with life. No fleet lost a pilot, no combat timer cost me a ship, no in-game consequences for out-of-game interruptions.

Likewise, they are not opponent-gated activities, in that they do not require other players in order to accomplish. As a matter of fact, mining and PI/PP (and the entire production chain) are more valuable the less other people do them.

Those two conditions are important to me because I play EVE primarily as a secondary activity to my real life job, which roughly follows the working hours of central Europe. This means I am active in-game mostly at the time when the least number of people are on, so more solitary pursuits simply fits my schedule better.

Tomorrow I will write a little bit more about the play style I have adopted, and how it fits with other play styles in EVE. For now, welcome aboard.

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