Eve and the pre noob state
Some of you will remember that I spent some time on Eve a couple of months ago, I enjoyed it but then got into an exisential crisis about why my character seemed to be achieving more in her Eve life than I was in real life (I mean she was learning Engineeering & stuff like that!). Cue me cancelling Eve account, deciding to enrol on an Accountancy course, studying Accountancy, having another existential crisis on why I waste money on boring things like Accountancy, moving Accountancy course stuff to the attic and aimlessly logging back into WoW to start to level yet another alt while quietly weeping inside. Oh dear.
I’ve tried & tried to fall in love with WoW again but it’s not working. I’m bored. My subscription expired last week & I’m reluctant to renew it since the truth is I don’t want to play it anymore (apart from logging on to say hi to the guild) . This means I have an MMO sized gap in my life, and this gap is staring to feel Eve sized. So yesterday I took the plunge & renewed my Eve subscription.
After downloading various patches I was finally in. I’d pretty much forgotten everything about the game – including who I was, who I was trying to build standing with and why. But after about 15 mins some of it (not all …far from all as you’ll see) came flooding back. I was doing Distribution missions but with a long term goal of R&D. I was training skills to open up the R&D missions, and doing Level 1 Distribution missions to increase my standing with the corp I wanted eventually to do R&D for. See I had a plan.
So I picked up a Level 1 Distribution mission from a Duvolle Lab agent. It all looked straight forward, but the mission details did say I would be passing through a low sec area if I used the automatic route. Ok I thought, never seen that before, but surely they wouldn’t really put me in danger for a Level 1 mission, would they? Surely it’s just an overly dramatic piece of text to give the mission some edge. Of course. That’s what it is.
So I accepted the mission, set destination, undocked & went on Automatic pilot, and picked up my book to read while I traveled through LOW SEC space.
Yes there are names for people like me. Don’t put them in the comments. You’ll hurt my feelings.
What happened next is a blur. First I glanced at the screen at one point and noticed it said in my overview that there was a corpse nearby. Ooh interesting, I thought, never come across that before. The next thing I see is red text telling me I’ve done something foolish (umm, yes), there are some explosions, more red lines indicate my ship is in a rather dire condition, then I jump somewhere and it all seems to be over. I’m still in space, still flying.
Whew that was close, I thought. But not that bad. But then I notice I don’t have the usual shield & gun icons at bottom centre of my screen. Odd I think. Where have they gone? Then I look more closely at my ship…. there is no ship. I am in my pod. How can a pilot lose their ship without realising it? Well I think you have to be a special little pilot, a twp pilot (perfect Welsh word), a pilot like me. It would be a huge achievement for me to reach noob levels – I am in pre noob state – an Eve amoeba.
It dawned on me (finally) that no ship meant no cargo for my distribution mission. So that was over too. I’d braved low sec space for nothing. I arrived at my destination and pondered what to do next. And this was where full blown craziness descended on me. I thought there was still a way I could do this. I had been given a new ship (a Reaper – basic but functional). I looked at the map & wondered whether I could cobble together some sort of safe route back to collect the cargo again. But I was in Low Sec space. There was no safe route. The minute I undocked I was a sitting duck. So I … undocked. Of course I did. For some reason I thought the laws of the Eve universe meant I wouldn’t be attacked again & that I could get home safely. Yes this is the sort of naivety that means I should never be allowed to leave the house. So I undocked, clicked on the big A (please Eve experts, stop rolling your eyes with such vigour- you really will hurt yourself) & yes – you guessed it, within seconds I was back in my pod waving goodbye to the shortlived Reaper. And within a few seconds more I was back in some hangar in a totally different part of space being told I was dead but thank god I had a clone (yes thank god – I had randomly created clones when I last played Eve without any real idea of when I’d need to use them). So I’d failed the mission, lost two ships, been killed and was now a clone - all within the first hour of returning to Eve.
I then spent the next two hours or so jumping what felt like a zillion times trying to get a ship big enough to complete just one “transport some soil” mission – first I tried a Reaper (another one) plus two expanded cargoholds (for which I had to jump 7 times to get to a market that sold them), then when that didn’t give me enough room (and yes I know I could have stayed where I was and tried a simple approach known as Maths to work out if Reaper plus Expanded Cargoholds would have been enough …but you’ll have gathered by now that logic isn’t my strongest point…and also thank goodness I gave up Accountancy!), I then found a way to search my assets scattered all over the Eve solar system & jumped twenty or so times to pick up my old Wreathe (which for some reason in the past I’d named Foxy????), and then jumped twenty or so times back to pick up my dirt, but then remembered I’d left half of it back in the ship I’d left in the hangar 20 or so jumps back and so… well you get the point.
Welcome back to Eve Michelle…
And yet…yet…it’s Sunday morning & I’m back on it again. Eve – the game for illogical masochists perhaps - in other words me. Have I found my new MMO home?
