Hardcore Casual

One of the defining and critical features of a sandbox MMO is options. Options are different than layers in that options don’t fade or get replaced by “the next thing”. You ‘finish’ layers. You can’t ‘finish’ options.

EVE has a lot of options, all ultimately resulting in one thing: more ISK. More ISK is always on the mind of an EVE player, and as your wealth moves up or down, your gameplay adjusts. You fly pricier ships when you have more ISK, you gamble more, or you don’t focus on ‘farming’ as much. When your wealth dips, you refocus on more profitable activities.

One of the options our Corp has been somewhat focusing on lately is scanning/exploration. Initially the driver here was poking around in wormholes, but last night we also used exploration to find a Grav site for our Sunday Mining Op. It’s not a huge difference, but it does mix things up and add something new to a weekly event, gives us a different mix of ores/minerals.

Scanning is somewhat of a mini-game within EVE, one that initially I found incredibly frustrating. Some of the blame lies in the UI, which can make seeing the location of an item difficult initially in 3D. Another important aspect is simply the newness of the activity. It’s a much different task than anything else in EVE, and when you don’t know some of the tricks (shift-click dragging all probes, setting the camera focus on an object by clicking it), it can seem borderline impossible to get a site to 100%. And the ever-present factor, skill training, is there as well. When you first start out, you likely won’t have all of the skills you need at V, or even IV, which makes the whole thing a bit harder/slower as well.

What I am looking forward to is scanning down combat sites with my indy alt, and having my combat pilot run them in his Assault Frigate. While the total amount of ISK generated won’t be the same as running level 4 missions in my CNR, it will be something different, and if I get lucky with a faction spawn perhaps the ISK won’t be horrible. Mostly though this will help me improve at scanning itself, which is a valuable skill not just for PvE-based activities, but for PvP. Being able to scan down an enemy ship quickly can be the difference between scoring a nice kill and someone slipping away.

Exploration is just one more item in the EVE bag of tricks. And rather than replacing the previous ‘end-game’ activity, it’s an invisible option in every system, waiting patiently for you to mess around with.

As I logged in last night, a few Corp members had already scanned down a wormhole (C2) that happened to contain 11 POSs(!) and a large number of sleeper sites. Not wanting to miss out on the fun, I hopped in a Drake and made the one jump to the entrance.

Once inside, we cleared most of the sleeper sites with our three battlecruisers, and had a Noctis pilot looting/salvaging as we went. At the end of the night we had a very lucrative haul (don’t know exact numbers as I had to log, but several hundred million ISK at least), and got yet another taste of WH life. Oh, and the WH closing right after my ship re-entered Empire, with everyone else still inside, was an interesting ending to my night.

The reason the wormhole had so many sites up is (as I understand it) because the Corp that lived there had not been clearing them. As someone in vent said, that many sites is likely a solid week of spawning. A solid week that we cleared in about two or three hours, hauling away all of the spoils for ourselves.

That’s one reason I love the WH concept in EVE. You never know where an entrance/exit is going to appear, and you never know who is going to scan it down and take a peek inside. While we were clearing the sites, a random cov-ops frigate appeared on d-scan, which raised an alert. However nothing came from this, so odds are it was someone else just popping into the WH, saw it was active, and left.

It truly is dynamic content, amplified by the fact that EVE is played on one ‘server’. From some quick intel, we were pretty sure the Corp living in that WH was a Euro corp, so we were in ‘their’ space while they were offline. Tough break, but that’s how things go. We had no chance of attacking their structures, but we were able to take some profits from their location.

And while that night was very profitable, the situation could have easily escalated into a fight had another group come along. Or maybe the WH would have been already cleared, or contained sites that we could not exploit (for instance, we were not able to harvest the gas sites). WH truly are a great unknown in many ways, and that is half the fun.

EVE-related blog post notice: If you would like to join us, comment here or shoot me an email. If you don’t have an EVE account, I’m more than happy to send a 21-day trial invite, and split the PLEX-related profit if you decide to sign up. Again just comment or email me.