The new game I tried this weekend is called PlanteteryFarm InteractionVille.

“Syn, is it like FarmVille but Sci-Fi? I love clicking cows while tweeting that I’m clicking cows and updating my facebook status that I’m tweeting about clicking cows! Want to be my friend?!”

Short answer: Yes (about Farmville, no about being your ‘friend’/’follower’/’circle’/’stalker’).

Long answer: Yes, if the version of FarmVille you are playing happens to take place inside the largest virtual world, and along with running your farm, you also have the option to PvP, PvE, or approach the market from a dozen different angles. Oh and assuming you sell your cows/soup/whatever to hundreds of different markets all with similar but ultimately different market factors. And that you are PvP’ing (Econ PvP is still PvP kids) against people who truly care and are invested, rather than octo-moms. But yea, it’s Farmville, yo.

Honest snark aside, PI in EVE, after two days with it, is not as bad as I had heard (although I heard that on forums, so my bad). Yes, the initial “wtf am I doing” is like anything else in EVE, and requires you to spend about an hour or so reading online, but it’s not nearly as complex or ‘hard’ as it initially appears. Especially if you don’t solo-hero it. I asked my Corp, got someone to answer some basic questions, and had my first colony up and running shortly thereafter.

The biggest plus to PI is that the cost to play around with it is low (below 10m ISK, and very doable at 1m ISK), so even if your first colony has to be totally scrapped, it’s not as crushing financially or time-wise as taking a ship into a mission and getting creamed, or ‘learning’ about low-sec. Perhaps most surprisingly (for EVE) is that you can see results as soon as 15 minutes in, and the initial skill training requirements, as well as the ‘maxed out’ cap, are very low.

I mentioned Farmville in jest to start, but in a lot of ways PI plays the part very well. If you don’t want to micromanage it often, and just want another low maintenance stream of ISK, PI can be that. If you want to focus more on it and can check in often, it can do that, with corresponding results. And if you want to market maven the process, and really carve out a space for yourself and (hopefully) make a ton of ISK, you can do that as well. Best of all, if you want to move up or down on the investment scale, it appears that PI is flexible-enough to allow for that also. A few tweaks and that high-input setup changes to a once-a-week ISK farm.

It also fits into the multi-tasking style I have going for my Industrial pilot. I can be out in a belt, mining in my high-capacity Hulk (Mining is so boring!), managing my planets (Trollolol you are playing Farmville), creating/updating production orders (one-click crafting sucks!), and checking/updating market buy/sell orders (Excel online yo!) all at the same time. I even have drones to kill the belt rats for me (PvE!), and a decent tank should trouble arrive (PvP!). Oh and I’m usually being a social carebear just chatting about nothing in Corp chat as well (which more often than not consists of a lot of funny link-spam, which we all view with the in-game browser).