Saturday, July 6, 2013

Slamming on the breaks

Patience is a virtue, especially when you play Eve online but it's a trait I don't possess. I'm trying really hard but I keep on stepping over the limit of my abilities and paying for it. It all started when I just moved to Providence. I had the idea that making huge amounts of isk would be fairly easy by ratting as I heard the value of the loot was significantly higher than in high sec. So after moving I set off to the closest asteroid belt in sight. I was in my hurricane battlecruiser which was very badly fit but I felt confident as they were just rats and I had just about 10 million skill points. Fittings was still something totally unknown to me. Having spend very little time and interest in it as I was mainly focussing on industry and trading and had very little experience with pvp and pve. I managed to take down a couple of sansha lords and cruisers with a quick repair station detour but no big loot to be found only a few million and it took me some time to take them out so it wasn't that profitable. After repeating the same scenario for a few belts I asked around for a pve fit which was way better in tanking the sansha but I still had no clue what modules I had fitted. A while later my interest wandered off to the signatures i could find as my new pve fit was able to tank the belt rats easily. Hoping for a better loot, I warped to zero to a forlorn hub as a regular hub didn't seem that profitable. No need to look anything up on the wiki as they were just rats and I should be able to complete them easily by now, no? 
Seconds after landing, my shiny newly fitted pve cane got obliterated to space dust. This vessel had been with me for over the past few months and with no recent losses I was left feeling shocked. Then a lot of weird things happened simultaneous in my head also known as brain farts. I was feeling the regret of losing a ship that had been with me for a long time, but I also realized I didn't have the pve fit saved, so I couldn't just fit another one without acknowledging my derp to my new corpmates. So how was I able to loot my wreck the fastest way possible? I did have a cloaky probe lying around with some tractor beams fitted and the rats were about 80km off the wreck so I figured I had a good chance to do it. Don't forget that all these thoughts happened in a few seconds and my mind was overflowing with bad ways of solving this issue. So seconds after undocking I was in my pod again and feeling dumb like I've never felt dumb before. What the hell had just happened? It was clear that this plan wasn't going to work from the start and still I went trough with it being overconfident again. After experiencing some lessons in being humble I still seem to forget them in the heat of the moment, only to face palm about my decisions later. 

So here I was, two ships lost and still not much isk made ratting. I decided to grind the asteroid belts until I had enough skills to pilot a battleship but after a few days of constant belt ratting I was suffering from the daily grind. I made a little profit selling the loot and salvage combined with the bounty payments but it still wasn't much and a lot of hard (and boring) work. I even took a break from the game for a few days, to get motivated again and to have some extra time to continue reading the Eve novels. When I started playing again, I tried the focus less on making isk and isk per hour and made the decision to variate between solo pve and pvp/group pve so I wouldn't get burned out this fast. I still had my eye on the anomalies and after a few significantly more fun days I was able to fly my own battleship. Yet again pushing my limits I warped in the Forsaken Hub but this time at a distance of 80km. Unsurprisingly by now I received another spanking, but managed to warp out in time. Not giving up just yet, I started going for the regular Hubs, but it still took a whole lot of time to clear and again the bounty and loot wasn't that amazing. But I kept grinding while skilling up my artillery and large weapons skills. Days and weeks went by and the shameful event with the Hurricane was storaged in the back of my head and I felt much more experienced and even started to understand a bit more about fittings. It became clear quite early on that I couldn't to much besides regular hubs on my own and even while in group doing sigs I had to warp in the latest as I was the most harmful one of the bunch. As I already mentioned I had been focussing mainly on trading and mining so my skills weren't up to date to say the least. Still I kept on pushing the limit, trying to do sigs with just two battleships resulting in various forced warp outs for repairs and trying to complete Forlorn hubs on my own which took me ages to complete. So I kept going for the regular hubs as I put my skills under review still not earning the amount of isk I was expecting. One particular quiet evening an alliance member asked for some backup because he scanned down a combat sig. I volunteered and we met up outside on the gate. It was a Sansha combat site which (I don't remember the exact name) and we read the wiki page about it before activating the first gate.  The wiki page said the site had the possibility to completed solo except for the last room so we figured we might as well go for it with just the two of us. 
A few minutes in, my wingman started losing shield quickly as all the rats focused their aggro on him. I was doing fairly well but as the damage intake wasn't equally divided my partner had warp out not much later. Soon I had all the aggro on me as I was the only one left and my tank broke pretty easily. Still my armor repper was keeping up and I didn't think about warping away yet. A few seconds later I saw the Sansha battleships coming into range and what happened next happened in a flash. My armor went down in an instant but it kept stuttering back up in bits and pieces so I figured I had enough time to recall my drones before I jumped back for repairs but forgetting to start alinging was my demise and my tempest was transformed into spacedust. 

Again, feeling to confident, thinking I'd have enough time got me killed... The isk I lost didn't have much of an impact on my wallet, but still I was pushing my limits to far forgetting about all the thing's I've learned. So finally I slammed on my brakes and changed my way of playing. Isk per hour wasn't my main focus anymore and I started my trading alts back up to make some profits without having to rat for hours on end. I try to do much more diverse things and as much group based ops as I can and trying to wait patiently for my skills to increase and I must say I had the feeling something felt off my shoulders and I didn't feel the pressure to make isk constantly and was having way more fun playing in general. 

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