The past few days in Empire Space have been very entertaining.  A few days ago I rigged a Core Probe Launcher onto my Rupture and went off to see what mysteries are hidden in the vast reaches of Known Space (k-space).
At first scanning signatures was very frustrating and time-consuming, but it also is quite exciting when you finally resolve a Cosmic Anomaly into some type of explorable site.  I have gotten rather adept after several game sessions doing just that.
Yesterday was especially exciting. I resolved several Unstable Wormholes, which for the non-Eve players, are temporary portals into Wormhole Space (w-space). I dropped some bookmarks into the Corp places tab and continued scanning the systems around my base of operations.
Exploration is fun in its own right, and for those with more A than E, the rewards inside the various sites are rather decent for a noob solo pilot, such as myself.  I popped a bunch of npc pirates, salvaged a ton of loot, and had a grand ole time of it.
Later, the Corp logged on for their regular Incursion run, but unfortunately the Vanguard Sites were in Gallente, some 20+ jumps from our HQ, so they couldn’t run them effectively.  Luckily, noob-pilot Cyndre to the rescue with a stack of bookmarked Wormholes for the gang to explore.
The first was mediocre with only two sleeper sites, but worthwhile for them to crank out since it was in our home system.  A few more had collapsed since the time I set the bookmarks and were now useless.   I quickly scanned down another site to keep things rolling, and BAM, a beautiful little site not too far off the beaten path to have a look. I jumped through for my first visit to w-space and found a nice looking system with lots of untouched Sleepers for the guys to demolish. Â
My first reaction inside the Wormhole was exciting… I haven’t felt that rush, that fear, that wonder in a game in a long time.  Would someone be inside and non-to-pleased that I dropped by for a visit?  Would I be targeted and destroyed before I could bounce back out?  What would it look like?
As it turns out, I survived, the fleet arrived a bit later…Â life moved on, but I am hooked…
All I wanted to do was scan down the rest of the exits and go deeper into w-space, maybe find some great uncharted territory, but most likely to die in a blaze of glory a few jumps away.  Either way consequences be damned, that’s where I am headed… but I have some training to do to get ready for it. First things first, I need to be invisible.  Cloaking I: que’d and skilling. Â
W-Space here I come.
~Cyndre
I went full bore stealth, had the skills and the ships. Never really did much with it but was fun to play with. My biggest issue was that I never really connected with a good corp. I played for a long time, mostly with small groups doing mining. Got bored and left for good. There is a lot there, I just got tired of looking for it.
The one time I was part of a nice big corp, we got demolished by BoB. That was the end of my desire to play. I don’t blame them, they just helped me out the door.
Come play with us. It is relaxed, low-key, no time committment beyond what you set on yourself, and lots to do whether pve or pvp. Once we move the Corp into w-space for good, there is a whole new world, totally different from k-space living.
I am glad we aren’t going just yet, because I am not ready, but I am excited that we are going “soon.”
This was one of “those” exits in which I made sure to leave no room to return. In other words, I’m done. Thanks for the offer.
If you don’t already know, alt-dragging probes will move them all towards or away from the centre of each other at once, without having to move them all inwards one at a time, which is a massive time-saver. And shift-dragging moves all probes laterally at once, so you can move a bundle of them in any direction quickly. You can also change the range of the probes by dragging the edge of the sphere, where shift-dragging will change the range of all the probes at once. Finally, clicking on the name of a probe will centre the display on that probe, including in the z-axis, which makes following signatures around the system much more comfortable.
I have written a rudimentary guide to the art of scanning, as well as two identification charts for wormholes. One is a guide to wormhole colours, the other a guide to wormhole types. Maybe some of this can be helpful to you.
PJ, that isn’t a rudimentary guide… thats is THE guide. It was stikied in our private corp forums, and it is how I learned to Scan.
Also, reading your blog inspired me to want to explore w-space and is one of my favorite EVE blogs out there. Basically, your covert-tengu is my ideal ship build!
Cripes! I’m flattered, thank you.
Enjoying the writeups, keep them coming. Question: how much time are spending in game on an average day/week? I’ve toyed with the idea of playing for several months now.
Sam, you should never, ever base your time ingame on mine… I am and have always been a compulsive gamer. To narrow it down, its at least 5+ hours per day, broken up in two spots… moring with coffee before I got to my office and night after the kids are in bed. In addition, I own my own business so I can log in for short burst during the day, but I don’t ‘play’ during that time, really.
My opinion for a ‘normal’ person. Easily could have fun in Eve on less than 10 hrs per week, even more so if you have the freedom to log in regularly to manage your skill que and any trading/industry items you have going. The regular logging in for skill ques diminishes after a few weeks once all the short low level skills are done and you are doing 17hr+ Level 4 skills.
You should definatly try the game. If you don’t enjoy it or have the time for it, you will definatly know that within the first 21 days and thats all free time, so…
I’ve been going back and forth on whether I could do it – my concern is I would get frustrated by the limits on my game time. 10 hours a week would be pushing it, I think, unfortunately. RL just gets in the way.
More than total time, the question is can you schedule 2-3 hour blocks if you know in advance. If you can, you can basically experience 90% of everything we do (just not as often of course).
If you can’t commit to that block at least once a week, it would be tough to get into certain things (Incursions, PvP Ops), but not for others (certainly mining, possible WH sites if the WH is close).
Other than that, you can succeed in playing the market in very short bursts, or do a mission or two as time allows. Whether that is ‘enough’ to justify the cost is up to you.
What I found completely addictive in EVE was to join a RP corp – not trying to mess with the bigboys, but picking fights with the RP corps from the other groups, as well as coordinating with the local small mining corps on anti-piracy.
This was 5 years ago, though, and I hear things have changed.
I quit Eve a while back because of bots. But I was really getting into the whole scanning, WH exploration thing. I had a pimped out drake that could solo a lot of the easy Sleeper sites after I’d scanned them down in my cloaked T2 Heron. I even spread the excitement to our little corp and we ran a few holes with Battleships, which was great fun. But isk is the monkey in Eve, and I was always aware of how much money others were making while I was moving from system to system looking for the right kind of hole…