Being a n00b, Again
Since my cover-story is new-eve-player, I’m essentially re-starting the game from scratch. EVE has an API that allows authorized groups to check into your character’s background - what corps you were part of, your financial history, what chat-channels you’ve been in, where all your assets are, etc. I can’t transfer any starting-cash to my spy-alt, so I gotta start as both a completely unskilled, and a completely poor character.
One of the core mechanics of EVE is the acquisition of Skill-points. EVE doesn’t have character levels like other MMOs where you actually need to play to get stronger, you just need to wait for your skill-points to accumulate. This is both good and bad for a spy - I don’t need to grind to get leveled-up, but I also don’t have a lot of options to speed the process up.
This leaves me painstakingly looking through target-corp’s fleet-doctrine* lists, trying to find what I can train into quickly so that I can have a place in any fleet that might be pinged for such that I can join that fleet and relay movements effectively. Feeling the anxiety as a new fleet-doctrine is announced, trying to do the math on what the best training options are to both get into said fleet, and also to have the spare brain-cycles to relay the important spy-info back to home-corp.
Not to mention needing to farm the ISK (EVE’s in-game money) to afford all the ships. Flying under a fairly high-skill level group means I need to buy lots of expensive Tech-2 ships, which means lots of Krabbing (PvE to make cash). It’s even more stress on my limited skill-point pool, since PvE usually has different skills than fleet-based PvP. All this means I need to spend more hours farming on target-corp’s side, and not playing with friends.
The one bright-side is EVE Alliances tend to run on a bring-your-own-ship, we-replace-losses model, so once I’ve paid for the initial ship, I don’t have to work too much to keep my hangar stocked. Known as “Ship Replacement Programs” or SRP, they usually pay you *most* of the value of the ship, counting on EVE’s in-game insurance program to cover the rest of it.
*A fleet doctrine is a list of ships/fits that make-up a given fleet, and what each ship’s role will be in said fleet. Muninns for DPS, scimitars for logistics, rifters for tackle isn one example.
One of the core mechanics of EVE is the acquisition of Skill-points. EVE doesn’t have character levels like other MMOs where you actually need to play to get stronger, you just need to wait for your skill-points to accumulate. This is both good and bad for a spy - I don’t need to grind to get leveled-up, but I also don’t have a lot of options to speed the process up.
This leaves me painstakingly looking through target-corp’s fleet-doctrine* lists, trying to find what I can train into quickly so that I can have a place in any fleet that might be pinged for such that I can join that fleet and relay movements effectively. Feeling the anxiety as a new fleet-doctrine is announced, trying to do the math on what the best training options are to both get into said fleet, and also to have the spare brain-cycles to relay the important spy-info back to home-corp.
Not to mention needing to farm the ISK (EVE’s in-game money) to afford all the ships. Flying under a fairly high-skill level group means I need to buy lots of expensive Tech-2 ships, which means lots of Krabbing (PvE to make cash). It’s even more stress on my limited skill-point pool, since PvE usually has different skills than fleet-based PvP. All this means I need to spend more hours farming on target-corp’s side, and not playing with friends.
The one bright-side is EVE Alliances tend to run on a bring-your-own-ship, we-replace-losses model, so once I’ve paid for the initial ship, I don’t have to work too much to keep my hangar stocked. Known as “Ship Replacement Programs” or SRP, they usually pay you *most* of the value of the ship, counting on EVE’s in-game insurance program to cover the rest of it.
*A fleet doctrine is a list of ships/fits that make-up a given fleet, and what each ship’s role will be in said fleet. Muninns for DPS, scimitars for logistics, rifters for tackle isn one example.
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