Newstocks

War 101

Took my first Eve University class last night.

Almost missed it, because I stupidly thought that 2am Thursday Eve Time (i.e. GMT) was 10pm Thursday Bermuda time, when of course it's 10pm on Wednesday. Fortunately, I was online anyway and saw the messages about the upcoming lesson in corp chat, so managed to get myself over to Korsiki in the nick of time.

The class lasted the best part of two hours, and was run by a guy called Angelica, who sounded like he was German. It was pretty good. There were over 20 of us in the class, and most of the time we were just listening to Angelica over TeamSpeak, with the opportunity to type questions in fleet chat.

Most of the class was about war: how to know when another corporation has declared war on Eve University, and what to do when it happens. There was a lot of useful information and by the end of the class I had a full A4 page of closely scribbled notes.

We also got to see our corp's POS or "Player Owned Station". It was a bit disappointing. I was expecting a big station that you could dock in, but it seemed to be just a big pylon floating in space with a few manufacturing facilities attached to it. Apparently dockable POSes are known as "outposts" and can only be built in lowsec space over which your corp has sovereignty - not something that we have.

The last part of the class was a very brief introduction to fleet movement and gate camping tactics, but I suspect I still have a lot more to learn in this area.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood

Aidan's still not making much sense when he talks, and his vocabulary doesn't seem to be growing very fast. Nevertheless, it's clear that he understands a lot more than he can communicate.

"Close the door, Aidan," we'll say, and he'll go and close it.

"Go and get a can of corn," we'll tell him, and he'll go and get it.

"Point to the cow," we'll say while reading one of his books, and nine times out of ten, he'll point to it.

It's really pretty amazing.

Good deed for the day

One of the gaming blogs that I read had their account hacked today, and lost a number of posts as a result. Fortunately, the blog includes whole posts in its RSS feed, not just excerpts, and my feed reader had already downloaded and cached the deleted posts. So I was able to copy-and-paste them into an email and send them to the blog's author so he could repost them.

It feels good to have been able to help.

Eve University

Finally got accepted into Eve University last night, after another hour-long chat with one of their recruitment officers.

I'm going to move my base of operations up to Korsiki, the location of their HQ, so I can better take part in the classes and fleet operations that they run. It's only 8 jumps away from where I'm operating now - not far, but far enough that it makes sense to take all my assets with me. So I started gathering them up from the stations they're currently scattered between, and spent the rest of my time familiarising myself with the corp's rules and installing TeamSpeak (mandatory for participating in the corp's activities). Didn't even get to run a single mission. Eve's like that: it's easy to spend hours busying yourself with minutiae, be it figuring out a skill training plan or getting to grips with the game mechanics, and never actually leave the station you're docked in. Right now I'm quite liking that slow pace, although it remains to be seen whether that's still the case once the newness of the game starts to wear off.

Interviewing, and repeating missions

Had the first part of my interview for Eve University last night. I was expecting it to be short, something of a formality. What can you ask someone who's only been playing the game for two weeks, after all? But my conversation with the recruitment officer dragged on for a couple of hours, with sometimes lengthy pauses between messages as both of us were doing other things at the same time. It didn't really feel like an "interview" as such, more just a casual chat.

When it came time for me to go to bed, I suggested we carry on the interview when both of us were next online, hoping that he'd tell me that wasn't necessary and just welcome me into the corporation. But he didn't. I'm not sure whether this is a deliberate stalling tactic they employ with all new recruits, to weed out the folks who are keen from those who are not, but I guess I can understand if it is.

Found the first thing that I don't like about Eve last night: agents will sometimes give you missions that you've done before. Considering I've only been playing this character for a couple of days, I think it's pretty lame that I'm already running into this. I levelled a character from 1 to 70 in World of Warcraft without ever having to do the same quest twice. Guess that's one of the reasons why solo PvE content generally isn't considered Eve's strong suit.