One of the advantages of having played Eve for a long time (albiet on and off) is that I have some very high skills. Since Eve uses a time based skill gain system instead of the usage based model that most games have it means that if you stop playing and don't cancel your account you can keep improving as look as you log in every month or so to to start a new skill training. Now I haven't done that for all of the time since launch, but it does mean that I'm more inclined to not cancel if I don't play for a few months.
All of this means that I've maxed out lots of the useful skills and this has made lots of more difficult skills available to me. Part of this are tech 2 equipment, which is like tech 1 but better. The tech 2 equipment that is the hardest to get the skills together to use are the ships and the weapons as they both need at least the basic version of that skill maxed out and the ships need another related skill as well. What this means is that in order to fly, for example, an interceptor, you need to have the interceptor skill and have maxed your frigate skill for the race that you wish to fly. The interceptor skill needs Evasive Maneuvering to be maxed before you can learn it, which is good because I usually fly a battleship and so I maxed that a long time ago in order to make my ship a bit more zippy. To fly an assault ship you need to have Engineering and Mechanic maxed, which, again, I did long ago because they're even more useful. The slight problem is that I never trained up the last level of Frigates because I moved up to Cruisers and then Battleships a long time ago. Because I'm so close to being able to fly these ships I've decided to take a week out of useful skill training and get my frigates skill up to speed so that I'm at least on the ladder for the tech 2 frigates.
Game play wise it's a waste of time at the moment as I don't need any of these ships, but I have an urge to be able to fly all of the ships. I'll probably not be splurging on heavy assault ships just yet though.
posted @ Sunday, June 12, 2005 1:47 PM