In perhaps less time than I thought, I caved in and resubbed to one of my long time online antagonists, EVE Online, demonstrating once again my embarrassing lack of willpower. Personally, I hold the EVE CCG and Eve Tribune (links to the right) responsible in equal measure, but then a return to a, hopefully, more engaging EVE experience than I'm used to from past visits, was always something I'd been planning on having a go at this year anyway.

Of course, EVE is the game you don't have to play, to play, and prior to cancelling in the usual distemper last time, I started Gallente Battleships V going, a skill that takes around 60 days of training to complete, depending on attributes and prerequisites, and then promptly forgot all about it. The subscription ended, but the skill kept going, and now, on my sheepish return, I find that I'm actually quite good at the game now, partly from long experience, but mostly because I have about 16 million skill points, almost all in Drones and the Dominix.

It's hard to quantify EVE progress in the way you can in any other MMO - Newbie, High Level, End Game - these terms translate only in the broadest sense, as so much depends on how your skill points are spent, and it's widely thought that beyond 5 million points, you're easily competent in all the basic 'must-haves', and beyond lies a series of different and highly specialised skills, focussing on specifics.

Anyway, to test my skills somewhat, it was right into a Level 4 Angel Extravaganza. Clearly my Agent had thought I was dead, and was keen to rectify this sudden reappearance, sending me out on my first solo L4 mission ever. I hadn't got the Dominix yet, and was still in my old Typhoon - not an easy ship to fly, due to it needing quite high skills in a number of different systems to make work, as opposed to the Raven's 'missiles > u', or Dominix's 'dronez 4TW!' The mission was a success, although took about seven hours to do, and required a number of warp-outs (mostly on fire!) to fine-tune my tank setup. The fact that everything has had it's HP doubled since my last visit may have helped or hindered my progress...I can't really tell...definitely took longer than I remember, that's for sure.

Day one, and already, I've won. Well, won the straight, PvE 'questing' anyway. Certainly I can grind those out ad. infinitum, with them becoming easier and easier with each new piece of faction loot I add to the setup, but after a while, you have to ask...what am I earning this money for!

Fortunately, CCP have not been idle since my last season, and out of a surprising number of new (to me at least) features, two in particular caught my fancy; Salvaging, and Exploration.

Salvaging is pretty straight forward. When you blow stuff up, it no longer vapourises, leaving just a neatly prepared cargo barrel, that the Pirate, with somewhat inappropriate forethought, managed to load up with vital subsystems of his ship, moments before destruction. Now the ships actually become wrecks. Some of these wreck still contain the normal loot, but all of them, when prodded with the right kind of gizmo, now have a change of coughing up bits of broken scrap technology too. Genius! Two goes at looting! I love looting, me. I suppose it's a lot like Skinning in WoW; need to empty the loot before you can go for the Salvage parts.

The other end of this, is Rigs, which are a new class of equipment, made form the above parts, which act a bit like Implants for the ships, again, mirroring the 'Socketed' items found in many other games. These Rigs can't be removed, only destroyed to make way for a different rig. Seems there has been recent problems with the salvage parts drop rate, and naturally, the Rigs are massively, and unrealistically overpriced at present, but I don't care - I seem to be getting an inordinate amount of pleasure cruising through the aftermath, prying out burned circuit boards from the drifting wreckage. I ought to be able to knock up a fresh rig from the scrap-pile any day now!

The real winner for me though, is Exploration. It really is exploration in it's most literal sense - boldly going, seeking out new life...then finding new life, realising the new life is in fact the old life that's been attacking you at every other asteroid belt for the last few jumps, and then Unleashing The Drones upon said new life, and stripping the now broken new life down for saleable parts.

You use these new scan probes, various new skills, and a LOT of patience, to track down new, randomly spawning...stuff, out in deep space, well away form the usual belts, planets and moons. Hard to find another comparison in other games really, but it has everything I'm looking for in MMO gameplay - it needs a bit of careful thought, it requires a lot of patience, but seems to reward it appropriately, and best of all, it lets me, the average gamer without huge guild, phat loot, twinked gear, or RL unemployment, still find new and interesting things first!

It's quite an elegant solution to a very knotty problem - without going all mad on instances, how do you make it so the average gamer can still find new things, once the powerlevelling uberguild 'have been playing since beta' crowd have trampled through it all, and pounded it into mediocrity (complete with maps, screenshots and spreadsheets)?

Of course it's all somewhat randomly generated still, but the thrill of the chase, the knowledge that other players may also be looking for the same thing, and the kinds of things you can find in these hidden locations definitely appeal, and the entry level to getting involved isn't that harsh - a few minor skills, some cheap equipment and a low-end frigate (which actually seem to do better at it than Battleships, via ship bonuses). The scan probes themselves can be a little pricey, but a few regular missions can supplement the income until the locations start to pay. Mostly though, you just need the determination not to give up easily, and it has a similar hands-off 'can watch TV or surf while doing it' feel as mining for much of the actual scanning. Of course one the location is found, things can get awfully exciting very quickly.

I've tracked down two so far, in 0.7-0.6 space - one had mobs in that needed friends in two Assault Frigates to cope with, and the other had over 50 million in rare asteroids in, so there's a lot of variety in it, and much of the other new stuff, Invention, revamped Hacking, revamped Archaeology and the like, all derive from these hidden parts of space. For me though, the mere fact that they're hidden at all intrigues me - knowing that there is something out there, and having the wits, tools and ability to find it.

More info here:
EVE Online Forums: Exploration Guide v1.5

(More a useful discussion of techniques, rather than list of locations. The locations don't even spawn until someone warps to their location, which is very random in the first place. No cheat sheets for this...you need to work for it!)


And as if these two new things alone weren't enough to add a new dimension to what I was fearing was going to be a rather short-lived and stale brief return visit to EVE, I've also gone straight in and joined a player Corp, rather than just solo again - clearly how you're meant to do things. More on that later, but for now, as ever, it's just nice to immerse myself in the serenely violent majestic starscape that is the day to day of EVE Online...