Once upon a time, I imagined myself a Scientist in EVE Online. This was the golden days of the Tech 2 Lottery, an ill-advised system all in all, and now recently replaced. After about 45 days of skill training in an otherwise useless skill, I got talking to an agent who would give me just under 50 'RPs' a day. These Research Points would accumulate over time and each represented one ticket in a gamewide periodic lottery, which governed the distribution of the incredibly rare Tech 2 Blueprint Originals, licences to print money, in effect.
Suffice to say that the expected Ishtar BPo was not forthcoming in a hurry, and I largely forgot about the whole thing, probably in favour of some other shiny EVE Career Path instead - Long Distance Space-Trucking or something. Mind you, my agent didn't forget about me, and for the past two and half years, has apparently been doing dubious things with Bunsen Burners, Van Der Graff Generators and forlornly hoping that I might actually get back in touch and do one of the daily fetch-and-carry missions, which result in double RP for that day. Fat chance! For all I know, I was even offered the Tech 2 BPo in the interim, but not actually playing for all that time, if I was, I missed my chance.
Fast forward to this week, and I'm back, pre-emptively signing up mostly to get patched and ready ahead of tomorrow's big Super Dooper Prettification Patch. I did the usual 'Who/What/Where The Hell Am I?' round-up and one thing that caught my eye, was the little entry in the Journal mentioning that I now had about 41100 RPs, just sitting there, and now, it's all different. There's a new Invention system in palce that replaced the big Lottery some time ago, allowing people to make Tech 2 Blueprint Copies from Tech 1 items, and a whole bunch of Data Interfaces, Datacores, and so on. Wilhelm explores the basics of it here:
The Ancient Gaming Noob: The Road To Invention
Ouch! Seems that chance still has an awfully large part to play in Tech 2, which is a shame, and there also seems to be a rather large amount of expensive kit needed. I'm very much a glass is half empty kind of person, so paid a visit to my R&D agent, cleaned them out of the new Datacore consumable items you get in lieu of lottery tickets now, and with a bit of research, sold the lot for a hefty lump sum, and am now richer than I've ever been in-game. This isn't especially bragging, mind you, and usually, I operate with just about enough spare cash to buy another battleship when (rather than 'if') my current one slips on a lag-spill, gets caught on a patch-mission-difficulty-tweak, or just plain falls victim to my own stupidity or tiredness. I've now got enough cash for six battleships, plus fitting, in reserve now!
My Scientist Agent is also apparently continuing to generate more RPs, at about the rate of just short of one fresh Datacore a day, in effect, giving me an EVE Online Salary. I think I may forget about it all again, making it a nest egg for the future. Alas, as in many MMO crafting systems, it seems that in this case, the real money is to be had be resource gatherers, only in this case there seems to be very little staring at asteroids involved. Mind you, it's anyone's guess what these Datacores will be worth in three months or a year.
This accidental trust-fund nest-egg, from my absent-minded past self, to my present day and greedy self, is half of a greatly revised outlook on the game for this current revisit, the other half being a revision of my expectations of the whole thing. 'Don't fly what you can't afford' is an often repeated truth, but I'm not sure I ever fully understood it's import, and perhaps a better, if not as snappy, alternative should be 'Don't fly what it will take more than X to replace', where X is the maximum length of time that you can be bothered to spend 'working' in EVE, rather than 'playing'; mining, ratting, mission grinding, whichever is your own favourite. I mean sure, I can do Agent 4 Combat missions, but it is a bit stressful sometimes, and often a circular process; I earn the monies to buy the battleships to earn the monies... Spare cash I don't have to spend on new Battleships is usually spent on rare modules, Tech 2 modules, to further refine the Battleship earning process.
Six Battleships in the bank is all very nice, but how many Battlecruisers would that buy? Or Crusiers? Hell, it'll keep me in Frigates indefinitely, allowing me to explore the more dangerous aspects of the game, which I'd traditionally shied away from, not so much due to fear or pessimism, more a weary awareness that anything I get blown up in, I'll have to then replace out of my own blood, sweat and tears. The less time I can spend doing that, the better, and the nest-egg is a good head start.
All this is just as well really. Turns out my corp has grown, changed and expanded a lot since I was last in it. They kept me on as 'on leave' and I'm seeing all sorts of new faces in chat, and old ones too. Part of the corp's new direction seems to be a determined push on an area of 'Low Sec', a haven for pirates, criminals and assorted other unpleasant types; the outer rim, the periphery of civilisation, and the badlands. Modesty, and paranoia, forbid me to mention any names, locations or suchlike - I'm sure you understand. Participation in the settlement of this area is optional, but I've done the Carebear bit to death, frankly, and so have signed up to relocate down to the low-sec office and help out there however I can; exploration, covert-ops, and I'm sure, no small amount of 'Pew-Pew'. I'm a lot less worried about the prospect, now that my tastes have been appropriately lowered to match my means, and it looks to be interesting times ahead, the first of which will involve me running my four favourite ships through a quite hectic pod-kill gauntlet to meet up with the new corp outpost!
Of course the real reason for my return is tomorrow's big patch, although to be honest, I'd forgotten how good the thing looks even now as I do a bit of pre-emptive shuttling about to round up my junk and move it all yet again, and for a game that's basically had the same graphics and models for the last four years or so, certainly doesn't look too shabby. Time to set a long skill going and wait for the Rapture to arrive!