The Angry Raider

Last night was a touchstone moment for me in EVE. I finished training the skills necessary to fly my Raven.

Wait, EVE? When did I start playing that? As it turns out, a few months ago. Let me explain.

I was at Best Buy with my wife and brother, browsing the PC games section. I noticed that Best Buy still had a copy of the Warhammer Online collector edition, which I wanted so bad back when WAR was new. As I scanned the boxes for something interesting to try out, I saw EVE Online.

CCP, the makers of EVE, had struck a distribution deal with Atari, and they released a boxed version of EVE in stores. They call this version “EVE Online Special Edition”, and it includes a 21-day buddy pass for your friends and a pretty nice Gallente shuttle that, as I found out later, is like a giant bullseye flying through space.

That’s what you do in EVE. You’re a pilot, and you fly spaceships. You don’t walk around. You’re always in your ship (or a pod). You outfit your ship with weapons, mining lasers, salvagers, and so on. And you can have more than one ship. In fact, you can have a practically limitless number of ships, spread all over the universe.

I decided to give EVE a try so I bought the game. I installed it on my Mac Pro when I got home and flew a few of the starter missions. I thought it was a pretty cool game. It’s skill-based, which is quite a bit different from WoW and EQ2, being level-based games. In EVE, you don’t go from 1 to a level cap, and there’s no endgame. Instead, you train skills, and each time a skill training is complete, you gain the ability to do something. For example, there’s a Targeting skill. Each time your Targeting reaches a new level (from 1 to 5), your capabilities in Targeting improves. It lets you target more accurately, with faster speed, and so on. If you plan on doing a lot of PVP, Targeting is a good skill to train, for example.

My 60-day EVE subscription expired with me putting maybe 3 or 4 hours into the game. I just didn’t really get into it, and I was playing a lot of EQ2. EVE doesn’t have the kind of “log in and quest” mentality that EQ2 has, so oftentimes I felt like I didn’t know what to do. Plus, I had no idea what to train my skills toward.

Fate intervened in the form of a coworker and one of his friends, who are both active and jubilant EVE aficionados. After a few conversations with them over tacos, I decided to resubscribe and give EVE another try. I followed their advice and made ample use of EVEWiki, downloaded EVEMon, and read about certificates. I started a new character so I’d have a clean slate, started training the basic core competency, and set out in the world with the intention of becoming a pirate.

As I traveled from stargate to stargate for various missions, I came across a very impressive-looking ship. It was the Raven. I knew right then that I had to have one. Being the goal-oriented person I am, I immediately set my plan into motion. I went into EVEMon, created a plan for the Raven, decided on a loadout, added all the skills to my plan, and started the 15 day process of learning the skills I needed to fly this badboy.

But I also needed a way to pay for it. The Raven is 80 million ISK, and the training books were easily 10 million. It would take me months to earn 90 million ISK from mission running. That’s when my coworker told me about PLEX.

PLEX is an EVE timecard that you can buy from CCP and sell in-game for ISK. It’s built right into the game. Long-term players with billions of ISK don’t even pay to play EVE anymore; they buy PLEX on the market. I bought two cards for $35 total and sold them for almost 700 million ISK. My money problems were solved immediately.

I’ve never had a problem with RMT when it is sanctioned by the maker of the game. I’ve bought server transfers, gender changes, name changes, Station Cash, and FreeRealms cards, so to me, PLEX was no different. My instant millionaire status still didn’t allow me to fly the Raven: I had to wait, just like everyone else.

My long-term goal is to do missions with my Raven, help my corporation mine wormhole space by blowing up sleepers, maybe PVP in .4 space. Someday I’ll get a Tech 2 ship like a Widow, and maybe even join a corp that lives in 0.0 like GoonFleet.

Here I am today, Raven Day + 1, and my beautiful new ship is sitting in the hangar, waiting for me to undock it and fly around. But I can’t do anything with it. I don’t have my Cruise missiles, or my capacitor efficiency, or shields. I have to wait until Sunday for those skills to finish training.

I love this game.