Phew! It's been a busy few weeks for me in Eve and real life, which is why I kept putting off posting. But here goes.
My wife has started playing Eve! She had bought a new laptop and wanted to try this game that seems to have its hooks in me, so I installed it (three days of download attempts! In the end I needed to use the repair tool to make it right.) and taught her one basic maneuver. How to approach, orbit, web and shoot a target. She ran a few tutorial missions before I convinced her to leave them (she'd done them before, a long time ago) and just head out and run level 1 missions. They provided a steady source of red crosses to shoot and it was interesting to watch her progress from only watching one thing at a time, with a long lag between actions, to correctly monitoring everything around her and thinking about the next target while the current one is being shot.
She came out with Aideron for an Open Fleet last Sunday and survived it! It was a quiet night with only one big fight, which, unfortunately, we missed due to having to reboot her laptop. But she *did* get a neutral Catalyst killed :) While sitting at a gate with the other Atrons in fleet, a Catalyst appeared and yellow-boxed her. "Should I warp off?" she asked. "Yes." I said, and while doing so the Catalyst got one shot off, taking out most of her shield. The gate guns opened up on him, and the other Atrons too, and Irene was very happy with how that went.
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My manufacturing activities have reached a new and interesting point, with a friend researching some BPOs for me. I'm making various rigs in Jita and Fliet and turning a good profit. I'm really looking forward to the new industry changes, since, with slots disappearing, I'll be able to research or build wherever I want. I don't mind flying supplies around to quiet systems to get a good price.
I've started using plex to pay for my account, and having referred two people to join the game, I've had a little boost in that department. But eve mentat tells me that my PI operation alone is generating 800M profit per month, which is enough by itself to pay for my game time.
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My Jita alt has started running level 3 missions in a Drake, the basic fit suggested by Eve Uni, so that my broker fees with the Caldari Navy will decrease. So far it's down from 0.74% to 0.67%. I got stuck, temporarily, on a mission called Cutthroat Competition, which featured jamming rats that shut down my ability to target them. It should have occurred to me, a seasoned vet of 9 months, to use ECCM, but it did not...instead I tried buying rapid heavy missile launchers (nope, battleship only). After a few attempts at various failed tactics I googled the mission name and found people suggesting ECCM, so I fitted two of the appropriate modules and the rest was easy.
Had I been a new player, though, I might have ragequit instead. The flavor text of the mission, and for any mission with an unusual element (i.e anything other than just shooting red crosses) should have the agent's text include a warning like "You may encounter jammers in this mission. Perhaps you should fit an ECCM module like [insert-module-name-here] or two to make sure you get through it." This is an easy change and I hope CCP considers it. It's a shame that such a good game requires third party web sites to get me through sticking points. I like to think I'd have eventually thought of the ECCM on my own :)
