Wednesday 24 September 2014

Day 832 : Roid Rage and the End

Now then, don't be rushing in on the title alone and thinking I've been ganked by CODE while mining, subsequently gone postal, quit and denounced EVE just because of a single set back that the game set me up for in the first place. The Roid Rage I'm talking about here has nothing to do with asteROIDS and more to do with steROIDS. Prescribed ones. I'm not taking steroids to build up muscles because, really, WTF would I use those for? I've been taking them for a good reason - see http://diaries-of-a-space-noob.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/day-767-postcard-from-nexus.html 

They didn't tell me that "roid rage" was an actual thing. After several encounters with it I reserved my EVE play to my industry characters. I was left exhausted by almost PVP on my front door step in RL at one point thanks to these drugs. Don't keep ringing my doorbell late at night when I'm on steroids. There's a life lesson for you. God alone knows what I would have done had I entered rage mode during a low sec frigate scrap. Probably smashed my keyboard out of the window using the monitor as a bat or something along those lines. I'd of been famous on reddit for a day.

They don't tell you that roid rage has a sinister euphoric equivalent. I didn't think that wandering the haunted lanes of low sec was advisable in this state either. It'd be like seeing someone skipping through a field of daises, singing at the top of their voice, whilst actually in The Walking Dead. Inadvisable.

I was on the cusp of trying something new when the Roid Redaction descision was made. I'm going to get back to that soon but you know what it's like when you abandon some project for a couple of months in EVE. You get back to your hangars whose contents probably reflected some masterplan, you look at said contents with a sense of discovery, and you say "what the living fuck is all this crap?". It might take me a few days to sort out.

The last month has been largely filled with optimising the industry plan outlined in http://diaries-of-a-space-noob.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/day-780-abandoning-margins.html. A lot of that is downtime. Autopiloting, the odd amount of mining, staring at stock levels, staring at the cash icon in the sidebar, daring the bugger to blink. That kind of boring old nonsense.

I did get up to some other stuff that caused a little more excitement but not so much that I stood the chance of turning into The Incredible Roid Hulk. 

Firstly, a round of reorganising turned up an odd faction blueprint that I'd missed. I generally keep these aside for some future use. I got them out of COSMOS missions on my first character, grinding reputation for a POS (back when you needed reputation to anchor them). Idly I checked the blueprint in the new industry interface. Then I checked it again. Then I made a spreadsheet and did all the calculations myself. Then I flew to Jita, sat in 4-4, and looked at the prices. I read them aloud. I counted the numbers. In other words, standard EVE levels of paranoia and nothing drug related. A 3 run BP was going to make me around 2 billion profit. Somewhere I'd picked up a 3 run BPC for https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/'Radical'_Damage_Control_I

I expressed out loud how much of a "shame" it was that I couldn't remember where I got it. I've quoted the word shame as it covers a series of expletive based tirades that I couldn't utter in a prison, let alone a blog.

Anyway I built all three, spent several hours deciding on the best way to get them to Jita, got annoyed with the whole thing, ran them to Jita one by one in an Interceptor. Not, in hindsight, the greatest idea. Exciting though. The most exciting and adrenaline laden twelve mouse clicks that there has ever been.

I received a less sizeable windfall, but a surprisingly large one nonetheless, when using a pair of destroyers to run hi sec sites. There's a DED 3/10 that crops up now and again in high sec and a few of those left me 200 million richer in a day. The money was eclipsed by the surprise at how much fun I had running the sites with two destroyers. It was a lot more hands on than normal PVE and somewhere along the way I fell in love with an MWDing rocket fit Corax. I'd have my Algos and it's drones gather up all the attention and then yell "Dive!" and drive right into the center of the mobs exploding as many things as possible with rockets. Who said EVE PVE can't be fun? It might be the closest I'll ever get in EVE to the run of the Killing Time in Excession by Iain M Banks. What can I say? It killed some time.

The same pair of destroyers also encountered some weird station scenery attached to the bizzaro Gallente science station model. I'd go and make sure it's common scenery of some form but I'm rather attached to the notion that it's an alien UFO. "No one would have believed, in the last hours of a steroidal nightmare, that Gallente affairs were being watched by a small, green, blinking light."





EVE Track of the Day

Midnight Confessions - The Grass Roots