The other major bit of Ardwulf news out of the weekend is that I resubscribed to EVE Online. It appears my stay in New Eden will be lengthier than I’d planned. It occurred to me, though, that most or all of what I was working toward was stuff I’d already achieved in my first crack at that game, and that it would therefore be kind of silly to convert the trial I’ve been playing on to a real account. So I reactivated my original account instead.

Gahar, my original character, had neither the money nor the skill points I’d remembered him as having, both having somehow inflated in my mind over months of inactivity – I came in to a character with a little over 4 million skill points and just under 2 million ISK. Nevertheless, a 4.1 million skill point character is a lot farther along than a 950K skill point character, and I did indeed already have access to salvaging, tractor beams and, after about an hour of skill training, Microwarp Drives. He was also at 0.97 standing with the Brutor Tribe, unlike my trial character who after a week was at… 0.47 or so. So he is literally on the very cusp of Level 2 missions.

And despite liquid assets being somewhat short of what I’d remembered they were, he did have a Burst, a Rifter, a Stabber, a couple of shuttles and a Hoarder (the Tier 2 Minmatar Industrial,) all fully fitted, and not with the cheapest off-the-shelf gear, either. This amounts to probably something like 10 million ISK in total assets, which is really quite a lot. In addition, as I said, 4 times the skill points goes rather a long way – this character can mine, manufacture, refine and run missions smoothly, and he has a pretty good start on Trade and Social skills, and even a couple of the Advanced Learning skills. Despite not having all that many skill points in total, he’s several weeks ahead of where my trial character was. No implants, though – I’d gotten podded fairly early on and never replaced them.

So I got to work on skills, set up market orders for implants, and ran a mission for the Brutor Tribe, which alone netted me a couple of million ISK in profit after all was said and done. I actually ran it in my Rifter and turned it in, then kitted out the Stabber for salvage and went back and got all the wrecks – and there were quite a few of them. Ideally I would be using a Destroyer for this, but although I have the skill to fly one I didn’t have the first rank in it yet, nor the ship itself. Pity I can’t transfer the 3.5 million ISK from the trial account, but that’s okay – I’m done there. EVE has demonstrated over the last week that it’s what I want to be playing right now.

My goal for the next week or two is to get enough cash to acquire two ships – a Scythe for mining, and secondly a Rupture for running level 2 missions, which I am about ready to start doing. The skill base isn’t quite where I want it, and I do want to move into Assault ships soon, but I probably have sufficient skills to run them in a Cruiser now. I admit to being curious as to how difficult they’ll be.

I had started, even on the trial account, fiddling with trading. Conceptually, I find the idea very appealing, but the most obvious approach to it – buying stuff for a low price in one system, then hauling it somewhere where it can be sold at a profit – is numbingly dull, and hard to make much money at unless you manage to find a route which offers a good exchange and which you can traverse in relative safety. I’d tried this (it was what I’d originally bought an Industrial to do) and did not care for it as an activity – it’s boring like mining but requires more micromanagement unless you’re okay with using the autopilot a lot. Using the autopilot in an Industrial sucks.

The more common approach to trading in EVE is market trading, done by placing buy orders for stuff on the cheap and sell orders for whatever the market will bear. Without the skills to support this one’s ability to do it is very limited, and the skills it takes to be really good at it are fairly expensive. But I have enough that I can begin to play around a bit, and so far it’s been both profitable and kind of fun.

Not that I’ve made a gigantic amount of money – about a million ISK on the trial account, and much less than that so far on Gahar. But it requires very little management at this level – I can check my open orders between missions or in off hours, and make some nice scratch on the side. It’s an aspect of EVE I may not ever become really good at, but am happy to dabble in, and had been interested in from very early on but hadn’t known how to get started.