The Eve Online 14 Day Trial Experiment: Days 4 and 5 – Disaster Strikes!

No comments · Posted by Roy in Eve Online, PC Games

My 14 day trial experiment in the science fiction space MMORPG Eve Online got off to a pretty good start. Day 4 went very well as I made good progress, but then on day 5 disaster struck. I suffered a pretty big setback that will definitely hurt my chances of being successful in achieving my goal of earning enough to buy a PLEX in 14 days.

Day 4

I spent most of day 4 doing some missions in the Sisters of Eve epic arc while I waited on some skills to finish training. I picked up the Salvaging skill to get more loot off of the enemy npc ships I had to destroy in the missions, and was very pleased with the extra income it provided. A few of the items I salvaged from the ships sold for well over 100,000 ISK each. The only bad thing about salvaging is the extra time it takes, especially if there are lots of ships to salvage.

Day 5

The first part of day 5 was much like day 4; I was running missions and making from 150,000 to 300,000 ISK per mission. It all came to a screeching halt, though, when I ran into enemy drones that were much stronger than anything I had ever faced. Up to this point, I had little to no trouble when fighting enemy ships. If I ever got low on health in prior missions I would warp out, heal up, and then go back to finish off the enemies that were left. The enemies I faced, however, were so strong that I could hardly do any damage to them. Once I got low on health, I tried to warp out of there but it didn’t work. One of the enemy ships had used a warp scramble ability on me that prevented me from warping away. I could only sit there and watch helplessly as my ship was blown to smithereens.

I spent the next couple of hours trying in vain to retrieve anything I could from my wrecked ship, only to be killed in about 10 seconds every time by the same enemies. This gave me flashbacks to doing corpse runs in the original EverQuest, not exactly my idea of fun. I finally gave up and returned to the nearest space station to assess the damage. I would have to replace my ship, which would cost almost 2 million ISK (this was partly offset by the insurance payment of 760,000 ISK I received from the in-game insurance function). I also lost all of the weapons and other equipment that was on my ship. Thankfully, all of my mining equipment was safe back at the station.

So it looks like I’m done with missions for now. I will be focusing on mining with some market arbitrage (buying low in one region and selling for a profit in another region) on the side to reach my goal.