Life in a Wormhole: Time and Relative Dimension In Space #eveonline

Time for a bit more wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff to help get caught up to current events.

The biggest challenge with wormholes is staying engaged. If you’re engaged and doing stuff, then wormhole living is the best thing in any MMO I’ve ever played. If, however, you’re in the mood for a more passive gaming experience, where you just sit back and let some random NPC tell you to go kill ten rats, then wormholes can be kind of a drag, simply because there are no such NPCs out in wormhole space, and you’re left at the mercy of your fellow wormhole pilots (friendly or not) to provide some entertainment. If you’re not in the mood to scan the home system, you’d better hope someone else is. If you want to shoot at someone but can’t be arsed to go find them, odds are you won’t have much to do tonight.

The problem we’re running into in the current hole is that the “level” of the hole (a class two, on a difficulty scale from one to six), isn’t particularly challenging in and of itself. I can easily remember times when the sleepers filled me with a healthy amount of respect, but between better training and more knowledge of the content, those days are fairly well past. In short, simply shooting sleepers in a class two isn’t the draw it might have once been. We’re looking for either bigger or more frequent challenges, and that’s what most of the activity this week amounts to:

Perhaps in Lowsec?
While running out to Amarr for some parts, I decide to detour for a random solo roam through the low-sec systems our hole is connected to, looking for trouble. Trouble, however, seems to have taken the night off, and I return to the hole with no kills or losses to report.

Perhaps a Merger?
A couple days later, Em and I sit down for a long talk with one of our alliance mates who lives in a wormhole similar to ours, except that instead of a static connection to low-sec and more class two wormhole space, his system connects to high-sec and class Four wormhole space. The set-up sounds like a lot of fun. Runs to known space are even easier, sure, but one of the fun draws is the fact that, if you open up the wormhole to highsec all the time, the signature tends to lure in curious exploration pilots — the results can be fun and often hilarious. Also, having access to higher-level wormholes with more challenging content and (potentially) more skilled pilots to fight sounds fun as well.

It’s a good talk, and leaves Em and I discussing where we’d like to see our two corps in the near and distant future.

Perhaps a Roam with RvB?
Sometimes “Ganked” null-sec roams with Red versus Blue can be a lot of fun. Other times, it’s more like this one, which amounts to ten minutes of fun packed into many hours of aimless wandering and miscommunication. Honestly? I think everyone involved is too sober.

Perhaps on Sisi?
I join up with Em, CB, and Shan to try out various types of ships on the test server and to practice catching ships on wormholes and gates (and escaping from people trying to catch you). It’s good fun, although the overview when I’m logged in is basically non-functional and very nearly makes the game unplayable.

Still, we have a good time and get in an entertaining scuffle with a pilot from Eclipse., ending in a long conversation about ship fittings and overheating tactics that shows me a lot of the cool things you can do with underrated ships. Pity about the overview, though — damned if that little excel-like grid isn’t basically the heart and soul of everything that happens in space in EvE. In a lot of ways, the game is just the old text-based Battletech MUSE that I used to play in college, with cool graphics added — all the real work still happens by interacting with the text grid.

Perhaps a re-match with the Same T3 cloaky cruisers that we pushed out of the home system a few weeks ago?
Umm… no, that doesn’t sound like much fun at all.

Oh. We don’t get a choice? Well, damn…

More on that tomorrow, in its own post.