EVE: Get Offa My Land!!

Well it finally happened, after much waiting and debating our corp finally hauled it’s collective asses down to nullsec! This area of space is often referred to by many EVE players as ‘where the money is’ and so as something of an exploration fan I have been seriously looking forward to getting my hands on some decent ruins to explore and databases to raid.

This friends is an intergalatic piggy bank. Pass me my space hammer!

With every packed up and ready to be shipped the first challenge that presented itself was exactly how to get down there in the 1^st place, to which our CEO simply responded ‘Oh that’s easy just kill yourself’. Lo and behold I was able to move my clone over to a station in null and then simply self-destruct. So that was my first hurdle overcome, the second one was a tad harder, all my stuff was in high and would not be able to be freighted down until things had settled. Again, through another stroke of luck (and admittedly some very fast flying) I was able to fit a basic exploration heron. So my Adventures began…………

Within 5 minutes I had already tracked down an untouched relic site, despite a few mistakes (of the making ruins explode variety) 5 minutes later I had finished that site and was heading to the next. On route to another system I thought I would check my estimated cargo value 50 million, I did a double take, 50 mil from a single site, this was 3 times my highest ever take in high sec! Truly it appeared Null-sec was truly the land of milk, honey and power circuits!

However it was not to last, merrily scanning away as I was I noticed I was being hailed by some friendlies, who (once I had responded) promptly told me to ‘Get of their land!’. Not wanting to cause a scene, I profusely apologised and explained I did not know this was their turf (while admittedly finishing the hack I was midway through). Chalking it up to my newbieness I went on my way and lo and behold a few systems on another group told me to sling my hook.

Juuuuuuuuussst leaving system, give me a few secs!

‘Right’ thinks I, ‘I will just stick to systems with no-one in’. So again off I go finding empty systems and appropriating whatever I could find. All told I managed to make about 490million over the course of a couple of days and so at least, despite my run-ins with grumpy landowners in tengus, this looked profitable.

Not only are these sites valuable, they are pretty too!

However this was also not to last, merrily scanning down in an empty system someone pops in and politely asks me to leave. This person seeming the more affable type I asked them to explain why. ‘Oh don’t you know, the alliances around here stick to scanning in their own systems.’ At least I now had a sort of answer rather than the old rocking-chair, shotgun, tengu approach. Although this now leaves me with a bigger problem, our alliance is a small old thing and I can scan down our 5/6 systems in about an hour or so, so what do I do with the rest of the time?

I stayed with EVE because I got hooked on exploration, just for the shear freedom it offered. Rock up, fire your probes and race to the sites. Someone beats you there, tough, they got lucky, but you’ll get there next time. This whole parochial approach to scanning, while understandable (people need the isk to pay their system rent) does seem to go against the pioneering spirit.

I am still waiting for my covert ops skill to finish, but once that’s done I think its wormholes for me. At least it truly it no-mans land there and the worst they can do is blow you up, as opposed to politely asking you to leave! In the meantime I think I will sit around and play with planetary interaction. Wonder if I can name a planet……………………………….