You’ve Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party

I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend. No, not the rise of ironic hipster mustaches or that somehow, Justin Bieber’s live concert movie just outsold KISS, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin combined (although both those things should be keeping you up at night).

No, its that my ability to get mission-bears to shoot at me over stealing some worthless piece of mission loot seems to be, faltering. Not that I’m not getting any kills, just not the level or consistency I’m looking for. This is not a good feeling.

Part of it, I’m sure, is that for bizarre reasons, the summer months do exactly the opposite of what you think they should do to Eve. Any vet of this game will tell you that contrary to what by all rights should be record-setting concurrent player numbers and activity, Eve gets a little sleepy during the summer. My guess is, the older married-with-kids players use this time to actually do family stuff: vacations, home projects, etc, and generally more-important-than-space-pixels activities. And teenagers are much more willing to fuck off on homework during the school year to play internet spaceships than they are that summer coffee-shop/ fast-food chain/ cruddy retail job (take a note kids, my secret to getting through those soul-numbing summer high-school jobs was illicit drugs and Beastie Boys’ “License to Ill” . Be sure to have plenty of both.)

But, I had a growing suspicion that there was more to it than that. Was it my own diminished play-time? Maybe my tactics needed updating? Maybe (God help us all), whiny mission bears were getting…*gasp*….SMARTER? Or, was it the giant flashing “TEARS” and “CEO” title attached to my name? Bears are a skittish lot, and having the words “Tear” and “Extraction” in the Alliance name can sometimes talk them down off that ledge of taking a pot shot.

One thing that was definitely throwing me off was my “Eve quasi-celebrity” status (apparently, there are at least 4 more people that read this blog aside from myself, 2 of my corpmates, and my mother). I’ll admit it, I’m an attention whore, and it’s always nice to see “Hey man, love the blog!” in local; its never nice, however, to see that in local from the guy who’s mission you’re currently trying to rabble-rouse in. A fan of the blog means “this guy knows your tricks and isn’t going to shoot”; victims of our own success, or something like that.

I needed to up my game, and I needed to dig deeper for new tricks.

Then it hit me: if Aiden couldn’t get kills because of notoriety, maybe someone with zero recognition could…

Enter my secret carebear infiltration alt: positive security status, member of an industrial corp, and the title “Mining Director”. Throw in a dash of carefully planed naiveté (“I didn’t know I couldn’t take that! Sorry, I won’t come back!”), a dose of Eve-anonymity, and the fact that I was “ninjaing” in ships like a Bantam, a shuttle, and a Retriever, and the results were ridiculous: I racked up 10 kills and 1.5 billion isk profit in 2 days.

A Navy Apoc, a faction-fit Golem, a deadspace booster Maelstrom; the list went on. Whats more, the behavior of the bears was totally different than when I was ninjaing with Aiden! People would shoot you, and then politely wait in their mission for you to return and beat them into next Tuesday. Alternately, guys would shoot and bounce, but then come back to the mission less than 10 minutes later. It was like ninjaing on easy-mode, made even more fun by playing behind the facade of my puppet carebear alt.

Unfortunately, I can’t post these kills because, well, secret alt is secret. So, I’ve decided to think even more outside the box, and I’m training my not-so-secret Orca alt in the delicate and fine art of pewing mission runners in the face. I expect hilarity to follow.

 

o7,

-Aiden

 

P.S. In other news, I’m breaking down and probably buying a laptop, and its going to (drum roll please….) NOT be a Mac! Egads! The idea behind this is to have a work station I can bring on the go with me, but also to be able to run Eve on (I know, lol-gaming laptop). At the moment, I’m thinking about a Dell XPS 15, since with the right specs, it seems to be a pretty decent Eve-on-good-settings capable laptop. Also, you can them factory refurbished with 1yr warranties for like $700. If anyone has any insight though, feel free to share.

~ by Aiden Mourn on July 21, 2011.