Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Innaugural Post

Hello and welcome to my EVE Online related blog.  My name is Troy Wexler.  I do nothing of note in EVE Online, so if you are looking for insightful commentary on nullsec politics, how-to guides, news updates for major power blocs, etc, you won't find any of that here.  I started this blog to practice writing, and I will use it as a log of my activities in EVE and my lessons learned when trying new things.  I am not sponsored by anybody, I do not receive compensation from anyone, and I have no political affiliations in EVE.  My opinions are my own, and nobody is paying me or pressuring me to say anything.

My primary source of income is running missions in high sec.  I have slowly worked at my standings until I was able to run level 3 missions.  I ran level 3 missions for several months so I could work on my skills and save up some isk for a level 4 capable ship.  I had almost 2 billion isk saved by December 24, so I bought my first level 4 ship, the Caldari Nighthawk.  I had heard that it performs well in level 4's, but it exceeded my expectations.  It has a beast of a passive tank; I can aggro entire mission areas and not have to worry about dropping below 25% shields.  It also puts out enough dps to make short work of anything a level 4 mission can throw at me.  I am happy with my purchase.

I also made a windfall profit a few days ago on a third-party website.  My brother is an avid MMA enthusiast, so I asked him for his predictions for the main event of UFC 168.  He said that while he really wanted Silva to win, he thought that Weidman would prevail.  So I made an account on EVE-bet.com, took the remains of my mission ship fund (about 1.4 billion isk) and bet it all on Weidman.  So now I am sitting on 3.3 billion isk, which is enough to put me in any level 4 capable ship I want as long as I don't use ridiculously overpriced deadspace or officer mods.  I have heard good things about the Tengu, so that is what I am training for now.  In less than 2 days, I will have Caldari cruiser to 5, at which point I can begin getting heavy assault missiles to 5 and HAM specialization to 4.  If that doesn't work out, I will re-evaluate my training priority to get into a Marauder.  I have the Marauder skill injected, but I don't yet have any racial battleship skill to 5; I have Caldari at 4, and the other 3 racials injected.  So realistically, a Marauder won't happen until the end of Spring or the beginning of Summer at the earliest.

My plan for this week is to run level 4 missions in my Nighthawk.  I have the standings to run level 4 missions with several NPC corps in my corner of space, and accepting more than one mission at a time should increase my efficiency.  I will also try to run all the storyline missions I have been offered.  Doing so should raise my standings with the Caldari faction enough that I can anchor a POS in a .7 security system.  If it works out like I think it will, I will have to figure out how my personal standings affect my corp standings and how corp roles work in relation to POS ownership.  I have a feeling that I will have to learn many lessons about POS deployment and ownership before I can achieve my long-term goal of producing ships for profit.