Universal Narrative

Another war dec finds me flying around from A to B in a stealth bomber that I just trained for and planning to buy my first Ishtar. It's an unusual level to be flying at with 42m skillpoints, or close to 7 years in the game.

Other players have different goals to me. They enjoy the rush of PVP more than I do, or the power trip that comes from skilling up for a capital ship and being the biggest fish in the (rather large) small pond. Others just enjoy the graphics, mechanics or the social interaction. For me these things are all very appealing, but something else about EVE Online appeals to me more: the unique sense of narrative.

Narrative is powerful. It's how we understand the whole universe. As a student of creative writing, I've made it my job to understand the different narratives being presented to us - not just in fictional works but in the media, politics, etc. We fit all the pieces of these different things together into coherent narratives to make sense of them; we even do it to things where it might not make sense, like the behaviour of our co-workers, the weather, our own plans for the future...

EVE, more than other games, allows us to shape a narrative in very special ways. That's what sets it apart from other MMOs, what has kept me coming back to EVE after bouts of Minecraft, Civ IV, Zelda and Borderlands. "Player Created Content" is the watchword in this sandbox.

Does that mean I should head out to nullsec, play the politics and sovereignty game, where grand narratives of empires and colonization (without the negative consequences to indigenous peoples) are written by players every day? Mebbe I will at some point. I certainly listen to enough podcasts to do so.

But one of the main reasons I'm writing this blog is to point out that there are narratives in EVE, even for high-sec care bears. Every succesful hauling trip to Jita is a narrative of cat-and-mouse (and every unsucessful one a bad horror story). Every succesful fleet op - or even the slow, patient game of growing your wealth - it's all narrative. And we have our own grand narratives, too - wars between Marmite and CODE., the fights over highsec POCOs. There is content to be found, even for the carebears.

WAR! Woah-Woah-Woah-Woah

So it turns out a fellow lefty on my Facebook page likes to prey upon the carebears of Eve. I can't really figure it - in many ways we are the proletariat of this game, collecting the raw resources through various forms of basic grinding that go into the hulls and modules for PVP fights and alliance tournaments. Almost all minerals being collected out in null sec space get put straight into making titans and other capital ships, so most of everything else out there is bought in the market hubs and comes from us too. But each to their own. Now we are at war with CODE. Fuck 'em.

One of my golden rules for playing EVE is - never take a risk you don't have to. A legal war dec means CONCORD won't keep us safe from our war targets. That means regular activities like mission running, mining or hauling goods all come with the risk of getting ganked. Our Alliance's SOPs are not to do any of these activities during a war; if we can see there are no WTs online we might risk something, but for notorious suicide gankers like these guys, its not really worth it.

So what can a highsec carebear grinder like me do for the week the war will last that doesn't incur unnecessary risk? For a long time for me, the list was short and mostly involved playing other games or doing productive things, but lately I've been branching out a little more. I'll make more confession posts in full about each of these activities, just wanted to reflect on what there is to do during wartime for anyone who might be tempted to stay in an NPC corp and avoid war forever.

• Planetary Interaction (PI): It is generally a background process, but when you spend more time than usual sitting in station it can seem a little more fun to micromanage the process. There's still danger in taking a hauler through space to sell the goods, though, so if need be I collect them in a station until war is over.
• Station Trading: Although I've got a Dodixie jump clone to safely get in & out of the closest market hub to home, I'm finding it more fun and profitable to trade in our home region of Verge Vendor. It's a pretty quiet market, but has some virtues: less need to babysit orders and adjust them every 15 minutes to ensure they aren't outbid by another player, and with the right mix of items which people want to pick up close to home, I can trade enough volume to be growing my ISK satisfactorily. Plus if I were to get caught by the WTs, backup is only a few jumps away.
• Cloaky cloaky: using a cloak and microwarp drive it's possible to navigate lowsec space fairly safely, and the same principle applies in highsec too. This is a way to move goods around discretely, although I don't have room to move any ships or large quantities of rocks which will also have to wait before I can sell them. I've also recently gotten into a stealth bomber, which can warp while cloaked without the use of the cloak+mwd trick... and could be used for laying traps on our enemy, too ;)
• Wormhole Living: Some of our alliance mates live in a wormhole - we've got bases in both a c1 and c2 - and this war is the first time I've joined them living there for an extended period. Other corp mates have tried basing themselves out in our lowsec base also. Both come with the risk of PVP violence, but I think the wormhole is a little safer due to the lack of a local chat channel obscuring who is inside. Normally I just have my PI running in here and occasionally pop in when someone's scanned a good site; now I'm having a bit of fun being the one who does the scanning, and gets first crack at whatever goodies pop up. It's brought in a fair bit of ISKies, although since the risk is higher I'd normally be happy just grinding away in high sec :)

This isn't exhaustive, of course; more a chronicle of what I have been doing than a suggested check-list. There's many forms of PvE at which I'm still a n00b, and one of the reasons why I started this blog was to force myself to stop procrastinating and giving those different activities a go.

At the end of the day, I think of myself as a high sec care bear, but I can enjoy the thrill of flying in more dangerous space and earning the rewards as much as the next player. They just aren't at the core of my gameplay. It comes down to your goals in the game - what you find fun about it - which will be the subject of a future post.