Warp Drive Active

After working a grueling 31 out of 34 hours (with 1 hour of sleep) I'm finally on vacation. If you have read the blog, you know that I've always said that I would need to take a week to learn how to play Eve Online. Well, that week has arrived. Early this morning when I woke up from the crash I always go through whenever I work the crazy hours, I remembered to download the game from Steam (which has a 21-day free trial) and then went back to sleep. Just a warning to everyone about the trial account. The trial period begins when you set up the account, not when you first enter the game.

EverQuest 2 is still my main game, so I logged into Eve after filling up my sales crates in Norrath. First thing I noticed is that at the login screen the game shows the players how many people are logged on. When I logged on, 40,996 players were currently in New Eden. After logging in came the usual cinematic, which I thought was very good.

Then came character creation. Oh my god! I loved it. There is some voice work that describes each of the four empires/races along with text. After some last minute intelligence I gathered from Atraxerxes, Dillon Arklight and War Childe on their joint podcast plus information about ship types I gleaned from Eve Wiki, I chose to roll up a Minmatar character. I actually chose to roll up a Minmatar Vherokior mystic. That's right, I'm playing a shaman. I didn't play one in World of Warcraft. I haven't rolled one up in EQ2, and EQ2 actually has a character class called mystic. I picked the space game to play one in. After checking with Google and finding a guide to Minmater clans, I thought the stats wouldn't be bad (Intelligence 8, Charisma 8, Perception 4, Memory 8, Willpower 6) so I gave in to temptation and created one.

My first attempts at moving around were pretty laughable. I stumbled through killing the first pirate, taking a lot of damage I didn't have to because I was learning how to turn on my guns. I said to myself, "Noizy, you're not in Norrath anymore."

So far I've gone through the absolute minimum tutorials and have skills in the skills queue. Right now I've lined up Mining 3, Repair Systems 1, Repair Systems 2, Minmatar Frigate 3, Gunnery 3, and Hull Upgrades 2.

The chat channels did catch my eye. I haven't really paid attention to the chat, but there is a "Rookie Help" channel. And you can easily make the text larger or smaller. Of course, maybe all my MMO experience helps and it wouldn't be so obvious to a brand new MMO player, but I don't think so. And you get numbers for the number of people in each channel. You'd think CCP was proud of how many people they can handle in their game at one time.

A piece of intelligence did come through for me. Because I chose to play a Minmatar, I am currently making the Republic Military School at Ammold V my home base. When I looked at the corp recruiting tab (and why can't EQ2 have something like this for guilds?) I see that Eve University has moved to the Ammold V station. I plan on joining Eve University sometime after finishing the tutorials and starting up a paying account and this makes joining up very convenient.

One other thing of note. Eve is not like EQ2 where the bank is a world bank. If you accept something in a station it is in the item vault for that station. Do not expect to see it when you go to another station. The one fault I see with Eve right now is that I do not have a history of completed missions I can look back on. I think that would come in handy in trying to track down where I may have misplaced something. Also a history might come in handy when trying to help out others with missions. But maybe that is just an EQ2 thing.

I know that these are pretty random thoughts, but I wanted to get something posted on my first day of playing Eve.