Death Penalty

I spent the second day after the launch of Retribution dealing with the consequences of losing my Hurricane on Tuesday.  Eve Online's death penalty has a reputation as harsh since seeing your ship explode means actually losing the ship in-game.  Add in the fact that anyone can loot whatever remains of your ship and some players run away screaming and rage-quit.  Me, I just try to hold the field and loot the wreck first.

While players on the outside usually look at the material loss or even the ISK loss, the biggest loss for me is time.  Time spent looking on the markets for the best deals to get me up and running again cheaply.  Time flying out gathering the purchased goods.  And time spent making rigs when they are outrageously priced on the market.  Really, do you think I'm going to spend 8-10 million ISK on rigs when I can just spend two hours making them from the scraps I have lying around the station?  Some would say I should pay the ISK because the two hours spent manufacturing the rigs is better spent missioning.  Those people also probably sell rigs.

That two-hour timeout imposed by manufacturing items did have an upside.  I actually looked the Hurricane's ship fitting for the first time since the expansion launched in the wake of actual combat (well, PvE) activity.  Because of the reduction of the Hurricane's power grid by 225 PG I had just unfit the Medium Nosferatu II instead of downgrading the guns down to 220mm Vulcan Autocannon IIs.  Experience shows that was a big mistake because while running my gang link the ship is not cap stable and running the nosferatu against NPC battleships lets me refill my capacitor (as NPCs always have 100% capacitor) and speed tank at the same time.  A great way to mitigate damage.  But I put the fit together so long ago I forgot why it worked.  So when I did my shopping I included 220mm autocannons on my list or I could put the module back on.

I did have some time left so I also installed the Buckingham test client on my desktop.  The instructions were easy and I was up and running in no time.  Since CCP has done such a nice job of duplicating the capabilities of EveMon in-game and EveMon isn't updated yet I just logged onto Buckingham and played around.  Logging onto Buckingham has the advantage of everything costing only 100 ISK, including ships.  A great place to theorycraft and I will probably take advantage of the test server in the future.

I'd tell you how the mission went last night but I ran out of time and went to bed.  I am going to do another mission or two just to prove to myself I can still run them, but then I'm heading back to low sec.  The other death penalty is that dying to an NPC is well, embarrassing.  That's probably the biggest penalty of all.