Seven Years And Counting

Today marks my 7th year anniversary of playing EVE Online. I have had periods where I didn't log in due to business trips or attending Fanfest. Sometimes I only logged in a few hours in a week. But over that time I kept at least one account subscribed.

One of the secrets to playing EVE is setting goals for yourself. Heading into my eighth year calling New Eden home seems like a good time to set some new goals. Here are some of mine that I'll work toward completing over the next 6-12 months.

My Maelstrom has served me well as the flagship of my personal fleet over the years, but the Shadows of the Serpent event picked out some of the old tech 1 battleship's flaws. While the ship's tank never came close to breaking, the Maelstrom is just so damn slow in warp. The choice for a replacement came down to the Machariel (3 AU/sec) or the Nestor (2.5 AU/sec). While slower, my goal is to obtain a Nestor. While the slowest battleship in space (base speed 70 m/sec), the Sisters of EVE battleship has scanning and drone bonuses plus is a remote armor repair platform. I'm looking forward to teaming the Nestor up with a Damnation to see how the pair performs, especially in one of the new-style holiday events.

Of course, I have to get the Nestor first. My plan is to grind the 600,000 loyalty points to buy the blueprint copy from the LP store and then build the ship myself. Just getting the ship may take a couple of months, during which time I can figure out a good fit for the ship. Over the weekend I already earned 59,000 LP, so I'm almost 10% of the way there. With any luck I'll have the ship in my hangar by EVE Vegas.

A second goal is to get a character's standings with the Gallente Federation up to 9.9 so I can obtain the two-run Megathron Navy Issue blueprint. Raising my standings up that high will require running through the Gallente COSMOS missions in the Algintal constellation. I will also need to run the level 4 Gallente epic arc, Syndication once or twice in order to build up the standings. I figure the Gallente faction grind will take at least 4 months. So in other words, I may finish by next Fanfest.

My first two goals will require spending a lot of time in high sec. I am not abandoning low sec. In addition to building my ships, I want to mine my own minerals. That requires mining in low sec at a minimum. I even anticipate roaming around null sec in a Prospect looking for some of the high end ores. I've never mined mercoxit, for example, and am looking forward to finding a suitable site.

I also want to experiment with a class of ships I've never flown: recons. I had some fun the couple of times I ran combat sites in low sec with a Bellicose. I wonder how I would fare flying a Rapier or a Huginn. The Rapier provides the familiar feeling of flying a cloaked ship through low sec. The Huginn, as a combat recon, is undetectable by directional scanners. For PvE purposes, I could probably put in a probe launcher in the utility high and scan down combat sites. Hey, if my ship doesn't show up on scan, people on roams won't bother scanning down anomalies on the off-chance they can find a ship. At least, that's the theory.

Finally, I need to continue my bookmark project. With the expansion of grids to an ungodly size, I am slowly but surely redoing my bookmarks. I need to continue that work as well as making some really long insta-undock bookmarks for important stations where I keep valuable ships. I need to come up with an appropriate interceptor fit for that work.

Does all of this sound like a lot of content? I think so. I should last until Fanfest, when we hopefully will see previews for a lot of shiny new content. And if I finish a lot faster than I think? Hey, this is EVE. I've barely scratched the surface of the things I can do. I'll find something else to keep me occupied.