Sometimes I just need to get away from talk of gambling and economic reports and just fly around New Eden. Really, I'm still pissed that CCP decided to put the new raffle system in a release named Free Market. And what's up with also releasing something called Kicking Over Castles at the same time? So, when I wasn't finishing up my R course, I hopped on my characters and played EVE.
For some reason, I thought using a Hurricane to run Emerging Conduits was a good idea. Maybe a shield-tanked battlecruiser would work, but the armor-tanked Hurricane I tried to make work struggled. I need to go back to my Vagabond and see how much the improvements to medium auto-cannons help. It's possible that with the added DPS, I won't have to warp out of every other site.
When I wasn't working out how to fly an armor-tanked Hurricane, I hopped on my Signal Cartel character and did a little exploring. In the first session, I looked at Dotlan and saw I was close to Providence. I thought to myself, "Why not?" So off I went.
Did I mention my Signal Cartel character is an alpha? That's right. I flew around in a 1 million skill point character though an area that has seen better days. Thankfully whoever put up the interdiction bubbles left them untended, so I got to practice extracting myself from the situation. While Providence has a reputation of being a bit friendlier than normal, seeing an interceptor on a gate as I warp to the next location is a bit nerve racking.
I safely arrived in my destination constellation an did a little probing. I found the entrance to a C5 wormhole and went in. I played around a bit, then realized two things. The first was that I was kind of sleepy and wasn't going to play much longer. The second was that even if I found a relic or data site, the NPCs would eat me alive. I needed to find a C1, C2, or C3 wormhole. Those are easier to find in high sec. I think.
As I said, the time was late so I exited the wormhole to go back to my high sec station. When I emerged back in known space, one of the locals asked if I had just come from Thera. I told him no, and then began my journey home. I only ran across one gate camp on the way back. Looking back, my reactions were kind of funny. First, I saw two Rattlesnakes on grid and thought, "No dumb Rattlesnakes can catch me!" I decloaked and aligned for the next gate. Then I had the bright idea to scroll down. That's when I saw all the cruisers. Oh well. They let me through.
My second session of the weekend had me thinking of moving locations. With all the presents from CCP, I needed to find a place to store them. I undocked to probe down a few relic sites, keeping in the back of my mind the desire to escape the station I was in. I figured travelling via wormhole was a lot safer than scooting through Amarr or Uedama.
The first site I attempted to probe down was a Sansha relic site. The difference between a max skill alpha and max skill omega was readily apparent. A site I could probe down with just a little difficulty with my main I could only reach 94% with on my alpha. The next site was a wormhole. I jumped through and, much to my surprise, I found myself in Thera.
That's right. If I had checked Eve-Scout.com, I would have seen I was in a system with an entrance to Thera. But truthfully, I was more concerned with practicing my probing. Since I was already on the website, I decided to check if any exits led to where I base the rest of my characters. Sure enough, an exit to a low sec system would place me only five jumps away. But the board indicated the exit would collapse in less than four hours. Now, instead of just jumping to the bookmark, I decided to probe down the exit. I really needed the practice. I bit to my surprise, the wormhole still existed and I jumped through to low sec. A few minutes later and I was at my new high sec base.
Why would I want to base out of high sec. Time, really. I figure my chances of finding a lower-class wormhole with sites I could run would increase if I was in high sec. My next session bore that out.
On Saturday night, I probed down a C2 wormhole. After making sure Allison was engaged, I jumped into the wormhole. An occupied wormhole.
Well, I think the wormhole was occupied. I saw player-owned customs offices and a citadel. But no one appeared in local. Of course, unlike Jita, people who live in wormholes don't like to clutter up local with mindless chit-chat. Which is too bad, because I wanted to chat with the cloaked Proteus pilot I knew was just in scram range of me, ready to pounce. He wasn't in local, and I didn't see him uncloaked, but he was there. Trust me.
I knew the wormhole had to hold a relic site. I had no doubt at all. But I needed to shake this cloaky Proteus who thought he was clever and fooling a new player. Ha! I did what any half-competent explorer would do and decided to create a midpoint bookmark. After making sure to bookmark my original entry point, I warped to a planet, creating a bookmark about half-way to my destination. Then I immediately doubled back to my newly created bookmark. To make things interesting, I then lit the afterburners and turned on my two ECCM modules. The technique wouldn't save me from a dedicated probing pilot in a dedicated probing ship, but the measures should defeat the efforts of a casual day tripper. Or any alpha character like myself.
The wormhole only contained five signatures, including my entry point. I decided to probe the signatures until I identified what type they were, and then complete the scan if I found either another wormhole or a relic or data site. All the time Allison was reminding me to use my directional scanner.
As an aside, I know that Allison is probably programmed to give a reminder after a set amount of time. But at one point, I had just hit the d-scan when she reminded me again. I actually said out loud, "I just did!" Besides, d-scan will not detect a cloaky Proteus.
Then it happened. I found the cloaky Proteus. Well, I didn't actually find him, but I found an Angel's relic site. Where else would a cloaky Proteus sit? Considering I had to fiddle with my probes at .25 AU in order to get a 100% result, Mr. Proteus Pilot had plenty of warning. But you only live once, so I warped to the relic site.
I landed and got to work. The site held six hackable containers. I tried to follow the rule of sixes and managed to hack four of them. I lost a fifth when hacking the final node. Four out of six on an alpha isn't bad. Just a warning, though. The second time you fail the hack, the can explodes. Fortunately, my ship took no damage.
After clearing the site, I looked at my haul. 22.9 million ISK. Then I looked at my ship. The fitting window valued my ship at 788,000 ISK. In other words, I was carrying loot worth 29 times the value of my ship. I looked at the time and decided I needed to go to sleep, so I exited the wormhole and docked up for the night.
Okay, it took three tries, but I finally found a relic site in a wormhole and hacked the site. Now that I think I figured out the secret, I just need to find the time to play and practice. But since I found my main characters, I can hand off the loot to my market character to sell in Dodixie. Or maybe somewhere else. I haven't decided yet.
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