Flying Solo In EVE: The Vagabond

I took a little break over the Independence Day weekend. Not the entire weekend because I did need to play a little for blogging purposes. Then I started flying my old love, the Rifter. I did finish up in Exordium and maybe got a little carried away, working on another EVE project: making PvE fits for heavy assault cruisers. Eventually I want to make one for each NPC empire. My new thumbnail for EVE posts is a little bit of foreshadowing.

Online activity declining after the launch of CoW

Looking at the charts I wasn't the only one. For the week the average number of accounts logged in dropped again down to 24,000 +/- 500 accounts. So far in 2026 the line has not dropped below 24,000. Will the online numbers continue to drop or were Americans just off celebrating the holiday weekend (and everyone else watching the World Cup)?

A pause in PLEX sales

Over the week the average price of PLEX on the global PLEX market dropped 4.4% as the Omega time sale in the New Eden Store ended on Tuesday. The replacement sale in the cash shop involved skill points and Cerebral Accelerators which didn't impact demand for PLEX. Offering new SKINs for sale in the NES wasn't that enticing. Overall players traded nearly 15,000 months of gametime on the global PLEX market for 34.7 trillion ISK.

Statistics halfway through 2026

Last week was ship nostalgia week as I flew a couple of ships I hadn't in a few years. The first was when I finished up in Exordium on my new character. I forgot how much fun flying a Rifter is. A very low skill ship, the NPCs didn't manage to break my shield tank, a positive on a armor tanked ship. On my new character I am now busy training up to fly a navy destroyer for when I run the last obvious new player content, the Sisters of EVE epic arc The Blood-Stained Stars. Yes, I'm still traumatized by Dagan 17 years later.

The Vagabond is a blitzing beast

I decided I wanted a HAC to blitz level 3 missions to make running through the Daily AIR missions run faster. While my Sacrilege is a long range sniper that shrugs off damage, Gemini gave me a Vagabond fit that relies on speed and a lot of close-in autocannon damage. Yes, my AI experiment with letting Gemini fit ships continues.

My testing with the ship is almost over and I have to do a write-up and post on the experience. Admittedly I'm an afterburner type of pilot and don't like the idea of someone shutting off my microwarpdrive with a scram. But I decided to let Gemini fit the ship and take advantage of the Vagabond's role bonus. The resulting 2400 m/sec speed is really nice flying around mission pockets.

The AI did let me know the Vagabond relies on speed. I was a little slow figuring out the situation once and had to warp out. But once I remembered how to manually pilot by clicking in space the experience was pretty fun. And satisfying. I'm just glad I was doing the level 3 versions of the missions.

I do have to admit I started thinking about the movie Dr. Strangelove and Slim Pickens waving a white hat as he rode a nuclear bomb to a target over the Soviet Union. That image, plus some of the coverage of the World Cup in Texas, inspired the below Vagabond image. Which is one of the reasons some may not like AI: cat ears in EVE.

Not exactly the way the devs imagined riding a Vagabond