[Jester's Trek] Trial by fire
Trial by fire
Reading through my notes on the summit on the plane coming home, it occurs to me that someone might ask "What about the new player experience? Does this CSM not care about this at all? Is CCP dropping it?" The answer is "Definitely not!" NPE was on a lot of people's minds and came up explicitly in three of the summit sessions. You'll be reading about it in the minutes once we know which part of CCP's plans do and do not fall under NDA.
In these discussions, I got the opportunity to tell an amusing story of my earliest days in EVE Online. I've told this story before, way back in 2011, but the post was tagged Perpetuum Online and as a result a lot of you probably haven't read it. I want to resurrect it now both as a reminder of how NPE often is and because it is, after all, a pretty amusing story. Keep in mind as you read it that this is either before eve-survival.org or at least before I'd heard of it. Keep in mind also that I was playing on a trial account at this time. It's kind of a miracle I subscribed...
When I first started playing EVE, I created a generic combat-oriented character because that's what my RL friends had done. "You can make money by doing missions, and use that money to buy skill books and the ships and weapons you'll need," I was told. I finished all the tutorial missions, ending up with a Merlin. I fitted out that Merlin as more experienced players suggested, then started looking at various L1 missions in Caldari space. Cycling through various missions available to me, the one worth the most money was called "The Blockade" and would have me fighting Guristas. I accepted it and went in.The story got me some laughs when I told it at the summit, but also illustrates that a lot of the implied problems in the game from way back then still exist now... cripes... almost six years later. Has it really been that long?
Three minutes later, my Merlin was scrap metal. I was jammed, webbed, and surrounded by enemy frigates pelting me with missiles and railgun fire. How was I supposed to kill the mission's stasis tower if I was jammed? Treating the mission as a puzzle to be solved (I was brand new to MMOs, remember), I decided to take a Kestrel in instead. I'd read that there were FoF missiles that could be fired even if I were jammed. The Kestrel had four missile launchers. I figured I could go in, get close to the tower, and destroy it with FoF missiles, then kite the jamming ships as I killed them one by one...
The Kestrel lasted two minutes before it was scrap metal, too.
Without realizing it, I had selected the hardest level 1 mission there was, against the worst enemies I could have chosen. But I didn't know this, and so I got frustrated in short order. I asked some friends for help, and one offered to come in and help me with the mission. We both went in together in our frigates.
And he lasted about three minutes. I, having some experience with this problem, managed to get my third ship out alive.
My EVE career was about eight hours old at this point, and I was already very frustrated and nearly out of ISK. I wasn't making money; I was losing it. I didn't know this, but I didn't have the skill points for what I was trying to do. I couldn't fly a destroyer or cruiser yet, and my defense and weapons skills were sub-par. But I still needed ISK for skill books. How to solve this problem? Another friend suggested taking up mining, which had a much lower risk factor. And that's exactly what I did, starting a second account and second toon to focus on that. That was boring as hell, but it funded my early EVE career and my first forays into PvP.
So yeah, this subject is still on people's minds in Reyk, only now they're getting ready for a completely different way of looking at the problem. As I said, more to come on this in the minutes.
Source: Trial by fire