The Common Sense Gamer

The LOTRO group logged off earlier than usual last night, which was good because we were down one man and we didn’t want to get too far ahead. With just a little extra time left over before going to bed, I decided to give Eve exploration a try just to see how the mechanic worked. Both Jonathan and Adam were shooting the shit with me on Skype while I brought out my Heron to take a peak on what was out there. The first thing I did was bring up Van Hemlock`s excellent article on exploration. It`s a step-by-step guide on how to do this kind of thing. But then I saw this article up on Massively. It`s a bit more up to date and informed me that scanning has really changed since Eve`s latest expansion. So…off I went.

The first thing I did was drop a probe right outside the station that I undocked from. Not knowing what I was doing, I then activated the map. Ummmmm…I know I can move these probes and make them warp places, so where the heck is the interface to do that in this map? I dunno. So, I then decided to warp to a planet instead…thinking that that will clear my head a bit. I opened up the scanning interface once I got to the planet, and I noticed a map button on the scanning UI. I pressed it and, presto, I could see the probe, it’s scanning sphere and….I could move it around. I was officially in business. I launched three more probes and started to place them so that I had the most coverage of the system. When I was happy, I selected all four probes (…very important…) and hit “analyze”. It was very quick and immediately I got two contacts back. Sweet. I decided to concentrate on the one that had the strongest signal…about 12%. I decreased the range of the probes, rearranged them around the contact (…which itself was only a red sphere…) and analyzed again. I did this exercise of moving and reducing the probes’ scan range until I had a certainty of 100% on the contact…at that point, I warped to it. Once I got there, I saw a warp gate. Yayyyyyy….my first exploration quest is a success. But, we’re only part way done…aren’t we.

I asked Jonathan if he wanted to go into the unknown with me, and he said “sure”. He brought his Merlin out and hung around the gate while I traded in my Heron for my Drake. All ready to go, I warped into the breach. I have never seen a pirate complex like this one before. It was huge. There must have been at least 20-30 ships there…all frigates, Battlecruisers and Light Missile Batteries. I also noted plenty of structures like shield generators and others. Rocks. Man…where there ever a lot of rocks. The size of the Veldspar was just amazing. I figured that there was at least 10 Mil ISK worth of “stuff” that I was looking at….maybe more. I knew we didn’t really have time to take advantage of this find, so I dispatched all of the badguys and blew up some of the structures. Apparently, the badguys did not like me blowing up what looked like the main structure of the complex and decided to spawn with about 20 or so Battlecruisers. Yeah…I bailed at that point since Jonathan and I already spent about 30-45 minutes in there discussing the possibilities of this newly discovered gameplay.

I’m now a fan of exploration for three reasons: 1) It has an actual process that is really neat-o, 2) the possible ISK that can be had with this and 3) it feels like this is what being in space is about. I was quite happy with the experience.

D out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 8:47 am and is filed under Eve Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.