EVE: The Need For Focus
I'm going to have to settle down and focus on something in EVE, soon. At the moment, I'm trying to build up industry skills, build up my drone skills and buy new ones, build up ship skills and buy new ones to get a battlecruiser, build up the trade skills and buy new ones so I can manage my trading from one station instead of having to gallivant all over the galaxy to sell things, and get a research alt up and running. It's all a bit much to work on at once.
The trouble, I suppose, is that I do want to do everything. My main income at the moment is mission-running and trading, so it would make sense to knuckle down to one or other of those to get enough cash to do the other things. Cash, generally speaking, is what's coming between me and the things I want to do. There's also training time, but in many cases, that's less of an issue; you can get many basic skills to IV before the time crunches really hit, and some can run to V in a few days if your attributes are right.
So, thinking through it: Mission running is reliable cash, but it's slow. It'll get better once I get up to higher levels, and I might give some consideration to fitting the Vexor slightly differently - at the moment, the high slots are occupied by three railguns, a tractor and a salvager. I think it would speed up my mission times considerably if I went to one railgun (or maybe even a missile launcher of some kind), with two tractors and two salvagers. The low slots are occupied by a pile of hull tank bits, but they're doing very little that's of any use to me - the ship has literally never dropped below 50% armour. So I might look at other items for the lower slots. The mid slots, I'm happiest with - a cap booster, a shield booster, and an afterburner.
Trading is also reliable cash, particularly on the two or three items I've found that I can buy steadily, and sell at markups varying from 400% to a stonking 1200% in one case. But until I get the remote operation trade skills, trading involves a lot of flying around, and that's boring, not to mention inefficient. I strongly suspect, though, that the ISK per hour, even flying around, is better than that from missions. So I might have to bite the bullet, trade-grind for a few days, fill in with missions when all my cash is in trade orders, and raise the money for the remote skills that way. Once I have them, trading becomes a great deal more attractive, and less time-consuming.
And then I can get the battlecruiser and the fleet of über-drones, and the research alt fully set up, and, and, and...
Posted by Drew Shiel at August 24, 2007 12:52 PM
