Some Days it Doesn’t Pay to Undock in New Eden

One of the problems of EVE Online is that events happen in their own time and not necessarily on your schedule.  I had a big open gap of time one evening this week and I sat down and logged in… only to find not much was going on.  Sometimes Delve is quiet and there just aren’t any ops going on.

Well, it is a big universe, there are other things to do.  So I grabbed my main high sec alt who I had set up with a ship to go do some Winter Nexus sites.  That should be fun and lucrative, right?

The Winter Nexus in a Paxis

I filamented and flew around high sec for two hours without finding a single site that wasn’t down to the last NPC and somebody in there finishing that one off… except once, when I landed in a site where nobody was there and the last NPC was 500km from the landing spot.  I feel for the person who got that one.

So aside from getting credit for entering an event side, the whole thing was a fruitless ordeal.  I slow boated back to the high sec system my alt calls home and wondered what else to do.  I figured I could do some Abyssal filaments.  That is something easy to do while listening to a podcast or an audio book.  Sometimes I think I do them just take screen shots.

Every time I am headed toward the gate it just looks epic

Then, looking at the daily tasks, which were all for evermarks, I thought I should get my main out there and have him do a few Abyssals and earn some evermarks.  I actually want the alliance logo on his ships and he only ever gets evermarks from login rewards as the agents for that are nowhere near Delve.  I happened to have a clean jump clone up in high sec not too far away, put in place when we were up to something in high sec… probably when we were shooting the TTC or something.

So I clone jumped up there, flew over to where my high sec alt was and traded for the Gila I used to run T3 exotic and firestorm Abyssals.  I made a safe in the system, filamented into a T3 firestorm pocket, and promptly lost the ship… like, in the first freaking room.

This is NOT supposed to happen

I have had that Gila with that fit since 2020 or so, during which time my alt… who isn’t even really a combat alt, but an alt I trained up to ferry ships out to deployments so they can fly a lot of hulls but don’t have all the weapon support skills trained up… ran over one hundred T3s without a loss.  But my nearly 260+ million skill point combat main who has 270 skills at level V… boom.  A real AYFKM moment.

I guess I should have gotten that Harrowing Vedmak earlier, but I had to shake the pair of webbing Trigs.

Then, on being podded, which is always the end result, I found myself back in 1DQ1-A where I realized I hadn’t installed a new clone when I jumped into the other one, just in case something like this happened.  I swear, I am a hazard to be around.  I trained up Elite Infomorph Psychology V just so I would have enough clone slots to leave them around in convenient spots.

No evermarks for me.

I would have been more upset if that very same alt hadn’t fished up an 8 billion ISK item hiding in the couch cushions at the back of a hangar last week.  But that is another story.  So the ISK to replace the Gila was there, no problem.  The question is always what fit to use.  I had to shop around for that for a bit until I found one that fit my need.

And then I had to buy some more filaments and get everything back out to the system where I like to use them.  Everything takes time in New Eden.

Once I got my alt set back up I logged out.  It seemed like a whole lot of nothing gone right.  It isn’t the ship loss so much as the time expended for no fun or profit.  This is, as noted at the top, a prime issue with the game.  Oh well.

And then there was a Zungen ops ping.  There was a target for us.  So I logged in another alt that was logged off out in the drones, got into the fleet, and we all dropped on a Phoenix Navy Issue and blew it up… and the CRAB beacon as well.

Scratch one Phoenix

However, that didn’t count as undocking.  That alt has been logged out in space for well over a month now, just waiting for the call for targets.  Still, that was a bit of salve at the end of the evening.  For me at least.  Probably less so for the Phoenix pilot.  But at least they didn’t lose their ship to NPCs.