I've been playing EVE Online now for about six weeks or so. In that time I've mostly concentrated on mining but have waffled back and forth in my skill training between mining skills and combat related skills. I can actually fly a fairly decent Battle Cruiser now and I'm working up into a second Battle Cruiser, which I should be able to fully fit by the end of next week. I enjoy mining during the day, but I have been desiring to stretch my legs a little. I want to shoot stuff!
I get some of that action by running missions in my Thorax (Cruiser) and Myrmidon (Battle Cruiser). But shooting dumb NPCs (the AI on the older generation of NPCs is truly horrible) can get rather boring. I want to gun for the tougher variety of game out there. Other players. The problem is my corporation is really an industrial corp, although it does have a small number of "combat" players that guard the mining fleet on mining operations. I've been pushing to get some regular PVP ops going in the evenings, but thus far we've ventured out three times. And only twice did we encounter anyone in the low sec space we patrolled. Both of those occasions were fights at gates in which we initiated the combat, so we ended up tanking the gate guns along with the opposing force. Neither occasion ended in what I would report as "well". The first instance ended up in me losing my Vexor cruiser to an Armageddon, along with another corp mate losing his ship too, and the other three players warping off. The second bit of action was last night and both the targets we opened fired on jumped through the gate to escape us. we're not very accomplished pirates it would seem.
That's fine, however what I found truly disturbing in all this is how much security status you lose. Even if you attack someone with a very low security status themselves, you lose quite a bit. I'm a noob and I lost 1% off my security status last night just firing on two players. That might not sound like a lot, but it takes forever to make that up running level 1 and level 2 missions. Occasionally I get to tag along with someone running a level 4 mission, and that's really where I make the lion share of my security status. If you aren't concerned about possible travel implications then it isn't that big of a deal. But it really wouldn't take me long to go to -5.1 the way we're currently operating. And I don't want that.
Instead I'd like to see us running wormhole ops and jumping people we find in those. But thus far there has been very little interest. They'd rather cruise gates instead. The plan for tonight is to try and lure people to attack us. Which I suspect will be an utterly boring and fruitless endeavor.
So lately I've been finding myself on the the official EVE recruitment board looking for a corp that might be operating in my region and runs gangs in lowsec/wormhole space. I've found plenty of corps looking for pilots, though only one in my region. But they all want people with a lot more skill points than I have at the moment. Sadly there isn't a thing I can do to make my skill points accumulate any faster than they already are. I've got just shy of 3 million skill points at the moment and it looks like I'm going to have to keep casting longing glances at the recruitment board for the foreseeable future.
