EVE Online: Day 3

I tried to trade today. That failed miserably. I kind of figured that the trick to trading was to pick something up from a station that it's cheap, and then sell it at a station where it's expensive.

Of course, all of the sale prices are 5-10 times the buy prices. Which means that the only way to buy low and sell high is to go through the buy-order and sell-order process. Since you set up a standing order for either a purchase or a sale to happen at a specific price, you don't actually get your money until somebody happens by and buys at your asking price. I'm still waiting to see if I'll make any profit at all from my trading run of skillbooks.

As I've heard several times from other players, trade as a primary means of income is probably best left to the experienced players. It seems to require entirely too much knowledge of the game and the universe, not to mention significant startup capital and large merchant ships, for a newbie player to succeed at it.

I've also done a lot more challenging combat at this point. The biggest challenge is definitely in outfitting your ship appropriately. I worked out my load mostly through trial and error, although a calculator or spreadsheet would have been more effective. There's an *awful* lot to balance: weapon damage multiplier, ammunition base damage, weapon rate of fire, energy cost per shot. Likewise, your defensive systems are drawing from the same energy reserve and have similar attributes. Trying to analyze all of these variables required that I shuffle between about a dozen different "Info" windows simultaneously.

Once in combat, I found that my top-of-the-line frigate could easily hold its own against four or five NPC pirate ships, but that larger fleets rapidly depleted my shields and armor. I've since developed the tactic of warping into the encounter space, taking out as many ships as I can before my shields are critical, and then warping back out to lick my wounds. I seriously doubt this works in PvP battles, as there's a piece of equipment that jams warp--and it's apparently fairly popular amongst players.

The most frustrating thing I learned today is that CCP is dropping official linux support. This means that the only way for linux users to play is through either Wine, Cedega, or CrossoverGames. And, of course, there will be bugs and issues with those solutions as well.

I'm not sure why people in the forums were griping about the quality of the official client. So far, it's worked perfectly for me. My only complaint is that it won't run in a windowed mode; but, I can live without that. Unfortunately, CCP will be releasing a major revision in March, which will render the current client incompatible.

I'm currently attempting to install the Windows client in CrossoverGames. But, if that doesn't work and play without annoying the piss out of me, it seems very unlikely that I'll be playing EVE Online past the end of my trial period.