Day 12: An exercise in frustration

“In space no-one can hear you scream”
- Alien

The next few days were unbelievably frustrating. Either I was too busy to play, there were no suitable wormholes, there were too many hostiles or there were no successful engagements. One night the system was filled with multiple blobs. Another night I had two customers, the first did not bite and the second escaped through the wormhole before I had him into hull. At least I had learned some lessons from the past, such as adding Triglavian Entities to my probe scanning filter.

One of the requirements for being a pirate is a lot of patience, but mine was being stretched thin. How was it possible on my first engagement to get everything so wrong and come away with a kill, and now to be getting things mostly right and come away with nothing? Not that I didn't still make the occasional howler (like that time I accidentally warp scrambled the wormhole - but the less said about that the better). If sound could travel in a vacuum, my frustration would have been echoing across The Forge.

About the only good thing that can be said of this period was that my training queue was getting shorter. I managed enough time online to complete at least two Air Daily goals. It was a pleasant break to take the Incursus out to kill my 25 NPCs. (Am I the only one who thinks that the Incursus looks like a cross between Alien and a Philips rotary shaver?) This brought in 10k skill points each day. Unexpectedly another 75k arrived from career progression - which conveniently finished off Drones V a few days early. Not much benefit for my current fit but very useful for the future.

With Phase One of the plan (my first killmark) accomplished, I was eager to complete Phase Two (five killmarks), but I was beginning to think that it may never happen. Much as I was enjoying my first time being based out of Jita, I am a country lad at heart and was yearning for wide open spaces and a lot less clutter in my local.

Incidentally, the Air Daily goals really messed with my hunting technique. On nights when one or more of them involved scanning down signatures I saw more activity on d-scan, but significantly less people warping to the wormhole. At one point my d-scan was nearly the full height of my laptop screen and so chock full both Sisters and normal probes it was hard to see if anything wasn't incoming! Not that anything was.

The other consequence of my frustration was a review of my decision not to subsidise Bjorn from my other characters. During my time in New Eden, I have had the bad habit of starting a new character for each project. Current situation being a case in point. Back in the days when I had friends in EVE one of them commented ”you can't really play EVE like that". It never stopped me, though. The plus-side of this is that I have a couple of small blocks of PLEX which CCP have kindly given out in various events, and I have never spent. I've decided to add these to Bjorn's slush fund so that (if he ever completes the Heron plan) he can start immediately on Phase 3 - rather than farming escalations for faction loot as originally intended. I'm already scheming as to how to spend it. For now, however, the focus must remain firmly on that next killmark.

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