I like to have a plan. One might suggest that I NEED to have a plan. A plan, a goal, a destination. Screw the journey, I want to know where we are going and how we’re getting there.
I am like this in real life as well. It is probably why I have ended up as a project manager. I’ll listen to ideas and possibilities for hours, but I am always the guy who needs to bring the conversation around to whether or not a suggest or idea or new feature will get us to our goal.
When I lack a plan or goal or destination I get restless and a bit bored. This happens all the time for me in video games. This blog is a written record of that.
And that is fine. Video games are entertainment, and if you are not being entertained then you ought to move along. It is as easy as that. Mostly.
In single player games there is no problem at all. You stop playing and everything just waits for you. If you get the urge to play again, you just pick up where you left off.
Things are a little more complicated with multiplayer. If you stop playing WoW there is no real penalty. There are content updates and events and such, but if those were engaging you wouldn’t be bored, would you?
There is the whole aspect of casual friends you may have made in game. I’ve wandered off and left a whole slew of acquaintances behind, never to run into them again. Returning later I’ve found myself in a guild where nobody play or kicked out of the guild and with a friends list of people who no longer log in.
I’ve solved this mostly by no longer making any casual friends in online games.
But then there is EVE Online.
The bubbles of existence in null sec
When New Eden is not that exciting, when you’re not logging it, it is a bid dodgy to just stop playing. If you live in low or high sec with NPC stations scattered about you can just park you stuff and rest assured that it will be there and available should you return.
But in null sec… and wormhole space as well I imagine… where it is all player owned Upwell, you can’t just stop logging in for a year. Not if you want to be able to find your stuff. Your corp might have left the alliance and joined their foes, your alliance might have packed up and moved, there might have been a war and the structure you had all your stuff in might be gone so when you log back into the game you’ll find yourself sitting in space, no friendly station to be seen, and all your stuff locked up in asset safety.
It is worse in wormhole space I guess, because they don’t even have asset safety, your stuff just gets dumped into space and is gone.
For a game that trades on the sunk cost fallacy… well, it is actually pretty effective to make people worry about losing their stuff.
Anyway, all of this comes up because I am at that point where I have no plan in EVE Online. I didn’t log in much last month, stopped bothering with my PI, and basically did the minimum to remain looking active. That requires me to go on at least one strategic fleet op every month, though I usually just do two because they aren’t hard to find and when they’re purging the slackers you want to be a bit ahead of the curve.
But I can’t just log off and go away for months. I’d probably get away with it for six months, or maybe a year. They don’t purge people on a regular cadence. But if I did get purged it would mean having to deal with all my stuff, most of which is sitting in a Keepstar in the Insmother region of null sec. That is kind of a bad neighborhood if you aren’t in the gang.
Part of me is surprised I have as much stuff as I do because we moved from Delve to Tenerifis, which meant packing up and either hauling or shipping everything.
And then we moved again less than a year later, at which point I had to pack everything up again.
So you might image that I had lightened my load considerably… and I did… but stuff just starts to accumulate the moment you settle down in a new home. There are new doctrines which means buying new ships, there are various items from login rewards and such, and there is all the stuff from you get from ratting, which I don’t do a lot of, but I do enough to have to haul a blockade runner full of modules back home every so often.
It all adds up, and is made worse by the fact that I am that guy who still has the bag of marbles in his bank in WoW because you never know when that might be useful! I am the worst about that. I hesitate to mention what I have in my bank in EverQuest II.
When I get in this state, when there is no war happening and none on the horizon, where the summer doldrums have hit and most of the ops involve saving someone’s Rorqual from yet another INIT gang roving in our space, I often start thinking about taking a break.
But, as noted, that is not always easy. Stuff… always stuff… hangs over me.
So I do what I usually do in this situation, which is to start selling stuff off. I go into my hangar and sort everything by group, and then just start listing whole categories of things.
I’ll get in there and, one I make sure everything is repackages and is stacked up by type, I will select something like all the missile launchers, click on “sell” in the contextual menu, and the go through and price them all, one by one, checking the current market price for each, until I have them all set. Then I press the button and they are all listed.
Then I go on to the next item. Maybe it will be shield boosters, or propulsion modules, or armor hardeners, and do the same thing. A new batch of items will go up for sale.
I just listed all the drugs… excuse me, boosters… I had in my hangar. I have no idea where they all came from. I only held onto the Quafe Classic, which is something you only get from events and is of high value. Though, honestly, I should probably have just listed that as well.
I do this is groups, maybe one or two groups when I am logged in for a bit. I don’t want it to become a chore. I just want to lighten my load so, if I need to move I can.
Ships are… not more difficult, but more annoying to deal with. fitted ships at least. To sell a fitted ship you have to sell them via contract, and half the fitted ships in my hangar are from outdated doctrines. So what I should really do is strip them, repackage the hulls and all the modules, and sell them too.
More things to sell.
Now, what happens is that I transition to having no plan to having a plan. The plan is to sell everything off so I can walk away for a while. But it takes time. I keep finding new things to list. If I decide to strip a few more ships in order to repackage them, a bunch more stuff ends up in my hangar. I have to repackage all of that and then there is more stuff to list on the market.
I am not in a hurry either because, while I am down to one account, my subscription on that account doesn’t run out until February. Also, when I do finally decide to move I’ll need to resub my second account for at least a bit because once I can get everything pared down to the point that it will fit in a jump freighter, a fax, and a carrier, I’ll need somebody to go ahead and light cynos so I can get everything parked in a nice, safe low sec station.
Of course, now I am engaged with the game again, working towards a plan, a plan that has some time to run. So I start tending my PI again. If I am playing the market I might as well have a little bit more to list.
The sell off has gone so well that I earned one of the few achievements available outside of empire space in just a few days. All it required was selling 2.5 billion ISK of items in a regional market. Surprisingly, given the Fenris focus on empire space, selling in null sec counted.
Marginal Victory Achieved
(Also, you can see how quiet things have been for me. I haven’t even been through 30 different solar systems since Cradle of War launched back in early June.)
I am actually well past that mark. And while I had a couple of officer mods that sold for a decent amount, I have mostly been selling modules in the 1-8 million ISK range. I was just sitting on a lot of stuff.
So I will be at this for a while, so if something does start to happen in the interim, if there is a war or a deployment or some other adventure, I will probably still be around for it. I’ve done this whole “sell off and pack up routine” a few times before. The furthest I have gotten is right before PAPI invaded the Imperium back in 2020. I had already moved a carrier and a fax to a low sec station in Aridia, easy to do from Delve, when the drums of war started to bang.
Which, I will admit, ended up being pretty timely. Unlike a lot of people I did not have many things end up in asset safety when our structures began to fall. I had corralled most of my stuff in 1DQ and was selling it off of getting it ready to ship.
So for now I have a plan. We’ll see if another plan shows up to give me a reason to not simply finish this one up and drop out. New Eden has never failed on that front so far.