Eve Mentality

     How many times have I heard, in just about any MMO that allows PVP, "Oh, I know he's a dick in the game, but I know him, and he's a great guy in real life".  Yeah, whatever.  That comment is especially common in Eve, and people try to sell the fact that just because you can be an asshole, it's ok to be an asshole.  Even though you're being an asshole to another person, it's ok because "it's just a game".  I call bullshit.

     I know lots of people.  Because I decide who I socialize with, who I voluntarily talk to and to a certain extent who I work with, the majority of these people are nice people.  Nice people don't need to be all gooey, be perfect, be polite to everyone all the time, donate to charities, help poor people build there houses, or any of that shit.  It's more than good enough to just not go out and screw with people just because you can, or more importantly, because you can get away with it.

     I know and hang out with great guys.  They are great guys at work.  At the hockey game.  When we go out drinking, or go to a movie, or go to the gym, or to a restaurant.  I even play some video games and MMOs with some of them, and they are nice guys in there too.  At no time, have I ever seen, or even heard, of an instance when any of these nice people fucked with someone just because they thought they could get away with it, or even when they didn't know that someone was watching them.  There are obviously grades of everything, and no one is perfect.  Everyone has that dark streak or dark patch in them.  It's just a matter of how easy it is to see it.

     When it comes to Eve, PVP, and more importantly non-consentual PVP is part of the game mechanics.  Engaging in PVP in low or null sec is no problem.  There are no game cops, the game mechanics allow it, and if you don't want any of that kind of PVP action, don't go in there.  Same goes for worm hole space.  Go in any of those game areas and don't be surprised to get your face melted.  I'm cool with that, and participated in that.  I've been blown away and podded in all areas of eve.  I've also blown away and podded guys in all areas of Eve, BUT, the guys that I did that to in high sec were war targets or ones I had kill rights on AND, the only guys I podded, were the guys talking shit.  Just because I can screw with guys, mainly newbies, in high sec, doesn't mean I will.  I'm an adult.

     High sec is a different story.  There are consequences.  There are repercussions, although slight, for non-consentual PVP, aka ganking.  Why?  Primarily because the people that are in high sec are there because they likely aren't interested in the other areas where it's more of a PVP free for all.  Plus, many other aspects of the game are available in high sec, and not available in other game areas.  The . . "hardcore", the "pvpers", like to call these high sec players carebears.  The carebears though, aren't completely safe up here.  There are ways to bait the foolish, the unwitting, or the naive into non-consentual pvp traps, or to declare a war on them or their corporation, and then you can legally shoot the carebears.

     Personally, I think the players who go around "playing" pirates, "pretending" to be griefers in the game space of Eve, are anything but "nice guys".  I know nice guys in Eve.  They're nice guys in real life.  The peopel who cause grief and anguish in any game, not just Eve, are doing it because they're dickheads.  Somewhere, for some reason, they've got some kind of anger issues, and on the internet, where there are no repercussions of any real significance, all it takes is just that little bit of anonymity, and the true nature of the asshole comes out.  It's right there, just under the surface.  So easy to get to.  This supposed "nice guy" only needs a couple minutes to log in, and they can be the asshole they really want to be in real life, but can't.  They've got issues.  Mental problems.  Suppressed anger. 

"My parents don't pay enough attention to me . . ."
"My parents are a drag . . ."
"The girls don't like me . . ."
"The boys don't like me . . "
'The cool guys/kids/girls won't let me hang out with them . .
"I hate my job . . ."
"I don't have a job . . ."
"Everyone thinks I'm a loser . . "
"I don't have a <insert name of some item> . . ."
Waaahh!!
"So, instead of getting a grip on my worthless life, I'm going to see if I can screw with everyone I come across, make them as miserable, or more miserable than me, and then my life won't be as pathetic, and I won't seem like such a loser."

Whatever their primary problem is, the second part of their personal scumbaggery, is that they're trying to sell the bullshit that being an asshole is ok, because it's a video game.  In the end, once the other people get over whatever the little net-baby did to them, the little griefer will still be a loser.  :)  When the little griefers come down off their griefing high, they find this out, but the thick ones, instead of realizing that nothing has been solved, go do it some more.  When there's a whole pack of them, curiously, it's important to be the biggest loser of the herd of losers.  In a litigious society, like the US for example, in the past where often a person could have that kind of stupidity pounded out of them, now, it can last and extend well into adult hood.

     I'm not a small guy.  I'm not a quiet guy either.  I've never had a problem making my position known, influencing people or "persuading" people.  While I am far from perfect, I at least had enough of a moral compass, and enough maturity, and enough of whatever else is involved, that I realized and understood that just because I COULD do something, or COULD get away with something, doesn't mean that I SHOULD do it.  Just because I could use a number of my talents, or physical size to get my way, doesn't mean that I should, and it certainly doesn't make it right.  Claiming anything else is the providence of the bully.  Electronic bullies in Eve are no less of an asshole than the bullies in real life.  They're still dickheads.  At least the bullies in real life have the balls to get up in your face.  I'll give them a sliver of respect for that.

     This is the age of the console kiddy though.  This is the age where it's all talk, like yapping dogs.  When I grew up, and til well into my 30s, it was still the age of not writing a cheque with your mouth, that your ass can't cash.  Even bullies often got what was coming to them.  Never underestimate the effect of a little guy with a baseball bat on the attitude of a bully.  Now though, there is nothing to get that angst out.  There are no fist fights like the "old days".  It's knives and automatic pistols and machine guns, and spineless drive-bys.  On the internet, it's puerile bravado.  Vapor.  Spineless machismo by sad little people, hiding behind a computer screen.  Like real life, the Eve gankers, griefers and "tough guys" are no different.  In the past, in real life, the vast majority of intarpipe tough guys would be gagging on their teeth.  If they're really lucky, in their life time, they won't see things go back to the way it used to be.  Every once in a while, I am amused to see when internet tough guys talk the same way to people in real life, and while they are stunned by the pain when someone punches them in the face, they are probably more stunned that they got punched in the first place.  Ooops!  You weren't talking shit to a microphone or a keyboard!  Unfortunately, a fist can't come out of the monitor to reset their fucked moral compass or their attitude.  Yet.

     At the same time, maybe all the little griefers in video games, that can unload their life issues in a virtual manner is a bit of a pressure relief valve and maybe lessens the likelyhood that they will explode in real life.  At the same time though, that doesn't take into account the reaction of real people, to their actions in the virtual world.  It is no real consolation that it is only "virtual" mayhem by latch-key and console kiddies, when other people, with no burning desire to make other people's lives as miserable as theirs, are just looking for some recreation or entertainment.

     With some of the comments and changes proposed, and slowly being implemented by CCP, in the interest of the Eve community and a healthy social fabric in the game, maybe the boys in Iceland are getting a little tired of the assholes that Eve is notorious for.  Not good for PR (except for attracting more angry, little losers . . ).  Not good for attracting people looking to play a game.  Only the small, and weak of mind, think that notoriety is just as good as popularity.  CCP knows the difference, and they might be steering toward "popular" instead.

The Point?  Much to the despair of the assholes in Eve, they might be forced to confine their talentless griefing asses to the areas of the game where there are other players that are more than capable of fighting back.  Unfortunately for the griefers, they'll find that consentual PVP areas will be a tougher arena than high sec with un-armed transports and new players with 10,000 skill points.  Poor babies ;)

The Plan: Plateaus and new peaks

     The training plan has thankfully reached a few new high points in the plan for Eve domination.  Sort of unanticipated, but as the core skills all get up near max, that makes it much easier to start branching out sideways into many new shiny boats.  It also frees up the mental load, and allows one to think of other interests in the Eve-verse.

     The main has finally gotten into his Hulk and is nearly trained to Exhmuer 4, which is where he'll sit for a while.  Rep is up to lvl 4 with Carthum, so a lvl 3 R&D agent is busy plugging away at about 100 RP/day.  Not a lot, but a start.  I could, and want to, talk to a lvl 4 R&D, but I need to train the science skills up to lvl 4, and that takes a little over 3 days x 4 skills.  I have some other things that I want to do before devoting a couple weeks to that.  Incursions are coming along nicely, and I'm planning to try to FC a some fleets, starting tonight.  I'm 4 days away from flying a fairly shiny-fitted Bhaalgorn, so I bought one along with some faction webbers, and other mods.  I'll point the toon at flying that and then it will hopefully be fairly easy to get Incursion invites with a tricked out dual-web boat.  That would mean more isk.  At the same time, if I find I am fine with FCing Vanguards, I can get isk whenever I want to built a corp/alliance fleet, or just PUG it.  After that, I'll see about topping up the science skills while mining/Incursion-ing isk, and then put him in an Orca to help with transportation duties to get back to COSMOS missions, as a better transport boat for mining ops, and as a possible future WH closer.

     My main alt is now only 2 skills out from a perfect Orca pilot, but those two skills are going to be almost 2 months of training.  She's got the books now, so she's headed towards R&D skills as well now and should be ready to talk to agents by the time all her skills are up.  She's also going to Metallurgy and Research 4 (at 3s now) and I'll start picking up some BPOs and work their ME and PE up in prep for later.  I'll get her warfare link skills all up to 4's (mostly 3s now) so she can run a boost Orca for the COSMOS and lvl 4 combat missions, and provide ship fitting and loot/salvage storage.

     The other two alts are now perfect hulk pilots, and topped off the last of their drone skills to lvl 4.  They're now also training up some of the science skills to do some R&D.  The one alt will be then heading towards a logi ship to help support mission running, while the other goes straight at combat ships.  The logi alt also has metallurgy and research up to 3 already, and will go to 4s to help with basic ME and PE duties too.  I could easily dual box two DPS incursion boats, but until I get more experience, I doubt I could dual box a logi and a DPS.  So, the combat alt will head towards some kind of a shiny and double the Incursion income.

     The two newest toons are slowly building up their skills as needed.  they can both fly BCs in support of some of the tougher COSMOS missions, but they are also just finishing off their last science skill for the R&D agents, and they can both run lvl 4 missions with Carthum too.  After that, the one toon goes towards the last 7 or 8 days for her Hulk, while the other does the last 8 or 9 days for his Iteron 5.  When that is reached, they'll both head towards the 12 day span for lvl 4 science skills, and then go for multiple R&D agents.  I might get one of them to start doing ME/PE research too.  The other alt has high salvage and ORE industrial skills, so it'll run salvage duty on the higher level missions while the other 2 combat boats (BSs of some flavour) will finish up mission sites and one runs off for more missions.

     I'm not in any rush to sprint up to the control panel and hammer the "I WIN!" button, so as I look more into the indy side, I see more areas of Eve to explore.  They are all rather time intensive skills though, so I'll make sure they can all fly some decent combat and support ships first before going too hard at manufacturing.  There are so many unique missions to run, in so many different areas of Eve space, that I think the wormhole part of the plan will be put on pause for the time being.  With a higher competency and interest in indy play, I'm looking more closely at POS operation.  My main can set up a high sec POS now, and between myself and a couple others, we'll either massage the players of a corp or buy a high rep corp to set up a POS.  Lots of time for that as I start picking up certain BPOs and research them.

New goodies are good goodies

     Well, there certainly are a pile 'o features coming up in the Crucible update.  There's lots of technical info regarding the tweaks to the ships and guns, especially for the Gallente.  That's great, but as I don't have a lot of seat time in Gallente boats, ATM, the updates will likely be live before I get flying the boats much, so the improvments will likely go un-noticed, save for all the (hopefully) raves by more frequent Gallente fliers.

     Some of the things I am looking forward to though, are the T2 warfare links.  That will be interesting, but will definitely add a pile of time to the training que.  The ship fitting window tweaks are also going to be handy for the stats geeks when it shows outgoing drone, turret and missile DPS, as well as the defensive DPS your boat can take.  A cool aspect is also that missed shots, will actually miss now.  When I tried Perpetuum, that's how they treat missed shots.  There's supposedly a new layout for the autopilot display, and the thing I look forward ot the most is the new warp and dock/jump/activate feature.  Apparently, coming soon, when you select a gate, and hit "D" (dock/warp/jump/activate), you will now warp to the gate, and then automatically jump through.  Awesome.  There might be a counter for the ship spinners too.  Funky, but I plan to be undocked too much to ever worry about that.

     One of the best things, that hopefully puts a damper on griefers, is that there will be no insurance payout when you get Concorded.  Yay!  Poor little griefers.  So, hopefully that makes people pause before trying to use the new tier 3 glass cannons for griefing, but then again, with the Gallente weapon buffs, and all the other ship upgrades, it might make it easier to gank people using cheaper boats anyway.  I guess we'll have to see how that works out.

The Plan: Pie for everyone, part deux

     Last time, when talking about pie charts and skill training, I got hungry.  Had to take a little time out to aggro some banana cream pie of my own.  Additionally, it made the post length somewhat less epic in length.  It's all good though, so now, on to the last two toons.

     The 5th toon is a family member's account who is fairly engrossed in higher learning at the present, and currently lacks the spare time to engage in space-based Tom-foolery.  Her toon is Gallente, and was trained in basic combat ships and skills for initial mission running.  It has fewer skill points than the other 4 toons.  I picked up the gauntlet, and spent a few days to quickly get her into a Mammoth, so the other 4 toons could utilize their higher level mining skills, and she could empty mining jet cans instead.  I then pointed her at the mining barges, and the core skills needed to fly them, as well as some drone skills for mining drones and combat air patrol for rats.  It's sort of a disjointed effort while chasing skills on a beginner toon, when you have more advanced requirements for its use.  As of late, she has been trained up to BCs and some gunnery skills to help out on the COSMOS missions, and she has trained the major R&D skills, and is now training the minor skills to level 3 to talk to the R&D agent.  She's one of the 3 initial R&D toons and also has salvage skills to help out when running missions.  Once the science skills are up to minimum, she'll head for a hulk and then start the process of bringing the core skills up, the way the other toons did.  She'll get a healthy dose of combat skills to complete her ability to mine, and then, we'll see what the plan will be, but that will be at least a couple months down the road.

     The last toon is another family member engaged in the throes of higher education.  He's also interested in Dust 514, but I'm not sure if this account will be the one used over XBox, are a separate account will handle that if he indeed has the time to play.  It's another Gallente toon, and another with a start on basic combat skills and ships, and the toon with the lowest skill points.  This toon assumed the role of jet can transport in an Iteron 4, and the previous toon was promoted to miner in her Retriever.  This toon also trained for R&D and was running COSMOS missions and distribution missions for rep, and can now decently fly a battle cruiser.  He can also fly a Retriever and will go for an Iteron 5 after the other science skills are finished up, then possibly a hulk as well.  He'll also top up all his core skills and then we'll see where he's at after a few months, and much more missioning.

     As mentioned, all the toons can salvage, as I have this ADHD thing with leaving wrecks=cash=loot=cash, so any boat except for the main pew pew ship has at least a salvager, if not a salvager and a tractor beam on it.  All the toons are all trained to PI 4, so with the recent PI and POCO changes, the prices have apparently gone up and there might be some extra cash from PI now too.  As time marches on, I'll be able to mount a 4 hulk, 1 Orca, 1 Iteron 5/hulk mining fleet, which should be some fairly healthy ore, for high, null or WH space action.  My main can run L4 missions with Carthum, so he's fleeted up with the other two newest toons to accelerate their climb to L4, which should happen before their science skills are done.  Then, with 3 Lvl 4 research agents going, I can fleet up the other toons to accelerate their rep to L4 in preparation for their R&D as well.  My main has high enough rep already to set up a POS in high sec now, sweet, but there are a lot of manufacturing skills to be initially trained, and POs setup and management, as well as the corp and permissions, are still a big unknown for me.  Still making good isk, managing the toons, and lots of interesting things to explore yet, so I can level up some more mission/COSMOS/Incursion related skills before worrying about more grandiose things.

The Point?  Plans are a good thing to have, and if you can stick to it and endure the long haul, it's very satisfying to finally reach major plateaus and goals. :D

Incursions, too

     My first foray into Incursions was with my alliance.  Low pressure, low key, a bunch of players I knew or was familiar with.  It was good.  I had red a lot of information about gankers, griefers and shitty FCs.  Not exactly love stories for a player with an expensive boat, not that a N Geddon is even close to the cost of a Mach, or Nightmare, or other such ships.  But for those "war stories", that was enough to make me leery of hooking up in a PUG.  This time though, I had a couple hours to burn, so I thought what the hell.

     I slow boated over to the closest Incursion system, and opened up the public shield fit channel.  Figured I'd spam them both with my fit while I sat there waiting.  I was using 4 other toons to mine and run missions.  Figured I might as well make some cash while I was floating in space.  Progress was slow.  Not a lot of people seemed to be around, so I watched people advertise their fits and preferred Incursion name in the chats, and added my name to the mix every few minutes.  About 15 minutes went by.  When it rains, it pours though, and all of a sudden, 3 people were asking for DPS boats, and asking to X-up with fits.  Cool.  Dropped my fit in the chat, got picked up right away, and then the 7 man fleet slowly started to dwindle after a couple minutes of waiting for logi boats.  Meh, so I dropped fleet too, and went back int other mix.  Another fleet was asking right away too, so I dropped my fit again.  Got picked up by a large fleet that was ready to go.  Strong fleet too.  4 Machs, 2 Nightmares, Tempest, me, and 3 logis.

     The FC was pretty laid back, no anchor, no drone controller, just drop in, stay where you are, and blow the crap out of the standard mobs.  Great fleet, lots of horsepower, and people knew how to use their boats. We mopped up a lot of rooms in pretty short order, 8 or 9, and then the FC had to log.  A couple others left too, but the core stayed.  We only had to pick up a handful more players to flesh out the fleet.  A Vindicator, Bhaalgorn and another logi, and then off we went again.

     Once again, we had some fairly decent firepower.  There were a couple other fleets in system, one having even more DPS than us, and another one with considerably less.  Two or three of the Vanguard rooms were contested, but only one was against the big dogs, the other two were against the weaker fleet.  Again, good logis, a good FC, and I think the biggest thing was that the mobs were going down so fast that worrying about taking incoming fire was pretty much a moot point.  We managed to run 7 or 8 more sites, and then that FC had to leave too, and the rest of the fleet broke up soon after.  Perhaps my first incursion PUG was a rare good one, but I doubt it.  No one was commenting on how the fleet was a good one and a nice change from all the shitty ones, so for that reason, I'm thinking that decent fleets are the norm, not the exception.  I got another .35 Concord rep increase, and a little over 170 million in just less than 2½ hours.  A few more runs like that and I'll have my own Bhaalgorn.

The Point?  Drop into an Incursion system, advertise your bad self, and start blowing rat faces off :)

PI, POCO and PITA

     Dontcha just love acronyms, or at least short forms?  Sometimes, it's almost as if it's this unspoken race or contest to see who can come up with the most apt acronym for some new game feature.  PI is an oldie and a goodie, but new ones like "POCO" are tougher, and can be a PITA to figure out.

     So, the Player Owned Customs Office (aka POCO) were a recent announcement of a revamp for the whole PI thang.  It's clever, because it feels like it will fit nicely with the whole Dust 514 thing when it goes live.  Control the planet, control the resources, control the customs office, control the resource access.  Lots of sand box room in there.  I imagine strong enough corporations might make a living at building and defending POCOs, and not really give a shit about the PI or the systems/sovereignty, and might be able to make a living just charging for access to their resources on the planet.  I also imagine that planet owners would not allow such things to happen, but there might be all kinds of new and clever player services to be offered in cojunction with the POCOs.  Time will tell.

     Also, in line with the POCOs, and the enhanced need for building resources now, there's also the Goon ice blockade.  Apparently, many, if not all, of the PI products are starting to become more expensive.  As PI is a fairly mind numbing thing to do, even though it only takes a couple of minutes, and also seeing as how  was clever enough to train ALL the toons, including some of their alts, up to L4 PI, I should get off my space-ass and fire up the extractors again.  I was only producing a single product, so I would probably have to go shopping for a couple more planets to produce more items though.  I would imagine the P3 items would have the biggest price increase - but could be wrong on that.  The fact that areas now run out of resources, and the operations occasionally have to be moved, sort of made me lose interest for a while.  I'll have to check the market and see if the increase in prices injects iskie signs in my corneas aand piques my interest again.  PI is something I should be more interested in if I figure I want to fly a POS some day when I grow up.

The Point?  Whenever there's some kind of task or activity in a game, that is a PITA to do, especially for a consumable item, there's usually money to be made.

The Plan: Pie for everyone, part 1

     I like pie.  Lots of different pies.  Some not so popular, but still pie.  Pies are handy in other ways than filling that sweet spot, they're good for organizing things into manageable slices.  Whether that's rhubarb, lemon meringue, chocolate ice cream, or information.  Pies, I think, are the awesome sauce of life.

     Eve gives you running totals on skill points, and indicates how many skill points you've spent in each of the major skill areas.  For someone with a head for numbers, they can likely picture that in their mind.  For someone like me with a head for pies, it just makes me hungry, and I wonder how much whip cream I have left.  If I can organize the skill points into a pie shape or pie chart, well, that's almost as good as hot apple pie and vanilla ice cream.  While Eve itself can't perform such feats of culinary organization, Evemon certainly can, which you can find if you randomly dig around long enough.  Which I did, because who actually reads the instructions that come along with software, right?  Am I right?  I think I'm right.

     My plan for skill training and Eve experiencing and experimentation involved a number of stages, and as it is pretty much still chugging along in the intended direction, all the tertiary skills that were needed here and there, to accomplish said plan, were sort of unanticipated at the time I planned my plan.  I had a pretty good, but rough, idea of where I wanted to go, but was fairly unaware of all the other supporting skills I'd need for some aspects of the plan.  Looking at the prerequisites for all the skills is pretty time consuming, and, well, boring.  Even still, I am slowly getting to where I want, and wanted, to go, and that is pretty cool.  Thinking about all the extra skills I needed, though (especially with the addition of R&D to the plan), I was curious how the skill points were actually being spent, so I thought I would whip up some pies and see.

     My main started out without any plan, other than me seeing how many different kinds of shiney spaceships I could fly, and it was awesome.  Not extremely efficient as far as flying ships well, but definitely fun for flying different ships.  my friend had great focus and aimed straight at specific ships, well up the skill tree, but I was all over the place.  Even now, it's still the biggest slice of pie.  I pointed the toon slightly sideways at mining as getting up to level 3 combat missions with mediocre combat skills was a bit of a pain, so industry got a lot of love too.  Surprisingly, science is the 2nd biggest slice of pie, but that is no doubt because of the scanning skills, mining prerequisites, and most recently, the science skills for R&D.  Taking the time to finally round off most of the core skills brought engineering and electronics up a lot and now gunnery, drones, with the other two, are pretty well fleshed out to level 4.  Mechanic, I thought, would be bigger, but most of the skills are only trained high enough to just get into the level 1 rigs, so lots of skills are trained, but not very high.  Navigation also has most of the core skills up to 4, but it is supprisingly small too.  Missiles were trained up and aimed at stealth bombers, so it's small, and the rest of the smaller slices were specifically trained only for individual tasks.  I don't see too much leadership training until I start looking at things like carriers for this toon.  There will be more points going into industry for his hulk (3 days to go), and then a few more refininng skills for different mining crystals, but then he'll be getting a lot of love in the gunnery and ship departments to start flying the big boats, plus likely a base Orca pilot.  The combat and ship skills will also help a lot for level 4 combat missions, Incursions, and the COSMOS missions.

     My main alt started life specifically as a miner, first at a hulk, then as an Orca pilot.  Pretty skill intensive to head for maxxing out the miners and transport and industrial command ships, so it's no wonder spaceship command is such a big pie slice.  She's going to go Caldari for the combat ships as very few points have gone into anything but industrials.  Industry is big because she is also the main refiner.  Leadership is big because she is also the main booster for the mining fleets, so the other leadership skills were also trained.  The plan is for her to fly carriers and logi ships too.  It'll be easy to build those on top of the leadership skills she's already got for running mining fleets.  Her core skills are up to the same level as my main, but she has minimal combat skills, and needs to top up her basic drone skills.  She's 4 days away from mining director 5, and then just needs 2 more level 5s to have perfect orca skills.  They're big skills though.  Warfare link specialist and ore industrial.  I'll fleet her up with the otherr missions runners to build rep for the month+  it'll take to get those skills up, then she can top up her drones and start working on her ship and missile skills.  She's also going to pay a role as either research, invention or production.  She'll run as fleet booster for running level 4's and be an on-site fitting service in case mods need to be switched.

     The 2nd also also started life directly as a mining alt, but also trained her for running a Mammoth for the little mining fleets.  Not as many skill points as the other two toons, but the majority are in industrial ships, and then supporting industrial skills for T2 miners and crystals.  Science is big because of astrogeology 5, and it will get bigger when she heads toward the R&D skills.  Engineering is big in proportion to the rest of the core skills as she has nothing in combat skills, and the rest of engineering, electronics, navigation and mechanics are only skills in support of running a hulk.  Enough skills in PI to get to level 4, and that's it.  This toon is going to be Minmatar, will likely be a basic Orca pilot eventually too, but mainly a combat pilot with a secondary in manufacturing.  Right now, she's a perfect miner and is working on topping off her drone skills.  Next will be R&D skills, then a quick shot straight up to battle cruisers to help with missions and run COSMOS.

     This is my brother's toon that he hasn't had time to play in a while, so I'm making sure the electricity stays connected, and the grass gets cut :)  It has more skill points than the other two alts, but not as many as my main.  He started it aimed at mainly combat ships, LOTS of combat ships and had basic gunnery skills trained to get into some cruisers.  I took it and aimed it at an Iteron 5 so it could shuttle ore as I jet can mine with the other toons.  After that, I put it in a hulk and it's 2 days away from being a perfect hulk pilot now.  It's staying Gallente.  It can fly a freighter and a blockade runner, and I also intent to spend a couple days to get it into basic Orca pilot skills.  The big boats it can fly are the explanation for the ship heavy skill distribution.  Once it's done with the hulk, it'll top up it's drone skills, and then the science skills for R&D.  It has mostly level 4 skills in all the core areas as well, and will head toward mainly combat ships and carriers, so the slices of gunnery, and ships, with possibly more drone and some missile love, are all in its future too.  Big boats, big guns, and it'll be doing the COSMOS runs too.

     Between these 4 toons, all the races are covered, for flexibility, but my main is high enough in skills that it's very easy to switch between the faction boats of the different races, and likely in time, all the boats.  All the toons will/do have salvage skills and can fly a Noctis, so I can scoop some extra shinies during missions too.  Having all 4 races should allow for good flexibility in speed running level 4 missions.  The other two toons will be covered in another post . . .