2013-12-23

Three Year Eval

On January 22nd, 2011 (a few days before my son was born), I tried out Eve for the second time. (I'd first tried it back in 2006, but it didn't really take at the time.)

It's now almost three years, 65 million skill points, and ~4000 logins later, so I thought I'd do a quick retrospective, as I've done in the past, but looking mostly at hard numbers.

Punching the Clock

As I mentioned, I've logged into Eve on my various accounts about about 4000 times since returning to the game, averaging about 75 minutes per login. I've been active for just over 1000 days, so on average I logged in at least two of my accounts every day during that time. (That's not accurate: for much of that time, I had more than two accounts running, and have had several months where I didn't log in at all, due to other stuff going on.

All that works out to about 2.5 years of 40 hour weeks, if this were a job. Obviously, it's not split up that way in reality, because the online time was often doubled (two characters logged in at once), sometimes tripled, and I'm obviously not only logging in during the work week.

At peak activity, I've had four accounts active, but between CCP promotions and a couple years with a media account, I've at most paid outright for two accounts, at any given time. That's how many I keep active now, with the others mothballed and full of industry toons for which I have no current use. Given that I maintain three yearly family accounts for a couple Kingsisle games we almost never play, I don't consider the costs of Eve particularly onerous.

Given the amount I estimate I've spent on the game for subscriptions and collector's edition and the time logged, I'm getting about two minutes of entertainment per penny.  Compare that to our average trip to the movies, where the ratio is approximately 20 seconds of fun per penny (assuming my wife and I split the tickets and concessionn), and I feel just fine about my entertainment choices.

And that ratio of value only counts online time, of course - I do a lot of entertaining and mentally stimulating noodling, writing, and talking about the game when I'm not playing it as well (not to mention the not-insignificant benefit of maintaining a regular writing habit).  All in all, I consider it all money and time well-spent, especially when I can (and have) spent months largely away from the game for other things (barring updating skill training queues). It's a great game for knowing you're getting something accomplished even when you don't have time to play right now.

Shooting Stuff

Especially in the last year and a half, my focus in the game has largely been PvP. On my main combat character, I've gotten 730 PvP skip kills and 251 losses, total. On average, that's worked out to me getting a kill slightly more than every other day (actually, it works out almost exactly to two kills every three days), which isn't terrible, especially when you figure that I probably went at least a year on the account before getting into PvP in any serious way.

All those wrecked ships work out to 65 billion ISK in losses for my opponents (about $2100 USD, if you pay any attention to largely meaningless ISK to USD conversions worked out based on the list price for a PLEX in- and out-of-game) - and 8 billion ISK in losses (which is less than the value of the ships I currently have scattered around in hangars at the moment). On average, ships I killed were worth about 90 million a pop, and the ships I lost averaged a price tag of about 30 mill. All in all, those are ratios I'm quite happy with.

Plans for the Future


Nothing particularly fancy. Shoot stuff. Blow up amusingly. I'm happy in Faction Warfare with Ty, and I've got a training plan set up for him right now that should have him at level 4 ISIS mastery for every class of sub-capitol in the game (he's got much of that done already) and well on the way to solid Dreadnought and (maybe) Carrier skills by the end of the year. I'm in no rush for the Carrier ship skills, as Bre has Ty covered in that department, with nigh-perfect Logistics skills and closing in on level 4 ISIS mastery with every model of carrier - she makes staying mobile easy. Cyno is green.

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