One Ship To Rule Them All

In a game defined largely by material assets such as ships, at least on the surface, there are often ships that stand out amongst others. For me, it was the Nighthawk. While on the one hand a lot of us are here in the AU-F because we enjoy meeting new and interesting people who we can enjoy the online entertainment industry with, we all maintain a secret guilty pleasure; our precioussssss ships. Everyone loves some good booty... er, I should say loot, and there are quite a few ways we all indulge ourselves whether it be Varian's drooling obsession with T3, Kuroda's abhorrent desire to fit everything with faction modules, or my own sick passion for collecting frozen corpses.


Summer of '08

Having never really experienced real PvP I found myself in an L4 last summer, with a few friends, scowling at a Heron that had warped into our mission, flipped our loot, and was blinking menacingly. Our friend Troy, who was hotheaded enough already, decided that he could not stand for this, and began firing on the frigate. Caught up in the heat of the moment I too assigned my drones to attack in attempt to eradicate this pest from the mission pocket.

Of course, the more experienced of you will realize, this was our first mistake. No sooner had we begun firing on the Heron, than it warped out, and a gang of T2 ships warped into the pocket on top of us, all blinking, locking us down with all the rage and fury of a Viking invasion. Here I was, fresh into a Hyperion that I had spent my last dime on a week earlier, being target locked by you guessed it, a Nighthawk. Oh the humanity! Missile after missile pounded my armor from what seemed like a million kilometers away, which was in reality maybe 50km. My armor, melting before my eyes, my ship worth more than the family jewels, pelted by death from afar, sent me trembling towards my warp button, as I headed for the nearest station. As I begin to align for warp I fired a few rounds off at him with my rail guns. The rounds hit, but there was not a scratch, he was totally unfazed. I was outclassed in every way. It was time to get out of Dodge. Much to my dismay, shortly after escaping certain doom, one of our pilots in a Harbinger was scrambled and made into little tiny pieces of space debris.

Even though everyone else managed to make it to safety somehow, the lesson had been taught. Nothing is ever as it seems in the dangerous world of EVE Online, and the dark seedy underbelly you find in most major cities in real life, is just a warp away in this MMO.

Having made a lasting impression on me, this Nighthawk pilot in fact did me a favor. Now I had witnessed just how devastating a substantial ship divide can be for a newer, inexperienced, or unprepared player. This Nighthawk, was the epitome of prowess and danger to me now, forming my outlook and sense of the game for months down the road.





Back to the present...

So ok, sure, everyone has had this kind of experience at one point in this game. It is the new player experience. It is no different than when we logged onto Warcraft for the first few weeks and see people in raiding purples, nor when undocking in a rookie ship after a few days of playing the game and suddenly find ourselves straddling a Freighter or Tier 3 battleship which seems to go on forever into space compared to our seemingly tiny gnat of a ship.

Now that I have the Nighthawk, have battle tested it in a real PvE scenario, and am preparing to usher it into PvP in the next few days, what are my impressions of how far I have come since last summer, and whether the long wait was worth it? After all, it took me nearly ten months of training to get to the point where I was ready to train to a ship that costs 250,000,000.00 ISK just to purchase let alone fit and rig.

Well, I am here to say, it was worth every second. Not only is this ship fun to pilot, but it gives you a sense that, well, your time in game has produced tangible results beyond the social aspect that keeps you coming back. Sure, I warn everyone to avoid acquiring more and more ships just for the sake of acquiring them, but given a positive outlook on the game that focuses on building relationships with other players online, I can indulge guilt free in such things as a shiny new 400,000,000.00 ISK Command Ship that I will gingerly take onto roaming gangs while I get a feel for its capabilities.

What does this say for the young character in the game, still focusing on leveling off those core skills, those battlecruisers, those first few T2 ships, and whatnot? Well, it says, hang in there! This game is about patience, not luck. When you set to train something, you wait, you do not hope. It will come! Those 45 day training regimens you ponder endlessly while staring at EVEMon and just wishing you could, "Fly that T2 ship already!", are worth every second. Because it happens, eventually, given time. No competing with people for drops, no worrying that everyone else will see your prized item drop whenever you are not present in the raid, no frustration when you accidentally spend too much DKP and you cannot even enter the running for it the one time it does drop, none of that.

We have quite a few former Warcraft raiders in this corporation, and I think they can all attest to the fact that in EVE everything comes with patience, which is such a wild change from relying so heavily on luck and perseverance.

In EVE, if you want it, you can have it. And I got it. My preciousssssss.







*Note: If you are interested in how I fit the Nighthawk for missions presently here is the build that I use. In the future, I am going to use a T2 Large Shield Transporter on Mithos which will allow me to boost the Nighthawk's DPS while maintaing a more than sufficient tank for any and all mission types.