Hands Off, My Loots!

Casiella, from over at Ecliptic Rift (by the way, one of my favorite blogs…go read it), recently posed a question.  I’ve been meaning to get to it, and it’s taken me longer that I expected, but finally…here it is.

…what sandbox professions do you really like? Maybe you practice them yourself, or maybe you just enjoy the fact that they exist, but which ones really expand the world for you?

I know, it’s extremely obvious what I’m going to say here.  Ninja Salvaging!

WRONG!!!

Ninja Salving is my profession, yes…it does not expand the world for me.  I’ve found all I can find in Ninja Salvaging, I’ve taken it as far as I can, and I’ve done it well (I like to think).  Yes, it’s a really fun thing to do, and it’s what I focus on in my day to day dealings.  But in terms of the question Casiella posed…it does not give me that sense of wonder, or awe anymore.

So what does do this for me?  The Market!  Player banking, scamming, trade, insurance fraud.  All of that, the overall meaning of isk in EVE is what drives me to an extent.  Having the ability to do whatever you want, in any way you want is just awesome.

In EVE, you don’t just buy stuff from the NPCs and sell stuff to them, it most normally goes to another player.  But even that in itself is boring.  So what!  People makes stuff, they sell stuff, they blow stuff up…it’s just economics, not that interesting.

Wait! I know that, that crap is boring…but look closer.  The part that is interesting…the part that really captures me is when you get past the CCP created part of the economy.  Look at the player run banks, stocks, bonds, even mutual funds…not to mention ponzi schemes and just outright scams.  The fact that this stuff started from the ideas of players, and in many cases have been highly detailed in guides, blog posts, and forum threads…and people still fall for them…is just bewildering to me.

And then, my interest goes even further than that.  I see people posting things that other people immediately reply back with “you shouldn’t have said that, now it won’t work anymore”.  Only in EVE is this normally not true.  The Devs don’t run off to squash the abilities of people to scam, or collect their billions of isk in interest from loans.  Have you ever seen a loan shark in WoW that could completely destroy your ability to play the game?  No?  Well I’ve seen it done in EVE.

The world of isk in EVE can be a bright light, shining for the wealth that is out there to gather…or it can be a lurking spider, ready to leap from it’s trap and inject it’s prey with the venom of the “ragequit”.

THAT is what I find the most interesting about EVE…and secretly…it’s what I’m the most talented at

If you are reading this post right now, it’s for one of three reasons:

1. You saw my new post on the old podlogs site and clicked the link (probably the most likely)
2. You already knew about this site from the couple of times I’ve left comments linking to this site rather than podlogs on accident (done that about 20 times or so)
3. You searched for “Crazy, Homosexual Monkey Sex” in google. (Not very likely…but now that it’s here…I’m sure it’ll work in a few days…)

As much as I liked PodLogs (props to a really great service), I just wanted my own domain name and site again so I could edit whatever I wanted and make it look just how I want.  The freedom that having my own site provides is just something I realized I need after being with a free host for a while.

Some of you may or may not know, but I have run my own hosting company for almost 6 years…sadly I’ve recently had to shut it down do to lack of time and…well…lack of customers because of the lack of time.  So rather than hosting everything myself on my own servers, I decided to go with @AnMiTh who runs an awesome EVE hosting service over at Lonetrek.ws.  He’s got really cheap prices (and you can pay in either cash, or ISK) and a great service…and since I’ve been a host for 6 years…I don’t say that lightly…I’m hard to please when it comes to hosting providers.  If you are looking for a place to call your own for you blog…please check out Lonetrek…you won’t regret it!

Well, since I’m in a linking, talking about other people mood…I guess I’ll mention that I’ve decided to steal some ideas from Casiella.  About a month ago he made a post on his blog about some excellent WordPress Plugins…which I’ve already installed on the site here.  I’ve still got a lot more to do…but I’ve got enough done to make myself feel like I’m ready to launch the site (hence the reason I’m writing this post).

I still need to redo all my Tags and edit some links in previous posts, as well as getting everyone to change their links/rss feeds to the new site. (hint hint: if you are reading this…you can change your link to http://handsoff.myloots.com and rss feeds to http://handsoff.myloots.com/feed)

Hopefully everyone will enjoy the new site as much as I know I will…be on the lookout for some good changes in the near future…and a new style of posting category sometime this week!