The Long Game

One thing which fascinates me about EVE is that you can play the game at three paces simultaneously - the short game, medium game and long game.

The majority of the time you play the mid-term game; resourcing, logistics, petty day-to-days. This is fascinating in and of itself, and here I put in PVE in all it's forms, and industry. PI, for example, you do for mid-term goals such as affording a new PLEX, or a new ship, or saving versus a rainy day. You may not know what the rainy day is yet, but you save for it. This includes, incidentally, skill queues etc.

Some of the time you play the short game; tactics, PVP, marketing. This is the most exciting part, obviously, mid-term game that you've been playing for days, weeks or months to get whaat you need to get in order to do PVP, you couldn't really PVP. Not outside of noob ships.

When you get up to the level of bittervet (it's an official rite of passage whining on the forums) you get to play the Long Game. This is the engine room of content creation, emergent game play, diplomacy, wholesale spying and insertion of rogue elements into foreign entities to gather intelligence. This is the game you play in nullsec, we are told.

But, honestly, the boiler room of the Long Game is really the wormhole environment. You hear about people plotting super kills in nullsec for a month? Well, in w-space, feuds last several years. People seed caps into wormholes a month ahead of schedule. Corporations and members plot betrayals over the course of months, and execute them on command.

People camp systems for shinies, for capitals, for ganks regularly. Literally at any time, BUGRY has 2-3 alts camping various bear dens, just in case. I have a couple of corps, entire corps, on watchlist, gathering behavioural patterns and noting them down in logs, to hopefully map out the golden time to seed a cloaky fleet for a gank on a weekend.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you play the Long Game solo. Like when your alt gets trapped in a wormhole. This tips the intel gathering process on its head, and so you stay logged out all weekend and gather intel on watchlists, and you discover 17 toons really are only 3 guys. You discover that they all sign in prime Russia time, and only then.

So, plans to tip over at least 2 POSs on Tuesday. Or at least get the second into armour, so they can't unanchor it without significant logi humping, which I don't know that they will do.

Gambaratsu!