Greetings All!
This is technically my third Eve trial. The first was way back in 2006 or thereabouts when I was sent a 14 day trial offer by Amazon or something along those lines. Anyway, I thought the game was ok but I was heavily into WoW at that point and ended up back among the gnomes and dwarves raiding various dungeons for purple shinies.
My second trial was around this time last year where I planned to try and PLEX the account but ended up being side tracked far too much and trying my hand at a little of everything on the pve side of things. I did manage to make 300 out of the 600 (at the time) million necessary to plex the account and given a couple more days I really think I could have made it as most of my income was station trade or inter-hub trade related which should have grown exponentially as profits were reinvested.
This time around I did more research and planned to do something a little more interesting than station trading or indeed mining. Not that there's anything wrong with either of those things, I just wanted to take a more active part in the game. With that in mind I stumbled upon exploration and decided that it would be my primary source of income.
For those that may not know, exploration involves using special probes you launch from your ship to scan the local area for anomalies in space which could be relic or data sites or something less useful to an explorer such as combat sites, wormholes or gas sites. Once you have a good enough signal you can warp to the location of the anomaly and should find several containers (hopefully) full of loot and ripe for the picking. But before you can loot them you need to hack into them using a relic or data analyzer to implant a virus. The virus takes the form of a mini game which is both fun and frustrating.
Now I'm pretty sure last year I gave exploration a miss because I vaguely remember after you cracked open the container with the virus it spewed out loot into space which you had to furiously click to capture before it despawned. However I may either be going mad or thinking of another game. Even so, the mechanics as they are now are fine and you're able to open the container like any other cargo container or wreck and take the goodies. I'd heard that relic and data sites in null sec space could net you between 20 and 80 million each so obviously my sights were set on null for the high risk, big win situation but even high security exploration seemed to have it's merits so I decided to try my hand at high sec to learn the ropes and see where I go from there.
So plan in hand and target set, I downloaded the client and set up a 21 day buddy trial account using a link I found on a blog about exploration. Now it's time to see if my plans come to fruition or if I get distracted like last year. Keep reading to follow Spaktula's journey to PLEX his account from nothing in 21 days (or hopefully less!)
