High-Sec Vacation

High-Sec gets kind of stale when you live there long term.  Missions seem more boring.  Earning lots of ISK seems pointless.  There's just nothing to it but the bare mechanics of the game.  That is how I felt about it the last few years, while playing casually in High-Sec.  It's also part of the reason I moved into a wormhole, I needed more challenges to stay interested in the game.  But everything changes when you are just visiting, passing through on the way back to something harder.  I hadn't felt this way about High-Sec since I last lived in Null-Sec.  Suddenly the calm safety was refreshing, even if the urge to spam d-scan was hard to ignore.

Saturday morning I logged in and started a new ritual of scanning down the hole with my alt.  This will happen each day until I get Niskin back inside.  My wormhole is finicky and is unlikely to give me a good entrance for at least a week.  On any given day I always have 4 or more connections, This time I barely had three.  My two statics and a frigate hole to w-space.  I forget where the Null connection went but it was too remote to bother with.  I checked out the C5, it had one static to a C1.  I decided not to take it any further than that yet.

The thing is, if I dig deep through a chain to find an entrance I will probably find one.  Then after I get in I'll have High-Sec K162s every day for a week.  I'll play Bob's game, but on my own terms.  He's going to give me something good eventually and I'm willing to wait for it, for now.

Before Friday night I'd actually been considering taking a week and spending it in High-Sec, but wasn't sure when would be a good time for that.  I had some loot to move around, things to organize, and just general upkeep that I hadn't done before going to w-space.  After I finished scanning down the wormhole with my alt I switched back to Niskin and continued working on those tasks.  I hauled the loot from Yulai and Pashanai to Jita and sold it.  Then I headed for my High-Sec mission hub.

The goal at this point was to cover the loss of the Prowler before I even got back into the wormhole.  I skipped a drone mission, then a burner mission, and then had to lose some standing skipping a Low-Sec mission.  Finally I got something worth running, Mordu's Folly 1 of 2.  I ran that and looted it, which was when I noticed I had a bunch of old loot sitting around from previous missions.  I decided I'd haul all that to Jita and sell it also.  Using the Prowler it's a much shorter trip cutting through Low-Sec.  But that would have to wait, I was done for the day and wanted to stay in the mission hub until I knew what was up with the wormhole entrances.

The next day, on Sunday, I logged in and scanned down the hole again.  This time it was worse, there were just my two statics.  Null was a bust, the connection was to Detorid, near Insmother.  My C5 static led to a hole with a C3 static.  I started scanning the C5 down to see if any inbounds would make my day.  The first one I found was to Null again.  Before I could go out through it, a ship came in through it, an Astero piloted by somebody involved with the Northern Coalition.  Once again I said screw it and headed back to my home hole.

Switching back to Niskin I ran another L4 mission.  The 2 of 2 on Mordu's Folly is a faction mission with no bounties so I skipped it and got Unauthorized Military Presence.  That was worth running and was a breeze in the Scorpion Navy Issue that I keep around for such things.  After the cleanup I took all the loot from both missions, and the stuff I had sitting from before, and headed to Jita.

That put me a bit closer to where I was before Friday night.  If I can get those stolen POS arrays out and sell them, along with a few other things, I should break even.  But we are now about a week past my second month in the hole.  Normally I'd have done a recap post for the month by now.  I may still do one, but it's clear that December will come out as a loss, even if the actual loss was in January.

Sunday night I didn't sleep, at all.  I tried but it never happened.  I've had that problem a few times in the last year.  So I took the day off work but didn't really play, other than a quick scan of the wormhole, which came back with nothing exciting.  Today is Tuesday and I'll try again tonight.  We'll see how long it takes to get back in.

Note: A few posts back I said I was at 21 days of fuel in the tower.  Since then I've produced a few more and put all my reserves in the tower.  Before getting podded out Friday night I had just over 28 days left again, so things are fine in that regard.  One thing is sure though, I'll be bringing more fuel in on the return trip.  If I let this go too long it will take a lot of work to stock back up again.