PRESENT DAY:
It has taken me this long to realise I have made a mistake in my reporting. In writing this weeks article one thing comes across, things are getting boring.
One of my opening remarks in this series was the justification I gave you all regarding my deposit of £10. The reason I gave was that a series of articles about me sweating would simply not be interesting to read. However, every time something interesting happens to me, I find I struggle to report it as people will be able to work out who I am and therefore ruin the experiment. This means if I stick to my own rule, you are about to get a series of articles about how many bombs I dropped ever day for the next 15 days.
Due to this, the next article I publish will have some pretty major rule changes applied to it. More information about what is to come, and the changes I am making are at the bottom of this article.
Meanwhile, on with the show!
DAY 11:
Today I continued my skilling of mining. Things seemed to be going pretty well, I was loosing a little on average each run, but not so fast that I was worried my bombs would disappear before graduating my disciple period. Whilst I was selling some of my ores at auction and preparing to buy more bombs, a nice suprise was waiting. Several blueprints had been left on the counter of the auction by Xander Zan Catman. He invited people to help themselves. I grabbed three, including a Maddox I BP. Whilst I appreciate none of the blueprints were worth very much, this was a great example of what I have recently been harping on about in these articles. Though the blueprints mean virtually nothing to Xander, when you are a noob with very little money every pec counts. He could have put these unwanted BPs in the Trade Terminal, and gained maybe 10 pecs from them. But instead, he gave them away, giving other people the opportunity to try to sell them or add them to their own books. Those 10 PEC mean a whole deal to the people just starting out.
Deciding to give mining a break while I waited for my ores to sell, I headed to swamp camp to try a little more sweating (while trying to sell my newly acquired BPs
). To my suprise, here was another person giving away free stuff. Denachron Cron lay on the ground placing objects randomly on the ground, while a gaggle of Newbie avatars rushed from place to place to be the first to grab them. The items ranged from armor parts, to oil. I joined in the scrum for a little while, enjoying the thrill of the chase far more than the prospect of sweating. I ended up with about 50 pecs of stuff in 15 minutes. I figure that's 100 sweat, so I did quite well! Finding people like Xander and Cron have really made this experiment an enjoyable one. All I hear on the forum is moaning about scams and rip off merchants, but other than my mentor, just about everyone I have met has helped me. Kinda makes me warm and fuzzy inside. It also inspires me to do my part too, and when logging back in as Pinky, I took on a disciple - he never logged back on after 2 days, but that's not the point!
DAY 12:
Today, something new happened. When I logged on, a little message in the chat window said "You have 1 friend online". Now this isn't in itself so weird, but when I opened up my friend list who do I find? Yes, you guessed it, someone I haven't seen since Day 1... My mentor! Of course I simply had to say hello!
Quote:
Noob: Hello
Mentor: Hi
Noob: Not seen you in a long time!
Mentor: i play in another time
Noob: Doesn't that make it hard to teach me?
Mentor: What u want to learn?
Noob: The game lol. I saw you first day - was told a mentor would help teach me
Mentor: first - u need hunt skilling. Second - u can begin mining
Noob: Dont I need to do sweating - my society says I should sweat
Mentor: If you don't want depost
Noob: Well i deposited a little, but almost all gone now. Cant afford to keep paying
Mentor: For a 2 years I playing I deposited about 700 usd, but one time win 1X00 usd. Now I play without deposit
Noob: How do you do that?
Mentor: better I think - need to hunt with FAPing
Noob: Can you explain how to do it?
Mentor: See Hall of Fame, mining section ATH, XXth places
Noob: Dont know how to do that, whats the Hall of Fame? and whats an ATH?
Mentor: click F All Time High
Noob: I see you
Mentor: About hunt with FAPing - usual hunt. When you use fap intelligence is growing. That skill needed to mining and crafting.
Noob: I have no idea what you said means
No more replies
END
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Well, I think we as a community are all the better off for those pearls of wisdom!
Yes, I realise by posting this conversation, my mentor will now recognise me - But I also know he will be regretting what he said in our next conversation (a week later), knowing full well that I am going to be posting it in the next article. I will also be naming him.... duh, duh, daaah! (Insert Dramatic music
)
I actually don't have a clue what he is talking about here, if anyone could enlighten me in this thread, feel free! I think what he is trying to say is that if I FAP a lot during hunts, I will gain intelligence quicker and with that intilligence I will become a good miner and crafter. What I don't understand is Intellegence is an attribute that a new avatar starts with just 1. To build up a level of intelligence that would have even a small influence on either profession would take many months of hard core FAP usage. I leave this to you guys to discuss - I was never very good on all this skilling stuff
DAY 13:
I had a day off - so shoot me!
DAY 14:
I was quite please with myself today, the constant mining was paying off. I reached level 1 prospector and also maxed out the stats on my Ziplex Z1. Having previously been told about maxing out weapons in society chat, I figured it was reasonable to assume my newbie character would understand the same principle applies to Mining gear also. So, I took a trip to auction and compared a few finders, eventually settling on the OF-102, which gave me back my much needed skill bonuses.
I have never been one for recording information while I play the game, but the one thing I have been doing is bomb counting and comparing it against my Prospecting skill (the skill I need to hit 600 on to graduate). Here are some of the stats so far:
200 bombs = 128 prospecting
250 bombs = 154 prospecting
350 bombs = 189 prospecting
400 bombs = 211 prospecting
500 bombs = 254 prospecting
I figure using 500 bombs at this point was pretty good considering I started with 180 (ish) PED and got all my equipment from that too. The recycling method seems to be holding up so far, just hope it holds out long enough to let me graduate, or I would be having to do some serious sweating to raise funds quickly!
DAY 15:
The PEDs seemed to be dropping at quite a rate today, fortunately, a nice find hit today, a sizable Lysterium right in my last 15 minutes of playing. It was a pain to pull up with a TT extractor, but helped fill the PED card back up, and gave me some nice mining skills during the extraction.
Inspired by the nice find, and with being half way through the experiment now, I thought it would be interesting to see how I was fairing with my PED balance.
Heading to the Trade Terminal, I threw in everything I has to see the TT value. 159 ped. Not too bad, I had lost about 25 ped so far, but the skills were gaining well. I think at this point I decided the noob life was the easy life, if I kept up with this rate, I may actually make a profit by the end of the experiment.
PRESENT DAY:
So, as I mentioned at the start of this article, some rules are going to change. You will already see above that I have given myself away to at least one person (my mentor), next I am going to give myself away to everyone.
The next few days see the last of my noob activities. Once I am finished in game, it no longer matters if people know who I am or not, as it is too late to influence the experiment. So, let's spice things up a little...
You guys have been very good holding back on speculating who I am within the threads (although I have a fair few PM's with guesses - none of them right btw
). So, as 711 has kindly donated 50,000 EFD to help me reward all who helped me in my adventure, and you, the
EF community did your part by not posting any wild theories. As a reward, you now have a free reign to post your guesses who I am. Then, in the next article when I reveal who the noob is, out of all the right entries, one will be picked at random and will receive 20,000 EFD (the rest being saved for other rewards at the end of the series).
I will of course be able to post
full details of
everything that happened to me, and some of it is pretty interesting! See you in the next article!