As fans of the popular televisual entertainment “Wife Swap”, we thought it might be fun to try a similar concept with MMOGs. We couldn’t find anyone who’d swap their wife for a 1 month LotRO timecard, though, so had to settle for a couple of players swapping games instead. This week it’s Ian Jefferson, a committed EVE player, and Jeff Ianson, a long term World of Warcraft player.
Ian’s Diary:
“I’m a Covert Ops specialist in EVE, so I asked Jeff for some advice and he suggested I pilot a Rogue, as they have a cloaking device. Undocking from the Inn in Westfall, I warped to a safe point to start scanning the sector, which in WoW they call ‘looking around’ with your ‘eyes’. Little of consequence seemed to be happening, so I plotted a course across the zone and continued scanning, quickly finding a Gnoll-class ship. Activating my cloaking device I moved closer, but it was obvious the Gnoll was part of a larger fleet, and taking on superior numbers would have been foolish so I backed off.
Continuing to scan the zone I observed a Dwarf-class vessel hitting a rock with a pickaxe, thus suggesting it was a mining ship of some kind, easy pickings for my autocannon (or ‘bow’). As it hit the rock again I decided not to be mean and destroy it right away, instead opening com-channels to issue a ransom demand for a couple of million Isk. The enemy vessel replied “lol”, but this was obviously false bravado, as after hitting the rock one more time it warped away at high speed, clearly terrified. He’d obviously picked up on my lack of warp scramblers, a pity, but a significant triumph nonetheless.
Over the next few hours I scanned the rest of the zone, and finally determined a Defias-class Bandit had strayed a little further from his fleet than he should. Before he could rejoin them, I put on full afterburners and started circling the Bandit at optimal auto-bow-cannon range, getting in several good hits and taking down his shields. It closed in, presumably specced for closer range weapons, so I switched to what they called a ‘sword’ module, and managed to finish it off. I’m not sure where the pod went, I didn’t see it; perhaps it got caught in the explosion. As I started towards the wreck to salvage it, though, another Bandit appeared, so I quickly cloaked and moved away from the area, it had obviously been called in by its ambushed corp-mate. I’d obviously stirred up a right hornet’s nest, with Defias-class Bandits all over the place, and it took three adrenaline-fulled hours of stealthy manoeuvre to escape the area and return to the Inn. One confirmed kill and a miner driven off, though, a pretty successful start I thought.”
Jeff’s Diary:
“I asked Ian whether I was a tank-spaceship, dps-spaceship or healer-spaceship, and he said it didn’t quite work like that and depended on modules or something. LOL! Anyway, I flew around a bit, but I couldn’t see any spaceships with yellow exclamation marks hanging over them, lol, what’s up with that? Who’s supposed to tell you to go and kill ten spaceships or collect five spaceship tusks and that? I posted ‘DPS LF tank+healer’ loads of times on the trade channel but nobody even replied lol what a load of rubbish so I logged out.”
Join us next week as an Alganon player and an Allods player swap games, and don’t even notice!