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This is about my 20th post since the Catalyst expansion interested me enough to revisit EVE two months ago.

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My wife’s 12-month contract had a short extension but is finishing next month. She is moving on to a new 12-month contract elsewhere. It is the hardest job market she has seen in more than 30 years of working. Companies seem to be retrenching and cutting back left right and center.

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My job was meant to finish up but was extended for a couple of years.  The contract renegotiations were apparently brutal, with a long fruitful relationship permanently damaged. Organisations seem to be screwing over their staff and their suppliers.

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I think I mentioned that I was having performance issues when running two clients undocked at the same time. It has been limiting my EVE play.

My PC has an Intel i7-14700K, 32GB RAM, runs off m.2 SSDs and a pair of GeForce RTX 4060s. Not top spec, but I assumed it should handle two EVE clients running in 3800×1980 windows ok.

Turns out it can.  I just need to remember to allocate each client to a different graphics card. It defaults to the same one.

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I have remarked in the past that concentrating on EVE can be difficult with my family. They still keep me busy, but generally I no longer need to drop everything immediately.  These last couple months have helped prove that.

(As I typed that I could hear my daughter baiting my wife, and the raised shrill in my wife’s replies.  I had to immediately stop typing and go and distract both from the clash they were about to have.)

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For a while there it seemed CCP were pushing towards all stations being player owned. Then in their ever-changing rules, they made them easier to kill so that they were not something you wanted to rely on. They then removed some space and trade routes through the Triglavian invasion.

As I played EVE less, I consolidated my characters and their assets into Jita. I did not want to return to the game at some point in the future to find everything lost to rule changes.

In the last two months I have had to branch out and try and find new locations to live out of, moving away from Jita.

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I have spent 2 months now operating anywhere up to 20 jumps out from Jita.

While there are plenty of gankers and griefers, and they are active in the areas where people travel or loiter (more than I remember them being), there are not all that many of them. It is the same groups and the same people. I have been diligent in monitoring the Killboards and setting negative standings, but after a couple of weeks I rarely came across new ones.

Meanwhile over the last two months I have run several hundred exploration sites. Aside from some cheeky behaviour during the Nexus event, every player who has warped in on me running a site has warped out again.  This includes data and relic sites with unopened cans.  I don’t ever recall Hi-Sec being so consistently considerate and polite.

There are many very old characters flying around Hi-Sec, avoiding drama and not bothering anyone one. I presume, like me, that they are keeping themselves amused.