How Much is Enough

Just one more isk.

In bicycling culture, it's called the "N+1 Problem."  How many race bikes do you need?  Just one more.

As I've been gathering up my assets list, a thought resurfaced that I'd been trying to ignore:  EVE is no longer (only) about the isk for me.

I know! Heresy.



For a long (long) while in my EVE career, my only (ONLY!) driving goals were isk/hr and hull progression.

I was a risk adverse highsec player; I mined, I missioned, I built, I traded.  These things resulted in easily quantifiable isk increase per session.  I looked at purchases like an investment: how many missions would I need to do for the new Golem to pay for itself via increased lvl4 speed? Buying the Orca would save me time; I could buy trit and pyer to feed the factory from a cheaper source more jumps away and then go haul it in one trip instead of multiple.

I progressed up through ships.  Frigate, cruiser, Apoc, Raven, Tengu, Golem.

The Alliance we were kickstarting at the time needed a capship wing, so I invested in a pair of carriers and a dread, and all the skills and equipment because ... progression.  These hulls were the next step up beyond Battleship, so of course they were what we aspired to.

I ignored supercool ships like the Mach, Navy Apoc, Bhaal, Rattlesnake, Legion, and Gila because the ships I owned (at a high level) did everything they did.  The return on investment was poor.

The problem with this was that once I'd bought the Golem, there wasn't much left to aspire to.  I'd checked all the boxes.  I wasn't ever going to fly a Super, and I couldn't bring myself to fly other hulls without a compelling isk-related reason.  Other than replacing all my tech2 fits with shiny faction stuff (which I refuse to do), the Golem was the pinnacle of progression.

An indicator of my mindset, I now realize, is that my assets list was wicked clean.  Every module that dropped was sold or melted on a regular basis.  Why let precious isk sit idle in the bottom of some hanger when it could be reinvested and working for me?

Somewhere, out of necessity, I outgrew this mentality.  I've been typing about it for almost a year now (thank you, faithful readers), but the assets list purge was a huge reminder.  I had hundreds of millions (if not billions) of isk strewn throughout the map as I flitted from area to area like a hummingbird ... having fun.  I literally moved for awhile because I "got tired of that color of sky" and left a trail of junk behind me.

And if you're wondering, I'm not rich by most current measures.  The isk I make in a given week is actually quite poor.  But I have enough; the isk I make is sufficient to maintain my current lifestyle, and that's kind of all that matters.  I kill burners because I enjoy the encounters.  I smash Dread Pirate Scarlet and save the Damsel because they are my favorite missions (Buzz Kill, however, could stop spawning for me, please).

My assets list was a glorious mess; perhaps I should have left it that way. :)