When I first played oblivion, I didn't really understand how the leveled stuff works. In say, morrowind, there'd be places where lots of really tough monsters were, and when you were new, you just couldn't go there yet. It actually created a nice sense of progression, where you first had to quest nearby the major cities, then slowly conquer the roads in between them, and finally begin to push back into the wilderness. In oblivion, it's completely different. Everywhere you go you'll find mobs at your level, they all scale to match you. All the mobs drop gear appropriate for your level, all the chests have contents generated on the fly to match you. It essentially means you can go anywhere at all and still be able to kill stuff and get interesting loot. Which is somewhat convenient, I suppose, but it does take away from the feel of 'conquering the world' and since you can never get an edge on mobs, you never feel like you're becoming excessively powerful.
Getting back to what I didn't understand about the leveling when I first played. The key thing to remember is that everything resets. I didn't realize this, so my first playthrough was very very limited to places where a quest directed me. I didn't want to enter a new place early, and then have the level-matching loot system set all the loot to my low level, I wanted to do the quests to level up first, then go exploring so it would match to my high level. But that doesn't matter! You can clear a place, level up a few times, go somewhere else, wait 2 days, and that place will be full of monsters and chests again, at your new level. There still isn't that much reward for exploration, since loot and such is randomized and level matched you'll never find that zomg epic sword, but at least the game doesn't outright punish you for exploring a place before you're 'supposed' to get to it. :P
Other games! For eve, I didn't really have much time to do anything. I'm making a push to get social skills up to iv so that I can remap away my charisma. Then I'll..... I dunno! I know I want to get to tech 2 heavy missile launchers, and that will probably be the best way to improve my mission/standing grind. But I also do want to get a good mining boat, so I can participate in my corp's mining ops. And I recently took an interest in planetary interaction. My corp keeps telling me I should train drones more. I still can't use tech 2 active shield hardeners. And I really regret not having the standard core competency certificate. So many different directions to go in. o.o
I ran a few missions till they wanted me to go fight other empire factions and I can't abandon that for hours without standing loss. Then I started messing around more with PI. My initial effort was pretty feeble, a small little thing that makes a couple hundred thousand isk worth of toxic metals per day. It seems like everyone goes for building up a huge vertical enterprise, and then stop at the highest they can go comfortably. One guy in my corp uses 3 alts to fill in the entire production line from raw resource extractors all the way to C4 products. Says that it pays for the plex for one of his 3 alts. Sounds like a lot of hassle to me, with no alts. :P So I'm trying an experiment! I started a new planet, set up about 2/3's of the power grid like you're supposed to, extracting resources and turning them into C1 products. But I reserved half of my power grid for advanced industrial factories. I ran around and grabbed a lot of cheap C2 stuff and imported it all down to my planet. The factories will slowly convert it to C3 stuff. I did some simple spreadsheeting, and it looks like I'm going to see a 40% return on the cost of buying the C2 stuff, if the price of the C3 holds. Either way, it's an experiment to see if it's possible to make money this way. I figure that since I'm sitting in empire, I'll never find high quality planets for extracting resources. But for factories it doesn't matter what quality planet you're using. We'll see how it goes.
WoW raid tonight. I'm actually starting to get a little tired of raiding 3 times a week. Maybe I should take a break from it a bit.
My mood: Definitely dropped pretty low last night, but I feel better this morning. Call it 5/10.
I really need to learn not to follow day to day stuff about the markets. It's too depressing. Today I dropped to a net loss for the year. I'm 13k poorer than I was two weeks ago. >.< Sigh.
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