Comedy Of Errors

Last night after I got home from dropping the rest of the family off at the in-laws, it was about 8:30pm and still an hour and a half until the 24 hour downtime for the Empyrean Age expansion. So I figured I would try and get a faction standing increase so that my corp, Katana Securities Inc would start getting its standings raised.

I could either blow through 15-16 level one missions and get a storyline, or do a couple COSMOS missions up near Hek. Hell, I figured I might as well do the COSMOS mission and get it done real quick. Heh, boy am I foolish.

First off I needed a ship, something small and fast. The Raptor Interceptor was fast but not strong enough for a good slugfest. My Harpy assault ship was configured for long range sniping and not close in brawling. And my Rifter was too small and weak for a good time.

So I would buy a new ship, probably Assault class. I toyed with the idea of a Hawk but there was a cheap Harpy for sale in station so I went with what I know. I bought some 125mm II railguns, equipped up a PvE shield tank and flew up to the Ani constellation, warped to the first beacon I could see, and talked to the first agent I found.

He gave me a mission to get some artifacts. I then spent the next 15 minutes trying to find on the internet where I had to go to kill rats to find these things, but no luck. I finally realized that it was a trade mission and I could buy them off the market. Expensive but I was after the faction increase. Once the mission was completed I checked my standings but saw no changes. That is when I realized the agent was a Caldari pilot and not Minmatar. DOH!

I went looking for a good Minmatar agent and found four in another complex. Unfortunately, I had already run missions for the first three, and only the fourth would talk to me. She assigned me a mission alright, a mission in which I would have to:
1) Go get a bigger ship because I wasn't confident that the Harpy could handle a level 3 mission,
2) Go to one complex and kill rats hoping to get a Hacker ID Slice to get into the second complex,
3) Go to another system and use scan probes (!) to find the gate to use the Hacker ID Slice on,
4) Finally use the gate to get into a battle with rats hoping to find and kill one with the item I am supposed to retrieve.

Well by this time it was 9:30 and downtime was rushing at me, but I accepted and decided to see what I could get done. I left the Harpy in system in case I needed it again and flew down to get my Cerberus that I set up Friday evening. It can handle a heck of a lot and should be up for the job. I also picked up some scan probes and Recon Probe Launcher on the way back to Hek.

Then I went looking for that Hacker ID Slice. I found the necessary rats and killed them but had no luck getting a Hacker ID Slice this time. I didn't have any more time to wait for a respawn so I resignedly docked at 9:56pm and vowed to complete the mission after downtime tomorrow night. Assuming downtime doesn't go over if the expansion is harder to install than expected.

Sigh, I should have just bombed through the 16 level 1 missions. I have to give credit to CCP though; the COSMOS missions that you can only run once are far more varied and interesting than the usual standard missions. This pod pilot approves and asks for more.