Probably not badly enough to put in the work to get one… but I’ll get to that.  First, why am I even asking the question?

We were on a fleet back during the invasion of Insmother where Asher Elias, leader of the Imperium and one time commander of the Reavers SIG, was answering some questions as we waited around for a timer and the topic of capital ships came up.

To be fair, this question always comes up in any general setting, people asking about what they should train into and what hulls are desirable.  The discussion strayed a bit into future plans for war, with Asher saying that our foes across the gate in PanFam could likely out form us if it came to a dreadnought fight, but he felt that if things escalated to supercarriers and titans, that the Imperium held an edge in numbers, a situation he wanted to maintain.

I cannot vouch for his information, but I imagine his sources are better than anything I could find.  PanFam also does an occasional audit of capitals, data from which I gather has spilled.

Things went towards which titan was best (Too many Avatars, Leviathans are very popular right now, Ragnaroks have a good doomsday) and related items.

But the message, which was reiterated in subsequent weekly firesides, was that the coalition wants more titans.

And there is always some team player part of me that is ready to jump right on something like that.  After all, there was a long stretch of my measuring things like how long it would take me to train into a titan with my every 10 million skill points posts.  That recurring item started with a post back in late 2007 where I looked at how long it would take me to fly a titan.

The number I came up with was 168 Days, 15 hours, 14 minutes, and 19 seconds.

At that point I knew so little about the game that I probably didn’t realize that got me the ability to sit in a titan, that there were at least as much training time for supplemental skills before I could do anything effectively with a titan.  I did know, however, that I would have to train them all in real time with the learning skills I had trained up helping a bit (those didn’t go away until 2010) because there were no skill injectors back then to speed things up.  We didn’t even have a skill queue back in 2007.

Also I was young(er) and more naive and new to New Eden, having not even crossed the 20 million skill point mark.  I have since bridged the skill gap.  I think I am hours away from sitting in a titan and have most of the subsidiary skills already.

But that is not the only issue.

I am also pretty sure back then I didn’t know that you could not dock a titan anywhere at the time, that it wasn’t a ship you could just jump into a fly like a battleship.

But I am certain I was also pretty unclear on the costs.  Honestly, I don’t know what a titan actually cost in 2007, when they were still pretty new.

I do know, however, that the six most expensive kill mails I am on over at zKillboard are the six titans I managed to tag during the battle of B-R5RB.

Titans do not cost that much anymore.

But neither are they as cheap as they were at the height of the Rorqual mining era.  I am not saying CCP was wrong to undo that situation… I just want people to remember that they introduced that and skill injectors and Keepstars where titans could dock up, which led to the titan proliferation about which they began to fret so much around 2020.

Anyway, I regret not buying a titan when they were 50-70 billion ISK.  But that was also a different time and I am not sure I had that much ISK sloshing about.

Today you need to have around 200 billion ISK if you want to get into a titan.

I don’t have that much ISK… though I seem to have more than I thought.  I could scrape together 50 billion ISK… if only I could travel back in time to 2018 or so… which seems like a lot of ISK to me.  I am not quite sure how I got there.

Actually, I sort of know how I got there.  I basically accumulated so many ships over the years that when, after the move from Delve to Tenerifis, when I shipped so many of them back to Jita and sold them, I found that I had been sitting on a bit of a gold mine… with values enhanced by CCP’s messing with the economy.  They doubled the price of battleship hulls and I had been sitting on a lot of battleship hulls I had accumulated since the exodus from Deklein to Delve at the end of the Casino War.

Lucky me I guess.  But 50 billion ISK doesn’t buy you a titan any more than the approximately 10 billion ISK I probably had back in 2018 would have bought me one then.  I need at least 150 billion more ISK to get there, and probably more like 200 billion when it comes down to fitting and such.

That is a lot of ISK… for me at least, and which gets me back to exactly how casual of a player I am of EVE Online.

Sure, where there is a war on or move ops or we’re picking up the entire coalition and moving… AGAIN… I do log in a lot and can get pretty involved.  But then peace is declared or the conflict winds down or I finally get all of my stuff to the far end of the move and… then I kind of taper off.  I have a bar for activity, which is each month to get on at least one kill mail and to get participation credit on at least one strategic fleet operation… but those are pretty easily done.  If I am sitting around and a homeland defense fleet pops on the second of the month and I get on one kill and have my one participation credit… I might not log in again that month save to do maintenance or if something interesting is going on.

The problem is that earning ISK feels like a chore for me and it is pretty tough to find the motivation to get on and rat or mine or whatever when there are more fun or interesting things to do elsewhere.

The one ISK earning exception for me was planetary industry, and that was because I set it up so I only had to log in once a week do keep it going.  However, with the big move I had to pull up stakes on that like so many other people.  We all did that as demand went down… I am invested in the fuel block production pipeline and we have a whole bunch of new space with few structures in it… just as everybody dumped their stocks on the market, crashing prices.

So my 500 million a month per character operation is offline until structures start getting deployed and fuel block demand picks up.  And even then I still have to go out and find some new planets to start in again with, planets that are both far enough away from the market that they aren’t over committed but close enough that I don’t get popped getting product to that market.

To sum up, I am too damn lazy to earn the ISK in game and too damn cheap to just PLEX myself into that much ISK. (Also, CCP is again messing with the PLEX market, but more on that on Monday.)

Basically, I don’t want it enough to put in the work.  I will have to be content with that one time on the test server when I did fly a titan.