BB 68 – How do you play your important internet spaceships game? On a laptop, 12 monitor setup, 50” TV, amongst the family or locked away?
I live in Melbourne, Australia. Unsurprisingly I play EVE in a Hermit Cave. My study door is kept closed to dull the noise from the family and keep the cats out. When I play I hunker down behind a couple large screens and attempt to hide from my reality and responsibilities.
My desk is positioned to allow me to watch TV while playing EVE, and to split my attention between the screen and my wife when she pops her head through the door. Well – that was the intention. It sometimes works if she is just asking if I would like a cup of tea. More often however she appears to order me to do something out of my study, or she comes and stands next to my desk, forcing me to turn the chair to face her. In both scenarios I can’t watch my EVE session. If it is not her, it is the kids. As such I generally prefer to play EVE when I am the only one home, or everyone else has gone to bed.
I run EVE on a custom built i7-3770, with 32GB Ram, SSD, Dual GTX 680, Dual Samsung 28” 4K Monitors and Windows 10. I generally use Logitech game keyboards – currently the mechanical G710+, and Steelseries Mouse.
When travelling or as a backup, I run EVE on a MSI GS60 3K Ghost Pro laptop, which has an i7-4710HQ, 16GB Ram, SSD, GTX870M, 15.6” 3K Screen and Windows 10. I can use my desktop keyboard and mouse to control the laptop via Stardock’s Multiplicity, so can use that as a third screen.
Neither are cutting edge anymore, but can run both my accounts (on the desktop in a 3000×1800 window) without issue.
I find EVE a frustrating game to play if I get interruptions. It is much more immersive when I can cocoon myself away, open my clients, open my EVE tools such as Excel, EFT and DOTLAN, and just lose myself in it. I suspect if I had more social interactions through the game that this sort of setup might be less important, but as it is, it seems to help me enjoy my solo style of play.
My study is my equivalent of a man cave. While I don’t spend as much on technology as I did before kids, the room is set up relatively nicely. My wife generally takes the view that as I work from home and can spend 12+ hours a day in the room, it is appropriate to spend money setting it up properly. I don’t go crazy with my purchases, but over the space of 15 odd years it has slowly been upgraded and improved to the point where it is a nice place to spend time.
Other Blog Banter posts on this topic can be found here.
Evehermit 
Another fellow Australian playing EVE the wrong way 🙂 Similar setup and reasoning here.
Maybe it is a recalcitrant Australian thing. 🙂
Nice… now excuse me – I have to go wipe the drool of my (cheap logitech K120) keyboard…
Nice rigs
Really nice setup evehermit (understands the ‘hermit’ component of name better now), you just need a lock on the door 🙂
I’m in the foothills of Adelaide. Nice location to live but the old rotting copper phone wires in the street and in the pits are not very kind to internet stability. I’ve nearly lost stuffs in the Evosphere due to crappy slow signal. Looking forward to the NBN rolling (waddling slowly perhaps) up my street in a decade or so.
It is a bit of a joke around here when we will see the NBN. Technically the suburb has it – but that is only in a couple tiny areas where developers have created new townhouse estates and cabled them for it. I understand the NBN will also take over the Telstra Pay TV cable in the next year or so – but the availability of that here is also very limited. Any optimism I might have had that the remaining 95% of the suburb would get the NBN any time soon was lost when Telstra, after years of neglect, started repairing copper lines in our streets. Quoting a couple separate technicians, they were doing the maintenance because it would take the NBN so long to get to our suburb that they would comfortable recuperate their costs…