Skills and Professions

For a long while, it has been mysterious how your skills affected your "professional standing". However, since December 18, 2006 with the Version Update (VU) 8.8, we have been given a new screen that shows all the professions of your avatar. Since then, the old thread "How to calculate pro standing" has been supplemented with the new "Skill Impact on Professions" thread, both on EntropiaForum (EF). The data in there comes mainly from people chipping in or out skills and taking note on their profession levels before and after.
I have been following a slightly different approach, as I have never, and probably will never chip skills. I follow the profession level using (L) blueprints on Carpentry and lately Tailoring. This is for two reasons, really: firstly, the skills involved are not commonly chipped and traded and thus little information is known (see e.g. a strange thread on Machinery). Secondly, I like to craft a little here and there and record my returns in order to come to a conclusion whether Engineering really affects the returns you get on crafting. (to be continued after I get this job done my boss just gave me)

Way to go...

A milestone on my way to unlock Serendipity was achieved today with the demise of an Atrax Young East of Jason. The combination of LWT and Marksmanship skill gains were enough to push me over the limit -- now it's "only" 4 levels to my next unlock. Way to go, I must say, as skillgains became quite slow in the recent past, something many people complain about.

Needless to say that as a hunter, this is my best profession, all the rest comes way after this. My little crafting hobbies will not do any good in unlocking, this is just to gain a few insights into the system.

Baseline

I thought it would be interesting to know where my Avatar Bredan "Gingko" Oraigg is at this point in time. So I took the screenies of all my skills and processed them through EU Companion to post the result on the pe-wiki. Got a total of 39k skill points at the moment, with Laser Weapon Tech being my best skill with 4076 points. This was built all "natural", i.e. without chipping anything in or out in my ~18 months of play. 108 HP show me that there is plenty of room for improvement. I just have not unlocked the skills that give the most HP. In fact, I only unlocked Marksmanship & Ranged Damage Assessment so far, as I am mostly into ranged combat.

(By the way, if you have no idea what I am talking about, take a look at the sidebar on the right, where you will find a few links that should get you started. At this time I have no plans to write an introduction to Entropia, but that may follow, I keep going long enough.)

So what about the interesting part of a real-cash economy game - money and profit? I am tracking my progress using a few tools and can say, that I have been breaking even just nicely over time. There has been a big dip during late last summer, but I have recovered in the meantime. Mainly thanks to other players that bought my stuff at some mark-up. So I guess overall, MA has made their profit on me. I have not looted many items, though, just the basic TT fodder everyone seems to get nowadays. I guess I will list my globals and items loots at some later time. Now I need to enjoy the nice weather outside :D

Let's get started

Inspired by this blog about Entropia Universe, my favorite spare time burner at this time, I have tried to log into my old, very old blogger account that I had actually not used since early 2003. And it still worked! It lasted 4 years of inactivity in the digital age. You are used to get your emails deleted after 30 days, so I thought this was just incredible.
Now, instead of putting bits and pieces of my virtual career all over the web, I have decided to put them all together in one spot. I have no idea what this may grow into, so I am as curious as anybody else.