EVE - the Other Woman

I'm sure it's not an uncommon phenomenon that EVE is widely despised by our fairer partners, probably more so than other generally unpopular husbandly pursuits. Even if you're slouching on the sofa in your underpants, watching sport/sci-fi/documentaries or out drinking beer with the lads, the resentment EVE seems to generate is altogether of a different kind, at least in my experience.

Part of the problem with EVE is that by it's very sandbox nature it has no defined start and end time. There aren't any levels or zones that delineate when you could reasonably stop. Also there is a need/temptation for little 'maintenance' visits just to queue up skills, check sales orders or some other administrative task. Because of this, the tendency is to have EVE idling on the PC more often than is strictly necessary. Something that doesn't go down well if you're caught tidying up your hangar when you had only popped to the loo.

Having recently married, I looked to my more maritally-experienced friends for advice. Fortunately, one is also a corpmate and so suffers from the same problem. We've jokingly referred to having to earn "brownie points" by attending to our husbandly duties in order to earn the right to play EVE. We've even developed some chat-window shorthand to determine whether a sudden online appearance is with or without the wife's knowledge.

So for a laugh I thought I'd formalise the process so we'll have a better idea of whether we should be playing at any given time.

Let's assume that a brownie point [BP] is worth 10 minutes of EVE time. I would've gone for a greater value, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the exchange rate of Good Husbandly Deeds to BPs isn't going to be great. What follows is a rough guide to how BPs are won and lost.
Current Estimated BPs: 24 (I cooked dinner yesterday and recently agreed to a 7 day holiday). That's four whole hours of EVE time. I'll have to see if I can redeem the brownie points before I squander them.

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