A Brief History of Time, Part 2

I finally joined a player corp in August of 2009, almost 2 years after having started EVE. I'd been podded a few times but never had a player kill in all that time, like a true carebear. I wanted to break that mold, to prove I was more than a missioning, mining drone in a game of people who interact with each other daily. Funny enough, I had the skills (technical, EVE skills) to fly great PvP ships like the Taranis or Thorax, but I had no idea what to do. So I joined a corp, and within a couple weeks that corp joined a 0.0 alliance, and I found myself facing a simple decision: live alone, in emipre, while the corp made millions (individually and as a corp) in 0.0, or find a way to get to 0.0. Never one to do it the easy way, I moved my medical clone to our 0.0 station base, and hopped in a scanning Helios (yes, I could fit a covops cloaking device too) to fly down directly.

I figured I'd probably lose the ship, if not the ship and the pod, but it would be a great learning experience, so what the heck.

With a senior corp member on Teamspeak with me for moral support and advice, I navigated my way 24 jumps through losec and 0.0 to our new home, moved my medical clone to the medical station in system, and started ratting in the only battlecruiser I owned, to earn the ISK to survive and grow as a new denizen of 0.0. That was all in August of 2009. Since then, I've probably spent 2 weeks in empire total - most of that trying to sell off the Meta3/Meta4 loot I've found, and to fit up replacement ships as I've lost them in 0.0. I learned quickly how to chain belts (and yes, it does still work) to get the most ISK/hour, at one point I was easily pulling down 10million ISK + per hour ratting, not including the loot or salvage - just in bounties.

Since joining a corp, my EVE time has actually skyrocketed. I used to play 2-3 nights a week for an hour or so (whatever a mission took to run). Since Dominion, I'm logging 2-3 hours 5+ nights a week, running two characters simultaneously.

So that's the history, in short summaries. I'll be migrating some posts I've made on our corp forums to this blog, to flesh it out. See you out there!

Two years, Three Months, and two blogs later...

So I started playing EVE when they released a Mac OS X client back in December of 2007. Looking back, I had no idea what I was getting into. I had played MMO space sim games dating back to Compuserve, but nothing prepared me for EVE. I didn't even pay attention to the training queue for at least two weeks, I thought I could rule the game from my fancy Tristan frigate I mined HOURS to buy, and I was playing a multi-player game all by myself.

That wasn't too bad for the time. In RL I had just become a dad, and my wife and daughter occupied most of my attention. A few months later though, I had introduced a couple of co-workers to EVE and they were already in a player corp, raking up kills and flying ships bigger than I did. I was accused of being a carebear, and it was true. I hemmed and hawed about joining a player corp, but just never found the right group, or came up with a new excuse why I needed to play alone in this game where at any given time almost 30 thousand other people were in the same universe. Then came expansion after expansion, and I still ran L1 missions in my destroyer, not looking at the bigger picture. I could hop in and out of game in short time that way, even though I never made a lot of isk, and I never got a bigger ship. I kept skilling up though, dabbling here and there, today a mission runner in a T1-fit Tristan, tomorrow mining in a Navitas. Slowly I trained skills for bigger ships and better items, which really paid off once I woke up and joined into EVE Online - the real game.

I played alone until the release of Apocrypha, when I immediately jumped on the scanning bandwagon and was in a wormhole within the first 24 hours, with acceptable scanning skills. I ran into a gang of pirates in that wormhole, and they were stuck, lost and needed help to get out. We chatted, I scanned them down an exit wormhole, they invited me to their corp but I wasn't ready to play with others, I was still a loner at heart. I started blogging with a contest promoted by CCP and a new EVE-bloggers website, which went great for all of 2 months until the guy hosting the website lost everything I'd written. I started up again, but was depressed at the loss of my work, and I stopped writing. It was appropriate, then that the site shut down shortly thereafter.

My life in EVE went on, I could fly mean, T2 fit battlecruisers in my missions, I could mine in various Exhumers, even fly Iteron IVs and had recently skilled to fit and fly an interceptor. But I was slowly burning out, a lone candle in the depths of space, with no-one to share the experience with. I was the ultimate failure of EVE, almost two years into the game and I had played alone the entire time, and was on the verge of quitting. That was July, 2009.

This blog is my third iteration, the third time I try to write about my life in EVE. Welcome to my wanderings in the darkness that is EVE Online...