Wayback Machine: 27 August 2009 (Shedding isn't easy...)

This is the third in my series of "wayback" posts - posts recovered from archives of previous iterations of my blog.


About a month ago I finally decided to grow up. I've been playing EVE since December 2007, when the Mac client was released, and in that time I have racked up 0 kills and been podded 9 or 10 times. I did hisec missioning, not even trying out L4 missions forever. I was the poster child for Care Bearing. I think part of it was, I didn't really get into EVE. For me it was like a round of Civilization - play every once in a while when you have time. Well, I got a couple of co-workers into it, and they called me on the care bear lifestyle back in March of 2009. Just before Apocyrpha was released. So I started looking at what goes on in a PvP lifestyle, and started focusing my skill training more on ship/ship support skills, rather than the shotgun approach I'd been taking since the beginning. I started reading blogs written by PvP players, like Wensley, Flash, Mynxee, and the like, but I wasn't looking to be a pirate - just learn how to fight and defend. Then I started taking missions and occasional drops into LoSec, learning more about the directional scanner (I still need work on this one), and watching local, and flagging players and corps with status so I can keep careful eyes out. Finally, I dropped the non-existent shield of the NPC Corp (The Scope, FWIW) and applied to a full-on PvP corp.
After a bit of Q&A, I was accepted and have been a novice in the corp for about a month now. I haven't started my actual PvP training yet, since days after joining the corp left Empire and went back to 0.0, and I wasn't ready for that leap. I've been grinding up my status with an NPC corp in Empire to get a jump clone, so I can take shelter in my fuzzy empire blanket when the 0.0 lifestyle gets to be too much, or when I need easy ISK or items that are too hard to make or get out in 0.0. Let's face it, I'm really just hanging on to my fuzzy status just a little longer, because I'm afraid of the change. However, this weekend I will have trained up the skills to mostly fly a Helios, and I'm going off the deep end. It's a 30 jump trip from Empire to my corp base in 0.0, and I'm going to learn my way down in the Helios, fit with a CovOps Cloak, jump clone or not...