Thoughts of EVE

Welcome to the eighteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by none other than me, CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

On May 6th 2010, EVE Online celebrated its 7th Anniversary. Quite a milestone in MMO history, especially considering that it is one of the few virtual worlds out there to see its population continually grow year after year. For some of you who’ve been here since the very beginning, EVE has evolved quite a lot since its creation. With the expansion rolling out roughly twice a year, New Eden gets renewed and improved regularly. But, how about you the player? How has you gaming style evolved through the years or months since you’ve started playing? Have you always been a carebear, or roleplayer? Have you only focused on PvP or have you given other aspects of the game a chance – say manufacturing. Let’s hear your story!

My game style used to be unfocused and therefore pretty weak.  I fell into the usual mindset that if I could just get into that BS everything would be so much better.  I could use T1 guns; that was good enough right?  Being in a BS would give me the ability to take down anything I wanted, right?  But even as I was plugging along, learning the absolute minimum required, I would find myself getting side tracked from my lofty goal.  I wanted to use everything and I wanted to use it now.  That T2 Stuff just took too long to learn how to use and it cost too much so I never bother with it.  But I did learn how to use every weapon type. I didn’t consider that the Gallente favored Hybrid Turrets so I used projectile turrets because they had a longer reach and used little of the capacitors energy which I needed to power all of my fancy shield upgrades and all of my other fancy armor upgrades. (Yes I know it was stupid of me)  I didn’t bother with efficiency skills, I felt like they offered me nothing right then.

Even with all of my floundering I had never even considered the use of Scan Probes to find better sources of ore; I thought that they were just to find Ice. I had never considered that there might be a better way.  I never ran missions once I finished the tutorials because it just moved too slowly, they didn’t offer me the income to sustain my inaccessible goal.  I never really liked the idea of PvP either just because I never won, go figure.

I had a difficult time finding something that was enjoyable in EVE (I know now that my lack of enjoyment was of my own design and not of the game) all I really wanted to do was to hang out with like minded individuals and play a game.  I didn’t want to do missions because it was too slow and it was difficult to find people who were willing to join up to do missions.  Ratting was ok but annoying to find prey; and again it was difficult to find people to join up.  At this point in time I feel like I should mention that I didn’t have any leadership skills trained either because it would have taken away from my “goal”.  Near the end I settled on mining, not because that is what I really wanted to do but because I had ran into a guy in a belt who was being attacked my rats, I defended him and I had saved him, he noticed that I didn’t belong to a corporation and he invited me.  It turns out that it was a mining corporation and they were getting ready to move to 0.0 and I wanted to do as much as a could at that moment, so I start training mining barges and industrials at the same time.  I figured I was about a month away from a Hulk and I was training Gallente Industrial V when I had to stop playing.  I say that like it actually would have happened.  My meaning in that is, I didn’t even have the ISK flow to purchase the skill to fly an exhumer let alone the exhumer it-self.  I was prone to switching between combat and mining so frequently that I never learned how to do either one well.  I’m sure it was there but I never used the skill que before either; my previous character would go all night without training and if I missed a day or two, which defiantly would happened he wouldn’t train anything for days at a time.  I also didn’t know anything about the Learning Skills which increased your attributes therefore decreased the amount of time it took to learn anything.

In the end the best thing that could have happened to me and my life in EVE was to get fired from my job.  If I hadn’t had to quit the game then I never would have spent my free time reading about the game and all of its facets.  Now that I’m playing again, I feel like there are worlds of options available to me.  Scanning can yield a multitude of interesting events and places that can be profitable too.  I’m also staying more focused and learning the skills I have before jumping onto something else.  I’m currently flying around in a Rifter and it’s fantastic.  I had skipped past these little crafts so quickly last time and I never took the time to feel it out.  Since I’m not spending all my ISK on new Skills and bigger ships, there is actually a relatively large chunk of change in my wallet these days.

There is a multitude of different things I want to do and try but for now I’m focusing on what is in front of me and not trying to see what’s over the horizon just yet.  That day will come and I will be prepared for it this time.

I’ll see ya’round Cowboy.