Chocolate Heaven

The Misadventures of a Minmatart

The plan

So, this plan about reminiscing, what’s that about then?

Well, I wondered recently about why I start blogs, and then end up never posting anything after a while. I like the idea of blogging, but actually sitting down and writing about Eve just doesn’t work for me. When it comes to writing about what’s going on in Eve, I’m clueless, since I’m still a noob after all these years. When it comes to writing up what I’ve done in Eve recently, its quite boring since I don’t really do anything other than talk with people.

However, it struck me that there is one thing I do very well, and that’s sit on my e-rocking chair on my e-back porch and blather on about the ‘good old days’ in New Eden. Nobody has ever complained when I go into my running monologue about the introduction of level 4 agents, or the glory days of mining pre-Castor, so it must hold some interest… Right?

The idea then, is to hone that and do a fairly frequent entry on ‘Eve Retrospective’. I’ll look at what happened in Eve 5, 6 or 7 years ago this month (obviously 7 isn’t an option…. yet, and my chatlogs are limited from 2003 anyway, nuuu). To make it more personal I’ll add in snippets from chatlogs here and there, screenshots I might have, and throw in whatever RP, or political flim-flam was going on at the time. It’ll be a history lesson for you youngin’s who don’t know your m0o from your Space Invaders, or your Yulai from your Jita, or your Jove from a baked potato (common mistake, that last one).

Image courtesy of secretlondon123 via Flickr: http://flic.kr/p/5vXNyE

The format is what I’m stumped on though. I can do it one of three ways:

  • A monthly roundup – this will likely take a long time to research, and end up a very very large post, and almost certainly lack a lot of info
  • A weekly roundup – smaller than the above, more frequent, less likely to miss stuff, but more likely to burn me out
  • A ‘whenever’ entry – where I’ll talk about whatever I happened to stumble upon in my time travelling adventures

I personally like the third one, but what do other people think would work best?

Concerning first contact

This is something that gets me going really. I can blather on about old-Eve for hours, just ask anyone that’s been in a channel with me for more than an hour or so. I intend to do a whole series of retrospective blog entries regarding this sort of thing, but I figure that needs its own blog entry to describe it, and this can be to answer the question posed by Arukemos on his First Contact blog entry.

My first contact with Eve, was in the May 2003 edition of PCFormat in the UK. It was a preview of the game, since it hadn’t quite launched at the time the magazine went to press. Its actually quite fortunate that I read it – I didn’t have a subscription and I picked the magazine up towards the end of the month – a few more days and I would have missed the preview entirely, and who knows what would have happened!

Up until then, I had been playing Ultima Online for around three years. I liked the sounds of Eve, because for a long time I had been looking for a spiritual successor to the Elite games that I enjoyed so much many years beforehand. The character creation looked awesome too!

Had to pay off some things before I could buy the game, and it arrived on the 5th June 2003. I waited until after work to set it all up. I read the manual very carefully, having already been informed that the game had a steep learning curve I wanted to be sure I knew all I needed to know before plunging in at the deep end. That was probably the last time I read any manual before playing a game. The information was mostly wrong just one month after release. Of course, I laugh about it now.

Knowing little about skills and such, I made a Ni-Kunni, and dumped as many points as I could into Empathy/Social skills, figuring this would make my life easier for negotiating prices with brokers and the like. Wrong! As we all know, that’s not how the skills system in Eve works. Whether it was like that in beta or not, you’ll have to ask someone else – I’m not that much of a grizzled veteran.

After playing with the char gen for a good 20 minutes, I logged in and did the tutorial mission – yeah, that’s right – there was one tutorial mission. We had the usual drone tells you how to lock things, mine a roid, shoot another drone bit. After that it was: refine the ore, sell the minerals, take this piece of paper to the next system. Right, sod off, you’re on your own now.

I know of a few people that didn’t know how to train skills for the first few days, because it didn’t say anywhere, and the podding mechanic was much much less harsh than the manual made out: The manual made out that the better the grade of clone, the less likely you would lose skills, with the elite clone giving you a 5% chance of losing an undefined number of skillpoints (it may have been defined, but I lost my original game boxes somewhere /cry)… Harsh as fook.

Anyway, rambling now.

Which ever Amarr school corp it was, there was about 12 people in there at peek time. Yes, a whole dozen. Nice peeps, but very quiet. Made friends with a couple of them and we helped each other out mining ourselves into better frigates, and then industrials (see ancient picture).

Miney McShrimp and her Happy Guar Friend

The next day, a friend started playing, but rolled a Brutor. Primarily to shoot stuff, since it made out that high perception would mean more pewpew – indirectly, that much was true – and their school corp was bustling. About 40-50 people at peek times, and very lively. In retrospect, it was because that was the Republic Military School, and I was in the industry/whatever Amarr school of nobody-wants-to-mine. I ended up re-rolling Minmatar, with a greater sense of how the game worked (so I could balance my attributes better), and never looked back.

Due to the cascading nature of our interactions and their impact on New Eden, should I have joined the Amarr military corporation, the chances are quite high that I would have stayed there, and a whole lot of stuff would never have happened… But that, children, is a story for another time.

Time to move

I’m going to leave my corp sometime soon I think. I’d say I’m going to leave the alliance as well (which is obvious), but I’ve had the alliance tab with ‘blink off’ for over a year now. I talk to them in their OOC channel, but mass-RP has always daunted me, so I’ve stayed out of it. I think that probably contributes to why I don’t really care about the alliance in general, and subsequently never get involved in stuff they do.

That’s not why I’m leaving though. There’s no bad blood or anything like that. I just… I get set in my ways, and at the time when I’m playing very little, they’ve gone through a recruitment surge, and the corp is now nice and full of young eager pilots. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great thing for the corp, I’m just very antisocial at times. I think I need some time either ‘freelancing’ or just hanging out with people I already know.

AFK Corp

I was with these guys for a while between being a Glamour Bunny and being in Re-Awakened Technologies. Was only a month or so, but they are very laid back, nice people who focus on individual goals. Its a good place to go to chill out and grind for isk. Additionally, they are based in Hakeri – or were – which happens to be my main residence at the moment.

The problem though, is that the people I did know there have (mostly) joined what I presume to be a sister corporation, Damage Over Time, who do 0.0 stuff. Something that really doesn’t interest me. Also, due to the nature of the corporation, there’s not a lot to do as a group aside from missioning… Which is fine, but I like to mix it up a little.

Independent Faction

Not a corp, but an alliance. I’ve known Winter Steel since she was knee-high-to-a-noob, so Colonial Fleet Services is always an option.

There’s also DBR’s corp, which just has her in at the moment, but they are also in the same alliance. I’d need to find out where she hangs out first though – obviously I’m a bit restricted in Amarr space, heheh.

These guys are also freelancers, which is good for chilled out playing. I guess I need to establish if they have any/many group activities and see if that tips the balance and puts them ahead of the AFK Corp option.

Exploration

Being the annoying individual I am, I’ve grown quite an attachment to the go-anywhere, do-anything way of life in New Eden. Despite the lack of missions in wormhole space, these anomalies offer the best option for varied gameplay available right now. I would miss missions though…

I could join an established exploration corp. I know at least two different ones that have at least one person I know in. I can spread out and be ‘cautiously sociable’ from there.

Or, I could make my own dedicated “we live in wormhole space for a year” kind of corporation with the explicit goal of scientific discovery rather than plundering for riches. That’s something I’ve thought about for a while, but I think I’d get burned out on the effort that requires when its combined with all the stuff I need to do day-to-day on my other accounts/characters.

In closing

A bit of a stumper really. I both miss, and am somehow scared of social interactions sometimes. Inner conflict sounds way more dramatic than it actually is, but that’s the sort of thing.

I can join a corp I’ve been in before, a whole new alliance, an exploration corp, or do something myself (and most likely fail).

Lots of thinking to be done!