EVE New Citizens Q&A

I started my game and was not having a specific direction or goal to go, I was just seeing the game, having fun flying frigates around and see the visuals (which was OK at the time I started)... mined some rocks, did some level 1/2 missions and moved around with some friends who started the game at the same time with me...

Few days after starting my trial, I decided to make it a paid account because I liked the game and how the economy/role play are going... so I got my first account... and I kept training random skills and trying new things every day, from combat, to pve, to industry and science and mining...

I got lucky with some extra money in RL and I bought a PLEX... then I saw the magnificent Abaddon battleship and I was "OMG ME WANT!"... so I bought the skillbooks and started training for that... by the time I finished training for that, it's price went up for some reason... so I bought an Apocalypse... I put all 4 types of weapons on it, medium/small sized guns... and a mix of propulsion upgrade mods in low + 3 types of armor plates (200mm, 400mm, and 800mm), and I put webs and ECM modules in middle slots... I thought I had an awesome ship and it is a kickass battleship! (well, again I was just playing for fun, no goals, no targets were set, just messing around, telling myself I can quit it anytime later if I don't like it)...

I kept moving around with this ship between highsec sites killing NPCs and sometimes getting some nice faction drops... until one day I was in a site, and someone warped to me, I had my ECM burst module active (thinking I was jamming rats who were 30km away from me), that guy came in the range of my ECM burst... next thing I see is my green POD.

I got over it and I did not like losing that awesome battleship I got (my first loss ever in the game was a battleship!!! ) so I BOUGHT a new one, got it fitted the same as the previous one... but this time I wanted to try something new, so I put a probe scanner on it and I started to scan... I found a wormhole... it was a C3, I warped to it and I looked to it, thinking "go in? or not?", I ended up jumping into the wormhole WITH the Apocalypse and warping to a site there... I got to 44% hull damage upon the first wave of NPCs aggro, so I freaked out and got lucky to warp before I lose the ship back to the WH entrance and got out...

I did not know anything about wormholes back then... I thought it was empty because local channel was empty... I could have died horribly that day, but I was lucky

Wanted to even try something new, I went with my Apocalypse and jumped into a lowsec system... got a gate camp with 1 Tornado and 1 Proteus... the moment I saw them, I was "OMG I'm dead. better I disconnect so my ship disappear!"... but at that time, the mechanics were changed and that was no longer possible... when I logged back in, I was in my pod again (that loss happened in the second day after losing my first Apocalypse to CONCORD)...

After that, I thought OK, I need a career, so I trained for a retriever and started mining to make money... I spent few weeks, then I found an Amarr FW corp ran by an old vet and his friends who were since day 1 in EVE (since 2003), I owe everything I have and learned to those guys...

I started flying with them, asking about everything stupid and non-sense to them, then slowly, I started to take EWAR role (ECM griffin/blackbird)... I lost ships daily, to the point I used to laugh when I use the ship... I got rage mails and bounties on my and everything from people pissed at me because I jammed them... that made me LOVE ECM forever... I felt I was doing something in every fight even with like 1.5 million skillpoints... I even got max EWAR (ECM) skills in the first 4 months of joining the corp.

The FW corp got cold, many of the guys I was with decided to take a break, and I was left alone... looked around to go on my own, I got into the world of wormholes... I joined few corps, I was able to fly stealth bombers, got T2 weapons, and modules... I could now be a serious front liner after I was in the back doing my EWAR...

Suddenly some of the old friends I started with in the FW corp showed up, and I teamed with them again to sit in a C3 wormhole, doing sites, hunting people, doing PI, some more old guys showed up, and we got us an upgrade from class 3 to class 5 wormhole... we setup 2 POS'es in there and got some nice and awesome time in there... until one night, where we were put into a situation that other WH corp wanted a fight and we did not give them that fight because we were logging out due to our time zone and their time zone... so during our offline time, they reinforced our 2 towers in the wormhole; and a defense fight was locked... we had the fight, we survived, and defended the towers... though we lost a dreadnought in front of our POS shields... one of the MOST AWESOME and emotional times I had in the game, that I will NEVER forget... after that fight, the company got broken again...

Now I am on 45 million skillpoints (seems little compared to other older guys)... in a 0.0 alliance with 2 of the old vets from the FW corp... we are spending some nice time together..., I can fly capitals, I can fly all subcaps for all races, I can use most T2 weapons systems, and I can do almost anything I want...

I started without a goal... but now I have a goal set, and I'm actively working to it, hoping I will reach it someday in this game!.

Will have the check the in-game combat log , I cannot find it on the online sites due to date maybe...

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It does not show your name on the killmail because I did not get attacked from the other pilot (assuming you), it was only CONCORD and the pirate rat, but it happened in Abudban 11 October 2012 if that is the one you mean, though I was with a different character.

Not sure I would be considered a "veteran" but I have been playing since 2011 now. I started Eve because of the staff members at Eve Radio. One day I joined in the IRC channel out of curiosity to find out what the game was about and to talk to the people over there. I started with a basic trial account and right off the bat - I did do the first mission to get your ship, and then after that I closed out of the tutorial mission and started warping around to random places, eventually I lost my ship and I closed the game.

That was late 2010. Then in 2011, I was given a 21 day friend trial by one of the Eve Radio staff members and joined in the channel ingame. After actually doing the tutorial this time around and talking with the people in the chat room there, with them also helping me out, things started to click and I started understanding things and learning what I could.

I had already fell in love with the graphics and also the community at this point. I found myself within a new corp that was focused on industrial, and made some new friends, but the corp didn't last too long as the people started to leave. I was a bit sad but I continued. My next corp moved me to a whole new area that I was never in before; low sec, and then eventually null sec.

Null sec is where I learned "click to move" - yea it took me a month or so to figure that out - basically I got stuck in a belt and was bouncing off a asteroid and had rats hitting my poor retriever hard. I called out in corp chat for some help and told them that I was stuck in a rock and it wasn't letting me warp, they told me to try to navigate around the rocks, and my response? "How do I do that?" - They proceeded to facepalm at me and then told me what to do, but it was too late as my retriever was blown up into little bits and pieces.

I learned a lot that day .... to say the least ... this poor little newb .... but I wasn't discouraged, I was helped to work on getting a new ship and they were supportive of me; but again eventually the corp started to die out and I found myself going back to high-sec eventually and leaving to another corp.

Needless to say, it has been a bumpy road and I still find myself learning new things and trying new things I haven't done before. I have at this point, done a little bit of everything. But my main love; industrial and mining. I fell in love because I loved the fact that I can work hard and get what I need to build my own ships and anything that I needed. It gave me this feeling of accomplishment to build something that I have never felt in any other game. You have to work hard for what you build; and it felt so rewarding.

My current corp has been wonderful; they have also taught me so much knowledge that I was lacking. I got more involved in mass production and inventions and started to learn more and more, and I think a lot of things that I wouldn't have learned otherwise since I been with them.

I am happy where I am in eve now, and now I try to keep passing my knowledge on and helping other players with whatever they needed, but it has been a long road.

Eve Forever!

My very first EVE experience was in 2010 i think.
I read it on a forum about a game that takes place in space, planets, stars and you can do there wat you want.
It was already midnight, bored and i was sick of playing shooters so i made a trial account en logged in.
Because i never played a mmo, beside a regular single player rpg, the first startup was chaos.
All those buttons, all those tabs, all those numbers i saw i and got an instant headache.
Some womans voice talked to me about docking in a station. I was thinking "wtf, station? Where and how do i get there?" I didn't even found the warp to button in the menu and was literally lost in space. So a couple of minutes later i quit and never played EVE for over 3 years.

3 years later i was more experienced in MMO's en suddenly i saw a EVE online banner.
This time was different, it was on a windy sunday and got all the time in the world.
So i downloaded the trial again en started this char. This time the intro was more helpful en taked my time to read all the things.
Did the tutorial and was very impressed about my Rapier. Then a venture, burst, trasher followed and finished the 5 starter agents. "So what now?" i was thinking, so i grabbed my venture en fitted it with a civilian mining laser en started mining.

That was the moment when i fell in love with this game.
I sat there in the starter system (Embod minnie space) mining while the lightrays of the sun shined upon the asteroids and this song started playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5mnCRN1Bco
The next day i saw that i needed an industrial to ship goods so i subbed and used the Wreathe that i got via a starter agent.

So for the next days i did nothing but mining, hour after hour while in the meantime reading faq's, tips, tricks about this game. Each evening after i had a nice shower till i got to bed for another workday. Eventually skilled to fly a retriever and mined, mined, mined...and read all the things!
Then i switched to security missions using my Trasher and went out to the SoE epic arc.
When i came back to my homesystem (still in Embod) i skilled for a cruiser. A couple of days later i got an Stabber Fleet en fitted it for lvl 3 missions. Did a whole bunch of them, but after a while i felt so lonely.
So i searched for a dutch corp, found one en moved all my things to a system 15 jumps out. It was a pve miner/mission corp and 2 evenings a week we did some fleet mining with a orca and a freighter.
At that time i skilled some PI skills and started my first colony. Because highsec pi is not very profitable i putted buy orders in some lowsec systems a few jumps out and switched to factory planets. Every day i jumped to those systems, collected the goods en flew back. There i lost my first ship at a gatecamp (luckily it was empty) and got away with my pod. I was doing this for over months. Each month i grabbed all the selfmade pi items en sold it in Hek and Rens. Because i buyed them very cheap i got a very nice profit of over 50% and maked my first billlion.

Because i was bored with mining and corp mining in general, i left and started my own private corp to avoid taxes.
I searched for a good system and found a system where there was a lowsec system between high sec systems.
Traffic there was very low so this was a good spot for setting up my pi again.
Meanwhile i was skilled enough to do lvl 4 en fitted a Maelstrom.
After a couple of months pi, missioning, hauling, bit of trading, i got bored off it and decided to join a nullsec corp for pvp.

After a bit of searching i came to a corp which was a member of the CFC. So i sold all my belongings, selfdestructed and woke up in Branch.
Setted up my beloved and money making PI and created an alt who did the same.
Then a new game opened up for me. Joined every fleet i could, did roaming, deployment and saw my very first Titan and super. It was amazing! Huge that that thing was...
In peace time i did some scanning, joined in pve fleets for anomaly's and so on...it was the best time in all my EVE career.

But 6 months ago a change came in my RL so i sold everything, left null and stopped my sub asap.

And now i'am back to this game. Today i recieved an invite to go back to the place i was before i left the game and now its time to pick up where i left.

Reposting my story from here: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=postmessage&m=5547984


It's my birthday on Thursday! \o/
Yes, this is my main, and I'm (still!) in my NPC noob corp.
I thought I'd describe for new players a bit of what I've been up to since I first subbed.

Quick tldr:
Playstyle - small gang PvP in NPC null
ISK made - 9.06 billion ISK (sum of current asset value, liquid ISK, and value of ships lost.)
Ships lost - 2.79 billion ISK, 149 ships
Ships destroyed - 106.13 billion ISK, 833 ships
Solo kills - zero
Income source - Mostly DED sites and ratting, although recent I've started L4 missions
Advice to newbies - I salute you if you can, and are engaged by, going it alone. But if you find yourself losing interest, get involved with a group of players that will teach and support you. That's the best thing about EVE, in my opinion.
Skillpoints - 19 million, mostly in fitting and core skills, drone and hybrid weapon systems, and a few dabblings into more advanced ships.
EVE Monument location - nowhere. I missed it by a few days.

I joined EVE never having played an MMO before, and not knowing much about the game beyond it's sci-fi aspect and what I had read about a few large fleet fights (in particular B-R5RB.) While working through the tutorials I had all sorts of naïve thoughts about what I'd do - for example ninja salvaging such large fights. Being only semi-social, I didn't seek out any of the player corps and ignored the several recruitment emails I got. After the SoE Epic Arc, I spent some time mining, making a million ISK here and there, but that was starting to get fairly boring in a short period, just watching a little number (my wallet) go up by small amounts for no real purpose. I thought I'd try some exploration perhaps, particularly because it involved travel and exploration, two of the aspects that draw me to science-fiction literature. (And by the way, I love the development of the Drifter story in New Eden because it reminds me of good sci-fi.)

As part of that, I looked into creating a jump clone so I could move about quickly from one side of the map to an other. I was dismayed at what I read about standings requirements, but I was also pleased to read that some people in my NPC corp offered JC creation for free. I headed out to the staging system at the appointed time, got my JC, and was invited to join their fleet in null-sec... "Null-sec?" I thought. I barely had a concept of the different security spaces in EVE at that time, but I thought I'd give it a go - the JC session gave me an affinity towards these people, and I didn't have to commit to anything.

I in my Atron was scouted into the null-sec base in what now is a blur of a memory. So much mew stuff I didn't understand was happening very, very quickly. I now know I was being flown from tactical bookmark to tac in an effort to avoid bubbles. Upon arriving I was given a random shield-fit Vexor, fitted with mods half of which I didn't have the skills to use, plus a couple frigates. I renamed the Vexor to "Aspirational" and set about quickly losing the frigs in a few engagements. It was fun, and unlike my time in highsec something I could see myself spending more time on. I jump-closed back to highsec, purchased a couple PLEX which I sold for ISK (1.3 billion ISK at the time, I think) to jump-start things, and shipped a few dozen Gallente frigates down to the base via the logistics service the group offered.

My learning (which still continues today of course) then started in earnest. Point vs scram was a particularly important lesson, I recall. Printing off cheat-sheets of what ships did and what they were named didn't help - only naturally over time have I gotten a good sense of the more common ships seen in null. I'm better with spatial awareness during battles. I mostly remember to overheat now. A printout of the DOTLAN tactical map of systems in my region is something I still keep next to my keyboard. I've even FCed a handful of times - which is stressful yet fun, sad yet joyous, all at the same time.

I now know 9 billion ISK isn't much, but it's enough to keep me stocked in the kind of ships I like to fly - mostly T1/T2 frigs and T1 cruisers, and the occasional battle cruiser. I have a few more ships like a T3 and some faction ships that I use for specialized purposes, but I'm too fearful to take them into combat for now. But even so I've never flown anything I couldn't afford - that 1.3 billion from the PLEX was my wealth floor for a long time.

I've calculated that I can now make 35 to 55 million ISK per hour with L4 security missions, depending on what the market is doing, with fairly little risk. Prior to that, it was mostly by participating in group PvE activities like DED sites I made ISK, for which I could make 100+ million ISK for 20 minutes or less of work but that didn't happen very often.

So that brings me to today, 363 days later, still living in the same NPC null base, still flying with mostly the same group although other pilots have come and gone in that time, and still really enjoying the EVE universe doing my little small-gang thing.

I don't consider myself a veteran by most means, but anyway that's my story on how I got my start. I don't know if my post helps anybody, but I also wanted to thank everybody who posts in these forums, writes blogs, hosts wikis, reddits, etc., and especially thank the pilots that take newbies like me under their wing, for providing a wealth of resources about this very deep game that I've barely scratched the surface of.

o7 and here's to another year...

Back in late 2003 I was working for a electrical company and one of my best friends then had just started playing the beta version of EvE Online.

He actually called me up and was ranting how F'ing ace the game was and I should try it.

So I did and here I stand still after all these years. It's been quite a ride since starting and a few highlights are below.

I thought at first I would involve myself in industry and plodded along building things not on a massive scale but more of a "its mine get off" scale but I met a guy from auz who was in the corp I joined and he taught me tons of stuff on how to build in mass and generate some decent isk.

However I felt there was more than just this and started running missions in my spare time from building to generate another form of income. Being fresh faced I had never ventured into low sec and one day I jumped my battle ship in and warped to a mission.

It was to my surprise a different kind of red flashing showed up in my overview and i was promptly relieved of my ship. Because I didn't know the spam warp upon explosion my pod was locked and I was ransomed. Being a bit angry at the time I kindly replied
"do you see me mooning out the side of my pod window". I had a nice instant trip back to station.

I learnt that there was more to EvE than meets the eye and I started teaching myself to fight. It was around 2006 when I met up with a couple of chars who I have know all this time and know quite well in rl now. They taught me how to fight to the point I was able to start flying freely and roaming blowing ships up.

We became quite famous for being the outsiders in AT7 when we came forth only to be defeated by the PL rush fleet. A lot of people thought some of our fights were great because we fielded the Battle badger which just didn't die to 3 baddons.


Light jump a few years of doing the same thing to the modern day. I have seen a lot of my friends come and go and i'm still here plodding along.

I don't have a lot of wealth
I am not hugely known in the game
I still don't know everything about EvE.

However I am extremely addicted to the game just because.....well I actually don't know but what I do know is that i,m a friendly until the point I lock you up and relieve you of your ship.

My advise to any new chars playing EvE. Try everything and be what you want to be. EvE is extremely diverse, addictive, ruthless and enjoyable. But don't get to upset as its only pixels.

Fly Safe o/

My Wall O’ Text in the hopes that it can somehow help CCP or other new players:

Been playing since around 2010(?). I had only recently even tried MMO’s, mostly free to play, since I came from an era of thinking that you bought a game once and played it forever, subscription models were for suckers. I quickly got tired of remaking characters in other games and repeating the same content ad infinitum.

I had come to try the game with neat pictures of spaceships and space and the understanding that one character could in fact do everything. That you could change what your character did in game on a daily basis, without having to ‘re-roll’ had a lot of appeal to me and even though Eve was an older game even then, reviews had always been kind to the visuals.

I fired up the game for the first time, got confused that my account name wasn’t my character name, went back to my research and found really old advice about folk picking names that started with letters in the middle of the alphabet since all that really good research told me FC’s picked primary targets by alphabetical order. I haven’t even logged in yet and my ‘well-researched’ knowledge is about 3 years out of date.

I finished my super snazzy caldari character (they were supposed to start with the skills more in line with that ‘jack-of-all-trades’ space man I wanted, again, old data) and was determined to have a universal character, maybe a little mining and trading, but definitely wanted to try this fleet combat thing I had read about.

I logged in for the first time, and was told there was a bad guy that I had to kill, and good luck with that. After a few frantic moments I was told that something I did worked, and soon he was dead. Read that I should talk with the actual tutorial agents ( I was reading everything in each wall of text that popped up, I actually had to take screen shots and sit real close to the screen to read the tiny text by the volume ). At this time, the game was very much a solo experience for me, trying to read, figure things out, clicking on stuff to see what it did etc. Lost my first destroyer to those dang drones in ‘burning down the hive’.

One of the pre-reqs for Eve-Uni at the time was that you finished the tutorials and epic arc while you waited to be contacted for an interview. I was mining in my bantam for one of the industry(or marketing?! seriously, those tutorials left a lot to be desired) when out of no-where, some bastard came flying into my little ship with a stabber and sent me reeling out into space. He stole my ore from a can and sat there waiting for me to take it back.

I had already read about can baiting though, so continued mining but it bugged me that this person was tormenting my poor little noob mining op. When he didn’t go away in the first minute, I sent him a chat invite, choked a bit at the price (2,000 ISK!? good lord!) and sent my first inter-player communication in the game:

“baiting looks as boring as mining”

This reach out from me kicked off a conversation, this guy was from some Null Space alliance just bumming about high sec looking for kicks between fleet ops and I was just learning how to play. He invited me to go run some Level III missions with him, and I naturally assumed this was some evil plot to kill me and my bantam. I wasn’t going to fall for that, no sir. Luckily for me, this player offered to buy and fit me up a cormorant destroyer so that even if it was a trap, I wasn’t out anything. He took me out, walked me through those first few fleet warps and gave me looting rights. It was a very pleasant experience that all stemmed from his attempts to blow me up and my convo to him.

That experience encouraged me to overcome the ‘trust no-one ever in eve’ mantra that was in all the new player guides even then. As a result, when I hit the Dagan wall with my Level 1+2 skill level blaster/rail/autocannon/laser cormorant it wasn’t too hard to take a leap and ask in local for some random passerby to help me kill Dagan. Another older player eagerly offered assistance, and what had been taking me hours to try and do alone was rapidly accomplished in about 2 minutes with the help of a Vexor and its drones.

Still, aside from these brief moments of interaction with other players, the game still felt empty. No one talked in local chat, everyone was off doing their own thing and Rookie chat was a cess-pool of whitenoise and off-topic chatter. Besides, I had read that the trick to survival was to always keep local open, so rookie chat sat there idle and hidden.

When my interview for Eve Uni finally happened, and I was welcomed into the corp chat channel, the volume of people responding and talking suddenly made space feel much less empty. That was a defining moment too. The game was suddenly much more engaging when it didn’t feel so darn empty. All changed with an active chat-room.

I quickly got myself out to Null Sec under an apprentice program, and really enjoyed flying around in my nubbin skilled drake fighting the Russians and getting bombed by PL. There was a fight when I was blissfully flying around in a merlin (my drake had died the day before and I was too space poor to have replaced it already) zipping around PL titans in among the bubbles with everyone dying around me and Comms alive with vets complaining about the hot drop.

I was utterly useless (and had been kicked from the fleet a few times, but kindly told to not worry about it and keep rejoining by our FC who understood my predicament). But the experience sold me on the game ever since, very much the same feeling I get watching the new ‘This is Eve’ trailer. It was fun and epic to be involved in these fights with hundreds! (seriously, such progress on node reinforcement since then) of folk pushing the server to its limits working together to do these things in game.

For the newbs.

Not a vet but I am bitter.

I started EVE around 2011.

I've been living in low security space for over 3 years now, based in only two systems in that time; Parts and Old Man Star, both in the same region of Essence.

The beginning..
- It was the Christmas holidays, my brother was home with the family and he advised I try out this space faring game called Eve Online. (he was such a bad influence)
- I tried the tutorials, got bored of these very fast and was soon overwhelmed with the complexity of eve. My brother had gone back to work in another city so I couldn't have him hold my hand while tackling level two missions in my Stabber.
- Shortly after in search of excitement I ventured into low sec with my mighty Stabber and tried to kill a rat that had a 500,000 ISK bounty I thought would make me a rich man. I was attacked by a pirate player and destroyed, Sadly I couldn't find this loss on the killboards.
- De-motivated and unsure what path to take I unsubscribed.
- Couple months later and bored of FPS games I re-subbed my accounts.
- I decided to make some friends around the same level as me and did so by founding a newbie corporation.
- Said newbie corporation succeeded in making many friends through recruitment and having it join a high sec industrial alliance I am still in contact with today.
- We were declared war on by a few high sec greifing corporations.
- With the limited skills and knowledge we had we we're unable to defend ourselves which resulted in some boring game play (hiding in stations, blue balling)
- Not that we did not try! I remember locating a solo war target and attempting to form a fleet with members that were interested in pvp, rushing to cut off said merc as he was on his way to our home region to try kill our miners. We identified a system and gate to cut the merc off but he got there first and landed on grid with us 100KM off.
The fleet I managed to put together was me and 3 friends, I brought a hurricane with a half decent fitting for my skills and pvp, the rest brought Drakes. I started to burn towards the war target (also in a Drake) with my microwarp drive, I remember telling my corpmates to keep up with me as I burned for the Drake only to find out none of my fellow fleet members had fitted microwarp drives themselves, essentially no prop mods, at this point the Drake had managed to drag me off my scattered fleet, owned me one versus one and then did the same with the 3 Drake pilots in my fleet, one by one. I was determined to never let such a thing happen to me again!
- One of my corp members Syphillis Farstriker soon inspired me to venture into low security space again.
- We moved into Parts in Essence, a low security system in a small pipe that leads from mainland high sec to a small high sec island. The pipe had and still has some decent traffic we could catch on central gate.
- The gate camping generated some fun fights and drama, I quickly hit -10 security status resulting in a banishment from high security space. My toons were all still low skilled at this time and turning outlaw had it's disadvantages in regards to making ISKs which further motivated my piracy.
- I lost all interest in managing a high sec newbie corporation, resigned as CEO and focused purely on low security space, only a few members came with me to pirate in the parts pipe.
- Driven by boredom and a need for ISK to fund PVP I decided to join a local pirate friend Karbox Delacroix in ganking Hulks and Mackinaws in various mining hot spots of high sec, we done this for many months ruthlessly.
- As the miners dried up we went back to gate camping and roaming low sec looking for gudfights, mostly solo and the occasional small 2 - 5 man gangs.
- We were known to be living in the Parts system by local pilots, corporations and alliances to the region, some of these included Shadow Cartel, The Tuskers, Pandemic Legion and many more. We were easy, good and fun targets for these entities, when camping the gates we were sitting ducks with limited numbers that could be caught in pounces or baited into hot drops easily.
I remember being dropped on by Shadow Cartel https://zkillboard.com/kill/21362490/.
- Real life got busy at this time and I never had the time to play EVE enough to make subbing worth it, so I unsubscribed.
- A few months later I returned to EVE and the Parts pipe to find a few of the local guys I would fleet with before were still playing and living there, mainly Andcris01 and Detalist.
- I decided to join the same corporation as my brother; Bladerunners, a null sec alliance, once they witnessed the kills I got on their killboard in the Parts pipe some members including my bro decided to join me in camping the pipe and roaming nearby.
- I could not leave low security space, it was to much fun, so I left bladerunners.
- Detalist; an old PVP buddy from parts was considering joining low sec corporation Soul Takers based out of Old Man Star only 3 jumps away. At the time there were some newcomers to the parts pipe
- More friends and backup was required to keep a relative dominance over the pipe's systems in order to confidently PVP, make ISKS and have fun.
- We both decided to join Soul Takers and move out to Old Man Star, I stuck around in parts for a couple months camping and baiting for Soul Takers and our blues.
- Moving to Old Man Star from Parts was quite a learning curve, it took me a while to learn the tactical and strategic advantages in OMS. It also took time getting intelligence on the local pilots and corporations visiting and living in OMS, their tactics, numbers, personalities, standings etc.
- Since moving to OMS 2+ years ago I've been involved in thousands of gudfights, thousands of kills, trillions of isks destroyed.
- Mostly small gang and solo pvp.
- Ironically I am occasionally going on Shadow Cartel fleets now.
- There is still a mass of things I've never tried or attempted to learn.

I've been in the game for nine years, but I'll start with the last nine months:
I was a bittervet until I found James 315 and The Code. That's not hyperbole. I had unsubscribed, and the idea of never resubscribing was being seriously considered, but I kept up on the latest goings at TMC and EN24. From there I found out about minerbumping.com, and decided "I want to do that." So I signed back up for another month, which became three months, to which another year of time was recently added.

When Karmafleet was created, I was sufficiently reinvigorated with the game to take another stab at nullsec (while signing up for the freight ganking Ministry of Love group in the Goons of course.) Been along for the ride with them for the last three months and enjoying the game like never before. There's always something that calls you back to this game if you're willing.

But my introduction to Eve was troubled. I originally subscribed in May of 2006. I'd hit the level cap in Dark Age of Camelot and had no interest in the end-game content such as it was. Can't fault DAoC for it specifically because the end-game was the same as it was for any other MMO. Maybe even better, because of the "realms" conquest system that could change hands between competing factions. Nothing remotely on the scale of Eve sovereignty, but I had no way of knowing that. My MMO experience in general was fairly limited at the time, and still is (trial accounts in Anarchy Online, Perpetuum, and WoW failed to persuade me.)

Masochism was an must back in 2006. The cost of T2 equipment was exponentially higher in most cases, and there weren't as many ISK-making opportunities available, especially for new players. There weren't as many ships available, and those that were, often weren't very well balanced. The NPE was an absolute joke and third party resources either weren't available or weren't promoted the way they are today. The user interface was unintuitive, and I think you finished the NPE with about 100,000 ISK in your wallet. You got logged off at random, and there was no WTZ.

And I loved it... for awhile.

All my player interactions seemed to end badly. When I tried to go to lowsec I got killed by NOS Domis. When I tried to go to nullsec, not understanding the essential difference to that space, I'd invariably get killed in a bubble that often didn't even display on screen. I decided the best course of action for me was to mine in highsec until I figured things out (a terrible, terrible, terrible idea, then as now.) Sometimes I'd go mine in lowsec but always got killed. And yes, I raged. I raged hard some times. So many times I said I was going to quit, but I didn't. I started to wonder if maybe the PvPers knew something about the game that I didn't, but usually I just operated with the fallacious line of thinking that these players were just sociopaths out to ruin my good time.

Fortunately I got picked up by a corp that divided its time between high and low sec, with occasional PvP forays but also a lot of industry and a chill demeanor. I followed one of the members to a corp in the Band of Brothers alliance in 2007, which was a huge mistake on my part because I had neither the resources nor know-how in the game to play with a group with that particular philosophy. I was out of my depth and didn't really get it figured out before I had a "you can't kick me, because I quit" moment and left before any bad blood got generated that might fall back on the dude who vouched me into the corp in the first place.

After that, I joined a highec merc corp, and between 2008 and 2014 I was generally quite content with whatever I found myself doing in the game. I had a lot of stuff going on for me in real life in that time, such as grad school, a job search, and a military deployment, so the great majority of those years were spent playing very casually and sometimes infrequently as part of RvB. I did start to get a little bored with the game eventually, and wondered if maybe I had just lost interest (I've never really been a "gamer", I guess), which circles back to my first paragraph.

Oh, and I went to Fanfest back in 2007, which was the first time I'd ever been overseas. Those couple of days were, let's call it transformative, and I've been to a variety of destinations on either my own dollar or the taxpayers' since then. So, thanks CCP :D

I had led a fleet or two of my own around this point - and only occasionally got kills. Never lost anyone though - at least not on the fleets where I was in command. Maybe I was just lucky. I certainly was this time too.

We moved back north, and hung out in caldari and gallente space for a while.
I'm not sure when, but round about here is where we went on another corp drive, and salvaged enough stuff and missioned enough to afford to buy a rorqual.
Some of us temporarily signed on with a corp that was part of BoB during MAX Damage 1.
However, it was a corp that forced you to only make money for one week out of every month, and then the rest of the time you could only pvp. (Which didn't make sense to me - what happened if you were still bad at PvP, and needed to get new gear to replace stuff you lost, because ship replacement programs were apparently for other alliances - like BoB. Maybe).

I got disillusioned with BoB in general, and their "greater community" within a couple months.
I didn't shed many tears when they got brought down either.
I think I laughed. They didn't treat non-BoB members very well. My corp got wardecced about this point anyway, so I upped sticks and left to highsec again.
I led a few fleets, and squished the guys attacking us - some small corp that thought it could fight better than it did. We stripped one guy of assets, and they dropped the dec a few days later. I mostly attribute it to luck, and some good members who were willing to humour me and follow my orders. I was the insane one flying an ewar ship though - a caldari EAF.

The only ship we didn't remove from them was a drake.
Not long after that we managed to afford our rorqual, and we upped our POSes again.
This time we moved north to venal again to rejoin C02 who had been let back into the NC.
This time we merged with another corp though.
After one guy raged at me for something one of our members did, I pointed out that I was no longer a director in any way at all (none of our guys got leader positions IIRC, and I was firmly stepping back from anything approaching leadership roles).
Not long after that uni picked up and I pretty much dropped from game, except for skill queues.

A few months later I picked up playing properly again, and joined with a Mostly Harmless corp in the NC alongside my old friend again.
one of BoB's new things as IT not bob, no really we're not, was a MAX Damage campaign. It was a bit tired, and while they hit H-W, they got thrown back, and I got to fly arty matar ships and blow up their caps.
I also finally afforded my first phoenix class dread, and earned a lot of cash.
We also fought eastwards and eventually hit some russians in Vale - I accidentally took a station over there for my corp when I wasn't supposed to. A system called 020 something.
The one where CCP devs were watching the second time we invaded and crashed the server.
OOps indeed (I'd forgotten drones could shoot the station too - mine did, and "won" me a station).

A few months later we were on the run from Pandemic Legion and co who had been hired by the russians, and stayed on long after their contract expired because of "gudfights".
Not so fun for us - the NC fractured, and some alliances ran off, some imploded, and some got pulled down by spies.
Lord2Evil in Mostly Harmless decided to nick the cash and leg it, I don't know where he went.
The rest of us slowly pulled back, and I finally lost my chimera after a year or two of owning it and flying smart. PL were well in practice at cap hunting by now.

I replaced it, and got my stuff out.
Eventually I joined a corp in Goonswarm (not goonwaffe itself), and helped defend CFC space in VFK.
I got my revenge on PL and the others who had forced us this far, and found myself enacting a repeat of H-W, by helping murder the invaders and their capitals.
At this point I had fought on every side in null except for the eastern russians (including fighting alongside PL at another point), and become disillusioned with the lot of them.
I stuck with CFC though, simply because it was fun.
Got in fights, learned some more, became a reasonable cap pilot, acceptable battleship pilot, and debatable pilot of other things too - I'm still learning stuff all the time. I'm probably quite terrible in non-capital non-fleet ships.

We pushed east and help set up several CFC alliances with space.
We eventually engaged south in delve for the... second time? Then fought around for a while.
Burn Jita sort of happened a couple of times.
We fell out with TEST for... reasons, I guess. Mostly just TEST leadership, really. And both groups needed a fight.
So we went south and cleared them out. Oh, and asakai happened. I was asleep when that happened.
Then we came north, and then went east again. I think IRC gasped its last around this point, so we went home, and killed delve again, because N3 had turned up.
We did terribly, but somehow won.
It sort of becomes a blur.
Invading and winning in delve is becoming... normal? regular? Dull?

Oh, I was part of 6VDT. In a few screenshots, look for a phoenix dreadnought in the bottom of a blob (use the station nearby to orient yourself). I'm in the bottom right of that blob.

After all this there was a lot of "north" for a while.
Then east and B-R.
I missed all of this due to work. Very unhappy about that. I only helped with the cleanup.
After this it was back home again, and then some stuff happened, and we've been south to do stuff.
We seem to have won again?
And now we're off home.
No idea what'll happen next, especially with fozziesov.

All of the CFC stuff and Mostly Harmless stuff happened on my combat alts though.
This character is highsec, and helping out Gallente in live events.
I've stuck with what is now Imperium simply because they're more fun than the alternatives who take it too seriously and treat line members like dirt.

Just have fun is the best advice.