Welcome to the eighteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by 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!
Like most everybody, I’ve evolved my playstyle over time. In fact, I haven’t stopped evolving my playstyle.
My personal history
When I first joined EVE for more than a trial period, I only knew I wanted “to smuggle”. I didn’t really know what that meant, though. So I spent hours with EVEMon without realizing that the data dump from which EVEMon had built its skill tree included unpublished skills. At first, I focused on hauling (“space trucking”), combing EVE Central for trade routes I’d run blindly in my Hoarder, without having any real clue about my cargo or destination. Here’s the long and painful review of my corp history, for context. You might want to skip down to the next heading if you’re not interested in my travels from space trucker to militia pilot to cyberpunk CEO — but note that my play style has always centered on immersion, whether that includes traditional roleplay or not.
My noobish self didn’t know a thing about corps, so my history started when a random convo in local led to an invitation to join Soulbound., I did so without really thinking about it. After a week or two, I stopped saying much in the corp and eventually took a brief hiatus since EVE hadn’t fully gotten its tenterhooks into me. I came back to find the corp had made the obviously reasonable decision to kick me for months of inactivity. So I hauled for an ice mining corp, then found a SWG friend in EVE (Kohiko Sun) and joined her corp, getting me into Electus Matari at the same time.
Up until now, I pretty much focused on hauling and some mission running. But then we found out more on factional warfare for the summer 2008 expansion, plus additional details on how it would work. This totally sucked me into CCP’s clutches and I founded the 17th Minmatar Tactical Wing, a RP/PVP Minmatar militia corp, with my new main “Kudon Astraisx”. Eran Mintor, Neu Bastian, and I had a blast recruiting and flying around running missions, getting in dogfights, and a bit of plexing. I even got my RL brother to join.
Then I took a brief break from the game and turned the corp over to my good friend Neu. We didn’t really know much about corp management, so when he appointed Megan Maynard as a director, the corp still owned all its shares. Bad move on our part, because Megan took the shares and voted himself in as CEO, removed the directors. cleaned out the hangars of about 500m in ships, modules, and supplies, then resigned and handed the CEO reins to some inactive player.
Neu and Eran founded the Valklear Guard after that, and I ended up selling the Kudon character. As inactive players came back, saw that the corp now consisted of a lifeless shell, and handed things over to other inactive characters, eventually the corp ended up in the hands of my brother’s character. But he himself had left for World of Warcraft, and so it still sits there.
At this time, I realized I wanted to focus more on cyberpunk RP. I got Casiella’s training on track with exploration (pre-Apocrypha) for hacking and whatnot, plus reprocessing and a little bit of invention. I looked for RP corps that fit me, bouncing from my solo corp (Ecliptic Rift) to White Rose Society, a Sansha loyalist group, back to Ecliptic Rift, then over to Stillwater, at the time an Angel/Thukker group. Despite the fact that I had several friends in there, including Eran Mintor, Nakatre Read (the CEO), and some other really awesome people, the corp didn’t fit me for reasons I won’t explain in this post. I still maintain good relationships with quite a few of those folks, including Naka, and I see Eran around although our RP has diverged at this point.
After taking another brief break to visit friends in SWG, I came back and started to build up Ecliptic Rift. From that base, I started the Back Alley Trading Company [BKAT] with Chainer Cygnus and another friend from SWG. (I suppose that thread runs through this whole thing, doesn’t it?) We focused on trading in Syndicate and Placid plus some random PVP, and even lived in W-space for a bit. When we joined United Trade Syndicate, we decided to split into two corporations for combat and industry.
I shouldn’t have done that. My sister corp Syndicate Special Operations Division [SSOD] did okay, and in fact most of our players went over there. They typically kept alts in BKAT, but as you might imagine, our activity on the industry and trade side essentially flatlined. Once we got down to a bare handful of players, I closed the corp at the end of the year and went back to flying solo(ish) doing exploration and trade. Unfortunately, Chainer went AWOL and totally incommunicado, started playing WoW, and left his corp hanging in the lurch. I talked to my friends Denovin Zyrinax and Caels Caldenhai, directors who owned shares, and explained how they could gain control of the CEO spot in his absence. We’re still good friends today, just doing different things.
This makes me look like a bit of a corp-hopper. Perhaps I am, in comparison to the sort of folks that joined at launch and have flown with the same corp for seven years. But I think every player needs a little bit of time to find their feet in the game, and not every corp turns out to be a good home for every player for any number of reasons.
What’s next?
I’ve flown more or less solo for about six months now. Recently, I put an alt in a corp, and for various reasons, it just didn’t work out. I’ve learned a few things about corporation management over the years, and I’ve decided to give it a go again.
So I have now formed AngelNet Research, a Curse-based corp focused on Angel Cartel R&D and roleplay: science, industry, planetary management, and some mission running for the Cartel. As you may already know, not only does the Angel Cartel have lots of juicy background in this sort of area (technology and industrial development), but plentiful NPC lab space and valuable LP rewards. I know this sounds like a typical carebear corp, and I suppose it might appear so from a particular perspective. But I believe living in NPC nullsec does ameliorate that to a significant degree: we live with substantial risk every day, not hiding among blues or behind CONCORD’s skirts. And while PVP won’t be something on which we focus, occasional bomber hunts or ganking ratters would make sense. I don’t plan to mine asteroids, as Curse seems to have a fairly decent mineral market already, but I can see where some folks interested in this sort of thing might want to do some ninja mining. As for roleplay, the corp will have lots of IC interaction and decision-making made based on roleplay considerations. I have a few interesting twists and hooks planned, but they haven’t yet progressed to the point where I want to announce them.
I have not yet opened up the corp to applications, as right now I need to complete work on a community site, recruitment thread, and collateral. But if you have an interest in manufacturing, research, planetary management, or Angel Cartel mission running with a healthy dose of roleplay, feel free to contact me via EVEmail, email, Twitter, or even through a comment on this site.
Watch this space for more!
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