My good friend Tony, (jungleburger in Eve) was spouting out his generally hard to understand scouse phrases. For about a month, he had been going on about Eve Online and it just so happened that our unit leader, Jez (Invictor in game) also had been a long time Eve enthuistiast.
We had just come off of a strenuous 4 month night shift. During this time, the only salvation, though little it may be was WoW. Another friend had got me to play it and the foul bastard game suddenly became a second job after getting home from work at 10am.
Tony had a new wallpaper up on his work computer. It depicted a Phoenix Dreadnought with numerous Caldari ships flying through space. As an avid Sci-Fi fan, (you can find me watching Star Wars, Firefly etc etc on many occasions) my immediate thoughts were 'wow! those ships are cool'.
Tony then brought up the Eve Online ships scale picture. To which I was astonished. The best use of scale in a space game I had seen was in FreeSpace 2 back in the day. It did not even get close to this. The Phoenix dread was hundreds of times the size of its escort. At this point, Jez walked over, pointed at the screen and said 'my alliance has just built me one of those.'
I knew by now I had to give the game a go.
That night I downloaded the trial. I made a Minmatar, high charisma, special ops, mining character...
The character was called Jedziah (Most of you know I have since replaced her with one that's a it better). Jedziah lasted a week or two before I realised how much of a mistake I had made with the starting stats. Soon after, Artem was made with a decent stat setup to boot and immediately started on the path to a mining barge.
My initial thoughts were to sustain myself with ISK in order to build one of thos gargantuan Dreadnoughts for myself. Now Eve was so different back then. Jungleburger appeared in the belt I was ratting in in his 70 Million ISK Jaguar Assault Ship. With fittings it had cost well over 100. Crazy in comparison to the inflated market we see today.
2 Months down the line San was born. It was out of a lust to get involved with the PvP and piracy going on in New Justice. With the guidance of JB, she went on a learning plan to help her train skills a bit faster. Initially, San flew around in a Kestrel and a Comorant not soon after. I'd occasionally drop into Metropolis low sec and wonder what on earth the ship scramming and webbing me was doing.
By the time San had become PvP aware, JB had set up a splinter corp for which I spent over a year with. We had a lot of fun times, experienced 0.0 for the first, second and third times and unfortunately then broke apart due to some extremely spongeant members sapping the life from the directors.
It was during this time with TRPLA, that we first met The Bastards and formed a coalition. Our pirating ventures were similar to the ones we had today. Our main enemies at the time being Black-Flag and M34N Corp. In fact, FlashFresh and Jubes are on too many of my loss mails to count.
It was after TRPLA collapsed that Eve started to move from my life. I had tested a number of corps over a short period and could not find the connection we all had in TRPLA. After a number of tries, I had lost the love for the game and took an extended break from Eve. I honestly didn;t know if it was temporary or a permanent one.
RnProphet, who had followed us from The Bastards to enjoy a bit of fun in Syndicate had rejoined them. I had been playing a number of other games with him, namely the likes of Supreme Commander and such. He had gone to rejoin The Bastards.
I had remembered how much fun I had during my time there. In fact, no other time in the game had produced as much fun on a regular basis as the time I had spent flying with them. I decided to give Eve one last go and rejoin with them.
By now, San had flourished into a 30 million skill point character with the ability to fly a myriad of different ships. My other alt Jed, had been focused solely on battleships and had pretty much maxed out any skill she could to make them awesome. Soon, I realised that I was back in the place I should have come back to a long time ago.
The moral of this story is quite simple. Eve becomes that alluring mistress due to the ties we make with others. It is the company that you fly with that makes this game so different to the other MMO's out there. The 'Pub Like' atmosphere on the Bastards Vent is something that other corps have found hard to replicate. Everyone is a friend of everyone and there are no outsiders in the corp, despite its astronomical growth in recent months.
It is the one corp I have found where everyone is pulling for the same thing and making sure we have nothing short of epic fun whilst we do.
The temptations of Eve are strong on so many levels. Hours can be lost literally doing nothing on the game but sitting in the station and using the chat as an expensive MSN. Nontheless, CCP have to be given credit for providing us with such an excellent game, free expansions and generally exciting us all with what is to come.
2 comments:
Amen to all of that! The Bastards truly have something special going on...so many charming, amusing, competent pilots and such a great sense of humor in how you all approach the game overall.
Isn't it delightful that one week you can be "enemies" with someone and the next be flying perfectly amicably right alongside them?
I still deep down hate Flash and Jubes for all the pain and anguish they caused me in this game!
Don't tell them though ;-)
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