What was going on in December six years ago?
The instance group was still early in its adventures in Rift.
EverQuest II merged with the EverQuest II Extended F2P experiment.
Diablo III seemed to be on the horizon, along with Torchlight II and Path of Exile. My annual MMO Outlook post wasn’t very MMO-ish.
Star Wars: The Old Republic was arriving on the scene while Star Wars Galaxies was being shut down.
Lord British was being coy about his ultimate RPG, how fond he was (or was not) of EA, and how nice it would be if EA would let him use the Ultima IP he sold them way back when.
We starting to worry about the fact that the Mayan calendar seemed to call it quits in 2012… again, Lord British on the scene here as well, he seemed to be talking a lot back then… until we all got a new one in the mail from our Mayan insurance agents. That was probably a good thing, since the contact information on the old one was pretty far out of date.
And I was back subscribed to EVE Online for the Crucible expansion.
Crucible – November 2011
Having voted with my wallet and unsubscribed after the Incarna fiasco, I was back to see if CCP was really changing course or not.
Crucible dropped at the end of November 2011 with a promise to focus on fixing the game that already existed in New Eden as opposed to dumping new features on us. As Hilmar told us, the era of the Jesus Feature was over and the patch notes foretold a lot of incremental look and feel improvements for the game.
Things were pretty in Crucible, I gave CCP that. But it was still the same game overall and I had worn out most of the paths in high sec that were available, having run missions, manufactured, invented, mined, and played the market. After a few days of looking at space and ships and such I was already feeling a bit done with things.
And then my pal Gaff suggested I come out to null sec where he was.
He had been out there for a while and had asked me to come out previously, but I was always tied up with what I was doing. I get hung up on my “stuff” and all of that “stuff” was in a station in Amarr space, much closer to Delve than Deklein. The idea of packing it up and moving was too much and I would always put off joining him until I was “ready,” whatever that meant.
This time, however, I hadn’t been around my “stuff” for months. My attachment to it was pretty weak, as was my attachment to the game itself in that moment. I was pretty sure I was going to unsubscribe anyway, so I said I would go.
So six years ago today was my first null sec post where I joined the corp Gaff was in, set my home to their main station, and self-destructed to awake and find myself in Deklein. From there it was fleet ops and space battles and ships and effects I had never before seen in the game.
From that point forward I started seeing new things and playing in a new way. In the six years since the sovereignty map has changed (what it looked like back then), the mechanics have changed, the fleet metas have changed, the graphics have changed, moon mining has changed, jump travel has changed, skill injectors arrived, Alpha clones became a thing, and null sec has gone from being a pretty restricted club to being pretty accessible via large new player organizations with low barriers to entry like KarmaFleet, Pandemic Horde, and Brave Newbies.
Also, I’ve been part of an invasion of Delve at least four times.
But all of that has kept me invested in EVE Online and came at a time when I was ready to step away from New Eden once again.
As for the tipping point, with the coming of my sixth year in null sec it also means that along the way, in the last few months I suppose, I passed over the line where most of my in-game time went from being in high sec space and doing the PvE things I mentioned above… which I still do sometimes, but not as my sole vocation… to being mostly null sec based.
I suppose the real question now is, am I a bitter vet yet or not?
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