My Veteran Bonus Restored in Norrath

EverQuest II has a system in place to help you along in leveling alts.  When you get a character to the level cap all of your other characters get a 20% bonus boost towards their adventure or trade skill experience, depending on which cap you hit.  You can tell if it is active because the words “Veteran Bonus” are highlighted in color, as opposed to being grayed out.

Bonus Active

It is actually progressive, in that you get a 20% boost for every character at level cap, so if you get two you have a 40% boost, at three you get 60%, and so on, up to a maximum of 200%.

Mousing over the words “Veteran Bonus” in the character select screen will bring up a tool tip that will tell you your bonus status.

What you see with one char at adventure level cap

It is a handy little thing if you like to collect alts and get them moving along after you finish leveling up your main.

Why do I bring this up today?  Well…

Blood of Luclin level cap

Yes, by Thursday evening, the third evening of the Blood of Luclin expansion, I had made it to the level cap for the expansion with my first character.

I can seriously prove, thanks to ManicTime tracking, that I spent more time getting through the access quest to get to Luclin (yes, I did it the hard way, but the easy way hadn’t been posted yet) than I spent getting to the level cap.

I had hit level 119 before I even wandered out of The Blinding, the zone where you first show up in the expansion.  I hit level 113 for just showing up and was gaining a level with about every other quest after that.  At 119 I had a quest that sent me off to Sanctus Seru, a city zone, where I ran down two quests and hit level 120.

I barely have any screen shots of the new expansion yet.  Though I do have almost exactly the same one of riding the flying bug transport service across The Blinding that Bhagpuss posted.  Fortunately, I have another one that shows the flight destination coming up, so I won’t have to post an almost exact dupe.

Bug flight coming in to land

I am not sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand, I do appreciate a a quick and spirited leveling experience.  And it is likely that I will be working on some alts, so it is nice to have that bonus and all.

On the other hand… and this is going to be the hand that is dropping things because it is trying to carry too much… what the literal hell is going on here?  What is the plan?  Who decided that level cap in a day was a universal right to be extended to all players on arriving at their second zone?

I won’t stop playing due to not having hit the level cap, but I must admit that the drive to level cap is often a key motivating factor to me.  I do tend to be something of an advancement junkie and can get discouraged when moving forward is grindingly slow.  But going this fast is kind of crazy.  I am pretty much still wearing most of the hand out gear that I got for showing up.

I even went into the Alternate Advancement window to knock that slider over a bit, but realized then that we didn’t get any more AA levels this time around.  I am at the AA level cap of 350, and have been there since I wrapped up the signature quest in the Plane of Magic a few weeks back.

As for the expansion itself… well, I’ve barely been there, haven’t I?  And I don’t have the nostalgia factor that Bhagpuss has going into this as I was don’t with any serious play time when Luclin became a thing back in EverQuest.

The quests seem decent.  I probably need to read a bit more closely to follow the story.  Daybreak likes to have the story come directly from the mouths of the quest giver NPCs and I will admit I do occasionally with for a “can we just get on with the task?” response to hurry them up though the dozen or so “how did that happen?” and “is that the case?” and “tell me more” responses you’re prompted to click on.

I am also a bit surprised that flying isn’t a thing on Luclin.  Real world physics would indicate that flying would be easier on a moon where gravity is lower.  And of the few things I recall about Luclin from EverQuest, it was that the gravity was indeed lower.  Wasn’t that the lore reason for being able to walk about with a million platinum coins on your person in the Bazaar?  I do recall that time I forgot to bank my coins before leaving and ended up on the Plane of Knowledge severely over burdened and walking at a snail’s pace to get back to that sweet low gravity.

Do we unlock flying at some point, or has Daybreak gone where Blizzard only fears to tread and put out a no fly expansion?  I guess flying might be available in other zones, but I wouldn’t know yet, would I?

I am also a bit concerned about game performance with the expansion.  At prime time US there is a lot of server lag.  I have spent time waiting for the game to respond to my inputs, I get moments where I appear to be standing next to a mob but cannot hit it because the server thinks it is somewhere else, and my mercenary and pets have a hard time keeping up with me.  I see them lagging way behind as I move, and I see the followers of other players I pass wandering about, trying to find their way to their boss.  Maybe making us all keep a mecenary, a pet, and a familiar out at all times for the stat bonuses wasn’t such a good idea.  (Also, my merc seems to work for free on Luclin.  The pay time comes up and he gets zero.  Is that a bug or a feature?)

And then Skyfire server fell over for a while yesterday.  Naturally that is the server I play on and it was a bit disturbing to log in and simply not have any of my current characters listed on the character select page.

Some of this is new expansion jitters.  Daybreak has had extended maintenance downtimes for the last couple of days, no doubt to try and address some of the problems.  But still, there do seem to be some shaky aspects here.

As for my plan, I do want to see more of the expansion.  But hitting level cap also puts me in a mind for alts.  This could be a good expansion for getting some alts up to the level cap, though the hard part is going to be getting them to level 110 so they can join in.  I have a few at level 100 and the Plane of Magic path to 110 takes considerably longer than the Blood of Luclin path to 120.

And then there is the tradeskill path.  I have a few characters at or about level 100 for tradeskills, including Sigwerd.  I may have to look into how to get into Blood of Luclin crafting, though that too means going back to past expansions for a while.

The Steam Winter Sale Kicks Off for 2019

With the turning of the seasons comes a sale at Steam.  There is one for spring, summer, and autumn.  But the winter or holiday or whatever sale, that is the original big sale, the one that used to spark excitement and a frenzy of buying titles you never ended up playing.

Back for 2019

No doubt if you have a wish list on Steam you have an email in your inbox this morning telling you that a good portion of it is currently available at a discount.

There is also the usual Steam event with things to do to earn badges and such.  One of the day one actions was to put some items on your wish list, Steam no doubt still stinging from the summer sale when they managed to get people to purge their wish lists, to the chagrin of many an indie dev.

It is also time for the Steam awards voting.  The nominations were last month and now users get to pick from the most nominated titles.  As a crusty old MMORPG player who rarely plays the latest and greatest titles, I haven’t touched many of the nominated titles.  I think I own two of them.  But, like the general public on election day, ignorance never stopped me from voting.  Only laziness can do that, and I am not that lazy yet.

Anyway, it is here.  Time to shop… or browse… or earn a badge or two… or maybe log in and see if your account is still there or look at your game list for some sort of “games of the decade” post.

The Steam Winter Sale Returns for 2019

Like anybody doubted it would.

Yes, the holidays are upon us and one of the more recent traditions, the Steam Winter Sale, has returned with them.

As has become the norm, this is the modern, relaxed version of the sale, where the price drops remain throughout the event so nobody will miss any good deals just because they were at work when a flash sale hit.

This years special event is an advent calendar-like daily visit to the Extremely Cozy Cottage.

Along with that are some of the usual activities, besides buying games.  You can vote for the Steam Awards.  The nominations were part of the Autumn sale… a Steam sale for every season is now officially a thing… but nothing I nominated made the cut.

Still, I’ll vote because you get a trading card each time you do and apparently I’ll do about anything for a Steam trading card.  I’ll even look at my queue three times every day.  Seriously, these events are the only time I ever look at my recommendation queue.

But will I buy anything?  I anticipate getting an email from Steam soon telling me that 35 or so games on my wish list are now on sale.  And, while I haven’t been complaining like some about having sooo many unplayed games in my Steam library, I am still well beyond buying things simply because they have been marked down 80%.

I suppose eventually I’ll be posting about how Epic and Discord and Twitch and whoever else seeks to wear the digital games storefront mantle are all having seasonal sales.  Just because they want to differentiate themselves from Steam in some way doesn’t mean they can ignore the trends that Steam has started.

 

Operation Frostblind

It might be just me, but it feels like CCP cannot do two good player events in a row in EVE Online.  If they get one that is popular and gets a lot of response, the next one will be… less well received.

That is probably my memory being faulty.  I don’t run every event.  I know the Federation Grand Prix was a bust.  CCP said as much at EVE Vegas.  I am not sure how the Dawn of Liberation event went, but the Secrets of the Abyss event seemed to do well, rewarding people for running Abyssal pockets.

I think the contrast here for me is with the Crimson Harvest event we had a while back and the Operation Permafrost event, which kicked off on Monday.

Now Blinding Capsuleers in New Eden

As I wrote previously, I enjoyed the Crimson Harvest event.  It wasn’t a complete walk over, but if you fit yourself for it you could mine or zap NPCs to your hearts content, earning points towards rewards and collecting items from wrecks.  While I went in for just one SKIN reward, I rediscovered the serenity of mining while listening to a podcast or audio book and ended up going the distance on one character and continuing on with a couple more.

There were a couple of highlights for me when it came to the Crimson Harvest event.

First was the lack of scarcity.  When CCP does events based on sites spawning, they tend to be competitive.  You race around looking for sites.  Then when you find one, you warp in hoping it isn’t in progress yet.  And even if you get there first you have to hope somebody won’t warp in and get the last kill and loot the rewards.  All of that becomes frustrating if you play during peak hours, and even off peak there always seems to be somebody warping into your site to try and take the big prize.  That their bio is always in Russian is probably just a coincidence.

So for Crimson Harvest CCP put two sites in almost every system in New Eden.  I think they skipped Jita, though I saw the two in Amarr.  So if the site in your system was overrun, you could just move over one and find another.  One site in each system was for mining, the other was for fighting NPCs.  Each was fairly clearly marked.  And, when either site had been run out it would disappear off of the overview and a new one would spawn.

This meant that I could move a half a dozen systems out of Amarr and find a quiet site to mine.  The lack of competitiveness also seemed to make people relax and even cooperate on occasion.  Other players would mine happily or would chat as they dropped in to knock off any NPCs that happened to be hanging around.  It was quite pleasant in a way that events in EVE Online often are not.

The other was how nice the sites looked.  CCP, fresh from making all that pretty Abyssal space, went all out to make an autumnal space wonderland, with pumpkin-esque asteroids and bright orange nebulae.  I took way too many screen shots.

A Venture in the Crimson Harvest event

So the Crimson Harvest event set a quality baseline for me which carried over to the Operation Permafrost event.  That was probably my mistake.

But CCP did make it seem like the events would be similar.  There was to be the usual tasks to accumulate in The Agency for some prizes.  There was a promise of mining… both gas and ore this time… as well as NPCs to tackle and sites to hack.  And it was all going in another wonderfully done up skybox with a holiday theme.

The first sign of trouble was how the sites would be distributed.  This time around there wouldn’t be one per system, but just on per constellation.  Constellations vary in size, but they are rarely smaller than four star systems, so calling it five to be generous, you end up with only 20% of the sites to run that Crimson Harvest had.

Fine, whatever.  Crimson Harvest probably had too many sites.  One per constellation wasn’t going to be that bad, right?

I got together my Procurer, still knocking about in Amarr space after the Crimson Harvest event, and updated its fit a bit.

I even found an Amarr skin for it for cheap… screen shot taken later in Jita

Since the NPCs were from Mordus Legion, I made sure I was good versus thermal and kinetic damage and traded out my Acolyte drones for Hornets, the latter dealing kinetic damage.  Setup for things, I headed out to find a place to mine.

Once I found a site… The Agency tells me many things, but which system in a constellation has the event site is not one of those things… I warped to it and found three gates.

Hanging around the gates

The gates were labeled North, East, and West.  I knew that they aligned to mining, hacking, and combat focused areas, but which was which wasn’t clear to me and, once again, The Agency wasn’t helping me out.  So I chose a gate… the North gate, since it was closest, and took it.

I was accelerated into warp, through a white out of my screen, and into a very bright white atmospheric setting.

And while I am not going to complain about that as much as people were on the forums, it is a bit of a change for those were are used to the dark of space.  It is not the mellow black and orange of the Crimson Harvest.

On arriving after the north gate I found my overview loaded with NPCs.  This was clearly the PvE slaughter house.

A Mordu’s Legion ship laying in wait

I warped back to the marker and took the East gate.  That dropped me in the midst of a bunch of hackable structures.  There were also some NPCs to keep people on their toes, but the theme here was clear.

Back to the marker once more and then into the West gate.  That took me to what appeared to be mostly empty space.  There were a few NPCs around that immediately sent some missiles my way, but the site was otherwise empty.

Procurer in the bright empty sky

I sent my drones off to take them out, which wasn’t too tough.  The Procurer was able to tank the incoming damage well enough.

But I hadn’t come out to zap NPCs with my drones.  I didn’t mind doing that as a side task, but I came out to get in some meditative mining time.  So I left that constellation and moved on to the next.  There I found pretty much the same situation.  So I moved on again… and then again… and once more before I finally found a single unmined asteroid in an event site.  It was hanging in space about 300km from my warp in and my heavy tanked Procurer didn’t have a propulsion module to help scoot it along.

At that point I started looking online to see what was up with the mining aspect of the event.  Was I trailing behind some fleet of locusts?  Should I look elsewhere or just hang about hoping for a respawn.

As it turned out, the mining segment of the event only respawns at downtime.  That mean that while I am still asleep the server repopulates all the mining sites.  Then I get up, go to work, have lunch, work some more, come home, talk with my wife, listen to my daughter complain about school, have dinner, maybe watch a bit of TV, all before finally logging in about 18 hours after downtime.  During that interval pretty much everybody living in time zones to the east of me has had the opportunity to mine out all the sites, so that by the time I show up there are just the leftover asteroid or two, too far away from the warp in to even bother with.

So I set a course back to Jita.  I didn’t have any combat ships out in Amarr space for my alt so I figured I would head back there to put something together.  That Drake I use for events sometimes was there.

Hinging the event, or at least the mining aspect of the event, on downtime feels like a bit of a mistake to me.  That gave me a flavor of my old high sec mining days when several European corps used to mine out several whole systems every day before I got home, so I ended up having to move out to the hinterlands in order to find a ready supply of rocks.

I might try the combat aspect of the whole thing, but the mining portion of the event turned out to be a bust for me.  And I know I’ll be able to pick up the SKINs on the market soon enough anyway, so I might just leave it at that.

Further early opinions about the event are available over at The Nosy Gamer.

Winter Movie League – Jedi Triumphant

The week we had all been waiting for finally arrived for out Winter Fantasy Movie League run.

The Star Wars: The Last Jedi premier weekend promised to be a high rolling weekend for totals.  The options for the week were as follows:

Star Wars - Friday           $823
Star Wars - Saturday         $501
Star Wars - Sunday           $422
Ferdinand                    $157
Coco                         $90
Wonder                       $40
Justice League               $35
The Disaster Artist          $45
Thor: Ragnarok               $25
Daddy's Home 2               $25
Murder on the Orient Express $21
Lady Bird                    $19
The Shape of Water           $18
The Star                     $17
Three Billboards             $14

As expected, Star Wars was split into three days to keep other movie picks viable.  But at that pricing and with the initial estimates the only viable anchor outside of Star Wars seemed to be Ferdinand.

Initially pegged to hit as much as $25 million on its opening weekend, Ferdinand was priced such that it was the obvious pick… if you believed that estimate.  I wasn’t buying it and my skepticism was reinforced by an decline in the estimates for the picture as the week went on.

At least when sites could be bothered to pay Ferdinand a moments notice.  That annoyance of the week was mostly the inability to get much news about other possible pictures in light of all the focus on Star Wars.

My initial, Monday afternoon at 5pm pick was two screens of Sunday Star Wars and six screens of Thor, a selection I did not budge from until Friday morning.  I have long harbored the bias that Friday was a sucker’s play, and the pricing for Friday for Star Wars did little to assuage that feeling.

Then on Friday morning I saw the Thursday night preview numbers come in for Star Wars.  The 7pm to midnight run of the movie brought in about $45 million.

As we learned previously, Thursday night preview numbers get added into the Friday total for FML, so Star Wars was going into Friday, its first full day, with $45 million on the books.  That was enough to get me to change my picks with less than an hour to go.

But then what should the filler be?  I could see that seven screens of Thor or Daddy’s Home 2 would be easy enough.  Biased against the latter, I went with Thor.  And then, seeing how much of my budget was left, I ended up injecting Justice League and The Star into the mix at the cost of two screens of Thor.

My Winter Week Three Picks

That was where I sat when time ran out and the picks were locked.

Then it was time to contend with FML.

For some reason they decided to update their user interface on the biggest week of the season, changing up how information was presented to the user and hiding away something that used to be easy to see; the picks of others.

You could still click on individuals to see what they picked for the week, but previously if would show the whole league listing for the week with all the picks.

That issue got addressed when they put in the first weekend estimates on Saturday morning, but that still left a 24 hour gap where you couldn’t easily eyeball your league’s pick as a whole.  I hope they will fix that before the coming week.  That is the first thing I like to do when the picks get locked, check to see what everybody went with.

And then there was the point in time when they updated the estimates and somebody keyed in $54 million instead of $5.4 million for Wonder and the rankings were suddenly upended.

Things did settle down though and as the results were updated it looked like anchoring on Friday might have been the best call.  My secondary picks however… not so much.  Seven screens of Daddy’s Home 2 were the winning add ons to the Friday anchor, the Perfect pick, which one of the Meta League players got.

Winter Week Three Perfect Pick

So the Meta League scores for the week looked like this come the final numbers:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $150,374,259
2. Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $126,618,403
3. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $126,391,492
4. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $122,295,706
5. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $122,200,948
6. The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $121,527,861
7. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $121,260,528
8. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $119,959,574
9. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $119,841,499
10. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $117,530,074
11. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $117,514,309
12. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $113,954,953
13. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $113,556,221
14. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $113,556,221
15. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $111,856,907
16. Kraut Screens (T) – $108,270,492
17. Movies Movies Movies (T) – $100,930,447
18. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $92,035,164
19. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $92,035,164

Meta League Legend

• TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)
• MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

At the top end was Corr with the perfect pick., with Elly in second place with what was my second to last pick… and then I decided I was leaving too much of my budget behind so swapped it out.  That put me in third.

After Corr the top half of the pack was pretty tight, with less that a $10 million gap.  There were a couple of empty screen gambles in that group, including Po Huit, who left two screens unfilled for his pick.

Then things start to tail off.  Overall the rankings followed the general pattern of Friday, then Saturday & Sunday, then Sunday & Sunday, then Saturday only, and finally SynCaine and Liore who both went all-in on Ferdinand.

That led to some changes in the overall season ranking.

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $263,991,676
2. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $246,902,611
3. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $239,243,948
4. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $236,054,049
5. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $236,045,807
6. Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $234,910,614
7. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $233,602,345
8. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $230,221,059
9. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $229,567,773
10. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $225,903,099
11. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $221,434,424
12. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $221,352,862
13. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $220,689,176
14. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $218,314,767
15. The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $218,084,149
16. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $214,612,291
17. Kraut Screens (T) – $209,585,483
18. Movies Movies Movies (T) – $206,590,950
19. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $205,022,899

Corr’s perfect pick was enough to move him from 7th to 1st place overall in the Meta League, pushing ahead of Ben.  On the flip side, SynCaine’s opting for Ferdinand dropped him from 2nd to 14th spot on the list.  My betting on Friday was able to get me from 15th to 9th position, but the pack is still pretty tight.  Corr does not yet have anything like an unassailable lead and a good or bad week for people could still shake up the ordering quite a bit.

Which brings us to week four, the Christmas Holiday weekend which includes Monday in the results.  The options are:

Star Wars                  $815
Jumanji                    $275
Pitch Perfect 3            $251
The Greatest Showman       $110
Downsizing                 $72
Ferdinand                   $67
Father Figures             $54
Coco                       $51
All the Money in the World $31
Wonder                     $28
Justice League             $17
Daddy's Home 2             $20
The Shape of Water         $23
Darkest Hour               $16
Best of the Rest           $15

Star Wars sits at the top again, priced so you can only have one screen of that and some low priced filler.  Is the force that powerful?  I think it might well be and my Monday evening gut pick was anchored on it.  It did an all time top ten Monday take this week scoring $21 million.  Maybe I was sensing that.

But if you’re feeling a disturbance in the force, there are other plays available.  This coming weekend sees a lot of new titles showing up looking to cash in on holiday magic and vacation time.  Jumanji, Pitch Perfect 3, The Greatest Showman, Downsizing, Father Figures, and All the Money in the World are new this week.

Meanwhile The Star, Three Billboards, Murder on the Orient Express, Lady Bird, The Disaster Artist, and Thor: Ragnarok have all fallen off as options.  Having The Star go missing this week is a bit ironic I suppose.

Then there are the lingering few.  I clearly do not understand the movie going world if Daddy’s Home 2 is not only still on the list, but not even at the bottom yet.  Ferdinand and Coco also seem poised to pick up some kids out of school business.

And then there is the wild card, with Best of the Rest appearing on the picks for $15.  That means whatever other movie out there performs the best will take that spot.  Historically that play seems more likely than not to be the best/price performer since it rewards any film that exceeds a certain amount.  This could be the way The Star works itself back on the list.  A $2 million showing for it would make it viable.

So you have to ask yourself, is this going to be a Star Wars Christmas or not?

Five Years in Null Sec

Back in December of 2011, even as Hilmar was telling the CSM that the era of the “Jesus Feature” was over, I was again subscribed to EVE Online.  Having unsubscribed after the debacle that was Incarna, I was back to see what CCP had done since then as they launched the Crucible, an expansion that promised to get back to the nuts and bolts of the game and start a trend of fixing stuff that people had been complaining about for years.

I had to admit that it was pretty, with new nebulae and start gates that appears to be lined up to shoot you at the correct star even.

Jump Gate in Action

But as pretty as the update was, it wasn’t holding me.  I was back and looking at all the stuff I had in my hangar, leftovers from the various paths I had trod over the previous half decade in New Eden… mission, mining, production, arbitrage… along with 70 million skill points in training and felt no inspiration.  I was subscribed for a month and figured I would spend it toddling about looking at pretty things and then let my account lapse.

Even my friends, the people who came and went from our little corp, were all gone… all save Gaff.  Gaff was back and playing, but he was out in null sec where he had gone a year or so previously, and there was not getting there to visit, though he did stop by in high sec for the occasional romp.

He had tried to get me to join him in null sec in the past, but I am one of those people who gets stuck on “things,” and all of my things were in a station in Amarr space and I couldn’t imagine trying to get them all up to where he lived in Deklein.

This time, however, my commitment to the game was waning such that I was up to take a chance.  I filled out an application to join BSCL, got accepted, changed my home station, and self-destructed.

I was revived in the station at CU9-T0, the headquarters of my new alliance, TNT, but quickly scooted off to 0P-F3K, the system that BSCL mostly called home.  It was December 18, 2011 and a conflict had just broken out.  After the great VFK headshot Goonswarm had taken what was once DekCo, transformed into the Clusterfuck Coalition, or the CFC, once its boarders expanded, on the road after some neighbors to the northeast that were seen as threats.  The CFC struck out at them and these foes, White Noise and Raiden, announced they were set to come get us, promising to rid Deklein of Goons, a statement which was turned into the infamous cry of “VFK by February!”

It was war and I had to figure out what was what in a hurry.

I got to our staging system in VFK-IV, got on coms, got myself a doctrine ship, and was soon bumbling my way through fleets trying to figure out what was going on and not screw up.  But by December 21 I had already bridged off of a titan, been in a fleet fight, done a structure shoot, and had seen all sorts of new things in the game.  And probably more importantly I became part of the ongoing story that is null sec space.

Null Sec Sov. December 27, 2011

Long after seeing a titan was no longer special and I had trained up skill points to fly in every subcap doctrine the coalition could come up with, being part of the sweep and story of null sec space has kept me interested in the game.  Before I came to null sec I used to drop my subscription and take a break every so often, usually after I wore out whatever goal or project I had been working on.  Since I came to null sec I have remained subscribed and logging in.

As something of an MMO tourist, being in a null sec alliance and part of a contentious coalition has afforded me the opportunity to witness many of the noteworthy events that have sometimes made it to the mainstream news.  To abuse a former CCP advertising catch phrase, “I was there” for:

• My first “big” fleet fight in EWN-2U which saw the newly released time dilation mechanism in play (post)
• Burn Jita of various flavors (Burn Jita tag)
• Z9PP-H when CCP fumbled the node and saved TEST (Post, though I left just before that happened)
• The Lazamo at 3WE-KY (post)
• 6VTD-H at the end of the Fountain War (Post with lots of links about the battle)
• HED-GP when we were killing nodes with drone assist (Post)
• B-R5RB, which remains the most expensive battle in New Eden history (B-R5RB tag with several related posts)
• M-OEE8 and the great betrayal of the Casino War (Post)
• Defeat in the Casino War and the great migration to Delve (Delve 2016 tag)
• M-OEE8 Keepstar fight with the most pilots ever to pile into a single system (Post)

Those are points in time that a lot of people will remember.  I think the one big event I totally missed was Asakai, which happened while I was at work and was done before I got home.  And these are just peak events.  For each great clash there are many smaller battles.

And even when there isn’t a wider war going on… which is usually when some vocal non-null sec players start chanting about “blue donuts” and “stagnation”… there is always something going on, even if it is just planning and building for the next conflict.  We can’t sustain constant war, it takes too much out of people.

And the story continues.  That series of discreet events I listed out are just points on the arc of a much wider and ongoing tale of which so many people have been a part.   Some actors and organizations come and go, others change sides or become part of new organizations.  If you read Andrew Groen’s book Empires of EVE, that is just part of the story, a great snapshot from null sec, but only a snippet from the ongoing saga of 0.0 space.  War, alliances, spies, betrayal, conquest, victories, defeats, old hands, bitter vets, new bros, null sec has it all.

Null sec sov Dec. 20, 2016

Granted, null sec isn’t a game niche for everybody, and there are aspects of it that do get tiring.  After a couple of years of mostly being in the blob of main fleet, the whole effort was starting to wear on me.  If you look back at January of 2014, when B-R5RB happened, I am only on six kill mails.  They were six titans from that battle, but I wasn’t doing much else and my Dominix got left behind in the system after the Russians collapsed and lost all of that space.

And then Reavers came along with ops where 100 ships is a big turn out for an op and got to do all sorts of different sorts of fights all over New Eden.  And that isn’t a constant activity.  We deploy for a bit, have some fights, then come back home to do other things.

All in all though, being part of null sec is pretty much what made EVE Online finally “stick” for me.  Every time I think maybe it is time for a break, something new comes up in the story and I decide to stick around a bit longer just to see how that plays out.