Life in a Wormhole: Winning at Eve Blogging #eveonline

When I first started playing EvE about a year ago, it was an investigative role on behalf of MMO Reporter, and my editor asked CCP to give me some game time so I could really dig in and write some articles.

Quite unexpectedly, they set my main account up for a year of play time, which was a bit of a shock, as I’d only intended to write a few EvE-related articles for the site in question.

Once those articles were done, I felt a bit… obligated, I guess. I’d been ‘paid’ a year’s worth of time for a couple week’s worth of writing, and I enjoyed the game, so I just… started writing about whatever I could think of to write, using my own gaming-related website as a repository for all of it (and overwhelming the non-EvE-related stuff in the process). That these posts have been well-received by the EvE community was an unexpected but welcome bonus.

There’s a meme that circulates around the EvE playerbase wherein a player is said to be winning at EvE when they unsubscribe from the game. The particularly optimistic and/or confident ex-player might expand on that to claim that they have actually beaten EvE, but most won’t do that, because such statements have a way of being proven wrong, given enough time.

Over the last year, I’ve helped quite a few “winning” players start losing at EvE again, and that’s something I’m really kind of happy about. For whatever reason, these little stories about our misadventures in Anoikis inspire old players to return to the game, and convince new players to give it a try. That’s good — it makes me feel that I’ve repayed CCP in kind. I love hearing from those players, which I do on a fairly regular basis.

Unfortunately, this type of nigh-daily blogging is, for me, coming to a close.

My year’s worth of play-time and, thus, the ‘pay’ I got to write regularly about EvE is just about used up, and while I’ve contacted CCP to request an extension, I’ve been (nicely) informed this blog isn’t really a professional media outlet (agreed), and as a result a media account doesn’t make sense for them.

Fair enough.

I’m still going to play, obviously; I really enjoy the game, but that sense of writing obligation is gone. As a general rule, I get paid to write, and if I’m putting time into writing something that I’m not getting paid for when there’s paying work waiting on my desk — well, that’s just irresponsible. So I’ll be tabling the daily EvE posts for the foreseeable future.

My non-EvE-playing friends (all of whom have been reading this blog for much longer than I’ve been writing about EvE) just heaved a long sigh of relief.

What sort of EvE stuff will I continue to post?

Mainly, articles that strike me as interesting enough to do just-because.

Aside from that, I’m going to continue to document my day to day misadventures via Twitter, in a mini-diary format of which I’m very fond. It’s not as detailed, but it’s often a bit more fun (and sometimes quicker) to write, and leaves room for some good conversations when people ask for more details. You can find the Twitter feed at Life in EvE — I’ve taken the not-insubstantial time to back-fill it with the full Life in a Wormhole timeline and begun posting new stuff. I hope that if you enjoyed the posts here, you’ll enjoy this new thing as well.

I expect I will.