Eve Online: My Year in Review

This is going to be one of those posts that isn’t time-delayed, due to the subject matter.

I just noticed that I started playing Eve one year and one day ago. January 22nd, 2011 marked my return to EvE to give it another try after failing to find anything of interest over four years previous.

It’s the fact that both of my main characters are only a year old that makes me kind of shake my head in bemusement every time someone asks me for any kind of advice, and why I rarely give any advice or write guides.

So if you’ll indulge me a moment, I’d like to take a look at where I am and what I’ve managed to accomplish.

Characters

  • Ty, my first main, has focused mainly on cruisers and battlecruisers. He can fly a battleship if needs must, but so far at least it really hasn’t been his thing. His skills focus mostly on Gallente and Minmatar ships (with a distinct preference for Minmatar, though he’s Gallente himself), but he can fly passably in pretty much any race’s ships, and suspect he will eventually be able to fly all the sub-capital ships of all four races. The thing I’m most happy about with his progression so far is getting to some major goals right at the end of the year with the advanced cruisers. Ty can fly both Minmatar and Gallente Heavy Assault Cruisers, Recon Cruisers, Logistics Cruisers, and Strategic Cruisers. I’ve still got a ways to go to full mastery on several of the more recent acquisitions, but I’m past the point where I’m embarassing myself by sitting in one with a booster seat on to get my head up even with the steering wheel. My main goal with him in the coming year is to really master the cruiser hulls — Level Five in All The Things, as they say. We’ll see how that goes.
  • Bre, my second main, is a bit of a weird bird. She started out as a scanning alt, but with a big skill point boost thanks to being the character I made up four years ago, she quickly drew even to Ty in skill points and demanded some projects of her own. She’s pretty solid in science, research, and electronic warfare of all kinds, but my personal project was her was frigates, and I saw that goal reached about the same time Ty got his cruiser goals met: Bre can fly every single race’s frigates at level five, and can fly all the tech2 variants of those frigates as well, from Interceptors to Assault Ships to Electronic Attack ships to Stealth Bombers. In addition, she has the support skills to complement those types of ships, and can use the tech 2 versions of every type of weapon system that can logically be fit to any of those ships.  If it’s small and fast, she’s pretty damned good at it.
  • Berke came to the party a bit later than the other two, and he had one purpose: to fly an Orca. I wanted someone to follow Ty and Bre around as they wandered around New Eden, hauling extra fittings and spare ships like a one-man caravan, and Berke was that guy. But when we moved into wormholes, priorities changed and Berke, who’d gotten quite good enough at Orca and other industrial piloting by that point in time, branched out into other useful support skills: he’s recently gotten all the advanced Leadership skills to a high level, and between that and some of his more esoteric skills (he can’t fly a combat ship, but he’s a dab hand with a tower gunnery array), he’s become a real asset — a great booster for a fleet of any kind. He’s my team player, my never-asks-for-a-thank-you guy and, in all seriousness, a hell of an Orca pilot.

What We’ve Done

I didn’t come into EvE saying “I want to live in a wormhole,” but I’m really glad that that’s how things worked out. Our corporation colonized a system, then joined a larger alliance and, through them, met our new friends in the Home System. It’s a situation I might have hoped for with no real expectation that it could happen in a cutthroat game like EvE, but it did happen, and I’m lucky for it.

Between Ty, Bre, and Berke (scanning Orca FTW), I’ve visited over 400 wormhole system in a little over half a year. I’ve made… well, a lot of ISK, and spent almost as much. I’ve even helped defend our system from invaders, blearily watching the scanning window for any sign of enemy activity in the wee hours of the night (more on that in a few weeks).

TL;DR: I’ve had a pretty damned good time.