Still Alive, Still Rambling

It has been a busy few months for me and hard to believe that my last post was back in April. Mid April real life took over pretty hard and didn't leave much time or willpower to maintain the blog. I also sidelined EVE for a while to try out WildStar. This resulted in a shortage of EVE shenanigans to write about and talking about my skill queue choices and passive market PvP didn't seem too interesting. However, with the 1 year mark passing on my first character I thought it would be good to take a (brief) look at where I started, how things are going and how I feel about the game in general.

It's funny to think back to a year ago and just how much I've learned. I started playing EVE because I just wanted to try something different. I remember getting to grips with the UI and blindly meandering from place to place figuring out what to do. Wide eyed with ambition I was going to take over the universe... or die trying. Oh boy did I die. First in the tutorial missions, because I couldn't be bothered to read the wall of text. Blah blah, use the unfit frigate to go blah blah suicide mission blah blah. Then in a wormhole, because I didn't know what sleepers were but wormholes were mysterious and intriguing. Then to mission rats because a tech I fit Raven with no drones is made of paper and can't get away from frigates. But I was doing okay, from each failure I learned and slowly but surely I was building up some ISK. Then I joined BNI and died a whole bunch more. Fortunately Atrons are cheap and my wallet didn't evaporate too quickly. Eventually I found my feet.

Fast forward to the present. I now run 4 accounts maxed out at 12 characters. jEVEassets tells me I'm worth ~50B in total, the majority of which is invested in the market. I'm space comfortable and able to fund just about anything I want to do in the game. More importantly, I'm still learning and still having fun. Currently I'm doing a bit of everything and able to sink a bit more time into the game again. For PvP I'm either flying with BNI (never not bomb blues) or out hunting solo on my faction warfare alt (I finally got some legit solo kills, woo!). I've also build up a mini high sec trade "empire" across 4 characters which also double up as my personal logistics network along with my JF pilot which gets plenty of mileage. Finally I'm testing the waters with industry which has proven quite profitable so far and a nice side project when other things are quiet or just for a change of pace. Life is good.

Moving on I have a few things planned. I still need to play around a bit more with DED sites. I'm at the point where I could train into a Tengu so some extended trips in null sec could be fun. I quite like exploration so adding combat ability on top should be interesting. My trading continues to expand and I'm comfortably able to make ~5-8B ISK per month with a fairly passive trading strategy. At most I spend ~30 minutes per day updating orders and managing my item stocks. Usually this gets spread out between downtime in other activities such as quiet periods during a fleet or during form up. I find the markets in EVE fascinating and I'm learning more about them every day as I research additional investment opportunities. Other than that, now that my JF pilot has perfect skills, I'm training him into a Blops. I foresee some solo hot drops in my future!

Overall I have plenty on my plate to keep me busy and interested. One of the most interesting developments has been Brave Collective's progress from low sec chaos to a much more organised null sec sov group as part of the HERO coalition. So far I've enjoyed it and it has been a great natural progression for me. It has also fascinating to watch how much the metagame can change an alliances approach to EVE, for better and for worse. Either way, living in null has been a great learning experience for me and really helped round out many of my EVE activities. Just one more step towards universal domination.