Returning to Eve Online

I used to live, breathe, eat and sleep Eve Online.  I originally joined the game just looking for an x-wing type space flight simulator, and obviously found myself in a world nothing like that.  I found something better.  I spent about a year or so casually playing; running NPC missions, mining, occasionally PVPing, nothing too crazy, or too time intensive.  Casual and relaxing gaming at its finest.

One of the biggest continual points of interest for me was the Eve doesn't require a whole lot of attention and multitasking while playing.  You can easily almost leave your ship on autopilot and only spend a few seconds every couple of minutes giving it commands.  It's profitable, and somewhat fun.  But eventually that gets boring.  And in the summer of 2008, I decided to leave my corporation of fellow boring pilots and jump into some PVP based corporations. 

I drifted along for a few months, and while I had always dabbled in PVP, when the Empyrean Age expansion was released on June 10, 2008, I jumped into faction warfare and I was hooked.  Eve isn't so much having fun in the game, but having fun in the game with the right people.  Through faction warfare, I found the right people, I began FCing (Fleet commanding), I began soloing, and I began a long and respected career as a whole-seller of destruction.  I miss those days, and it's with that in mind that starting next week I'll be returning to Eve, not only to blog about the state of the game in the wake of scandals and promised expansions, but to farm the delicious tears of anyone stupid enough to get in my way.

This'll be a weekly column, every Friday, but if you're not in the mood to wait and see what I feel about the myraid of changes that have struck through the Eve Online universe, you can follow my progress here.  That link will show you a brief combat history of my pilot, and since all I'm doing is PVPing and evaluating the state of the game, that'll be a nice summary for anyone looking to keep track in between updates.

Next week I'll talk more about the state of the game after CCP's (The company that runs Eve) layoff of 20% of their work force as a result of them ignoring their fan base and producing a near-worthless expansion.  I'll discuss the veteran player exodus that followed, the attitude of the remaining players in the game, and provide an outlook and first-impression of the multiple changes that have been implemented in the game since my last tenure in Eve earlier this year.