Update: Absenses and All That

So, to anyone who's visited in the past, oh, forever, you know I haven't been updating this blog much.  There are a couple of reasons for that.  Don't worry, I won't leave you hanging.  The truth is, FW stopped being something light-hearted and got ultra serious for a bit.  Then it stopped being that and just stopped being something I cared about at all.  My alliance, I.LAW, had stopped really remotely resembling the alliance it had started out to be.  In some ways that was not a bad thing.  However, whenever a creation takes a life of its own (fully recognizing that I was one of multiple creators and cannot take full ownership, nor would I wish to), sometimes you lose that connection to it that made it special for you.  Now, I.LAW and In Exile will always hold a dear place in my heart.  That's why the corp still exists, though not in an active form.  However, they can't hold my attention.  For those who don't know, in my real life, I am a law student.  That entails a good deal of stress (largely good stress) and time.  I got burnt out on EVE because I was burning out on life.  All of these things made writing a light hearted satirical blog about FW rather pointless.  It's still pretty pointless since I unsubbed my accounts a month or two ago.  However...

I'm not done with EVE.  I'm not.  EVE's been a part of my life for almost 8 years.  I need some space at the moment, but I know I'll be back to it.  But, what of this blog?  What will I write here?  Will I write here?  What the hell will I say? 

That really depends on what I do when I get back.  The way it looks, I'll probably be heading out to null-sec to rejoin friends.  Why? Because I'm an old bittervet.  It's comfortable.  Also, I'm not a PVE sort of person and null-sec ratting is about the only PVE I can stand.  So, that's the update.  Now you know what I'm doing and I can say that I've written something here.  With any luck, I'll get the urge to write fun stuff ridiculing the day to day life of null-sec.  I'm probably going to have to change the name, though.  FWeeking Fail wouldn't really work, would it?

So, patience.  Patience and maybe a dancing llama?   

Yeah.  Dancing Llama.

Necro Time

So, I've been away from this blog for a LOOOONNNG time.  Seriously.  It's been forever.  Any readers I have left (which is probably not many at all) will probably not really care why I've been neglecting this particular blog of mine.  Well, tough nuts, I'm gonna tell you anyway.

First, it should just be said that the metagame and all the attendant out of game stuff that fuels this sort of blog kind of dried up for me.  To be honest, post-Inferno and over a period of time, a lot of the things that are uniquely Faction Warfare stopped really being uniquely Faction Warfare.  We have our weird sov mechanic which is about as inane as the null-sec one.  We have a host of null-sec style alliances now involved.  The tight-knit community of FW players has become a sea of new faces which I haven't really gotten to know as well.  This goes for both sides.  When I first came to FW in the Amarr-Minmatar warzone, it was a vibrant community of people fighting for the sake of fighting.  Pew was commonplace because there weren't really any other mechanics available that were worth a damn.  I saw the same enemies on a regular basis and they became familiar.  While both sides got frustrated with each other from time to time, I think a lot of people also had generally favorable views of the enemy, if only because they were willing to come out and kill or be killed in pretty close to even fights, some of which got pretty large.  I'm not going to say that these fights stopped completely post-Inferno, but the fundamental nature of FW changed, and not for the better.  This sapped my desire to write about it after a while, especially since I've never attempted to present a fair or balanced or even honest portrayal of the happenings in FW.  This blog was always meant to be tongue-in-cheek.  I think you can see why I ran into writer's block.  It stopped really being funny.

Second, real life got really busy for me.  Seriously.  I'm a law student now, which takes up considerable time and energy.  Nights when I had time, I often was too tired to even consider a three hour fleet (not to mention TZ considerations which would have me up until 1 a.m. before my 8 a.m. class).  I am beginning to have a better budget of time and energy, which may free up more time in the future (or maybe not.  Law school is a crapshoot that way).  Also, I'm married, and wives have a funny habit of wanting to see their husbands from time to time.  It's another thing in the balance, as it were.

Third, I have another blog which is an RP blog.  It's a creative outlet for me and allows me to explore some topics vis-a-vis philosophy, morality, and other concepts of a literary nature.  I'm not the next fucking Faulkner (I'd prefer to be more like Chuck Pahlaniuk anyway, honestly).  I'm just saying, I like to write.  RP > FW Trolling.  True story.  As the warzone stopped being terribly engaging for me, I started logging on more for the RP (because why just be a nerd when you can be Uber-Nerd?).  So, basically, I stopped updating this blog in favor of frollicking through homicidal maniac pretend land and writing short stories about my characters, each of which tend to run the gamut from cold sociopath to manic emotional wreck on a regular basis (but in a classy way!).  Also, people die a lot.  Yeah.  My stories involve a LOT of death (I stopped counting the bodies a while back after it started being meaningless...I mean 5 digits is excessive).  Shameless plug time.  If you want to check out my fiction writings:  The Path of Strife.  The newest post is first, so you should probably go to the archive and start at the beginning, or it won't make much sense (soooo much history).


Anywho, that's pretty much it for now.  So, I dunno, go watch porn or something.

Why MMORPGs

I was considering today why it is that I prefer MMORPGs over most other game types.  Eve certainly has the pvp aspect, which I feel is probably a solid draw for a large number of players, but it can't be denied that pve is the biggest draw for games like WoW and its ilk.  I can't really speak for anyone else in regards to the selling point of Eve in general.  I can only really speak from my own experience.

Also, just this once, the trolling light is off.  I'm actually writing a serious post.

Role-play

I didn't RP for probably the first year and a half to two years of playing Eve.  At that point in time, it was something for myself and a bunch of work friends to do when we got home.  I was in the Navy at the time, and my work friends were really my only friends, and my wife wasn't there at the time.  So, Eve became our hobby, and one that cost much less than our old hobby of getting absolutely shit-faced at the nearby bar.  I vomited slightly less, as well, which I saw as a definite improvement.

We formed our own little corporation and began to play around with running complexes and other pve nonsense, but I began to be quite bored with it.  I managed to become CEO and I made us join with a pvp alliance in Geminate, and quickly splurged to set up system sovereignty in an out of the way system.  This was back when sov was a matter of putting up and keeping up POS's.  So, my little corp of 10 people held a shitty system for a very short period of time.  Inevitably, much larger and more active alliances swooped in and ROFLSTOMPED the bajeezus out of our alliance.  This was when I pulled us out of the alliance, got our towers out safely (True Sansha Large tower is not a pleasant thing to lose), and quickly went about killing noobs in high sec to get my fix.  Before long, I had become estranged from my corp.  I had lived in low-sec with maybe 3 ships to my name for about a month, killing where I could.  But, this really wasn't enough to keep me playing. 

I took a long time off before I came back and resumed my old high-sec ganking ways.  I happened upon someone recruiting for TNT and decided to finally make my break with high-sec for good.  I settled into null-sec rather comfortably for several months.  But, then null-sec politics came into the picture.  I decided I didn't want to be there anymore.  An old friend's wife convinced me to join Amarr FW.  This is where the reason I play MMORPGs finally came to be.

I met some very interesting people in KotMC.  But, Shalee was probably the most important for the purposes of this discussion.  Between her and Rin, I had been convinced to try out this RP business.  It was shaky at first.  I didn't know what RP was supposed to be like, and so I sat and watched for my first few tries before I began to really get the hang of it.  I started an RP blog, intending to flesh out my character beyond the unscripted chatroom interactions.  That blog (The Path of Strife) is now 108 posts long, and my character sufficiently complex that I am constantly interested in seeing what he will do next.  He's gotten a life of his own. 

That's why I play MMORPGs.  MMOs allow you the ability to truly create another life, to breathe life and personality, neuroses, etc. into a character of your creation.  MMOs provide another world, another history, and another framework in which to place that character and to explore their choices.  It's not just about blowing up spaceships for me.  It's about watching the triumphs and failures of a person I've grown quite attached to.

That's why I play MMORPGs, and that's why I RP.

The Ups and Downs of Taking a Break

I recently took some time away from Eve.  I've been reflecting a lot on it, which is kinda weird.  However, this isn't the first break I've taken and there are some similarities I've found in every one of these absences.

The Good:

A break is good sometimes.  After too many months of sinking more time into this game than just about any other aspect in my life, internet spaceships begins to actually seem like serious business.  Losses start to seem suddenly important.  KB stats are watched closely.  Tempers begin to flare over imagined slights against imagined character.  Stress begins to find its way into what is ostensibly an escape from stress.  In short, you get way too wound up.  Then, you start to log on because you feel like you owe it to everyone else.  You play, not for fun, but out of obligation.  Like a job. This leads to burnout.  You just get tired.  You find yourself loathing logging in.  You begin to resent the game.

Thus, we get to the good parts of taking a break.  You get to recharge.  Your time away allows you to wash away all that negative shit.  Then, when you finally venture back online, you see it fresh and the things that got you hooked originally hook you again.  The thrill of blowing shit up.  The camaraderie.  The antics on comms.  Even the vile fleet porn links. 

The Bad:

The bad generally depends on how long you were gone.  A few weeks comes with almost no drawbacks.  But, if you drop off the radar for several months, like I did, it's not always so pretty when you return.  Especially so if you are a director.  Granted, as it's been stated, I'm a pretty shit director who didn't do much anyway, but when you return you find what little you did do is being done better by others.  You find that the slew of patches that came out while you were away have fundamentally changed everything and you spend weeks trying to catch up.  You find new members who don't even know who you are.  The cozy atmosphere you created is replaced with one where you question what it is you are supposed to even be doing.  Further, the corp you left may not be the same one you come back to.  May still be the same people and same name, but things change when you're away.

The Remedy:

Generally, the best thing I've figured out to do is to simply go out in fleets, chat in corp chat, and spend time reconnecting on comms.  Before long, you feel reintegrated.  Your rustiness begins to fade, and so does that feeling of uselessness.  That, and it's hard to be bummed when you blow up a fleet of minnies in shinier shit.

Anyway, I'm just using this post as a way of dumping the things I've been thinking onto screen and maybe purge some of it.  Catharsis by verbal diarrhea or whatever.

Absence Makes Me Itchy

So, I haven't written on here in a long time.  A lot of that is due to an increase in RL obligations.  However, I think a lot of it is also my being increasingly out of the loop regarding the "big picture" of FW. 

Here's what I mean by that.  I used to give a crap about sov.  Not a huge crap, mind you.  However, I cared somewhat.  Then, despite what I thought would happen, sov suddenly meant ISK.  That ruined sov for me.  I didn't think it would, but the character of FW changed such that a lot of the "pvp4fun" was replaced by a desire to crush the other guy so you could increase your ISK.  Further, tons of people flocked to FW for the purposes of getting space-rich.  The status quo never really returned.

All is not bad news, though.  Pvp is still enjoyable.  However, nowadays I spend almost all my time in frigates fitted as cheaply as possible and leroying into minmatar gangs of cruisers of all tech levels, usually in greater numbers (lulz ensue). 

That's okay, however, because it seems we happen upon all sorts of people in the warzone who derp themselves to death anyway.  (http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=18563570)

And then there's the obligatory hotdrop from PL.  We stumbled on their Hyperion and said "What the hell, why not?" and engaged.  After about 10 mins or so, navitas arrived, popped cyno, and my slicer got up close to an Aeon shortly before going boom.

So, despite not giving a crap about sov, I will say I'm diggin the fights (if you wish to call them such) that I've encountered since my return to Eve.  They may lack in the epic quality of some of the bashes of years past (battleships at Huola/Kourm), but they make up for it in lighthearted fun.  I'm back and itchin for more.

A Strange Christmas Gift

This is probably not news to most of my readership, which, I'm still not convinced is more than like Shalee and maybe five other people.  However, assuming that this site does have a few other interlopers, I'll go ahead and give my own thoughts on the rather bizarre series of events this past week.

I left town for a few days to go see family in my hometown three hours away.  On my way there, my mother in law was sent to the emergency room and then the ICU for critcally low blood sugar, difficulty breathing, infection, and a host of other complications.  My wife and I raced to deal with this issue.  After attending to those matters, we came to my parents' home where I checked my messages and discovered that my corp was essentially gone.  This was Christmas Eve.  My initial reaction was "Seriously?"  I quickly fired off my own recommendations for how to deal with the situation.

By Christmas afternoon, In Exile was born, I.Law was gone, and people were already beginning to move.  See, for us, it's not about the name.  It's not about the stats.  It's about the people.  And this is why the actions of Sab0tag3 and his little buddy Druiel Druphestos were pretty much an epic failure.  They don't understand that, because that's not how they are wired.  See, when Sab0 tried to pull this nonsense the first time almost a year ago, we kicked him.  We set him red, and that's pretty much how that ended for us.  For the most part, we just moved on and stopped giving a damn.  I can't really say I've given him much thought at all in the past year.  So, when this business went down this past week, I took it as a compliment.  Apparently, we've been quite at the forefront of his.

So, now we've got a new corp.  We're already at 96% efficiency with 7 capital kills.  When I finally get home, I'll be moving my toons over and will be going right back to business.  That's what we do.  So far, I am pleased to see the massive support of I.Law's members quickly joining up under our new banner.  Thanks for not taking this to heart.  I continue to be proud of all of our members.

So, I am writing this largely to say that we aren't going anywhere.  We aren't letting this get to us.  And, to Sab0tag3, allow me to say this:  Merry Christmas.  You have my deepest sympathy, and I hope you do well in your future endeavors, even if those endeavors continue to be mean-spirited attempts to ruin my Eve gameplay. 

To everyone else, have a wonderful holiday.  I look forward to being able to return to logging in sometime in the next few days. 

-Ryven-

Infidelity

I feel like a cheater. I have, for over four years, been married happily to this wondrous game, Eve Online. Ok, so we took a trial separation in 2010, but, otherwise, our marriage has been strong. Then fall 2012 hit and I have been running around behind Eve's back. I have a mistress or two. And I am red with shame.

Real life and Guild Wars 2. These are the harlots that have stolen me away on many a night. Real life demands my time. RL is a greedy, clingy bitch of a mistress. I would leave her but she blackmails me with my future. Guild Wars 2 dazzles me by placing no demands on me at all. She tempts me with her laissez faire.

I confess this in hopes it can bring me some slight absolution, and perhaps Eve and I can repair our broken relationship.