This is the first picture I ever took in Eve.
And this is what I just undocked to as I started writing this blog.
(Vindicator, Moros, Archon)
My butterfly effect was this: Around my second week of playing I accepted a job offer in rookie chat. Someone wanted someone to haul the ore they were mining. At the time, hauling was of huge interest to me. It still is, honestly. While slow and boring, moving things from point A to point B physically is interesting. The offer was for a few mil an hour. This was more then I could make by myself doing anything that I had figured out to do. I jumped at the chance. I had two or three Iteron I's from the tutorial missions. I could afford to lose one for the chance.
I made the twenty jumps and started hauling his ore. He paid me for it and we started chatting regularly. He seemed nice enough. I headed back home to do some other stuff. Over the next few days I hauled ore for him and chatted. Eventually he invited me to his corp. I decided, why the hell not. He said that he used to play but no longer had access to those accounts. He had restarted six months ago and wanted to do and industry and mining corp. It sounded great to me, so I joined up. After all, I could always leave.
The second day he introduced me to a player he had recently meet. This person was a 2003 player who had resubbed after some inactivity. They were discussing getting something started up together and to my joy I was pulled into it. The 2003 player also had pirate friends down in low sec that he introduced us to.
Things come and things go. My first corp CEO could not give up enough power to come to a meeting of minds with the guy he was partnering with. Mix that in with funny business with ISK and the members all bieng dirt poor and I wound up leaving. I had been growing closer and closer with the pirates.
A few days after meeting us, one of them asked if anyone wanted to make some ISK doing a courier mission for him. Since we had been chatting for a bit and I was feeling trusting, plus he had ventured to do missions with us a few times, I decided to bite the bullet. I was the only one who raised their hand and said they'd do it. I still had those iterons from the training missions. Then my CEO tried to speak up and say that we could think about something later but we were going to do some missions now. I said, "No thanks, I'm good it sounds fun" and off I went. I had about 50mil isk then. I spent almost all of it buying what he needed. I had a tiny bit of fret as I waited but a moment later he reimbursed me the ISK.
I was scouted down to low sec and dropped everything off. I then made it back to high sec, (scouted still) and was offered a future of salving level 5 missions.
This changed my life. To fast forward through things already mused upon, I started to salvage missions in my catalyst. That is how I wound up killed and podded my first time. I didn't understand gate mechanics and I was struggling with my auto pilot. There were two ways to get where I was going and auto pilot is automatically set on safer. I wanted to take shorter and did not realize that I could reset it. This led me to jump into the wrong system, attempt to turn around and get blapped on the gate. I was podded because I didn't know what to do after my initial destruction.
The pirates reimbursed me for that loss. They felt bad for me and I didn't whine about it I just asked what had happened. I continued to salvage missions in my catalyst and start to learn how to survive in low sec.
The funny side effect was that outside of my corp, no one else would believe that this was what I was doing. I was also mining still. I couldn't do more then level 2 missions on my own and I became flustered with them. I was flying ship after ship but none of them seemed to work for me and the advice I was given only left me confused and frustrated. That was when I leaned to hate, "It's easy there is no reason you shouldn't be able to do this".
I tried ship after ship. I failed. I flew a throax, a vexor, a brutix. Finally, with the myrm I reached a point where I could struggle along a bit. It turned out that I had no gun skill and all drone skills. I'd been flying gun boats with no ability to shoot anything with any type of reasonable ability. However, what each ship did and why was still not apparent to me. I figured that those that knew more then I was were automatically right about my abilities. I was only three weeks into Eve and I didn't understand yet how completely different fitting your ship is here.
My myrm was still fail fit but it kinda worked. However, I now hated missions. I did them with my friends (I was no longer in corp but I still hung out with htem). But alone? Not if I could avoid it. Instead, I salvaged for everyone and mined my heartout. My ISK increased. By the end of my first month I had 62mil in the bank. I'd been hovering at 100mil and bouncing around. I invested in a second Noctis for low sec and a Domi to help my mission runner friends. I had a second toon that could salvage and she would eventually become my PvP toon with the pirates. At least, in my dream world.
However, a falling out with my mentor left me alone and in tears. My tears, for anyone that wishes to sip them, are well documented and written out. I was distraught for days and felt like shit. However, the pirates petted and soothed me. I started to spend more and more time in low sec with them and a few weeks later, they took me in.
I think I wrote about the time my CEO said, "How did we even get you?" and I gave him the brief above butterfly effect.
There were ups and downs, but now as I'm starting a manufacture process for new mods popped off of a faction spawned battleship rat, after I built the pirate faction ship bpc I found and am selling the 470mil isk shiny loot I also popped, all because of this butterfly effect... I look at my carrier (that I will one day fly) and my wallet that sits at over 5bil (all made in game, no plex) and I'm very happy with where I am...
(Continued in Part 3)
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