My Year in Review

Rudolph the Red Nosed Cynabal says "Hello".

Blog Banter 42 is about the year in Review:

I'm not overly good at reviewing things by the year.  But this year, its a bit easier since my game has seen such a huge arc in what I do and what I understand.  I can't review Eve as a whole because I do not understand Eve as a whole.  Instead, I dip my hands into the pools that I have splashed around in and view what reflections sit upon their surfaces.

While I might not have a review of Eve, I have a handful of thoughts focused on Low Sec and the changes over the last year in both Eve and my personal game.  In fact, I’d embroiled myself into public opinions of Low Sec and developed a little personal campaign to prove that we are a part of the game, not just boogeymen on the other side of the gate (no matter HOW much most of them enjoy that fact it can’t be our complete definition).

I realized that I hadn't written about the changes that Retribution brought that validated many of my opinions of Low Sec as a place for pirates and PvP in its own rights.

I have a character with over twenty million skillpoints. I am boggled by that.

A year ago I was not a pirate.  Now I am.  More on that in another blog.

A year ago, Ender was suggesting that I try out Eve Uni if I needed a place to learn about Eve.  I was hanging around low sec but I wasn't yet dedicated to it.  A year later, he commented on obtaining me as a good thing, a few weeks ago during another discussion.  I’m still glowing from that bit of attention and validation.

A year ago I was in a badly fit Myrm, in tears of frustration as I struggled through Level 3 missions.  A frustration so intense that it has created a loathing for mission running that I cannot shake.  If I was ever close to giving up on Eve it was during those few weeks when I was corpless trying to survive on the edges of two worlds and failing at both.  Now, I find myself in threads, feed braced and fingers warmed up to defend the place that I defined, unequivocally as my home.  My subs are paid forward a year and I find myself stepping outside of my personal safety zones a little more and a little more.

Pirate Rights: Earlier this year, my logistics character took GCC (now a Criminal Flag) when she repped a flashy red corpmate. It was a side effect of a broken mechanic but I saw it as a bit deeper than that.  I saw it as CCP not accepting Pirates and the outlaw characters as a valid social group.  My argument then was that if I could kill and pod a corpmate in high sec without Concord caring how could I not repair a corpmate in low sec without Concord stepping in and slapping me around?  With the entrance of Retribution that went away because CCP said that yes, Pirates and Outlaws were real people as well and due the same rights and privileges within their legally allowed areas as any other player in the game.  Our own interactions with each other were no longer penalized as crimes greater than the kill/pod corporation scams that filled high security space.

PvP: And then CCP said “Yes, we do accept you, our bastard step children, even if we don’t often say it and rarely pay attention to you,” and changed gategun mechanics to allow us greater flexibility and access in fights.  No longer did low sec PvP penalize us for 15 minutes of down time.  No longer were our brave and loyal drones attacked and blapped as they sought to assist their masters. Crime watch came in and changed PvP in general.  I still find more good then bad in the changes.   It wasn't the nerf that we were expecting.

War Decs:  After weeks of war dec spam from Dec Shield due to broken mechanics, I’m just glad its done.  There have been a lot of war decs this year.  From TEXN returning to Molden Heath and RANSM decing us because we fleeted with them to the Eve Uni War that caused the population of Molden Heath to transform into UltraPirate and go into a focused and committed war.  War decs as a mechanic have come a long way and war decs in my personal world have also mutated and changed.

ISK:  Making ISK in Eve has been all over the place.  Mining buffs, the OTEC control of the moongoo market, faction warfares complete breakdown, the goon market manipulation  the new ships in retribution and on and on and on.  Personally, I didn't make my goal of 10 billion liquid.  I decided to invest in other, longer term projects.  I am very disappointed that I didn't reach that goal.

I've made friends of the people that I was once frightened of and become part of a community that I once, longly, admired from afar.

While it was asked to review the year with numbers, I can't assign such things to reflections.  For me, it was a good year full of good things.  Highlights and low lights and small things and large.  All of them have been worth the time and effort and I've enjoyed it all tremendously.  I'll leave it to others to attach grades and numbers to things, to dig through to events of the greater history and shake them out and dust them off.

I focus on a micro perspective quite often but that is the one that fuels my desire to play.