Remember, Remember, the 1st of December: Year Three

I was born on December 1st, 2011. Two weeks before I had moved into my current home. With a fiber internet connection I was on the prowl to try a game that I had read about for some few months. A game where everyone could kill me, but if I was clever I could become rich and successful. A game about trust and lies.


My first character was incorrectly named. I had to biomass her and remake my new one. I didn't understand the game well enough to know that I didn't have to wait to biomas to remake her. The name would not have been the same. I then messed up the name anyway but it was days until I realized that I did not spell Chella's last name as Rainer but as Ranier. Damn my Dyslexia. I was already invested in her and almost done the training tutorials so I just took the spelling hit as yet another thing in my life that I had mispelt.

Now it has been three years. Three years since I started to play and three years since I started to blog about playing. 60+ million skill points on my mains and 900k views across 1,486 posts  My blog was created out of the fact that the only Eve blogs I found where about veteran players. I wanted to know that other people where struggling to do missions and swamped by all there was to learn about the game. Without having one to read I decided I would do it myself and honestly document my process of learning about Eve.

My original blog was named the Walrus Bucket after the meme. I changed that about three months in to Low Sec Lifestyle. By then I had been adopted by THC2 and Ender, Lue, and Diz where my world. I wanted to become something they would be proud of. I wanted to become a player like them. Confident. Assured. Knowledgeable. Capable. Deadly. They where what I wanted to become but I was not there yet and naming my blog after piracy seemed to be a step of arrogance. I was living in low sec however and I often had people call me a lier when I told them of my level five salvaging and where I lived and what I did. My blog name changed and I started to write almost daily about my adventures. In a way I was proving to myself that I was actually there, living in low sec as a newbie, doing level five missions, and making it work.

But at that time I was still creeping around the edges of  Molden Heath society. I spent my days doing level five missions with Lue and learning the game just by living day by day. I dragged my salvage out of low sec with a Catalyst and sold it, accumulating millions and then hundreds of millions of ISK that I would one day use to buy fantastic spaceships and fight great battles with.

I was born after Crucible's launch, the expansion after Incarna. I've never known a world without Tier 3/Attack Battle cruisers. I've never known the game without captains quarters and avatars. I've never known pre-Incarna Eve or CCP. I only know the time from then until known if one discounts the history that I have been documenting.

I never planned to run for the CSM or become a public figure in the game. I was an industry focused player that met a group of pirates and ran off to low sec when the people that I knew in high sec wanted to restrict me to much. I fell in love with the people as much as the place. It was the other day that I said to Vov, "I don't know how I wound up in this place." After all, I was a industrialist turned pirate who loved doing logistical movement. I opened up a store on a whim to help a corpmate and became successful where I didn't realize I would be. I ran for the CSM because I deeply loved the community that I played with and I wanted to improve, help, and fix what we had. I'm glad that I did because the CSM has been an amazing experience. Often, a surreal one but an amazingly surreal one at that.

My Eve story sounds a bit charmed. I have no idea how that happened. Each thing I've done has become another pathway into something. My blogging has followed suit and become a mix of my daily game life and my general thoughts about the game and the people inside of it. I sometimes do not know what to consider myself anymore. Fortunately labels are not necessary. I am whatever I am evolving into.

I've been debating my future. Year three has been amazing. I've had more social interaction at Eve events then ever before. I'm still amazed that I have made it to the CSM, something that means a lot to me. I've not accomplished some things. I've not become the solo PvP badass that I wanted to be. I wanted to be like Ender for a very long time. I don't know if FCing is for me. I feel that I have so much to learn and understand still. I also don't have the hundreds of billions that I wanted. That may disappoint me the most. It turns out that I am good at making ISK but not amazing at it.

Will I make the low sec newbie friendly corporation in the future? I think so. Will I one day leave low sec and try other areas of space? Maybe on an alt? Should I change the name of my blog? I may be the only one who cares what it is called. Will Jaguars be nerfed into overweight waddling whale-frigates before I start flying them regularly again? This is an incredible fear of mine. Will I be elected for CSM again? I really do hope so. I have so much more I'd like to do. I don't know the answer to any of it but I do hope and plan to find out.

While I type like an obsessed fangirl, I do admit that every day is not perfect. The negativity and bitterness sometimes get to me. I'm thin skinned so mean words and cruel actions hurt my feelings and make me sigh. It is one of those things that I'm not supposed to admit. I'm an emotionally invested type of person. I've changed corps in this last year and that was very, very hard for me to do. I miss what I had and I am still adjusting to what is now mine.

Eve as a game fascinates me. Three years in I am still amazed by it. Not just the game play, but the people. I've gone to Vegas. I've gone to Iceland. I've even been going to local gatherings to hang out with people I might never have met before. I often write about the people part of the game. I feel boring compared to others who write battle reports and lovely, technical things. But, I am what and who I am and musing upon people is something that I do.

It seems traditional to set goals on these types of occasions. I've never been good at that so I'll skip that part. Instead, I'm going to try to remember to be open minded to things. There is a lot of game to learn about and a lot of methods of game play I'd like to come to know. I'm going to work at being more comfortable with what and who I am in game even if it does not fit in with what other's find to be best or optimal. It's okay that I'm not a PvP goddess. It's okay that I like building things and buzzing around minding my markets. It's okay to be me.

I'm three years in. I have sixty million skill points. That is a magical amount of skill points that still startles me to have. I can track my game from the very start. The ups and the downs the learning and the mistakes. I'm glad I've laid it all out in the pages of this blog. The life and opinions of one Eve Online gamer. I remember fondly my days of salvaging with Lue. I'm not so fond of  the ones where I was chasing after the fleets in my poorly skilled Rupture. But they all combine to make this Eve life for me.

Hi, I'm Sugar. I've been playing Eve Online for three years and I think its a fantastic game. Nice to meet you. I hope you've enjoyed meeting me. I'm already enroute to my 4th year of Eve game play. Things to do, people to meet, gameplay to see.