So much for that…

Well! That Minecraft category really took off… NOT. Just deleted it.

I’ll leave the one and only post on Minecraft there as a reminder never to try bite on something that will chew my face off. Lets just say I’m not a hard worker at all, despite what I’ve thought of myself. The challenge for me was trying to work with plugins, making them all work nicely with each other, have a MySQL database linked with the server, and a nice website which I skimped on with a shoddy subreddit, all whilst knowing nothing about how Minecraft plugins worked, knowing nothing about MySQL. Halfway through, I also realised why a subreddit just didn’t cut it as the sole out-of-game source of game information for the server.

Also, every minute I spent working on Minecraft, was a minute my urge to return to EVE grew.

So a few days ago, I dropped my pickaxe and re-entered my pod.

A few weeks absence from EVE (the longest break I’ve had from EVE whilst still having access to it) makes you think about a lot of EVE stuff. For example, why does it keep haunting my thoughts even though I’m so immersed in another task, or another game? I’m not sure if I was suffering from EVE-withdrawal, but my thoughts even strayed down the path of questions like “Is EVE’s New Eden as real as our universe?“.

Anyway, I’ll take a note on that and maybe answer it down the line in another blog post.

Oh, and the blog too. I missed playing EVE, but seeing this blog go quiet was as much a reason as that to come back. It seems nothing else sparks thoughts worthy of a blog post and my time.

So, lets get into it, shall we, chaps?

The Return

I’m back in EVE, and it seems to be the season for giving up, much to my shame. Not only the Minecraft server, but when I logged back in to EVE I felt… out of place. This will take a while to explain, because many of my previous posts have been on my alliance, The Black Sails, and my desire to see us to glory.

I did say that, and I like to think of myself as a loyal guy, but ever since I left FW, I felt it calling me back, just as drowning myself in Skyrim and Minecraft never stopped the ceaseless whispering in my head to return to EVE. I took our alliance’s KB from 20% ISK efficiency, trained our core pilots up to awesome, confident PvPers, and TBS sits on a 50% efficiency, not great at first glance but I am extremely proud of that growth. I did all this, of course, in FW space. All those frigate roams, all those scuffles and cheap fights. It’s because fights could be found in FW, but all it did was make me want to rejoin the perpetual war even more.

Fast forward to today. I’m back in my old FW corporation, TRIAD. I’m sitting in a plex, idling as I wait for someone to come to attack me. Do I regret leaving my alliance?

In the end, perhaps our goals were too grand for our humble beginnings. I was not the leader, I was merely an FC. I didn’t call the shots, nor did I want to fight for leadership to do so. In the end, burning out was going to be the conclusion; I was already seeing some friction between members as we were crushed time and time again by groups who had more experience, more resources on hand, compared to our fresh-faced, open recruitment alliance.

Our aspiration to become a terror to everyone turned on itself, and we became our own terror, constantly wondering whether we had the resources to sustain ourselves. Fun in that situation starts to dwindle as we tighten up and try to make everything as efficient as possible, and I did not wish that upon our new players at all. I didn’t want them to feel the burn-out of struggling to keep the alliance alive against all odds.

“But Revi,” some will ask, “isn’t abandoning them worse?”

A good question. One that keeps echoing around in my mind even as I restore my FW loyalty point stores back to their former glory. I won’t pretend I was key to the alliance, but I was one that formed the ‘core’. The ones that were around when the majority of the other players were on, the ones that always had ‘o7’s to go around, the ones that were in the fleets.

I figured my departure on its own could never be the core reason for the alliance to crumble. If it were to fall apart, then it would be due to a whole host of factors, one of which perhaps could have been me leaving, but a big one would be what I mentioned before, that we were too ambitious for our own good.

I think my break from EVE, and being in fleets everyday with our members, helped me see the dreadful end that I’ve been trying to shut my eyes to, the dead end that we were slowly flying our fleets into. Eventually, we’d have to accept that we were dogs with all bark and no bite.

I said it. It hurts to depict even myself like that, but this whole post is me trying to turn over a new leaf, and I want to get everything out so I can do so without regret.

Where I stand now

An Amarrian Tormentor-class frigate; my first time taking an Amarr frigate out for a spin.

I have new skills, and am trying out Amarr frigates and Energy weapons for the first time, and they’re awesome.

I’ve left the alliance (with a few goodbyes). I hope they won’t hate me for it. The last 7-8 months was spent with them, fighting, shooting, arguing, leading, oh god there was a lot of stuff that happened. The experiences are irreplaceable, the friendships hopefully will be remembered.

I return to Faction Warfare, where I think my heart really never left in the first place. Onwards!