Well, it’s been a while.

So it’s been a while away from EVE. The question I want to ask myself is, was it burnout?

This is important to answer because if it was burnout, then I need to find out what I was doing that was getting me burnt out in the first place, so I can minimise those aggravating factors.

If you could measure burnout, I’d say it was around 2/10 burnout. I still felt like playing EVE, but new responsibilities like my education poked me and said I had to start thinking about things other than spaceships. And yes, other games were involved. Jeez, I’m so disloyal sometimes.

But it wasn’t to the extent that, like the beginning of this year, I couldn’t bring myself to log into EVE at all. That was bad. However, it looks pretty bad if I try to put it off as nothing when the blog posts directly before this are laced with weariness.

Getting back into EVE, featuring shiny losses!

I suppose the reason for the small degree of fatigue in EVE lately was indeed the heavy activity we’ve been having in faction warfare. In fact, it’s quite astounding how much of an impact we (me and a handful of other FCs, as well as a strong core of members we had running daily with us) had on the warzone during the weeks where I had nothing better to do but shoot internet spaceships.

Some highlights were making the system we were trying to push the top system for kills in all of EVE. Also, one of our greatest assets in this militia, a kukonja by the name of Jebi Vjetar, earned himself the title of capsuleer with the most kills during our campaign.

It was, in retrospect, incredible fun. But it was also an incredible effort to keep running. But I see now how much we disrupted the natural order during our push.

For one, I’ve returned to see war targets who previously stayed holed up in the system we were assaulting, now start roaming and gate camping again. It’s nice to see evidence that our pressure forced them to relinquish those kinds of activities, making the war zone a little safer for the rest of our militia (who are probably spies anyway, damn it). It’s a powerful observation, and one we can definitely use if we just figure out how. 🙂

I also noticed at one point we pushed war target groups who weren’t accustomed to working together, to start to. This really made me smile. If I were to try to find the singular achievement that I could safely attribute to myself, it would be that of starting those early open militia fleets. They are now commonplace, and whilst this has certainly lead to discipline and structuring problems (not to mention personality clashes and all that), it warms my heart to see them running. To see people asking for fleets in militia chat, and there being a greater chance of them happening.

I am the most paranoid bastard in fleet comms, and as soon as people mute their mics I ask them to re-open them, as soon as someone new joins fleet I say hi, try to pry information from them. But I also cannot help but fight the paranoia that is deep-seated within the rest of the militia. I’m trying to be the mother hen, in effect. “Here, let me do the worrying about spies,” says Big Daddy Revi. “You guys have fun together in fleet.”

Anyway, to see the Amarr reactively turning to each other after we had stepped up first, gave me quite a bit of satisfaction. Unity was something we could say we managed to develop to a greater degree intra-militia, than them.

So, we’ve established that, even if I did feel a little burnt-out, it isn’t enough to start winning EVE. Cool.

Moving on: what’s happening now?

Well, a few days after I started frequently logging in, a major Amarr FW group by the alliance name of Multicultural F1 Brigade, left Amarr to join their Caldari brethren in the bloody battlefields of Black Rise and Placid. We’ve formed lots of theories about why, but worrying about why was secondary. The thing is, they had left the systems they occupied for us to take back.

I’m not going to look the gift horse fedo in the mouth here, and I’ll take it as one of those opportunities that come and go with the ebb and flow of the war. How I see it, this means fortune will favour the Amarr next, and we’re going to get hit in the face when it does.

So yeah, I’m going to buckle up and turn to the group of people who have been flying with me for those past months and say: “Warriors! Now is our time! Now is our chance! This is our destiny! FOR THE MAT-”

And I’ll cut myself off because I’ll realise I’m talking to a half-full room full of new nose pickers and mouth breathers.

Huh?

Oh right, I forgot to mention that not only did the Amarr notice the lack of pressure, so too did those brave souls who fought with me all that time. I’m back and only a handful of who we had previously are around. The rest, who knows. Perhaps they’ll return. Perhaps. I hope so. That core of members I suppose, was what I envisaged to be the core of our militia, the group that would grow to become that high-SP vanguard to lead the charge. Of course, as soon as the point of the spear breaks off and FCs start to go awol, the rest of the tip breaks without much more resistance.

The crux of the matter is, I wanted to make the Minmatar a stronger, self-sufficient, united force. What I achieved was not exactly wrong, but not quite there yet. I underestimate how much people want FCs to lead them. Not everyone wants to be a strong, independent Brutor woman. Lol.

So I’m looking at a bunch of names I haven’t seen before, and I realise that the tides have shifted during the mere weeks I was away, and I’m that lonely rock on the beach that even the kids don’t want to move. It will take more work to bring this group up to scratch, and if real life gets in the way again, who knows what could happen to them eventually if I’m not around trying to keep them fleeted up.

Bah. It’s too early to let this pessimism get to me. I’m only 1 and a half years old in this game! The miracle of youth still smoulders in my pod! Who knows. I won’t go crazy and try to be super active until my next round of holidays (ahh, the poor student life is a grand one), but I’ll try my best to be ‘around’.

o7