2.5 Thrashers

Hooray for blog post titles that are weird and unrelated!

Of all the things to break the monotony of FW in my EVE life, I would’ve never expected a random mail from a random null-sec corporation who were recruiting people in NPC corps to suddenly give me something to talk about. I’ve spent the last weeks staring at blog post drafts which all just seemed to come out the same way: FW, FW, FW. And I mean, that’s no surprise given that I engage in FW activities for 99% of my EVE time, but really, there’s only so much you can say about war.

Anyway, my alt today got a mail from a self-proclaimed PvP-centric corporation that lives in sov null. Interesting, definitely. If I didn’t have things for my alt to do down here I would’ve probably gone to check them out. But that’s how it is, I have to ignore what would undoubtedly have been a wonderful opportunity.

I did a bit of snooping around the corporation’s major alliance, Nerfed Alliance Go Away (NAGA). And by snooping, I mean just looking at their alliance description. Nothing really strikes the eye until I reach the bottom and find this gem:

You have enemies?
Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

-Winston Churchill

As ‘that guy’ who tries to get along with everyone, my admiration for some of the things Churchill said overrode my Mr. Nice Guy outlook and drew an evil grin to my face.

Developing a taste for cruisers

I started off EVE in Vexors. Lots of them. I died in that trusty hull a lot, and it’s elegant curves kept me company in the coldest of stations. It was love at first sight that first fateful day that I opened the Interbus Ship Identification System.

But as time went on, I realised I had misplaced my early love. Frigate warfare was a new, more flirtatious mistress. A lovely, petite thing that happened in the blink of an eye. Her enchantment hit me unguarded, and I was swooning and wanting to know all about the many hulls and ways to fly those nimble little things.

Alas, I realise I am a fickle man; the call of the cruisers is burning inside me once more.

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!

Running from my problems

The longer I play EVE, the more projects I undertake. Big ones like being a great solo PvPer, or winning the warzone for the Minmatar militia, or starting this blog.

Then you have all the little ones. These ones are the killers. Train this newbie up in the ways of faction warfare. Run a lot of fleets. Haul in ships and create a system for hauling in ships. Trade on the market to make profit on the side. Get to -10 security status.

Random screenshot of me trying the Hookbill, which I think is going to be a new favourite.

In the end, I’m stuck with dozens of goals, and I’m trying to fulfill them all at once, and the end result is I get none of them completed.

Heroes are a lie; the disenchantment of war

I stare out of the station we had wrested from the Amarr, trying to gaze through my gaunt reflection and find in the glistening stars beyond the reason I stood here in the first place.

It was eerily quiet after the cacophony of screams and trampling boots as our soldiers poured into the station and established control over the civilian population. They had had peace for only a meagre seven months, barely enough to repair the lives that had been overturn by the Amarr who took Huola from our hands in the neverending cycle of a war between immortals.

A slave girl, Matari and bone skinny, sobbed for us to save her Master. I wonder, sometimes, whether we are giving freedom, or forcing freedom, upon the people we fight for. I wonder, sometimes, whether we live on freedom, or we too, force-feed it into ourselves, as blindly and religiously as our sworn enemies consume their Scriptures.

What am I fighting for? My mere voice commands dozens of pilots, my hands guide weapons of mass destruction. My life is infinite (how long have I been alive already…?). Was power granted to me to simply be a monster that enjoys cruising through the wrecks that litter the aftermath of fleet battles? Surely not. Surely there’s something more, something beyond myself that I am contributing to.

And yet here I am, searching for answers amongst the stars and questioning the answers I’ve given myself previously.

Gunpowder treason and plot

Beneath this mask there is more than flesh, Mr. Creedy.

Beneath this mask there is an idea.

And ideas are bulletproof.

-V, V for Vendetta

The phrase ‘gunpowder plot’ got stuck in my head while plexing a few days ago and it took me a while to figure out how V for Vendetta and my faction warfare efforts were related.

The Shepherd

Sheep herder.
Sheep. Herd.
Shepherd.

Amazing how lazy the English language can be.

Today we got into a fight with remote repairing Tristans with armour logi support. We had more numbers and destroyers, so I was confident.

Some of my fleet, though, were not, and made their concerns apparent before the fight.

Well, we ended up winning, and that doubt initially was what made me think about today’s post.

Everything except the kitchen sink.

I never really got the story behind ‘kitchen sink’  fleets being fleets consisting of everything and anything. So I talked to my fleet about it one day, and well, one big idea was actually that, when packing up as much as you could to leave the home, you’d try to take everything except the kitchen sink. So in a kind of inverse way, a kitchen sink fleet therefore consists of “everything”.

I really liked that description. I was also taken aback. Because in my whole year and a half in EVE, I never asked for the true meaning of a kitchen sink, because I thought I knew it.

When I first heard it, I thought it was named so because a kitchen sink generally had all kinds of things in it. Pots to cutlery, vegetable peels to defrosting meat, etc. That made sense to me, at least. I enjoy making up stories to explain what I’m unsure of. It’s not a good idea sometimes though, because if I get away with the… Delusion… For too long, it becomes harder to accept reality.

Thinking of ways to think.

The Amarr have decided they’ve had enough. Where we were previously taken systems quite easily, it’s like we’re a bird that just dove into water.

They don’t have many systems left, and I must commend them on their fortitude, because they’ve been deplexing systems very consistently for the past week, and at T1 warzone control there’s not much LP to be had by doing it.

What I was worried about was that it would become a war of attrition, and there is a scary possibility that we’re falling in that direction. It’s scary because EVE is a game, and if people aren’t having fun, they won’t want to play. This goes for both sides. It sounds like an absolute grind for the Amarr to have to deplex for nearly no LP all day, and for us, it’s painful to keep running from fleets because the Amarr can simply bring more than what is necessary to fight us.

Divide and conquer – or not?

Fleets are wonderful things in EVE. When PvP players get together, fleets are formed, fun is had together, people share their losses and victories, bonds are made (or broken) in the fiery aftermath of a fierce fight.

Fleets highlight the social element of EVE, and brings out so many interesting interactions between FC and member, FC and FC, and between your squad members. From heated discussions over topics totally unrelated to EVE to the most coordinated target-calling, the spectrum of conversation on comms when you’re in a fleet is almost always unique.

Knowing this, having experienced it in my own fleets, and in nearly every fleet I’ve joined, would I willingly divide a fleet?