Baby-Steps

The thing with suddenly deciding to quit an MMO is that you don't do any of the sensible things you really should do. You never think 'Well, maybe in four-and-a-half months I'll decide on a whim to come back to the game, maybe I should get all my crap in order before I leave.' So here I am, with half my stuff stuck in the nether regions of of a not-particularly friendly 0.0 station.

Bugger.

I decided, after a while, to deal with this by pretending I'd intended it all along. A clean break with my past, I retroactively asserted, was clearly the best thing to do. I didn't need those ships anyway...

So, now I find myself in a dusty old Harbinger fitted out for long-range 'oh-I-wish-I-was-a-zealot' work - possibly the worst ship in the world for trying to escape hostile space short of a frighter, though at least than I could try it for the sheer brass-balls value - with two tasks to attend to.

1) Logistics

and

2) Finding a corp

The first bit was relatively simple. Two hours of liquidation and hauling (thank god, by the way, for the usable new browser. It makes hauling so much less of an eye-gouging pain than it used to be. I just head onto a webcomic, click 'random' in-between gates and the watch the systems fly by) were enough to put me back on my feet, plus I remembered where I'd stashed my all-important insurance missioning battleships. It's incredibly important to have at least one of these in case everything goes tits-up for you. Unless you want to grind Level 1 missions in an Ibis, of course.

The second part... now that would be trickier.

Getting Back on That Space-Horse

Well crap. I guess I've fallen off the wagon again.

Four months ago I quit EVE Online, and actually felt pretty good about doing so. I was playing a lot without getting very much out of it, and frankly I'd fallen out of love with the game. Blame 0.0 I suppose. I'd joined up with a big ol' alliance a couple of months ago and as much as I was enjoying the epic scale, all the 'endgame' stuff that EVE is famous for, I lost a lot of what made it fun for me. Screwing around with friends, small-gang PvP and the freedom to do whatever the hell I wanted.

Plus, I was stony-ass broke, which didn't help.

So I ditched it. Subs lapsed (not that I subbed anyway, DeepSpaceSupply is much cheaper for UK players), mails unread and skill-queue left unmanned. A clean break.

But you know what, EVE is real good at getting its claws into you. Even months later I still thought about what might be going on back with the other guys I knew from the old days, what the politics were up to in 0.0 and whether the Goons had self-destructed. The reason, it finally occurred to me, why I still cared was a simple one.

EVE Online is a really good game.

Still, I wasn't going back there. Not yet, anyway. It took some time until the metaphorical pebble kicked off the allegorical landslide. It was a YouTube video. A video that I randomly bounced onto at 2AM, trawling for something to entertain me. This video was special in that it was an Alliance Tournament video, specifically the famous 'Team-of-Thoraxes-VS-BoB' match.

I watched it, and got so damn pleased with it that it lead me to a solid conclusion - I was going to start EVE again, and play it how I wanted to.

Now, where to start...