Are you tired, rundown, listless? Do you pop at parties? Are you unpoopular? (pauses) Well, are you?
Lucille Ball - I Love Lucy
I cannot tell you how many people I know that have quit this game, or talked about their excitement ebbing in regards to it. I can appreciate this, I've experienced an ebb in my interest many many times. There is a single reason why I've been able to enjoy this game as long as I have, and that's options. Here's a flowchart, go spend 20 minutes studying it and then come back.
How many of you have done everything on there? I haven't. You probably haven't. If you're bored, or unexcited, perhaps it's time to change professions.
There was a time when I was a solo'ing fiend. I'd take a rifter out any day of the week and get some kills, maybe a loss or two, but always hauling in more than I lost. Then they upgraded the graphics on EVE, and my sad sorry computer only barely kept up. Now it was a crapshoot, was the other side of the gate going to load, or was I just going to die before I saw anything. When I warped into the belt, was it going to take 10 seconds before I could start tackling, or would I be able to do so immediately? I took the good with the bad, but one day I decided I'd had enough of the bad, and I jumped to a new profession. Piracy was fun in an ideal world, but I don't live there.
So I dabbled in some 0.0, but the renting life wasn't for me, and I found my way into a mercenary corp, NOIR. To compensate for my lag problems, I flew a Stealth Bomber. Now if I lagged out when I landed on grid, I was safe, because I was stilled cloaked. Bam, problem solved, and for a while that was enough. Like all things, that got stale and boring, and I was going to move on again until the CEO offered me an officer role. I took it with gusto, because honestly, who doesn't enjoy bossing people around?
So that went on for a while, and I became a director of NOIR and a director of the people renting from us. Quite a turnaround from a year before, and quite enjoyable. But after a while, I felt that old tug again, and moved on.
I puttered around in low-sec again, flipped cans in high sec, ninja salvaged... nothing really felt right. But this is EVE, and if you're bored, that's on you. So I found a 0.0 alliance and again dived right the heck in. It's a completely new playstyle, and learning is my specialty. I'm still working on some of the finer details, but I've gotten the hang of it. Now I want to master it.
That's on top of the Eve News Now I'm doing, which is a completely separate but legitimate part of EVE. Interacting with the community all on it's own is a genuinely pleasing process, or why else would we blog?
Find something, master it, and find something else. It may be odd, but it's what you do. If you're bored, go find something not boring to do.
If you haven't done it yet, but you just assume it'll be boring, then you're probably going to stay bored.
Lucille Ball - I Love Lucy
I cannot tell you how many people I know that have quit this game, or talked about their excitement ebbing in regards to it. I can appreciate this, I've experienced an ebb in my interest many many times. There is a single reason why I've been able to enjoy this game as long as I have, and that's options. Here's a flowchart, go spend 20 minutes studying it and then come back.
How many of you have done everything on there? I haven't. You probably haven't. If you're bored, or unexcited, perhaps it's time to change professions.
There was a time when I was a solo'ing fiend. I'd take a rifter out any day of the week and get some kills, maybe a loss or two, but always hauling in more than I lost. Then they upgraded the graphics on EVE, and my sad sorry computer only barely kept up. Now it was a crapshoot, was the other side of the gate going to load, or was I just going to die before I saw anything. When I warped into the belt, was it going to take 10 seconds before I could start tackling, or would I be able to do so immediately? I took the good with the bad, but one day I decided I'd had enough of the bad, and I jumped to a new profession. Piracy was fun in an ideal world, but I don't live there.
So I dabbled in some 0.0, but the renting life wasn't for me, and I found my way into a mercenary corp, NOIR. To compensate for my lag problems, I flew a Stealth Bomber. Now if I lagged out when I landed on grid, I was safe, because I was stilled cloaked. Bam, problem solved, and for a while that was enough. Like all things, that got stale and boring, and I was going to move on again until the CEO offered me an officer role. I took it with gusto, because honestly, who doesn't enjoy bossing people around?
So that went on for a while, and I became a director of NOIR and a director of the people renting from us. Quite a turnaround from a year before, and quite enjoyable. But after a while, I felt that old tug again, and moved on.
I puttered around in low-sec again, flipped cans in high sec, ninja salvaged... nothing really felt right. But this is EVE, and if you're bored, that's on you. So I found a 0.0 alliance and again dived right the heck in. It's a completely new playstyle, and learning is my specialty. I'm still working on some of the finer details, but I've gotten the hang of it. Now I want to master it.
That's on top of the Eve News Now I'm doing, which is a completely separate but legitimate part of EVE. Interacting with the community all on it's own is a genuinely pleasing process, or why else would we blog?
Find something, master it, and find something else. It may be odd, but it's what you do. If you're bored, go find something not boring to do.
If you haven't done it yet, but you just assume it'll be boring, then you're probably going to stay bored.
Completely agree. I started off with the industry side of things and wound up being the industry & logistics director of one of the largest industry focussed corps in EVE. However, that started to feel like a job and there were some disagreements among corp direction. So I left the corp, now have one account living out of an Orca in Null and another in Factional Warfare.
ReplyDeleteBoth are new, interesting and have made EVE 'fun' again.
Started playing solo. Got bored. Joined E-Uni and had a ball in the ILN, but eventually got bored. Left and founded a wormhole corp and had a fat time, but eventually got bored. Wrapped it up and started industry/trading on one account and joined a 0.0 alliance on another. Still waiting to get bored, at which point I'll try something new.
ReplyDeleteOh, and somewhere in there started a podcast :)
Great post!
Well said!
ReplyDeleteI have a similar philosophy. I've only been playing since August. At first, I started out doing missions. I got bored with that pretty quickly (doesn't everyone?). Next I tried my hand at some high sec and low sec exploration. Now I'm living in a wormhole, doing lots of scouting and gas harvesting and saving up the isk. I have another character I made that I'm doing a lot of solo pvp with. In the future I plan to try my hand at pirating and mercenary work. The only two things in EVE that I really don't have any interest in are mining and being in a null sec alliance.
ReplyDelete