Friday, May 9, 2008

A Noob's Journey

Browsing through my oldest pvp exploits made me realize that it’s been a little over 10 months since I first started to play Eve, and the journey has been rather entertaining. When I listened to the excellent Drone Bay hosts talk about tips for new players, it made me feel that I wasted a lot of time as an ignorant noob. I couldn’t agree more when they talk about the importance of finding the right corporation. For the newer players out there who read my blog, I hope you can shape your own Eve experience through the tales of my noobdom…

In The Beginning
I started in an asteroid belt with a powerful Ibis (did you know it had a drone bay?) in the system of Todaki, at the School of Applied Knowledge. After a few days of doing tutorials and L1 missions from agents who had attitude problems, I was told to find a group of players to play with. So I joined my first corp located in Amarr space of all places, which promptly fell apart on me after 2 weeks when it was wardecc’d by a single pirate flying his “T2 ships and shit”, quoted verbatim from the CEO who was, on hindsight, a bit of a corp-hopper and probably new to Eve. Not a good combination.

Weeks flew by and I found myself mission-grinding in Caldari
space, basing my operations out of a corp located in Nonni. I trained up for mining barges and building, but found little joy in shooting rocks. The corp mining ops, which lined the wallets of the directors, helped a lot in instilling the fear of mining into me. I started flying caracals and drakes (quack quack), and it made mission-running so much easier.

One day I jumped into Passari, one of the most infamous spot in low sec space, to pick up a courier mission. That very moment, as I loaded to a grid of red flashies, was the first time I saw how pvp could be like. My heart was thumping as I sped away from the gate in a shuttle, while local was abuzz with sightings of a Triumvirate Nyx, no less.

I didn’t like those guys. Who were they to try to blow a harmless noob up?
(I do enjoy blowing noobs up now. How else will they learn?)

Yarr?
It wasn’t until 3 months or so into the game when I had my first taste of blood, pirating with my new 0.0 corp mates from Rule of Three. My first kill was a drake that a corp mate had scanned down in a belt in Mara, and I still remember how much “shakies” I got. We ended up pirating mostly in Mai, a dead-end lowsec system in Amarr space. This was where I trained in the basics of pvp and scanning, but targets were few and far between as the system was almost constantly camped by us at the time. My current disdain of pirating was based on the premise of Mai being boring as hell, with the occasional hauler, swarms of noobships, and the very rare battleship with crap T1 or mining fits. Anti-pirate gangs were rare as well. Granted, I have great respect for true roaming pirates, such as the likes of
Kane Rizzel and LordChaos (ok, anti-pie, but whateva), but Mai just felt like a wading pool for me.

With my newly acquired negative security status, I managed to get 2 rigged crows Concordokkened 1 jump out of Jita, me being an immensely idiotic noob. I almost gave up on Eve as the swarm of fellow noobs descended upon my wreck…

In fact, I did stop playing for a few months, due to RL workload.

The Great Wild West, The Train, and The Baptism of Blood
I finally ventured up the Tribute pipe to the alliance’s 0.0 home in the Drone Regions. Everything was new to me then: the gleaming asteroid belts, the triple battleship rat spawns, the concept of not-blue-shoot-it, and keeping an eye on local at all times. I fattened up my wallet through ratting and trading high-end minerals. During this time, there was a
push against Band of Brothers in the south and members of the NAPtrain were pressured to aid in the invasion, so off we went, and I got one of my first blob experience (wasn’t overly fun, but not bad) flying under some talented, albeit bad-tempered, Coalition fleet commanders. I also led my first roaming gang into Providence as a trainee, and the results were very satisfactory. I ended up leading most alliance ops, which culminated in a successful large battleship slugfest to cement my spot as an alliance FC…

The Naughty Pvpers' Paradise
Unfortunately, that single battle was the last good fight that Ro3 saw. I was tired of dealing with carebears and their reluctance to engage in pew pew, and having to go 30 odd jumps to find noteworthy targets. Also, there were many internal problems including corp thefts and drama bombs. Eventually I saw that the corp was about to fail catastrophically and made it out for greener pastures. Why pay for a game that I no longer enjoyed and was giving me grief on a daily basis?

I joined the dark side. Insurgency was a most refreshing change of scenery. I was surrounded by a vibrant market (compared to my old home, not Jita), talented pvpers and FCs, and had a lot of fun flying around with alliance mates. Things escalated quickly – a month after I joined, the NAPtrain attacked over a dysprosium moon, bringing in about 10 alliances to wipe us out. I’ve learnt a lot about POS and capital warfare since then, and though the Northern Coalition has made fairly successful inroads into our space, I have to say that Insurgency has held up very well considering the massive odds leveled against our fleets. Whether Insurgency gets ousted out of Branch remains to be seen, but I personally wouldn’t mind returning to the roots of skirmishing in Gurista NPC space. And finally, we catch a glimpse of
how BoB must have felt during the Coalition’s assault on Delve.

And this is where I am right now. I’m happily nested amongst a group of dedicated 0.0 pvpers, and while I’m not very optimistic about the way the War is going for us, I still see many opportunities for Insurgency to turn into a formidable 0.0 alliance. I foresee myself staying with them for many more months to come…


Did you make it past the bulldozer?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

i remember that drake didn't know it was your first kill thou

Anonymous said...

Do you really believe that insrg has been attacked because..of a moon?
The story of the war is actually pretty simple, but had little to do with moons.
Northern forces had conquered branch and divided it, giving some parts to small alliances who fought with them, secured it for a bit, and then headed south.
While they were away, insurgency invaded Branch. Northern entities were campaigning both querious and fountain, with the main forces of MM/MH invading Fountain and RZR helping in Querious.
Insurgency at that time took the chance to kill the smaller northerners, breaking agreement after agreement. Even attacking morsus friends inside tribute.
Then, they were set neutral, and rzr came back, because an attack on their pos and space was obvious. Rumours via eve-tribune and leaked internals suggested insrg was not so friendly after all.

Insurgency knew what they would face from the beginning when they stepped into branch. They smacktalked themselves into the war they are in, pissing every single alliance off that crossed their path in the north.

Sorry guys (and gals), but you gave every single entity now shooting pos in branch a good reason to be there. By either putting up pos in their territory (insrg towers in tribute), shooting their blues, shooting their allies, and smacktalking over every single channel available.

I wish you good luck with insrg, but in my opinion you should throw out all those smacktards (they will go to the next fotm-alliance anyways when it's looking grim), throw out those corps that are just there to leech, throw out some more corps, and go on a healthy roaming rampage without any political stuff.
Props for staying with them while it looks grim, gives you an edge over those who most likely packed their bags weeks ago, but also realize the problems a 28-corp alliance brings.

Anonymous said...

I held off on commenting so far, but I really need to interject. It is incredibly naive to think that the “entire north” would decide to turn against an alliance they recently gave space to, and just decide to start killing them for no apparent reason. I was disappointed to see you go to insurgency, because I felt you were stepping out of the pan and into the fire. That may or may not turn out to be true, but I am glad you are having fun.

Bri said...

thanks for the comments guys, keep em coming ^_^ and o/ to kaos, i've been chatting with fzoul and swanny! just because we're red doesn't mean we can't socialize, right.

bato, excellent pov. i was ex-coalition and had fought against insrg while they invaded branch, so i kinda know what is going on in mm/razor's heads. i foresaw this coming, and was abit surprised razor did not reset insrg earlier. rzr was weakened by the war against bob, and the moon was only an excuse to reset insrg, after they had organized the blobfest with the NNC. so no, the moon wasn't the exact reason, but it was given as justification for ousting insrg out of branch, as they had made a mistake with tri when they took deklein - didn't want another "tri-like" alliance so close to their home space. i won't disagree that agreements were broken, but i think both sides did to some extent.

but hey, i knew i was stepping into fire, that's the point right? i was tired of the naptrain style of playing. plus, this blog would be boring without fire. that we can agree on. :P

see you in venal!

Anonymous said...

o/

yes, socializing is good. i still check your blog daily for updates... rl has me not playing much these days, so even if i don't agree with the point of view, it's always a good read :)

keep it up, and have fun.

Will Coleman said...

where you going now? Holding space is over-rated.. I'm glad they are going back to their roots, pvp.. they can be another Outbreak.. Alliance killers.

CrazyKinux said...

Hey Bri, love the new logo and site theme!

Thanks for the mention of The Drone Bay and my post on finding the right corp. You might want to check the URLs though, cause they're links. Both have a blogger.com tagged in front of the correct URL. You'll need to edit them!

Cheers and keep up the great posts!!

 
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