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?