Retrospecting

Well it's been a month. I started playing on December 6th, and it's already been quite a ride. Im actaully banned from the rookie help channel for being too much of a badass veteran.
Time for a retrospective.

When RagnaR bullied me into trying Eve, I figured I'd try and abandon it quickly, like I did every MMO since 2002, and also Eve itself a few years back. So I made a character named after a good friend of mine, just to mildly annoying him, but it all worked out in the end, Cesare Romero is a cool name.
Some in-depth time spent in the avatar creation later, I started the tutorials and agent missions. Tutorials? There were no tutorials last time I tried playing this!
As a side note, I've never seen such an intricately created system for something as inconsequential as human character details in Eve. Maybe someday it'll be used for something worthwhile, but CCP have since then refocused on more important aspects of the game, like ships.

As I may have mentioned in the past, RagnaR has been lending a helpful ear and hand all along the way, to ease my transition from puny fleshy real-life human to immortal New Eden demigod. I remember the first things I said to him upon receiving my rookie ship: "Wow, a civilian gatling laser, I'm going to pretend this is super awesome and powerful". Come on, think about it, to someone who's never played eve, the words "gatling laser" sound pretty damn impressive. And then I had no idea about civilian gear, or how to find out where DPS numbers were, or that small  T1 weapons are a bit poop in any case...good thing I decided to use that phrasing "pretend".

So, what have I learned since those scrub days?

• I've learned that even if an Agent NPC teaches you to scan, and that scanning can find wormholes, wormholes are doubleplusungood.
• I've learned that Eve is one hell of a drug. One day, I was the 1st person on the entire Tranquility server to connect after the daily downtime; at least according to the 0 playercount and 0 people in local. To be fair, it was purly by chance that I started my client up at 11:31 that day.
• I've learned that just like Dark Souls is a really hard videogame, it's not as hard as I'd expected. And Although it sometimes seems like everyone in Eve is there to gank, kill, steal or scam you, there are a lot of really helpful people, and even many of the lying, cheating, scamming bad people are gentlemanly in their manner.
• I've learned that if you're polite and friendly, good things will happen to you. 
• I've learned, and keep learning every day that there is more to learn, so much stuff to do, so many skills to train! AAARGRRGHHH! I'm not changing the title of this blog for a long while.
• I've learned to embrace Eve, and although I first thought " ' I wish I could get more information on this topic' - said no Eve player ever", I'm actaully starting to find little defects I'd like changed, nitpicking at the essence of Eve's grandeur...like many forum whiners do. Even going so far as to think of new and terrible meta-game ideas. Here's my best bad idea: what if frozen corpses weren't naked? What if instead, if you podded someone, you could literally steal the shirt off their back, thus creating an other layer of parallel AUR economy.
• I've learned to learn learning something new to learn every learning day, like yesterday: if people really want to find me, Cesare Romero, in the game, even if I don't divulge my location, they can potentially use agent locators to find me. But really now, taking the effort to track my little 1,5 mil SP dude would me more of a waste of time for the would-be griefer than for me. Shoutout to blog reader Mungus for that!
• I've learned that the most important thing is to have fun, but I don't think I've internalised that lesson yet. Mining is no fun, building things is not that much fun, playing the market is a bit of fun; but at my low level, it's low levels of fun. But dammit, it's all profitable. Long-time veterans will laugh at me for bringing in 10-20 million ISK an hour, saying they'll do 500 times that in wars, or ambushes, or what have you. And to those people I say...have you seen my Coercer? Who do you think I can shoot and kill with 45 DPS? In the end, money can't buy happiness, but enough money can rent it indefinitely.

Today I think I'll go check out the EVE gate, and if I survive the trip, I'll be sure to torture your souls with my vacation diaporama.