Regret & Realisation

I wonder how many Scots wait until they're my age before going for a look around Edinburgh castle. I must admit that I've only visited fair Edina a handful of times over my twenty-eight years, and Friday there was the first time I'd made the trek to the castle.

Edinburgh's a wonderful city, that seems to have been built kind of like Ankh-Morpork - on top of itself. All the old buildings in the town centre seem so staggeringly high thanks to the hills, and I cant wait to go back again and start exploring the back alleys and nooks and crannies that I passed on the way up the Royal Mile.

The most startling experience was in the War Memorial within the castle. I'm not normally an emotionally expressive kind of guy ("Huh! Me MAN!") but I was moved to tears in that place. I was brought up listening to WWII stories told by my Gran, and - though I don't remember him at all - my Granda was a survivor of the war. Admittedly, he spent most of it being horrendously mistreated in a series of POW camps, even spending some time at Auschwitz.

I spent a lot of time reading about WWII as a young boy, filling my head with tales of heroic sacrifice and death or glory charges. In that place, though...it wasn't a symbol of the glories of war that are relayed to those left behind. It was a quiet marker of the Great War that said: "We're sorry"

I was truly humbled.

Moving On

I came back into EVE last November, with six months training time wasted, and a whole lot of experiences missed. My corp had grown and advanced, and guys who started playing after me were now multi-millionaires, doing their own thing for God and glory.

I'd missed so much...even before I'd never really seen one thing in EVE that I wanted to do. By that I mean I didn't want to be an industrialist, I didn't want to a trader or a miner or a fighter. I just wanted to play along and see how things went. Now things are changing again: StateCorp is moving again, almost halfway across the world map. This new area is ripe with prospects - the mining may not be as good, the fighting may not be as hard, but all in all we have a chance to make our own space now, big fishes in a little alliance, as opposed to tadpoles in the Forsaken Empire.

But I'm stuck with an empty wallet, my own overriding ignorance and stupidity (the one that always leads to me losing ships I can't afford to lose) and one ship. Lose this and it's pretty much all over for M Piquet.

I guess it's bite the bullet time.

Fallen Empire

Tensions are rising within the Forsaken Empire, the alliance my EVE corporation belongs to. A recent end to the hostilities with The Five and a breakdown of diplomacy with PA and NBSI...our enemies are our friends, and our friends now our enemies.

It's a complete turnaround of opinion, basically from nowhere (as far as the grunts on the front lines are concerned), and has set in motion a chain of events that look like they'll tear the games' second biggest alliance apart.

The biggest question StateCorp has to face is...what do we do?

PvP 4tw!

Last Thursday in EVE was my first real exposure to PvP. An organised StateCorp fleet, with Zwiss as fleet command, went roaming and got five kills. Not a lot, given that there where twelve of us, but enough to give myself and the other PvP noobs a sense of what's involved in decent fleet combat.

I say decent because one of the recurring themes in corp chat is the lack of good fleet commanders in the alliance. Last night I saw the difference between the two. Not that Kirin incapable, but the level of communication was far lower, and the rush to combat more impulsive and, ultimately, more destructive.

For the sake of getting on two kill mails last night (both for the same guy, funnily enough), I lost a Hawk and a Moa. Losing the Hawk was my own fault - an assault frigate and two interceptors taking on an inty, a missile boat and a droneboat was always going to be close - but I can't help feeling aggrieved about the Moa. It was easy to see who was jamming the fleet, but we all kept pounding on the wrong ship...ah well. The insurance money bought another Hawk, so it's off to 0.0 to try some ratting.

Good EVE

Finally, EVE has come back to life.

The ongoing war with The Five, my lack of (ingame) money, my lack of skills...it was getting me down. A few weeks of training and I can fly a Hawk, which is perhaps the most fun I've ever had in EVE. It's fast, it's hard, it's not as powerful as its big brother the Harpy...but it'll do. It'll do until I can afford something better, anyway.

While EVE is coming back into focus, WoW is fading away. It was fun, for a while, but the continual grinding is boring, dull, monotonous, and a thousand similar terms. My Paladin is nearly level 40 (and gaining a mount will probably change things in WoW in the same way the Hawk did for EVE), but it's came to my attention that he's not the character I wanted him to be. A mid-range damage class, a mid-range healer and a mid-range tanker. Neither one nor t'other. Jack of all trades ad master of none, and all that. Frankly, it's boring. I have a lower level Warlock as well, but the games' novelty is wearing off.

Give me the stars anyday.

And on that note:

EVE Diary 1: First Frontier
EVE Diary 2: Learning Curves
EVE Diary 3: How We Won The West And Where It Got Us
EVE Diary 4: All Alone In The Night

My semi-regular series of EVE Online play diaries continues over at alwaysblack.com