o/

Hello Everybody. My name is Phoenix Einherjar….  Wait. Fuck that. That was lame. I’m not introducing myself to a support group, and that’s not even my real name. Phoenix is however my EVE alt who will badpost on forums and write this likely-terrible blog. So tally-ho! and sally forth to the introducing.

This blog is the first I’ve ever written, but I have a mighty need to ramble on about whatever pops into my head EVE-wise. Most posts will probably end up revolving around failed attempts at making castles in the sandbox, kicking other player’s sandcastles and generally losing shitfit internet spaceboats to other bad players. As the name of the blog suggests I’ll probably also rattle on about my misplaced sense of e-honour. Yes. Honour. With a U. Get over it America.

... to introduce myself!

Internet Spaceships you say?

One of my RL friends got me into EVE circa 2004/5. At that time I was young and stupid as all high-schoolers are. I only had the family computer to play on and a glorious 56k dial-up connection. The game took about 10minutes to log in and another 10 to get into station from character select (I shit you not). Of course, this was back in the “good old days” as bittervets call it. Where the tutorial consisted of “Here’s a newbie ship. Fuck You.” and you had to warp to station/gate at 15km and slowboat in. The only way around this was to use “instas” (bookmarks that someone manually piloted 15km behind the gate so you’d drop out of warp on top of it.).

All said, with my connection I couldn’t do much. Most of the first few months playing was changing skills (no skill queue!) and being gifted the odd cruiser or industrial ship by friends. I would promptly lose these to gate rats as my mates all demanded I move out to low-sec with them. I tended to load grid in a pod more often than in my ship. The log-offski wasn’t an option either because of the aforementioned loading times. I saw myself skilling heavily into industry. And by industry I mean industrials. My dream was to be a space-trucker. *sigh*

After about 4 months of effectively doing nothing but change skills and dying to gate rats, I followed my acne-ridden, dribbling, front-of-the-bus friends to WoW. It was a dark time in my life and I don’t want to talk about it here.

Fast forward to 2012 when another RL friend and I had just decided that The Old Republic should have been vapourware, and it was time for something new. He was dark-side in SW:TOR but wanted more than just callously killing NPCs via the second dialogue choice and having glowing red eyes. He wanted “a game I can be a dick in”. My immediate response was to suggest EVE, having been looking for an excuse to get back into it myself.

Dafuq happened to New Eden while I was gone!?

Ignoring a 1-month stint in 2009, and the occasional chat with people who still played the game, my coming back to EVE was definitely as a complete newbie scrub. Gotta say though: the new player experience is a vast improvement over what it used to be.  A casual 2-weeks farting round in a noob ship with a fresh account and the introductory missions were done. I’d been shunning work and reading EVE wiki’s resulting in a bit more knowledge and a migraine. I can only imagine how mind-boggling this game is for complete newbies. As I was playing with my newbie mate, I didn’t want him to lose interest due to carebearing it up  and on reading about this fandangled new module called a salvager, I happened upon our new profession.

The Way of the Ninja

Ninja Salvaging (and ninja looting) are hands-down the most fun way to make millions(!) of ISK with very little skills. If you read otherwise, then that person is a carebear who gets butt-hurt when someone cleans up their space-garbage. It does take a bit of reading and some specialised skilling to work out and god-forbid you failed the exploration tutorials*. One of the things I plan on posting to this blog is a series of videos on how to scan (for boats in particular) and how to ninja salvage/loot.

Being a ninja is also the best introduction a newbie can get to the Retribution security and PvP high-sec mechanics, but again – a topic for a later post/video.

*The most common question in the Rookie Help channel and Local in any rookie starting system is invariably “how to scan”

Time to wrap it up retard

Alright, alright. That’s enough for now. My introduction to EVE was not an exciting affair, but it might give context to future posts. Who knows. My immediate plans for this blog are semi-regular quasi-fortnightly whenever-I-think-of-something updates. The first things I’ll ramble about will probably include riffing on e-honour, scamming, ninja’ing and maybe some tears when someone gets nappy rash from playing in the sandbox too long (hopefully not mine).

In the meantime, Fly Stupid. o7