anyone want to read bout my whole eve life?

[Sylvia Lafayette]

would anyone be interested in reading this autobiography of my eve life I'm writing as five journal entries for this one class. so far its 2 1/2 pages single spaced.

[Sylvia Lafayette]

ended up about 7 pages double spaced

[Oleksandr]

That sounds interesting. I would be interested.
I think it would be a good addition to forums as well.

[Sylvia Lafayette]

incoming wall of text then

Eve Online is the current game I am addicted to and have been since February 12, 2005 when I started playing it. I found the game on a web site that I was surfing that listed free online games. I downloaded it and started a trial account. I picked the one race called Gallente because their description was appealing and made a character. I decided to make a female one since I didn’t feel like looking at some ugly male for the 14 days of my trial account.
After making my character I went in and followed the tutorial which taught me the basics of flying a ship. I started off in a new player’s ship that was pretty much the equivalent of a metal box with thrusters. In order to get a new ship I went and either did courier missions or mined—I can’t remember. The starter ship is called a Velator and you control the ship through a pod that your character is connected to with cybernetics. If your ship gets blown up you eject in the small egg-shaped pod. If you’re pod is ever destroyed you wake up in a cloned body wherever you last cloned it. You need to buy a new clone or risk losing skill points.
Skills are how you are able to fly more ships, use items more effectively, fly faster, hit harder, or mine more; skills essentially dictate how well and what you can do. All skills have 5 levels that you can train and you gain those levels over time whether you are logged into the game or not. This aspect I found appealing because all I have to collect is the in game currency called ISK instead of levels like in the online games like World of Warcraft.
After several hours (or it was the next day—it’s hard to remember since it was a year and a half ago) I got into a new ship that was inexpensive and had a mining laser bonus to it so I could mine more ore from asteroids and gain more ISK. After getting this new ship I found out more valuable ore could be found in low security systems where players could attack each other. In low security systems there were also larger non-player character pirate ships that would attack you in asteroid belts. I would go in the asteroid belt and mine till my cargo hold was full then go dock and sell it.
The day after I had found this nearby system with its valuable ore I was threatened by someone in the local system chat channel to get out or join the corp. if I wanted to mine the system. Corporations are Eve Online’s guild or clan system for players. At the time it seemed like a good deal to just join the corp. and be able to keep mining this valuable ore and keep making better money then I could make in a high security system. The corp. members taught me how to mine more effectively and helped me out as they could.
Not long after joining that corp. I trained my skills for a destroyer and bought one. Destroyers have tracking speed bonuses for turrets that lets them attack fast frigates more effectively. Their armor and shields are about the same as a frigate but they have a lot more turret points which allows for more mining lasers and they have a larger cargo hold. At this point I was running combat missions in a nearby high security system.
High security systems allow players to attack each other but as soon as someone does the police show up and blow them up very quickly. If someone steals from a jettisoned canister however they are flagged as attackable with no consequences to the owner of the can but concord (the police) does not show up. I forgot to mention killing npc (non player character) pirate ships (called rats in the game because most online mmorpg’s have a giant rat as one of the first monsters to kill) have bounties to them, so when you blow them up you get ISK. This process is called ratting.
Within a week I had the skills to fly a cruiser and mined the minerals needed to build it. I went and bought a one run blue print copy of the ship and had a corp. mate with perfect building skills build it for me. I really felt big and bad in my cruiser. The ship was called the Exequror and it has a cargo hold bonus per level of the cruiser skill and a capacitor use bonus for remote armor repairers. It was essentially a logistics ship. Just about any ship with turrets could be used for mining, however, and this was how I used the new cruiser.
About that time I decided to specialize in using drones as weapons since they didn’t need ammunition and could be used at the same time as I was mining. One day in order to mine I decided to hire a new player to help fight off any rats that would spawn in the asteroid belt I was mining in. His name was Rackar al’Ulqua who became a friend after that and later started a corp. that I joined. While mining he would orbit me and fight off any rats that would show up with my drones assisting him. Once when a friend showed up in a cruiser he thought it was a pirate and started attacking him. I had to call him off before he got destroyed, but he impressed the CEO of the friendly corp. that had warped in.
Not long after this event I bought a subscription and began training skills not trainable on a trial account. This allowed me to fly industrial ships that are also called haulers. The industrial ship for my race is called the Iteron and industrials have a large cargo hold but are very slow and weak. Industrial ships would speed up mining by allowing you to mine in your main ship into a jet can (jettisoned canisters are like nets in space, they hold many times over what a small ship’s cargo can but are very weak and only last about 2-3hours). You then switch over to the industrial ship and pick up what you mined in the can. This allowed me to sit at the asteroid belt and constantly shift ore as it was mined from the cargo to the can.
Not long after getting the Exequror I got the skill for the next two cruisers. One was called a Celestis and another called a Vexor. The first one was designed for electronic warfare and the other was designed for combat with drones. Since I was specializing in drones I chose the latter to fly and started running more combat missions than mining. Around that time my corp. moved south because the system we liked to mine in was getting pirated too much. My race’s industrials have 5 versions, one for each level of skill. The other races have varying industrials with varying skill level requirements and bonuses. I had enough minerals to build the 5th one so I had a corp. mate build it for me and it sat down in that system for when I had the skill to use it. It was about 5months-a year before I could use it.
The last level of industrial took me 23 days to train. After having the Iteron M5 (each level Iteron had a mark to it. Iteron M1 was the first level to level 5 Iteron M5) built I left that corp. for the one that Rackar was starting. I thought it would be fun to build a corp. from the ground up and it was for a while. During that time I trained up for a battleship. The battleship was called a Dominix and was ugly but had bonuses to drones that I used and made higher level combat missions more accessible.
To get my first Dominix I got a loan form a corp. member and managed to lose several rapidly before learning to fly it well. I even lost one to falling asleep during a mission. That was the last time I fell asleep playing Eve though because I learned to get off and go to bed from that.
While scouring the heavily spammed recruitment channel for recruits for my corp., I was offered a spot in a corp. that was part of a 0.0 security alliance. Zero security space has no penalties for any hostile action and can be claimed by an alliance. The ISK that can be made of the large rats in 0.0 space and the best ore is a lot more then you can make in empire space at low skill levels. I left some stuff with the old corp. I helped start, said goodbye, and said that I would keep in touch. They understood that I wanted to try out 0.0 space.
While in 0.0 I made good ISK and had fun ratting, but then the corp. moved to a completely different area of space on the other side of the galaxy. I got lost on the way there and lost all my stuff. It made me put a month long skill on and quit eve for a month. After I came back I was ejected from the corp. and I just sold whatever I had at that station in the middle of nowhere and self destructed my pod. This got me back into empire space (high security space).
I then rejoined the corp. I had helped started. They were more than happy to let me back in because the value of the stuff I had left them with had helped jump start it. They had moved to an interesting area that was high security space surrounded by low security space. So, it was dangerous to get to but safe to live in with good profit coming from the rats and ore nearby. It also had a friendly alliance and several corps keeping pirates out of the area to keep it relatively safe.
I lived there for a month or two till the CEO got tired of the stress of leading and decided to quit and take just about everything in the corp. assets. This made a lot of people angry although I understood it was stressful to run a corp. The corp. went downhill from there and eventually disbanded.
I then sat in a generic non player corp. for a few weeks until joining a friend’s corp. that he had created some time before my previous corp. had gone down the tube. He had been in my previous corp. but wanted to start his own and somehow had gotten into a war with a 2 man corp. So I joined to protect the corp. since I was in a battleship and was older than the other two people in that warring corp. While I was in that corp., I had fun helping the newer players learn and get on their feet and make ISK ratting and mining and running missions. At that point I had perfect building skills or was working on them.
In the end the war only had one battle where I sat outside a station with my battleship waiting for an assault frigate to come in range of my drones. I could out tank any damage he could throw at me and he could outrun my drones so it was a pointless battle. He just sat outside of range and then gave up. An assault frigate is a tech 2 frigate that is skill intensive and stronger than normal frigates. That warring corp. was only after the CEO (my friend) of the corp. and gave up the war after that stalemate of a battle.
Not long after another friend I had made in Rackar’s corp. invited me to go into a new 0.0 region that had been added to the game. I decided to go with them and see how good the ISK making was. I borrowed money from that friend to buy a bunch of stuff and set out into the new area. I was going to make money by producing things and selling them for more than they were worth because it was hard to get stuff out to that area. The area was a nice area to make ISK but there were too many hostile people nearby so I left soon and paid off the ISK I borrowed from my friend.
I then rejoined the corp. that I had only joined since they were at war and started working on getting a freighter class ship. The freighter cannot pick up or jettison anything in space just in stations but it has an enormous cargo hold. At this time I had finally trained level 5 industrial ships and picked up the Iteron MV I had built for me before I left my first corp. I still have that Iteron.
I then met Oleksander who was trying for CEO of a corp. based on objectivism. I had read Ayn Rand’s Anthem and Fountainhead but had not read Atlas Shrugged. I finally read Atlas Shrugged at his recommendation and wanted to help him start a corp. that would go out into 0.0 space and build a sort of utopia. I then tried to mine for the freighter on my own by mining about 8 hours a day but it burned me out and I quit eve for about 2 months.
When I got back into Eve I went into the generic corp. and just ran missions instead of mining for the freighter. I then went and joined the main corp. that Oleksander had become CEO and went to empire and finally ran the highest level missions with success. I bought the minerals needed to build the freighter and over a period of a month and a half I built it.
Then I Joined the Art Institute of York and that sucked up a lot of time and I haven’t been able to play much. Because the freighter was built out in an unsafe area I saved up money to pay an escort and over Christmas break I will try to get it to a safe area as soon as possible.