A Sad Day

Yesterday was a day that I had been thinking about for about the past 6 weeks or so.  This was the day that I ended up pulling all of my combat capable pilots out of Fountain and had them leave Fatal Ascension.

I have been playing EVE since 2007 on my main and since 2009 I have been living in null security sov.  All of this time in null sec sov has been in the North and Southwest.  First this was part of the original Northern Coalition which was the precursor to the Clusterfuck Coalition.  As you may gather, I am well versed in jump bridge routes, gate routes as well as capital routes for nearly 50% of null sec space.

Three times over the course of my EVE career I have decided to take a sabbatical from the game.  Whether this was due to real life pressures, financial challenges, or the most recent one which was just a general malaise with the game and a dissatisfied direction of development by CCP.  The last pause in the game occurred between October 2013 and ended in October 2014.

Like all of the pauses in the game, I never truly left the game.  Yes, I unsubscribed from all 9 of my accounts.  I let the training queues go inactive, and deleted some of my logs from the computer.  However, like Revileushin Eyri mentioned in this post from December 13, no one truly burns out of EVE.  She truly is a cruel drug that one cannot simply drop at any time.  I did not really view the forums so much as I would monitor the EVE news sites almost on a daily basis.  I watched the streams of the New Eden Open and the Alliance Tournament this year.  Finally, the one piece that truly kept me hooked into the game was Twitch.  Twitch allowed a bittervet to enjoy a nice pause in the game, but still get enjoyment in watching space violence being inflicted on poor souls.

Over the past two weeks, I started to chat more and more with one of my very close friends in game who I have known since 2009 and told him that I was getting dissatisfied with FA.  Funny part is that previously I was attempting to convince him to leave The Bastion and join me in FA.  He actual pulled the rip cord a few weeks prior to me.

I think the part of process that finally convinced me to make a change was the amount of activity I have been seeing on my alt corp characters.  The alt corp runs reaction towers in low sec with moon mining taking place.  I moved my component manufacturing down to the low sec system as well and finally they are now manufacturing the Tech II products as well.  I literally did not log on my main character for nearly the entire two week holiday.

When I take the increased activity of my alt characters, combine it with nearly zero activity in null sec and finally add onto this the huge bump in new accounts being created and pilots struggling to deal with the EVE learning curve, I made the decision to start this corporation.

I started to gather all of my gear in Fountain.  Good lord, that was a lot of stuff.  I ended up packaging all of the subcapital ships.  Unfortunately, with the jump changes of Phoebe, there was no way I was going to make 10-15 carrier jumps over 5-6 midpoints just to save ISK on rigs.  The amount of time was the biggest factor for me.  So, with all the ships packaged and modules gathered I ended up with 4.3 million m3 of cargo.  Hmm, good thing I did not swap the Rhea for the Nomad yet.  Still ended up taking me 12 trips in the Jump Freighter just to evacuate the goods.

As the last combat pilot was jumping out of Fountain into Aridia yesterday, I actually mentioned on Teamspeak that I was a little sad.  Unfortunately, I do not ever see myself jumping into sov related null sec.  Instead, I am excited and gleeful of the new opportunities for the future.  I am very happy with the direction that development is taking us in.  I look forward to changes which will open more and more systems to pilots.  And finally, I am looking forward to trying to assist new bros learn this game that I love.