I used to play EVE. I was never any good at it, but it always held a kind of fascination and it’s a world I find myself drawn to. I’m not entirely sure why, mind you, because it’s a pretty stressful game: space is dangerous, unknown players can in no circumstance be trusted, and if you lose a ship… well, it’s permanent, and you need to make enough monies to compensate for the loss. But I think I enjoy the challenge of it, including its brutal learning curve, and I really like the fact that there’s a fairly large variety of content.

I also still know a community of nice and helpful players – people with whom I’ve played in the past, and with whom I still occasionally chat, making the whole “I should get back to EVE” a fairly common self-nudge. And then, someone who shall not be named showed me 21 Day Challenge, Can YOU plex it! the other week – which made me want to explore the PvE side of things more, and next thing I know, I’m looking at my in-game inventory trying to figure out where I left most of my stuff.

Coming back after a couple of years is a weird experience. My character is still there, with all her skills and all her money (which makes the “newbie” experience very skewed, but not necessarily in a bad way). I found my main stack of “stuff” in a station somewhere in high-sec, so that’s where I put my base for now – I’ll reconsider once I’ll have blown up all the ships that are in there 😛 Some reflexes are still there – where to look for what, how to try to fly safely, how the mechanics roughly work. Some “emotional” reflexes are still there as well – the gut-wrenching stress of deciding to go through low-sec to get to a place in 5 jumps instead of 25, or the very large hesitation at even considering to jump through a wormhole. (I haven’t set a wing in null-space yet.)

And then, there’s trying to get back in the game. I’ve had a few close calls already – and I lost a few ships as well. None of these actually happened in PvP, which makes it a bit embarrassing 😦 I’d like to believe it’s because I’ve been careful with regards to PvP, which is not entirely wrong, but I don’t think I was ever at a real risk there.

My first loss was a VNI, lost by engaging something I shouldn’t have. (In my days, Autothysian Lancers didn’t exist, and gate rats were… reasonably safe to engage. I think.) My second loss was ALSO a VNI, lost in a combat site that escalated past my (player) skills. I think I could have escaped that one if I had seen earlier that I was webbed (and not aligned) – I failed at warping out before my ship died. Sad.

After a bit of whining (that I’d lost a ship again) to the aforementioned nice players, someone made the remark that data cache hacking in wormholes was actually fairly good money, and that it was feasible in a pretty low-cost ship. I stumbled upon All-Out Guide to Relic/Data Exploration, which I found pretty useful – took a bit of advice here and there, and went on my merry way through that wormhole. Which lead to my third loss, which was, was, thankfully, less ISK-painful – only a Magnate. I scanned the whole hole, found a pirate signature, went to it… and missed the “covert” keyword on it. Started hacking a can, can blew up, and I heard the “DING” of the ship insurance notification before even seeing that something had gone wrong. Cheap ship, so it’s fine; I am, however, sad that I didn’t make the effort to dump my stuff back home between two sites explorations, because I had loot from the previous successful exploration in my ship 😦

Since then, I HAVE done a successful wormhole data expedition (and brought the loot back to my home base, although not sold it yet), and I brought a bit of salvage to Jita to go back to my starting ISK levels (roughly 1B liquidity – that I had PLEX’d before stopping playing, I think). I also did a couple more sites and got another escalation this morning, played with a Thrasher and guns instead of drones. I feel like I’m starting to slowly getting back into the game (and enjoying it 🙂 ) and re-building the itty-tiny bit of competence I ever had. I think I may enjoy the game more this time around, also partly because in the meantime I did get somewhat better at handling stress and anxiety. Hidden benefits of life skills: getting less bad at video games 😛

I don’t know yet if it’s going to stick – partly because playing both WoW and EVE may be more than I can chew. But this morning, I ran into a group of three Lancers. I wisely avoided them.