Dear Diary, Mood: Apathetic

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in.  I've decided to make this blog just to put down some of the random shit that enters my head while playing video games.  Most of this will be EVE related, but I will touch on other games from time to time.  I have some thoughts about copying formats from other prolific bloggers, but I think I'll just wing this at first and see how it goes.

Who am I?

I'm Apathetic Brent.  I started my EVE career some time in July of 2007 after my girlfriend's brother got me to make a trial.  I care beared for the first few months on until...my corp was wardec'd and the inevitable occurred.  Keep in mind that in 2007 killmails didn't show all modules on the ship.  After losing my pride and joy I talked to the people who were killing us and asked them how to get in to PVP.  The long and short of it was to hop in a Caracal and go to a low sec belt.  After losing a few ships I became lucky enough to get on my first kill.  With that, a PVPr was born.

The Dark Ages

After dabbling around on my own a bit and largely failing, I ended up joining a low sec pirate group and flying SPR drakes and thinking New Eden was mine.  I played for a few months doing small gang stuff and learning the bare bone basics, then took a break for a year or so.  When I came back I re-joined the old corp I was in (Knights Cross at the time) and continued to pvp.  At some point I went to 0.0 and lived near Pure Blind and occupied my time by camping the Torrinos gate in EC-P8R.  I don't remember the name of the Alliance I was in, but suffice it to say it was some shitty renter alliance that died years ago.  I bounced around with the same pirate group again after that until I took another year(give or take) break.  Most of this is me flying around with 90% tinted glasses on not really knowing what is going on.  That brings me to a topic that I'm going to post about in depth, which is the evolution of a player in a game.  Holy shit that's a horribly constructed sentence.  Oh well, fuck it.

Now I dive in to where I really started cutting my teeth on PVP in EVE, The Militia.  I joined Caldari Militia in September of 2009.  This really marks the beginning of my journey towards being a good pilot.  I made some good friends and really started to do small gang PVP.  The reason I blossomed so much was because the PVP was so readily available.  Caldari Militia was also the place of my first solo kill, and was really the birth of my love of the drake(I have around 600 kills in a drake).  I started flying under GavinGoodrich, which at the time was the head FC for Caldari Militia.  I started paying attention to how he FC'd and how he called targets and mentally took notes.  After a while I decided to FC for my first time and the results were less than favorable.  After a few months of practice I became the second most popular FC in the caldari militia.  The funny thing is that I was still utterly terrible at eve at the time.  From there about 100 of us decided to break off from the militia and create a null sec alliance.


A More Enlightened Time

Three very important things happened after we left the militia.  The first is that I had a group of three friends(Gunniih, xoxFatcatxox, and Get'oFix) that were the cream of the corp from our group, and we started doing 2-4 man gangs every day.  This really helped us all grow and a group, and also work on communication as small gang pilots(completely different than being in a medium/large gang).

Secondly, Garmonation 7(part 1, part 2, part 3).  For anyone who has watched the video, you already know what I'm talking about.  For those of you that haven't, it opened my eyes to a million new ways to PVP.  A million new opportunities.  A million new tricks.  I literally watched segments of that video in slow motion just to see exactly what was going on.  In the few months following me watching that video I racked up something like 200 kills in a dual prop taranis.

The third thing is something I will probably write an entire post about at some point, and that's Genos Roams.  There used to be a channel back in 09/10 called Genos Roams.  It was an invite only channel with some of the best pilots in the game in it(of which I wasn't one). The MOTD in the channel would just list a system, and time, desired ship types, and an FC.  The three FCs I flew with in Genos Roams were Garmon, Gobbins(Admiral Goberius), and Fmercury.  All of them were very good FCs, but each had their own personal style.  Garmon was always super ballsy and did shit I couldn't wrap my head around that I later realized was brilliant.  Gobbins was a hilarious Mario clone who was very innovative and had the singing voice of an angel.  Fmerc was just an all around solid FC nothing flashy, just shit that worked.  The first time I ever heard "burn to the sun" was in one of Garmon's gangs.  It sounds stupid, but it opened my eyes to a  very simple concept; you don't always have to brawl.

Leveling myself up, not my character

I took all of the small things that I had learned over the previous two to three months of flying with Genos and started putting it all in to practice.  Over time I was able to start taking gangs that looked way too strong and win fights.  Positional awareness and grid management started to feel as natural as breathing.  From there I worked hard on becoming a good small gang fc.

Our null sec alliance that we created from the militia eventually failed, and the better parts of our membership joined Important Internet Spaceship League(BDEAL), who we had been flying with and fighting against for the previous month or so.  My friends and I created a corp called Void. with the vision that we'd only have good pilots.  We would not let any filler in.  We would run internal fleets every night around 01:00 and then do alliance fleets later in the night.

Soon after the merger, Agony invited us to move to the new Providence(CVA had just been kicked out), and we were given our own pocket to live in.  Words like "Thunderdome" and "Small Gang Paradise" were thrown out along with promises of beer and hookers.  BDEAL moved in and quickly took a nasty turn.  Going from syndicate, one of the poorest regions in all of eve, to true sov space tainted the well of BDEAL.  People stopped pvping and were only focused on being space jews.

Hiatus  

From there Void. broke off and moved to low sec, then one fateful day we all discovered the bane of our EVE careers.  It's name...was League of Legends.  Long story short, we all quit for playing eve and just played League.  I ended up moving and was without internet for a year(Montana Problems).

After being gone for a year I decided to come back to EVE.  BDEAL was a shell of its former self, and with all of the Void. members no longer playing, it was time to go shopping for a new corp.  My list was short.  I wanted to go to PODLA, Rote Kapelle, or Pandemic Legion.  Podla offered amazing small gang pvp with some of the best pilots in the game.  Rote Kapelle was the largest power house in all of Syndicate(smartest kid with downs syndrome).  Pandemic Legion would have just allowed me to try a part of the game that I've never done.

I talked to Rote first, and that's where I landed.  The offered me endless man love and pinkies in butt holes.  The offer was too good to turn down.


I feel like that's a good stopping point because the "Time in Rote" post will be just as long if not longer than that. Expect to see that tonight or tomorrow.

PS too long didn't edit.