The Road Ahead

In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship - he merely left his office late one morning, and has never returned since. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the Guide staff still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a sandwich and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon's work.
--Douglas Adams

OK, so I'm not as evil as I everyone thought.  I can't leave you hanging on what lies ahead for me for more than a day.  This is probably the post people wanted me to make sooner, explaining exactly what I'll be doing in the coming months.  Sit back, relax, and join me on a look at what I enjoy so much about this game and how I plan to recapture some of the moments of wonder I felt when first playing.


As I mentioned in my last post, I spent about a day with Faction Warfare.  At the point I joined, I had already made up my mind on what I was going to do, but just wanted to give it a try and see for myself exactly how it all worked.  I'll have an upcoming post about my misadventures and generally epic failure as a FW pilot before too long, don't worry.  With that short term excursion out of the way, let's look at what decision I had made for the long term.

First, I need to you to understand my mindset at the time.  The PR disaster surrounding CCP in recent times concerning the release of Incarna, Microtransactions, Leaked Internal Communication, et al. had left me feeling somewhat drained.  On a positive note, it had also shown me just how much I really cared about EVE Online and wanted to see it succeed.  One statement that I had seen brought up during the discussion of Incarna was that it contained very little for the veteran player.  That it was largely geared towards revamping the New Player Experience.  The validity of the statement aside, it did get me thinking.

One aspect of being in Blood Money that I had always enjoyed was the interaction with new players.  Nothing can stem the tide of Bitter Vet Syndrome more than a constant influx of players that are still bright eyed and inexperienced with the game.  You can't help but smile anytime someone who had only been playing a week posted on our forum that some ship called a Falcon appeared during his fight and then suddenly he "couldn't target anything!  That guy must have been cheating."  The energy these players brought with them has always managed to keep me from being sucked into simply complaining about how "ECM is ruining EVE!" and instead forced me to explain these mechanics to someone new to the game in a manner that was even tempered and explored the pros and cons of various aspects of gameplay.

It got me thinking about ways to reconnect with my inner-FNG and, before I knew it, I was in the recruitment channel for Eve University.  Inquiring about joining, I was promptly laughed out of the room.  Something to do with all the bad things I had done to people and my current security status.  I guess I was misinformed by the news that E-Uni had BECOME OFFICALLY PIRATS.  Or maybe they had just reformed since April.  I may never know.

Deciding to retool my plan a bit, I instead sent an EVE-Mail to the E-Uni Teaching Manager and volunteered my services as a Guest Lecturer.  I also offered to write the Syllabus for their Intro to Low Security Space class, which is currently somewhat lacking.  As I haven't heard back from them, I'll go ahead and add that if any of you reading this have some pull within their organization, feel free to abuse that power for my benefit.

But FNG, you said you unsubscribed your account, how is anyone going to contact you about anything and how does that tie into what you're doing in game?  Glad you asked.  The answer to the first part is that my EVE-Mail included instructions to contact me on this very blog, or through my email address which was provided.  The answer to the second part is that I wanted to try out that aforementioned NPE for myself.

Deciding to kill two birds with one stone, and seizing upon an opportunity I may not have again anytime soon in that I have zero responsibilities to anyone but myself in the game right now, I've decided to to revisit The Road to Yarrr.  My pseudo-guide to starting Piracy could use some testing, and I can think of no better way to get in touch with my inner-FNG than to try Pirating in a day old toon.  Four of them in fact.

I've already started it, and I must say, I'm rather enjoying myself.  I get to answer questions in the Rookie Chat channel while waiting for Propulsion Jamming I to finish all while checking out the revamped NPE in rather great detail.  I've been taking notes, and you can expect to see a detailed review of it in an upcoming post.  For any of you that are too impatient for that, let's just say it's better, but still includes a lot of things that are confusing/just plain wrong that should have been easily caught by someone playing through it.

This entire process should take me about 2-3 months, depending on whether I stick to just one pass through all the races or if I end up testing Incursus v. Tristan and Merlin v. Kestrel as well.  I'm hoping to gain some additional insight on better ways to Pirate as a new player.  I also get to not feel like such a hypocrite as I do now when flying around in a Vengeance with Assault Ships V while telling the guy with a third of my SP just how viable an option AFs are for soloing.

There you have it folks.  Sorry for any of you expecting a more grand reveal of my plans for the future.  I have high hopes for this little endeavor and already have a couple of topics I'd like to write up some guides for in the future.  In large part, it comes from a desire to gear the blog more towards good advice than simple recaps of fights I've been in.  There are already plenty of those blogs out there, and they usually have far more exciting fights than I do.  With the break in my RL I'm also hoping to get back to a twice weekly posting schedule.  Although, as soon as I say that I already know I've just jinxed myself.  Wish me luck.

Regarrrds,

FNG