Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Most of the time I am like this:

I definitely agree with this type of reaction:

Many times life leaves us feeling like this:

Hopefully we don't end up like this:

As another year draws to a close I suspect many of us are not so different in that we may reflect upon the year we are about to exit as well as look forward to the new year about to begin.

Perhaps many lead a very good life. Perhaps many struggle to get by.
Perhaps many of us are like minded. Perhaps many of us differ in our thoughts and beliefs.
We may agree, disagree, or agree to disagree.
But at the end of the day, no matter where we stand on any issue we should try to remember that we are all of the same race.
There may, and often times will be, some that we will never be able to get along with
or compromise with or agree with. And that's ok. We're human.


I'd like to wish every one out there a very Merry Christmas and, safe, prosperous Happy New Year.
Be we in game friends or foe, out of game comrades, or a thorn in one another's side I raise a toast.

Cheers

Blog Banter 31: The Entire Wormhole That Eve Is

Welcome to the thirty-first EVE Blog Banter, a community conversation between anyone and everyone with an interest in discussing EVE Online. For more information on how this works, check out this link or for details of this edition's topic, read on.


As any games journalist would probably tell you, a true and complete review of a Massively Multiplayer Online game is impossible. MMOs are vast, forever evolving entities with too much content for a single reviewer to produce a fair and accurate review. However, a collection of dedicated bloggers and EVE players (past and present) with a wide range of experience in various aspects of the game might be able to pull it off.


This special 'End of Year' Blog Banter edition aims to be a crowd-sourced game review. Using your gaming knowledge and experience, join the community in writing a fair and qualified review of EVE Online: Crucible. This can be presented in any manner of your choosing, but will ideally include some kind of scoring system. 


With each Blog Banter participant reviewing the areas of EVE Online in which they specialise, the result should be a Metacritic-esque and accurate review by the people who know best. 
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I'm going to refer to Eve in its entirety as a wormhole. Let me try and explain.


I'm not going to give you my specialized area of Eve because Eve is my specialized area in terms of gaming. If not for Eve I would not, to this day, be playing any other game. 


With the Apochrypha expansion came wormholes. Wormholes in Eve are, for lack of a better explanation, a world within a world. There are sleeper rats that can only be found inside a wormhole. There are influences perpetrated against or in favor of certain characteristics affecting, for example, ones ships resistances, targeting abilities, module effectiveness, etc... but to name a few possibilities. These unique features are found only in a wormhole. While my focus of this review is not about wormholes I need to provide some amount of information surrounding wormholes to set the stage. The fact that they are unique is to say the least. The fact that they are a world located within a world is undeniable.


Eve Online is a world located within a world. Hence making it a wormhole in and of itself.  I seek not to focus on one particular interest within the game. I seek to tell you, the reader, why Eve Online is, in my opinion the best "gaming experience" ever.


By nature I am not a gamer. I was born in 1968. An ordinary child for the times we played outside. We got in to trouble for being gone too long. We were never home. Never inside but to eat and sleep. 
-Enter Atari
Hey! Tanks and Pong were cool and all... but it held our attention only so long. Then there was the arcade game; Asteroids. Asteroids was that "not so pretty" spaceship game. But it held many laughs. Afterburning across the screen/off screen/on screen/off / and so on. But all this was filler for the brief down times we had between scaling the vertical walls of the cliff behind our house, throwing lawn darts that could pierce your skull like a hot knife through butter, and riding dirt bikes with wide open throttles and no helmet.


What the fuck does this have to do with Eve? You may be asking. 


Simple. All these decades gone by I did not fall in to nor adopt the "gamer" life. I was your average Joe. I was not embroiled in gamer life. I was embroiled in real life. I became a junior firefighter when I was 14 years old. I wasn't  LEEEEERRRRRROOOOOOYYYYYYYYY of Wow. I was Harri, the nobody junior firefighting teenager who could give a shit less about some fucking mind bending game. And just for your information: My real name isn't Harri. Or even Harrigan. Harrigan Vonstudly was the name of our AKC registered Basset hound when I was a child. A gift from my aunt. 


Decades later I met my "to become wife." When I met her she played Eve. Not being a gamer I had no clue what Eve was. Once she told me about Eve I used to make fun of her for playing a spaceship game on the internet. That was 2006. 


Two years later, two years of not paying attention to Eve Online and poking fun of her for playing such a game I decided to create an account and try it.
Following her direction, remember, she is a carebear, I set off training in to a Drake. 
Missions, standings, isk, L.P.
Second account for a miner
Third account for PvP because the above two sucked and are boring.


Eve pulled a non gamer in to its grasp.


From August of 2008 to November 2008 I had learned enough about Eve to know that what I was doing, PVE, sucked. PvP was where it was at. I found myself chomping at the bit to get home from work so as to log in to game. Lord help my soul if I knew that I had a skill training ending and needed to be there to "inject"  and /or start the next skill. 


Today I sit at the position of doing nothing but PvP in the game of Eve Online. What started out as the first undock, wow, look at this world. What in God's name is all out there? This is massive. Has become a more focused entity. Yet it has become a more widespread venture.


Eve is vast. Eve is huge. Eve is difficult. It's harsh, unbending, unforgiving. What Eve is not is much easier to describe than what it is. 


I tried PvE in terms of mission running. I tried mining. I tried research. PvP, the real design of Eve is where I ended up. It is where we all should end up. People looking for a guaranteed safe, risk-free opportunity need not apply.  You won't find it. Cry all you want. It's not going to happen. And should it ever find its way in to our beloved game, nay, lifestyle of Eve, may she burn in hell. 


Have you figured out why I rate Eve Online a 10 out of 10? Probably not. That's ok. You're slow. And I''ll try to speak a little slower for you.
The wormhole that Eve is is the fact that it takes real life people, as we all are, and allows us to become something, anything. Eve allows all of us to be what we want to be but maybe we are not able to be in any other medium. It allows some of us to be exactly what we are in the real life and carry it over to this universe. 


The wormhole in Eve, that is Eve, represents the unknown. It represents different. It represents new. It invents. It reinvents. It encompasses our real life in to a virtual life that may very easily be mixed up with and confused for what is real and what is not. This is what makes Eve the chart topper of any and all MMO's. Period!


Eve is Eve. You are Eve. Or you are not.


~Harri out