My Eve Epiphany

I was bored yesterday.  Boredom mixed with very little playing time always brings out... how best to say it?  It brings out  invention.  Sometimes this invention results in me flying to the edge of the map and back, just to see if I can.  Sometimes it brings out flying into enemy space and being annoying for a really long time.  Sometimes it means fitting ships in new ways and seeing if it works or not.  Sometimes it means getting blown up and sometimes (more often than not thank you) it means blowing something else up.  Yesterday it meant getting in my Manticore and flying 37 jumps back to Providence.

The idea wasn't given much thought.  Ostensibly the trip was to pick up the few remaining pieces of faction modules I had forgotten when I left.  The other part was to see what was going on in 9UY for myself, which turns out to be almost nothing at all actually.  I think me and a few guys I know could've re-taken the system ourselves yesterday.  But hidden among these rationalizations was the real purpose.  A purpose that I wasn't aware of until after I blew up the Blue Retriever.

I had an epiphany as I sat in the Ice Field and watched my (then) potential victim ice mining.  It had nothing to do with how easy the kill would be if I chose to pursue it.  It also had nothing to do with the fact that the pilot happened to be blue to my Corp.  Due to a complicated series of strange decisions that I won't get into here, certain Corps within the same Alliances were set red and certain ones were set blue.  In my mind, it was an either-or question.  Either they are red or they aren't.  Of course I asked for and received approval from the Corp Directors that were on at the time and then I killed it.  Boom.  Not the "boom" of the ship, but the "boom" of that epiphany.  A sudden flash of insight into this wacky game of ours.

And if you've been reading the blog you can probably see this coming.  It hit me that I was finally playing the game and the game wasn't playing me.  I think I just climbed up onto that famous Eve plateau and realized it didn't have anything to do with skill points after all, it had everything to do with the game itself.  And my relationship with it.  I was free for the first time since I joined my first Corporation.  I had, in 3 well-placed volleys, removed the shackles of loyalty that others had placed upon me for no good reason.  The loyalty that they expected from me was a one-way street.  Very seldom if ever returned in any tangible way.  As the famous Middle-Eastern saying goes, "The past is dead."

Long live the future.