Media of the Week

Media of the week is a new little feature that I thought might be fun.
Each week I will be linking a video, image and possibly a music track of some sort, and commenting a little on why I like them. Some may be topical to what's happening at the time, others won't be and some might be a few years old, but pretty good nonetheless.

I'm completely rubbish when it comes to anything creative of this sort, but I absolutely love some of the stuff others create and really do respect them for taking the time to make what they make and sharing it.

So to get started,

Video of the week.

Ghost Festival - Push Eject

I first saw this a couple of years ago. And after watching it the first time had to go back and watch it another couple of times. The cool bits in it for me are the, intro where the image distortion matches up to the music. Then onto the camera following a drone fighter as it flies around and spins. The the short clips of the Caldari frigates flying around in something close to formation (or at least a pack) at high speed as well as some actual small gang fight footage being shown as well. Along with the fast pace of the footage it gives the impression of a fast moving and highly active corporation which is good at what it does. Lastly the shot of the Moros Dreadnought firing its blasters, and the balls of plasma coming straight at the camera are fantastic, and I don't think I've seen this in a video since.
Overall its fast paced, fits with the music and is visceral showing off the beauty of Eve, and the fights that can occur against other players.

its perhaps one of the best corporation recruitment video's out there for Eve Online. (note I didn't say Alliance, I may look at some of those next week.)

Image of the Week

Ship Tree UI

This is actually a series of images from a thread if you can call them that from Reddit, which I sometimes look at.

Here's some more, Linky.

According to the Reddit thread,  this was taken from one of CCP's test servers, and shows a new way of viewing the ship progression tree in Eve. I Like new stuff. I often jump from new thing to new thing, and think "Ohh Shiny". This is this week's Ooh Shiny thing for me.

Anything which makes it easier for new players to visualise and see what paths are available to them is a great improvement. Hopefully this combined with the Skills now showing what they "unlock" at each level they're trained to will make it that little bit easier for those new coming into the game.

And after all the easier it is for people to understand, the quicker they're likely to get somewhere and have fun. This is what eve needs if CCP wants to decrease the turnover of people giving eve a go and quitting because they didn't know or understand it.

But I've also got to wonder how much time and effort has been put into this which could have been spent on something else, which might be seen as more important to the playerbase.

In conclusion it looks good, its going in the right direction, but I also wonder what else they can do with it?

Music/Sound of the Week.

Mediaeval Baebes - Glass Window

If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, you might remember having heard it as the music which accompanied "The Witness" trailer which was first shown at the PlayStation reveal a couple of weeks back. The game itself looks really nice as a puzzle game, in which to lose yourself for a few hours easily, and not feel like time has been wasted. It's also being made by the team behind Braid, which you might have got and played via Steam.

Its certainly something I'm looking forward to playing in the future, lets hope for a PC version.

A quick and dirty newbies guide to Eve.

So here goes, me giving out useful advice. People in the past have told me I'm good at this, I'm not so sure.
It's likely just going to be a collection of links to useful sites and articles and 3rd party programs but I will be starting out with those golden rules of eve which get thrown around constantly, (in reality its just a list of don't do this or that).

The Golden Rules of Eve Online.

1. Have fun.

This is really overlooked compared to number 2 which is said so many times.

2. Don't fly what you can't afford to lose. 

This can't be stated enough. Its no use spending all your money, selling every ship you own for that Tengu Strategic Cruiser and then thinking you will take it for a spin on a low-sec radar sites or a mission or something and the moment you enter low-sec, you end up finding yourself surrounded by pirates who are ripping you to pieces. Seconds later your waking up in a new clone without an ISK to your name and nothing but a rookie ship.

3. Don't fly what you can't afford to lose. - Yes again.

4. Your going to lose ships and you will get podded. Its just part of the game.

It really is. its not personal and the game allows it, even in high-sec. CONCORD is there to take revenge not to protect. The only way to not lose a ship or get podded is to never undock, in which case you might as well not play.
Best thing to do is as soon as you can afford to, take some T1 frigates to low-sec and look for fights. Your going to lose a heck of alot of them and your pod often as well but you will get used to it and not lock up later with fear when your in a more expensive ship or when it matters more.

5. If something sounds too good to be true

Its a trap! People will try to scam you in this game. Keep this in mind. They will often try to come at you sideways.

6. Don't mix your weapons 

If your fitting guns they want to be all exactly the same, same with missile launchers. So no to having a couple 125mm auto cannons on your Hurricane alongside some 720 howitzer artillery cannons.

7. Don't mix missile launchers and guns, unless you know what your doing! And if your a Noob you probably don't. (A few ships used to have split weapon high slots, e.g. Of 6 high slots, 3 could take turrets and 3 could take missile launchers, though I think this has been done away with with the rebalancing.)

8. Don't trust anyone,

They all want to steal your stuff or blow you up. (Possibly an extension of 4, but if so it needs mentioning again.)

 9. You don't need faction, deadspace or officer modules to be good.

In the majority of cases T1, Meta or T2 modules are enough. Its not the ships and items that make you good in Eve is you, the player that makes you good. Sure they help but they won't stop you being surrounded by armed bastards who want you dead and to loot your stuff.
For example.
Did you really need to fit officer guns and a deadspace tank on your Vindicator? just so you can complete the mission a couple of minutes faster? Nice ship, but T2 guns would have been fine, and that tank is just overkill to the extreme. Spending some money on faction mods can be a good idea, like on Federation magnetic stabilizers.

10. Don't bling out a ship unless you know

1. What your doing,
2. It's a ship worth blinging out for a specific role.
Otherwise you end up like the guy in the link, fitting a module which cost a silly amount to a ship which shouldn't need it and doesn't benefit the role in which its used for.

And as with the pirate code these aren't laws, they're more like guidelines.

My Advice.

My advice for starting out as a new pilot would be this.

Do all of the tutorial missions even if your not interested in industry or mining.
Why?
All the tutorials give good rewards in terms of cash and ships, if you know your never going to need that Venture you can sell it on once you have done them, and make a decent profit.
Train for your races T1 frigates first, find a half decent fit somewhere. Ask around, look on the internet, in wiki's and work out what skills you need to fly it well, and what skills you need for each of the modules.
Chances are doing this will concentrate your skill training towards a quick and achievable goal which you can build from with your future training.
The Goons and TEST have it right, a frigate can change everything.

Getting used to losses.

Once you can afford a couple dozen frigates take a few out to low-sec. expect to die, don't get attached to them. Make sure its insured and your clone is up to date. Learning to accept losses early on will make it much easier later on. And remember each time you get podded and wake up in a station,

UPDATE YOUR MEDICAL CLONE! RIGHT GOD DAMN NOW! DON'T UNDOCK TILL YOU HAVE!

It can also be worthwhile to have a look who killed you. They will most likely upload your loss to a website like eve-kill.net It can give you some useful information. Also you can try convo'ing them. They might be complete dicks, they might not be and may take pity on you, a new player and explain where you went wrong, what to do better. Its all a learning experience.

Plan for the future.

Think what you want to do and begin training towards it. Set yourself goals and work towards them.

See a really cool ship fly past and think, "I want to fly one of those" look it up, work out what skills you need and train for it.

Hear a story about a fight somewhere, and think "I want to be part of something like that!" Find out more about it, what ships they were using and what kind of fight it was and come up with a plan yourself as to how to get there.

Want to build ships to sell them on the market? Start looking at your industry skills, what do you need to be able to build whatever, and begin working towards it, do a few trial runs of making small quantities of ships, get the hang of the industry side of the game and get going, and scale up your operation.

Some highly useful links.

Eve University Wikipedia perhaps the most comprehensive eve wiki out there covering allot of the details and with a good bunch of guides thrown in there.

BattleClinic This can be useful for looking for relatively good fits (loadouts). Beware not all of them are, and its worth reading the comments to see what others say about them.

Dotlan Probably the best third party map out there. It can show you pretty much everything in a manner far clearer and easier to understand than the in-game map.

ISK Guide Download it and have a look through, it gives a good overview of many of the different paths you can choose to tread and how best to begin your journey down them.

 Failheap Challenge A community forum site filled with bitter vets with nothing better to do than post all day. They do however offer some excellent suggestions on fits and ships in the "Ship Setup Hanger."

Offical Eve Online Forums. I wasn't too sure whether or not to include this. But you can find people willing to give good advice on there, but also people who will troll and give bad advice, however the latter two are relatively easy to spot.

Some blog's such as Jesters Trek which is linked to the right hand side are also quite good to look at for some information on ship fittings and other parts of eve. For example his definition of a safe undock or kick out station is well worth a read.

This is not an exhaustive list, there's far more out there and in greater detail, it just depends on what you want to do whether its any use to you.

Your experience in eve is in your hands. Put enough effort in and you can with a little luck be anywhere down the line.

First love?

Don't worry I'm not going to start getting all soppy and cry on the internet about some girl who broke my heart.
What I'm actually wanting to talk about is that very first game that you fell in love with and still have rose tinted memories of playing and all the little quirky bits and pieces and crazy, funny and epic moments that took place in it.
I'm sure we all have that. The one all others get measured by.

Mine is Anarchy Online.
A little about Anarchy Online (AO) . Its set around 29487 AD on the planet of Rubi-Ka, the galaxy is ruled by mega-corporations, the largest is called Omni-Tek and as you can probably guess they're not exactly the good guys they would like you to believe they are.
However in the northern territories of Rubi-Ka there are the rebels, ex-corporate employee's who have stood up for their rights and want freedom from the yoke of Omni-Tek control. After a series of wars, Omni-Tek with all its military might was pushed back from the northern territories it once owned, and hasn't been able to establish any major footholds there since. However you start playing in a period of cold war. the Clans in the north are content with what they have to a large extent. They control a series of cities and are able to export and import and basically run themselves how they like. In the south Omni-Tek is held at check by ICC (basically CONCORD, but without real military teeth.) In the middle is a more nebulous group, the Neutrals. Those who don't want to work for Omni-Tek and be a mindless drone, yet also don't want to have to bow down to the Clans in the north. they have set up two safe haven cities, Newland City and Borealis. players were able to choose any of these three factions with Funcom the games developers not intending Neutrals to be a valid option till players first started to refuse to sign up to either the Clans or Omni-Tek. The neutral classification was initially to allow new players to make a better informed decision on which side to pick.

As far as the gameplay goes, it was incredibly complex, items were level locked and also stat locked, but there were items which buffed stats and nano's (read sci fi spells) which also buffed stats and there were allot of nano's available for all 12 professions (Classes) as well there being four races or breeds.

It was released about 12 years ago, and its still running somehow, though on what I suspect will be life support once they have finished the couple of development projects they have been working on for the past three or so years.


I first really started out in AO when I was still in school. I had just got my first computer and had tried out Runescape and probably some other horrific free mmo's which were available at the time. It wasn't long till I was talking to some friends and they suggested that I should give AO a go and that they could help me out a bit.
At the time I hadn't really any experience of playing a game where you have an avatar, to customise and improve, and kit out with equipment. They gave me some direction and I flailed around on my Froob account barely existing on their handouts till they suggested a method of making some quick credits which I didn't have to be high level to do.
I began starting to import Omni Med Suits from Omni Tek controlled regions where they could be bought from vendors at about 1-2k per piece and passing bags of full sets over to my Clan main to sell in Old Athens for a couple of million credits. Soon I was importing via this way about 20 or so sets a day if not more and selling them for these vastly inflated prices and making what I thought was bucket loads of credits at the time.
In reality I wasn't but at the time I was actually becoming self sufficient with it.
Anyway I persevered with it, eventually upgraded to a paid account and stated to push myself up the levels. After a couple of failed characters I switched to the third faction available in the game (Neutral) and really hit it off, ending up with an endgame character. Time flew by as I progressed through all of the content. I spent a couple of years on that character, logged a silly amount of online time, and spent half of it just talking to people and helping out or running my guild.
This was the golden period of this game for me, there was plenty of fresh content, more was being added, the grind was over and my character was pretty damn well equipped and pretty damn badass.
Eventually the bitter veteran grew in me and as the rate of development slowed down and the storyline ground to a halt to be largely ignored I grew more bitter, the same old gripes kept on coming up till I reached a point where I threw in the towel and moved on.

 Anarchy Online had a learning curve much like Eve's. It was high, painful and long. The grind was also immense, unless you put money in and paid others to do it for you. Before you watch the video, guess what level he is going to finish leveling and hit level cap at.

Most of you I guess went for around 80 or 90? maybe 100 tops. He actually stops at level 220.
the combined level cap of AO was actually described as 200/20/30/70 but most commonly as 220/30/70. Basically you had to grind 200 normal levels, at an incredibly slow and dull rate, which often caused people to call in higher levels to tank masses of monsters and allow them to just kill them and get the xp or pay for one of the professions (classes) to team them, and kite around aoe'ing everything in an area till it died, whilst the lower level player just sat out the way and twiddled their thumbs. This was continued with the further 20 shadow levels which were introduced with the second expansion Shadowlands, which vastly improved the game, by pretty much adding an alternate dimension which was far better to level in and raid in. Following this came the Alien Invasion in which a further 30 alien levels were added, and then following on from that they released Lost Eden which added a further 70 research levels ontop of all the rest. This grind became such a joke that when the developers held a competition to name a new orbital night club they were adding to the game players backed the name "The Grind" far more than any other suggestion.

As you can probably tell it was a horridly broken game with little real thought it seems put to progression and the grind they were introducing. The economy is also still shot to hell as well with inflation and not enough good gear available or ways to make money available which doesn't involve camping out at sites where the good gear drops.

When you moan about this or that in Eve, just remember there's a game out there where the company behind it has pretty much abandoned it to chase after profits from other games its produced and hasnt bothered to listen to its community and sort out its problems.

Hopefully this has given you some insight into just how bad a game company can be. How little it can care about its community and how a game can stagnate so much more than Eve. I have nothing against the actual team developing Anarchy Online its the company which they work for which is screwing itself and perhaps leading itself to ruin. In other words be thankful for CCP actually giving a damn or even pretending to as its more than what others do.
No doubt someone will make the argument that its a twelve year old game and that I shouldn't expect miracles or for its development to be continued. I will point out that Eve Online is only about two years younger and is in far better shape.

Something new.

What has really impressed me so far is the number of little additions to Eve Online, and what a difference they make to my overall enjoyment of the game.

• Waypointed routes showing in space, so you can see where you will be flung by gates between the stars.
• Rounded targeting reticules. A very nice change from the boxes we had before and I guess is along the path of bringing us the interface they show in various trailers. - I can't wait to see if they do more with this.

• Agression Timers. I think this is another fantastic addition, simply being able to see it cycle down and what exactly you have timers for and against is such a big blessing and removes one of the things you have to be constantly thinking about in the back of your mind.

• Safety controls. I actually like this especially when flying in high-sec where in the past I was always so worried about automatically shooting a neutral and getting concorded as a result, just because I've an itchy trigger finger from null where its all NBSI (Not Blue Shoot It). However I've yet to try it out in low and null-sec areas where I'm wondering if it will be a hindrance.

• Info Panels. Nice to see this made far more concise.

• New camera follow, via "C" on selected target. OH MY GOD! This is awesome, there's no other way of describing it.
• New sounds. The new little sounds for all sorts of things like skills finishing, targeting, being targeted, the aggression timers finishing and probably a fair amount more I haven't noticed. Overall, pretty cool and not invasive sounding. They just fit in brilliantly.
• New mining frigate, Venture. It looks pretty damn cool. The colour scheme suits it incredibly well. In a way its a shame that its just a frigate when compared to the looks of the Exhumer's and Mining Barges, which just look shocking in comparison now.

I know there's some new destroyers as well but I've yet to get a hold of one to have a really good look at, though from what I've seen the Minmatar one looks awful in my opinion with its door wedge barbed look, whereas the Caldari one looks like a kick-ass submarine boat, and the Gallente one looks fairly classy with the mini drone bays on the side. The Amarr one I'm least sure of my opinion on, though leaning towards "Meh" its not bad but its not great. I will come to look at them another time.
If you hadn't guessed by now I like cool looking ships and judge them all.

There is one improvement that I would like to see added which perhaps only I would find helpful.
Currently you can view a mini solar system map, constellation, region and universe maps via pressing F11 which brings them up in a series of boxes as a side bar. Region and Universe aren't that helpful in my opinion and neither is constellation exactly great.

What I would propose would be to make it so you can have just the maps you want in seperate boxes you can pull around the screen, e.g. a separate solar system mini map would be invaluable when D-scanning and possibly in wormholes. a mini constellation map, or one which showed you every system within 3-5 jumps would also be helpful. Especially if the format in which they were shown was cleaned up and improved. It could just be me, but that would be a cool little change and have a direct benefit upon my style of play.
However I've no idea how much work this would take. And I do know that some things when it comes to these games which are 10 years old aren't that easy at all, as the dev's now will have to deal with code which hasn't really been touched in years, written in an incredibly outdated fashion and of which there's very little to no notes on.

Going Forward.

It strikes me that I still haven't written anything about my plans and goals to reach in Eve in the near-ish future, along with what I've done so far.

Currently I've been playing Eve again for about 24hrs.
My character, Altrius Maartel is a Minmatar Sebiestor male. I actually attempted to make him look somewhat like me, but that turned out to be an impossible task. (the problem certainly wasn't weight related.)

So far I have managed to complete all of the tutorial missions and noticed something a little odd in the advanced military series of missions.
I don't think this was intended but during the second mission I think it was, your handed a frigate supposedly packed with proximity activated explosives, with which your supposed to destroy a pirate base. I flew up to the pirate base. It blew up, but the ship stayed intact and its now sitting back at the station, waiting to be sold. When I fly a ship packed with explosives, I expected it to, you know go BANG! later on in this chain of missions there's another where your told you are going to lose the ship they give you once more, this time I did actually lose it to the overwhelming odds they throw at you.
My problem with this is twofold.

• Your forewarned you are going to lose your ship, when in reality you have very little idea of when your going to lose your ship, apart from knowing it could be blown up by someone at any second from the moment you undock it.
• Its hidden away in a tutorial, when in my opinion the sooner you introduce a player to this fact of life in eve, the better. Why not do this in the very opening sequence of preliminary tutorials?

My skill training as been very haphazard so far and will likely be for the next couple of days till I get to a point where I can do enough to be able to properly engage and enjoy the game a little, even if its shooting red crosses, till I have enough ISK to do anything more entertaining or griping.
I've begun cross training into Caldari and Amarr frigates, and begun training up astrometrics so scanning should become easier.

The plan currently is to get astrometrics and its relevant support skills up to a comfortable level. Along with frigate related skills for Minmatar, Caldari and Amarr and possibly begin working on getting the skills required to fit a covert ops cloak and a covert ops ship before moving on to assault frigates. Somewhere out there I remember finding a fun Merlin fit that I would like to give a go again.

The overall goal of this is I want to enjoy playing and really get to know the frigate ships far better than I have in the past where everything I flew was compared to either the Hurricane or Drake, both pre-balancing, when they were so powerful. Once I've grown a little bored of them I'll progress to cruisers and work also on getting a cloaky hauler.
One thing you may find if I continue with all this writing is that my play style and preferred character type is that of a unseen rogue. Though I do also enjoy the up front, and in your face tank and hefty damage dealing. This may come up in another blog post in the future where I look at why I like to play in a certain style.

Getting back on track. Later this week I will be attempting to convince the friends I've mentioned to join me in eve and help get them sorted out and progressing through the tutorials where ever they may start out and then eventually gathering them all together.
Whether they stick to it and actually enjoy it will play a major role on what I will do in the future.
However my plan would be to start a corporation and run exploration sites in high-sec and low-sec and attempt some Class 1 & 2 wormholes.
Wormholes are something that has interested me for a long while. Probably because of the exploration and the unknown and not knowing nature of them. And going back to Corporations, I will probably be starting that corporation very soon as having lots of people green to me flying about is more worrying than it would be having neuts in local in null-sec for some bizarre reason.

Screenshots or pictures haven't really featured in my blog yet, so here's a little something.

Edited 22:36 04/03/2012: to clarify my progress and opinion on the tutorial missions.

Ever returning.

This is probably my fourth go at Eve Online.

The first two attempts were years ago, of which I don't remember much other than in the first attempt like many people I found it all too confusing and gave up in fairly short order.
On the second attempt I got a Drake, probably horridly fit and ended up getting bored of running missions and had little clue to what else was out there and so stopped again.

The third and most recent attempt began when I suggested to a housemate at Uni that we give it a shot, after all playing with friends and someone you know means you have that interaction and also someone else to talk to about it and work together to answer your own questions. It was in this play through that I moved from the comfortable relative safety of high-sec to low-sec and then rather rapidly to null-sec, and ended up flying and fighting amongst the massive blobs in some of the largest battles and more recent military campaigns of Eve Online history.
It was also during this time that I began to spend an increasing amount of my time reading up on the goings on across 0.0 and what other peoples views were of just about anything to do with Eve. However after a year of this I became bored and somewhat tired of the current state of null-sec, the experience started to become stale and I walked away again to try something else.

So when people say you always come back to Eve Online, I understand exactly what they mean.
Eve offers something which just seems to be so... missing from other mmo's out there currently and probably for the foreseeable future.

To me I believe that the things which keep on bringing me back are as follows.

• The sandbox nature of the game.
• A proper player run economy, where everything is constructed and sold on by players.
• Risk and Reward.
• Consequences.
•  Space science fiction setting.
• The scope of it and its complexity.

The sandbox nature of eve whilst not pure, is at a point on the scale where it has just enough tools and background to make it easier for people to get in, enjoy, construct and destroy that you really can do an awful lot without reaching the limits of what is capable in eve. other games such as Minecraft are far more pure in their sandbox by providing you with a blank canvas and leaving you to get on with it, but I feel are lacking in the provision of tools to either construct of destroy. Its this aspect of the sandbox which keeps me coming back.

A player run economy which actually runs pretty damn smoothly, with real progression capable in it. Being able to sell your loot from missions or ratting or from mining, and know that somewhere out there who ever bought it will actually use it and possibly lose it.
Going back to my bullet point, I added in the word, "proper". The reason for this is because I do not believe many mmo's have this as there is not anywhere near as great a sink for currency in them compared with eve, where so much gets blown up on a daily basis, and a greater majority of it is gone forever. Whereas in other games there isn't this loss of currency from the system and thus unless the game developers keep a weather eye on or have something in the workings of the game to adjust drop rates you end up with players amassing fortunes and not having anything to really spend them on but drive up prices or add to inflation.

Risk and reward, however much this gets a beating currently be thankful that it actually exists. We have to every time we undock gamble to a certain extent on whether whatever were undocking with is going to come back. This increases the further you go out from the centre of New Eden, as the controls of what a player can do with impunity increases so does that reward to a large extent.
I will say however that the rewards in high-sec are just about right, erring on the side of a little too good in my opinion and those in low-sec and null-sec are just pitiful. But rewards can also be fights and the experiences and whatever else you encounter, not just the ISK value of the activities.

Consequences, yes I cringe at CCP's Butterfly Effect video mainly because I as many others probably do wonder at how often this occurs or accurate how this portrayal of eve really is.
But they are right there are consequences to every action you take, more so in eve than in most other games. Yes 99.999% of the time those consequences of your each action are boring or don't actually travel that far.
But that possibility that you could cause a hurricane 200 miles away is still exciting.

Space science fiction setting. I would say that for the last however many years the mmo market has been saturated to a large extent by fantasy theme park mmo's. I would class Guild Wars 2 among those theme parks, but I'm veering off topic here.  There haven't been that many great science fiction settings used in mmo's until just recently. Even then the big ones which spring to mind are trading off the name and lore established elsewhere and are attempting to appeal to an existing fan-base. The lack of originality in this regard is also something which grates on me, and probably is another reason I keep on coming back to eve, because until just recently you haven't been able to access the Eve universe any other way than via Eve Online.

The scope of it and its complexity.
First of all I would like you to take a mental step back, a few deep calming breaths and just think about what other styles of play are available, what roles you can fulfil, what other activities are available to you.
Once you have done that I can probably safely tell you,

"You haven't even scratched the surface, you will have forgotten so many other things."

As for its complexity I think this can easily be summed up by quoting something Ripard Teg posted on his excellent blog Jesters Trek, which I will be shortly adding as a link to from the side bit.

Back to the quote, it is something like this, "Each time I hit what I believe to be the bedrock in eve someone else shows me another layer to it." - That wont be it exactly I will have a look at finding the blog post in which it is in, if anyone is interested, but going back a couple of months on Jester's blog will take me through a couple hundred blog posts.

I first really started out my mmo experience in Anarchy Online (AO). Which to my mind is reasonably comparable to Eve Online, it was made by a Scandinavian games company, it had a futuristic science fiction setting, in which the human race as moved far away from Earth. And it had its own serious complexity, and grind. I'll go into this in more detail soon.
After getting annoyed with the complete stagnation of that game as the developers moved on to create Age of Conan and then Secret World, I left it. But I took away with me an enjoyment of complex gameplay, of which eve is the only other contender on the market.

To be honest with myself I could go on and write in far more detail about each of these points and probably develop each into its own blog post. I may keep that for a day when I run out of inspiration, or if I suddenly have masses of people clamoring for it. (Yeah right :P)

Hopefully this was an enjoyable read for you.

Fly dangerous out there.

A Beginning.

Hello.

Just saying that in Eve Online would seem strange unless it was on a voice comms to friends, corpmates or allies. Its not something you would think of typing into Local at the best of times.
But yes,

Hello to you and welcome to my blog.

I will begin by making no promises that if you have stumbled across this that I will be regular in posting or will indeed even keep it up. If it disappears within a couple of months you'll know that its because I just haven't stuck at it.
I'm also not promising to get everything right or factually correct. I ramble, I remember odd things and never the sources (I will be making a special attempt however to include these as much as possible, going down the rabbit hole of links on the internet is after all a past time I'm sure nearly anyone who is reading this will have indulged in).

Further to this I think its important that I state that the tone and writing style of each post will in all likelihood change from post to post for the first few as I get the hang of it. The visual style will also likely be changing as well till I'm happy with it. Unfortunately I'm no graphic artist or web designer so don't expect any shock and awe impressive stuff, words and writing is closer to my forte. 

It would probably be best to explain a little about myself and what I hope to achieve, document and comment on in the future to give you some idea of where I'm coming from and where I'm going.

Me. - No personal details here sorry. Though I will say I'm yet another guy. Not an elusive hot chick on the internet as my first guild thought I was till they heard me speak on voice comms for the first time, it was a little anti climatic for them.

I've been playing games and MMO's for the best part of a decade, which makes me feel very old, when it shouldn't.
My gaming history which might be interesting to know is this;

These are grouped to platform and then to something close to the chronology I played them.

Playstation; Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot 2 the Vortex Strikes Back, Collin McRea Rally, Grand Tourismo, Command and Conquer Red Alert (yes it was on the Playstation and it was pretty good!) and some football game I never played.

Playstation 2; Killzone, Timesplitters 2 & 3, Dead or Alive 2.

Curtesy of  of friends - Playstation 3; Assassins Creed 2 and Brotherhood, Killzone 2 & 3, Call of Duty Black Ops, Battlefield 3, Dust 514 Beta

PC; Dune 2000 (first RTS I played, and played for days on end.), Warhammer 40,000 Final Liberation, Dawn of War series, Age of Empires, Half-Life 1 & 2, Call of Duty 2, Unreal Turnament, Rainbow Six Las Vegas 1 & 2, Deus Ex Human Revolution, The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Skyrim, Mass Effect 1, 2 & 3, Minecraft.

I'm listing PC MMO's seperately as I feel they're quite different to other games.

PC MMO's;  Runescape, Anarchy Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, Battlefield 3, Planet Side 2, Eve Online.

Your probably wondering why I felt it important to list all of that. Well in my humble opinion what games you have played and experienced before, shape what you expect of current and future games, what ideas you have and what you find fun and what keeps your attention.

Well now that's my gaming history out of the way its possible to move on to my goal of what I'm hoping to achieve with this.

Simply put, to add my own experiences of Eve to those of others, and to hopefully engage in the dialogue which continues across the internet about this game in all its aspects, be warned I am still interested in Nullsec politics even if I'm not a line member in one of the massive coalitions anymore.

There will likely be posts that have nothing to do with Eve Online, but I make no apologies for that, skip them if you want. I'm not forcing you to read any of this, but if you want I could come round to your house and smash your face repeatedly into the computer monitor if you like.

One final thing that ought to be covered before I dive head first in, why the name Casual Void?
The last time I played Eve it very nearly took over far too much of my life, this time I want to attempt to see if a more casual play style is possible, hopefully this will mean that I wont be burnt out as I was last time. So that's where the Casual comes from. Void, well that is what space is, an unfilled void. It is a nothingness, with barely anything passing through it. Eve Online may have 7500 star systems and even more Planets, moons and stations and ships zipping around between it all, but just think how many (insert crazy big number here of your choice and times it by a billion a couple of times) square kilometers of empty unused space there is. So to me, Void feels far more accurate than say the word Space which when we think of we think in far smaller terrestrial terms or of planets moons and stars, but never really the void between.

Hopefully all of this wasn't too painful to read, and if you have made it this far, thank you for sticking with me and I hope you check back for other posts.
Next up will likely be some post explaining the reasons why I have come back to this terrible game.
I will also promise some pictures to alleviate the wall of text.