Member of the EVE Tweet Fleet

Friday, October 10, 2008

News and stuff

A long time friend and all round excellent diplomat has decided to take a break from his position in a 0.0 alliance. We got to talking. Looks like a case of general 0.0 burnout. As he stated he wasn't burned out on the game, just on the responsibilities and the constant PvP of his (now ex-) position. This got me thinking on the subject of burn out in general.

It's like life that way. Too much of a good thing can be bad. The problem can be recognizing the symptoms early enough to change course without getting burned out on the game as a whole. As a general clue, if you're a PvPer and your mining alt starts looking more and more like a main character - it's time to take a break.

One of the advantages of EvE, with it's higher average age bracket, is that most of us don't have a problem staying in touch with good pilots when they go off to different pastures. You need to take a long view in this game, not a short one. Politics in EvE are Machiavellian enough that today's fleet mate will be tomorows target and vis-versa quite frequently. There's also the fact that although you can specialize to specific tasks quite quickly on a single character, having a fully developed, flexible, main character takes quite a bit of time. Very much can happen in that large chunk of time.

Part of adapting to the long term part of this game and/or the metagame of EvE is recognizing these facts and planning accordingly. It does not matter if you are the leader of an alliance or a simple PvP footsoldier. In EvE if you do not establish at least some long term goals you will eventualy flounder and burn out. In this game, even PvP'ers need to keep an eye on the bottom line (for the most part) or they run out of ships. Making sure their support system is in place to keep them supplied in hulls and modules takes planing. Remember EvE is a sandbox. You need to establish goals for yourself, and they will change over time.

Ok, enough of that. Onto last night. Various conversations took up about half the evening last night. I did manage to get out and do some PvP with a new FC. Not too bad, lacking a bit in the self confidence departement, but didn't make any stupid calls. As a plus we managed to catch a Drake and an Abaddon. I actualy got the killmail for the Abaddon so that's the first KM I've received that was not a pod or a noob ship. Woot!

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