Accepted to BNI!

My application to Brave Newbies was accepted! I spent the 2 days after my acceptance letter flying around consolidating my assets and selling off what I could. Had to train up trading a bit so I could sell more than 1 thing at a time, so that was fun.

I then spent a fair number of hours reading up on everything BNI, and I was absolutely dumbfounded at the amount of knowledge these guys have got on their various websites and forums. There's more to read here than I could read in a year if I really dedicated myself to it. I'm lucky I already know enough of the terminology that this isn't all Greek to me. Still, it's been all I could manage to not let this influx of information overwhelm me.

I've sold off most of my high-sec assets, set my clone to BNI's home system, and self-destructed.

Welcome to null Pitiful Heartless! You are not prepared!

Among the other gems I discovered was a page written by a BNI member that basically walks you through the low level skills that you'll need to be not a loser missing essential skills, and while I had about 98% of the low level skills he mentioned already up to level 3, there were a few I missed, for example, leadership, surveying, archaeology, and so on, that have since been added to queue.

So what to do, now that I'm in null? I've got more questions than answers. So what I do know is that I'm currently without anything to fly since I took the pod express? I spent some time checking out both the corp fittings tabs, and also the local market, and these guys look pretty stocked out, so I followed some of the first advice I was ever given in EVE: don't fly anything you can't afford to lose. I took a look at the BNI Doctrine, and selected the Merlin to start off with. I bought 5 complete with newbro fittings... got to replace this newbro fit ASAP!

Got connected to Mumble, and I have to say ... I already feel fantastic. There are a plethora of people online at my normal playtime, which to be honest was something I'd been fretting about because of my prior experiences with inactive corps/alliances.

Had a nice chat with a Brave Dojo officer to confirm what information was kosher to post here and what I should avoid. They directed me to the BNI Reddit page and advised me to post a link here so others can read, so I've also registered on Reddit, and will be posting this page up soon! To all the people from BNI reading this, please, let me know what you think, and how I can improve! Your comments are greatly appreciated!

Basically I was just told the obvious stuff, don't post fleet locations and compositions in real time, blah blah. Nothing I hadn't already guessed, so that's good. That having been said, I'll also avoid mentioning any players by name in future unless I'm granted permission by the pilot in question. Wish I had more time to play tonight, but it's already late for me, and I have an early morning tomorrow at work, so I'll have to leave you all with a simple, 'Fly safe! Can't wait to fleet up and go blow people up or die trying!' As long as we have a good time doing it together, I don't care which tbh :P

I suppose being in BNI, I can no longer salute in the typical way ... I've learned that BNI salutes backwards for ... whatever reason. I'm sure someone will enlighten me sooner or later)))

Fair winds and following seas Pilots!

Fly safe. 7o

Back to Game!

Unexpected but cool turn of events.

Had to go out of town for a couple of days for a pretty cool reason. As I may or may not have mentioned, I'm an American living in Russia. I live in a city of roughly 1.2 million people nearly 700 miles (1,000km) south-east of Moscow. Anyway, I had a friend from Hollywood wire me a letter asking me to do him a favor and go to Moscow for the weekend because he's making a movie and needed me to interview some cosmonauts from the Soviet era. So that was pretty awesome, but obviously kept me away for a few days.

Back to town again and ready to check on my application, surely I've got a reply by now? ... nope. So time to continue looking. Can't wait forever or I'm going to end up quitting again like before due to boredom. I have to say, right away, that this is the worst part of EVE.

While it's true that a sandbox environment opens the doors for lots of cool and unique situations, it also has the unfortunate side-effect of no one trusting anyone else and making it hard for new players to find good homes. Let me reiterate - GOOD homes.

Anyone can find a home, but good ones are rare. The biggest problem I experienced before was that I found corps quite easily, but never good ones. Either the corp wasn't focused and had lots of players wanting to do different things and never got together for activities, or simply no one was ever on.

That having been said, I'm okay with waiting a bit longer to get into a corp so long as it's a strong corp worth being in. So instead of waiting and wasting time, I've decided to apply to several corps at once and see what bites.

I'd ask for advice, but I don't think anyone reads the blog yet. Which reminds me ... Maybe I should apply to evebloggers.com... hmmmm.

Fair winds and following seas Pilots!
Fly safe. o7

Skills 'n' Such

Aim for the stars! Now you can actually reach them!

I've already set about getting my skills leveled and I've got about 70 days in queue currently. I'd have more, but apparently the 50 skill queue cap is still in place, so that's all I could manage since I'm still working on level 3 skills.

I've set my goals currently on fitting out a Vexor, followed by an Ishtar, so I've downloaded EVEmon and planned out the next 700 days of training. Even should I decide to follow a different route and not fly these particular ships, training to fly them in my current setups I imagine will net me a wide variety of skills in armor tanking, turrets and drones that I can use elsewhere if necessary.

Still waiting to hear back from the corp. Trying to entertain myself by chatting in Starter Corp. Got bored.
Watching EVE videos on YouTube to remind myself what I'm aiming for. Watching epic fleet battles.

I've really become a huge fan of Rooks and Kings. Out of sheer boredom I someone managed to slip into fanboy mode and sent an in-game mail to Lord Maldoror, the creator of the Carrion Call videos. If you haven't seen them, you really need to check them out. He actually logged in last night, saw my mail, opened it. Didn't respond. Maybe he was tired and he'll respond later. Maybe he just can't be bothered responding to every newbro that sends him fanmail. *shrug* From reading interviews, he seems like a decent guy, so I'm going to assume busy and hope he gets back to me later. </fanboy>

This is really my goal in EVE. I don't need to get involved in pipe-bombing campaigns or anything quite so grandiose, but I really loved watching LM's videos about the struggle of the few against the many, and their frequent victories under such conditions is just mind-bogglingly impressive. I really aspire to reach those levels of skill in EVE someday, and these videos give me hope.

While I would like to find a large active corp at this time, what Rooks and Kings has is really what I'm looking for. I don't need big. I need active and tight-knit. A small group of good friends that goes shoulder-to-shoulder into toe-to-toe conflicts with bigger guys with bigger guns, and damn the consequences, let's find a way to win. There's something in it that just speaks to me, and I hope I'm able to find a home that has that kind of camaraderie. Who knows? Maybe with some time and patience I can even make it into R&K? One always needs to motivate oneself with lofty aspirations, yeah?

Of course in the course of writing this blog, I'll need to be careful not to reveal too much information about where I or my corp are, what we're doing, etc... it is of course a game rife with spies and tales of deception and mayhem wrought by angry spiteful I-thought-he-was-my-friends.... but I still wonder if I should inform my corp that I'm writing a blog about my/our endeavors, or if as long as I don't reveal any critical information, it's safe and doesn't bear mentioning.

Something to think about ....

Fair winds and following seas Pilots!
Fly safe. o7

Slow Going

So a few days down already and still no luck. So the problem is that I'm trying to find a good corp that's the right fit. I've decided that Brave Newbies Inc. is where I'll try first since they have a reputation for.. well, accepting newbros.

I've applied to the Brave Collective's wormhole corporation, Catastrophic Overview Failure. I have to say, I love the corp's name, and I've been promised that the corp is quite active. I've already had a conversation with a recruiter, and completed my official application on their website, during which time I was required to write a limerick about the CO, whom I don't know, Dmitrii, so that should be interesting to learn the outcome of, since I've not written a limerick since high school - a full decade ago.

If there's one thing that'll dive me away from a game quick, it's playing alone, so I have to remedy this issue fast and make new friends on the fly.

I was asked what role I'd most like to fill, and I had to be honest - I don't much care. While it's true that my history in MMO's has been largely filled by tanking, that was mostly borne of the fact that that was what my guilds needed most, and if truth be told, I've always cared more about my guild/corp mates than about anything else.

That having been said, I was told by my recruiter that what they need most right now is just pure dps. Sounds good to me. They said they should get back to me about my application with 48 hours, so we'll hope it's sooner rather than later.

Spent tonight running Sisters of Eve missions because they said I should, so that was fun. God I'm bored. Someone please invite me to do something ....

Fair winds and following seas Pilots!
Fly safe. o7

There are two types of pilots...

So who am I? I'm a nameless carebear Orca pilot with no corporation with a few million SP invested in industry that's done playing it safe. I know next to nothing about PvP except stay aligned. I know the basic ideas of PvP regarding repping shield or armor, and I know about tackling, points and primaries. It's enough to get started. Basically I know enough to avoid getting blown up usually but that's all about to change. Queue: "Cryptex - Slay It"

I've decided enough is enough and I'm sick of playing it safe and spending hours mining and avoiding rats and having my biggest fights be about who is going to mine out that dense veldspar first. So screw it. Life is short, and the worst that can happen is I die. So I'm going off the deep end.

Unfortunately my character's name started with "Aa", so not wanting to always be primaried first, I've opted to trash my characters and start new. Enter 'Pitiful Heartless'. Out for blood, and looking for corp.

Herein I plan to mark my progress in PvP and my new life in Null/WH space. Hoping it'll be a more interesting ride than I've experienced from EVE so far. I'm done being a mouse. It's time to fulfill my destiny as a God and be fearless. Let's see what happens.