Morning all
Pretty much as the title says, after 6 years away from the game I happened to be watching a video on YouTube and an advert for EvE popped up, and strangely I found myself just watching it and decided to check up on this once glorious game to see what its current state was.
A bit about my previous time in EvE. I started playing back in 2005 and like many other found myself addicted to this game, I loved the scale and size it, the game felt so big when I first started out. I loved reading the forums and seeing some of the big named characters in game going at it with each other, even though Iâve never been a role player, Iâve always felt like a bit of roleplaying was just part of what EvE was and just playing the game made you part of that.
It wasnât long in to my life in EvE that I realised the only gameplay for me was going to be through PvP, I loved how brutal and unforgiving it was, the fact you could spend hours saving for a new fancy ship and in seconds it was gone gave you such a rush of adrenaline that you couldnât find in any other game. So naturally I found myself drawn to other players who also enjoyed this side of the game, and after a few different corporations I found my first real home in a corp named coracao ardente and for a few months we just travelled around EvE as a fairly small purely focussed pvp corp just fighting small scale fights, but this was back in the day most ships were viable and you didnât have to have a specific setup and small corporations could cause havoc in 0.0 space without having 700 capital ships dropped on them.
As the corp grew we got the opportunity to join a smallish PvP alliance called Triumvirate who was based up in the north (I know over the years there has been many different faces of triumvirate but this iteration for me was Tri at its very best before the curse of deklien) and this gave me the chance to experience both larger fleet based PvP as well as still doing a lot of smaller roams. But as with all good things time can be cruel and becoming a sov holding alliance set us on a course of self destruction. Over the years we reformed Tri and had some amazing times but the game had started to change drastically. EvE started to feel small, jump bridges, jump freighters, nearly everyone had a cap ship and it felt like 0.0 space was no longer the big scary place it once was. You couldnât disrupt supplies being run to 0.0 like before, big alliances just ignored you they no longer need to really defend there space as they would just by pass and unless you started threatening their infrastructure they just let you kill there careless ratters and ignored you. I remember in my early days as part of ASCN (Iâm not proud of this part of my history) we would have to do freighter escort runs 50 jumps through 0.0 space with AAA constantly trying to kill you, it provided content to be fair but living in 0.0 was hard work and you had to defend your space to make it happen.
Anyway after 7 years of pretty much non stop play I took my first real break, id bounced about a few places but the game had lost that special thing that had drawn me in all those years ago, and more and more in game friends left and I decided it was time for me to go also. But as many of you will know, quitting EvE is never that easy, I returned after a break and find that spark again through WH pvp in a corp called Volta, it was small organised gangs turning up anywhere in space. We would try and catch a ratting carrier or 2 and hold them until they sent reinforcements and then things got good. Sometimes they would drop overwhelming numbers on us others we would kill them all and get out before things got too much and it brought some of that enjoyment back for me and I got another few years out of EvE before calling it a day in 2014 and this time for good, or so I thought.
So my question is before I take the plunge and try this game one last time, is there still quality small pvp out there, Iâm not interested in sitting on gates ganking people, I want fights, good fights. anywhere from 5v5 to 100v100. Big capital warfare doesnât really interest me, I miss the days when there was only a few motherships in game (Does anyone remember Herra? I believe a corp called The Establishment had one of the first motherships and used to drop it on everyone) I donât want to sit in a system with 2000 other players shooting structures I want to see if this old game can give me one more adrenaline rush like back in the day. For all its faults over the years, I donât think Iâve ever found a game that captured me quite like this one, maybe I am just feeling nostalgic and trying to turn back time but they donât make games like this anymore.
I know its a wall of text but thought I would share a bit about my time in this game.
TLDR
Is the game worth trying again?
Can you still find small to medium quality pvp
Why the hell do random NPCs with weird names attack me when undocking in my reaper after 6 years away (Whats that all about, I just wanted to go visit Jita)