Welcome to my new blog

Welcome to my new blog. This blog, Journey to New Eden, will chronicle my experience as a new player in Eve Online. I honestly don't know what's going to happen on this journey. I am intrigued by this game, but am not sure if I am really going to stick with it or not. Therefore, this could possibly a very short-lived blog.

A little bit about myself (at least my gaming self): I started with MMORPGs back in the Ultima Online days. I played that for a year or two, then took a break. I tried EQ back in its very early days, but really could not get into it. I remember fighting bees for 45 minutes to make enough money to buy a new pair of gloves, then die and not be able to find my corpse. It was way too frustrating.

I took several years off online games until about 2 years ago when I started playing WoW with a friend of mine. I played for a few months on a human mage, then lost interest for about 3 or 4 months. Then, for some reason I started back up again on a new toon (a healer), and never looked back. I lived through the launch of TBC and WotLK, and currently have a level 80 dwarf priest specced holy, and my aforementioned mage, now level 71.

As much as I love WoW, I'd always been intrigued by this Eve game I'd heard about. I had some friends who played it and told me just how complex and "real" it was. I had really no idea what they meant, so I thought I'd give it a try. I downloaded a copy of the Eve client and got myself a 14-day trial account. I muddled through the first few missions, but after I was out of the basic starter missions, I was really lost. I found myself being killed over and over again on what should have been easy missions, and really had no idea what I was doing, or more accurately, doing wrong.

But while I was failing epicly, some things about Eve were starting to click in my head. I saw that on the market, everything was being sold or bought by real players, not NPCs. I got a glimpse of how a player could play as a miner, pulling resources out of asteroids, an industrialist, manufacturing goods to sell on the market, an arbitrageur, correctly market discrepancies and making a killing at the same time, haulers moving stuff around the galaxy, a pirate, making things hell for all the above, and so on. As an MBA, I really appreciated how I saw the market at the core of the game.

Anyway, I gave up on that character because he was such a disaster, and decided I would give it one more try. I wanted to like the game, but I was being stymied at every turn. How much fun is a game where you wipe again and again on beginning missions. This wasn't end game raiding for crying out loud! So I got myself another trial account, and set about starting out again. This time, I was going to do it right.

I figured if I was going to do this right, I would need some additional guidance. I looked around and found a number of resources, but what I was most excited about an Eve-focused podcast I found called The Drone Bay. As I like to listen to podcasts on the way to and from work, I downloaded all the episodes of the podcast to my Zune and started listening to them.

The Drone Bay podcast has a segment on it they call "Don't Panic" that is targeted at new players. Bingo! I'd hit the jackpot! The segment had two suggestions that really helped me on my second attempt at Eve. These suggestions have made a big difference in my enjoyment of the game this second time ar0und, and may be the difference between me sticking with the game or giving up on it.

And with that I'm going to stop for the evening. I will save those two suggestions for my next blog post...