Getting Involved in the Big Picture

You hear that? That my friend is the sweet sound of nothing. The holiday bustle is finally over.

The house is back to normal, the kid goes back to school, and the wife goes back to work tomorrow. It's snowing outside, but the weather was good enough to wait until after the traveling was done to get really bad.

Tomorrow I hope to get into some artwork I have been putting off, but tonight I'm shaking up my Eve life a little for the new year. I've decided on a whim to get involved with this latest war popping off in the south.

I have always wanted to live in Catch/Esoteria, the hunting and pve are excellent, but I have never made it past expeditions of a couple weeks. Since the Goons moved out there after wwb, the area is a lot less accessible. I did notice my last time out to catch before all this began that it had quieted down enough that newbro explorers were coming back to the area, eager to get rich on those intact armor plates the Sansha sites drop.

Being a solo lowsec player, I really dont have any grasp on the politics and happenings of nullsec. It's just not been my game yet. Knowing nothing besides I want to be involved is quite intimidating, as I could easily make a mistake right off the bat just by joining the wrong coalition. I was lucky to run into this excellent breakdown by Jin'taan detailing the major players and a little about the history of the area. He has since made a second update video which I would suggest you watch over reading my ramblings if you really want to understand this conflict.

There seems to be some disparity on what we are calling this war, I have heard the general Eve populace refer to it as the 'Casino Wars', and others refer to it as the 'Winter War'. If you read the Imperium site, you will see they are calling it the 'Traitors War'. It's all in your point of view I suppose, until I know it better I will go with CCP and call it the Winter War as well.

So what do I want as a pilot out of this conflict? It's hugely important to set goals and outline expectations in Eve and this situation is no different. Well obviously I want to be involved in some of the large block battles that define our game to outsiders. I missed wwb as I was fighting the dirty Amarrs in FW, and my exposure to large scale fights is very limited, so I hope this will be a good opportunity to get the practical experience needed to know how to fulfill different roles in a large fleet skirmish. I also hope to expand beyond dealing dps into more specialized positions such as recon, booshing, and ewar.

Along with this I would like to try flying some logi. I have an alt with exceptional logi skills, but I have never used her in that capacity. There are a few reasons for this. As a solo pilot, its not easy to logi yourself on an alt and also fly your own ship effectively. The few times I have tried I have failed due to my inexperience on the logi end. Having not had any practice I am hesitant to volunteer to logi in situations where I do come into contact with other pilots, in npsi fleets and the like. I hope the sheer number of engagement popping off at any given time will give me the gumption to jump in and give it a try.

With all this in mind I decided to join with a small corp within Co2. As far as I can tell, they are the 'traitors' that The Imperium is on about and that seems like as good a reason as any to check them out. I do know I do not want to fight on the side of The Goons, the type of nonsense they parade is exactly the kind of thing that turns me off about the game I love.

I have not had a ton of success with corps, something I've written about in more detail in past posts, so at the beginning of the process of looking I took an attitude of ambivalence about the situation. In my mind the joining of a corp had a different purpose now than it had had in my past attempts. In the past I was looking for a home/friendship/comradery/etc, this time around I'm just looking at a means to an end. I dont have myself closed off to finding these things, far from it, but I think not getting my hopes up is a smart choice.

All that said, I may have lucked into a cool group of pilots. While they are a smaller corp, they are all very active and fly together and are friends. You can't really ask for much more from a corp. I have had a lot of support getting set up and I get the feeling that I might be able to be an important cog. I seem to have come at a good time as we deploy to catch in the very near future. I am hoping for some good content!


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