But first I guess I should give you a bit of background.
How did it all begin?
Way back in early April of 2008 I was an active member of a tabletop gaming forum and on one of the invite only boards there was a thread started by someone that had just discovered a different MMO. They had found it through their involvement on the Something Awful site. Reading about his antics as someone attempting to learn the game whilst being at war with at least half the population as well as the sorts of things that happened and were allowed sparked a desire to try it.
Having been out of online gaming since the release of Quake 3 I was completely unfamiliar with anything about Something Awful and their gaming wing, Goonswarm. Hell, I didn't even have the nouse to Google around and see what was what. But there sure seemed to be a lot of fun to be had.
So I downloaded the client and set up a trial account. Back then the whole concept of the consequence of decisions started with character generation. Your choice of Race, Bloodline and Background had a big impact on your stats and starting skills. In this respect I was lucky as I had some experience with generation RPG characters and approached it in the same way as with rolling a character for a system you had no prior knowledge of.
I spent around an hour and a half on creating this character. Reading through the information provided on each I selected a Brutor Minmatar Slave child as this seemed to fit most naturally with my attitude and usual play styles. This gave me a basic character set for combat and I modified the attributes in a similar manner for a semi-balanced spread with a leaning towards willpower and perception.
Then came the selection of skills. Again, all that I had to go on was the description provided by the game and selected a military history and tweaked around to get a good balance between navigation and combat orientated skills.
Then came the moment of visualisation and I ended up with what you can see. Obviously I wanted to be a some sort of macho man with a penchant for weird leather outfits and buckles.....
The middle years.
Within about six weeks I'd already moved to null-sec up in Fade along with a bunch of other newish players as renters for whichever version of TRI that was around at the time. Did you know a noob in a speed fit Rifter could comfortable speed-tank a triple 1.8M BS spawn? I sure didn't, but it was fun finding out. If we needed to get back to high-sec for anything we used to just undock in a pod and ask whoever was outside to pod us back. Despite the fun we were having being in null-sec and attempting to learn what the hell we were doing things didn't quite work out and within a month we'd all moved back to high-sec and shortly after that the corp had pretty much folded as the CEO was on summer break from University.
By then I'd developed a taste for PvP and thought about trying the pirate life. Not knowing anyone outside of the small group that I'd moved to Fade with I opted to post in the recruitment board of the forums stating that I was looking "for a group of like-minded people where I can practice the non-consensual transfer of ownership of items". Whilst not being contact by the criminal scum I had hoped, I did manage to fall in with a decent crowd that promised the usual: Everything. Honest!
It was with this group that I spent all my time with for the next two years. I learnt a huge amount in that time and got to do many things. Bullet point time because I just realised how much I've typed. /o\
- Null-sec roams. Mostly into CVA space but also out to Syndicate.
- Running reaction chains in low-sec. Which damn near killed my game.
- Dropping to below -5 sec status because of hanging out with the main Alliance where we had our reaction towers.
- Moving back to null-sec.
- Discovering my primary aptitude when in null-sec was being able to run away very quickly.
- Head of alliance intel/scouting. This was also the division that ran all cyno chains.
- Alliance diplomat. A natural progression from the above, some might say.
- Destroying a griefer corp. As in they stopped logging in.
- Alliance CEO. Another activity that damn near killed my game.
- Corp. infiltration. Although I have to say that they were great people once I was in.
I then managed to mess my right arm up quite badly with at least a single fracture in all four bones at the elbow. This also kept me out of work and my accounts went inactive. When I returned I found that most of the people I had been flying with had moved on and left EVE behind. I was homeless and on my own. I was also stuck with blocked VOIP traffic (still am) which seriously limited my options.
Which brings us to...
This was the primary cause for the founding of FPA as the home for what was just my mission alt but had become my main. I branched out into manufacturing and the financial side successfully operating a publicly funded operation for six months.
At the moment I am experimenting with how little tank I can get away with for running missions on various hulls and attempting to repair my standings with all factions to allow a greater freedom of movement and options.
I still haven't given up on my main and am working on being able to fly all combat orientated hulls below Capitals, although he already has the support skills needed to fully fit and fly triage carriers for all races once I get around to training the racial carrier skills.
And that about wraps it up. I'll probably write up some of my more memorable exploits over the next few weeks/months. If there's anything you want to bug me about either leave a comment or you can get me @FullPocketAggro on twitter.
