“u new lol?”
“sort of, played 2009-2014 and just came back”
“uh wow! no offence m8! o7”
So I took a nine year break from EVE and came back recently. I played EVE from I think 2009 until 2014, most of the time with at least one leg in Nullsec and as a proud member of one of the then bigger player alliances like the Curatores Veritatis Alliance or the Razor Alliance. I saw my share of Providence, Catch, Pure Blind and then the “Utter North” of Tenal. I was a proud combat pilot doing my share in the onslaught of LXQ2-T back in 2010. Boy, what a massacre that was. I hadn’t seen anything like it in any computer game before!
When I had a first look at the DOTLAN and Daily Sov maps a few weeks ago I realised that some things had changed while others hadn’t. I wasn’t actually surprised, because I guess while players and alliance names may change or simply rotate, PVP doesn’t change very much in EVE.
Before my hiatus I founded a mainly Highsec corp together with a friend of mine and we both left EVE in search for other games to play. But finally at the start of 2023 we decided to come back, try out a few things and see if it was fun (again) to play. The short answer is yes.
But many things have changed in those nine years and most of the things so far seem to have taken the right direction. One of the first things my friend and I did was make contact with the community, because we always felt that was the heart of the game. You do stuff with people you can relate to. But a lot of our old pals moved on, too, and others …well, they still play but now do so in places we don’t like so much. Some of the old names still carry their share of things that weren’t always cool back then. After all, nine years is only nine years.
So we decided to look for something new, something that would prove to be a good start for “old returning players who are noobs again”. That was when we crossed paths with Shadow Ultimatum [SHADO], an I think relatively new player in the grand scheme of things, carving out their niche in Cloud Ring nullsec space while holding the northern frontier of the Imperium coalition. But I don’t want to talk big. Let’s start small, shall we?
We first spoke and met with the CEO of the Sirius Syndicate [SISYN], who seem to be a chill bunch of “evening Dads (and Moms maybe)” dealing with industry and pewpew. They only recently joined SHADO and were, well ARE, still setting up shop helping with that niche I mentioned. That’s fantastic for old-new players. A young, entrepreneurial corp in an equally young, enthusiastic alliance doing their thing. Much to learn (again) and much to do to blaze a trail.
I still have to cope with the “new” mining mechanics, with residue and the surprisingly fresh revamp of moon mining (yes, I’m an ore obsessionist!), with Serpentis dreadnaughts in asteroid belts and with a lot of other things that seem to have kept the game alive that I found boring and stalled nine years ago.
I will not make it a full time job this time like I did all these years back. Instead, I plan to take it all in and enjoy what I’m doing with my new alliance mates. Because this is the way.
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