OK, a little about me, the player behind the characters that populate the posts. I’m a Canadian, male, age over 50. I’ve always been interested in science and technology since I was a kid. While my career is in IT, my interests cover a fairly broad spectrum of the sciences. Math, physics, ecology, electronics, a little biology, and little psychology, and so on. I don’t get deep into all of these, but I relish a challenge where I can expand my knowledge. Right now I’m working on a construction project – building my own little retreat by a lake – and I’m enjoying wrapping my head around soil issues (supporting the foundation), structural issues in the plans, energy efficiency both during construction and in the house when it’s done, trying to keep the environmental impact  small, solar energy, and so on, and so on.

So Eve is a game right up my alley. There is so much “science and engineering” in the game that I can spend tons of time analysing “stuff”. I’ve cobbled up my own spreadsheets to do calculations, and borrowed others and tweaked them. I can, and have, spent more hours in a week playing with numbers in Eve than flying. I should probably fly more than I do, but I can say that I enjoy the time I’ve spent studying how things work in the game.

I enjoy the complexity of the game. There is so much in the game that there is always something new to turn my attention to. I like the fact that you can spend years training your character, and there’s still more you can train. When I started I met some players who were 2 to 4 years in the game already, and after a year and a half they’re still 2 to 4 years ahead of me.

I’m also learning about myself too. I’m too contemplative – by that I mean that I spend too much time looking a things from different angles. Too cautious. Not good for pvp – at least not pvp in ships. Doing your research and thinking things through seems to work well for trading pvp, though. I’m also risk averse in the game – which surprises me a little, because I’ve invested in the real life stock market and I am quite able to roll with the ups and downs there. But in Eve, I’m real cautious about losing ships, even when I can readily afford to replace it.

I tend to prefer smaller gangs than big fleets. To me a small gang is less than 10. I also like doing cloaky type things – scouting, gathering intel, and such. One of the alliances I was in wanted some volunteers to spend some time in cloaked ships deep in enemy space just to gather intel, etc. I wanted to be part of that, but they were looking for players with experience in that role, which I didn’t have.

At this point I’m at a cross roads and I’m not sure which road to take. But I have 2 chars to keep me occupied and plenty to watch and learn in the game to keep me interested. I doubt I will lose interest – I might have competing interests in RL that will limit my Eve time, but so far the game has notlost it’s appeal to me.

And that’s where the title of this blog comes from.  :)