As an exercise for myself this year, I have been trying to write more. Not to pursue a career as a writer or anything like that, I just felt that improving on my writing skills will help me in a number of corners of my life.
One issue which has dogged me so far is finding material to write about as I have an office job, which renders my day-to-day life rather mundane. I can only write so many tweets and status updates about transit delays, traffic, and idiot coworkers who I can't go into detail about without getting fired. After some thought, I decided to begin writing about EVE: Online, which I have been playing as a hobby since early 2010 with a couple of false starts prior to that. However, much like my day-to-day life, my EVE presence tends to be less than riveting, most of my days following a general routine which, to me at least, is quite rarely worth writing home about. It became clear to me that in order to properly write any sort of content, I would need a project.
That project began to take shape one bored afternoon when I went a little bit nuts and ended up reading a ton of EVE lore, and I realized how shallow my understanding regarding some aspects of the game really were. There was a whole star cluster out there which I had only had a peripheral interaction with. From mining my first Veldspar, to sitting in the middle of a 4000+ person battle, to stalking targets through wormhole chains, I had never really explored the world.
On top of that, I realized how long it had been since I was really
new to EVE. My main character has been constantly subscribed for half a decade (but a brief window compared to some older characters, I know). I haven't had need to start a new character in a couple of years, having acquired a small stable of characters through the Character Bazaar to supplement the handful I had trained up myself, my in-game life revolved around my corps, and whatever the conflict du jour was. Since the last time I had a new character, the New Player Experience system had changed at least twice, most recently with the Scylla release.
And then I put it all together. I would start a new character, train it from scratch, try the new New Player Experience, and, systematically, visit every star system in EVE's K-Space cluster.
And write a little blurb about every single one. If I make it, I will have over 5000 entries, and I can think about trying to visit every J-Space system, but that is a long ways off.
Anyways, I feel that I should have some rules for my voyage, to keep things consistent.
-Region by region, I will visit every single Highsec, Lowsec and Nullsec system in EVE.
-Each system will have its own blog entry.
-I will only use the new character I have created for the purpose of this exercise.
-I can and will use tools like Dotlan and EVE-Kill/ZKb for statistics, general information and things that I can't keep in my head.
-Jumping into a system and immediately burning back to the gate and jumping out does not count. I must warp to at least one object in system
-I will use my older characters as generous benefactors for this journey, because missions are boring for me.
-I will not use another one of my characters as a scout to try and ensure my new character's safety on his journey. Death will be part of my trip, most likely.
Tl;Dr: Checking out the neighbourhood.
See you dear readers all next time.
If you have read this already, and are considering continuing to read, I will be looking into getting an RSS feed set up at some point. Also, if you have not played EVE:Online but would be interested in it, you can be a total dude and check it out using my referral link here:
EVE 30 Day Trial. As a money grubbing whore, I will also mention that if you wish to donate isk to help fund this venture you may do so by donating to Vilhjalmur Stefansson in-game. I will give a shout-out to any character donating over 100 million isk, and any character donating over 100 million ISK will also get to name my ship for a day (nothing which will get me banned will count as a ship name)
