By Gergoran Moussou

On September 11, 2019, I became the ninth person to complete the requirements of the Cross-Campus Initiative after around four months of participation in events around the various campuses.

Like most people who join EVE University, I started at HSC. The most popular activities there, mining and mission running, were what I had been doing solo after finishing the Career Agent missions, so it was a fairly easy transition. The community was quite helpful for getting started. Even though I was unable to pull any L4 missions (and still lack the standings for the agents in Amygnon, since almost all of my solo missions at HSC were with Roden Shipyards). They gave me some good tips on how to do those activities and what ships I should train into for those activities, most notably when I was running L3 missions in a Drake and someone suggested that I train into a Dominix and then a Rattlesnake. Even when I didn’t have a ship which could help clear missions faster, people were glad to let me come along and salvage. However, the general focus of the campus meant that I was mostly on my own for what became my preferred activity: PVP. At this time, E-Uni rarely had PVP fleets scheduled, so most of my PVP was solo roams through nearby Low-Sec space (I had no victories). The first war after this year’s wardec changes was an incentive to do this more: T1 frigates are much more expendable than the Gila which I was using to run missions, so I spent more time outside of High-Sec since P I R A T rarely leaves High-Sec. Eventually, because I was spending most of my time in Low-Sec, for both PVP and exploration (since I found it very lucrative to dive into wormholes in the area), I decided to move to the Low-Sec Campus. My core impression of HSC’s community is that it’s full of people who like to do their own thing while enjoying each other’s company in voice communications, but will generally welcome you to join in if you want to join in on what they are doing.

When I arrived at LSC, I had in mind that it wouldn’t be a long-term stay and that after a while, I would check out a different area of space, either NSC or WHC. However, it quickly became a campus that I was reluctant to move away from. I joined during a golden age for the campus. The incredible work that Urban Oxide, the campus manager put into the campus made it easy to do everything out of there. The community was smaller than HSC, but hugely active and eager to do stuff together. No matter when I logged in (some days, my work schedule made EUTZ more convenient, others, USTZ, and I often did both a couple of weeks into my stay at LSC when I began several weeks of unemployment), there were people eager to do stuff. Usually, that stuff to do involved roaming around in small ships (mainly T1 and navy frigates) to find fights, so I found plenty of fights. One experience which I found at LSC, which I did not experience at all at HSC was interacting with the neighbors. When I was at HSC, I didn’t pay attention to who the neighbors were at all. Because LSC has more interactions with other players (often involving the exchange of ordnance), I kept track of who else roamed CalGal, both to consider what I might be up against and because some of them ended up becoming my friends. Even now that I have moved to a different campus, I keep my medical clone here and generally stage my fleets from here because it is a more convenient location than any other campus for roaming CalGal.

After a few weeks at LSC, I ended up at my current home, the Wormhole Campus. The first thing that I noticed was that there was significantly less room for doing stuff as individuals than the other campuses. I arrived at an unusual moment: after finally applying to WHC after weeks of procrastination, my first visit ended up being to defend some structures which got reinforced in the same weekend that I applied, before I was actually accepted. This mostly involved sitting docked in the Astrahus with a lot of other people waiting in a Retribution in case someone ended up showing up for the timer (fortunately, this didn’t happen, but that was an incredibly boring three hours). After this, I had the opportunity to do a more normal WHC activity, PVE harvesting, because Bacon (WHC’s C3 static) connected to a system with a Low-Sec static to Eugales (LSC’s home system). They formed up a harvester, so I refit one of my Confessors (since it was a Wolf-Rayet system) and joined them for it, making more ISK per hour during that than any other PVE activity that I had done to that point before logging off. I got accepted to the campus that evening, while I was on the way to the staging system for a non-Uni fleet, so as soon as I got back, I moved my scanning Anathema and the aforementioned Wolf-Rayet Confessor into my new home. More than any other campus, things are unpredictable due to the nature of wormholes, so while I have called this my home, there aren’t often any planned events and I therefore didn’t count anything at WHC toward the requirements for CCI. Some days, I’ve been in multiple intense PVP events, I’ve also spend fairly long periods without seeing much PVP in the WHC chain. Some days, we’ve rolled into great systems for PVE (the two main requirements being a small number of connections and a large number of combat anomalies), other times we’ve ended up with systems that either had no PVE content or were too dangerous for it. The main thing that it doesn’t have which LSC has is accessible solo content: as someone who hasn’t trained into any sort of cloaky combat ship yet, I can’t really hunt the chain yet in something which can engage targets that I might find. For this reason, I keep a stock of ships at LSC for use when I feel like solo-roaming. However, the teamwork-focused nature of wormhole living has made the WHC community into an extremely close-knit one.

In addition to the three campuses which I’ve used as my primary home, I’ve done stuff at a few other campuses. The first campus which I checked out was the Null-Sec Campus. I went over for a visit a week or two after moving into HSC and got set up with a ratting ship. Unfortunately, my early visits to NSC ended up being a false start: while I ended up appearing on a killmail for the first time, I got the impression that people there generally flew ships which I couldn’t fly yet (having barely trained into cruisers at the time), so I stayed away from NSC for a while. However, I later ended up returning for some scheduled roams and mining operations. I found the roams to be quite enjoyable as a change of scenery from my usual areas of Placid and Black Rise, while the mining operations gave me some great ISK. My experience of the Amarr Mining Campus has been a pretty good one. I’ve participated in a couple of mining operations on my primary character and many more on my alt which I keep at AMC (sometimes I mine while doing something on my main, sometimes I mine while sitting docked up on my main because of stuff going on in the chain, sometime I mine while not logged into my main, but there’s always something to mine, preferably ice). The community down there is fairly laid-back and relaxed, so when I’m down there, I generally enjoy the social aspect of the campus. I’ve often found amusement in how the mindset of the other miners down there differs from mine with regard to PVP. It was even funnier when the opposite occurred one time and I went on a rather long explanation to some people in WHC’s Mumble channel about which ores are the best to mine and why, despite there being almost no mining of anything other than gas at WHC (although I try to mine some ice whenever we get a shattered system near enough to be worthwhile). The last campus which I really participated in (aside from a couple of visits on my own over the months before I made my way over there) was Project Solitude. Again, like the other campuses in High-Sec space, this is a fairly laid-back community, but the isolated nature has its own appeal which I particularly like. I’m working on setting up some things to do in this location specifically to take advantage of that isolation.

Both times when I changed my primary campus, it took a bit over a week to get fully situated at the new campus. The first time, it was mainly for financial reasons. After moving to LSC and dedicating most of my game-play time to PVP, I ended up both making significantly less ISK and losing a lot more ships, so whenever I saw HSC mission fleets scheduled, I flew over because I hadn’t yet figured out how to make much ISK in Low-Sec. The transition from LSC to WHC was more because I felt overwhelmed by how much more demanding wormhole living is at first and I hadn’t gotten used to the idea that content might be different from day to day yet. Unfortunately, LSC’s golden age concluded soon after I got myself fully situated at WHC (the campus manager stepping down for real-life reasons and the assistant manager leaving E-Uni resulted in a lot of services being suspended and player engagement at LSC dropping significantly).

Finally, I noticed when adding myself to the wiki page for CCI medalists that I had directly interacted with the majority of previous medalists in earning it. Esca Sinak, the last person before me, does not interact with me very often but was in the first fleet that I scheduled and has processed many of my SRP requests. Psychotic Fickity was one of the first people who I remember encountering after joining E-Uni and being introduced to people in Mumble, and ran the first few events that I participated in. Penelore was no longer involved with FCC by the time that I started taking fleets out, but her alt which remained in E-Uni for a few weeks after that was in my first fleet and talking with her in LSC Mumble gave me a lot of informal advice on how to run fleets. She was also one of the people who most strongly encouraged me to head over to WHC. Mike Kingswell is a common fixture at any HSC event that I’ve logged in for during EUTZ hours, particularly when I’ve shown up for the monthly shared can (otherwise known as Mike’s Bounty Mining) and was very helpful when I first posted a fleet on the calendar, suggesting a good route (which I ended up following for the most part). Budda Sereda left E-Uni before I joined, but he still participates in FCC Slack and I’ve gotten some helpful feedback from him.