I have read many articles on what makes EVE Online a game which stands out form the crowd, and I never truly understood what the writers of these articles meant until I played the game myself. Ask EVE Online players what makes the game so good, and most will probably give you a different answer, and that is truly what defines EVE. It is a truly open world game, where you control your own path, and your own choices, in a huge, sandbox universe. Allow me to tell you my story.

I began playing EVE only two months before writing this article, and I am still what many people would call a new-bro. My story of exploring EVE began when I logged into EVE for the first time. I designed my character, and chose my race, Gallante, as it happens. After designing my character, and name, I entered the game for the first time. Following the Tutorial Agents missions, being the dutiful newbie I was, I chose the exploration missions. After scanning down my very first wormhole, I jumped in, and after scanning down a location in the wormhole, I was surprised when my ship went boom. I quit exploration for a while.

Well it was time to try again, by this time, I’d been asking around the awesomely friendly rookie chat in game. It’s a place where new players can ask all the questions they want in a friendly environment. Well, someone noticed my incessant asking of questions, and decided to recruit me to their corporation, which is EVE’s version of a guild. EVE-College (E-COL) promised to be a corporation that would show me the ropes, and they did. I learnt a lot of the lessons that every player in EVE has to learn, and the most important of these is to not be afraid to lose ships. Losing ships is an important part of the game, for the only way to learn in EVE, is to make mistakes.

With a new found friend of mine in E-COL, we decided that we wanted to establish an industrial division in the corp, solely based on mining and building ships, and so we asked our CEO to place a Player Owned Station in the neighbouring low sec system, a place where players can kill you at will, only worrying about the wrath of guns near the station or gates. He willingly accepted this, and seemed enthusiastic about what we had planned. So I warped into the system to look at our new POS, completely unaware that I was now fresh meat ready to be killed. So warping off somewhere in space, we were waiting for our CEO to add us to fleet, when a pirate appeared out of nowhere, and blew us to pieces. But after he killed me, he taught me how to stop other from people doing the same thing to me, and gave me 50 Million Interstellar Kredits (ISK) and told me to enjoy my game. I was awed by this, and after a while, it dawned on me, EVE is a game full of people who want to kill you, but they can be your friend 10 minutes later.

Oh, there are bad people out there. There are people who will scam you, torment you, and even try to ruin your game, and I’ve had to deal with all of these types of people, but there are also people on EVE who will become your friends, who will move from corporation to corporation with you, and who will be loyal to you. Still, can you really trust them? That is EVE, your friends have the option to shoot you just as quickly as your enemies, but that’s all part of the game.

In the end, our CEO ended up having to take an extended leave from EVE, and with that, and the constant war declarations from people who love to fight new players, (you’ll probably meet some of these people) my corp mates and I decided to band together, and to form a corporation of our own. We decided to be brave, and make our way into null-sec, the Badlands in EVE; where anyone at all can shoot you and kill you at no cost, with no risk, and in deep null-sec, there are player owned empires. Heading to null-sec was eventful, but once we were there, it felt like home, we were safe, we had very few people around us, and everything was good, for a while.

The peace didn’t last, our activities in null-sec had not gone unnoticed, and soon we found ourselves being harassed by another group of players, we tried to fight them back, but they were smart, they always made sure they held the numerical advantage. We couldn’t win. We tried, but in the end, we didn’t stand a chance, we were a group of new players, trying to win against players who had been playing EVE for a lot longer than we had. Our peace ruined, we were at a loss for what to do.

But then we had a brainwave: Why not join a bigger, more experienced corp, and see what other people play like. And that is what we did. Joining Iron Guard, within a day, we were involved in a huge fight, which resulted in CFC dropping 20+ Supercarriers and 7 Titans on our fleet, and to us this was it, we were living on the edge of our seats, trying to stay alive in a huge battle against ships that could blow us up with one shot. The adrenaline rush hit me so hard that I didn’t sleep that night.

My story in EVE has only begun, but whether you are a new player, or an old player, where will your journey take you? All I can say is that I have the ability to choose my own destiny in EVE, to forge my own path, and so do you, after all, THIS IS EVE!