Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

I don't think four months is the longest I've ever gone without posting, but the time that's passed since I last wrote in May has managed to be both quiet and extremely eventful at the same time. I've been out of EVE completely more often than not over the past three months due to a slew of RL troubles, which have only recently begun stabilising. In the past couple of weeks, however, the relative malaise of my internet spaceships time has turned around significantly.

Anniversary

Almost two years ago, I undocked a ship with the intention of using it to PVP, without any idea what I was doing. Realising this milestone has made me reflect on the changes that have come over the past two years, and the people I've had the pleasure of meeting and flying with (and sometimes against). PVP is mostly a social activity for me, so I think it's appropriate that I take the opportunity to offer my thanks.

Just for the Hull of It

One of the recurring themes of both my PVP career and my "ooo, shiny!" approach to skill training plans is being unable to decide which ships I want to fly. Recently I took the opportunity to sit down and look seriously at which hulls I've been undocking the most. The results I ended up with were very different than I thought they would be.

Broadening Horizons

Looking back over the past ten days, I'm not sure which has surprised me more - how much my perspective on PVP has opened, or how it took me this long to really realize things that people have been telling me forever. The previous week and a half has been a collection of events that have ended up meshing in my head - not terribly coherently, at first, but hopefully I'll be able to sort them out enough that they make sense to read!

As we often do, my fiancé and I have decided that in addition to the prospects we're already waist-deep in, we wanted to try something different. A friend and former corpmate of mine is a member of Fiskl Guards, a corp which fairly recently left the blue-to-IT Black Star Alliance and decided to join up with Red Overlord in Feythabolis. Huo and I agreed that it seems like an interesting place to be, between their PVP fleets and the opportunity to do some carebearing away from prying eyes. So, I've packed up my alt and am currently waiting to get her and her things moved down to the middle of nowhere. I can't really offer much more on that at the moment, since I've only been a member of the corp for a few hours, but I'm looking forward to seeing what comes.

Progress, not perfection.

I don't know if my PVP skill has exactly grown by leaps and bounds over the past five or six weeks, but I'm getting more comfortable with it. I've reached a few milestones that I'm pretty proud of, some of which I've wanted to do for a long time but never actually thought would happen.

The Start of the Journey

Ships I can already fly: Primarily Gallente, BC hulls and down, though BS combat is of a more Caldari flavour. Ships I've currently taken to the field in are the Ishkur, Thorax, Deimos, Brutix, Myrmidon, and a couple of painful times each in a Dominix and a Raven. I CAN fly Gallente and Caldari HACs, recons and logistics ships, but aside from one run in a Deimos (where I managed to take down one of the Vaga pilots before the other four swarmed me, not to mention the Falcon backing them up) and a less impressive bout with the Arazu I haven't really taken the opportunity to do so.

Ship Goals:

• Perhaps first and foremost, get into the habit of flying cheaper ships until I can more regularly get out of a fight with the hulls intact - yes, I enjoy the "Diemost", but the advantages it offers over the Thorax aren't ones I can utilize best right now, and 100mil hull losses hurt.
• Fly drone boats more often. I'm skilled much more heavily for drones than I am for gunnery, thanks to years of flying missions in the Myrmidon, Ishtar, and my current baby, the Rattlesnake. On the other hand, I fly the Myrmidon relatively rarely, I fly the Ishkur like it's "T2 Incursus with more drones", and I don't think I've ever taken a Vexor into a fight.
  
• Give serious thought to learning to fly Minmatar. After what meagre experiences I've had with an autocannon Myrmidon, I'm thrilled by the idea of being able to hit something more than 5km away with guns. (The downside of having spent an EVE career flying blaster boats.) My gunnery and missile skills are reasonable, as are my armour and shield tanking skills, being balanced without shining too much in any one area. I could stand to brush up on my navigation skills, but otherwise, the only real barriers to being able to fit up a Rupture or a Hurricane are Minmatar spaceship command skills and training for T2 medium autocannons and artillery. (Whether I can really fly a Minmatar ship is another matter entirely...)
  
• Once I'm more comfortable with frigate and cruiser combat, learn to fly recons. Though I can fly both the Arazu and the Falcon, my total experiences in those ships have come out to one dubious spying run during a highsec war and a sparring session with a corpie to test my jamming effectiveness.
• Train a Thanatos, less out of any intention to use it in large-scale combat and more to finally get it out of the way.
  

PVP Goals:

• Start soloing, or at least running in fleets of five people or less. I've been shying away from solo PVP due to my perceived lack of skills, but I'm finally getting around to the conclusion that I'm really only going to learn how to solo by doing it, including the pain of losing ships to mistakes. (I've heard it referred to as "tuition for the learning experience", which I quite like.)
• Eventually, learn to lead fleets. I'm not sure how common it is to be more attracted to the idea of strategy and tactics on a larger scale than individual fights, but FCing has always been a draw for me. (I'm also the kind of person who prefers strategy games to first-person shooters.) I say I want to do this "eventually" because even though I'm actually MORE interested in leading fleets than in more general PVP, I firmly believe in not asking others to do something I'm not willing to do myself. Plus, any FCing I do is going to be less effective if I don't brush up on my own experience first.
  

Of course, I'll be adding to and refining these goals as I go, but I think this is a good place to start - if nothing else, I certainly don't have any shortage of things to work on!