Ship Attachment Disorder (SAD)

My ships do not usually live long enough for me to form any kind of attachment to them. 1-2 fights and they are dust and I am on to a new ship. But, lately, I've been suffering from ship attachment disorder (SAD) and it has indeed been making me sad. Last time, it was my first Confessor, from which I had weeks of fun and over 200 kills.

This time, it is in my first Crusader. Interceptors are not meant to be ships that survive long, but survive this little beast did. I scored 90 kills (mostly solo) in this crusader before it finally died. 94 kills in one cheap, poorly fit interceptor is pretty decent for me.

It died to a very unfortunate warp in, basically 0km on a Taranis, due to a broken grid (a grid gets broken when part of a typically visible area of space around an object or celestial gets "cut off" from the rest of very nearby space that usually would be visible--terrible legacy coding, in other words). "Grid' mechanics are one of the strangest features of EVE; impossible to explain to anyone besides those who have either died to them or learned to exploit them.

I owe this crusader a lot, though, because for the first time in almost four years I feel like I am getting the hang of null sec solo PVP. I've tried to break into NS solo before, but I generally find myself roaming for hours, getting maybe one good fight, and dying to a camp. Fighting in GE-8 has meant, of course, lots of BRAVE targets, but most of my good fights have come from non-HERO. players looking for trouble in the system. I now have a high sec, a low sec, and a null sec system in my "top-5" kills of all time--which is saying a lot for me because apart from the time I was in RVB I do not stay in one system to PVP very often.

Looking over my top locations for PVP, I also see I owe BRAVE a lot over these past few years. I don't mean I owe them "easy kills," I mean the fact that BRAVE draws players together, making "hot spots" on the map where one can do solo, small gang, and fleet PVP. Players meet in systems like GE-8 (or, now, HED-) not just to "farm" BRAVE but because that is an informal meeting place in the game for players and fleets of all types. GE-8 is in my top 5 locations for PVP, Barleguet is in my top 10, and Rahadalon my top 20. I guess I owe thanks to all three generations of BRAVE pilots, and it makes me hope not just for a bright future for BRAVE but also for new groups to emerge in the game that are similar in style (and size!) to BRAVE.

Hanging around in Catch over the past week has created some interesting content. At one point, late at night, I caught a Tayra heading to GE-8. The hauler was empty, but the pilot said "enjoy the loot." Then I noticed the can:

I got in touch with a BRAVE pilot that I frequently see doing solo PVP and I helped him get the towers to station.  That will buy quite a few t1 frigates and interceptors for hours of PVP.

Here I am jumping into a PL. super fleet, a common sight in Catch. Sometimes I troll tackle their carriers or that rorqual they bring along. While the jump changes (nerfs) by themselves have created more regional conflict using capitals, they also have exacerbated problems with the virtual immunity of large super-capital fleets. It doesn't matter if BRAVE has 10,000 players logging in every week and living in their space; all these supers need to do is log in for a few hours total to ruin the sov. A game where these ships cannot be countered by subcapitals or where they play any major role in sov is a game that cannot survive into the latter half of its second decade. What EVE needs--what null sec needs--is 2 or 3 more groups like BRAVE, 2-3 more 10,000 sized, mostly newer players learning the game by living in space and doing new things in a supportive community. Of all the things I hope the new sov changes bring, I hope they bring more players to the game, players like those brave newbies.