At the start of the year, with lock down being a thing and my daughter hogging the Playstation, I installed Eve Online on my shiny new laptop. Eve had transitioned to a Free-To-Play model with two states of being, Alpha – which had a limit to the skills and ships you could use – and Omega – the paid-for account which opened everything up to use. I had played Eve before so I was already aware of the game – a vast space MMORPG.

Oh, it’s not Pay-To-Win, like some MMORPGs. The ships available to an Alpha account are perfectly playable.

So, having spent a few months here and there in the vast galaxy of EVE, just logging on for a hour at a time, tonight felt like my first proper game,

A few weeks ago I joined a player-run corporation, the equivalent of a guild in Warcraft or Guild Wars, and a few days ago I decided to fly from system to system to where the Corp is largely based. Tonight I logged on to put my new ship though her paces and was joined by a Corp member who just turned up to help me destroy an enemy space station. We shared some chat after and went our our seperate ways.

And this is what I had been missing: the social element.

I’ll probably log on every day this week for a bit, and see if anyone wants to fly about and blow stuff up.

And the Corp even have their own Discord server, which is even better. I wonder if I can get any of them to play Guild Wars? 😉