The Grass Is Always Greener

From flickr user bulldog1

Our corporation recently moved back into the FW warzone, the system of Fliet, after a few weeks in Yvangier. It was recognized that this would keep us in fighting trim; deliberately putting ourselves in a system that we could lose. If you live in a system that is taken over by your opposition, you lose docking rights at the stations and you have to move out yet again. So you fight and you fight hard to keep your territory under your control. This is what it says on the box, of course: I joined a Faction Warfare corporation: fighting is what we do.

And yet.

I'd love to have a night of doing something other than plexing, but the contested status of Fliet shifts by up to 25 percentage points a day - we can't afford a night of wormhole exploration, or level 4 missioning. I could, technically, go do those things while my corpmates fight the good fight, but who wants to be That Guy? Not I; I like pulling my weight and in fact last night our FC picked me to manage the fleet while he went to take care of some diplomacy; there were about 15 of us at that point and it felt great to be trusted to not get us welped. Our corp directors have said they want to be able to take us into other areas of the game too, but for now, fighting for control of Fliet is the main event.

(side note: I think I did the right things: we were plexing in Heydieles, which was rife with plexes. There were two mediums available while I was in charge and our fleet had two Navitas repair ships. I put one, and half of the remainder of the fleet, in each plex.) Oh, and in an odd turn of events, one of our regular enemy pilots gave me a shout-out for this blog!

I don't want this to sound like a complaint - it isn't. But consider it a reminder; if you join a corporation that focused on one activity in Eve, that's what you'll be expected to do most of the time, especially if the corp's fortunes depend on doing that thing. Our corp also spends significant resources on us, supplying ships, building POSs, free jump-freighting, arranging for boosters; it'd be a churlish move to say "I'm not fleeting tonight, I wanna haul stuff around."

And if you're like me and read /r/eve, and other Eve blogs, you'll read about all kinds of other fun things to do in Eve, things you will probably not have time to do. If you're someone who can only play for a couple of hours a day (like me, married man with a child) you should resign yourself to doing what the corp needs you for and let those other activities go for now.  If you can log in during off-hours, that's a good time to go try those other things. And there's always the possibility that, for us specifically, we'll get Fliet under control and we'll be able to try other activities as a corp.

I could set up an alt that isn't in my current corp and go galavanting around New Eden. But I'd feel guilty at not helping my friends in Aideron, so that option is out.

There are some activities you can manage while plexing. Planetary Interaction is one, station trading is another. With skills like Marketing and Procurement you can even place orders directly in other systems, and create public courier contracts to have the stuff moved for you.

One-Day-Later Update: I'm Julie, your cruise director! I've been put in charge of organizing extracurricular activities for Aideron. We're picking one night a week where, if there's not a crisis occurring, pilots can go off in groups to do the kind of stuff I mentioned above. Its easy to say "let's do this thing" but the friction point is having everyone in an appropriate ship, so my job will be to make sure ships and modules suitable for PvE fits are made available.
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In station trading news, my Jita trader is doing really well - she just sold 4 'Luxury' tshirts for about a BILLION ISK; the profit on those was about 100-150M each! She has a further 1.7B in sell orders and nearly 4B in buy orders (thanks, Margin Trading!) so - wow!