The Virtues of Doing One Thing Well

(Tap...tap... ) Testing, is this thing on?

Hi, I'm Hespire Malneant, IRL a friend, co-worker, and bandmate of Your Blog's Proprietor. Back when he started the blog, he graciously extended an offer to let me post here but until this moment I've been too lazy to take him up on it.

You may be wondering (you probably aren't, though I'll proceed as though you were) "What caused him to stop watching porn pick up the keyboard and post to Vic's blog?"

It was my reaction to his most recent post, namely his thoughts about the costs of concentrating on one activity. Make that "being in a corp that concentrates on one activity, and spending his in-game time doing that activity with his corp." I want to point out that this approach actually has a lot to recommend it.

My experience in EVE has been almost the opposite of what he describes: I started a few months earlier than he did, and my attitude was all "I want to fly all the ships, do all the things, and make boatloads of ISKs!!1!" I joined EVE University (a corp that basically makes no demands of its members, other than that they refrain from being a**holes toward other players), created a second account, made 4 alts, trained all of my chars to Infomorph Psychology IV and created 4 jump clones for each, and generally took off in every direction at once. I've tried my hand at market trading, exploration, manufacturing, research, FW, PI... most of the things you can do outside of sov null. And I pretty much suck at all of it (maybe with the exception of trading) because that's just too many different things to attempt with the amount of time I have to play. All while failing to make the kind of social ties that make the game interesting to most players over the long haul.

So I've resolved to spend way less time with my trade alt poring over the market screen and my external trade tools, running around buying BPOs and setting up research jobs, doing missions by myself out in the middle of nowhere, and to put more effort into being at the Uni's Low-Sec Campus, fleeted up and in comms with other Unistas, flying frigates and generally engaging in the sort of activity that Vic has been doing to the exclusion of everything else. The grass on his side of the fence is looking pretty green right now.