Less Writing, More Low Sec

Lately I'm spending too much time following the herd in the EVE blogosphere and not enough time logged into the game.  I should add that part of the reason I don't log in enough is my own damn fault.  I have a research project related to illicit RMT I'm doing that requires about 30 minutes of data entry a night.  The results so far are making me happy but I can't wait for the end of the month when I finish.

I started to fall into the trap with Blog Banter 52.  Kirith's subject lined up perfectly with the closing of MMOData.net.  All those graphs and charts I've made recently?  They took a lot of time to make because I don't know that much about making graphs and charts in Office 2012.  So not only am I learning a lot about the behavior of the EVE player base, but I'm learning Excel at the same time.  I can't say I regret diving into the subject, and I have two more posts planned.  With everything I'm learning, I feel more optimistic about EVE's short term future.

I think what alerted me to the trap I was falling into was Ripard Teg's posts on wanting to give everyone 25 million skill points allocated into the core skills.  His writing on the subject has me alternating between rage and depression.  I don't think I would feel that way if he were not on the CSM.  So I did what is becoming my policy and waited 48 hours before writing about the subject.  But when the 48 hours were up, I still felt the same way.  Actually worse, because in that time I read Troy Wexler's excellent response to Blog Banter 52.  I saw a lot of the attitude Troy wrote about his experiences in null sec embedded in Ripard's proposal.

I could go off on a rant against Ripard's concept.  But I'm not.  While on the train ride home yesterday I read Sugar's post from Tuesday.  Then I realized that Ripard's thoughts weren't important.  Not everthing in EVE is negative.  What was important was getting back into space.  I play EVE to relax and get my mind off of the problems of the real world for an hour or two.  So when I got home, I did my daily data entry, ate dinner, and started flying around.  I purchased Gas Cloud Harvester IIs in Hek, then flew around collecting datacores from my agents.  Did I mention how wonderful the warp speed changes are?  And at the end of the night I felt much better.  Well, right up until the time my stupid computer automatically decided to update Windows.  Thankfully it happened right before I was about to jump from high to low sec.  But Microsoft happens.

As for Ripard's proposal?  Unless CCP is using Ripard as a trial balloon, I'll just type one sentence.  If CCP starts giving out 25 million skill points in the core skills, botters and ISK sellers will rejoice.

But enough of unpleasant thoughts.  I want to stay positive and low sec is the place for that for me.