Why Eve:

I've been a gamer since the spectrum came out, and there's very few games I've been rabidly loyal to, I sank a few years of my life into WoW but having reached the end game I found it elitest and repetitive, cartoony and frustrating, especially on a less than stellar PC.

My housemate had been playing Eve for some time, and recommended it to me, I tried out mining a little, I joined a corp who had mining ops (which at the time, I found thrilling, I'm sorry...), I got to gaze in awe as an Orca landed in our belt to carry away our hard mined rocks. I got scared away by NPC "rats", I got blown up by gankers, and I went through a wardec flying a Rifter desperately trying to kill the Raven camping us in.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I could see that there was a lot to learn, and I was told over and over that even the lowest skilled member could be a valuable asset. There was a challenge there, to learn my craft, to get good at a particular task.

I earned something in the region of 50 million isk, mining away in frigates and later on cruisers, before going to grab a hauling ship and gathering my rocks. At the time, I thought it was a fortune, I thought I was a made man.

(To give an idea for those of you who don't play, a month of game time can be bought with in game currency (isk) by buying an item called a PLEX. At this point, a PLEX was 175 million isk).

As much as I enjoyed Eve, I didn't have time for it, real life got in the way for a while. Then one day this came up on youtube.

Even today, this advert grabs me. I could point at a multitude of inaccuracies in it (patrols? NOBODY patrols their space like that, and nobody would come to save a miner, most would just laugh) but the idea behind it, the scale it talks about, the ability for 1 person to have greater impact... this all called to me, and I very soon came back to eve, and have remained (almost entirely) loyal ever since.

My overall experience of Eve is whilst it's not common, there HAVE been instances where a single individual has had significant effect, whole battles have sparked because a pilot pushed the wrong button, single spies have infiltrated organisations and caused crippling damage from the inside.

Mostly though, pilots are faceless grunts, if you replaced 90% of my alliance with pilots able to fly the same ships, I sincerely doubt my Alliance leader would give a damn, so long as they undocked when they were told to and didn't shoot the neutral we're not meant to shoot. In the grand scheme of things, I, you, and almost every other pilot out there, don't "matter" to the grand scheme, where we do matter however, is at the smaller level, the corporation level.

I fly now, with people I would largely consider friends, there's some within my corporation I could live without, there are some who make it a genuine pleasure to log in and fly with/talk to. People dotted around the globe, talking about the best use for bacon or who has the worst beer, people I may never have actually met, but would throw my in game body into combat to help out without a second thought.

At a corporation level, there's a wonderful camaraderie. Sometimes you all think leadership are shitting on you, sometimes the corp gets some perk or reward for having been on the most fleets, and everybody in your corp gets to smug at the other corps, it's like a whole second social circle and it's something that's kept me coming back for years.