I didn’t notice this til just now but, about a week ago, Infernal had his first birthday 
I remember the first time I sat in my Kestrel shooting at NPCs. I loved that little frigate, I really did. I couldn’t see how it could get much better. I ran mission after mission in it til I got my first Caracal, though I wasn’t that impressed with it. I just wanted to fly the Kessie more.
That changed when I got my first Drake. It was the best ship ever. I vowed at that moment to become the uber-est Drake pilot New Eden had ever seen.
It was around about this time I had my first taste of PvP and high sec wars. Some Corp whose members were a couple of years old decced us for no apparent reason, as they do. Although a lot of us were younger players we fought them hard. We’d take the fight to them and let them bring it to us. Unfortunately due to lack of experience we didn’t do so well, though I loved every minute of it.
After that those of us that enjoyed the PvP would take roams into low sec or go can flipping in the surrounding systems. We thought nothing of jumping into the dangerous low sec system next door when one of our corp mates was in trouble on the gate.
I still continued to mission the rest of the time, earning my ISK and standings. Moved up to the Raven, which was pretty good I suppose, but I was getting bored of missions by that point.
As the Corp started to fall apart we went our separate ways for a while. I joined 8lack Wing, a PvP Corp which was then part of the low sec alliance Idle Empire. This Corp taught me much of what I needed to learn to start PvPing effectively… and how annoying it is to rat your sec status back up to get into empire.
After some time we left the alliance, looking for a good home in 0.0. We spent a couple of months in Cloud Ring, then moved to two other alliances.
Pretty quickly I got bored with null sec. I accepted the offer to join the Corp created by a friend from the Corp I started in. We became like those that taught us how much we loved PvP in the first place. High sec wars were so much fun. What was at that point the three of us pounded on unprepared Corps. We were win. We gathered more members, choosing from people we had fought with, once taking in a member of one Corp who had been accused of being a spy then popped and podded by his so called friends. He was a miner, but since joining us has never looked back. We took in the majority of another small Corp we decced who gave us a good fight. Corps we were at war with would join alliances, we would go so far as to almost crush the alliance. When Corps left, we would dec them too.
Life was good. Something Rotten was WIN with a capital everything.
Then one day one of the Alliances we decced hired Mercs on us. That took our experience up a notch. Both sides fought hard and it ended up pretty equal. To cut a long story short (because I’ve gone on long enough) today those Mercs are our Alliance.
But even though I am now a year old, I’m still pretty noob. So I have more skillpoints and I can fly more ships, but there’s much I haven’t done. There’s something special about a game that can keep a person playing for years without them seeing all there is to offer. Before now I’ve never played a game like it and will probably keep playing for a long time to come.
Future plans? Fly more ships, blow up more of other people’s ships. I really don’t know. I’m happy in Something Rotten, we still are kinda win, even when we’re not (if that make sense), and the guys are a lot of fun.
So thanks to everybody who has got me through the last year and helped me become who I am, especialy my current Corp mates, without whom I’d probably have quit long ago.
Cheers guys.
