Peaks and Troughs

Time has been called on the Chronofile and Rettic has left EVE. This makes me sad. For many reasons.

With his departure, the EVE community loses one of it's great contributors. His blog, Rettic's Log: The Chronofile, was always a great source of insight and information as well as home to some incredibly high-quality EVE fiction (my favourite piece was 'Passage', but it's all excellent, please take the time to read it).

However, the Chronofile is just the tip of the iceberg. Rettic's 'Sounds for Flying' mixes are a superbly crafted series that I have found a refreshing and immersive addition to my EVE jukebox. His web design work on the EVE Metrics site is very slick and is very useful tool I was unaware of until Rettic's involvement and subsequent blog post. He was also a founding member of the recently formed independent pilot initiative, the Copernicus Coalition, an organisation that will surely feel his loss acutely. Many members of the blogpack have enjoyed forum signatures and banners made by his hand. I am sure there are many other things Rettic had a hand in of which I am completely unaware.

Although I did not get the opportunity to speak with him much in game, I owe him a debt a gratitude. He was the first fellow blogger to link to this blog, giving me the oxygen of readership. I also believe it was his sponsorship that brought about my inclusion into the Blog Pack when Crazy Kinux was looking to expand from the original twenty members.

In his final blogpost, 'You Can't Take the Sky From Me', Rettic writes with a sentiment with which I very much identify. I too have been finding EVE a burden of late, feeling obligated to log in to feed the POS, endlessly click my way through planetary interaction nodes and update the skill queue. This is not a particular criticism of the game, after all we choose our own gameplay and level of involvement. I have been the architect of my own apathy.

I believe I am suffering from a gaming malady very specific to EVE and one with which I have been afflicted before - a kind of EVE fatigue. In my case I have a tendency to play obsessively until I reach saturation point, then just stop (once for about four years). I am also aware that other players have been also been notably less active recently, my fellow Freebooters chief amongst them. That is bound to have an impact on my involvement, especially as we are currently not in an alliance, perhaps a mistake.

Other than Rettic, I have noticed other fellow Copernicus Coalition members have been exhibiting signs of this same unrest, interesting however is how each has dealt with it differently. Whereas Rettic has gracefully retired, I tore out my bathroom, Casiella Truza has eschewed all 'worklike' gameplay and turned to the dark side and Mark726 has been playing Mass Effect [correction: on re-reading my Twitter feed it may have been Mandrill who has been playing Mass Effect. Apologies for inaccuracy].

I know that the 'burn-out' is all just a natural part of capsuleering and I've just got to consider a coping strategy for my current fugue. The odd thing is, although the thought of logging in to EVE isn't that appealing to me at the moment, I still enjoy reading and writing about it, so I'm unlikely to depart with a Rettic-like grace and as I've run out of steam on the bathroom, a revision in playstyle is probably in order, along with some more frequent posts.

No doubt things will come together in time, EVE is still a seductive mistress despite her current health problems. I know this is all part of the natural ebb and flow of the tides on the shores of the sandbox. Onward I suppose.

Farewell Rettic, I'm sorry to see you go and thank you for the inspiration.

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