EVE has been a bit of a journey for me.
I first got into EVE through my girlfriend (shes now my wife). Her brother has suggested that we both might like EVE online. My Mrs started playing, and so i was curious as to what the game was. I've never been a "gamer" (note parenthesis), and to be fair, EVE looked very visually stunning and whatnot, but as a player / spectator sport it just doesn't really sell itself as a game (cinematic trailers etc do, but actual gameplay as a noob starting out really doesn't)
I started out exactly as others did - mining, missioning, all things PVE and not a lot more. To be fair, it was fun, i kinda enjoyed the "therapeutic" nature of the highsec mining and so on. I wasn't really too engaged in the game though.
Anyhow, one day at work, I mentioned EVE to a work collague and another one overheard and mentioned that he had heard of EVE so i told him a little bit about it and he said he'd try it out. We duo'd up a few times to work together mining and missioning and not a lot more happened beyond that. I went about my day to day mining and ratting and missioning making a small amount of iskies.
Around 8 months later, my work colleague told me that he was heading into nullsec with a group of players - it sounded pretty daunting to me - i was still pretty new to playing - by now, maybe 18 months or so at this time? Anyhow - i digress. What started out as a roam in frigates ended up turning into something very very different... and unique. Those band of pilots formed a group - a corporation - called Agony Unleashed and started running a PVP (player versus player) training university. The Agony Unleashed PVP basic class was born.
My pal mentioned to me what they were doing - basically teaching people how to PVP - and i didnt really know what that meant, but thought I'd give it a go anyway. So i dropped into Stacmon on a Saturday night X'd up and joined the fleet and i believe our instructor - i think it was Ripard - took us out and we learnt about PVP mechanics, trasversal velocities, gun tracking, spiralling - it was an absolute blast and massively eye-opening for me about a whole area of the game that i had literally zero understanding of. That was before we had even done the PVP roam.
The roam was an absolute blast - it was amazing fun. We killed loads of ships, and worked as a team, and it was something that i hd never ever experienced. Any game i had played had been shoot em ups, or racing games, and were never really collaborative - or generally were solo or duo - the was seomthing else.
I loved it.
Since then, i joined Ghost in the Machine - a group of close friends from agony unleashed personally invited me to corp, and we acted as cloaky sneaky weasels generally doing cloaky weaselly things aound New Eden. It was absolutely awesome.
From their i eventually joined Agony Unleashed - it was a long time coming.... and I've never looked back.
My character is 100% PVP and has been focussed on collaborative expereiences with awesome people. It doesnt matter waht i fly, but i strive to do it with people and become friends. This game has taught me the power of people and expereience, and learning.
Eventually Agony Unleashed shut up shop, and i ummed and aahed about quitting EVE in 2018. I am so glad that I didnt. People are inherently awesome. But people need to be engaged otherwise they get bored. So i set up FUN INC - Even Better With Friends and eventually the public NPSI calendar NPSI Community Gateway
I FC twice a week , and so I've run probably more than 1500 public fleets now, been to fanfest numerous times, presented at fanfest twice, fc'd at Fanfest, laods of other really cool things - not just benefitting the gaming community, but also the childrens hospital in Rek that we have donated more than £4K (from memory) to through the NPSI raffle.
The rest is history.
So why EVE you ask?
EVE is amazing.
Where can you find a game that can take you from sitting on your own with fairly low self esteem, confidence and belief in your abilities, in a room in East London to running a community website with a discord of nearly 3K people on. EVE is forever giving me satisfaction. I wish that i people realised how much I have gotten from this community.