Share your EVE highlight/s of the year!

Honestly, after such a great 2023, I didn't think 2024 could top it. But, Eve and its community always has a way to up the ante.

Personal Highlights

I was a presenter at Eve Amsterdam, talking about how to empower communities. From this presentation, there have been a lot of players who've reached out for advice for their own communities or collaboration with Eve Rookies.

Even though I didn't make it into CSM19 myself, I managed to use my platform to interview 27 of my fellow candidates during the campaign period. Several of the candidates have stuck around to get involved with the community which is amazing.

From those interviews, Voices of New Eden has been born. The concept is interviewing players no matter how big or small they feel their role is in our universe. Through VONE, we find out who players are, why they started playing Eve, what they do and a pain point among other things.

And of course, getting to serve on CSM18. While I don't play in SOV null, I think I was still effective as CSM. Especially when it came to helping a timely problem that occurred within the incursion community the first half of 2024.

Eve Rookies Highlights

• Started paying FCs for their time running fleets. Have paid out over 70 billion isk in 2024.

• Hit 3,000 members on the Eve Rookies Discord.

• Created 2 player corps (Eve Rookies Industry & Eve Rookies Academy) as well as the alliance Eve Rookies United.

• Took over a headquarter incursion community that was shutting down after claiming we'd never run HQ fleets. Since we took over in May we're putting out about 9-12 HQ fleets a month.

• The industry wing built a structure entirely themselves which we put down in November.

• Hit the 100 player mark on the Eve Rookies leadership team (FCs, ambassadors, advisors, etc).

• Only banned 3 people from the community in total in 2024.

And, there's already some BIG things brewing for 2025.

A Dream Come True

If last year's highlight was the rush of starting work on the War For New Eden board game and seeing the prototype at Fanfest - then this year's highlight was finishing my work on the project. Although technically I'm still working on certain last minute pieces, such as the illustration above which is for the inside cover of the main rulebook - my part in the project officially ended in August. But the year included a first for me, working with T'Amber on the exclusive board game related skins that the Kickstarter backers will be getting with their game orders.

The skins represent the first piece of artwork that I've designed and created that will be seen inside of Eve Online, in the actual game itself. Which is a pretty incredible highlight and something that I'm extremely proud of. Plus the skins look incredible and working with T'Amber to create those was an amazing process. We've known each other for almost two decades now and we've worked on many projects over the years, but nothing like this. It felt like the culmination of a dream.

The game will be released around March of 2025 and I'm truly looking forward to seeing everyone's reactions when they start getting it into their own hands. I look forward to talking with everyone about the game at Fanfest in May. I hope to see you there!

I started playing EVE in 2024 and I still had (and still have) a lot to learn. On this learning journey, I ended up making some beginner's mistakes that led to some remarkable stories haha

In the rush to explore, I decided to explore an unknown region with my corporation, already feeling capable of finding great riches and challenges. While scanning space, we found an unusual cosmic signature, which eventually led us to a Sleeper Cache. We then encountered a hostile environment full of drones, but we still went ahead. Laughing nervously and filling the chat with commands, we faced so many enemies until we reached the core... And just when everything seemed to be going well, I found a module that could generate me a lot of wealth, but as this joy was to be short-lived... a PvP gang tracked us down and what a nervous breakdown haha

We narrowly escaped, but that adrenaline rush served as a lesson for me to learn to take it easy when exploring. But I won't deny that it was a fun experience nonetheless and still keeps me coming back to space.

Whenever I play EVE it's mainly to interact with my friends, like JHenckes so I end up not having great experiences of an old and wise player haha. The only great story, this bore has already told, see his comment, so something that really marked me was the interaction and development of our corp, since 99% of the time we were outnumbered during encounters and mercenaries meant the end of us, when we finally managed to settle down and understand what the game was really about, like our defense of an Athanor already mentioned above. I'd like to highlight as a positive point the fact that we never banned anyone, in fact we managed to create a family (albeit a very small one haha). This period basically served to solidify that the game was in my life, that I would no longer be temporary and that we would have specific days of the week or even a whatsapp group just for interactions about the game.

Thinking about my highlights for this year, I can only really think of the development of our small corp. We had so much good times during this time. I thought about making a recap video, but since that is not really a singular moment, I chose this video. It is one of the first videos I made and shows the first ever T2 Battleship we killed in our fierce little frigates. You should have heard the coms when it finally died!