Oh My Head…

So friday, we had a very special op. Very tight plan. One objective. And we focused on it like a laser beam.

Drink an unreasonable quantity of alcohol, fly around, have fun.

This was a goon tradition called a “slosh op” which basically means fly ships you really can afford to lose, drink a lot, maybe a little bit of drinking game antics (one shot per death… two per pod… that kind of thing). Have fun. Extra points if you fly something completely ludicrous.

I flew rifters and managed to lose one before we even left system when I wandered away from my computer to make a drink and came back to find that instead of orbiting the station, I was now in the station in a pod. That was stupid, but hey, at least I had an excuse. I was drinking.

Unfortunately for us, our enemies weren’t cooperating and had a good sized serious business fleet up several times the size of ours. Naturally, we attacked. We died. A lot. At one point, for some reason I can’t quite remember, we blew up our FC for laughs. When I logged off people were going to invade Delve or something. I needed sleep and honestly, was having a bit of trouble being able to fly.

Jabber the following morning was amusing. Apparently I’m the only one in my corp who knows how to evade hangovers. For those not in on it, the secret is to replenish liquid and electrolytes. Before bed, drink gatoraid and water in volume and and take an ibuprophen or aspirin (not tylenol–bad things to your liver when mixed with alcohol). If you don’t have gatoraid, take a couple of multivitimins. It’s not perfect, but it works better than anything else I’ve found. The morning’s other surprise was I actually got on two kills, putting me solidly “in the black” in terms of isk damage done vs taken. Go me! (And really, if you got killed by us and you’re now embarrassed? You should be.)

It was fun. And that’s why I’m posting about it. Fun is something that is very easy to lose track of in Eve. Internet Spaceships, after all, are serious business. And that’s not just a joke. This is a complicated game that requires a lot of attention. Yeah, hopping in the ship and shooting up stuff is pretty good fodder for a fun evening, but if there is some way to run production or logistics for a thousand player alliance that is zany and madcap, I’ve yet to hear about it.

This is why I’m so happy to be back flying with Goonswarm. For all the insensitive humor or anything else, almost every moment I’ve flown with them has been fun. Eve is a sandbox game and I’m not sure whether that means there’s no way to win it or a thousand ways to win, but I do know there’s definitely one way to lose Eve Online and that’s to not be having fun.