EVE is a slow game. You can spend weeks training a single level of a single skill. Combat (the PvE side, I’ve never done any PvP) can be drawn out, and you rarely go down in seconds, it’s more drawn-out battles of shield attrition. So it didn’t come as a huge surprise to me when I learned that joining a guild (I mean, corp! It’s corp in EVE, because it’s all about the money, right?) could take a long time too. After answering that long questionnaire, I patiently waited in the queue for two weeks to get my recruitment info with EVE University.

And then, I waited some more, though less and less patiently. Especially since I was number 1 in the queue (of all applicants logged in at that point) several times during the week, only to lose my spot to applicants who had waited even longer. Yesterday marked day 20 in the application queue for me. Yikes. In the meantime, a lot of unsavory things happened in the game, what with the leader of EVE’s most vocal and obnoxious alliance publicly inciting people to harass someone into suicide, being kicked out of the players’ representative council in response, and then learning that there are also disgusting fellows among his enemies, who don’t mind threatening his wife.

I am set on at least giving the game a chance though. There are horrible players in any MMO, plus, my subscription hasn’t run out yet, so I might as well look for decent people in the game until then. So yesterday, I was sitting in the queue again, finally hitting spot 1 again, when an announcement came through:

Eve University is changing its recruitment process.  This may result in you being accepted without actually being interviewed.  At this time unless you have been told to queue for an SPO, do not queue.

My invite came about 10 minutes later. Well, boo. That’s what I waited for in the queue for almost 3 weeks? I was actually looking forward to telling you about how the interview went. And now I won’t even be able to sit in the university, waving my walking stick and tell kids to get off my lawn, and that they have it so easy these days, because in my time, you needed to walk uphill both ways, through the snow, to your interview, and could only pray you wouldn’t get rejected.

I said I got an invite. That is true. I’m still not a member, though. You see, I have this private corp I was talking about before. I had officer rights in that. Turns out, you cannot just leave a corp if you have those. No, you need to resign your rights, and then you are in a 24-hour stasis period, during which you can’t leave the corp. So, the invite bounced, and now I have to wait until tonight to get my invite. Hopefully. If anybody is on that can do invites. So no EVE for me this weekend. Because I’m bored to tears of mission running by now, and solo mining is getting monotonous, too.

It’s the story of EVE and me, in a nutshell: I will always find a way to allow the game to screw me over.

edit: just in case (because I was asked), no, this post doesn’t contain any April fools shenanigans.