EVE Evolved: A year of EVE Evolved - 5 most popular articles
Next week marks the one year anniversary of my weekly EVE Evolved column on EVE Online. I can hardly believe it's been a year since I was the newbie here at Massively, learning the ropes. To celebrate the one year anniversary of the EVE Evolved column, Massively is giving you the chance to win a free battleship of your choice, pre-fitted and ready to undock.
To be in with a chance to win, all you have to do is leave a comment here before April 25th saying which previous EVE Evolved article was your favourite and why. To enter, you must have an active EVE Online account but there's no need to leave your EVE character name, the winner's email address will be looked up and they will be contacted. And remember, it doesn't have to be one of the posts linked in this article, just whichever EVE Evolved article you've liked the most. The winner will be chosen at random and announced in next week's article.
In this retrospective article, I look at how far the EVE Evolved column has come and introduce the top five most popular articles by number of hits.
The beginning:
Before working for Massively, my previous experience was gleaned from working with Richie "Zapattero" Shoemaker over at EON Magazine. What started out as a friendly email over an idea to include a tanking guide in the magazine soon blossomed into a substantial portfolio of work. With four articles I'd written published in EON and six more that I'd done editorial work on, I confidently applied to an advertised position at Massively. I was initially apprehensive at writing a new post every week but I soon found that the constant practice was beginning to improve my writing and self-editing skills. One issue I've had over the year is that I've often felt I was going to run out of material to write about in the very near future. Thankfully, as the column name aptly summarises, EVE is a constantly evolving game and there's always some new aspect of it to talk about.
How far we've come:
The EVE Evolved column has come a long way in the past year. As a platform for publishing my ideas, I've used the column to cover a wide range of topics from in-depth guides to ECM, PvP and tanking to speculative opinion pieces on nomadic fleets, freeform processions and the problem of blobbing in PvP. The column format has changed a little over the past year, from the long single-page posts bordering 1500 words to a slicker new double-page format where each page is a little over 500 words. I also think the quality of the graphics and the way they're included in the text has improved a lot since day 1.
Top 5 posts - #5 – EVE's skill system demystified:
This short two-article series was dedicated to EVE's unique skill system. Part 1 introduced this unique system and explained it in detail. This post was aimed at MMO gamers that were either new to EVE Online or didn't play it, which presented something of a writing challenge. I found myself saying "If I had to explain EVE's skill system to an alien, how would I start?". Part 2 of the guide debunked two common myths about EVE's skill system and went on to show how you can optimise your training time. Even though these were my second and third articles and are starting to show their age, they've remained popular over the past year and are still a common find on google.
