May 2013

Stay Frosty "Anarchy" Wallpaper
Stay Frosty
May 2013 is the high-water mark for Eveoganda (so far!). In that month this magazine experienced 212,495 visits, which works out to an average of 6,854 visitors a day (including Memorial Day weekend). Looking back now, some of those days saw 14-16k visits a day. I have no way of knowing now how many of those were unique visitors, I never ran metrics on this magazine and I still don't. So these numbers just come from the basic Blogger metrics that are built into the Google platform. Our second highest month was October 2013 when we had 190,835 visitors. 

So what the heck was going on in May of 2013 that drove so many people to this little, quiet, unassuming corner of the Eve community? 

Stay Frosty was born. I was kicked from The Tuskers in April and I started Stay Frosty in May. Between those two things a lot of stuff happened. A lot of those things were extremely public, some not so much, and some remain behind-the-scenes. Some people labeled those things as "drama", usually those on the other side of events - but undeniably everyone found them interesting. 

I'm not writing this today to re-hash any of the things that happened then. I've moved on, The Tuskers have moved on, and Stay Frosty has certainly moved on. Last year at Fanfest I even had the chance to finally meet Suleiman Shouaa the CEO of The Tuskers in person and we hit it off, buried any hatchets, and we've both moved on from it. So all of that is well-buried and mostly forgotten. And I only say 'mostly' because it is still history.

I had a tremendous amount of things happening in my life at the time. A lot of which was still private at the time. I had lost my business the year before and my personal life was in chaos. I wasn't playing Eve as much as using this blog to stay sane. And I suddenly found myself with a lot more time on my hands, sadly, than I had previously. When I finally found time to start playing again - I decided it was time to exert more control over my situation in-game.

I had a plan. That plan worked out almost perfectly. But, as with any plan, there were certainly things that happened along the way that I couldn't have planned on. There were unexpected things that cropped up that unfortunately made the situation much more acerbic than I intended. You can't predict everything, the only choice you have is to accept things as they are and move forward. There are things I wish hadn't happened, and there are a few things I wish I had handled differently in hindsight, but I can't change those now.

The plan was to make as big of a splash as possible and get Stay Frosty off on an incredible growth spurt, establishing the code by which it would operate, and attract the kinds of players that would find that play-style interesting. And by those metrics alone, May 2013 certainly exceeded my wildest dreams.

I had started or been a part of starting 4 Corporations and 2 Alliances before starting Stay Frosty and I knew that doing so without a platform like this one was almost impossible. Corporations and Alliances start every day in Eve and no one notices. I was determined that if I was going to do that again, that this time I would put everything I had into it. It was time to put the biggest foot forward I could and establish something that would stand the test of time.

As I approach my 10th year of playing Eve this September, May 2013 is becoming the half-way point in my Eve career. Everything that happened the five years before that directly led to everything that has happened in the five years since then. It is both literally and figuratively the half-way point and the turning-point of my entire Eve career.

And that's why I brought it up today. Not to kick a dead horse, but simply to remember the past and to learn from it. But mostly to remember it. 

It is, after all, only a game.