State of the Union 2018


2018 was a big year in Eve Online for me. Stay Frosty celebrated our fifth year anniversary, we not only traveled to Fanfest for the third time, but we also went to our first Eve Vegas. We held our third Steel City Eve player meet at our home and we almost made it to Eve London... almost.

That's a pretty epic year by any measure. Unfortunately A Band Apart didn't do as well as we had hoped in the Alliance Tournament, despite winning our first two matches - we managed to lose our next two. We lost our automatic bid for next year's Tournament, but hopefully we will get the chance to redeem ourselves and finally make it to that mythic last weekend. Fingers crossed.

This year I didn't get a single Cease and Desist letter from CCP. In fact I pretty much have given up on the idea of working with them on anything. Despite hearing some encouraging information at Fanfest that led me to believe the door might be open again, my proposals met with negativity once again. So that pretty much put an end to that for me. I leave it to others to continue the fight if they wish. As for me it is time to focus more on my own projects in the coming year. The RedBubble store continues to do well and I'll be adding a lot more NEW stuff to it in the coming year. So stay tuned.

In addition I have several other projects in the works, including a new video series. I'm planning to open my personal hangar and give players some well-earned and experienced advice regarding ship-fitting, mods, and other basics. If the series is well received I'll continue it into more areas such as transversal, engagement profiles, overviews, and other PvP focused areas.

The podcast won't be coming back anytime soon. Frankly my enthusiasm for it wained significantly after CCP refused to let anyone on their side join me on it again. Despite several CCP employees having made guest appearances previously without issue, I was suddenly put on a stupid blacklist. And even though the person responsible for that action is no longer at CCP, the whole incident just left a bad taste in my mouth. Going forward I'll continue to seek projects and opportunities that don't involve CCP. Those always work out better anyway.

2018 was my lowest output ever on Eveoganda with only 117 posts this past year. This continues to reflect the state of Eve Blogging in general, with more and more Eve Bloggers shutting down or going quiet in the last year. I'll continue writing because this was always intended as much of a journal of my time in Eve as anything else. And as long as I play, I'll keep writing about my adventures.

This time next year I will finally be free of all financial obligations to the past, so next year's post will be extremely celebratory. My new job is going great so far and we are looking forward to the Cruisers of Eve trip to Alaska in July. We also hope to make it out to some player meets, but we are not sure yet what our schedules look like, so we can't promise anything yet. We will be having the 4th Annual Steel City Eve event again this year and that will be happening the last Saturday of July, the 27th. So that is the early word on that, you can mark that one down in your calendars and start making plans to be there. We may even have a Food Truck this year! (And other surprises!)

Thank you for reading and for sharing this adventure with me. I hope nothing more than each of you having a great, happy, safe, exciting and prosperous 2019. I look forward to sharing with you once again in the New Year.

Keep the courage and Stay Frosty my friends.

Onward & Upward.