Remember how deep the snow was when you were younger? It just doesn't snow like that anymore, does it? Well the snow was deeper because you were much, much shorter!
If there is a correlation in Eve for me it has to be Providence. Only a few weeks into the game and I moved into Providence for the first time. I did exactly what I wouldn't recommend to anyone in their right mind, I took the plunge into zero space with maybe a couple million skill points. Or less.
Last night my buddy Ged found a Wormhole in a nearby system that led straight into Catch, just a few short jumps from Providence. It was a slow night in the Alliance, but we managed to get four of us together to go take a quick jaunt down. See if we could maybe bushwack a few people. So we loaded up our Stealth Bombers, matched up our fits and headed thru the Super-Highway to Catch.
I've never spent much time in Wormholes and I respect those that do. For me Wormholes are Super-Highways thru which I can randomly pop out into other interesting places in New Eden. I travel thru them and out the other side. Inside a wormhole always feels like a dead place, a place for whispers and hushed movements. I dunno, maybe it is the lack of a local or something. We did manage to locate a Tempest on scan and using probes managed to locate him, but he warped off and disappeared before we could tackle him. So on to Catch.
Wow. It is hard to believe now that F9E/D-G were once among the hottest two systems in all of New Eden, that once they sported the largest battle that Eve had ever seen up to that point. It is hard to believe cause they are dead now. Flat, lifeless places owned by no one and NCdot. D-G actually had NO ONE IN IT! This is a system that usually averaged 100+ on any given day of the week, sometimes more than 500 at a time. As we traveled deeper into the old LFA/PXF pocket the news just got worse and worse. Dead. Lifeless. And apparently it must be like that a lot, because the only system with any activity at all was QBL. And everyone in there was ratting, and ratting in big expensive faction BS ships you would never ever rat in if there was any threat of being attacked ships. Lazy ratting. Lazy defenses.
I remember when four stealth bombers in local would rally the troops to defense, gate camps up, probes out, drones out, bubbles up, let's kill these bastards. Nothing. A lone Daredevil taunted us in local. Obvious bait we were smart enough to ignore. It was so bad that a Machariel showed up OFF THE GATE to pick over some wrecks. Man, if I had a Cyno on my Stealth Bomber and a fleet ready in waiting... but I didn't of course.
Sigh. Am I really getting that old in this game already? I doubt it, but last night made me feel old. We tucked our cloaked tails between our legs and fly silently home. Home now isn't dead and lifeless. Home now is full of energy, life and action. Sure I miss the activity and possibilities we had once on the border of Goons and -A-, an almost perfect boundary between safety and good fights every day. Providence was once a great place for a young pilot to be. Now it isn't.
You can't go home again. Unless you can find a Wormhole.