Blog Banter: Tribute to an EVE player - Letrange

Banter time! And last one for 2008. This month’s EVE Blog Banter idea comes to us by Roc Wieler of Roc’s Ramblings:

Write a story about a fellow EVE Blogger, or an EVE player whom has inspired you or affected you in some tangible way. After your story, describe why you chose them, and any Holiday wish you have specifically for them.

My great buddy Letrange wrote about one of my possible choices, especially as Queb has been my CEO from Day One in a player Alliance (I joined BOZO when I was 3 weeks old... extremely young to get into 0.0 PvP) and he has been helping me with some part of the game ever since, and giving me well-deserved spankings whenever I f... messed up, giving me pats on the back when I did good (like when I got on 23 killmails on a single op), and supporting me when things got rough, like last week.

But finding The One player who's inspired and helped me the most is pretty easy: it is Letrange himself.

When I first met Robert, then known as "Mage", at the Montreal Virtual World center, he was already one of the most hardcore gamers I had ever met, and getting to hang out with him brought my own hardcoreness to a new level. Granted, he never did go as deep into Red Planet piloting as I did, but he still managed to stay way above an average level. When he invited me to his place to check out the venerable TIE Fighter on his just-as-venerable Pentium 90, our friendship was sealed and we never looked back.

Around the same time, and also with the help of Virtual World, he introduced me to the Battletech universe, and that's when I experienced the awesome generosity of this guy: I inherited his Battletech manual collection because he wasn't using them anymore! He also introduced me to other universes: Heavy Gear, Starfire, Japanese Anime, Honorverse, etc. But somewhere in 1996 he gave me a serious dose of a seriously potent narcotic: Quake. Followed not too long after by another heavy drug: Diablo. That's when I started working towards getting my own gaming rig, an awesome K6-233 with 64mb of RAM and a Voodoo card (and eventually a Voodoo II and a TNT). I've been a Quaker ever since, with the occasional break into sims, RPGs, and sometimes strategy games; Mage got me to know the Space Empires games of course :)

Fast forward to 2007 when Mage became Letrange. I won't go into how I got into EVE because I did this last month! I spent the last part of the year reading up every EVE guide I could find and finally, on January 20th 2008, I phoned Letrange up to tell him the client was installed and Cozmik freshly out of RMS. I had done a part of the tutorial on a noob Caldari character at his place (that character got trashed) and again did only a small part on my own. We got off the phone and into a private eve-voice convo and he told me to proceed to his base: not bad, 5 jumps. There I get treated to more Letrangesque generosity: a Slasher, ACs, ammo, AB, ODs, Gyros, Point, Web... oh shit I can't fit those last three! That's how I learned the "Show Info" feature. "Now you know what to train" says Let, "Now go ratting for a bit, make ISK, buy books, etc". He laughed his head off when I told him the next day that I just learned there was loot in those wrecks!

Anyway, the only time he helped financially with actual ISK was when he told me about salvaging. He linked me an alloyed tritanium bar and told me "View market details"... when I saw 475000 ISK my jaw dropped and he tells me I need the salvaging skill. Quick check of the price: 900k ISK. Big OUCH for a week-old player. He then gave me the ISK to buy the book but boy did that skill pay for itself!

Letrange has written before about the way he helped me with BPCs and the stuff I can manufacture for myself with melted loot out of the 0.0 rats to make sure I'm never out of a ship or modules or ammo, but this in itself did more than that: it gave me a new understanding of the industrial side of EVE that I would never have gotten without experiencing my myself. So all in all Letrange sent me to the School of Hard Knocks, but in EVE that is the best school of all because you learn to fend for yourself.

So I give a big parade ground salute to you Rob. I probably never would have gotten into EVE without you. I wish you all the success in the universe in the jump-starting of AMC, and I did put your name on Santa's list for a new POS tower :))

o7