Red Vs. Blue

I've spent the last few days thinking about what to do next in EVE.  I've done wormholes, I've done exploration.  I've done so many missions and incursions that the rats know me by name (incidentally, yellow box in rat speak means 'hello' and red box means lets play - they're very enthusiastic about playing, but their games are too simple now).  Mining, industry and marketing have no appeal to me (though I briefly played with planetary interaction when it was first introduced).

PVP is an aspect of the game that has been somewhat elusive to me.  I've gone on solo ventures, small fleet roams, lol roams, bombing runs, and blob engagements.  But the kill mails aren't frequent enough to reinforce my killing instincts and the loss mails are very discouraging.

I recently attempted to correct this with my plans to fly Tristans until I got 10 kill mails.  But I don't have a long enough attention span to hunt for the solo rifter in Ammamake. Also, Poetic Stanziel's experience with a similar objective made me re-think the objective.  (Tristans, despite the buff to hybrid turrets, are hampered by the fact that they can only fit two blasters; the two missile launcher hardpoints don't really supplement the damage enough to make this a killer frigate.)

My character is quickly approaching 50m skill points.  For the past two years, I've concentrated my skill plan on combat skills.  I have nearly perfect tank skills, nearly perfect fitting skills, and I can fly every sub cap ship in the game (except command ships).  I can use all t2 medium guns, t2 medium launchers are just a few days away (though Level 5 of a few important missile support skills are still a few weeks away).  36m of my 50m skill points are combat related.  This toon should be a much better fighter with a much more impressive kill board.

I came up with a number of different options while considering my next endeavors, but becoming a better combat pilot is the first step to all of the things I want to do in EVE. This evening, I put in an application for Red Federation.  Let's see where this takes me.