"And I was like, you know what? I like this community, I like this game." And from that moment, something about EVE Online clicked for Kira Tsukimoto. She understood that EVE Online was more about the people playing it than the mechanics of the game.
Around that time, CCP Games unveiled their famous "This is EVE" trailer and BRAVE was about to become inundated with the new players that would be drawn to the game. "I spent all of the ISK I had from my PLEX buying frigates for 'new bros'," Kira said. "And then it got to the point where BRAVE literally ran out of teachers. We had no more people who could teach."
During that time, one of Kira's friends from BRAVE, Protovarious, tapped her to teach a class at the last minute when he was unable to. Kira, barely more educated than the pilots she was instructing, found herself teaching new players how to fit ships. Fortunately, she had taken the class herself enough times that she was able to relay the lesson to the new players. But Kira also discovered she had a penchant for teaching and began to tackle more and more beginner classes.
As the way things tend to work in EVE, it wasn't long until Kira found herself in the captain's chair commanding drunk roams (yes, they are as awesome as they sound) and even handling serious fleets during wartime. Kira, being the humble person that she is, was always quick to remind me that every fleet she led usually ended in disaster. But even if that is true, it wasn't enough to deter her from stepping up to bat every single moment she could. It wasn't long until Kira was commanding 250 person fleets—after only a few months into the game.
Around that time Protovarious was also working on starting up a new EVE focused podcast. "It was a very angry podcast," Kira joked. Kira was invited to be on the show along with a few others to discuss BRAVE's program for training new pilots. After, Protovarious asked Kira if she wanted to help host the show, to which she agreed. "We took a very different approach to most of the podcasts at that time," Kira said. "We decided that we wanted to run a podcast that made sense to new players." The approach proved immensely successful and it wasn't long until The Neocom was becoming a household name in the world of EVE Online.
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"It's become a media outlet that's very positive," Kira said. She explained that it became common for people to approach her at various EVE gatherings to tell her that the Neocom helped them decide that, despite what they might act like in-game, EVE players were a friendly and welcoming community.
That passion for making EVE more accessible eventually led Kira to starting her own corporation, Nova Haven, an independent organization that offers training and classes to players as a form of charity. Kira sees it as a way to give back to the community that has given her so much—a community that she would never be a part of if some friendly strangers hadn't taken the time to help her out and bring her in during her first EVE Down Under. "That kind of interaction with another player made me want to do it with other people as well. It made me want to give back what I got," she said. "Even after seeing the bad stuff, I still think that the good outweighs it by far."
