A lot of stories about the Eve community revolve around the huge null blocks and the fights they have over territory. Everyone’s heard of the Goons if you’ve played Eve for any manner of time and aren’t a complete self-absorbed hermit. I have friends that don’t play the game that ask me questions about the dynamic of coalition blocks more often than inquiring about what the game is. They just can’t grasp the reality that two thousand players in a single battle is a possibility.
What most people don’t hear about are the small wars. The small gang fights that take place in hi-sec in attempts to get ransoms; or just to ‘punish’ people for acting a certain way the aggressors don’t agree with. Chances are the reason people don’t hear more about these small wars is because the cost in ISK doesn’t compare to null fleets. That doesn’t make them any less memorable for those involved. Victims in hi-sec consider these types of people griefers. Suicide ganking, going on safari, reverse safari or corporation theft are just some of their methods of operation. They are generally out to ruin someone else’s fun in pursuit of their own form of entertainment. The reasoning behind this behavior varies from one player to another. Often times it boils down to the eternal search for those warm, salty tears.
I started out as a lot of players start out; I was scooped up by an industrial corporation that tried to cram their imperialistic mining agenda down my throat. This corporation bragged about how fast they could strip an asteroid belt. How easily they would run missions, reaping the benefits of the safety net that hi-sec offers. This was a time before the isk faucet of incursions, and so level four missions were the crème de la crème of care-bearing. It didn’t take long for me to realize this wasn’t what I wanted to spend my time doing. The problem was, I had made a lot of friends whom I did enjoy socializing with, and so I settled into a slump.
The turning point in my time in Eve came when this industrial alliance I was apart of was wardecced by a hi-sec wardeccing corp known as OMGWTFBBQTIME. Watching them work from my cloaked stealth bomber as they moved from gate to gate slowly pinning our fifty man alliance into two systems was incredible. It was the first time in a game I felt like the possibility of error had serious consequences. The PVP wasn’t consensual; it was met with the CEO and leadership telling us to dock up and wait out the wardec. I was two months into the game at this point and I had rushed for a stealth bomber because the possibility to warp around cloaked was sufficiently enticing that I refused to train into mining. Even though I was constantly ‘ordered’ to do so.
I also refused to just dock up and let the wardec pass us by; at least so much as someone in my two month old character could. As far as I was concerned, I was paying to play the game and I refused to waste seven days of that time, spinning in a station. That’s when I discovered the realization that social engineering isn’t a trainable skill, but one a player can put to use from day one. It had come to my attention early on in this war that OMGWTFBBQTIME knew exactly what stations we were docked in and knew exactly when we were undocking, and where we were. I mentioned this to leadership and they suggested it was because of locators. I knew better and I started doing some research behind new additions to the alliance two weeks prior to the war. And as it turns out, a spy had been planted in my corporation. The leadership refused to accept the fact that such a thing was possible; it was dishonorable, and they weren’t anyone worth spying on. When I called the spy out on team speak and he actually admitted to it, their tunes changed. The war was an utter debacle, and eventually paved the way for this alliance to consolidate into a single corporation, that would fuel the fires of many more stories to come.
At this point, if you’re still reading you may be wondering what my point is in all this droning on about unimportant things of the past. That is this; everyone is inducted into the game differently. Ultimately, it’s the player’s responsibility to accept the role of sheep, or shed the wool from their eyes and hunt with the right packs. Because CCP has given us a great big sand-box to play in; if you’re not building the castles, you might as well be the one kicking them over. This is an introduction into a series of stories and interviews of people that are self-described belligerent undesirables.
Next time on Between the Gates, we’re interviewing Zedrik Cayne.
