Editor’s Note: This article is a submission to EN24 from a guest author and does not necessarily reflect EN24’s opinions or positions.
Bren Genzan is a veteran pilot from Open University of Celestial Hardship [0UCH], established in 2009. An irrelevant corporation in irrelevant space that teaches pilots, young and old, that null sec is not scary. He lives in Curse, drinks fine wines and whiskeys, and more often than not, flies Falcons for the tears.
I made a proposal to a low sec pirate friend of mine, that I thought it would be cool if Faction War pilots could shoot neutrals first without taking a security hit while in space that they control. The response I received: Why would you want to do that?
Well, I said, Faction War pilots are in a permanent war against the other factions for control of space, and they still have to contend with 3rd parties interfering in their operations. From a lore point of view, it seems like if they are fighting people in their sovereign space, it should not be a criminal act.
That’s not good for low sec, I was told. This confused me. How could it be bad for a low sec pirate if a Faction War pilot engaged them first? The alternative is the Faction War pilot waits for the pirate to take the initiative, or chooses to run away, because they did not want to take the security hit.
I asked the same question of a few Faction War pilot friends of mine and they were all for it. They don’t mind having to fight the other militia and the “pies” at the same time, but the part they hate the most is having to fix their security status when they engage low sec pirates who jump into Faction War plexes looking for fights.
Isn’t that bad for low sec, I ask? No, they said, it’s not bad for their low sec at all. Go figure.
Both my Faction War friends and low sec pirate friends don’t like null sec much. I ask them why, and they say: They don’t like structure bashing. They don’t like big fleet fights. They don’t like SBUs and TCUs. They don’t like Call To Arms. They don’t like lots of Blues. They don’t like coalitions. They don’t like bubbles. They don’t like escalations. They want to small gang PvP, whatever that is, because I swear small gang PvP in Eve to any two people, even within the same alliance, is not the same thing. Many Faction War pilots do not like the way Faction War has evolved in to a miniature version of sovereignty wars, where fleet doctrines are now bloated, where structure bashes have become normal, where people can’t undock and find PvP unless they have 25 pilots supported by 5 logi. Where taking down an Ihub means bringing enough guys to fight the opposing militia and whatever 3rd party pirates that are going to bridge in.
I tell them, I live in null sec, I don’t have any of that. They look at me incredulously.
I remind them I live in Curse: NPC Null sec. I don’t do any of those Sovereignty things. I tell them that the only difference of what they do and what I do is I don’t have gate or station guns to deal with and I don’t take security hits for attacking neutrals. Oh, we don’t have FW plexes, we have warp disruptor bubbles.
Curse. Venal, Stain. Great Wildlands. Ore. Entire regions of space where the residents just live, Where the NPCs hold Sovereignty, where PvP is “the thing” for most, but PvE is not frowned upon. Where the denizens fight for the fights, not for flags in space. Where sovereignty is held by occupation, and has been since the beginning of time.
I’ve got a theory. We are all playing Eve, but we are not all playing the same game. When pilots who generally fly in low sec or in sovereign space talk about “null sec” they are talking about Sovereignty Null Sec. They forget that not all of null sec is marked by Territorial Claim Units, Ihubs and ADMs, just like not all of low sec has Ihubs and FW Plexes.
In Curse, as in much of NPC null, we have small corporations and alliances living in constellations, out of NPC-controlled stations where we don’t worry about whether our assets are going to be accessible next week, unlike SOV and faction war pilots, but similar to low sec pirates, whether they live within or outside of faction war space.
When I camp a bubble in Elysium, I’m just another pirate, albeit a NPC null sec pirate, interdicting traffic to and from Empire. If you come through flying something we can kill, my friends and I will blow up your ship, loot your wreck and use your modules to fit our ships.
We’re all about recycling. I get my most of my faction modules through “forced-charitable donations.”
We’re not flying in fleets of Machariels or Tengus or Svipuls. We’re in T1 frigates and cruisers, or assault frigates and destroyers, a splash of force recons and bombers, maybe a ‘dictor, if we’re feeling frisky. When we upship, it’s into navy or pirate cruisers, maybe a HAC or two. We’re true pirates, managing risk versus reward, maximizing the value of our kills and minimizing the cost of our losses. We’ll give you a good fight, but unless it’s an honorable 1v1, don’t expect it to be fair: We’ve been fighting large corps and alliances for years, fighting guys who bait you with something juicy and then jump or bridge in their 50 closest friends. With the wisdom of 4 year old rats, we’ve become adept at stealing the bait and leaving the trap empty at the end of the night. But we don’t get away unscathed every day. 500 million ISK ships show up on our loss board occasionally. We try. Sometimes we fail. That’s Eve.
Our null sec isn’t the null sec of 200 man fleets fighting over flags in space. It’s the null sec of 5 to 20 man gangs looking for trouble. It’s the null sec of the Frigate Menace, where low sec battleship pilots rarely tread. Curse is scary, and when the big fleets in the big ships fly through looking for the big fights, we sit on our perches and wonder ‘what’s going down in SOV null sec?’.
Not that we care much. We just hope that half of those guys will get lost and end up in micro gangs, trying to find their way home after the big fight. Cha ching! It’s not without irony that the changes that came to Eve Online with the Phoebe and Aegis releases have brought sovereignty null sec more in line the small alliance gameplay of NPC null sec’s “sovereignty by occupation” model.
Bigger is not necessarily better, it’s just different.
The Eve that CCP sells is big, epic, large scale, massive fleets, with thousands of pilots. It’s good for PR, but it’s not all of Eve Online. The Eve that outsiders see is harsh, unfriendly and caustic. The forums, blogs and news sites provide plenty of examples of a dark & foreboding Eve Online. It can be, but it’s not the Eve that keeps guys like me are playing. My Eve is small, close-knit, family oriented and fraternal. My Eve is the real Eve, one with friends and companions work together toward a single goal. I’m pretty sure that despite our differences of corp size and play style, that’s one thing we probably have in common: most of us play Eve with our friends, even if it’s just the friends in the corp chat of their NPC corporation.
Those of us who live in NPC null sec don’t fight for someone else’s agenda. We don’t sell our bodies for a ship replacement program. We don’t play another game, waiting for a ping to tell us it’s time to play Eve to subdue our enemies. We just play the game.
We complete our missions and complexes. Hack relic sites. Purge the belts of NPC pirates. Ship our PI products. Update our market orders. We make our ISK and buy the tools we need to play the game. We just live and fight and die, resurrect and do it all over again. We seek out our own experiences and try to find enjoyment in the universe that CCP has designed. We create our own content and it doesn’t revolve on the epic struggle, or some fantasy narrative.
Honestly, when my newbies ask me ‘Uncle Bren, what did you do during the World War Bee?’ I tell them without shame: I camped a bubble in Curse, ganked the unwary and watched the war on Twitch TV.
Ultimately folks, you play the game you want to play. As I see it, whatever you do, you’re probably not doing it wrong. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
