Plans within plans

I don't know if it's obvious, but I've kind of got a 2 voices thing going on. I thought it might be nice to be able to post in and out of character so I picked 2 different fonts to use for me and him.

I realised fairly early on when I started Eve back in 2003 that it wasn't the kind of MMPORG where you could just log on and just sort of bumble your way through, following the golden exclamation marks. You really needed to have a plan.

Working with my little group of buddies, we had a fairly simple plan: make enough isk to buy us all a nice cruiser each. Now back in 2003 that was actually a fairly tall order, there were no agents to offer missions, NPCs had insultingly small bounties and a small number of people had a fairly solid hold on the markets.

A few corporations began offering BYOM deals. You rock up with the materials required to build your cruiser, hand them over, pay a small administration fee and they built you a cruiser.

We took delivery of our very first cruiser, a Minmatar Rupture, after much chipping at space-rocks and exchanging of currency. I was the lucky ducky that got to fly it and from memory, it lasted all of about 4 hours. On pretty much its maiden voyage it was struck down by gate campers in Eifer. We were devastated, and needless to say, I went to the end of the line for the next cruiser!

From that day on, I had a fairly unshakable view of pirates in eve: griefers.

A pretty extreme view, of which oddly I have only very recently corrected myself on.

It's not all my fault of course; I have a pretty high MMPORG pedegree. I started my online gaming career in the world of Ultima Online, before all the Felucca / Trammell bullshit when flashy red people meant you would be dead soon. Similarly to Eve, if someone killed you, they could loot your corpse and take your stuff. Unlike Eve, there wasn't really much of a deterrant.

In Ultima Online, Pirates were PKers, Can flippers were Noto-PKers and 0.0 space was anywhere outside of a town. The biggest difference between the two was that for the most part, PKers were almost entirely cockpouches. They didn't just kill you, they taunted you, and if you were stupid enough to rise to a Noto-PKer, you got killed over and over until your criminal timer ran out (there was nowhere to hide from this, town guards were of no help if you had a flag).

So from pretty early on in my online gaming career another player killing me was someone who was getting their enjoyment from making me miserable.

It wasn't ever a problem in WoW, because that had a big red 'I want other people to kill me repeatedly' button, and even if you pressed it, all you ever lost was the time it took to run back to your corpse to get your stuff that was untouchable to anyone else.

Coming back to Eve raised this issue almost immediately for me and very nearly stopped me from bothering.

It was just a few days after I re-activated my original account. I was slowly settling back into things by doing a little bit of tradegoods ferrying. It was always a bit of a fetish for me after my long-behind-me days of Frontier: Elite II, buying stuff for 5 galactic credits at station x, shipping them to station y and selling it for 8 galactic credits each, who could resist!

I had found a very nice looking route that would net me a cool few million but meant the small risk of a 0.4 system. I figured it was time to start taking the risk, spent half my wallet on the cargo and set off. On Autopilot.

You see, before I came back to Eve, 'Warp to 0' hadn't been invented yet, so flying around with the autopilot made no difference if you were sat in front of your computer. It just meant you didn't have to keep clicking, you just had to pay attention. I hadn't quite realised that 'Warp to 0' actually meant you could insta-jump at a gate and I bumbled into a gate pirate. Pop, oops, arse.

I actually cancelled my account at that point. I was annoyed that someone else was enjoying the game entirely at my expense. After about another 2 days, I logged on again - I still had a month left to play so I set myself a small goal: If I couldn't build my wallet up to 20 million isk by the time my subscription ran out, there wasn't much point in carrying on, there would always be gate pirates and stupidity if it took me more than a month to recover from each one Eve Online wasn't really going to be much fun for me any more.

Obviously I suceeded, I actually hit about 50 million by the time I had to re-activate my account and I did so gladly. I also had a very nice little bonus when I realised that the Domination Overdrive module I had sat on an old hauler from before everything changed and was about to destroy because I couldn't sell on the market was actually worth over 60 million if I sold it through a contract.

It took a little longer to get over my 'All pirates are griefers' ignorance, but at least I learnt some simple lessons (the hard way).