No, not a witty and insightful piece on Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and Next Gen Consoles - it's EVE Online again. I try not to bang on about the same thing two posts in a row, but the only other news of note today is the introduction of Elves to veteran sprite-fest Ultima Online, and my feelings on that can be summed up with one long sigh of reproachful dissapointment. Could be worse though - it could be a Mecha-based expansion instead...

So, regular readers will now have a picture of the EVE Galaxy, composed of three areas; The wild open frontier of 0.0, where PvP is encouraged and no-one goes, the poorly policed borderlands of 0.4-01, where PvP ganking actually happens, and the bright glowing safe core systems of 0.5+, where all the players actually are. People drift from one to another on an individual 'day-trip' basis, but this breakdown is on the whole quite static, everyone having made, via geography, their choice on the whole PvP question.

However, this choice is not always theirs to make, and something I noticed immediately on returning to EVE after some months off, was the distrubing number of player-kills in 1.0 core systems. Enter Corp Wars.

The standard clan or guild social function found in most online games, exsists in EVE as a player-run Corporation and in addition to the usual shared chat and nametag, a great many game functions are at the disposal of these Corporations, mechanisms for sharing resources, and funds, and these are quite elaborate, and very useful, although they also provide a fantastic way for newbie-alts to steal all your stuff, pass it to a real character and then vanish, so like much in EVE, it pays to be paranoid.

I'm in one of these Corps; a small affair comprised purely of people I know 'RL' and if not trust, then at least know where live IRL in order to exact physical revenge. We mostly use the functions of the Corp for pooling resources; a shared box to keep all our junk in which saves us having to both be in the same place to trade bits and pieces any time any of us wants to try a different ship or loadout. Very convenient, but this comes with a price

At any time, for the actually quite negligible fee of 1,000,000 ISK per week, another player Corp may formally declare war on us. A week after this, members of their corp may open fire on and kill any members of our corp at anytime, anywhere, without any worries about police, etc. Of course, this applies in reverse as well - we'd be allowed to shoot them back, but that would be some small consolation if they outnumbered us more than, say, three to one, and were camping our HQ, details of which are easily looked up.

This Corp War system seems to be making the whole 'How can we get more people to 0.0?' question largely irrellevant, since the determined bored PvP corp doesn't need to go out there afterall. The only defence against this sort of thing is basicaly to not draw attention to yourself, and hope no bored 30-man 'Mercenary' corp notices you. Wars can be renewed week after week, for 1 million a go, (litterally an hours work for one person) and continued indefinitely, or until all the members of the victim corp either quit the corp, or the game. The message boards are littered with frustrated 'I quit' posts as a result of this game-sanctioned mechanism to effectively hound specific players to death and unsubscription.

(Oh, by the way, leaving your doomed corp and joining a 'safe' undeclarable NPC corportion to avoid a war, is considered an exploit. Have a nice day!)

There are two other ways to deal with it, of course; the "Grow some ballz and fight bak, n00bz!1!" strategem, which merely serves to accellerate our eventual bankrupcy, what with stat-based online PvP being 45% Ambush, 45% Numbers, 9% Lucky Dicerolls and 1% Skill, and all.

Then there's the "Hire some mercs!" gambit, i.e. pay another player corp signficant sums of money, so that they might declare war on our attacker themselves, which is about equivalent to paying protection money. Kind of like The A-Team, but with less confidence that Hannibal wasn't just going to take your money, laugh like a bastard, then declare war on you himself. Tempting, but no.

So we continue in our little corp, using the shared hangars, and shared chat channel, not speaking to strangers, and being careful to ensure no-one notices us, waiting for the day when The Bad Men come to utterly destroy us, for kicks and giggles...

So, our checklist for a survivable EVE so far:

  • Do not go to 0.4 Security space or less.
  • Do not leave the Newbie Corporation.

Which only leaves you vulnerable to Kestrel Suicide Alts. More later...