I've not talked about my recent season in EVE Online much, and while this is partly oversight on my part, it is also part reluctance too. In general, my online adventures are anonymous things, mostly because of personal paranoia. I don't put character names on the blog so that I don't get mobbed by crowds of autograph seeking fans while chasing goblins about, you see! Haha...I kill myself. But, and this is the important thing, in most of my online games, I am the only one that can do so.
EVE is a bit different though in that it's the only MMO I play which has non-consensual PvP, and item loss/looting. I wouldn't be there at all if that's all it had, but I find an awful lot else in there that makes the constant low-grade unpleasantness of the paranoia worth enduring. This paranoia is mitigated by several factors, which make the game playable for a carebear like me. Empire Space police restrictions act, on the whole, as an effective deterrent to casual ganking, allowing most players to go about their business free from attack in the 'safe' areas of space, still leaving a vast proportion of the game world free for no-holds barred PvP. It's all clearly marked, and while CCP tend to only put the Good Stuff in places where you can be knifed in the back while trying to claim it, there's still enough left in carebear country to keep me amused.
I've ranted at length
here,
here and
here about the three layers of PvP Safety in EVE; Stay in 0.5+ Space, Don't Join A Player Corp, and Don't Carry Anything Valuable In Cargo Through Jita, and sure enough, I recently broke rule #2, and more recently still, our little corp got a war declared against it - now in force. Reading back through those posts, I come across as quite a bitter young thing, and must admit to feeling a bit more sanguine about things now the actual event is here. It's not so bad afterall.
Given that one of the first things I did was type the Aggressor's names into
The All Seeing Eye and get back a shockingly comprehensive intelligence dossier of not only their past EVE History, but their MMO gaming movements for the last two years prior to them even starting EVE, including lists of commonly used alt names, previous guildmates etc etc, I'm going to decide on
NOT mentioning any specifics about me, my EVE Corp, or their wartime activites on this blog, if that's all the same with you.
Broadly speaking however, I'm starting to see that EVE War isn't nearly as crippling as one might expect, mostly for two reasons.
First, even in EVE, Space is
really really big. Game features allow the tracking of individual players, with a slight delay, to their current star systems, via Location Agents. However, for that to work, you need a name, and the Corporation Details only list the corp's CEO, and Founder - not the rest of the minions, of which I'm one, meaning that real detective work is needed to find the rest of the corp you're attacking. We've been tracking the Aggressors in a similar manner, knowing their names quite well thanks to their Google footprints, and so far, they seem to be at completely the wrong end of the galaxy. Even with Location Agents, and Ship Scanning, it's very difficult to pin down another player if they're actively avoiding you. It's going about business as usual that's the killer.
Secondly, the Earth is round. I've often wished for a flat Earth, as usually, online folks being in different timezones is a constant source of irritation to me, not to mention very late nights. However, in this case, it seems to be working out quite well, with The Enemy only tending to log on just as I'm about to turn in for the night anyway. Weekends may be a bit different, but we'll see.
As for counter-attack? Well, the corp, despite not really being a 0.0 Fleet Ops kind of thing, still contains a surprising amount of skills and resources, and we do outnumber the Aggressors, so who knows. I've no personal PvP experience in EVE, being of a pessimistic frame of mind when it comes to huge and massively crippling ship loss expenditure, but it might be fun to join in a counter-assault in one of the more disposable 'tackler' types of role.
Mind you, just to be on the safe side, I have started up a new Trading Based Alt, who is comfortably ensconced in one of the undeclarable Newbie Starter Corps, just in case things go badly enough to make the game effectively unplayable on my main, which can happen in the face of a large enough, organised enough and ruthless enough enemy. Rotas can be arranged and stations can be camped 24/7 if they're really sadistic. It'd be a shame to be paying for a game I couldn't play, so it's a useful insurance policy, to have someone else entirely that I can be, free from the rigours of war...
The War will continue until The Enemy decides they've had enough, and stop paying their One Million ISK a week. Watch this space...