Banter 21: Low-sec

Welcome to the twenty-first installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month topic comes to us from @ZoneGhost who a few month ago asked “Is Low Sec the forgotten part of EVE Online?” Is it? I’d like us to explore this even further. Is Low Sec being treated differently by CCP Games than Null Sec (Zero-Zero) or Empire space is? Can one successfully make a living in these unsecured systems where neither Alliance nor Concord roam to enforce their laws? What’s needed? Or is everything fine as it is?

Bit of a short response this month. Running low on free time once again. *sigh*

I’m fairly sure that from a pirating, or dedicated anti-pirating perspective, low security space needs some love. From my perspective however, it’s fine.

Don’t get me wrong – if the people that ply their trade there all hours of their gametime deem that it needs a boost, then I’m sure that it does, but from my limited werebear perspective, I’m quite happy with it, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts.

I haven’t touched PI down in these parts, so I can’t comment there. I have dabbled in low security exploration and plex running, missioning and anti-probing as well as a bit of trading and anti-piracy. There’s a lot to offer if you like varied gameplay.

If you just want one particular thing though, I suspect you need to be a pirate, or stay out of there entirely, because you won’t manage more than a few missions before someone comes along to say “hi” in a red-blinky kind of way.

If you do like varied gameplay though, its well worth going. The mission rewards are so much greater, and you’re practically forced into varied gameplay and keeping on your toes.

To answer the questions posed though: I get the impression that yes, low-sec has been lacking in additional features for a while, and in that regard yes, it could do with a boost. I however, am pretty happy with my time when I’m livin’ rough in Molden Heath.

Other Participants

Eve retrospective: Jovian go boom (part 2)

So a Jovian walks into a bar…

And explodes!

A quick tl;dr recap, since its been a while: A Jovian named Misu Baniya was mucking about and ended up exploding himself all over the galaxy into pilots’ hangars.

Thanks to the Jove being gigantic veiny-headed science nerds, they determined that unlike his nursery rhyme compadre, Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s spaceships and all the king’s spud-faced mutants could put him back together again. Thus began the great body part harvest by representatives of the four races. Each were eager to earn favour from said spud-faced nerds, hoping for riches, technology and glory for their empire. Rawr!

And so we begin (or should that be continue?)…

Rounding up of parts began in earnest. Some beginning before there was any kind of announcement to do with Baniya’s reconstruction. For a while, collecting the parts was a simple task. A lot of pilots were young and naïve in those days and readily gave up their parts… Until they realised the parts may have value, of course.

Then began the brokering. Parts were exchanged for isk, for ships and modules, for promises of shares in whatever reward was forthcoming, and even for other body parts.

Since each represented faction was to collect a different body part, it made no sense to hold on to a Cerebral Slice if you were Minmatar and your Gallente buddies had some Bone Splinters just taking up space on the mantelpiece. So trades were not uncommon, though naturally for New Eden, each party would attempt to broker a better deal for themselves.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you would find old rivalries cropping up. For example, the Caldari – who were by far and away the most organised in this effort – which subsequently secured their victory – would purposefully horde Cerebral Slices (Gallente), unless they could trade for Liver Bile (Caldari) at a ratio greatly in their favour.

Omir Sarikusa: Do not piss in his cheerios!

And then there were the Blood Raiders, who also managed to secure a large collection of body parts – with particular focus Blood Drops, which makes sense really. Subsequently – for a time – The Bleak Lands were beset by capsuleers, descending upon the cultists like a nest of angry hornets. This lasted for a while until their beloved leader, Omir Sarikusa, proclaimed that the Blood Raiders had completed their collection. Whether this, or the overwhelming influx of capsuleers was the reason for their stopping we shall unlikely ever know.

Intergalactic body part amnesty day

Initially, the Empires were buying back the body parts through the open market. This soon took a downward turn as those ‘trusty’ scammers got in on the act and started to cause their usual hullabaloo.

An alternative was quickly instated. A particular day was set aside where all ‘batches’ of parts could be returned to a commissioner from your race. These were NPCs played by the then-active AURORA division of ISD (live events team, basically), and you could trade the parts with them throughout the day. As an incentive, 20mil isk was handed out for each complete batch.

An extra reward was implied from the start for those that donated full batches, but no word on what the reward was was forthcoming, only that the overall ‘winner’ of the collection would gain great favour from the Jove.

The batch-prize was BPCs of a prototype cloaking device, something that until that point was not available in-game. The more batches donated, the more runs you would have on your BPC/s. Each of the cloaking devices initially sold for 120-150mil, and stabilised at 100mil after a day or two. This was however, a massive amount of isk in the days before faction/officer mods and lvl4 missions.

What happened to the other collectors’ stash I have no idea, but personally I made a lot of donators very happily invisible.

Adrielle Firewalker > Commissioner, I do not wish for money.
Commissioner Yonel Saktar > Your nobility astounds me, Sister Adrielle.
* Commissioner Yonel Saktar bows deeply. *
* Adrielle Firewalker bows *
Adrielle Firewalker > It is an honour to serve our people.

Aww, all better

Upon revival, Baniya began his visits anew, but in addition to visiting heads of state, he visited heads of capsuleer alliances, much to the frustration and annoyance of the official government bodies:

If they’re trying to make a point, I don’t know what it is. Sure, since the ISD came about the eggers have spread all over the place, but putting those ‘societies’ of theirs up there in lawless space on the same pedestal as us? If I didn’t know better, I’d say the Jovians were deliberately trying to undermine the rich history and traditions of our civilizations. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced that’s not what they’re trying to do. – anonymous Federation statesman

According to public records, Baniya visited the following deep-space alliances:

3rd Front Alliance
NORAD
Phoenix Alliance
Coalition of Deklein
Coalition of Free Stars
Curse Alliance
Fountain Alliance
JQA
Stain Alliance
Xetic Federation/Immensea Federation
The Fade Union

All of these entities were added to the Jovian Register of Sovereign Nation-states, to the further annoyance of politicians from the four CONCORD-sanctioned nation-states.

There is no society, no populace to speak of, no national customs, no real history, no common origin, no language. How, then, can these alliances be thought of as nations? What possible permutation of the definition can give rise to an initiative such as this? – Federation Senator Traude Bonailles

I guess some people are never happy…

Resources

Banter 20: Scamwiches

Welcome to the twentieth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

With the recent completion of the 3rd installment of the Hulkageddon last month, @CyberinEVE, author of Hands Off, My Loots!, asks: “Griefing is a very big part of EVE. Ninja Salvaging, Suicide Ganking, Trolling, and Scamming are all a very large part of the game. What do you think about all these things? You can talk about one, or all…but just let us know your overall opinion on Griefing, and any recommendations you may have to change it if you think it’s needed.”

Take a facepalm, or some “d’oh!”, or even some ragequit, and place it between two freshly baked slabs of stupidity, and you have a scamwich. You can even spice it up a little with a few slices of ‘over-tired’, a dash of ‘drank-too-many-beers’ or even a healthy ‘it looked good on paper’ salad. The constant here though, is the bread, which in this analogy is the stupid (in case you missed it).

In order for scams to work, someone needs to be stupid. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the victim is stupid, but rather they have to have a stupid moment, or act stupid. This happens to everyone at some point. From playing when overly tired and buying that expensive shuttle because it looked like it was 9k rather than the 9m you got billed (*raises hand of shame*), to investing billions into banks that eventually go belly-up when a disgruntled caretaker/director has had enough (*retracts hand of shame*).

Your isk, and your time in the game are your responsibility. There literally is no point in crying over spilt milk. Once you’ve fallen prey to a scammer, that’s it. That isk, or that [insert asset type here] is something you’ll never be seeing again. Even the months you invested in training that promising young recruit only to have them go all Mr Hyde on you and nick the contents of the corp hangar – assets and time – all gone.

I suppose this is the antithesis of a previous post where I proudly proclaimed that you should trust everyone within reason and just use your common sense more. The most important parts of that sentence are common sense and within reason. There is – and always should be – various degrees or levels of trust. You generally trust that when you’re crossing the road with the green man/walk sign that nobody is going to run you over. Likewise, you generally trust that in high-sec space, nobody is going to shoot at you without sanction to do so (or without sufficient reward to negate the punishment for trying). But, if you invest in that not-a-pyramid scheme Yvonne from marketing said was a sure deal, or invest your isk in an IPO, you run a reasonable risk that you’ll never see your money again.

Who is to blame in these latter examples? Is it Yvonne from marketing? Nope, its you, ya big ninny! Use your noggin! As I said before; scams work because people have moments of stupidity. As Eve has grown, there’s been more people to have stupid moments, and so there’s more scammers. You’ll never be rid of them because they ply their trade by perfectly legitimate means, and people are inherently greedy. This in turn leads to them taking risks that they ordinarily would not.

Other stuff

You’ll find that a little common sense (and occasionally some spite) goes a long way for other ‘unfair’ things in New Eden.

Griefing – Don’t rise to it? Go somewhere else for a while, or play something else for a bit. There’s other games than Eve, or even (le gasp!) the outside world. I hear pubs are a great place to socialise and get drunk. Its like Eve, but with less PVP.
Ninja Salvaging – This is the one I don’t get. So many people whine about it. Just shoot your salvage as they get near it. You don’t get the profits, but you do get the satisfaction of denying them the same. They’ll soon find someone stupider and/or whinier to bother.
Suicide Ganking – This won’t happen unless you’re stupid enough to fly a kestrel filled with PLEX or similar, but really… Who’s stupid enough to do that?
Trollololololing – A bit like griefing, but easier. Just ignore it. Sometimes trolls are not immediately obvious, but it usually becomes clear after a short while. This is when you should just walk away, do not under any circumstances attempt to feed the troll unless you are a) baiting it, b) a cannibal troll.

That’s all there is to it really. My down and dirty overview of naughty things in Eve… Not those naughty things, you pervert!

I wanted to do something much longer and more in-depth about human nature and anonymity, but last week my computer sort of melted and I didn’t have the time or motivation to do some kind of epic, so I’ll be saving it for another time – you lucky, lucky people!

20 Pages
« Previous
1
…
10
11
12
13
14
…
20
Next »

Chocolate Heaven