After several sleepy months where quite a few more people than just me were fairly inactive in corp, IFW seems to be waking up again. I’ve logged on several nights now to multiple roams and ops going on, with corpies fairly busy with the business of killing folks.
It’s been an interesting experience being a pirate in low-sec, and not a Faction War pilot. When I first moved to low-sec, it was to join a militia. And I was then in militia for years, rarely every experiencing low-sec without the backdrop of FW. And while it’s fairly common for militia pvpers to also be pirates (for some they are more pirates who happen to be in militia…) it is a bit different experience being just a pirate.
Low-sec pirates, I have found, do a lot of ‘for the heck of it’ pvp. Where, they roam around and shoot things without any particular goals or objectives. While this was also the case a lot of the time in militia, we also had the backdrop of defending our home system, and occasionally taking systems away from the Amarr.
Lately, a lot of what we do that isn’t ‘random roaming’ ends up being taking moons and pocos. And a lot of the time, it’s not really because we need or specifically want the moon or poco location, but because we’re hopeful it will aggravate someone into fighting us.
“Creating content.” they call it. And while some people seem to think this is the definition of a sandbox –where users are left to their own devices and their own content-creation –it just makes me frustrated. I’m okay with there not being any ‘paths’ or linear steps toward some specific end game, but it seems like there should be more for people to fight over than this. And it seems that the players of a game shouldn’t be stuck resorting to poking each other for no particular reason in the hopes of temporarily making someone annoyed enough to cause an aggressive (and hopefully explosive) situation.
Sometimes, I miss my null-sec days. It has been many, many years since I lived in null-sec. And there were many things I hated about it. But I liked the campaigns, and the feeling that I was helping toward bigger goals than just killing random dudes I happened to come across whilst roaming about.
I often ponder over what the ‘magic’ ingredient was that made us fight over space and go to war with far less ‘carrots’ than we have today. Sometimes I think it has nothing to do with EVE, and everything to do with the people that play it.
Nowadays, people want cookies and they ponder the finer points of risk vs reward of their various endeavors. They shirk from activities they deem aren’t ‘worth it’ and min-max EVE’s game mechanics down into spreadsheets and numbers.
Nobody goes to war anymore just to beat their chests over the bodies of their defeated enemies. There’s not enough profit in it.
You bring up interesting points, Susan. When I left Minmatar FW with Parallax Shift back in November, I wasn't sure where it was going to lead either. In fact, when I heard my old corp, Banana Moon Industries, was switching from null renter to low sec piracy, I decided to make the switch on more familiar terms.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, the switch to pure piracy has been favorable for me and mine. Part of the difference your experiences and mine may be due to location. I believe your corp is situated in low sec FW space, among a large group of FW pilots as well as pvp neuts. This provides you a lot of opportunities for pvp, but in a pool of similarly inclined pvp'ers.
Our corps is based in a very small 'pocket' of low sec within a large field of high sec. We're essentially a small group of pvp'ers within a larger group of pve'ers. Thus, we tend to stand out more, for better or worse. Because of the smaller low sec home region, we've come to an understanding with the few others of our kind, and with the larger mass of those more comfortable with mining and whatnot. Our roams take us to other small low sec pockets and to null which is nearby. As many know, Provi is a great place for targets, but for us it's even better: it's personal. But that's another story.
War deccing is just another form of FW and we've been taking advantage of that too. The only real problem is sec status. Since we regularly have to traverse high sec between low or null sec, it requires diligent maintenance of sec status level. Tags are becoming very valuable over here. We have routes to lots of low sec regions so long as we stay above -3, so that seems to be the boundary for us.
Pvp is harder to come by out here, but the variety of pvp is interesting. Particularly funny is when an affiliated pve corp gets war decced and we end up assisting the pve'ers. The mercs often don't expect that. Even funnier is when they decc us.
We've had a lot of good interactions with both pvp'er and pve'ers out in our little patch of space. We're ruthless and then not depending on who we end up running into. Pirates are fun, but pirates with a sense of karma? That's pretty fun too.
The problem is that the blue doughnut no longer fights real campaigns either. Coalitions don't fight for control over regions any more, they contest systems and reinforce structures just to provoke that same fight.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to win a battle you'd headshot the enemy FC, wing commanders and anyone else not a line grunt first instead of raging in anger when someone shoots an enemy FC because the f*cker is out in front of his fleet and the only one within fall-off range.
"Nobody goes to war anymore just to beat their chests over the bodies of their defeated enemies. There’s not enough profit in it."
ReplyDeleteThe ones that did that got murdered by the ones that didn't. War became a business, carefully strategic and calculated for effect. You ask, perhaps, why everyone doesn't just stop considering it as a business and commit to armageddon? Well, someone wouldn't, just for the sake of extracting tears from everyone else with massive dominance. Such is EVE Online.