YARRRRRRRRRRR! I say ...

For the second time in my life, I have gone full-on pirate.

Usually, in my persona as the Modeller, I am about building things.  Primarily miniature starships, mecha, and the like; but that also extends to my tenure in the EvE Online, where on one of my characters I build virtual starships of various sorts stretching from small frigates on up to massive dreadnaughts.  Even though I cannot watch that process in action, unlike a model coming together on my workbench, there is still that which is engrossing about the process.  About taking all different sorts of materials, and using one’s skills to put that together in something … neat.  The creative process fully at work.

However, there is another side to things, as always.  The opposite side of the creation coin is, of course, destruction.  As this is where my tenure in EvE has … well, for lack of a better image, sprouted its’ devil’s horns and bloomed into full malevolence in a way it never did as a stupid kid in my far youth.

Oh, I had my moments.  To wit: The very first model the Modeller ever possessed was that of an Eastern Airlines Boeing 727.  My father – from his own youth a very talented hobbyist himself, when he wanted/wants to be – had assembled it with a great deal of attention and care to details, as a present for me on my return from the hospital after some corrective surgery I’d had to have.  I was all of four years old at the time – and just as appreciative as a kid could be … but it was the appreciation for a toy, not a beautifully crafted plastic scale model.  Stupid kid, I was simply too young to realize what I had.  Which is why at the very first opportunity I had, I took that model outside and subjected it to a “hard landing” on our driveway (or maybe it was the sidewalk; kinda hard, forty years later, to remember exactly which).

Well, needless to say, the landing gear didn’t survive, and the smart paint job and detail work my father had applied was likewise … damaged.  Cue dumb kid running, tears streaming down face and broken jet in hand, to his daddy wailing for him to “Fix it!!!!11!11.”  Of course, he did; and the model was restored … although not quite as completely as it was after freshly made.  (My father was no fool; he knew quite well indeed that there would be more “hard landings,” to come, and so he repaired the landing gear with the doors glued shut.  And he was right.  A “schmott guy,” as one of my favorite online comics would say …)  Little did I know I should’ve tied the skull and crossbones bandanna around my head right then and there …

Thus began a long history of breaking such things, and reveling in stories of some pretty creative destruction.  Like the cousins I once visited out in La-La Land (Los Angeles, CA, to the rest of you) who told me about the model of the PT-109 they assembled with a built-in bomb (aka CO2 cartridge from a pneumatic BB gun, with an M80 attached to it) which got its one and only test run in a nearby lake.  The only remnant they ever found was a small shard of the CO2 cartridge.  (I still get a hoot out of that story.)

Likewise in EvE Online.

When I first started playing the game, I didn’t really get this – the whole reveling in destruction thing that so characterizes EvE as the sandbox it is.  The hobbyist and previous gamer in me made me out to be a carebear, originally (we’ve talked about that a little in a previous entry – someone more interested in industrial and manufacturing pursuits in the game).  But then I got an education: Breaking things in that game is pretty damned fun, too.

I still remember my first ‘suicide gank’ (for the uneducated amongst you, this is when you attack and hopefully destroy someone else’s ship in the game in an area where you know there will be an equivalent response from non-player forces that will destroy your own ship in response) as clearly as if it happened yesterday.  As “carebear” as I still was at that time, there were nonetheless things that offended me enough to want to … well, correct them.  It was, perhaps, not unexpected that one of the things that fit this bill was ‘bot’ mining.  As someone who was still interested in that live practice myself, from time to time, it irritated me that there were people or entities who fielded multiple accounts that they would set up to be run by software (instead of themselves) and use them to mine out all the resources of particular systems.  Not only did this harm guys like me trying to do it the right way – it meant one of my primary means of making money (at the time) was lessened – it was also against the game’s EULA.

At first, I tried to go about it the right way, by reporting the practice when I found it to the game’s managers.  I figured surely they would take care of people who shown to be violating the EULA.  When this didn’t happen, I was mad as a wet hornet.  What the hell?  People could flaunt the game’s license, and when proof of it was presented the people running the game wouldn’t do anything about it?  Outraged, I spoke with another in-game friend who proceeded to teach me a number of VERY valuable lessons.

The first was that you can, to a certain extent, police things yourself.  While the in-game popo will punish you for the attempt afterward, they cannot and will not stop you from make an attempt to do so.  The underlying theme here was that NO place is safe in the game; if some one – some nasty pirate (or group of same) – wants to kill on your ship bad enough, he can … assuming you ever undock it.  And if you’re spending $15.00 on the game, you will.  Oh yes … you will.

The second lesson I learned was that doing this – pvp, player versus player, whether the other guy is a willing participant in the act or not – is pretty darned fun.  In fact, it’s really darned fun!  This is the central tenet of EvE, what everyone really says EvE as an acronym stands for – Everyone versus Everyone.  The ultimate sandbox.  As long as you abide by the game’s EULA, you can do whatever you want with or to whomever you want.  Test your own skill.  Make it happen.  And oh, the excitement!  Even though that first time out was against a target I knew wasn’t paying attention, the adrenaline rush I got off that first time was heady stuff indeed.  And well worth doing what needed doing to repeat it.  I got my Yarr on, and it was FUN!  Since that day, I’ve tied the bandanna around my head and hoisted the Jolly Rodger on a number of occasions, in a number of different ways.  But never in that same, ultimately piratical way of being willing to throw away an asset of my own for the sole purpose of destroying someone else’s stuff who wasn’t also looking to do likewise to me.

Cue present day.

For going on five years, now, there has been a player-driven event in the game called Hulkagedden.  The sole purpose of this game is the destruction of as many of a certain class of spaceship as possible.  It has achieved a great deal of popularity among a certain segment of EvE’s population that has resulted in each subsequent iteration of it growing in scope and savagery over its predecessor events.  There are even prizes given out for various achievements in the effort.  Not that such would be needed to inspire these activities to happen – there are plenty of people do them all the time, pretty much just … because.

Anyway, on previous years, I had given a little thought to indulging my inner Yarr! In Hulkageddon, but never got around to it.  This year, however, has proven to be different – as we speak, I’m hip-deep in the happy violence of this event.  The blood is in the water, and this shark is circling.  And the blue flashes are so pretty!

Oh, I’m not so sanguine about the happiness of my victims, mind you, but that doesn’t stop me.  Not anymore.  If I had tried to do this long ago, after I’d first picked up the game, it would’ve been different.  Before that first suicide gank, I would’ve told you I was thoroughly anti-pirate.  I would’ve felt guilty about  creating those blue explosions.  That all began to change that day I blew up that first ship.  Oh, how the shoe – the boot, perhaps? – is on a different foot, now.  You see, starting then and over the course of many subsequent combats also I have come to learn the last and most important of the valuable lessons to surviving in this game:  EvE means never having to say you’re sorry … not if you don’t want to.

And for this … I don’t want to.  Yarr!