A Blockade Against Bot-Aspirancy

The New Order of Highsec is the primary source of innovation and emergent gameplay in EVE today. And we need to be, if we're going to achieve our goal of absolute Code compliance. Our Agents are constantly adapting to find new methods by which they can eradicate all the various forms of bot-aspirancy.

From time to time, an Agent feels a calling to concentrate on a particular type of ship or activity. Agent V-ktor Dolus felt inspired to bring the Blockade Runners ever more deeply into the fold.

As a consequence of our freighter ganking over the past few years, many haulers have switched over to Deep Space Transports. They couldn't run or hide from our vigilant Agents; we've been seeing a lot of blingy DSTs show up on recent Kills of the Week posts. Blockade Runners are similar to DSTs, but they come equipped with covert ops cloaks.

When used as CCP intended, Blockade Runners are essentially uncatchable in highsec: Immediately upon entering a system, a Blockade Runner can initiate a warp to the next gate and activate its covops cloak before being locked. Since there are no bubbles in highsec, it should be smooth sailing for the BRs.

However, as our Agents discovered, many Blockade Runners don't bother using their cloaks--even when manually warping from gate to gate instead of autopiloting. But why? Because they assume highsec is safe. Therefore, they disdain the simple task of activating their cloak for each jump, despite the near-invincibility that would be granted them for doing so.

That's bot-aspirancy, my friends.

Agent V-ktor and friends tested the Blockade Runners by attempting to lock them upstream. If the ship was lockable, that meant it wasn't immediately activating its cloak upon entry to each system. The sentence for this crime was death.

One after another, the cloakable ships fell in battle. The game mechanics should've given our adversaries an insurmountable advantage. But the Code gave our Agents the victory anyway.

V-ktor used a combination of traditional gate gankers working with a small (but armored) fast-locking ship acting as tackler to quickly interrupt warp initiation. The results were impressive. Needless to say, these haulers didn't expect suicide gankers to tackle them; they assumed safety while manually warping from gate to gate.

Each Blockade Runner was sent a special questionnaire, which politely reminded them that they could've escaped had they used their cloaking device. Naturally, the carebears were also asked why they'd chosen not to cloak.

The vast majority of the Blockade Runners were too stubborn and vain to answer the questionnaire. Those who did respond had no choice but to grudgingly concede that they'd been bested by our Agents.

Let all the potentially cloaky haulers be on notice: The Code requires not only that you manually warp instead of autopiloting; you must also use your covops cloak just like you would outside of highsec.

Elite PvP wins again! What a wonderful lesson for the Blockade Runners to learn. I wonder, how long until the pilots of these advanced ships complain that ganking them makes new players unsubscribe from EVE?