Nothing of Value, Part 1

Agent Bob Painter reports a significant victory in the struggle for highsec:

Bob and his friends successfully detained and destroyed an 8.7 billion isk freighter. The freighter pilot was attempting to illegally transport its cargo without a permit--and all while AFK. Nothing we haven't seen before. But what makes this kill unusual is that we have the opportunity to read about the battle from the freighter's perspective.

The freighter pilot was the alt of an EVE blogger, one Kirith Kodachi. He wrote at length about his taste of elite PvP.

"I planned out my purchases, set the buy orders for minerals, and headed to Jita for the more esoteric planetary parts. On the way back I manually piloted gate to gate always on the lookup for problems... but after I passed Udema I got relaxed and I allowed myself to get distracted for 15 minutes after warping to the Balle gate."

Kirith freely admitted that he was relaxed and distracted--that is to say, AFK. His opponents on the battlefield were actually playing the game, which put them at an advantage.

"I got back to my computer and my heart froze: a Macharial was yellow boxing me and had bumped me 76 km off the gate.

Oh Shit."

That sensation is the effect of emergent content in a competitive PvP sandbox game. EVE shouldn't be relaxing.

"I knew I was already fucked but I closed the client anyway and logged in an alt that I zoomed over to Balle. I tried to bump the Mach away from bumping me but it was a lost cause. I watched sadly as another newbie ship suicide ran my freighter to keep the timer going.

The Mach pilot opened up a convo with me and asked for a billion ISK to let it go. 'I already have a fleet of catalysts on the way, but you pay me and we'll just gank something in Udema.' I said no figuring that paying it would only add to my total loss. There is no trust in EVE.

I made a counter offer. 'Let me go and then I'll give you 1 bil.'

'That's not how this works,' he replied.

It was worth a shot."

The bumper performed admirably. And he saw right through the carebear's deception.

"Finally 15 minutes later (and 25 minutes after I logged out) the catalyst fleet arrived. The end loss was almost 9 billion ISK, of which 1 billion came out my pocket (for the ship), the rest hitting the bottom line of the corporation.

Later I picked myself back up, got back to Jita, got a new freighter, another load of parts, and even more carefully made my way back to base, ready to kill the client at the first sign of anyone looking at me sideways. I made it back without incident.

High sec sucks."

Kirith made the classic mistake of choosing to AFK autopilot through hostile territory with an anti-tanked 8.7 billion isk freighter. Naturally, he blamed highsec.

An unfair characterization. Highsec is only as stupid as the player. Even so, EVE players are expected to make mistakes--and to learn from them.

A few weeks later, Kirith lost another one, this time in the freighter graveyard of Niarja. Surely he learned his lesson this time?

Nope. The game was too stupid to learn, it seems.

Kirith returned to Twitter to announce his departure from the game.

Though he didn't deny that he was rage-quitting, he blamed EVE's game mechanics for failing to save his ship from the people who were actually at their keyboards.

This time, Kirith claimed that he wasn't relaxed or distracted; he was a fully attentive player. However, he made no attempt to take any of the precautions that freighter pilots are expected to make when traveling through New Order space. Instead, he relied on the tactic of logging off after he was bump-tackled.

As everyone knows, logging off does little good after your opponent already has you in his clutches. Just ask CYV0K, who lost his titan--the first ever built--while logged off, way back in 2006. When a freighter is bump-tackled, gankers typically have one cheap ship designated to fire upon it. This activates an aggression timer that prevents a logged-off freighter from eventually disappearing. That's why the list of killers on a freighter killmail often has a rookie ship or other low-damage dealer at the bottom.

This mechanic has been around forever--and Kirith was entirely familiar with it. As he wrote in the blog post of his earlier encounter:

"I knew I was already fucked but I closed the client anyway and logged in an alt that I zoomed over to Balle. I tried to bump the Mach away from bumping me but it was a lost cause. I watched sadly as another newbie ship suicide ran my freighter to keep the timer going."

In other words, Kirith knew ahead of time that his cowardly log-off maneuver would do nothing to save his ship. Yet it was the only tactic he could be bothered to use--even while sending a blingy freighter through Niarja.

Though you've probably never heard of Kirith, he is not unknown among the EVE community. And when the collective carebears of EVE learned that gankers had driven him from the game, there would be hell to pay.

To be continued...