EVE is Unforgiving, Alright
After weeks of carebearing in high-sec space, I finally had my first PvP encounter. I got popped in 0.4 space by a gatecamp consisting of 3 battleships, 2 battlecruisers and a speed-pimped cruiser acting as a tackler. A hundred millon ISK worth of equipment down the drain. Oh joy.
The experience was rather anti-climactic - my Drake battlecruiser didn’t even stand a fighting chance. So lesson one here is that EVE isn’t about fairness, it’s about might makes right. Lesson two is that if you’re acting like a retard, you die. From hindsight, I have been acting pretty retarded. I did check the map for recent combat activity but I disregarded clear warning signs, like that lonely red-blinking guy at the jump gate acting as a lookout. Or the containers labeled with clear warnings that there is pirate activity in the region. I guess I was just overly confident because I had entered that particular system several times without any trouble. Lesson three is: don’t be too confident, retard.
Losing 100 million ISK (after insurance pay-out) was a pretty big deal for me. Level 3 missions aren’t all that lucrative and the ship I lost represented a significant time investment. Yet, I found the experience less infuriating than being steamrolled by an Albion zerg every time I poked my nose out of the castle gates in DAoC. There is something inherently attractive about a game in which getting killed has consequences, unlike PvP in DAoC or WoW. This might not come as much of a surprise to seasoned PvPers but I’ve been trodding the Path of the Carebear for most of my MMO life. This is all new to me and I like it.
I’ve also been seeing a few visually more impressive missions than the usual assortment of ship and generic objects in deadspace pockets. Huge wrecks, enormous space stations, dust clouds… I wish there was more content like this. Running missions is dreafully boring. There are too few of them and that makes it every bit as repetitive as grinding always the same mobs in conventional MMORPGs. This isn’t helped by the fact that the missions aren’t particularly challenging.
Nothing I’ve encountered in level 3 missions so far can crack my Drake’s shield tank, and I usually aggro the whole stage and trigger als many waves as early as possible, just to have all the ship wrecks bunched up nicely for easier looting. It’s like playing in god mode, much better than running missions in an actively armor-tanked Gallente drone boat.
The Drake is also one of the most visually appealing ships in the game. It’s shiny, metallic and sleek and not as assymetrical as most other Caldari ships. I find it a bit curious that most spaceships in EVE, a game that is all about spaceships, look like crap. The Gallente Dominix looks literally like a sack of shit. Most Caldari ships look horribly deformed and Minimatar ships are essentially flying trash heaps that, admittedly, have a nice hobo charm to them. I hope that the upcoming graphics engine upgrade improves things but CCP will probably retain the basic design of all ships and some of these are simply beyond redemption.
