Out of Pod Experience

I fell in love with this game. I really did. The butterfly effect commercial is what got me into Eve Online. It gave me a sense of epic purpose and really made me want to help any other players I came across. And I didn't mind losing ships to better skilled players or eve gate camps, because I was having fun and experiencing the game. I even liked the idea of scamming corporations through espionage being allowed, i thought it was cool, and still do. I expected the game to be difficult to both get into and to play even after learning a lot, and it was and is, and I like the challenge to better my skills as a pilot and learn to fly smart and pick my fights and smell danger a star system away. i thought I could do anything and be anything I wanted in the great universe! I'm no stranger to MMOs or trolls or scams. I began playing MMOs when I was ten years old. I know every game has a group of bad apples. But I am a resilient person and could always find my way through the bad apples and find a few good ones. For the last month it been nothing but one bad experience with people after another. I tried to help everyone I met, only to come up with the short end of the stick 9 times out of 10.But I pressed on, always looking forward and I kept hoping I would come across a group of players who shared my interests and whom I could play with. I kept having bad experiences though. There were still good ones, like my introduction to Faction Warfare.

When i got into FW I was happy to finally find a way to get some pvp action cooperatively and competitively. But I found mostly these FW corps I was going through had very few online and those online players would jsut dock all day. Then I started losing more ships than my funds could sustain, so I purchased a PLEX and sold it on the market and bought a whole fleet of cheap ships. This left me sitting around 300 million ISK. After making some sales and running tons of missions and a few plexes I was sitting around 400 million. I was left thinking how could I make more money? I stalked the auction houses and market features of MMOs quite a bit and burned myself out on it, so that was really out of the question unless I found a GREAT deal.

Fast forward a week. I find my self docked in jita preparing to purchase and transport 15 cheap kestrels and their fittings to a distant star system in a far off region, with the intent of sustaining a week or two at least of vicious fighting against the gallente and minmatar scum. I see in local chat a contract for a raven navy issue blueprint. i click the contract and see the item is raven navy issue blueprint copy. Right clicking the item I show info and view it's market details. 935mil to sell this bad boy!!! Then i see the contract is for 370 million ISK. My heart jumps. I could buy this and make a triple profit. but what about the seller? Surely he made and error and mistyped the info. i try to talk to him in local. No good, chat's moving to fast. I try to open a convo to let him know. Again no luck, he rejects it. With money signs in my eyes and the chachings of cash registers and gold coins in my ears, I purchase the blue print. But not before double, then triple checking that this particular item will sell for 935 million ISK. i googled the item, I found posts about selling ti for various prices, all of them high prices. I thought I had hit jack pot. I accepted the contract, got my item, and then, to my dismay, was unable to sell it. What had happened? Was my client bugged? I reopened the client. No difference. I hopped in rookie chat, explained my situation, linked my item, and then found out it was a copy. Of an original. Worthless. Only good for one run and unsaleable on the market.

I had been scammed. Essentially losing a month's worth of isk earned and 15 dollars on top of that. I had been scammed. it was not an epic, months long act of espionage. It was not daring or exciting. There was no adrenaline pumping. It was not what I had been led to believe scamming was in this particular MMO. It was just another ****** experience with another player. Sure this game is difficult to start up, it can be overwhelming with so much freedom and some many things to do, but that freedom of choice is also exhilarating and, I think, refreshing compared to other MMOs. I chose to use this freedom to help others as much as I could. And others use this freedom to help themselves. But that scam was not the final bad experience. The straw that broke the camel's back, is when I asked in Rookie Chat what the hell was going, I was the bad guy for wanting to know what, if anything, could be done to get my money back. I was the stupid noob that should have paid attention and should have known all about blueprints. I was the ******* idiot that should be banned for wanting retribution for being scammed. I was the moron who should kill himself for not using my brain. My entire time playing this game I have been the noob, the idiot, the moron, and the bad guy. All because I could not see the one fault with this game: The people who play it. Part of me wants to push on and move past all this because the game itself is so fantastic, but a larger part of me just wants to call it quits and find a different game to play.

I've seen more than a few threads about how to get new players to keep playing after their first weeks, and have seen chats in game go on and on and on about it. People suggest add even more tutorials, make the game easier for newbs, give newbs 'care packages', and more that i cannot recall off the top of my head right now. The thing that would really make me stay though, is if it were a hell of a lot easier to find like minded players. As in, players who aren't narcissistic or sociopathic or outright lying douches. I will play until my Pilot's License expires, and then I think I'm done. Thanks for reading my story.

-Z

That's what you get for being greedy.

This is why I support scammers including margin trade scammers. The ghouls like OP looking out for people who make "mistakes" maybe entering a number wrong because they got carpel tunnel or bad at maths, and these dollar sign eyed vultures swoop down and take advantage. Then they claim THEY are the victim. It's ghoulish and makes my skin crawl.

Scammers prey on those with greed and laziness, they are the predators of the predators and I support them.

To be fair though, it's not just greed, it's inexperience. He does not know how the market and contracts tie together, so when he shows info on a item, he expects that to be a representation of the item he is buying, as would most newbies. This guy is now likely to leave, which means one less eve player, just so a scammer could make what is essentially pocket change. Scammers alienate newbies for a quick bit of isk. Supporting them is supporting the prevention of the growth of the eve playerbase.
And I know you'll all spew out the BS about how nobody wants this guy anyway and how he's clearly a WOW player in disguise and blah blah blah, I've heard it all before.
At the end of the day, had the guys in the rookie chat not acted like a bunch of pricks, it sounds like this wouldn't have been an issue, just a learning experience, but I've seen that chat, and for a place that's supposed to be for helping newbies it does quite the opposite.

I don't know about you, but I like EVE. And I want other people to like EVE. Situations like this don't help that.

Probably didn't even think to ask as the distinction between copies and originals only became apparent to him after he made the mistake.