EVE General Discussion

I’ve just come back from an alternate reality! And of course, the thing I did while in an alternate reality was play EvE. Let me tell you about it.

Life for a Belligerent Undesirable like me in alternate reality eve is very difficult. Highsec has a half-dozen or so associations of corps. Within an association, they share intel about scammers, war targets, and other unsavoury types, so it’s very difficult to catch someone with their pants down. There are still some unaffiliated characters to target, but they’re few and far between. The reason for this is probably that being in an NPC corp means the player forgoes actual ship bonuses that are part of the mechanics in alternate universe eve. So most of the characters you see in NPC corps are someone’s scouting alt, and treated with suspicion. Corporations at war typically get help with scouting and logi from the other corps in their association, as well as direct intervention. Occasionally this will escalate into two associations going to war with each other.

I don’t know exactly how this state of affairs came to be, but I can point to a couple of places where alternate reality eve went in different directions than our eve.

One of the earliest and most significant changed I learned about was how the Lofty scam was handled. Instead of the scam being nerfed, what happened instead is that the corporations a character was at war with became part of the character info you got when you double-clicked their name. People still fall for it occationally, but only when they’re quite new and they tend to lose a cruiser. Much beyond that they’ve usually been brought in by a corp and been taught how to avoid the scam.

That trend continued for many other things that caught a nerf here. People falling victim to various tricks were just given more information to help avoid them, either by CCP (having everyone’s kills and deaths viewable by everyone in game was a big move) or by their association. As another example, the standings interface was made much more robust. Instead of simply putting someone on a scale of red-blue, there are several more colors that people can use for whatever they like. I believe the common color used for scammers is brown.

While I was there, I went to engage in my usual shenanigans and fell flat on my face each time. I went to wardec some corps and discovered that any time I went within ten jumps of a target, someone in their association noted who I was at war with and warned them. A few times I caught nothing, but more often than not I landed in a trap and got murdered. I tried to safari some dudes, but given the closeness of corps, if I gave a victim any time to react they called in nearby help, who typically landed in cheap logi cruisers. And I couldn’t ever use that character to safari any corp in that association ever again.

I’m glad to be back, and hope that our eve never goes that direction.

Yeah! How dare that dude have an opinion!

I am confused about what kind of guy the alternate Solstice Project would be ...

Not sure if tears, or ramblings....