The Cutting Edge of Technology (also about ganking in EVE Online)

This week was kind of mixed. I installed my new SSD and somehow cut my finger when connecting it after the physical part was done. Then my lazy cat shed her fur all over my keyboard and after cleaning everything up, I somehow totally destroyed one of my favourite glasses. It just fell and shattered like a piece of ice. But then I had some fun driving through our forest with my new bike, so in the end it all balanced out.

My sweet little kitty last summer.

Sometimes it's just a up and down like that. Like the day I tried out HighSec-Ganking in EVE Online: A game for strange people.

I found the concept interesting enough: You take a destroyer, you seek out an autopiloting pilot asleep at the weel somewhere, you shoot him. He explodes, then CONCORD drops in and makes you explode. Cue your second character with another ship to loot the wrecks.

Since your ship will be rather cheap and utilitarian and your victims will often be quite lavishly outfit (not to mention carrying profitable cargo to steal), you step away with a profit even though you sacrificed your ship to the space police. Sweet!

Of course this kind of ganking is more complicated as I make it sound and it works best in teams instead of alone with your alts. But that's the principle at least: Sacrifice a cheap ship to the police to blow up a ship to steal expensive modules/cargo. An element of random chance is added to this -some stuff will be destroyed instead of dropping. That's the price you pay for shooting someones ship with weapons, you vile scum!

Back on track, during my "let's do random shit and see what's fun"-phase I tried out ganking, too. I made a PVP-alt character, trained her up in some essential stuff and moved her to a nice position. I scouted a bit around, I bought a Coercer (since I didn't like the Catalyst and didn't want to use a Thrasher, two destroyers far more able to do solo-ganks) fitted out for maximum damage and after I had everything to start hunting down the peasants of HighSec, I found out a small, but important fact:

Ganking was incredibly boring for me. Turns out, I had entirely the wrong temperament to sit around waiting for targets all day. In a group I'd probably had idle chatter to hold my attention, but to be a solo-ganker my attention span was just too short. After not shooting a single target (incompetence and boredom are a bad mix) I was waffling around a bit since my PVP-alt suddenly had no reason to exist anymore.

But then someone reminded me of Faction Warfare: This was the kind of random chaos which sounded attractive to me, so I relocated my PVP-alt to an appropriate FW-station and started her career as valiant defender of the Amarr. FW turned out to be quite fun, even if I kept and keep losing a lot of ships, due to being horrible at PVP. Right now I don't have the time to play around with her and her stash of cheap frigates a lot, but it's nice once in a while to just log in and have guaranteed fights.

In the end, bad and good balanced each other out.

Wow, this sounded way less pretentious in my head.