In EVE, both those kinds of players have to co-exist, and sometimes it’s not pretty.
The most-made-fun-of chunk of the “don’t bother me” crowd are miners. They sit in asteroid belts (pretty much every system has some) and slowly convert the asteroids there into asteroid ore, which they then refine into minerals and sell on the open market. The mining part of this process is incredibly hands-off. If you want to be reallllly lazy about it, you probably don’t need to touch EVE more than once every few minutes. You can more or less AFK your way to a decent pile of money.
Unsurprisingly, this drives the more combat oriented players a little nuts. Some of them, particularly pirates, will do anything that messes up the experience of so-called “carebears”. Carebears tend to hang out in the relative safety of systems with security levels of 0.5 or greater. The presence of CONCORD — EVE’s computer-controlled police force — gives them a feeling of safety. As the pirate are fond to point out, though, CONCORD punishes, it does not protect. If you start shooting someone in a system with security status > 0.5, CONCORD arrives in well under a minute and blows the criminals to bits with overwhelming force. The problem for miners is that their ships have essentially no defensive capabilities, and a small dedicated crew of pirates can easily blow up a 200M+ ISK mining ship before the police arrive. To make it worse, insurance pays out even on ships blown up by the police for criminal behavior, so pirates lose only 30%-40% of their investment (the up front insurance cost) in the ships they’re using. This is usually a tiny fraction of the money lost by the miner. The handwringing and moaning by carebears about how unfair it is that pirates can do this (known as “suicide ganking”) to them is easily worth this investment for lots of pirates.
We’re in the midst of an organized pirate campaign of miner destruction called “Hulkageddon II“. There’s a running competition among pirates to see who can suicide gank the most miners. This is predictably causing major consternation among the carebear community, since this seems to becoming a more frequent thing. GoonSwarm ran their own mini-campaign last year named “JihadSwarm” (which produced this totally fantastic video), plus the previous Hulkageddon.
My absolute favorite thing to come out of this campaign is a Downfall dubbing of Hitler learning about Hulkageddon (if you’ve never seen this kind of thing, this is a good background):
There’s tons of EVE-vocab loaded fast and furious in the vid, but really all you need to know to appreciate this is that Hulks are the best mining ships (Retrievers kinda suck in comparison) and macroing is to use a program to mine for you without your intervention, which is the height of lame carebearing.
I’m particularly interested in the rhetoric of both sides in these conflicts. Part of miners’ frustration is that their identity is wrapped up in providing the necessary resources to support the mischief of pirates; if they didn’t mine, the cost of pirates’ (as well as everyone else, too) ships and modules would go up. They conceive of their role as supporting everyone else, and getting paid relatively low wages for their hard work compared to other similarly complicated jobs like running missions. Pirates, on the other hand, are much more concerned with talent – from their perspective, mining is too easy and safe, while their chosen profession involves substantial risk. In their minds, EVE is all about risk/reward tradeoffs, and miners are doing something so low risk and low talent that a bot can do it. In some significant ways, the pirates are right – EVE is not designed to create truly safe places, and they proved it by sending a 278B ISK reminder to high sec miners.
Comments
4 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.Haha! That video was hilarous, and apparently Helicity Boson went crazy after references from that.
It can be found here, because I do not know how to do the tags outside of a .php forum. lol. http://www.ninveah.com/2010/01/epic-rant.html
Anyway, I like your blog; I saw it on CrazyKinux’s site. My blog is a little different, too. Or it will be a little different. I really wanna play EVE-Online, but my computer doesn’t support it. I will, however, get a new one in the summer and join you all then.
Good job,
Stevie
Hah, that’s great. I’m confused, though – I thought the video made fun of miners, but Helicity is a pirate, right? Confusing reverse-tears going on there.
Good luck getting a computer that can run Eve! That was what brought me back in, too – I could do empire stuff okay on my old machine, but knew I couldn’t handle fleet battles at all. Will look forward to seeing your blog.
Whoops! You are right. This video has the miners as Hitler, but I guess the miners are calling Helicity Hitler. In the video, though, Hitler (the miners) tells his people to go “wish them all cancer or something,” which they did to Helicity. Confusing, no?
Heh, that’s a great point.
All very strange and meta. I read that as pirates mocking the traditional miner response to things like this – crying and name-calling on the forums. How ironic that (1) that’s exactly what miners did and (2) it actually worked for the first time ever in the history of E-O forum fights.
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