EVE Corporation - Page 1995

EVE is....

You're burnt out on MMO's. You've played WoW, TOR, Rift, all those other keybind, gcd, rotation/priority based clones... hell, you've even tried out some f2p ones, and they're all shitty. Then your buddy says, "hey man, I found this new MMO, you should try it, reddit's got a huge presence in the game!" So you do... You fill out the app for dreddit, download the client, and log in. Once that's done, you literally blow yourself up to respawn on the other side of the galaxy, and get some free ships from TEST_FREE. You get on comms and listen to people bullshitting for a while, all the while reading, learning, and setting things up. You join a fleet. You have no idea what you're doing, but suddenly, comms is quieter, and there's one cool calm voice giving out orders. You find an enemy fleet, and the order to engage is given. Your fleet loses a few ships; they lose more. They start warping out. Comms goes wild.. "spread points, spread points". You happen to tackle a ship, through more luck than anything else... the fleet blows it up; turns out it was an officer-fit tengu, and that was the most expensive ship in their entire fleet. Everyone starts calling your name and cheering for you....

No wait, EVE is not that. EVE is undocking with your first battleship; you've been training up for a few months for this baby. You've put nearly all your money into this, but it's ok, because with this ship, you'll make it all back, and then some. You name it something memorable, like "SHITBUCKET". You fly on a few missions, then get one that takes you into losec. "Oh shit" you think to yourself after hitting accept routinely. You crunch some numbers and find out if you quit this mission, you'll have to go back to level 3 missions until you can get your standings back up. You decide to do it anyways. You undock SHITBUCKET, fingers trembling slightly over the keyboard. Jump into losec. Local's clear. Okay, let's get this over with as fast as possible. You're on the last part of the mission, everything's been going smoothly, you've relaxed a little. Suddenly, another ship pops up on the overview. Shit, you forgot to watch local. You start aligning out, but SHITBUCKET, true to it's name, is slow. He tackles you, and you're stuck. You panic. Almost everything you had was put into this ship. A minute passes, but it feels like eternity. You're still alive. Tank's holding, but barely. You start to calm down. You show info on his ship... it's a daredevil, a small fast ship that does a lot of damage for a frigate, but you're in a heavily tanked battleship. Some of the mission NPC's have started shooting him, but he's not taking any damage because he's so small and fast. You lock him up and set your drones and guns to attack. His shields start dropping, but he's taking out your drones one by one. 3... 2... just one left, and then it pops. Fortunately, you have one more flight in your drone bay. He's at half shields. You think for a moment; you get an idea. You launch drones, let them fire one round, and pull them back in. He has to stay close to you so he can have high transversal to avoid your large guns, but doing so means he's at point blank range and you can throw your drones out and pull them back in repeatedly. This continues for a few more volleys, then he realizes he's not going to last long enough for reinforcements. He warps off, freeing you. A "GF" (good fight) pops in local. You type "GF" back, as you align to the gate back to hisec. Only now do you realize how many muscles you were tensing, how fast your heart is beating, how relieved you are. You haven't finished the mission, but you lived.

No wait... EVE is about getting into your stealth bomber and flying out to nullsec to run some ops with Bombers Bar. You join fleet, cloak up, and wait. The order to move to a system is given. You wait some more. Intel is continuous... more waiting... then, paydirt. A fleet three jumps out. Russians, from the other side of the galaxy. What are they doing here? Who knows, who cares... they're two jumps out now. Drag bubble is up. One jump... they're in the target system. Will they fall for it? YES! Their entire fleet lands in the bubble, 100k off the gate. "RED GROUP FIRE, BOUNCE BOUNCE BOUNCE BOUNCE" you see a dozen or so bombs go out. A few seconds later, "BLUE GROUP FIRE AND BOUNCE"; that's you, you uncloak, fire your bomb, and start aligning in one smooth action. As you're warping off, you see their entire fleet blow up as one, over a hundred ships you'll find out later. You're grinning, and your FC gives out the happiest "YEEEEEEEEEEEEES!" over comms you have ever heard from anyone who didn't just win an olympic medal.

No wait... EVE is about finally undocking your Archon. The SHITBUCKET MARK XVIII. Yeah, you've gone through a few of them over the past few years. Wait, has it really been that long? As you're waiting for a friendly cyno, you reminisce on how long you've come to get here, in a capital ship! Your first one, your pride and joy. You've learned from escapades past, that something this expensive, you never undock until you have level 5 in all pertinant skills. You've been anticipating this moment for the past few months, and this is your first op with it. You're flying with some other carriers, a couple of dreads, and a decent-sized support fleet. Your alliance's sole titan jumps into system to bridge the sub-cap fleet. You're amazed at its size, dwarfing your carrier, which in turn dwarfs all the sub-cap ships. Cyno goes up, "LZ IS HOT". Titan bridges, pilots start jumping. You hit "jump", but nothing happens; the enemy fleet killed the cyno ship on the other side. No worries, several of the other ships had cyno generators and they light one so the other carriers can jump in. Once you load grid, you see another archon at half armor already. With the rest of the cap fleet on grid, his armor starts to slow... but it's still going down. Your screen is filled with blue and red squares, your overview is pages and pages long, and there's no way to tell who has the upper hand. You make a split-second decision. You reach over and activate your triage module; now your ship can't move, can't recieve friendly reps/energy transfers, and can't use any drones, your only offense, for 5 minutes; but more importantly, you can heal more and faster. The Archon stabalizes. It starts going up. Their fleet starts changing targets, trying to pop ships before reps could land, but with triage mode, you can lock ships up just as fast as they can switch, and out-heal their damage. Enemy ships start dying, it looks like your alliance is winning the battle, but they're not retreating. You only take a sidelong look at the fight every once in a while, focusing on keeping your allies up. Then, the worst happens... "enemy cyno... 8 moros, lokis, guardians, bhallgorns...". You stop listening, already knowing that they brought in everything needed to kill capitals. You look at your triage timer; two and a half minutes. 150 seconds. You know that one moros alone does at least 12k dps, and can do up to 15. Your stomach drops to the bottom of your gut as you realize you don't even have to do the math to know you don't have that many seconds.

No wait... EVE is about that goddamn persistent goblin, always undercutting me by .01 ISK! It's like he and I are in all the same markets! ARGH! You've been fighting with another capsuleer over your most profitable market for the last two weeks; at least, it used to be your most profitable. You look him up; he's in a starter corp, and has been there for two years. Someone's alt, probably has more than one. Never posted on the forums... never joined a corp... you keep searching, trying to find more about this guy. Hours pass, and nothing turns up. He likely never even leaves the station, so you can't even hire mercs to follow him around, war dec him, and kill him again and again. There's no way of knowing who his hauler is, and even if you did, he'd probably be in a starter corp too, un-wardec-able. Frustrated, you decide to call it a night, just gotta update your buy orders before you do. Then, you realize something; his buy order is region wide; you hatch a plan. You take all of the minerals that he was buying that you had in system, and contract it over to Black Frog Logistics, an entirely player-run hauling service. They haul it out to several losec systems in the region. Then, you wait. You add this guy to your contacts, and figure out his schedule. It takes 6 weeks of logs before you're sure; mercs are expensive. You sell all those freighter loads to him, 10 jumps out, in several different losec systems, far away from his base of operations. He's paid a huge amount of isk to buy all of your stock, and because of rising mineral prices, you didn't even lose all that much after Black Frog's fee. You join your favorite merc's public channel, and hire them to camp the bottleneck gate to those systems. They're expensive, but good. You give them his schedule. They report killing three freighters in the first two days two of them with an armed escort, then nothing the rest of the week. You thank them for their service, throwing them a little extra tip, because having the best mercs in your region amicable to you is always nice Before logging off for the night, you send an evemail to your rival. You know freighters are expensive, but you don't know if the ones that went through are his. You know you can't afford to hire those mercs, or any, for that matter, for a length of time to prevent him from picking those minerals up, but he doesn't know that. You bluff anyways, putting all of your wordsmithing skills to the challenge, boasting and threatening, bordering on extortion. You wait a day. He doesn't reply. You wait another day. All of his buy orders are gone, a locater agent shows him in the next trade hub over, and the money is flowing in again!

No wait, EVE is about finding out how to fund a new campus for your training corp; you have to get all the diplomacy stuff squared away, make sure you're not stepping on anyone's toes, because neutrality is how you've stayed alive this long. It's about finding volunteers to take care of processing, administration, updating the website, writing a mapping program, preferably in C, but you'll take whatever works. It's about writing a new OPSEC, and clearing it with the corp management, most of whom you have personal numbers to, and stay in a private IRC channel with almost constantly. You barely even log into the game anymore. It's like a second job, but you enjoy it. You love seeing these newbie pilots grow up and get the chance you never got, 10 years ago when EVE was new. You don't have much taste for fighting anymore, but new blood is always good, and it's a fulfilling feeling.

No wait, EVE is creating a new character, slowly training their skills to be a decent combat pilot. (note that this means you can't train your main character, who is on the same account) You post on the RP forums, about your backstory and [mostly made-up] adventures. Another pilot joins in, and you regale tales of near-misses and close battles, slowly becoming friends. Or what he thinks is a friend. Soon after, he invites you to join his corp; you accept, and the few dozen of yall spend many merry evenings on mumble, getting drunk, brawling accross your pocket of space, and writing verbose and over-embellished stories on the forums. Months pass, and one of their long-time members leaves the game, due to IRL commitments. Leadership roles get shuffled around, but they realize they need another person to fill in the hole; Long story short, you start getting responsibilities. More months pass; you are now a vital part of the corp; you've met up with some of these guys irl, gone drinking with them. You've seen/heard some of them get married, and listened to a couple of them tell them their dark secrets. They trust you. Little do they know, that the last 10 months has all been fake, a long, drawn-out revenge. They are part of the support of a major alliance, an alliance that ganked you long ago. Now, they will pay. You wake up all the members of your real corp. "It's go time." You steal everything. All ships, all modules, all the money, everything; everyone you can take roles away from, you do; everyone else, you kick. You take everything, and you run. In the morning, confusion abounds; you listen while trying to stifle your giggling until they realize who did it, and you are kicked from their comms; nevertheless, the impact you had was felt; the alliance fell apart two weeks later. (Now you may be thinking, why didn't CCP, the developers of the game do anything about it? I mean, this guy stole from so many people! Well they did do something about it... they made a fucking expansion and trailer based off of it. Stuff of legends :D ...)

No, wait... EVE is about spending tens of thousands of man-hours assembling and transporting the equivalent of tens of thousands of US dollars of ships accross the galaxy to one station, loading them with one round of ammo each, and giving them out for free to your alliance. Oh and this one station, is the largest trade hub in the game. Literally thousands of people are here during peak hours. All of the most expensive and highest volume stuff comes through here. And if you shoot anyone you're not at war with, CONCORD, the faction-less space police flying the most OP ships ever imagined, will neut you to nothing, infinite-point you, infinite-ECM you, and kill you mercilessly. Hence, the one bullet. For DAYS, Jita burned, and burned, and burned. CCP had to alter their code for how a system with this many people in it at once worked in the middle of this. All trade in the entire galaxy ground to a halt; mineral prices were 1000% more expensive, or higher. Ammo, ships, modules, couldn't be purchased anywhere. And still, Goons had more ships in Jita. CCP... well, they made a "news report", gave them even more publicity on the log-in page, and made a dev post that stated, "this... this is what we want our game to be. o7"

No wait... EVE is about conquering half the conquerable space in the galaxy, setting up diplomatic relations with the other half, so that no one'e fighting anyone and everyone is bored. Then, one small faction has a spat with another, tinier, faction. They call in help from the big boys. Eh, we're bored, we'll come. One guy, who is famous among the nullsec guys because he's a Fleet Commander of the biggest coalition in the game, pushes one wrong button, and instead of bridging a fleet to this little tiny outpost, accidentally strands himself there. Then, like sharks smelling prey, one of his old rivals jumps a fleet of caps in to kill him; in his pride, he calls in reinforcements. They call in more reinforcements. About 2.27 seconds, literally EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE FUCKING GALAXY, TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE, KNOW ABOUT THIS. CHAOS ENSUES. The CFC, the biggest power block in the game, has just dedicated a large amount of their cap fleet to this battle, and literally everyone else is coming in to curb stomp them. Only, they get in a lot of kills as well. Thousands of people, all fighting simultanously, TiDi (Time Dilation) is so high that no one knows how slow it's going, literally the largest multiplayer battle in gaming history is going on on hardware that wasn't even designed to handle this load. Night shift at CCP shuffle stuff around to another node, lag goes away but TiDi is still there. Battle goes on for hours, tens of thousands of dollars lost on each side, history is made, makes the fucking news. And you tell your buddies, I was there...

EVE online is a game about groups of bastards competing to be the biggest bastard in a battle for money and power. It's about spaceships fighting other spaceships in a fishbowl. It's about real world skills, not grinded levels/ gear/ items. You won't get far by just doing the same thing until it works. It's about earning trust and respect. You won't get accepted to a corp if you've been having a lot of conversations with their enemies. It's about forging your own path. No one will tell you where to go or what to do. It's about being an immortal pilot with a spaceship's worth of electronics in your head, allowing you to control an entire ship by yourself and learn skills hundreds of times faster than a normal human; the reward for your first tutorial mission gives out tens of thousands of ISK; one ISK converts to about what you'd need to live comfortably dirtside for a year; and a pirate you can kill in a matter of seconds has a bounty of over a million, you regularly fly ships of hundreds of millions, or even billions, and if you ever lose your ships, you get a new (shitty) one, for free, all paid for by the taxes of the citizens of tens of thousands of worlds in thousands of systems. They revile you, and curse your existence; all the while, you routinely kill ships with crews of hundreds, for pocket change.

This is EVE. Join the fight.