CAGEO: The Best Ship

This is the fifth post in my series the Casual Alpha’s Guide to EVE Online. At the beginning of the series I thought it might be a good idea to distinguish these from my other posts by using the acronym in the title. Now every time I write a new post for the series the acronym feels sillier and sillier. I just wanted to keep it clear that I write a blog about games that sometimes talks about EVE Online, not an EVE blog that sometimes dabbles in other things. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here? Let me know in the comments if I am right in feeling silly about the acronym, or if you think it does not detract from the content, or if you have anything to say about the content. I like feedback.

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I don’t think it is an unreasonable assumption that a massively multiplayer online game is best enjoyed as interactions between players. One of the criticisms of “high-sec carebearing” (that is, playing the game in ways that do not involve shooting at other players’ spaceships, in space that is deemed to be more secure though not totally safe) is that it gets to be more of a grind than a player-vs-player experience. But, being a sandbox type game, people vary in their opinions on what the right way to play the game is. For myself, learning how to do things like ratting or hacking has not only been a fun experience, but also one that provides in-game income that can be used for other purposes such as getting into PvP or recovering from a big loss. Indeed, a person could just pay extra money for in-game currency, but to seek an in-game solution to the problem of your shiny warship being blasted into tiny bits seems a bit more fun than whipping out the Visa card. And let’s face it, the kind of ships you can get for free or almost free are made of papier-mâché. For example, my Probe class exploration frigate that got ganked in a small pocket of low-sec space a few weeks ago.

This was my first player-on-player combat. I lost horribly. What napboi does is lurk in the Enden system keeping an eye out for exploration or mining vessels, then flies in and pins them down while his friends FEDERAL OFFICER and NAN0FIBER warp in for the kill. I know this because a look at napboi’s killboard shows this pattern. I was pinned in place then they brought in a supercarrier to squash my probe. It’s a bit like using a tank to kill a bird. But the point of this post is not to offer faint praise for their use of three advanced ships to squash one worth Ƶ2.5 million (which I estimate to be about $0.04 USD worth of spaceship if I paid for my in-game currency with real money). The real point here is that whatever they’re hoping to accomplish with ganking ships like mine, these guys appear to be having fun doing it together (the Tengu alone should have been able to make short work of my Probe if shooting down my ship was their only concern). There is no way I could go get revenge by tactics nor by attempting to pay-to-win. Sure, if I had Omega status and a yuge pile of ISK I could put up a ship more comparable to any one of theirs than the paper airplanes I’ve got in the hangar today. But the reality is that I would likely need a team, not a better ship, to take these guys down. My skills at convincing other pilots to join my revenge fleet would matter far more than my skills at fitting or flying any ship in particular. And since my only causus belli is that these guys shot down my fail-fit exploration frigate, this would be very difficult unless I had several space-rich friends who wanted to do me a favour on a whim.

Or, I suppose if I was a fleet unto myself like Jason Kusion I might be able to solo those guys. Kusion is a famous ganker known for being a big part of CODE.’s larger kills. For those not familiar, CODE. is the alliance that I characterized as basically the space mafia in my post Pirates, Carebears, and Emergent Gameplay. Jason Kusion uses a technique called multiboxing which allows him to control 15 instances of the game at once, with his alternate characters all named Kusion. The following is what it looks like to be fifteen and one at the same time:

Very, very different than what my game looks like. But even a one-man army like this was part of something bigger, the CODE. alliance. The reason I am talking about them so much today is that I was online for a little while last night and saw the Anti-ganking chat channel explode over a breaking news story: Jason Kusion has apparently betrayed his alliance and made off with over Ƶ500 billion. That is as estimated USD value of $7500 (I know it is not exactly Ƶ1 billion ISK for each extension, nor exactly $15 USD in real money, but I like to keep the math simple when precision is not necessary). It is enough to use in-game currency to buy a couple years’ worth of subscription for fifteen accounts. The story broke on reddit here first, followed by this thread allegedly posted by James315 himself admitting that CODE. is dead and his blog, Miner Bumping,will be archived. However, as of right now, a post went up on that blog today that did not address any of this. It certainly didn’t take long on the thread in the official EVE forums for people to start speculating that it this is all a ruse. It is hard to say how all of this will play out. What I know for sure is that this level of drama based on player interaction is what makes EVE special and I hope that if CODE. is really dead and Miner Bumping is over that some other group of people will take its place as the villainous evil empire of high sec. I will have to follow up on this in a future post.

At another point in the past month, I also had the chance to be given a tutorial in high-sec carebear mining, the kind of thing that CODE. was founded to oppose. I really don’t think that is my game (watching my ore hold fill with space rocks while I point a laser at a virtual asteroid), but I think that people who play EVE differently do need to understand what real mining looks like. The beginners’ career missions introduce the basic concept of what buttons to press, but there was NOTHING in that or the new tutorial that covered anything like what I saw that day. It was during this mining run that I discovered why people talk about Orca class ships and mining boosts; it makes a huge difference compared to using mining lasers on an entry-level mining ship. It’s a very different environment than getting ganked in low-sec or watching high stakes alliance drama unfold, but the conclusion remains the same: it’s alright to be good at flying spaceships, it’s not a bad idea to have good spaceships, but the best ship will always be friendship.