856 Days

It has been a busy couple of days in EVE, between PVE, revisiting ship fittings and asset sales. I figured I would round this off with some time in Null Sec. I started with the usual scan down of the constellation using my Alt. He currently does this in a Falcon, which might leave the locals uneasy.

To my surprise I actually found a Null to Hi-Sec Wormhole. The other side was to the ass end of the known Empire, but beggars can’t be choosers. I clone jumped my main down and basically started the process of moving out loot and a pile of combat ships I picked up off contract but which I decided I really wasn’t going to use.

There were a few of the local alliance members around, including one trying to PVE. He seemed to get spooked as I made my way through the system with my second PVP ship and left. Otherwise it was relatively quiet.

It is however never safe following a predictable pattern – and sure enough when moving my third or fourth ship out of station I had a run in with one of the locals.

I did the normal check – 3 people in local, all of them in station.  I assume it is because I play EVE from Australia and response times are slower, but once again between the time I clicked on undock and the overview loaded another player had undocked and activated a ship module.

In this case the overview was blank for a while, then the overview windows loaded but the image remained blank. I could see someone had undocked with me – so the first thing I did was selected my out gate and clicked on warp. The screen then loaded and I had a strange blue or green cyno type thing next to me, which I assumed was a jump field generator.

Sure enough this deposited me 100km off the station with a Pontifex. Given I was in a PVP fit Stabber and with nothing else to do, I figured this was an appropriate time to fight. I started by trying to lock the Command Destroyer, only to find myself almost immediately warping off to my out gate. Rather disappointingly it seems being jumped did not cancel my warp.

Thinking no worse of the local (who as I have remarked don’t seem particularly blood thirsty unless you make yourself an obvious target), I continued with my ship extractions. (The pilot had logged or moved on.)

The next ship was a Svipul. As I landed on my out Wormhole I found a Probe sitting on it with a 6-year-old toon. I waited for them to jump back to Empire space or Warp off, but they seemed AFK. I targeted them – but they still did not move, so fired one volley of artillery and destroyed the ship. The pod then followed.

(Meanwhile in my Captain’s quarters the housekeeper updated the “Days since the last unnecessary killing of another player” sign, crossing out 856 and putting in 0.)

Did I suddenly see the red mist of the killer instinct? After all these years am I about to become fascinated with PVP? No – my only thought in both encounters was a mild interest to see what the kill marks looked like. For the life of me however I couldn’t find it on the Svipul. Maybe I did something wrong?

I finished my session off by moving a Stratios into Null, which I had been wanting to do for a while, along with some of the ship fittings I had been missing. I still need a couple Covert Ops, possibly a Gila, and all the Carrier gear, but it was impractical to use the wormhole to collect those in a timely manner.  EVE game time success.