The Eve Online 0.0 Experiment - Post 053 - A Den Of Stinking Evil (Part 1)

A Den Of Stinking Evil (Part 1)

After considering the exciting shuttle production empire idea for a while, I decided to speak with some of the locals in Heild, in order to discover more about the kind of activities that take place in these low security systems on the fringes of Empire space.

I started to click on the players and was disturbed to see this:



I was apparently in the company of a bible-thumping zealot yet again. My first two poddings of my adventure had been at the hands of his organisation and I wondered if they were about to go for the hat-trick.

However, to my pleasant surprise, he turned out to be a very nice and genuinely helpful pilot, and we ended up having a cup of Earl Grey tea and an enjoyable chat. I reminded myself not to be so quick to judge people again in future.


Perhaps the Arrow Project weren't that bad after all...


I then began to talk with a pilot called Alandre Sessine, who enquired as to why it was that I was hanging around in this fuming "0.3 security" junk-heap of a solar system:



The more time I spent in Heild, the more I despised it. It was one of those sorts of areas that people deliberately take 3 buses to avoid at night, through the fear of being jumped by drugged up smack addicts, hookers and invitations to be driven home in illegal unlicensed mini-cabs...

I hated contraband activities and I resolutely swore blind, there and then, on my beating heart, that I would absolutely not invest my shareholders' valuable funds in anything at all that even so much as hinted at being vaguely prohibited.


A pirate called Kelron helpfully suggested a more noble use for my funds:




It was an intrguing proposition. Perhaps I was destined to become the gambling king of EVE, amassing a bulging galactic fortune through encouraging young pilots to spend their hard earned proceeds of mineral refinement on wild and exciting dog-fights.


It was certainly a unique and entertaining idea.


Over the next hour, and as I was observing the ebb and flow of the names in Local, the realisation dawned on me of just how much of a rubbish tip this backend system in the desolate wasteland of the "Molden Heath" region actually was:



I had never, not once, in my entire adventure, seen a pilot with the worst possible security rating of -10, and I now found myself looking at two of the menacing brutes.

Naturally, I was curious as to the character of such people and decided that I would find out some more about just what exactly it was, that was required to become a total outlaw, despised by every loving carebear:



It would seem that she had not set out with the intent of causing misery and destruction at all, but in fact had been a pacifist who had sadly strayed from the fluffy clouds, due to that age-old destroyer of all achievement:


Boredom


During the next few hours I got to watch how these -10 pirates went about their business. Essentially, they would construct a gate-camp in a radius of approximately 120km around the jumpgate, and would all simultaneously target and obliterate an unsuspecting traveller as soon as they came through.

The easiest targets are players in "tech 1" haulers, which typically have less than a thousand "hit points" in total, and can be quickly taken out by several fearsome battleships firing at them in unison, before they have the chance to warp away...


What a den of stinking evil!


However, a few minutes later, a surprising development occurred that was set to rekindle my desperately dwindling faith in the fabric of humanity...


(to be continued...)