My Loot, Your Tears

Paul wrote a very nice post about things that matter, and I'm going to steal his format to talk about why I don't live in null-security space.

You've Got A Friend In Me

EVE is best played with other people, in a corporation. No where is this more evident than in 0.0 space, where alliances with numbers of corporations fight over pieces of territory. Where everyone can shoot each other at will you want to have a group of friends for mutual safety, intelligence, and pooled resources. The solo player is at a huge disadvantage in 0.0 space.

The people that I've built friendships and trust relationships with during my time in EVE are not the type of people who form into large groups for mutual self-protection. My buddies are salvagers, griefers, and mercenaries. With the possible exception of mercenaries, these groups don't translate well into the 0.0 scene. Salvagers and griefers are by nature independent creatures, and the fact that they have a 100+ person corporation (Suddenly Ninjas) is mainly due to new players wanting a home with like-minded individuals.

My active participation on this blog has linked my name to these activities, including corporate infiltration. If I wanted to join a 0.0 alliance I'd almost certainly get turned away - who wants a known spy in their corporation? It's unlikely any existing 0.0 group is going to take me in.

Politics means 'Many Bloodsuckers'

I really can't give a damn about the alliance politics. CVA, Ushra'khan, BoB, Northern Coalition - they're all just names to me, as they haven't had much affect on my gameplay up until now. I have a healthy interest in real-life politics, but game politics just don't mean anything to me.

The following of alliance politics seems to be a prerequisite for survival in nullsec, with people going so far as to make automated maps and complex non-aggression pact chains (thanks to commenter for the link). I just don't care.

Going Where No Carebear Has Gone Before

My game play styles are salvaging, infiltration, scamming, and griefing. None of these really work in 0.0, except for infiltration which works anywhere. Scamming is best done in market hubs and on contracts; salvaging in 0.0 just gets you shot at by fifteen people; and griefing doesn't really have any meaning when everyone can shoot everyone else all the time.

The real game of 0.0 appears to be two-fold: Resource farming and fleet warfare. Keeping sovereignty these days means keeping enough ISK flowing to pay the upkeep on your territory units and upgrades, and you need people to farm those. Then you have the option to try to take over some other corporation/alliance space, and defending your own.

Resource farming is a lot like mission running, which is really not interesting to me. (Aside: As the crappy economy has left me jobless for the moment, I have to pay my four accounts with PLEX. Which has forced me to run missions with my alts, as I need at least 40M ISK/day to PLEX all four accounts. NOT FUN.) Ratting and mining is terribly boring. I have to admit that the high-end complexes would be interesting in that they drop 100 million to billion ISK modules, but at the end of it you're just farming again.

Fleet battles are notorious for lag issues. I have sat in on a few in a cloaky ship and seen it first hand, and it does indeed suck. I shudder to think at throwing a billion ISK carrier into one of these, only to lose it while waiting five minutes for the grid to load. If CCP ever resolves the lag issue - check again in 18 months apparently - I could see myself in some large fleet battles. The actual taking of a system or station isn't really that exciting to me, but mass scale combat has appeal.

And Yet...

So for the tl;dr people, I'm not living in 0.0 because I don't have any friends, no one trusts me, I'm not a farmer, and lag is a bitch.

Despite this I have to admit that I have occasionally daydreamed about tossing a barebones POS up in NPC-faction 0.0 space and using it as a base. Then I ask myself what I would *do* and I come back to ratting, plexing, and hoping to catch some other solo player alone before he notices me in local and cloaks up.

And then I'm back to the beginning.

This entry was posted on August 15, 2010 at 4:54 PM by khalia and is filed under Uncategorized.