Life in a Wormhole: Gadabout #eveonline

My comms are full of annoying distractions when I log in, and they’re proving unusually difficult to tune out.

First off is alliance chatter about some kind of bounty prize contest… thing. Apparently, the goal is to get more people involved in PvP by awarding prizes to anyone who manages to tic a box on a laundry list of different kinds of kills over the next couple weekends: sort of a treasure hunt of death or a game of murder bingo.

Now, I don’t want to dismiss the effort being put forward by whoever came up with the idea, but the whole concept carries about the same appeal, for me, as beer pong. Let me explain.

Who here has, either recently or in the distant, hazy past, played some kind of drinking game? Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about quarters, or Cardinal Puff Puff, or ‘drink when Mal is left at a loss for words’ Firefly Booze Bingo, or the aforementioned beer pong; raise your hand.

*raises hand*

Right. Now… do you still do that sort of thing with any regularity?

If you answered “yes”, you are excused. Toddle off now, you’re late for class.

If you answered “no”, it’s probably for one of two reasons:

1. You don’t really drink that much anymore (or at all), and don’t enjoy a game whose express goal is to get you to drink more than you otherwise would.
2. You enjoy a good drink, perhaps several, perhaps many, and you don’t need a game to help you pace yourself.

PvP is kind of like that. There is a small, small subset of people who will engage enthusiastically in any kind of killmail bingo you set up. They’re a bit like the college frat boys that cycle through an endless supply of drinking games — gung-ho now, likely to crash and burn eventually (possibly swearing off the sauce entirely).

Everyone else? Everyone else probably breaks down fairly neatly into three groups: disinterested, social drinkers, and those impressively grim bastards silently holding up the bar at the local pub. (That last group of guys might actually win the killmail bingo, but if so, they did it by accident.)

I think you can probably see where I’m going with this: you’re not going to convert anyone to an active PvPer this way any more than a game of Battleshots is going to make someone realize that binge drinking has been the one thing missing from their lives. The non-drinkers will keep non-drinking, the casual social drinkers will have a few with some of their friends if the opportunity presents, and the serious guys? Well, they don’t see the point of a drinking game to begin with; if you’re going to drink, drink.

Aside from that, the whole thing sounds needlessly complex, and I am a simple creature, so I just file it and mute that comms channel for awhile.

There’s nothing in our adjacent class two wormhole system but a high-sec exit and a connection to a class one wormhole, which is also empty except for a high-sec exit. So… high-sec or yet more high-sec; what shall I do? How about run some errands in high-sec?

Said errands include selling some loot and then a bit of shopping, as Ty has finally got off his indolent rear end and finished off the training for interceptor-class frigates, which was a subset of ships he’s thus far left in the capable hands of pilots like Bre, Em, CB, and Ichi. The Minmatar “Claw” combat interceptor has caught his eye, however, and he spends the better part of an hour fiddling together a machine that might actually be able to lay a glove on a missile-fit Crow (the Caldari combat inty). We’ll see.

Ty fwooshes back home in the new ship while Bre and Berke experiment in the empty C2 system with a project of Berke’s he’s dubbed the “porta-tower” — testing how long and how much of a pain it would be to anchor and online a temporary tower in a system where it would be worth our time to set up a lengthy bivouac. The test is informative, but it takes a bit too long, and both pilots (and the returning Ty) get cut off when the connection to our home system collapses of old age.

Ah well; its not as though we don’t have a ton of high-sec options. There’s not really even a reason to rush; with the porta-tower set up already and the hangar of Berke’s Orca filled with a buffet of ships, Bre and Ty take the time to shoot some sleepers and harvest some gas before we call it a day and head out.

Once out in the known world, we split up, with Bre and Berke heading toward Amarr space (where it is 80% likely our next connection from the Home System will be), and Ty flying the Claw in the direction of the Syndicate region for a roam the next day.

With nothing but multiple system jumps going on, the second distraction finally starts to register.

This second distraction comes in the form of some whining on comms. A pilot with an unpronounceable name (let’s call him Dolby) is looking for Cabbage, claiming that Cab is “an old, old friend” who invited him to join his corporation and move into the wormhole, and that he “owes me an invite.”

First off, Cab lives down under, and is probably asleep right now. And no, I can’t help you out, because…

Secondly, I don’t much care about your alleged past history, and…

Third: why are you on our private, password-protected comms channel?

This, unlike the previous distraction, doesn’t feel like one I can just mute and ignore until it goes away. I have, in the words of another science fiction intellectual property, a Bad Feeling About This.