Like an avalanche

My fellow blogger Myxee recently pointed out Only Boring Pilots Get Bored and my reply to that was:

And then there are those of us who have so much to do it sometimes feels like "They were drinking life from a fountain that was pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain"

The last week and weekend resembled that remark. Lets take a short look at some of the alliance's activities over the last week.

• Minor drama as I shook things up a bit at the inter-corp level (things seem to be functioning much more smoothly now - we'll see how it goes but I'm much happier on that front).
• Various incursion into our wormhole systems (we've got 2 bases atm) the more established system seems to be getting the intrusion response down to a science. My more carebear like pilots are starting to get proper 0.0 habits and responses. So much so that the KB overall efficiency jumped to 60% from the 30's. There is still much to improve but that is along the line of proper ship fittings and tactics. I'm already seeing the attitude change from "whine, bitch, moan, griefers messing with my game" to "they come in here, they better expect to die" which is much much more important.
  
• We got a free carrier (wormhole space is full of surprises). No I will not state who originaly owned it. Yes it's now safely in known space. A hearty congratulations to the two pilots who were patient enough to wait for a random hole that was big enough to get it out. Also good work with the Orca pilot to refit the carrier with a scan probe launcher. Yes it was a minor miracle that it actually came out in "blue-ish" space since we really only have 1 other alliance set blue.
  
• As previously reported - we are now a T3 manufacturing alliance so we can make full use of all wormhole resources we find.
• One of my pilots managed to get a solo Golem kill somewhere in the drone regions.
  
• Mmmmmm Mercoxit. Nuff said.
• I haven't' had to buy the high ends off the high sec market in the last 2 weeks.

The thing I'm most happy/proud about is the good things I'm seeing with my industrialists.

EVE is a weird game. It's definitly on the hardcore side of things. Of that there is no doubt. But it's industry and market attract a lot of people that they might otherwise not get in such a PvP centric game. This does however leave us with a bit of a conundrum as alliance leaders. How to integrate these two types of playstyles withing a working alliance. It's less problematic with the larger alliances, but with the smaller ones that don't yet have the inherent numbers to play the 0.0 game its a big issue.

There's also the issues with the types of pilots you have available in high sec. A large percentage of the "mid life" pilots get sucked down to 0.0. So we're left with a lot of newbies and burnout cases and griefers in high sec. The burnout cases aren't so bad. And you learn to start recognizing and tossing the griefers. But this still leaves a wide gap in the experience base.

There is also a case that there is a willfull blindness to a lot of the carebears (not necessarely all carebears but certain of them). They so much want EVE to be the type of space game they see in their own minds that they fail to see that they are trying to play some other game in EVE instead of playing EVE.

It must be admited that for the longest time there were no tools in high sec to combat griefing. I've personally come to the conclusion that certain aspects of the high/low sec game are broken/miss-designed and lead to a much lower retension rate than the game should have. When the gankers/griefers have all the advantages it just leads to fustration on the part of a lot of newbies. I'm not sure how to fix high sec. It's only when we start operating in wormhole space with hidden sites that a truly workable defense mechanism for the more industrial minded really came to the fore.

The key here is that situational awareness can make a difference. Unlike in high sec where if someone steals your ore it takes 3 minutes to re-ship to a combat ship during which time he's either gone to get a bigger buddy or gone away. And you can't war-dec them either since they are in noob corps. In wormhole space. First of all you can see them coming. The D-scanner is your friend (note: we're NOT looking for ships). This allows you to get to a different ship BEFORE they do something. Then you can go and hunt them down. It's 0.0 - no annoying concord stopping you from preemptive retribution. The wormholes themselves keep you from being totally out-blobbed (slam an Orca through a wormhole to low sec a time or two and leave it weakened - you can leave just enough mass to get a pirate gang caught in your space and get a good laugh out of the intrusion). Reacting like this is also good for keeping griefers out since they realize pretty quick that people reacting to them like this means no more easy bully kills. Griefers are all about the easy risk-less indy kill.

One of the things that you need to realize is that you can't play EVE on 'automatic mode' when you're in wormhole space. As one of my pilots once commented: "Man I'm even flying paranoid through high sec". Yes my young padwan you are learning EVE the right way. You must be paying attention and you must be ready to react appropriately to a given situation. But once you adapt your operations it's very nice. I've also figured out why the pirates in low sec are finding so little targets in the wormhole space they have access to. You'll have to excuse me while I go laugh my ass off on that one.

Anyways, back to surfing the avalanche...