Spoiled Little Children

I suddenly had a realization where a long time irritant of trying to explain EVE came from. I'd like to thank Tobold for the revelation. Contrast the following points of view:

Newbie coming from most other MMOs: "Wow, this is great, I can fly anywhere in the game"... Immediately tries to fly to 0.0... "Holy crap I just got blow out of space for no reason what so ever"... "This is griefing because I wasn't doing anything but minding my own business".

Experienced pilot finding a neutral pilot in an NPC corp flying in their space: "Yo! FC, we've got a potential alt scout in system XX-XXX, you got anyone in the area that can respond?"

Experienced FC: "Support squadron 1 go chase down that idiot, scouts head to systems YY-YYY and ZZ-ZZZ and see if there's anything that guy could be scouting for".

Here is the issue: The newbie may BE minding his own buisness, but there is no way to tell a newbie apart from a scout. Not to mention a spy. The fact that the newbie has not realized this is because he is conditioned to be the "star" of the game by most of the other MMOs out there. Other MMOs try and make the player feel like they are the hero, that they are better than anyone else, that only their actions and intentions matter. This conditioning causes them to act like spoiled little children who can't play well with other. Grow up, we're treating you like an adult. The grownups in EVE live in a world where realtime spying on the opponent is not only expected but assumed to be happening even when it isn't. I operate assuming that I've been infiltrated by spies (I hope they find us highly boring). All mid level to large alliances operate in this environment.

Get it straight: a lot of the high sec stuff (suicide ganking, can flipping) IS greifing. 0.0 is not. It's politics and metagaming. It's not about you, it's about what you could be representing. It makes the diplomatic situation in Europe prior to the First World War look like a model of stability. Your assumed experience (based on when your char was created) is meaningless since one of the common things is to use low skill point alts as scouts. That 2mil sp char that suddenly finds itself in 0.0 space is actually more likely to be the alt of some 50mil+ skill point pilot giving way more information away to "the enemy" than any alliance feels comfortable with giving up. The ship he's flying may be setup to be a cyno boat. The truth of the matter is that "scout" is a fairly critical to large fleet operations. SP do not make a good scout. Observation and clear communications make a good scout this is eyeball mark I stuff, a 1h old character can do this. This is one of the reasons we say newbies CAN make a difference in EVE. Even when we have a hand full of experienced high SP scouts using cov-ops and fleet recons, we can always use a few extra eyes in frigates to keep an eye on surrounding systems.

The unwillingness of certain new players to understand in the true environment the rest of us deal with is the cause of a lot of grief between the experienced player an the newbie. The fact that most newbies feel more comfortable in corporations made up mostly of newbie corporations and one or two experienced pilots is understandable (I've known quite a few high SP assholes that are poison to a growing corp). This however does nothing in instructing them of what really goes on at the alliance level and what alliance leaders and FCs have to deal with. The fact that the game mechanics allow for a lot of true griefing in high sec does not help. It doesn't prepare one AT ALL for the reality of 0.0. There has been REAMS of information published about the realities of living in 0.0. Yet newbie after newbie insists that according to their experience they should be able to waltz in and do what they want how they want WITHOUT REGARD FOR OTHERS.

Well boyo, I've got news for you, you have no way of proving you're a newbie, so excuse me while we treat you like any other 50mil SP intruder running a scouting alt for his fleet. The fact of the matter is you didn't run into a griefer, you ran into the pros and they flattened you without a second thought and you were forgotten as a rather idiotically easy kill about 5 minutes after it happened. Just because YOU are incapable of seeing the damage a 2mil SP character can do does not mean the rest of us are incapable of seeing (not to mention have seen in the past). We will do something about it. Scouts don't exist in isolation. The age of a character means NOTHING at this level. The abilities of the player behind the character is EVERYTHING.

The unfortunate thing is that because this is a SANDBOX in the sense that CCP just provides the mechanics, and we do with them what we can get away with, CCP isn't really in control of what the players do with the sandbox once they get their hands on it. The mechanics allow for scouting alts, scouting alts will get used. This is the major reason for the NBSI policy most 0.0 entities use. Now that CVA has been kicked out of providence I don't think there are any NRDS entities left in 0.0. There's a reason for that.

This inability to connect your actions and how they may look to others together with the whining to high heaven afterward is what makes a lot of newbies look like spoiled little children instead of adults to most experienced EVE pilots. This is why the reaction to this attitude tends to be fairly harsh. You act like a spoiled little child, you'll get treated as one.