Who do you think we are?

About a week ago, I spent a day simply chilling out in Decon: not hunting, not even thinking of popping the odd pilot who passed through occasionally. I made safespots; I probed out a few of the clutches of lost and abandoned drones which litter the system; I lazed in space simply because it was quiet and I could.

Towards the end of the evening, as I was preparing to turn in for the night, a rookie pilot entered the system. I'd spotted her a bit earlier on the scanner: fresh out of the academy a couple days before, flying a Velator and spending long minutes in a belt. One thing I try not to do is attack raw rookies without being aggressed by them first -- for starters, it really isn't fair to them as they have so little in the first place. For another matter, losing ships so early to a callous bastard who really doesn't care that they've just destroyed another pilot's only possession of worth, can discourage a rookie into leaving the capsule permanently; at the very least, it can give them a jaundiced view of pirates.

So I left her alone to her mining or whatever. This time, though, she started speaking in the Local channels.

'Excuse me? Anyone here?'

Perhaps it's my mothering instincts, largely beaten into submission, which encourage me to help people -- I used to leave the Rookie Assistance comms channel open, paying careful attention to find the serious pilots whose genuine questions were being drowned out by the mewling masses. There weren't many people in Decon by that point, and since nobody else responded, I did.

The rookie wanted to know about mining, bless her. Mining in a Velator in lowsec... she said someone had told her to go there, and my first thought was You bastard, sending a newbie into a kill zone, though for all I knew, she could have been working with a gang of antipirates to try to draw the evil denizens of Decon out into a firefight. So I was honest. I told her she was welcome to try mining and advised she see about acquiring an Imicus frigate as soon as she could, but warned that I could make no guarantees for her safety, and explained why lowsec is called 'low-sec'.

At which point one of the randoms in Local suggested that I had a gang prepping in the next system, and didn't believe me when I honestly said they were all off duty.

This is what I mean by people having a jaundiced view of pirates. I'm speaking politely and being helpful, and someone suggests I'm trying to lull the rookie pilot into a false sense of security so my 'gang' can stomp on her with hobnailed boots!

Now, firstly, had I actually wanted to kill the rookie... I'd have done it myself, in something frigate-sized. Don't need a bloody gang for a two-day-old target in a Velator, and suggesting otherwise is insulting.

But what offended me more was the implication that I was the kind of cad who would stab someone in the back as soon as their guard was down. I may be a pirate, my security status may be nearly as far down as it can go, I may shoot freighters and take advantage of a combat-prepped opponent's moment of inattention and not have my conscience too bothered by it, but... deception is not my style. The few times I've been involved with someone who has used deception as a tactic, I've felt dirty for it. I'm a bastard, but an honest woman at the same time.

It's not the first time I've been accused of this, either. When I was in Atrocitas, for a few nights a friend and I went to another system to run missions, and someone there called us cowards, informed us that we would never survive in proper nullsec, then undocked a carrier on my friend's battleship whilst staying within dock-range. When I was in Tygris Alliance, one member of another corp mentioned that I had surprised him by 'not being another lame-ass pirate and resorting to smacktalk'; with Universal Securities, there were times I wasn't certain I could trust my own corpmates to not turn on me simply for my outlaw status.

Are other pirates truely so bad? Or is it an unjustly-earned reputation based upon the expectations of others?

In the experience I've had in the last year, since Atrocitas returned to piracy from their mercenary stint, I've received more verbal abuse and enmity from non-pirates and antipirates than from those who, like myself, make our living from successful ransomings and selling off loot. I do realise we are disliked and mistrusted for our means of survival, and that certainly there are pirates - both individuals and groups - who resort to deception and cowardly tactics to make their living. But on the whole, the pirates of my acquaintance have been a likeable lot, and honourable in that rogueish-highwayman sort of way which so many songs romanticise. They socialise, care for their corpmates and associates, and have as keen a grasp on Right vs Wrong as anyone else. Their approach to their work, illegal though it may be, is nonetheless professional and possessing of a certain level of decorum.

It's not the being hunted that I mind -- that part is to be expected, and is even welcomed, as it assures a regular stream of targets. It's the attitude with which we are approached which is disappointing, and based on my personal experiences, I have to wonder if we pirates have genuinely earned such vitriol, or if those who love to hate us are ascribing to us values -- or lack thereof -- which are not our own. It's refreshing to encounter an antipirate who is pleasant and has a good attitude towards his quarry: the fights are fun, genuine tests of a pilot's mettle, and we feel they can be trusted to honour a 1v1 challenge in the way a more bad-tempered hunter cannot.

Perhaps it's simply the basic human need to feel that one is better than another, a mindset responsible for millennia of conflict. Perhaps it is simply bad PR and the actions of the few tainting the reputations of the rest, or in a few cases, an issue of self-projection -- 'I would do that, therefore I believe you would, too, if given the chance'. Whatever the reason, it should be noted that pirates, like everyone else, will respond better when approached as human beings rather than wild animals.

...Although if someone does feel the need to vent their rage, such conversations can and will be saved off in pirates' logs, to be shared later over drinks with friends for a hearty laugh!

Hellcats Office Tack-Board: Gang on the Move

Got bored with the smack in Vitrauze Local last night, so I clonejumped out to spend some quality time with my favourite Bastards. They were all out playing silly buggers, or some strange space-based version of capture the flag, and comms were lively. After that excitement, a remote-rep bs gang formed up for some roaming action, and I decided to be the lol one out in my favourite Thorax. I'm really starting to love flying that setup - she's a face-melter, and that Caracal didn't have time to call for help before it reduced to an expanding cloud of shrapnel. Don't sit at zero on planets, kiddies, it's not conducive to a long lifespan.

Caught this shot as we were aligning on the run home after a nice little gate tangle I didn't manage to get involved in - bloody Global Criminal Countdown from that cruiser tackle kept me a system out as the fun kicked off.

Announcement

We've mentioned before that we might do this, but now it's a definite:

The Hellcats Pin-Up Calendar is in the works, and with any luck should be available in time for Christmas!

I'm really looking forward to working on this, since it'll be a huge challenge, and hopefully will be a lot of fun ^_^

See ya in space, cowboys.

Wanted Woman

Chu took me out to a restaurant the other night. It was very nice, and we went with friends of his who aren't pilots in any sense of the word. It was in highsec, and the only reason I was able to get there was that Chu retrieved me from Vitrauze in his own ship, then used his reputation to convince Concord he wasn't carrying anything illegal.

I am illegal.

It's funny, when you go planetside, especially in the highsec systems. When you walk among the people, as Colonel Wieler does, without a sign that you are anything other than another planetbound soul, looking up at the stars with eyes bedazzled with the romance the holos project. They treat you as they would any other total stranger, shoulder you aside, bump into you if you're in the way, curse and swear and smile and sometimes bow (hey, perks of being female: not every man has lost his sense of chivalry). It only changes if they catch a glimpse of the implants in the base of your skull, the telltale signs that you have access to higher tech than any of them could ever dream of: their eyes go wide, their breath catches, their joints lock up and they go rigid as a cadet before a drill major, eager to please and impress, with dreams of telling all their friends how they met a real pod-pilot today barely hidden behind the glazed smiles.

I have a bounty on my head which currently stands at four million, five hundred thousand ISK. I'm worth a lot, dead. My previous bounty had scaled as high as twenty-five million. It's figures like that which boggle the non-pilots, the non-capsuleers. They don't know how to deal with figures like that. And it's a good thing that those of us with prices on our heads aren't required to wear a sign of our crimes when we leave the security of our capsules.

How would an earthbound person treat me, or any other outlaw, if they knew how many people had died at our hands, our turrets and launchers blazing fire, the hot breath of the star-faring dragons which become our bodies when we brave the cold of space? I've killed millions of workers and crewmen in the last fourteen months of my career.

They warn you of this, in the academy. Perhaps it's different in the other trade schools, where you're not expected to undock and fight. But our instructors were very insistant on making us realise that what we targeted was not purely a piece of metal and wires slotted together like the world's biggest puzzle; that there were people on board, and that we should be aware of how many could potentially be dying horribly every time we laid the coup de grace upon another challenger. They make you memorise the average crew numbers for every ship you could possibly encounter, and warn you that the destruction of too many lives without just cause will stain you forever.

I give the same talks to every man and woman who signs on to crew one of my ships. I tell them, if they have a problem with this, that they should find a different captain. My command staff I stay in touch with, since they are closer to the crew than I am; with what I do, I will drag no one unwillingly down with me.

Wrapped in a crimson Intaki robe, seated at a low table and sharing plum wine and pleasant conversation with people who know me only as the companion to their friend, causes me to wonder if our reputations only travel as far as the atmosphere, or if one day, that which does me in will be not a glorious burst of golden fire, a fleeting echo of the stars among which it will happen, but a humble knife to the throat.

We dragon-tamers are so very fragile without our beasts.

Eve Life Meets Real Life

So I was in the local games shop today, and got talking with a friend I don't see very often. He's just recently broke his WoW addiction and gone on to Warhammer. I was attempting to lure him towards Eve (we have cookies!), and a random guy nearby said, 'Who's the Eve geek over here?' So, yeah, I said, 'Me,' and waited for him to say more, maybe mention what he does or some such. He was clearly waiting for me to do the same, because he said something about people saying who they fly with and what alliance they support and other people going either 'Urgh!' or 'Yay!' I suggested that I'm relatively neutral and that I'm in the Hellcats, and he responds, 'Yeah, I've heard of them.'

And then he edged away rather quickly...

A Walk on the Carebear Side

So I decided to give my alt a little love the other day.

My alt, as most pirates' alts tend to be, is my hauler, my highsec roamer, my shopper and my mission-runner for when I just want something easy to kill a little time that isn't Second Life (because Firefly RP is just as time-consuming as piracy). It's a kind of roleplay, when I interact with people through her, because in my effort to keep her as separate from Shae Tiann as possible, I've had to come up with other reasons why my alt may be found wandering seemingly fearlessly through lowsec in unstabbed haulers full of t2 ships (I did nearly lose it once - the unexpected mega who landed on the gate just as my alt jumped in wasn't running his sensor-booster).

I have her based quite a few systems out of our base area, a couple jumps from a market hub, close enough to make shopping easy, far enough to avoid lag and Local spammers, and lately, since she's been in Shae's gear-staging system, I've been neglecting her. I forgot she had a mission on the Log to run, and her agent got a bit huffy when she failed respond, then I forgot to set a long skill running and she went 12 hours without a skill plugged into her head.

)0.0( oh noes!

So when nothing was going on down in lowsec and I didn't feel like roaming, I sent my alt back to her base to visit her agent. He had an incident report on his desk, and wanted her to go take care of it. Get those bloody Serpentis off that stargate!

Yes, it was The Blockade, level 3. NOT the easiest of missions, nor the fastest, and I wish I'd been more alert when I'd accepted it, because it ran twice as long as I'd been looking for in a mission that evening.

My alt runs missions in Hurricane with a standard pvp-style armour/resist tank, pve-quality mids setup, and ammo/drones selected for the targets' weaknesses. I have a sensor-booster fitted to make locking and hitting small/fast stuff easier, and it's prompted more than one accusation of being a gate suicider from people who clearly don't see boosters as anything more than a pvp tool. It works, it tanks like a bitch for most missions - it's actually overkill most of the time, but I'm lazy and just want to kill some time, with minimal effort.

So, yeah. The Blockade. The level three version chucks NPC battlecruisers at you like their market value has dropped and the owners want to cash in on their investment before it's worthless. They're incredibly squishy - the Guardian cruisers take more time to pop - and I was tanking up to fifteeen of them together toward the end. I kept running out of ammo, it took nearly three hours, and at one point I commented to a friend, 'No wonder the carebears-cum-faction militia whined, if they're used to mopping the floor with rats like this.'

Anyone who's ever gone head-to-head with another player can tell you that pve!=pvp. There's no comparison - players fight hard, they improve themselves, they work together, they know when it's time to run. Players use drones, one of the biggest differences I've noticed between missions/ratting and pvp. Players swap out ammo types, overheat modules, optimise ship fits and try unexpected combinations (a passive-shieldtanked artillery myrm? surely not! ...But I've seen it). NPCs...? Fail. They really, really do, and personally I think they ought to be a lot harder. They're predictable. They're slow. They don't switch primaries, they don't go back to shooting your drones except in rare cases, their dps output is predictable, they go to a certain preset range from you and they stay there. If you can't beat one, you can go back to your base, refit or grab a more appropriate ship, return and pwn the bastard, because it ain't going anywhere.

There's virtually no challenge - admitting to losing your ship to rats is like admitting you got mugged by an 8-year-old in a Frankenstein Monster costume. There's hardly any strategy to it, apart from don't kill the trigger rat first. I'm not even serious about the pve aspects of Eve because it's essentially the same for every mission. The miners/industrialists get the more interesting stuff - yes, I had an indie alt for a bit, I got a cool mission where I had to buy items and make stuff, and I liked it because it wasn't, 'Go there, shoot that,' or, 'Take Xitem from Apoint to Bpoint'. PvE isn't a challenge once you learn the tricks, and that takes... what? A month or so? If you can practically solo a Level 4 with your eyes shut, something's wrong. The system is so totally broken now becuase the missions may have been tough back when cruisers were the biggest ship in the game, but that's no longer the case.

I'm not certain if the mission difficulty has been boosted in the past, but it could use a little steroid injection. PvE players really should have to work harder for their rewards: tanking fifteen battlecruiser rats should not be resolved by the expedient of flying (very, very large) circles around them. It shouldn't be embarrassing to lose a ship to an NPC, mission-running shouldn't be an easy route toward ISK and standings, and it couldn't hurt to give the missions a little more variety so we're not all bored sick and falling asleep in front of our keyboards.

Hellcats Office Tack-Board: Roamin' with The Bastards

Mynxee's been decorating the corp office in Vitrauze, and since I enjoy taking photos, I thought I'd hang up a tack-board to display a few of the better ones. This week's display: Cruiser-Roam With The Bastards.