A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Refinery…

~or “Lessons Learned for Noobs continued…”

An interesting thing happened while mining last night. I was yellow boxed by a Rifter that landed at ‘0’ in the belt. I had about a 90% full cargo bay, was at about 75% on the last mining cycle, I was pre-aligned (but not moving) to the station… so I simply hit ‘warp’ and typed “prick LOL” in local and warped off with a full cargo hold…

Now at the time I didn’t even think about this really, I am a 4 year veteran and this is EVE. But… today I realized that what I did was a veterans response and by that I mean my ‘lack of response’, the whole hit ‘warp’ type ‘prick’ hit ‘enter’ thing was handled by a small part of my mind that was not reading a blog post on the laptop screen… I ‘consciously’ didn’t really notice the incident.

But I realized today that this is not how a noob see this… I remembered the first time I was yellow boxed out of the blue by a player… not in detail, I dunt remember where I was or even what I was doing exactly… Arnon or Soshin I think, inna mission mebbe… but what I do remember very clearly was how I FELT... whatta gut-punch the realization that I was locked up was and how weirdly scared I was all…

WHAT? OH SHEET!!! WHY IS HE LOCKING ME?? am I gonna lose my ship??? am I gonna DIE????

I broke out inna sweat, hands started to shake, I fumbled everything… I do remember I got out and back to dock… and then shook for a while before heading back out.

But he was just doing what so many vets do… griefing a noob. He target locks em, or can flips em or steals from dey wrecks in the hope of pushing them to go all ragey and finally shootz at him… then he killz them easy as pie and LOLs in local as he warp off to the next victim.

But even as a noob I quickly figured out several things… mission greifers and can flippers can usually safely just be ignored. You can either dockup, switch ops to another belt or system or just go on about your business, grab and safeguard what you can of your ore, loot and salvage and accept the loss of income as the ‘price of doing business’. But for him to attack you without provocation simply means he gets CONCORDED… and 99% of ‘em just want easy PvE kills not CONCORD RED on their Killboards.

One thing I used to also do was pop my own wrecks when invaded by a mission griefer… it was fun cause sometimes they’d be the ones to go all ragey in local… silly asses… so,

Lessons Learned #5 – Teach DETAILS about how ganks and scams and such work… give examples and teach safe responses to each…

(1)   If you simply don’t rise to the bait they can’t do shit to you except possibly gank you… but if they do they will get CONCORDED. Real sucide ganks are mostly done for profit, though rarely, but sometimes, just for the lulz…

(2)   Whatever they steal is replaceable and almost never worth the cost of your ship and fit…

(3)   and basically, if you ignore them, they actually usually just go away.

Hell mebbe CCP should make a few missions that recreate classic ganks… we gotta do better at teaching our noobs.

As to why I seemingly ‘ran away’ called ‘im a prick in local and docked up? Like I said I was at 90% cargo capacity and on my last mining cycle… I was heading back to dock inna second anyway… and I dunt like greifers…    =]

Fly Wreckless and see you in the Sky  =/|)=