PvB: player versus bully
10th August 2008 – 2.40 pmI knew EVE Online was a player vs. player (PvP) game when I started, and I knew that I probably wouldn't like the PvP aspects of the game if they were anything like my previous unfettered PvP experiences. Specifically, experiences where the only PvP people engage in are the unfair, completely one-sided battles where there are little-to-no consequences of their actions. I was pretty much hoping I could stay away from any aggravation, even though I have read about other players' troubles on occasion.
Today I took my new mining Osprey cruiser, the White Cat, out for a test run. I found a quiet asteroid belt with some decent ore to be mined and started firing my mining lasers. As the ore built up in my cargo hold I jettisoned it in to a can for later collection by my Badger. Everything was going quite smoothly, and the yield from the three miners and Osprey's bonus was making quick work extracting the ore from the asteroid.
However, it was all for naught. A wanted player with a large bounty on his head zoomed in to the asteroid belt in an interceptor, and parked next to me. He promptly jettisoned his own can in to space and transferred all the ore from my can to his. Admittedly, this flagged him as fair game for me to destroy his ship, but being in a mining vessel made me no match for his interceptor. Being in high-sec space it is possible that Concord would have come along and blown him to smithereens if he retaliated, I don't know, but I wasn't going to risk anything more than a haul of ore to find out.
I hadn't done anything to provoke a reaction apart from be a soft target, and it seems that the bigger you are the more you can push people around. It shouldn't be like that, there should be consequences. Personally, I don't look forward with excitement to the time when I can poke newbies with a stick to see if they fight back because I don't see life as a case of making others suffer because you suffered previously.
No doubt there will be plenty of people who will say that this is just part of the game, that I should expect such actions to occur. I'm sure they are right that I should expect the consequences of being in a PvP world, and I certainly am wary of my actions, but I consider bullies to be an illegitimate threat to my enjoyment. Gaming is as much escapism to me as it is fun. If I am not only unable to escape from bullies in a game but supposed to expect them, in a high security area too, I will look elsewhere to have fun.
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