Sometimes I feel that being a nice person in EVE Online is the wrong thing.
My personality is one that I like co-operation, I like helping people and I find it difficult to be a bastard and either take advantage of another person. I've often thought that I miss that "killer instinct".
All my friends in EVE Online have that killer instinct that, to me, allows them to be great players. The clinical attitude and "mistakes are not an option" of my CEO impresses me, I wish I could be more like him but then again I do enjoy being Mr Nice Guy and helping people rather than just laughing and shooting them.
Revenge Wanted
This Is EVE has bought a lot of people to the game and I was lucky enough to meet a player who had returned after a four year hiatus. He contacted me when I logged in two characters with a mail:
Greetings, would you be interested in killing a player for me? I will pay 250m for him to die 10 times. His corp is in this system. Let me know if you are interested.
Being the inquisitive type I asked for some more information and was able to find out that the player in question had returned to EVE Online after a four year hiatus, joined a corporation but found it was not to his liking after investing time and ISK into it. Upon leaving his former CEO put a 100m bounty on him.
He was slightly miffed by this and wanted to get revenge by paying someone to kill his former CEO 10 times. I had a chat with the guy and discovered he was a fellow Australian living in Perth who had recently returned and was trying to make a new start. We chatted for about an hour and he told me how he was going to buy a PLEX to fund this endeavour.
At this point I asked him why bother, he should wear the bounty with pride (none of my characters have no bounties anywhere near this) and he should move on and forget about it. He seemed to agree with this and after we discussed bounties in a little more depth I think he finally understood that they weren't a mark of a "bad" player but something that all players, good, bad and anywhere in-between ,can be given
He left the convo by adding me as a contact with Excellent standings and I was feeling rather generous and sent him a billion ISK after I found out he had 40m but that he was now down to about 15m because he bought some things.
Been There
I was reading /r/EVE a few days ago and nothing really was grabbing my attention so I opened one of those subjects that looks like someone having a vent or bitch. I hate these things but sometimes I can relate and that's exactly what I found.
A pilot was venting because he had lost a pod to a smart bomb Proteus in low sec and lost a rather expensive set of implants. The pilot didn't say much but his loss mail was linked and at first I smiled but then remembered my own loss on a null sec gate just a few months ago.
Looking at the loss I saw it was a set of Mid-Grade Snake's and as I had a couple of full sets of these from my recent LP adventures in Angel space I decided that I would ship some to Jita and help the guy out with a full set at a discount.
I fired him off an evemail after I setup the contract and received this response this morning:
[character], I totally thought this was a scam. 100%. I really had to look at all the info and realized how awful of a person I have become since my EVE career began, I don't trust anyone and was sadly mistaken on you. Living among all these awful awful people you forget that there is actually good people out there. I really appreciate the kind gesture and will pay it forward.
I was in the position to help someone and a full set of Mid-Grade Snakes could cost around 750m ISK but would only cost me 187m to get. I added on a little for isotopes, to jump the implants out, and the guy got the implants for 200m.
It does feel good to be able to help people I don't know. Maybe one day I'll get that killer instinct that my peers who PvP have.
