I watched the stars dash past my Moa with a new perspective. This could be the last time I’ll ever see this Moa, I thought. I knew that Lando probably had friends with him, since pirates very rarely operate alone for long in 0.2 space. I also knew that Trazir’s combat prowess was meager at best. The Great Magnet would have to be on our side if we were gonna win this one, and so far, I hadn’t been feeling much pull today.
My engines let out their dull, familiar whimper as they disengaged from hyperdrive mode. Four red crosses appeared about 20 km away, and my ship started beeping like a NORAD siren on Defcon 1. And there among them was Lando, cowering in the middle of their formation like a soldier hiding behind a field of mines.
“Ok man, cycle your target to Lando, fire your missiles, and MWD to 15 kilos.” As I said this, my own jet-powered implements of destruction set off from my ship and whisked through the vacuum of space, gyrating to their dance of death as they made their way towards Lando. I moved the camera to Trazir’s ship, and aside from his pitifully slow forward movement, nothing seemed to be happening.
“What the fuck? FIRE YOUR MISSILES.”
Silence.
“FIRE YOUR MISSILES MAN, WHY AREN’T YOU FIRING YOUR MISSILES?”
“I uh… I forgot to load the ammo into the missile bays. It’s loading now.”
By now, all four pirates had noticed our presence and my presents to Lando had detonated on his hull and ripped apart his shields. I pressed the MWD hotkey, but once again, I received the hellish message.
“Your ship does not have a sufficient amount of energy to use that.”
“GOD DAMN IT.” I slammed the phone receiver against the wall; in order for my lasers to work at their optimum damage level, I would have to fire them from a precise range of 15 kilometers. Since I was 20 kilos away, they would be doing about 75% of their maximum potential damage. Since this was a 2v4, since Trazir was out of action until his fucking missiles were loaded, and since I saw the white streaks of enemy rockets racing towards my hull, I did what any man in a cornered position would do.
I went berserk.
I worked my keyboard like a Japanese chef on crack. After several laser volleys, I could see Lando’s engines turn red; they were on fire, and in a few moments, he would be as well. My missiles let off a thundrous wave as they paraded and jigged, rolling towards Lando’s cheaply built ship. And then, they hit. My shields went down almost immediately in a brilliant glare as 4 enemy rockets erupted against my precious Moa.
“FUCK,” I shouted into Trazir’s ear. “DO SOMETHING DAMN IT.” I could almost feel his anxiety emanating through the phone cord, and an instant later I breathed a sigh of relief as his ECM ray sucked the energy out of Lando’s capacitors. And then, there was a brief flare as my missile discharged and the body of his ship broke apart in a million different directions. A second later, my other missile ignited in the then-empty space that once contained Lando’s ship. However, his pod was only meters away, and this explosion was sufficient to blow it to smithereens. I snickered ecstatically, for revenge had been mine, and I could now die with honor. The lasers burned into my hull, damaging my engines and slowing my ship down to a crawl. I cycled through the remaining pirates like a game show contestant spinning a wheel of chance. The spinner landed on some prick named Johanesan.
“Okay, focus fire on Johanesan”
I could almost hear war drums in the background as I targeted him and fired my laser volley. They had been moving towards us as we moved towards them, and the engagement range was now close to 17000 meters; my lasers would now do substantially more damage to the enemy shields. To my delight, Trazir had actually figured out how to use his armaments, and I watched in elation as his missiles streamed through the void, going straight for Johanesan’s armor. Another laser volley splashed against my aegis, and my ship caught fire. I shot off one last barrage of missiles at Johanesan before I force ejected and began to take off with my pod.
But I was too late.
The rockets blasted my 35 million credit toy into nothing, and the resulting conflagration decimated my pod. In my naivety, I had neglected to purchase good insurance, which set my skill gains back by about 3 weeks, and I had also neglected to change the spawn point of my clone if I ever died. As a result, I reappeared back in the newbie sector of Caldari space, a place I hadn’t seen in months.
“Finish off Johan and get the hell out of there, dude.”
“It’s already done, those last missiles of yours took him down. I’m hyperspacing away as we speak.”
I made some excuse about having to go eat dinner, and hung up the phone.
And then, it hit me. My 35 million credit ship was gone forever. OneEye Willie would build me a new one, I knew this, but his base was 5 hours away from where I was stationed, and I sure as hell didn’t feel like watching a shitty newbie ship fly for that long. I logged off Eve in disgust, and read through the lengthy list of patch notes that morning, looking for some explanation of why my MWDs didn’t work.
“The capacitor requirements for Microwarp Drives have been substantially increased.”
Fuck.
I logged onto the Eve forums, and learned that pirates and player killers, who comprise a substantial portion of Eve’s population, had been bitching to the game developers that MWDs allowed industrial ships to get away too easily, and that they should be nerfed so the pirates could gank an honest trader trying to make a profit. In response, the genius developers of Eve put insane energy requirements on MWDs; in order to use them, you would need to be running a barebones gimp ship, which meant that if you were flying an industrial ship, you couldn’t have any cargo expanders.
Using an indie without cargo expanders is like running a high powered train with only one boxcar. Not only is it stupid, and not only does it look ridiculous, but it is also highly unprofitable. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had grown tired of trading and mindless profiteering. Not only was I bored, I was pissed. Pissed at every idiot who played Eve and thought it was fun to watch pebbles float into their ships for hours on end. Pissed at the developers for taking away my MWDs. Pissed at the world.
As I browsed through the various forums, I noticed a fair number of investment threads; various corporations and individuals who offered to pool people’s money in order to buy a ship blueprint, which could be copied and passed out to each investor, so if somebody put money in the pool, he would receive his own copy of the blueprint. This intrigued me. I decided to log back in to scroll through the help menus and see how blueprints worked, but on my way in, I noticed a patch message.
“We would like to remind the players of Eve Online that game masters are unable to assist players who have been involved in any sort of scam. We have taken measures to prevent scamming by making it easier for corporations to see exactly who has access to the shipyards and equipment pools, but it is up to the officers of the corporation themselves to ensure that they fully trust the individuals they recruit.”
I called Trazir again and told him about the things I had just read. We had a nice long talk, and our planning commenced.
The possibilities were tremendous. I could think of so many potential ways to make an unethical profit that it made my head hurt, and for once, I welcomed the pulsing pain. Horatio Alger’s spirit was alive that day, and I reveled in it. Since trading, our only source of income, was now so dangerous that it would be fruitless over a long term period of time, neither Trazir nor I had any moral qualms about screwing somebody else out of their money. After all, it was a dog eat dog universe, and the only ones who made it to the top were the ones who did so by any means possible.
“Listen,” I said, “I think the best way for us to make money is to do one of these blueprint schemes. For battleships, the blueprints cost hundreds of millions of credits man. Hundreds of millions! With a couple hundred million each, we could live like kings.”
“Well, maybe,” Trazir responded, “but come on. Do you think people are gonna just give us their money? I mean, just like that, with nothing more than a promise in return?”
“That’s exactly what I think. I did it once already, remember? In this case, we’ll just be doing it with more than one person. And in my opinion, the key to pulling this off will be to build credibility.”
“I dunno man, but if you’re right, then I think we’d better start a corporation. Nobody’s gonna give their credits to a couple of space bums.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to go learn more about how these blueprints work. I’ll call you back some time tonight.”
The premise of blueprint investing was to be able to buy what would normally be a super-expensive blueprint for a much cheaper price. A group of people would give their money to one trustworthy person, and that person would then purchase the blueprint and make copies of it. These copies would be given out to each of the investors, who could then build a ship using their newly acquired blueprint.
I delved into help menus, game tutorials, and informational websites, learning as much as I possibly could about blueprints and the related skills I would need in order to persuade people to invest in me. I finally decided that our blueprint would be the Apocalypse battleship. I had seen it in combat once before, and it lived up to its namesake, blasting away 4 heavily armed cruisers in less than 30 seconds. However, it was also the most expensive blueprint of all, with an original copy weighing in at 1.125 billion credits to purchase off the market.
It would be an unrealistic stretch to tell potential investors that I had the maximum amount of skill level in each of the skills needed to upgrade a blueprint and copy that blueprint. So I figured that I would lie, and tell them that some of these skills were fully trained by my associates, and the rest of them were fully trained on my other account (which didn’t exist).
Trazir was right, though. The only way to successfully persuade somebody to invest in us was to make ourselves look as legitimate as humanly possible. To this end, we started our corporation, and I took an unnecessary risk by naming it “ZZZZ Best” (google the name). He didn’t catch the joke, and luckily, neither did any of the future investors. There was just one problem: the corporation only had two members. If a prospective investor looked us up, a corporation with two members would appear to be highly suspicious. With this in mind, we did what any company with dreams of wealth and splendor would do.
We went on a recruiting drive.
Trazir would fly around the Minmatar newbie sectors, offering 10,000 credits to anybody who would join our corporation. All they had to do was click on “accept” when Trazir made the offer, and they became a part of our corporate family. Since many of the people he encountered were only days, hours, or even minutes new to Eve, a great deal clicked “accept” and were subsequently given 10,000 credits. I did the same in the Caldari newbie regions, and within a couple days, ZZZZ Best was burgeoning at the seams with 18 clueless members. We had to act quickly and peddle our deal, as well as maintain member numbers, because there would no doubt be a good deal of turnover as people realized that they belonged to a corporation which did nothing for them and which they did nothing for.
We wrote up posts on virtually every Eve forum imaginable, presenting ourselves as a professional trading organization which wanted to broker a battleship deal for the good of the galaxy. We were tired of being pushed around by space pirates, losing unimaginable amounts of credits for no reason at all other than greed and misanthropy. To the greater community, we appeared to be the most benevolent, respectable capitalists around, and I was fully confident that investment offers would pile up within days.
I messaged HardHead that night about what we were doing; I had kept in sporadic contact with him, and I felt that he had a good deal of admiration for me.
Me: Hey man, here’s the deal. Trazir and I have made a shitload of money from trading; hell, we even started our own trading corporation, and we’re tired of making money. We want some fucking action. We’re both gonna put up 250 million for an Apocalypse battleship blueprint. Are you interested?
HardHead: I already have a Maller. Why would I want a battleship?
Me: Heh. Here’s a screenshot series in case you’ve never seen one in action.
I sent him a zip file of 10 jpegs that some pirate posted on the eve-i.com forums. It showcased his Scorpion going up against 3 cruisers. By the end of the series, his shields are only at 40%, and all the enemy cruisers have been destroyed.
Me: Listen bro, I’m telling you about this and giving you first dibs because I consider you a friend, and because you loaned me money when I was starting out. If you don’t wanna invest, I would understand completely. Why don’t you think about it? Anyways, I’m gonna go catch some sleep, talk to you tomorrow.
I logged off and walked over to my bed. The groundwork had been laid, and stage one was complete.
Oh dear.
