¶ So anyone who has played EVE-O knows that the in-game music can only get you so far.  Oh, sure, there’s that rockin’ little track that plays as you enter certain mission deadspaces, but that you can’t get via the Jukebox, that’s not so bad.  But if I hear one more series of beeps and blips I might lose my mind and fly my Rifter headlong  into an Amarr station’s reactor core at 4200m/sec.
¶ But then I discovered Pandora and the Music Genome Project.

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¶ For a while, now, I’ve been frustrated with hearing my pilots report that they’ve just jumped into a gate camp. I know as well as they do that they now have a 95% chance of losing their ship. I also know that they have a 15% chance of losing their pod and with it whatever implants they may have plugged in.
¶ Except that it hasn’t been a 15% chance in practice. It’s been nearly 100%! Every time I’ve been online and one of them has jumped into a camp, or every time one of them has logged on and told me about how they lost their ship and got podded, I have briefly explained how to not lose your pod. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to help. I continued to see capsule entries right behind ship entries in the corp’s confirmed losses column. I decided to post a more detailed explanation on our corporate forum. So far, everyone who’s read it has responded positively so I’ve decided to post it publicly here on the blog.

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You know… I started to make a blog entry about this ‘wardec’ from the Privateer Alliance, and about how they haven’t actually fought us at all, yet… about how they hug stations and dock as soon as the shooting starts… about how they mass on us with 15 ships when we’ve got 8 pilots in system, then they scatter as soon as their non-Privateer alt characters that they use to scout see the other 8 pilots we’re coordinating with a couple systems over (omg a fair fight is imminent!)…

But it’s not even worth it.

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¶ I think that by the time you’ve got 5 hours of flight time in EVE-Online, every capsuleer knows that there’s a war going on. Everybody knows that the tens of thousands of pilots involved in this struggle, and the sheer vastness of the territory being held and contested by the four main powerblocs (The Southern Coalition, The Northern Coalition, The Alliance, and Superfriends), means that even if you’re not fighting in this war yourself, you are affected by it. This war, and the territory (and therefor resources) being fought over have a universal effect on the EVE-Online in-game market. Issuesin gameplay and balance that arise during this conflict lead to nerfs that effect all players (drone nerf, nos nerf, nanonerf, what else?).
¶ Last night, I flew for my first time in a large fleet op that was organized with the sole intent of doing a little damage in the Great War in the name of VENOM Alliance and the Southern Coalition.

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¶ Right, then, so when we incorporated The Defias Brotherhood within EVE-Online, we did so with the intention of pursuing careers in piracy. [DFIAS] has existed for about a month, now, and we’ve found that perhaps having such a strong PvP focus is more complicated and expensive than it first appeared, especially as we’re still in the growing stage. Add to that the fact that we are now a part of VENOM Alliance, and it takes away one of the pirate’s largest sources of income – the griefers’ wardec.
¶ So we have decided that, while we will not discourage any of our pilots from engaging in activities CONCORD would frown upon individually or in gangs, we will not make corporate-sponsored ops out of such activities. We have also determined that, for the interest of self-reliance, it would be in our best interests to try to develop an industrial core within the corporation and grow that alongside the combat/PvP core.

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