“Whoever said that didn’t have many enemies.”
(Jon Snow/Stannis Baratheon)
Seagulls - You can shoo them away with some effort but they’ll be back trying to steal your french fries or burger lettuce. The term is both friendly and derogatory of course and is directed towards enemy capsuleers trespassing into your terrain and starting to create fuss and killboard trophies. You could also call them squirrels trying to find a nut or two and carry them back home. Pesky rodents…
When these seagulls come around they usually don’t arrive in fully fledged roams or engage in gang warfare. No, they aim to stay below the radar and not be annoying enough to provoke a counter fleet. It’s often a step below that, so small that an alliance needs to chose whether to react in force or not. After all, it’s just a Buzzard, a Tengu and a Dramiel, right? Right?
Cloud Ring lies adjacent to a number of lowsec regions like Placid (not a suitable name if you ask me) or Black Rise (needs to be called Red Rise henceforth). On top of that there are also multiple nullsec connections to Outer Ring, Syndicate and eventually “Player Land”, the territories of other player alliances. All this accounts for a “healthy” (for lack of a better term) influx of neutral and even red pilots in all kinds of ships looking for all kinds of stuff our trouble. Some of them may even be nice folks and if you invited them to your mining fleet they would just mine some Bistot or Chromite and then leave with a sayonara on their lips. Others… not so much. They come for the thrill of a kill. But at the end of the day, they also matter to your alliance’s wellbeing.
When you are NBSI (“not blue, shoot it”) you got your work cut out for you with this type of enemy. When you just want to haul resources across three systems or chew on a moon or two, things can get annoyingly costly if you fly around carelessly or go afk for a coffee. Seagulls can be the bane of any industrialist out and about doing a hard day’s work if left unchecked.
Still, the thing is as much as you pretend to despise those seagulls, you really don’t, because in their Maledictions, Lokis, Legions and Vedmaks they also give you ample opportunity to reverse the roles of predator and prey. They also keep you on edge and sharpen your situational awareness,make you use scouts and intel chats, invite you to test new fittings and to create new doctrines. And more often than not it works out eventually, landing you a juicy killboard blow where you should have been the victim. Remember me talking about a baiting Mackinaw with webs and scrams? Yes, that’s the spirit.
The relationship you build towards these seagulls can take very different shapes. People sometimes tend to dismiss them as idiots and morons just because they want to ruin your fun (when in truth they just want to kill your pixel spaceships). Then again, since they annoy your industrialists but make the hearts of your PVPers jump, you can’t really say it’s “black and white”. You’re good and they’re the bad guys. Not that simple. Usually it’s differnt shades of grey and quite possibly they aren’t always the morons you think they are. After all they are entitled to have as much fun in EVE as you have.
This is when things become mutually respectful, friendly even, and you realize these folks aren’t your enemies but just other players (who will still annoy you, no doubt ;-) ). I witnessed some really friendly exchanges in local chat after a fight or a lengthy cloak and bait chase where players (read: human beings) were content with the outcome of a very engaging gaming session — and I think that’s all that really matters.
That was when I started to call these folks “friendly fire”, because that’s what it is. They will melt your internet spaceships and spit some salt (and “good fights”) in local chat, but they will never puncture your tyres or eat your children.
Interestingly, when this delicate balance is being threatened by other external factors like another player alliance invading, these friendly fires may indeed (and grudgingly) agree to temporarily band together with you in order to hand said player alliance their backsides. This can result in very interesting situations where your former antagonist web/scrams the ships you then fire upon. It’s the psychological triangle where if you dislike a person or group and you have a (temporary) friend, that friend will also tend to dislike said person or group — if only for a small amount of time until a situational conflict is overcome.
And when that external threat or situational conflict has been dealt with, you ask? Will they stay on the light blue side and enjoy this new mutual experience further? Will you continue to band together?
The answer is a simple no. Seagulls are seagulls after all and EVE is EVE and that’s okay.
Comments