Because I Could

Hi, my name is Aiden, and you might remember me from such blogs as, uh, this one! Real life continues to take up most of my time, though rather than get into the long-winded version of it, lets just do a tl;dr-style list, shall we?

A.) Married life is awesome. Probably ultimately more awesome than internet spaceships.

B.) Work, though not as awesome as spaceships, keeps the lights on, and certainly keeps me busy.

C.) I’m actually working on an Eve-related project that will hopefully be done soon(ish) I hope to be revealed to the masses. More details to come.

In light of the above, I actually don’t have a ton of Aiden-related stories to report in on. When I do squeeze in some Eve time, I’ve been using a 2-man alt corp to wardec offline POSs for “roll-the-dice”-style pinata prizes from hangers and labs, which I think so far has netted me a few hundred mil, but not really anything in the way of great blog-post material.

Instead, I’m going to be posting a guest story from someone who eve-mailed me a little while ago, curious if I’d be interested in hearing his tale of his first heist, which involved hitting up a wormhole corp to the tune of 35 billion iskies. He honestly had me at “heist”, and after reading it through, I thought it belonged here. For anonymity’s sake, our Danny Ocean will go as “Agent Awesome” here; read on.

*****

From: Agent Awesome
Sent: 2013.10.10 06:19
To: Aiden Mourn,

It did fit into one EVE Mail.  Hope you enjoy it, would like any pointers if you happen to notice a missed opportunity or just to comment.

Because I could.

I’ve tried to remember if I have ever done anything dishonorable in EVE.  To this point, a couple of weeks after the time this story takes place, I cannot remember one.  It just isn’t something that ever appealed to me.  Of course, I had read stories of piracy and corporate thefts, espionage, all of it.  They were cool to read, but nothing that just reached out and made me want to do it.

Until that day that I realized “I could.”  That is the only reason this happened, because I realized that “I could.”  That was part of the beauty of EVE Online.

Background:  The corporation I speak of, I had been in it off and on for a year.  I left once thinking I would go to EUni, I left again join my holding corp, and once to join a null pvp corp for some training.  At one time I had several friends in the corp, and there was lots of chatting and some mining ops, some missioning.  We moved into a WH for a while, had some fun.  Then, RL aggro was on several of us.  By the time this story takes place, there were on avg 1-2 people in the corp online, and even then for guesstimates of only about 4-6 hours max a day.  I was usually on the longest.  Immediately before I put the plan into action, I checked the member list.  More than half the corp had not logged on in over a month, another quarter had not in the last week.

I had asked to rejoin the corp so that I could do some PI in their WH, maybe do some sleeper sites, and huff some gas.  When I got accepted I was given roles for the research POS in case I wanted to put some stuff in.  I was organizing some personal hangars and happened to click on the corp hangars….and realized that I had access to all but one division in each hangar.  Just curious at what was in there I started checking each division out.  There were t1/2 modules, some P2 and P3 components, items for reactions, the precursors to tower fuel blocks.  There were several that were empty, couple that had a container with a PW on it.  Then I came upon one that had some t3 and subsystem bpcs.  Those were nice, I remember thinking.  I then found some nicely researched ship BPOs for an orca, tornado, several frigs and cruisers, Retriever/Procurer/Covetor BPOs.  There were multiple hulk and mack bpcs.   There were easily over 200 researched BPOs for modules, fuel blocks, rigs, capital components.  Then I found about 500m in fuel blocks and another 350m worth of minerals.  I was kinda amazed that the corp had all these nice assets.  At this point I did some numbers and came up with about 20B in assets, that I could see.

Next day, all I could think about was all the shit I had access to, and this didn’t even include what I could fly in the WH SMA.  Or anything that was in the research POSs.  When I got off work I performed my normal routine, checking PI, mfg jobs, and moving some assets around.  On these trips I made sure to stop by the two research POSs to check out what was there.  Each tower had around 300m in fuel blocks, along with materials for another 150-160m more, best I could tell by quick glance.  In the WH, there were about 800m in ships that I and my alt could pilot, who just happened to also be in the corp, with the same privileges.  I had my alt start removing ships from the WH.  If asked why I was, I needed it to “run some L4 missions” or mine a decent Ore site that popped near.

Later that evening, after the other player that is online regularly logged off, I began.  My alt started by moving ships out of the wh that he could pilot.  On my main, in a matter of 3 seconds I had over 10B in BPOs.  Then I went through every hanger, dragging all the loot to my personal treasure chests.   I then immediately started making runs on the POSs (there were two in the HQ system).  I relieved the towers of all the fuel blocks and fuel components that were there.  If it was in the research POSs and I could see it, I took it.  I even took the stront (seemed like a dickish move, and I liked it!).  By this time, which was maybe 90 minutes into it, the alt had moved all the ships he could, then went back and emptied out all the modules, minerals, sleeper salvage (oh god the sleeper loot, piles of it, everywhere), and anything that wasn’t nailed down.

About the time the alt was finishing his job, my main finished the eleven jumps to the entrance to the WH.  My main went in and started grabbing anything he could fly.  I left about 3B in ships in t3 and t2s that I didnt have the skills to fly, but did manage to grab several fitted retrievers, a BR, a SB, and some haulers.

My heart was racing, worrying that someone might finally decide to log in that hadnt in 2 weeks or a director that would see what I was doing.  It was such easy ISK, lots of powertripping, and winning EVE.  I had the opportunity and I took it.  I wrote a corp email to send out, then decided to wait till I was gone from the corp.  I dropped roles and logged off.  Next day I sent out a corp evemail that said the reason I took it all was because “I could.”  And that it could have been more.  I finally had to log off to get some sleep for work the next morning.

Now, despite all that I took, I did not unachor any of the towers.  Although, I did put one offline and tried to figure out the mechanics more with some live action training.  I did leave most of the fuel in the WH tower, and all the ships I couldnt fly.

Day after had commited a corporate heist, I finally got the chance to sit and really look at all I had acquired.  My initial estimate of 20B was way off.  All told, with only about half the researched BPOs checked in contracts for comparison, the total was about 35B.  Not bad at all.  And that third account training the mfg/research toon was going to have some goodies.

Some things I learned from the experience:
1.  EVE is amazing
2.  Taking just an hour or so to research the mechanics of unanchoring a POS and I could have had three towers and any of the modules I wanted.
3.  Taking another 36 hours and I could have gotten another 2 t3s from the WH once the skills finished.
4.  I should have taken more time to plan.
5.  Having multiple accounts, specifically one that can fly multiple races’ higher level ships, can increase your haul dramatically in corps with WH.

*****

There was some talk the other day on /r/eve about Star Citizen being healthy competition to Eve Online, and I have to say, as immersive and intense of a world SC looks to be building, its things like this that will always put Eve on top. Its the emergent and unscripted player-run game-play that no other game touches that, whether you giggle at or despise the above story, makes Eve what it is. We do what we do in Eve because we can.

Agent Awesome, you are well deserving of the title. Congrats on the fantastic haul (especially on your first heist!), and thanks for the story.

-Aiden

~ by Aiden Mourn on October 11, 2013.