Eve Online - The Largest Smallest Universe in the, erm, Universe?

I'm afraid I'm still not doing anything vaguely interesting in New Eden to blog about. Ratting is bloody boring! My security status is now -6.7 ish, but my evenings of Eve are filled with shooting BS rats and avoiding PvP with a PvE boat in 0.0. Boring! I'm on day 9 of "Operation Rat Up from -10" and it feels like day 29! Hopefully I'll be back to PvP write ups next week when I get my sec status back to non-pirate!

Anyway I hope I do have a couple of interesting things for you to read. Firstly, picking up a Tweet I sent (@Drackarn) yesterday about ugly ships, Rhavas (@Eve_Rhavas) has launched an ugly ships contest. You can find his blog Interstellar Privateer here whilst below I tell an interesting (hopefully) tale of how the massive universe of Eve Online is not always that massive.....

-o0o-

A couple of years ago, I finally persuaded a mate of mine, who was also a work colleague, to start playing Eve Online. To be fair it wasn't just me, he had another mate who was also trying to get him into the game too. In the end he did give it a try and he enjoyed it so subbed up. Given the choice between carebear and PvP he, probably very rightly, chose carebear and went off "wormholing" with his other mate to start his Eve life.

In real life, we both lived in the same town and worked together in a City about 50 miles away (I'd got him the job at my work) so we commuted together. On a Monday and a Friday we'd take the train (Monday didn't fancy the drive and Fridays was pub lunch) and the other days I picked him up in my company car and drove us both. The usual topic of conversation was Eve with his stories of Wormholes and mine of Faction War. In fact we did mostly talk Eve on the commute, which can be a bad thing. I remember one time being in a packed "standing room only" train carriage when my (in-game) CEO called me on the mobile for a chat. I was stood in the crowed carriage isle telling him how we'd hunted down and killed a member of the Caldari the previous night. It was only towards the end of the conversation I realised the previously noisy carriage had gone quiet and everyone was looking at me. Yes, I can see how there may be confusion/worry about the businessman in the suit with the briefcase on the phone talking about hunting someone down and killing them the night before. But I digress.

Over the next year my mate left wormholing with his corp mates and they joined the Reverent Defence Corp, part of the IRed alliance in CVA space. We always had Eve related stuff to talk about on the 90 minute journey to work, then during work at our adjacent desks in the office, and on the 90 minute journey back home.... oh I forgot lunchtime in the pub! Yes we are both Eve geeks!

Fast forward a bit more and CVA is dead, Prov is burning and IRed have moved on to the Intaki area.

One of the corporations SoTF was allied to, and fellow Gallente militia members, were getting into some roleplay arguments on the forums with IRed. It was something about Intaki and the Caldari vs Gallente and the Malkanen incident. I didn't really know what it was about, and as it was roleplay on the forums I didn't really care. Now, remember, that me and my mate had nothing to do with this. It was completely unconnected to us and as far as the roleplayers knew there was no connection between him and me.

Things deteriorated between our allies and IRed on the forums, and war was declared. We were asked to back our allies up. Suddenly me and my mate were at war! Not just my mate, they guy I sit next to at the office!

Let's look at the numbers......
300,000 Subscriptions.
Over 5,000 star systems.
Players from 170-something different countries.

.....and I'm at war with my mate I work on the next desk to!

Suddenly the conversations on the commute were a bit more sparse. It wasn't that we had anything against each other, we were just guarded about what we were saying in case we let some intel slip. The week before I'd tell him of the fleet we'd have planned for that night and what we were going to do with it. Probably not a good idea any more! It's not that we wanted to wtfpwn each other, but could you not act on a bit of juicy intel that was let slip?

My corp mates were very "supportive" in suggesting I purposely crash the car on the way to work to take one of the war targets out of the equation! I THINK they were joking.

We did meet on the battlefield. We popped his Drake and caught his pod but I was able to persuade my corpies not to pod him as he was a real life mate. Was close though, someone did fire on the pod, but he was released with a slightly dinted pod. The war decs didn't last long and the fighting was mainly way from our home base of Nisuwa down Intaki way so we only had a few roams down there. But it was weird to see my rl mate with a red star by his name.

After the war, SoTF and IRed became friendly and we even went to their aid when they had a little problem that needed our special brand of MURDERING IN THE FACE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE!!!!!!!

However, for that week or two that we were at war, I had a very strange commute to work!