Keera goes on a Safari

I have mentioned on several occasions that a significant part of both my EVE experience and my views on issues like piracy, awoxing and ganking (all the good stuff, so to speak) have been shaped by the stories of people like Psychotic Monk, Haedonism Bot and James 315. These stories of anarchy, chaos and mayhem made me the player I am today. With the recent changes to game mechanics, awoxing is likely to disappear from New Eden, and I wanted to try my hand at this great art (and it is nothing less than that) at least once. I am neither the prolific writer nor the skilled player that people like Monk, Bot or James are, but if you are into this kind of stuff and you have got a few minutes to spare, my story might just entertain you anyway.

Just in case you have not yet read about the exploits of the people I just mentioned, I hereby command you to grab yourselves a nice hot cup of tea and go read THIS, THIS, THIS and of course THIS. I’ll see you in a few hours.

The quest for my own Awox-Experience began a few weeks ago, when I decided that one of my scouts, Esteban en Bauldry (yes, another generic surname that shows my complete lack of creativity – I usually come up with witty names about a week after character creation) would be developed into a one-month combat pilot. 

I trained some of the basic skills needed to cause a fair bit of destruction, prepared myself a lovely little Thorax and skimmed through the corp ads in the ingame browser. I found quite a few groups that seemed promising and threw in a bunch of cold applications (because I am a lazy fuck and did not want to deal with any recruitment channel stupidity). To my surprise and horror, four of the five corps I applied to offered me an invitation without speaking to me even once.  

I eventually joined up with a small German industrial corp called Hobel Dynamics Inc. (which is a pretty awesome name for an indy corp, at least compared to your usual array of silly corpnames) and moved Esteban to their home system of Jel. At the same time, I also moved my logi in the area, although calling that char logi might be an overstatement, it’s just my industrial guy with a week’s worth of logi skills.

Because I felt that I was still lacking some firepower I thought it best to train up a few more drone skills before starting the proper safari, so I played the newb for a while (which is not really that hard for me, to be honest) and collected as much intel as possible. I knew that there were two Orca pilots with one Orca each in corp, but as one pilot had significantly better support skills, he was usually in charge of providing boosts and collecting ore with the Orca. Sadly, the guy was keeping his Orca-piloting alt in an NPC-Corp and thus made my job a whole lot more difficult.

In a rather bizarre turn of events, I logged in one day to see my wallet fattened up by 50 Million ISK. I asked the CEO (who was also the secondary Orca pilot) about that and he told me that the money was payment for my participation in a mining op a few days earlier.  Well, that was nice. Especially since I was there for about 20 minutes and spent most of that time scanning ships and noting down fittings. Not a single shot fired, and already 50mil ahead – things were not going too badly, but I still wanted to blow up something big and shiny.

I stuck around for a while hoping for the best, but soon realized that there was no way to get my dirty little paws on that out-of-corp Orca without causing too much suspicion. So I figured that I might just as well burn everything else. 

There were only four people on (neither the Orca pilot nor his alt not among them), but I knew that one guy was slaving away in the belts with a Procurer, so I fired up a Venture and joined him, hoping to start a little impromptu mining op and at least lure out the CEO in his Hulk. I almost didn’t believe my eyes when I read that the CEO was about to go semi-afk, but wanted to park his Orca in the belt to make it easier for us.

Jackpot.

I tried to keep my cool, mining for a few minutes before docking up and hopping in the trusty Thorax. Before I undocked again, I grabbed a handful of ore (about 30Mil ISK, thank you very much) from the corp hangar and confiscated all the equipment I could get my hands on.

Once I hit that undock button I became nervous as hell. I was about to go through with my first awox, stab a corp member in the back and destroy a huge ship. Needless to say, I was as giddy as a fourteen year old about to reach under a girl’s sweater for the first time. 

I warped directly to the Orca and chaos began to spread immediately. Being the eternal noob that I am, I got a little overwhelmed with all of the things going on and completely forgot about the Procurer, but meh. I locked, scrammed and attacked the Orca, dropped fleet and fleeted up with logi to get him into position and start repping the Thorax (drones were eating through my virtually unskilled defense pretty quickly). 

This was the point I realized that it might be a good idea to launch my own drones, so I did just that, being a total pro and all.

With the Orca going down (slowly, but actually not as slow as I had expected) I began negotiations, as any good pirate would.

please note, the original conversation happened in German, I did my best to provide a somewhat accurate translation:

Hobel Eseth > ???

Michael KekZ > ey#

Hobel Eseth > what’s going on?

Esteban en Bauldry > awox, sorry

Hobel Eseth > awox?

Hobel Eseth > what are you doing?

Esteban en Bauldry > I am asking what your Orca is worth to you

Hobel Eseth > why ?

Hobel Eseth > please stop

Esteban en Bauldry > 500mil

Hobel Eseth > come on, please stop

Hobel Eseth > ok 500 mill

Click here for full transcript (German)

I was expected that awesome blink on the wallet icon, but sadly it did not come. Hobel played the old “I don’t have that kind of money right now” and his corpmate was trying to drum up help in everybody’s favorite cesspool, the Antiganking channel. 

Click here to read all about that.

As Hobel did not want to play along any further and initiated his Orca’s self-destruction mechanism, I began throwing some more Antimatter charges at him and soon got this juicy beauty of a killmail:

There you have it, my first awox and my first Orca kill.

It is not much, and I didn’t even get any ransoms (which I could have used, being space-poor and all), but it was an incredible experience for me.

I dedicate this kill and the whole operation to the following awesome people:

• James 315 and all the great folks in the New Order and associated groups, for accepting me into their community and teaching me so much.
• Psychotic Monk, Floppie and all those other Belligerent Undesirables, who were my motivation to do this kind of stuff.
• Haedonism Bot, for writing great guides for newbies.

Next time: How my derpness brought an end to this safari, how I fail at my second attempt and what I learned about awoxing.