EVE-Mag.com

What a little Snow revealed

Published on 03. Jan, 2009 ... written by Jacob Mei, Tags: Articles

So Christmas came and went and I decided to be a little naughty in EVE, seeing as the fat man had already delivered the goods. I logged into EVE, got into my assault frigate, put a snowball launcher on, filled my hull with snowballs and went out on my mission.

My mission was simple, to see what sort of reaction I could get out of people, not just any people, but miners. I randomly jumped from belt to belt, looking for targets (a side note, this was Friday and most of the belts were already bone dry, geez). I spotted a retriever chewing on some rocks as I entered the belt, no drones deployed. I set orbit for 1,500 meters, far enough not to bump but close enough that your personal space starts to feel violated. I orbited for a few rounds, nothing happened, however when I locked on him that’s when he let his drones out (three tech 1 hammerheads).

“Ah, someone is home.” I thought. Now I used to be a miner, I know what makes miners nervous. An assault frigate orbiting you at 1,500 meters with a lock on you will make any miner nervous. As soon as he started to turn and his engines started to glow, I opened fire on him, and laughed as a bunch of snowballs hit his ship. I quickly took my leave to find other victims in my harmless fun.

I exclusively targeted miners (anyone who was in a belt with active mining lazers was a target) and soon found an interesting pattern emerging. Out of about twenty “victims” roughly seven reacted the moment I started to orbit them in some way. Be it to deploy drones, line up to warp to a safe spot or what have you. Only six did something when I put a lock on them, be it to deploy drones, put shields up or begin to warp out (only about three actually warped away even after receiving a snowball, they either didn’t know what it was, panicked when the concord message didn’t appear and quickly left or just decided to move on to another belt). The rest did nothing, from approach, orbit, lock on and ultimately snowball up the engine they did nothing, likely vets, AFK miners or worse. In short, thirteen players out of twenty actually reacted to a potential threat before that threat acted.

It is a shame that I hadn’t the opportunity to do something similar as it would have been interesting to see the difference in numbers between say before the infamous Jihad Swarm campaign and today. What is apparent however is that a fair number of miners WILL react to any perceived danger that gets in their face.

In the end though this was all a bout of harmless fun, no ships were destroyed in the making of this article though I’m sure a few miners got a micro dose of adrenaline when they heard the bleep, bleep, bleep of a target lock.