TRS - An Introduction

The strict mistress of this here blog tells me I should find some sort of prefix for my posts because she wants them to be set apart from her own. What can I say, I'm a guest here.

The prefix I chose is an acronym for "The Reformed Spy" because that's what I am when it comes to EVE.

Let me introduce myself by starting my story with my life as an EVE noob. All you young folks out there in highsec, listen up, this is a story about someone just like you. I guess the old bittervets will also find it funny for nostalgic reasons.

By now it is almost six years ago that I started playing this game. I have not had any prior MMO experience, but I really liked the Homeworld series of computer games. I guess that was why modern adware somehow flagged me as someone who likes games with spaceships because I kept posting on Homeworld related forums about how to beat some level or other. Eventually I saw an ad for EVE online and it looked nice. I clicked it and ended up subscribing shortly after reading some stuff about the game.

My life in EVE began like that of many others. I did the tutorials, fitted my ships in horrible ways, mined and ran missions and ended up with some newbie carebear corp. One day that carebear corp got wardecced by griefers and that was when my EVE life took a turn that I would never even have considered possible.

Like all other poor noobs in highsec who are wardecced, we died and we cried and then died some more. Eventually the corp broke apart. Some people ragequit, others decided to strike out on their own. The CEO disbanded the corp. I was alone again, and since I had nowhere else to turn, I started a convo with one of the griefer guys when I saw him in system again a week or so after it had all ended. To my surprise, he seemed pretty decent and offered me to make other people cry rather than being a victim.  I ended up joining with those guys and suddenly I was on the other side, killing people like my ex corpmates.

So began my time as an asshole in EVE. They taught me the basics on how to fit ships for ganking and PVP. We had fun and we harvested tears until one fateful day I had another lifechanging conversation. This time with a carebear target. As I had learned to, I delivered the line that we will leave them alone if they paid us 100mill ISK. I thought that was a decent amount back then in 2008, and we weren't going to let off anyway, even if they paid. Unexpectedly, that guy replied with something to the effect of  "I'll triple that if you sell out your corpmates and deliver them on a platter to those mercenaries I'm going to hire to kill them instead."

I still remember that day like yesterday. While I was sitting there looking at the letters on my screen, something slowly dawned on me: I can make more money selling out my corpmates than I can by extracting carebear tears. I ended up saying yes.

What followed was some rather bumbling back and forth scheming that ended up with me leading that merry band of assholes into a trap with none the wiser. (TBH those griefers were not the sharpest knives in the drawer) I ended up getting my ISK, collected the loot from a few wrecks of my corpmates and "misplacing it" and - most interestingly - saw another form of tears flow: This time it was the griefers crying.

Like a good opportunist, I started talking to those mercs to ask them to take me in when the griefer corp blew up under the sustained fire of some real PVPers.. The mercs said, that they wouldn't take someone who was a spy and traitor. I hadn't even really thought about it in those serious terms, but when they put it like that I thought to myself  "Maybe I can be a spy in this game?"

It was the time of the Red Swarm Federation's war against BoB, and I had read about spying. I always took it to be more of a metaphor, but I realized then, that there was actual spying going on. Taking hold of that thought, I replied to the mercs that I could be their spy, and to my surprise they actually accepted.

From then on, I started an illustrious career in EVE that lead me to nullsec and into the shadow war that went on behind the scenes of some of the major conflicts throughout the following four years. I ended up insinuating myself into corps, collecting and relaying intel and eventually becoming a member of a professional spy network.

It all ended during the last days of the war between Test Alliance and the CFC versus Against All Authorities and their southern allies. Without wanting to go into details, a few things happened then that made me realize what kind of twisted mindset I not only helped support, but had also developed myself. I realized that it really done my head in spending years with professionally lying to people.

At that point I decided that I want to put an end to it all. I extracted myself, made sure I had my ass covered and ended up stopping with EVE for some time.

At around that time yet another twist in my long story happened. There was that RL friend of mine - the woman who started this blog - whom I had convinced to start playing EVE. Other than me, she not only was a total straight arrow, but she also recognized long before me how fucked up things were in my EVE life. I had many interesting conversations with her about the subject. While I had once convinced her to start playing EVE, thinking that she may become an in-game ally, she ended up doing things very differently than I.
At the end of it all, she convinced me to return into the game and try to do things more her way this time.

I guess that, and the fact that she cajoled me to write on her blog, says something either about her strength of will or my inability to say no to her.

So now I have started playing EVE again with a clean slate, and it feels good.

For my future contribution here, I will tell you about my second life in EVE which involves very different things than what I have ever done before: Small-gang PVP, Faction Warfare and being a newbie again as far as skills are concerned.

The mistress will make sure I keep you entertained.