One of the great things about Eve Online is that being a pirate is not a class or mode, but a title you earn through absolute dickish behaviour. The Pirates are pirates because they are pirates. See that new player? Kill him. An AFK player? Kill him. Wanderd into our area in space? Looked at us funny? All dead.

Knowing that Pirates in Eve are not restrained in any way can be bloody terrifying and a lot of players understandably get pissed when after rolling out their new fancy ship 4 pirates come knocking and proceed to tear it to sheds. Funny for the rest of us, not so funny for the victim. Luckily Eve has a bounty system where players can put money on someones head. Over time a single bounty collection can be months worth of money due to possibly hundreds of players adding to the pot. Unfortuantly hunting these people alone is suicide, finding them harder, and getting back out alive once the beehive is poked harder still.



My new corp spent its weekends doing odd jobs. Everyone had lives outside Eve and so getting everyone online on a Saturday night was rare. This night by chance there happend to be a lot of us on, probably around 20 players, and after talking about what we should do we decided that we should go bounty hunting. We knew that a few systems over contained a very large contingent of pirates and a few of our corp members could confirm that a some of their members had extremely high bounties on their heads. It was a somewhat scary idea for some of us as about a good 7-8 of us had never actually seen PVP. Sure we might have had little scraps here and there with other players, but a full on brawl in 0.0 space (ie. no NPC protection where all the top players hang out) was a completely different scale.



Oh, did I mention in Eve that if you get killed, you lose your ship and everything in it? You can take out insurance on your ship, but the money usually isn't important, its the time you spent getting all those items to build it that matter. Losing your ship in Eve can be a soul crushing affair.

So with a successful vote we all started flying off towards 0.0 space, everyone stocked up and ready for a fight. The new 7-8 of us players hung towards the back letting the older players make the initial jumps into each system we visited. Securtity ratings on the areas slowly ticked down to 5.0, 4.0, 3.0, 2.0 and soon we were in 0.0 space. Some of us were getting nervous as the safetey at being at the back of the pack was gone, pirates could jump in from any of the system gates now from any direction and fuck our proverbial shit. Probably right up.

Once we reached our destination the older players started splitting us up into groups, distributing the new players evenly among the newly formed squads with older players in charge. Now that we were here we had to find someone, so everyone flew off with their groups to find a hapless pirate.




After a few jumps with nothing of interest, one of the groups happened across an AFK pirate with a small bounty on him. "Well, it's a start" they said over chat and proceeded to attack the shit out of them while the rest of us made our way over to meet them. The pirates ship was blowing up just as we were meeting up and everyone did a little 'woop woop' over chat. Something wasn't right though. Why of all people, especially pirates, just go AFK. They never go AFK. And why such a small ship? It's a shuttle for gods sake, why would they be out here in...

Then over chat it all dawned on us. The pirate corp had parked this ship as an alert system for an AFK pirate to know when people are in the system looking for pirates. By attacking the ship we had not only walked right into their security lasers, but basically spent 5 minutes trying to punch the lasers with our fists. Just as we came to the conclusion the local ship listing lit up like a Christmas tree. Pirates started jumping in from every gate in the system and all of us, all the groups, were now huddled around this one stupid shuttle. People were screaming over chat about how we could let this happen and walked right into it while the older players tried to yell some sort of a plan over top of them.



We were told to split into our groups and jump immediately to the closest moon on your map. With no hesitation groups started jumping out just as pirates started jumping in. While my jump drives were charging (The rest of my squad was more nimble than my armour bloated tank of a ship) I saw group B get webbed by a series of pirates. Just as my drives kicked in I saw all of them destroyed, which meant the only ship left right in front of them was me. Just as the pirates began to target me I jumped to the local moon.

I met up with my group who were trying to figure out what to do. We all talked quietly over mics even though they couldn't hear us anyway. The pirates had left at least two ships on every gate and with much better ships and equipment there was no way we were fighting past them. Now the systems we were in had a lot of moons, so for now we at least figured that we had a few moments to gather our thoughts while they searched for us. The leaders told everyone they were going to setup a warp bubble (basically a temporary player generated warp location) and half of us were going to jump to the moon close to one of the gates and try and lure the gate pirates away. Group2, mostly made up of new players, would then jump through to the gate. This should cause the other pirates to come rushing towards that gate, in which case Group1 could jump out of one of the other now free gates. The plan sounded utterly pathetic but its not like we had any other options. My group was now part of Group2, the ones who were going to jump out through the gate once Group1 had lured them away.

It was just as we were getting ready to jump towards the gate when they found us. A pirate jumped into our moon and we knew that others would be on their way shortly. We were so focused on the new plan that we had neglected to make a plan for right now, so all of us panicked. Nobody knew what to do. Some of my group jumped too early towards the gate that Group1 was going to lure away, some of my group jumped to other moons, one of our group members was destroyed by the pirate straight away. I followed suit and jumped to a random location on my map.



The leaders were losing their minds. Group2 was scattered all over the system now and the timing of the plan was all messed up. In a half assed attempt to regain the plan, Group1 jumped near the gate anyway and began to lure the pirates away. We knew that we only had moments before all the other pirates jumped in too, so with only a few seconds window we all jumped to the gate.



Cluster fuck doesn't begin to describe it. While the leaders and pirates were holding up pretty well against each other, it was clear that at least two more of Group1 had lost their ships. We hit the gates and started warping out immediately, but we knew we had been spotted. The rest of the pirates began to show up just has the last of us were jumping out, which was just as Group1 was getting ready to jump to the opposite side of the system.

It was at this point we realized a flaw in our plan. We knew we had to get out of the system, but couldn't they just follow us to the next system?



While most of Group2 had made it through the gate, pirates began to immediatly follow. With the leaders not able to help us, we did the only thing we had been trained up until this very moment to do.

PANIC LIKE A HERD OF DEER.

Chaos ensused as everyone ran for whatever the hell gate was first on their list. Some went blindly flying into other pirate areas, but with the seeming dissaray of our direction, the pirates couldn't follow all of us and jumped back into their system to attack Group1.

We all made plans and slowly jumped back to our HQ. I had stopped paying attention to the chat tab for Group 1, so trying to make sense of their current status was confusing at best. Luckily running into no trouble on the way home we all docked back into the station and soon the tattered remains of Group 1 returned too. I'm still not exactly clear on how they made it out of there, but only a few of them remained. At this point we knew we were all safe and collapsed back into our chairs.



And then we vowed to never ever go bounty hunting again.