Sometimes in Eve a player will pack up their Orca with everything they own and have collected over the past 16 years and autopilot towards the Uedama gate. This sort of thing happens from time to time in New Eden. (You can read the response to this loss over on Reddit.) As is also typical the comments range from "stupid idiot" to "it's only pixels, so who really cares" on the response spectrum.
First of all, let me establish the fact that New Eden is 100% a made up, pixel based, computer generated imaginary world that runs off a server farm in England. It is created and maintained by a bunch of truly great people living in Iceland, England and other places around the planet. But it is indeed - just a bunch of pixels. This is true.
Secondly, it is also a world full of 100% real people. Without whom, the pixels wouldn't matter. And while it could be argued that "real people" might be also living in a simulation, let's table that line of thought for the time being and assume that real equals real.
The balance between those two facts is where Eve Online lives. Between totally imaginary and totally real. This is why it is so engaging and why it has stood the test of time. On the one hand it can take you 16 years to build up enough resources to fill an Orca with billions in blueprints, and several minutes to lose it all auto-piloting to a gate. Boom, gone. Forever. Lost to the imaginary dust of interstellar space. And the truly beautiful and incredible bit about that is this - no one can stop you from doing it. Eve is a sandbox, play the game any goddamn way you want.
I salute the Orca pilot. Much as I also salute this Dominix pilot from yesterday. Why not go for it and fit a battleship that can handle any situation? Amor? Shield? Mixed guns? Faction mods mixed in with T1 mods? Why not!? I sat on the HS gate yesterday in my cloaked Loki watching this pilot make the decision to go for it. I could literally see his mind considering his next move as he kept boating back and forth on the gate. I was equally rooting for him to jump back into the safety of HS and also warp off to a bookmarked spot in space. Which he finally decided to do with me warping in behind him. I salute you. You didn't let 17 pilots with -10 status in local deter you. No Sir.
I'm as guilty as anyone about bringing up bad loss-mails and trying to help educate the general player population about right and wrong ways to fly spaceships. Every single time I do it I feel a tinge of regret about sharing players mistakes on these pages. Sadly there is no other way around it. Killmails are a fact in Eve. But behind every kill is a player who has made decisions that, while we may not agree with them, they stand behind. And isn't it their right to do so? I say yes. 100% yes.
Do we really want to play a game in which every player makes only the best choices? Where every player studies the blogs, videos, forums, and comes to the right decisions? Where cargo is only moved with Jump Freighters? And every Dominix is properly fitted, aligned, and constantly spamming d-scan? Where is the fun in that!?!
Tomorrow I might decide to throw everything I own into a ship and... ok, let's not get carried away. I'd never do that.
I'm not an idiot.