The Space Pirate. It has always been the hard choice in Eve Online. You pay the iron price for choosing to base your play-style on player versus player combat by maintaining a negative security status. There are zero benefits to being so negative that other players can freely shoot you anytime they want. You are banned from high security space and any mistakes along those lines can get you killed by the police. In Stay Frosty we take this concept even further into absurdity by building our entire reason for being upon the idea of good fights and living from loot, theft, and ransoms. All while primarily flying solo or small (for real) gang against incredible odds. Blobs. Fleets. Cap Droppers. Cynos. Recon Traps. And all the wonderful anti-pirate stuff you can imagine.
It is no surprise then that old-fashioned piracy in Eve is dying out.
Back when I first got into piracy back in the 2010 era there was no end to the number of proud pirate corporations in the game. Thirteen years later and you'd be hard pressed to name one that hasn't moved into a wormhole, evolved into something else, simply faded away, or is hanging on by a thread to the old ways. And while certain individuals here and there might be keeping the flame alive, the numbers, the organizations, the alliances built around piracy are hard to find these days.
Uprising made this situation much, much worse. Improvements to Factional Warfare increased activity levels in Low Sec (good) but also pulled resources away from established pirate groups (bad). More critically however is the harsh restrictions that eliminated the vast majority of our tools. The sweeping broom of change removed pirate ships from the equation. It is no longer viable to jump into a Daredevil or Dramiel or Succubus or a dozen other ships because they can no longer slide into faction warfare plex. These ships were our force multipliers, the way a solo or small gang player balanced out the fact that we often face three to ten times the forces we are able to bring to an engagement. When every plex is full of Navy Dessies with frigate logi, what is a solo player's options?
I know that most people reading this are going to be unsympathetic to our plight. I also know that I represent an increasingly small number of players. Yesterday I was curious about just how many -10 players there actually are in Eve Online, so I asked about it on Twitter. CCP Fozzie immediately came back with the number 2,223. I don't know the criteria he used to come up with that number, as being exactly -10 is increasingly challenging to maintain these days. But even if we assume that the number would double or triple if we included -9 and below, five or six thousand players in the universe is not a significant percentage.
And why would it be? There is zero real benefit to being negative. I get nothing from it that helps me in my game play, other than the small chance that some other player might engage me on a station or gate. Which, while that used to happen pretty regularly, is rapidly becoming a rare event these days.
However, if pirates represent a small percentage of actual players - I see this as an opportunity. Because let's face it, content is king. And while we might be a small fraction of players we also represent a huge force for content generation. Especially if you widen the scope just a little to include those groups who are pirate-like in their operations in Low Sec space. Do that and our numbers start to represent a significant content source. One wonders then - wouldn't it be a good idea to give the primary drivers of conflict in low sec an actual benefit to maintaining a negative sec status?
I think so.
This is an easy fix. Any player with a -9 or below security status can IGNORE the restrictions in place on the appropriately sized factional warfare plex.
Once again Daredevils could slide into Scouts. Cynabals could slide into Larges. Once more Nergals, and Hawks, and those lightning based ships that I haven't used in so long I forget their names could be back in space again - haunting the space lanes. Once more Low Sec would became more dangerous, Pirates would be scary, rare, and able to disrupt the status quo - all of which works together to make all players better and space more interesting and viable.
Such a change would inject much needed vitality into a dying breed of game play that desperately needs it.
There is currently no real reason to be negative ten. Let's change that.
It's time. If we wait any longer there may not be anyone left to enjoy it.