Buckle in for a crazy story of insanity today.
So the other day I decided to hop into something different and go for a spin around the neighborhood. I choose a ship I hadn't flown solo in a long time, my trusty Jaguar. Flying an Assault Frigate around is one sure way to not only grab some attention, but also really limit the kinds of engagements you can expect. Not an ideal ship for solo roaming. Luckily for me, I don't care. I'm the Pirate Lord and I do what I want.
My arrogance (which is all for fun and totally fake) doesn't change Eve's inclination to ignore my wants and desires however. So fights were hard to come by. In fact, I would only get one fight the entire session and that fight would be unusual. To say the least. I spotted an Algos alone in an advanced plex and decided to slide into it. Nothing unusual yet. He was sitting about 36k off the beacon so I burned into him, set up my position, and scrammed him. The second I activated my rockets - my computer crashed.
Catastrophic crash. Re-start level. Normally this means coming back to a dead ship and more than likely a dead pod. I was not happy and I restarted the computer and stormed into the kitchen to grab a drink. Even my Wife was concerned, she knows what it sounds like when I am fighting - and the horrible silence that follows something going terribly wrong. Eventually I managed to get back into the game only to find my trusty Jaguar alive but with several toasted modules, including an offline prop mod. But alive and well and in warp back to the plex. A quick scan of the logs revealed the truth - my Jaguar had killed the Algos without me.
I wrote up a short description of what happened and posted it in our Discord. It was then that someone pointed out who I had killed. This player has been shared on our Discord many times over the past few months as he reacts - well, to be fair here - rather uniquely to anything that happens. That was a nice way to say it. Turns out a day later and I get a rather looooong mail in-game from him.
I won't share it all here, it is 13 paragraphs long. But I will share this section:
"true statement if you or your leaders jyst roam around chasing kills with alts with no course in the game then sadly you have been doing this for years and are lost thinking your playing a game but the only game you play is ZKILLBOARD which is not a game"
The rest kinda plays out as a long rant against our chosen play-style, I think. It is rather challenging to comprehend or to pull a logical conclusion from it. I think, like most people, there is a rather simple misunderstanding about our chosen play-style. For one thing I don't play with alts. I don't use a scout when I am solo roaming and my alt is a transport character that can go into high-sec space to pick up supplies. As I've said many, many times in these pages Zkill is a great tool for recording your activities inside of Eve - a record. Other than that function, few people who know anything at all use it to compare each other against. The point system is famously borked and has been for over a decade. I love zKill for what it is, but it isn't a game. It is just a recording.
I wrote back simply, "Sir, this is a Wendys." And let it go at that.
I really do try and avoid pointing out specific players in these pages, I really do. We all have our own things to deal with. But I got a response back to that humorous reply that changed things and made me decide to share this story here in these pages. I can give anyone the benefit of the doubt the first time, but once you've made the decision to escalate things - you have no one to blame but yourself.
I also won't share that response here. It serves no purpose to do so. At least not yet.