War Changes You

[EVE Online] I recently accepted the offer from my new corporation, which put me at war. The alliance we belong to had another corporation declare war upon us. This allows them to attack us anywhere in the game, even in Empire (normally pretty safe). Concord will not intervene. The only safe spots are when you are docked in a station.

Being 30 jumps away from our 0.0 station, I decided I should fly out there to save a jumpclone. The process to fly from one place to another used to be as simple as setting the destination and clicking the autopilot button. Now, I need to be on the alert all the time.

Our intel officers had been able to generate a list of most (if not all) of the members of the corporation we are at war with. I added them to my buddy list, so they are now the only thing on the list – making it my “not buddies” list. What this does is allow me to keep the local chat window open to see if any of my “not buddies” are in the system.

This was going well, so well in fact that I offered to grab a 40 million ISK blueprint original (BPO) for the corp on my way. You see, the corp wanted one and I just happened to be flying through a system that had one for sale. Seemed like a logical move to me. Little did I realize that my anxiety level would go through the roof at each gate now.

I managed to get through about 25 jumps with no problems, when I popped out of the gate into a system with the enemy present. Luckily, they were not at the gate, but they were out there somewhere. I decided to turn around and go back one system.

Docking in a station, I told my corp that I was not going anywhere until the next system was clear. I logged out for a few hours at this point.

Coming back in later that day, I took the BPO out of my hold and left it in the hanger. I flew out the the gate and hopped through to scout it out. Three enemies in the system now. Crap. I returned to the station in the previous system.

Figuring I’d have to wait for a corpmate escort (where is my covert ops ships when I needed it?) I decided to chat with the corp and do nothing. War makes even the simplest task complicated.

But then I noticed my email tab was blinking. I checked my corp mail and found a message from Concord. The message was as follows: “CONCORD has declared this war invalid as it breaches one or more articles in the Yulai Convention.”

Now all I need to do is wait 24 hours and I should be free to fly in Empire again. I will only need to worry about the sub-0.5 (alliance) space, which I would have an escort for anyway. Regardless, I plan to meet up with a corpmate outside of alliance space to hand over the BPO. He will fly it the rest of the way to our 0.0 station in a convoy with other corpmates.

Hopefully we can stay out of another corp’s target sights for a little while. I like having Empire free to roam.

– Ethic