All's Fair in Love and Video Games

From piracy and scamming, to backstabbing and thievery, EVE is full of stories of players and their nefarious deeds against one another.

I logged in yesterday evening to find my alliance (aka Snuffed Out) embroiled in a drama of our own making. After enjoying joint ops with other low-sec groups in the longest standing state of Voltron that low-sec has ever seen, a few alliance members decided spontaneously to disrupt the tenuous peace by awoxing several Shadow Cartel supers while they were using one of our POSes to travel home.

While I don't particularly condone the backstabbing of blues in this way, I do find it an interesting situation in the context of the last few months. After all, if we were a CFC corp and the supers had been Goons we were awoxing, people would probably be buying us a beer instead of calling us dishonorable for “killing our friends.”

But I guess the same rules don't apply when you're going up against those who the community has labeled tyrants. Kind of like those TV shows that make you sympathize with people doing bad things because they're doing them against other bad people.

Needless to say the whole thing caused much gnashing of teeth, both in alliance and out. I was not there during the “event” but according to those that were, most of the fleet did not know what was going down until they were bridged into the field. (And forced to switch to their friendly overview tabs to find the targets the FC was calling.)

Most folks were none too pleased afterwards and the whole situation kicked of Snuff's three stages of drama:

1. Someone (usually a specific someone but I won't mention any names ) does something to piss everyone off.
2. People grumble. The average age of Snuff is fairly high in the 'adult' range, so this grumbling typically does not contain highschool quality hormonal outbursts. Instead, there is this slow boiling of tempers where everyone uses various channels (and forums) to articulately and subtly jab at each other with brutal words of thinly veiled malice.
3. Our glorious British overlord writes a thing. This 'thing' is typically an odd and perplexing mixture of humorous inspiration and cranky snarkiness, wrapped up with a few amusing imgurs. And, for unknown reasons, the drama subsides and people are tentatively friendly again.

I will never understand men, lol.

As for me, I have mixed feelings on the matter.

On the one hand, it was a dick move. Lots of my own alliance mates are disgusted by it, and alliance leadership says it's not something that's going to happen again. Turning on blues is not our style in general.

But on the other hand, the last time I was fairly active in EVE there was a large, heated war going on between Snuff and Shadow Cartel. Up until World War Bee we weren't exactly holding hands and singing kumbaya. And no amount of money badger ISK will dissipate some of the bad blood that exists between various folks in both alliances.

So, for the sake of playing devil's advocate against the most common feelings on the subject, I can kind of understand how some folks in Snuff would jump at the chance to kill a SC super or two. (Or three.)

Even if they did have blue crosses next to their names at the time.

But either way. What's done is done. And only time will tell if Shadow Cartel will do anything about it in retaliation.

(And whether or not they will bring angry friends with them when they do.) :/