I ponder if the definition of piracy in eve has changed over the years. The majority of my piracy experience has been in the last two years and it wasn’t so much the traditional concept of piracy as it was a savage blood lust for death and destruction loot even be damned.

Of course that isn’t piracy that is just being an outlaw murderer type.

Exploring the idea of piracy is something I have been interested in, but in a traditional sense it is a difficult profession in eve… stopping the hauler… convincing them to jettison their cargo, or ransoming their ship/pod. Outright stealing their ship perhaps… (blowing people up sometimes is cool too)

One of our newer Nyan Cat Pirates has been exploring piracy in a more traditional way, he is a old player who has returned to eve. He wrote about it and posted it on crime and punishment. The responses in the thread really represent the paradigm shift in what low sec piracy was and what it is today. Here is his right up:

My first incident happened maybe a week ago, I was just testing out my nemesis, I haven’t messed with stealth bombers since they launched cruise missiles, and could only use improved cloaking device II needless to say it’s capabilities were a mystery to me, and bombs are a bit of a fuzzy area for my still as I’ve not went to null to play with them yet.

So I had just undocked from my lowsec home in my shiny new nemesis, and was going to warp to a belt to see what my damage was like on different size ships, when I saw on scan a drake. Now my lowsec system isn’t ever really deserted it’s close to a 0.0 entry point and typically has a few people docked up or passing through so a drake on scan wasn’t that big of a deal, but old habits die hard so I pulled up the d-scan and started doing some quick 90 degree scans when I picked him up in a direction where there was only belts.

After another minute I had narrowed him down to a specific belt and I warped in cloak to find him tractoring NPC wrecks 20km away to salvage them while still shooting at the rat that was left in the belt. At this point the adrenaline had started to flood my system, the last time I’d done any series PVP had been back in 2008, and the shakes had already started to take me. After all this guy could be bait, he wasn’t a new character he had a 2008 creation date and for all I knew he had buddies waiting to jump in or had a cyno module and was simply waiting for some evil pirate to show himself. Not just that but I was in a completely untried ship I had just got and whose capabilities I had no more handle on than simply knowing some numbers on paper.

I maneuvered my nemesis into range and decloaked, turned on my afterburner and started a more or less manual orbit at 15km away, because he was so close to the asteroids in the belt that I couldn’t possibly rely upon a standard orbit. Targeted him as soon as I had a decent speed, activated my disrupter and then my torpedo bays.

The first salvo of my torpedoes were away, and the drake still hadn’t targeted me, and was still shooting at the NPC rat that was still in the belt which already had him down to half shields. My torpedoes struck all but the thinnest margin of his shields. My second volley was away and hand blasted him into nearly half armor when he finally put his drones on me, while still shooting at rat in the belt. I fit my nemesis with a medium shield extender so I was doing fine and it looked like I’d be able to kill him before he could break my shields.

He must of come to the same conclusion, because he convoed me a second later and informed me that I had him dead to rights. At this point I decided to try and ransom him, it was something I did routinely ages ago but it had fallen out of favor, as some pirates thought it was funny not to honor ransoms. Still I thought maybe it was worth a shot. So shaking I managed to type out

“Recall your drones and stop firing, send 30million isk to my account and I’ll let you keep your ship. You have 30 seconds”

I fired another salvo to put him into half hull just to let him know I was serious when I saw his drones get recalled and I waited. It took longer than thirty seconds, and so i started a count down from 5.

five,

four,

three,

Still no blinky wallet,

two,

my finger hovers over the f1 key, ready to press it if local jumps, or he reengages.

on…. my wallet flashes I check the amount

Thirty million isk, I thanked him and left the belt, my shields had never dropped below fifty percent and I had just made a cool thirty mill in a completely untried ship. It was a dangerous risk taking an untested ship against a possible bait drake but it was worth it in the end.

tl;dr I ransomed a drake in a stealth bomber for 30mil, in my first act of piracy in nearly 5 years.