Bot on Safari

Lately there has been a lot of hype about getting new players into the dark side of EVE, particularly Safariing or AWOXing carebears in highsec. For those of you who aren't familiar with this activity, it is the act of joining a corporation with the specific intention of going on a gleeful killing spree of it's members, taking advantage of the mechanics which allow a character to shoot members of his own corporation in high security space without being CONCORDed.

Haedonism Bot goes on Safari

I've been hearing a lot about this lately, particularly from the community of my fellow Belligerent Undesirables. I've been encouraging my own alliance members to go out and Safari carebear corporations, and to set a good example I decided to try it out myself. Here is how it played out.

Target: NXS Mineral and Ore Extraction
To find a target I checked the corporate recruitment ads in the EVE Online forums. NXS was the first industrial corp listed. So I sent in a blind application with my Safari alt, who I had rolled a couple of days earlier. The app read "I'm a new player looking to join some mining fleets." Then I logged off, and a couple of hours later, EVEMon was telling me that I had a notification that my app had been accepted.

First Kill: Retriever

First Kill.

After that I logged in for an hour or so wach day, but there were only a couple of people flying around, and they were just in Retrievers. I was pretty sure from their advert that they sometimes did mining fleets with their Orca, so I waited. After 3 days or so, nobody had undocked in an Orca while I was on, so I decided to cut my losses and try another corp. Reluctantly I undocked, used the in-game map to locate the one guy who was out mining at that time ("find corp members in space"), went to his belt, said "ohai!" in local and blew him up.

We got into a bit of entertaining smacktalk in corp chat after this. The log is a bit too lengthy to post all of it here, but I do like to share, so here it is.

Anyway, basically I figured I'd just play the thing out from there. I was kind of in a hurry to find a juicier target and move on, but felt obligated to at least try for some kind of ransom first. They were pretty much newbs, for the most part, so I started at 50 mil, and dropped the price to 30 mil a bit later. By the time I got done bantering with them, it was getting fairly late, so I opted to stay in space cloaked up for the night so they couldn't boot me, and see who would be on in the morning. A few corp mails went out:

To which I replied:

And as a parting thought:

Important Information.

...and with that I went to bed. 

Second Kill: Noctis
The next day I logged in, afked a bit until a couple of people were online. This corp was really sleepy, usually there were just one or two at a time. Eventually I found two of them on in the same system, a dead end system with one gate out and no stations. I figured they were either mining or running missions, so I went there, thinking I'd camp the other side of the gate and catch them as they jumped out to turn in their mission or empty their ore holds or whatever. A weird coincidence in timing happened though. As I landed on the gate they were both there, in a Raven and a Noctis. The Raven warped off, and the Noctis jumped into the dead-end system. I jumped after, but my reaction time was slow, and he warped off. So I jumped back, put my drones out and waited. i figured the Raven probably had no point fitted, so I wasn't scared of it. (Would have hunted it down, actually, if I had logi support with me. The Noctis had to come out of there sometime, though.

At this point, they have noticed that I am ATK, so they begin to talk to me in corp chat. Neither of these guys had been online during the previous night's Retriever kill, so they were a bit confused about what was happening. I played it like the whole thing had been a sort of practical joke between the retriever and I.

1. [23:46:52] Zortron Andros > could we have a word ?
2. [23:46:57] Unexpected Platypus > sure
3. [23:47:08] Zortron Andros > care to explain what happened ?
4. [23:47:43] Unexpected Platypus > oh, we were just joking around, don't trouble yourself about it :D
5. [23:48:03] Unexpected Platypus > those guys are such kidders
6. [23:48:29] Zortron Andros > well, you did kill his retriever
7. [23:49:09] Unexpected Platypus > yes, well, i have a medical condition. my finger twitches uncontrollably near the F1 key sometimes
8. [23:49:17] Unexpected Platypus > nothing ii can do about it....
9. [23:50:30] Zortron Andros > so it was a one sided joke
10. [23:51:15] Unexpected Platypus > yeah, i apologized and reimbursed his isk, but he just wants to keep the joke going i guess, haha to each their own
11. [23:51:48] Zortron Andros > that i'll have to confirm with him.
12. [23:51:55] Unexpected Platypus > ofc
13. [23:51:55] Zortron Andros > how can we know you'll not do the same again?
14. [23:52:18] Unexpected Platypus > you have my word on it
15. [23:53:59] Zortron Andros > good to know
16. [23:55:23] Zortron Andros > so what are you up to now?
17. [23:56:02] Zortron Andros > ok
18. [23:56:06] Zortron Andros > are you sure about that ?
19. [23:56:58] Zortron Andros > really ?
20. [23:57:02] Zortron Andros > are you that person?
21. [23:57:30] Unexpected Platypus > haha
22. [23:57:33] Unexpected Platypus > guess so

Second Kill.

Right about when Zortron said, "so what are you up to now?" was when he jumped his Noctis back through the gate, and of course I pointed him and blew him up. Here are the full chat logs for your enjoyment. 

That was pretty much the end of this safari adventure. I chatted a bit with the one guy who stayed logged in (a good guy, actually, who I still talk to from time to time), and left the corp to find more lucrative targets, then got caught up in some alliance business, and haven't safaried again since.

Final Impressions

Safariing people is really fun. This particular Safari didn't result in any noteworthy kills, but once I made the decision to actually start shooting, the whole thing was really amusing. There was a fair amount of downtime, when I was afk cloaked and just hanging out doing things on another account, but when the killing was happening, it was as satisfying as any other dastardly deeds that I have committed in EVE. This is also an activity that new players can do with a bit of direction and mentoring, which is also great. Next time I think I will target a larger corp though, this corp had 24 members at the time, and there were usually no more than 3 online. 

Have fun and fly dangerously.