This is one of my most memorable EVE moments.
It was 2010, and I’d been playing EVE for less than an hour total. I was working my way through the tutorial missions when I got a mission to hand-in 1 Zydrine to a mission agent. This Zydrine wasn’t given to you, you had to go out there and get it yourself, and the mission had a time limit to boot. I had no idea where to get Zydrine from, but it sounded… mineral-y, so I began looking for different asteroids to mine in my Bantam to hopefully find some, but I was only finding ores.
Frustrated, I asked in local where to find Zydrine, and someone told me to buy some from the market. I brought-up the market window for the first time, typed in Zydrine, and there it was, lots of it. I saw all these sell orders for thousands of Zydrine at a time, but I only needed one, I couldn’t afford 4,000 of them! So I scrolled down the list until I found 1 Zydrine for sale, cheap enough for me to afford, and bought it.
After some panicking that it didn’t magically appear in my cargohold, I set course for my Zydrine. The course took me to lowsec, a system not too far from the starter systems. There was some warning pop-up when I attempted to jump through the gate, but the time limit for the mission was almost up, and I had no time for such warnings. As soon as I enter system, there’s a player sat waiting for me on the gate, all red and menacing and stuff, I somehow managed to enter warp to the station that contained my precious Zydrine and docked-up, but the person who was on the gate followed me there, I saw them land just before the station interior loaded.
I now had my Zydrine, and put it in my ship’s cargohold, the time limit for the mission was coming up, but there was this scary person waiting for me outside. I waited for a few minutes before deciding to chance it, I was fast enough to get away from him at the gate, so surely I would be fast enough to escape him from the station? Nope. I had barely loaded space when my ship got exploded almost instantly, followed shortly by my pod.
I didn’t realise this until sometime later, but it turned out that this player would regularly bait newbies into his lowsec system by offering 1 Zydrine on the market close to the starter systems, and then blow them up for easy kills. There was no convo, no recompense, and no friendly advice, just cold, hard experience, and honestly I’m thankful for it. The next time I lost a ship, I managed to get my pod out, because I’d searched for info about it due to this early learning experience I’d had.
