PvE = Self Harm

Ever since I've played EvE I've always had an inner Carebear that sometimes bursts out to do lame PvE stuff. That said I've always considered myself a PvP'r and I do tend to get bored of PvE very quickly. (as with most games I play actually)

Recently I have set myself up with a clone deep in 0.0 space, with a couple of ships and a station full of mission agents. Ive spent the last few days slowly (Note: _slowly_) building up my standings to be able to start the Epic mission arcs. I've finally got my standings into positive numbers, but I've still a way to go and many low level missions left to burn through.
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WHINE: The epic PIRATE mission arcs were designed with criminals in mind. They were for people who wanted to be on the wrong side of the law. My problem with that, is that nearly all pirates and criminals have terrible standings with everybody. So to start the mission arc you need to farm up a whole bunch of standings. Rather tedious to say the least.

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Anyway, yesterday I was about to jump into my new 0.0 clone and continue with my mission blitzing when I got stopped by Felix and Lady Thanatos (LT). Apparently LT had found an escalating mission, and wanted to know if anyone would like to join.

Its possible you can get some rather awesome loot from doing it, and they can actually be kinda fun. So I stopped myself from jump cloning and decided to join them on their epic quest for fame and riches. Lee11B also joined us and the chain sent us to a system several jumps away.

The first site was rather easy. We finished it in a couple of minutes, got some crappy/cheap faction loot from one of the rats and then moved on to the next site. That one was also easy and gave us a crappy faction item again, so we moved on.

While we were on the way to our next site, Lee decided it would be a good idea to sit on a gate with a bunch of frigs for a while... and idea which ended up with him getting scrambled, shot and exploderised before we had even got back to the gate to help him.

Being true to the spirit of Python we decided to just continue without him.

We carried on without incident until we reached a site that looked like it could be the final site. At the centre of the site was a small control bunker and we assumed that was where all the loot would be.

"Don't shoot the bunker yet, kill all the rats first!" said LT.

Fine. I shot all the rats in my bomber, melting them pretty easy. Felix was in his arty cane, so we pretty much volleyed everything (Even tho Felix brought the wrong ammo). After all the rats were dead we checked the loot of one of the faction spawns we had killed. Again... crappy item with about a million isk..

But it was OK, the bunker would drop something awesome no doubt.

So, after LT had recovered a little bit of cap he told us to go ahead and shoot the bunker. Felix, opened fire and.... I exploded???

What the fuck!?

I spammed the warp button to get my pod out and checked my screens. Apparently the bunker set off a blast wave which insta popped my ship. Awesome!

So I set of back home, in my pod, and about half way back I received the news that the bunker had dropped nothing. We had ended up with a couple of faction items worth about 15 mil altogether which when split up meant a measly 4 mil each. not even enough to pay for the ship I lost.

PvE sucks.