PvP in Eve is going to give me a heart attack
I shit you not. Ran with a gank op today into the new drone space. Scouted for the gang, until I pass a small Pure gang which passed me…straight into my gang. I jump back through, and my gang is engaging two harbingers. And above ALL OTHER TARGETS in my gang, one of them targets me. And my heart started beating hard. Hard enough that I could feel it in my goddamn chest. I can’t buy that in any other game. I don’t know why. I’ve been under high-stress situations in games which have similar or higher stakes on the line (Enemy Territory, Battlefield) but nothing fills me with sheer terror than the fact that someone else’s ship is firing at mine trying to kill ME. It’s as if they actually had a gun to my head.
The last time something like tonight happened was a while ago when Ars Caelestis (my corporation) was still a member of Huzzah. BoB rolls into the general area with an inty force while I’m ratting. We hear the intel - this may be an invasion. I’m in my raven which I had just paid off. I warp to our POS. Safety. But if BoB sets up, I may be stuck there. I make a break for the FAT gate, trying my luck. I get in warp, “inties spotted in RR-”…I think I’m safe. Midwarp I see members of the Band of Brothers in local. I reason to myself “they’ll never make it to the FAT gate, I’m fine”…until I drop out of warp. And there are the interceptors, waiting on the gate. I don’t have enough WCS in my ratting raven, I can’t defend myself from this. I jump through, because sitting there on the gate gets me nothing when there are more inties on the way. On the other side, there’s a fellow alliance mate, being picked apart. I can do nothing - my cruises can do little damage to PvP spec interceptors, and I start to align. Slowly. Very slowly. BOOM goes the alliance mate, and the interceptors turn toward me, as I on the inside damn myself for not attempting to help him despite. One of them locks me. I warp off. I don’t know if he put a scram on me, but it didn’t matter, it was done. All of this was over in the timespan of a minute. The warp to the gate, the jump through, and the warp to the station. At the end, while I docked, the end of my fingertips were literally tingling.
As long as that happens, as long as I can somehow get to that spot - the border between life and death, the not knowing what the hell is going to happen, I will play this game.