23 Feb 2012

The Enigma affair, comments and rages

The Original Enigma?

Just before going on leave for a week, I posted that two of my Bastards had snagged a ship flown by a CCP Dev and ended up podding him and getting a super rare ship in the drop, an Engima. I then left it at that and when I came back, I was a bit shocked at the amount of text that was generated across a number of different forums and killboards: from Reddit to EveNews24 to EVE-Kills to Eve-O.

I was a bit disappointed with the comments from various persons who accused us of faking kill mails (to pad our kill board) to being close friends of CCP and getting some cool toys because of it. A list of where people talked about it is at the bottom of this post.


After spending some time reading through all the relevant posts I wanted to take the opportunity to answer back, clarify and refute as much as possible but helpfully, TFS Tibbs, one of the two Bastards who was involved decided to put something down on and I share it with you all.

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The Enigma Affair

It was a early morning and I was drifting around Dudreda after a previous night's fun with the Eve-Uni blob. I thought I would run around the Arifsdald pocket, just behind the Eve-Uni base system. This system always has a few explorers to hunt down.


I jumped my prober into Ansen, a nice small system always good as everything appears on directional scanner. So a quick and easy task and on entering the system, I saw only one pilot in local. However, hang on a minute, it was a CCP guy!  My first reaction was that it was some kind of roleplaying event. I wonder what its for?


I hit the directional-scanner and spot a single ship.....a cockroach? WTF is that?



Second thought– I vaguely remember a role playing event where stuff was left in a wormhole for players to find -okay must be one of those frigates. I dropped probes.

A member of the Meatshields is passing one jump away, I pull him into fleet and I have a tackler now.
2 scan cycles later and I have a warpable target. We both jump in and I squad warp to target.

We land close to a weird looking ship and I
hear “point”, joy. The mystery ship was warp scrambled. Thank you Bracer! So quickly we start shooting this spider looking craft. It had shields and such and Bracer's ishkur's drones tore into it. No return fire, no movement to escape, no magic weapon. Nothing, holy shit, the pilot wasn't asleep was he? Once it was down to near hull we stopped shooting and kept points only; it was ransom time. This will be epic on The Bastards' ransom board!

I invite the Dev to our ransom channel, I have to pay a CSPA charge (SERIOUSLY WTF!) however, there was no response; the Dev is definitely AFK. 


CSPA Charge? For CCP?


Now what? We had about 20 mins to downtime – okay time to kill the stupid frigate and it went boom!
Kill the CCP DEV

We grab the pod, let's try another ranson but he is still AFK. Ok kill him, at least a nice corpse to add to TheHermit's mortuary ( a great website by the way..)

Job done and then we check the loot, silence our jaws dropped. IT-IS-AN-ENIGMA!
[At this point a million things go through my mind – Is this legit? Are CCP introducing the Jove?
Did I just win EVE? Etc.] Anyway its only 15 minutes to downtime. Stop thinking, scoop the loot and think later!

We have isk!!!

I hit 'scoop all' – no too big – f*ck we need a hauler. The next ten minutes are spent floating in space next to the wreck waiting for a prowler to arrive – no stress – calm, be calm.


5 minutes to downtime and the hauler arrives and grabs the ship. It slowly rumbles away. 

1minute to downtime and the hauler docks in high sec. The Enigma is sitting in my hanger – oof.



Tibbs and Bracer celebrating....

Downtime hits – WTF do I do now?

So – I start up a few convos – “no one will touch that thing unless CCP say its legit” is the general response.


OK – I do the right thing – I petition it.

And then the Jove came and took it away – oh well – at least we got a ransom payout in the end (1 plex each – for the record).

No elite PVP skills here – just doing my piracy basics – a freak event, a little bit of EVE history, and a few glorious hours of staring at a very red shiny ship in my hanger.


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So there you have it, straight from Tibbs himself who was one of three witnesses of the event. It is a freak, possibly once-in-a-lifetime-event, Tibbs and Bracer were in the right place and had the presence of mind to do what pirates do.

We do not have any relationship with CCP or the CCP Devs / Bug hunters.


The killmail has been API verified so I hope that removes all doubts. Great pity that we could not have kept the shiny red ship. I mean no-one can fly the damn thing so why not? It would make a wonderful addition to someone's hangar. A two plex reward is better than nothing and I have created and awarded a special medal to Tibbs and Bracer too but it is a poor reward when compared to keeping the ship!


Out of interest, if this ship WAS allowed to be kept - I wonder how much Tibbs would have gotten for it? I keep hearing 100b isk but surely not? Who would pay for this ship?



Here's a list of where the cockroach kill had been mentioned and some of the chatter in it:

Killmail comments (very funny and some quite rage-fuelled too!)

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12405684
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12401428

Eve.O forum threads (a tad dry but some funny posts)

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=68458&find=unread
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=68486&find=unread
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=68697&find=unread

Failheap thread
http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?5610-Cockroach

Kugu
http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?3647-Comedy-Killmails/page58

Eve-Uni thread
http://forum.eveuniversity.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=51164

Reddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/pje5p/pirates_scan_down_ccp_dude_loot_enigma_have_to/

Jesters Trek blog
http://jestertrek.blogspot.com

Oldergamers
http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/eve-public-intergalactic-superhighway-public-forum/415176-la-cockroach.html


Shameless plug...


While we cannot guarantee cockroach kills or CCP Dev bodies, we do have regular ops and roams (all small to medium fleets) as well as having a laugh. If you want to join us pirates, come on over to the Eve-O recruitment thread, bump it, follow the instructions and apply to join. We invite recruits to our regular fleets as part of the interview. Go on, you'll love it.

Also we have a need for US Timezone pilots (or corporations) to join us. Drop me or TFS Tibbs an evemail or convo.