This story was written at the end of 2004 and portrays the first two years of my time playing Eve-Online. Over the course of a few weeks, I intend to post the story in its entirety, as well as expand and write more. Please remember that as I was quite young when this was written, the quality of the work is not on par with what you might see me produce today.

Part 3: My Change

My destination was Umokka. I had sold my Hoarder and almost all my assets. I was now heading towards Umokkas top station to sign up for my new corporation, The Federation of Assassins.
FOA for short was run by Tank CEO, this was his first corporation. Tank and his friends were pure pirates, they killed people for pleasure. I thought to myself oh what fun that would be, a bit of the 'ol Ultraviolence for you Kubrick fans.

Tank was impressed that I was about as rich as his 10-member corporation put together, he had plans for the future which interested me, so I decided I join him. Teaming up with friends I still have in Eve today, people like Paddyman, DrStrangelove, Shircrief, Tibor Ferenc, Merlin and many others. My playstyle might be ruthless but my biggest assets in Eve will always be the people I know, they are always what keep me playing the game.

Our goal was to get a Blackbird original blueprint. The cost was about 36,000,000 ISK. It took us roughly 2 weeks to get the blueprint, after we got it one of the most memorable things that ever happened to me in Eve took place:

I was on the trade channel, someone was selling around 5,000 megacyte and about 6,500 zydine (Those are the numbers I recall). I had this brilliant idea, back then something like this had never been done before, it was new and original. I tricked the person, I told him I would buy the minerals for more than he was asking under one condition, he would deliver.

Now, this was before the time of sentry guns, CONCORD was there but not really anything you had to be afraid of, if I remember correctly they only responded in systems that were .8 and above. What we did was ask the person to deliver to Umokka, which was our sort-of pirate haven. The person agreed, I think you already know what happened. The second he jumped in five of us, four rifters and Tank in an Osprey were on him, he died swiftly and we got all the minerals we would need for our Blackbird production.

Killing for me was pure ecstasy, destroying my enemies ships, flying towards that loot can and putting all his stuff in my cargo hold felt very good, I absolutely loved it. Finally I had found my calling in the game, I was a pirate. This deed would shape the rest of my Eve-career, I focused on finding ways to get rich fast and easily, although until much later, I had little success.

FOA was doing good, we were mining the 'roid belts in Kakakela dry, trying to get all of our members into Blackbirds. We had had the nicest fleet in the game for a 15-member corporation. Soon our goals were set higher, we aimed for a Moa original. We mined, sold blackbirds, mined some more and then we sold some more blackbirds. Soon we had a Moa original blueprint, by this time we were ready.

We decided to move, we went to a system called Tartoken, it's right below Pure Blind. We camped one of the best pirate systems in the game back then, 93PI-4. Those were good times, we would kill anyone coming through with the locals being capable of little as no resistance, those were the times of real piracy, when people were just getting into cruisers and nobody had even seen a battleship.

This was around the time when m0o was reigning over Mara and Passari, j0rt got the first battleship, medium guns could have a damage modifier of 16x and all your gunnery skills and damage mods stacked over and over again. It was before the time of highways, before we had the FA and CA and when SA was the only large alliance. These were the times when you could pirate without being afraid of a fleet of battleships coming after you and before we had billboards.

Our stay in Tartoken didn't last long, FOA changed places again. This time the destination was set for Curse. Tank had received an invitation from Smoked, the CEO of M3G4 to join their alliance. The alliance was to consist of three corporations, M3G4, FOA and Da-Dragons. Together the 3 corporations ruled over the Curse region, note that this was long before the time of the Curse Alliance, which came much later.

FOA was a good corporation with one weakness, Tank. Tank is a horrible leader, he might be a good PVP'er but in a leadership role, we might aswell have the Teletubbies. His ship-losing habit turned us into his personal miners, with only the goal of replacing his lost ships. I took a stand, I had done this before, how hard could it be the second time around?

Part 4: My Escape

One night I asked Tank for factory-access so I could make myself some ammo, in his stupidity he granted it to me. Knowing that the Moa original was being researched, the second Tank logged off I pulled the it out of the laboratory and placed it safely in my own hangar. I then proceeded into emptying the corporation hangars of all blueprints, minerals and modules.

That isn't the whole story though, I had already talked to several corporation members about this and they all agreed, it was something that had to be done. The two members who were mainly in it with me were Paddyman and Tibor Ferenc. Together we flew around 200 jumps across the galaxy to get away from Tank CEO. We started in Curse, our first destination was Venal. We went only through 0.0, remember this was back when traveling took twice as long due to lack of stargates.

In Venal we met TTI, they told us we could stay there although there wasn't much there for us. The region was pretty dead, there were only three of us with 150 million ISK in assets stored in my cargohold. We decided to leave Venal and continue our journey. We went South, through Pure Blind and Cloud Ring.

We arrived in Syndicate, this would be our haven for the next five months. Here we would build ourselves up and reach our goals. We formed The Atlantic Corporation, almost everyone in FOA besides Tank eventually became a part of it. We mined, we NPC hunted, we became rich. Here we would reach all our ultimate goal of getting a battleship original blueprint.

On August 6th, spending 3 weeks of non-stop NPC hunting we finally got the Scorpion original blueprint. We had used our Moa original to make copies and sell, that way we had been able to get the originals or the Rupture, Maller and Thorax. To be able to get the Scorpion BPO we had to sell all those along with all of our blueprint copies, most of our ships and my dear beloved scorpion, that I had gotten just about two weeks earlier.

The Atlantic Corporation was a success story, all the members were dedicated, we were all friends, we had a great bunch of twenty or so people who had just achieved a major goal in exactly three months of playing. There was only one key factor missing.

Player vs. Player.

Another change was needed, we had a strong financial background, experienced members, nothing could and would go wrong. The formed The Legitimate Businessmans Club. I was the CEO, Paddyman and Tibor Ferenc were the directors. We were a pirate corp, ruling over FD-MLJ just as m0o dissolved and Sinister left to form the Curse Alliance. It was awesome, we killed alot of ships per day, we had Syndicate all for ourselves. We knew the best hunting grounds (XZH and MJY) to get rarest modules.

We teamed up with two local corporations, Fatal Shadows and Space Wolves. We formed a small alliance with the purpose of looking out for eachothers best interest. We sometimes pvp'd together, hunted together. The alliance went on for a while, Fatal Shadows eventually left with the rest of Sinister to join CA and Space Wolves dissolved. We were back on our own.

TLBC made a name for itself. We earned the respect of our enemies and stuck fear into the hearts of most. We were known throughout the galaxy, people knew where we lived and they avoided the area, the time came though that we couldn't run TLBC anymore, many reasons were behind it.

The main reason for why we split up TLBC was that we had too many enemies. We had around 60 active members in the corporation but it was basically us against FA, which had probably atleast ten times our numbers. We won some fights, lost others. In the end it came down to myself to make the decision. I had two choices.

a) To be stuck in this endless struggle that had been going on for over a month.
b) Take the extremely interesting alternative, explained below.