You know you’re making progress in EVE when people pop up boasting of having killed you. People, I should be clear, who haven’t actually killed me.

I was checking Ironfleet.com’s incoming links when I found this forum discussion. A nice link to a recent blog post got this response:

hahah….bill….do you know that Marlenus guy?

i popped on of his ships a while ago when he was trying to jet can ‘salvage’ from my corps.

it was the single most enjoyable experience i have had in an mmo :smile:

Kitted up an osprey for ‘mining’….had only one mining laser, the rest was combat stuff….warp scramble and a silent targeter….it was awesome! he didnt see it coming

There’s only one problem with this story: it almost certainly didn’t happen. Nice story, though.

Memories can be bad, so it’s theoretically possible I’m mistaken, that I’ve forgotten something that happened when I was still a noob. I do remember losing a Badger Mark I to a mining barge this way, back in the day, when I first discovered that warp scramblers existed in the game. After that, I was careful; paranoid even. And I’m pretty sure it never happened again.

I’ve checked my killmails going back to 2006.05.29 — there’s been no ship loss as described during the last nineteen and a half months. So if it did happened, it happened when I was less than six weeks old.

(That date — when I was six weeks old — was the date I lost my first cruiser, got podded for the first time, and learned that saving killmails is important. My revenge on Swiftness and Omae Gaw’d hasn’t ripened … yet.)

So … killmail or shut the fuck up?

It’s not that I resent the story — as described, that’s an honorable way for a jetcan salvager to die. It’s just that I’m proud of never falling for that particular trick. You can count the number of lasers an Osprey is firing, and if they’ve only got one, that’s kind of a red flag. In my pre-Crane days, I always used lots of stabs in the low slots of my ore-hauling ships, and I learned to time the grab so that I was out before anybody could get a lock. I used to love hauling repeated loads out from under the guns of a mining battleship.

I’m pretty good at this.

3 Responses to “I Shot Jesse James”

  1. Granite Greysock says:

    Just cause you dont remember it, doesnt mean it didnt happen. It was in Muvolalien (cant remember the exact spelling….just north of jita).

    I had kitted the osprey out with silent targeting (or whatever its called….havent played eve for over a year…since LOTRO came out) so you didnt even know you were locked…the INSTANT you went red you were scrambled so you couldnt jump out. Using heavy missles and a drones, I tore your badger…(maybe a badger II??) apart.I didnt pod you, but i would have it i could lol…. Was great fun cause you had been harrassing some of my corp mates who were mining at the time. I

  2. Marlenus says:

    As I said in my post, if it happened during my first six weeks in the game, it’s just barely possible. Muv would be the system where I was at that time, which tends to confirm your story. But my memory is telling me I only died once in that fashion, and it was to a barge.

    I never harassed anybody, though — just hauled their ore.

    Any time more recent, it didn’t happen, according to my killmails.

    Thanks for posting more details, and my apologies if it turns out you were right and I was mistaken.

  3. Granite Greysock says:

    the barge might have been my corpmate. I dont recall who actually laid the final blow. He (my corpmate in a badger) warped in as i was chewing through the shields and armour, and contributed to the kill with his one rail gun… i remember getting the kill mail though, but i dont remember who actually got the credit for the final kill

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