Not Politically Correct wrote:I've been playing since July of 2009. Had my ups and downs. Made a lot of ISK mining, lost a corp to an infiltrator, lost some expensive ships, blah, blah, blah.
Then I decided to start a mission running corp, and it was expanding nicely. 2.5% tax rate, Level 4 missions 18 hours a day even for people only 2 weeks old. It was a lot of fun helping them. Life was good.
Today I got an application from a 2007 player. +5.0 standing with Concord, no bounty, seemed like a nice guy, but there was a problem. He had been in both Goonswarm and Goonwaffe in 2010. So I asked him about that before accepting the application. He said that was a thing of the past, he had grown out of that phase.
Do you see where I am going now?
I accepted him and asked him along on a Level 4. He killed my CNR right outside of my home station. 994 million ISK down the tubes.
It was obviously my fault, as much for the things I did as the things I didn't do. But what's the result?
All the members of the corp are now in stasis and will be kicked as soon as they come out. Applications will be disabled permanently. I'm not going to quit the game, because I like it, but I would much rather fly solo, and auto-reject, than get another surprise like that.
'Nough said.
I get the general sentiment, OP. You expected the nature of someone to change. And you're not alone. Our society is, after all, built on this assumption -- that someone can be 'sorry,' and grow out of being bad. Problem is, that's such a terribly rare thing. One need only turn on the TV to find dozens of celebrities and sports stars who have 'done a bad thing,' appologized, and then offended yet again. And this is because people -- and, in particular, malicious people -- don't tend to change.
They say that 4.5% of the population are sociopaths. That means that, out of the 35,000 or so players on EVE at any given moment, approximately 1,500 of them do not possess anything we could even come close to identifying as a soul. Scary, huh? These people are all 'me me me,' have no conscience, no moral compass, and will do anything or say anything to gain even a momentary or fleeting advantage.
Contrary to what others have said, the anonymity granted by EVE doesn't somehow make being bad okay. You don't step out of yourself and get a free pass on karma when you log into this little electronic universe. If someone 'up there' is paying attention, they're paying attention no matter what the circumstances are. But, as I have said, there is a goodly portion of the human race that doesn't care... that doesn't worry over labels like 'good' or 'evil' because they think they've transcended them. You have to realize that those folks are out there, and that they would stab you in the heart to steal away a nickel.
I play the game alone... and may always do so. Space is a lonely place, as is life. Trust the person you marry. Trust your family. Trust a best friend. Trust nobody else.