An Eve Vegas presentation by Data Scientist CCP Larrikin highlighted pilots with the most kills between 2007 and 2019. As the scroll slowed to a stop, Eve’s current, most efficient killers were shown. This is the first in a series of articles about a few of those pilots.
“I found out about (the Vegas presentation) three or four days after it came out,” explains DuBoi Dustite, who ranks fifth overall with 32,156 ship kills. “Basically all I do all day, every day is undock and look for shit to kill. Pretty much how I spend all my time in New Eden.” Having 32,000-plus kills is one of the fruits of Dustite’s labor, but not the one he prizes the most. “The only real stat I’m concerned about on zkill is my number one spot for all-time ships lost. I’m pretty proud about that.”
Dustite started with Dust 514 and moved to Eve in 2014. He’s spent the past three years with The Lazy Crabs, a member corp of the Hull Penetration alliance. He says that while he probably takes too many fights, he encourages Eve’s newest pilots to do the same. “I’m probably going to die, but let’s see who I can take down with me. I wish more people had that kind of attitude because there’s people literally missing out on thousands of kills.”
What’s Blingy?
In his Dust days he was a loyalty points farmer. “I was dropping Orbital Strikes for my alliance, and eventually started doing it for myself. I was able to amass a huge amount of ISK and I basically lived off that for a really long time.” Once in Eve, he focused on making ISK in lowsec and was challenged by a denizen of Faction Warfare. “It took me a long time to get into PvP, and a long time to get my first kill. It was some dude from militia chat in a Cruor, and I was in a stabbed Cruor. This dude was like, ‘Why don’t you make it PvP fit?’ and I was like, ‘What’s a PvP fit?’ He said, ‘Fit a scrambler on your ship,’ and I was like, ‘What’s a fuckin’ scrambler?’ I fit it up and he came and attacked me and I popped my cherry. Linked my kill in militia chat and they were all, ‘Wow, that’s a really great kill, it’s blingy!’ I didn’t know what blingy was at the time!”
Dustite says Eve has the best PvP of any game hands down, and its player are vocal about how they feel, and “a lot of complaints are pretty legitimate.” In his opinion, the lack of willingness to fight and blow up ships is due to the current mentality of safety. “Eve rewards risk-averse players a little bit too much. It’s not so much the mechanics. It’s more like the people that play the game are mostly the problem. I’m pretty sure that’s a big reason for the population decline in the past year or two. Who wants to pay like 15 bucks a month to come across the same group that won’t fight.”
As a lowsec player Dustite watched ‘The Chaos Era’ from afar. He says the blackout didn’t affect his corp. It was “just business as usual. I think it was a good thing. I think they should bring it back and it should be a rolling blackout, or some kind of deployable or module that just blacks out systems. There’s nothing wrong with crabbing, but everyone should be exposed.”
Fight the Losing Fight
Attributing a large portion of his success to Hull Penetration, Dustite says his alliance is pushing back against Eve’s current risk-averse meta. “We’ll take unfavorable fights. We’ll fight the bigger gang, the bigger fleet. We’ll go in knowing it’s a losing fight. We’re just having fun! We’ll do what we can do and hope for the best.” Facing off against risk averse players isn’t the only struggle. “You go in there and fight them! You don’t need to go in with a hard counter and every little advantage. Take the fight!” Dustite says he doesn’t use combat drugs or implants. “It’s just me and my ship. One thing I’m really proud of. You need your ship and a couple of dudes to fly with and take whatever fight comes your way. If you got that, man, then you’re good.”
Ever since his Dust 514 LP farming days, Dustite’s time in Eve has focused on interacting with other pilots in some sort of PvP. But the harsh realities that make Eve great can and do take a toll. “I really like how you can scam people in this game,” he says. “It’s pretty awesome and it goes with the pirate lifestyle that you can live. But at the same time, it needs to go but it needs to stay. I know two people who stopped playing because they bought PLEX and fell for a contract scam. They were like, ‘Oh I can make a quick 200M if I buy and sell this,’ then the buy order just vanishes. Just like that. What the fuck? It’s just another one of those, all the things that make Eve great are also all the same things that make Eve really bad. Like Eve is really its own worst enemy.”
