Put this under the heading of “Just Plain Mean.”
I had docked at the School of Applied Knowledge in the Todaki system after picking up a few skills the other night. Friday night I undocked to head back to headquarters and was greeted with this in my overview.
Todaki is, of course, noob central. If you are Caldari, you end up here for skills and tutorial missions.
And a noob will be unlikely to know that a yellow colored cargo container belongs to somebody else, especially if that somebody else has taken the time to rename it something like “Free items! Take it!”
Of course, if you steal from somebody elses cargo container… regardless of what it is named… you get flagged red to that individual and he can kill you without any repercussions.
So somebody was out for a Friday night game of “smack the noobs.” You can see a couple of wrecked Ibis frigates on the overview as well, so targets were available. Zyionix needed a couple of lessons in “don’t touch the yellow cans” I guess.
That is just the nature of a wide open game like EVE Online.
I am just surprised that there is no EVE version of Three Card Monte going on in Todaki or Jita.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I believe the default setup in EVE will warn you that you are about to steal if you open a box like that. It can however be turned off by a check box.
Still, I’m sure more than a few new players ignore the warning and go for the ‘free’ item anyway. Surprised you did not see more ship wrecks.
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Pretty crafty lol.
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Allowing PKing of noobs in a starter zone. What an innovative way to retain new players. Or maybe it’s a filter to weed out fools who fall for stupid tricks. :)
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Yes, you do get a warning when you open up somebody else’s cargo container. But if you’re a noob and the container says “take me,” well…
If you only have an Ibis, you do not lose much besides pride, as you get your ship restored. The initial knowledge clone has more than enough capacity to cover what you have learned, so no loss there either.
So on the continuum of bad things you can do to noobs, I think it ranks below, say, tricking noobs into deleting their hearth stone in WoW.
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Link, I think your second guess is kinda correct.
“maybe it’s a filter to weed out fools who fall for stupid tricks.”
CCP makes no bones about Eve being an unforgiving environment. There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, about the developers being unsatisfied with the level of PvP in other games, so they designed their own game where almost anything is fair game.
It’s not a nice thing to do, and it’s not welcoming, but it does happen. And there are plenty more tricks, less obvious tricks that don’t pop up warnings before you do it, for the unwary noob. Beware accepting gang invitations from people you don’t know in Empire space ;)
The flip side of that kind of nastiness is the community response. I’ve mentioned Eve University here, a corporation that focuses on new players to Eve. Their corp chat channel, or even their public channel, will warn you of many of the potential traps in Eve. Around their headquarters in the Korsiki system, you’ll get a gang of E-Uni pilots chasing you if you start flipping mining cans or setting people up like this. They don’t take kindly to people abusing noobs. That kind of organization and protection of new people isn’t something you’ll find in most non-PvP games. In a weird way, the potential viciousness of Eve actually contributes to community-building.
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This seems to have evolved from the old free can trick.
About two years ago, people used to put cans in newbie systems advertising free stuff. Once a new player got there and opened it, someone in a ship bigger than theirs (isn’t everything bigger than a newbie frigate?) would fly in and lock onto them. Of course they wouldn’t be allowed to fire but it would scare the crap out of people.
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“This seems to have evolved from the old free can trick.”
It’s the same thing. Flipping ore, same thing. Opening and doing anything (even sorting) to the contents of a can flags you to that player’s corporation for 15 minutes. Once they fire upon you, you can return fire.
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@Trigger64
I know that happens now but during the time I’m talking about (about two years ago) that feature hadn’t been implemented yet. The most you could do was lock onto someone but you couldn’t actually fire at them, even if they had opened your can.
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@godlesswanderer
Ugh.. I read that comment like 5 times before I posted that.. and only now does it make sense :-\
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“And there are plenty more tricks, less obvious tricks that don’t pop up warnings before you do it, for the unwary noob. Beware accepting gang invitations from people you don’t know in Empire space”
Actually there is a really long warning before you accept gang invitations. Maybe they are too long for some, but then who cares anyway ;)
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