What is a Carebear?

If you're at all familar with my background in EVE and in this blog, I'm sure you can agree that I'm eminently qualified to write a post on carebears. (Yes, you may start laughing now.) Admittedly, a lot of the thoughts in this post come from the fact that since I started writing this blog, I've seen myself as less and less of a carebear than I have in the past. Eventually, it lead me to wonder exactly what defines a carebear in the EVE sense, specifically in the context of lowsec PVP.

My thinking on this topic started a few months ago while having a chat with some of the ladies in the Women Gamers of EVE channel. We were discussing different types of ship fittings, and without quite realizing what I was getting into (the fits were related to highsec missions), I started offering a few points before realizing that I'd absent-mindedly been thinking along the lines of fitting said ship for PVP, rather than PVE. The response of one of the ladies in question was, "Yeah, Dian, but you're mostly a PVP pilot anyway."



At the time, my reaction was a fairly surprised "I am?", but as I thought about it more, it made sense. In conversations around that time I hadn't referred to carebearing much at all, and the times that I did, it was mostly in the context of how I didn't do it very much. Fast forward to about a month ago, and much to my surprise, I found myself actually being slightly offended at being called a carebear - and even more strangely, the comment was made in jest by an experienced PVP pilot. (The surprising bit was that was made in jest, to be clear.)

When did that mentality change? When I first started PVPing, and even up until a couple of months ago, I quite freely referred to myself as a carebeat (with varying levels of seriousness). I honestly didn't expect to find myself bristling at being called a 'bear, especially since I'd worn the title with a mixture of humour and pride for so long. At some point, I was struck with a thought that was entirely too logical: If I objected to being called a carebear, I must know what they are, right? Well, you'd think that, anyway.

I've heard it said before that the majority of the people in EVE have done something "bearish" at some point, simply out of a need to make ISK. (This depends on how broadly you define "bearing", of course. For my purposes, it's anything that isn't directly in competition with other players - mission running counts, even in lowsec, but trading often doesn't since you're effectively fighting other players - you just rack up ISK instead of killmails.) We all have to pay for our pewpew somehow, right?

Then I tried thinking of it in terms of the amount of time spent doing said activities, but that didn't work so well for me either. When it comes down to a per-hour basis, I spend far more time running FW missions than I do actually PVPing - it's not uncommon, when I'm missioning actively, for me to spend a good ten to twenty hours a week running missions for the sake of paying for ships that I can lose in half that time in PVP. (Or, in my case, to spend it all on ships and faction modules that I'll fly 'sometime' and never quite get around to undockng. I can't tell you how long I've had a faction long point that I keep wanting to fit to my Lachesis, only to have the ship go up in flames after every time I consider it.)  So, at least for me, I can't really claim that I spend more time PVPing than I do carebearing for the sake of paying for PVP.

Ultimately, the answer for me was that it came down to what I enjoy the most. That probably isn't a stunning revelation, but it was something that I found worth thinking about. I think the change in my interests is a better indication of my EVE life than anything else I can possibly measure. What does this mean for me? Well, you'll notice that at the top of the page, the title of this blog is "Tales of a Recovering Carebear". In a sense, the question of what a carebear is has been the central theme of this entire blog. (Just for the record, I don't particularly have anything against people whose primary source of enjoyment in EVE is carebearing. Needing to "recover" from that mindset is a joke, not a strike out at the PVE community in general.)

Have I recovered from my bear-ness to the point that I can consider myself a "proper PVPer"? I don't know that I have an answer to that, partially because I've spent so long thinking of myself as "a carebear who happens to PVP" that I find it strange to think of myself as having turned into "a PVPer who happens to carebear". I think I'll have to let that percolate for a while and see what happens.

In the meantime, if you've gotten this far in reading this post and feel the urge to make a comment, please do so. I'd like to see what other people think about what makes a carebear, especially if you used to consider yourself one and have since changed your mind.