"Why is it a grey zone?" you ask? Well, it depends if you consider the Sister's arc as part of the tutorial or not. Considering that it is supposed to introduce the new player to all mayor factions in the cluster, you could very well make the claim that it still belongs to the tutorials.

I was just doing the sister's of eve quest and someone came and stole a guy I needed from a can. What are my options? I offered to buy the guy off him for a couple million, but as usual pirates always want the big score which is why they are always broke, and he asked for 20 mil. Not paying 20 mil for one part of a 50 part quest.

Can I petition it to get a replacement, or will it reset after downtime?

There's no grey zone. Only failure to read and understand articles. http://support.eveonline.com/Pages/KB/Article.aspx?id=336

"Doing the same in starter tutorial complexes is also considered grief play and will not be tolerated. "

Last I checked no epic arcs were listed under F12, tutorials.

Tippia's opinion matters a whole lot more than yours. He actually has the respect of a large percentage of the playerbase.

I highlighted the important parts. I never claimed that they are, just that you could view them as part ot the NPE/tutorials

While I (even as a missionrunner myself) agree that the theft of mission items is quite common, can happen to anybody and is working as intendedI think that stealing from the Sister's Arc might be entering a grey zone (or is it "legal limbo"?).

Which is why subscriber growth for this game has been anemic at best over the years and the player base is miniscule in comparison to almost all other mildly successful MMOs. Additionally CCP just laid off a large portion of their staff and lost a large percentage of their subscribers because they actually paid money to hire "thought experts" that told them to charge 80 dollars or whatever absurd amount they charge for a monocle.

There is a saying in school that 5% of your students cause 95% of your problems, and the same holds true in eve, but in eve for some reason they cater to the 5%. The only explanation I have ever been able to come to is that CCP truly wants no mass appeal whatsoever. They explicitly want to be a niche market.

I am all for pvp, and conflict, and fighting, and strategy, and interesting game play. However, when I am just relaxing and looking for something low key to do, and I decide to log in to eve and do a nice slow pace quest to pick up a little faction, and some guy roles up and steals my quest item and then tries to get me to pay a ridiculous amount for it, thats just annoying. It doesn't add to game play in any way. I can't see it being particularly entertaining for the guy that did it, unless he has some real issues, and its just pointless in every way. I guess I just have a problem with pointless things.

If he was attacking my POS, hey I get it. We are fighting over resources. If he attacks me in low sec I get it, he wants my stuff. If he is undercutting me on the market I get it, he wants to outsell me. If he infiltrates my corp and steals our stuff great, he is personally enriching himself.

Rolling in and stealing my janitor, then me offering 2 million, and him asking for 20 mil, and him not even making a counter offer, just a total waste of time for everyone involved. This also leads me to wonder, why the hell won't people of the pirate ideology ever negotiate? The guy probably could have gotten me up to 4 mil or so, I could have moved on with my quest, he would be 4 mil richer, but I offer 2, he asks for 20, and then nothing. Just a complete waste. Waste of an evening, waste of a game, waste of 15 bucks. Just a waste.

Actually, you claimed that you *think* it's grey zone. That is if we want to start to split hairs about who said exactly what and where. Fact remains that Sisters Arch is not part of Tutorial due to it not being inside F12/Tutorials menu. I hope now with knowledge what they *are* you recognize your own *thinking* to be false in this matter.

I'v been playing eve since beta, and although I totally want eve to be a harsh environment the OP makes several very valid points. I believe in HTFU but when the OP says that in some cases these things do not encourage more gameplay but just troll players into quitting he is right. Do we need to keep it hard? Yeah! Do we need to actively troll players just for the fact that trolling them might annoy them? No...

Besides risk versus reward this was a zero sum operation, hardly any risk to speak of expecting a big reward by using mechanics in your favour.

Its not on the market, and there is only 1 on contract for 40 million. Just gunna get on an alt and do the quest up until that point and trade the item to my other character. Luckily its early in the quest.

But WHY WON'T THESE PEOPLE BE REASONABLE???