I’m not sure I like what New Eden is doing to me.

So, there I was, yesterday, sitting in my Orca somewhere in Caldari space, munching on a couple of rocks when this Stratios warped in. It cleared a couple of pirates that had been orbiting me for a while without actually attacking me (in which case my drones would have shredded them). And then it just sat there.

And continued to sit there.

I tried contacting them to offer any assistance that I might be able to give them but received no reply.

The Stratios just kept on sitting there.

A good while later the inevitable thing happened and more pirates showed up. They decided a Stratios would be a way better target than my Orca and went right to work on it.

Some minutes later I noticed that the shields of the Stratios were gone. Now, it might have had some armor tank but there was no way I could know.

I decided to keep watching. As long as the pirates weren’t attacking me, my drones wouldn’t touch them. Sure, I could set them on the pirates manually…

…but for some reason I decided that I wanted to find out whether I could actually let the Stratios die to a couple of belt pirates. I was also debating with myself whether I wanted to make my attention known to the Stratios by locking it up and I quickly decided that I would do so because otherwise I would have no way of knowing how long to wait to step in to prevent the Stratios from dying.

So, instead of simply dispatching my drones I also just sat there, watching the Stratious lose all of its armor and more than half of its hull. And at that point the pirates decided to stray from their almost dead target and go up against me – which ended them quickly and saved the Stratios.

I am a bit scared that there is the very real possibility that I would simply have let the Stratios die when it would have been more than easy to help the pilot in question. A part of me is saying stuff like, “well, that pilot shouldn’t simply have taken a nap in space” and “it wouldn’t have been my fault, I didn’t shoot” and while that part would be technically correct (the best kind of correct?) the bigger part of me would have hated me for not helping out a pilot in need.

In the end I’m quite relieved that nothing bad happened to the Stratios (even though I’m sure the pilot was a bit surprised when waking up and finding their ships almost in shreds). I do need to spend some time thinking about myself and what principles I want to live by in this world, though…