Are you in the mood to wreck a little havoc? Wish to make some money at somebody else's expense? Perhaps pirating is right for you! If you wish to join the ranks of those who kill helpless pilots, pillage their ship, and make off with some precious cargo, you'll feel right at home. Similar to real-life, the activity is not all glamorous. Pirating in EVE Online is something which takes a great deal of patience and skill. You simply can't jump into any system and start blasting away, lest you're ready to face some consequences. Pirating in high-sec space is also a no-go because of Concord protection, Piece D or WOW and most pirates hang out in low-sec/high-sec border zones or roam in 0.0 space scoping for targets.

Looking for potential targets is the hardest step for every pirate to overcome. Because low-sec and 0.0 are not protected by Concord Police, it's difficult to find singular targets. In low-sec, most are found either at asteroid belts and gates, or NPC complexes and missions. Gate-camping is the easiest method of obtaining targets and occurs at most of the border systems. All one needs is a ship capable of tanking the automated turrets and you can shoot at targets all day. You'll probably need the help of a friend though to help kill and loot your victims.

The biggest potential source of income for pirates though is ransoming. Basically, once you acquire a target and begin winning the fight, you'll restrain from completely destroying the ship and instead open a convo with the victim asking for a particular sum of money. If the victim doesn't pay within a certain timeframe, it's generally best to just blow the ship up and loot the cargo. Ransom amount can depend on many things such as character age, ship type, weapons, and activities they were performing at the time. It's very important that pirates honor ransoms by not killing targets that pay up, simply because people become increasingly reluctant to fork over anything if they think they'll be killed after they do. As players perform hostile acts on other pilots, their security status goes down. Eventually, Piece D or WOW players may find themselves unable to re-enter high-sec regions in fear of being shot on site by NPC ships. To counter this, players hoping to re-enter the "nicer" regions of space must shoot NPC belt rats to regain lost security standings.

This same information can also apply to PvP and corporation wars, except these two can take place in high-sec and there is no incurred standing loss.

Corp Thieving is an activity that's simple to explain, but difficult to perform. All one really has to do is feign trust and dedication to a corporation long enough to the point when they are given rights and privileges to corp hangars and assets. The obvious difficulty here is getting to that point, as most corps do not hand out privileges willy nilly. It can take months and even years of waiting to pull off a major snag, but once you do, your character is for the most part useless. This is because most serious corps perform background checks for many applicants, asking questions such as "How come you were only in this corporation for a day?" or "We saw a post on the forums where you were fingered for stealing, is this true?" With patience though, things may pay off. Piece D or WOW Just last month, the largest alliance in EVE, Band of Brothers, experienced this issue and were purposefully dissolved by the corporate spy as a result, because they were given access.