On December 11th, 2011 Evian Drinker, a 1-Day old TEST newbro was involved in a battle within M-XUZZ.
Evian valiantly hurled his rifter towards an enemy Tengu, landing a point that held it till the rest of the fleet could followup and kill it. For his heroic actions Evian went on to have the 6VDT-H station named after him and received over 1 billion ISK in donations from the fleet members.
Evian Drinker is the second person to receive the “Hero Rifter” medal from Dreddit, A title reserved for newbie pilots who show exemplary suicide Rifter skills and massive, wall shakingly clanging balls the size of Big Ben.
Evian Drinker tells his story on Reddit
“So i joined up on a whim after stumbling into the 21 day invite thread last Friday - Dodeca Hedron providing me with the initial invite, pointing me towards the Reddit Wiki and guiding me through the first (confusing as hell) hours.
By the time i had completed the Military and Industrial tutorials i figured i knew everything i needed to know to play Eve and was enjoying flying towards stuff to see if my ship would blow up (kind of disappointed their is no collision damage tbh).
Then my application for TEST got approved and i realized just how little i knew. Everyone on Team Speak 3 and in Corp chat were speaking English - but it made no sense to me. People kept talking about “Dictors, PI and Poeses”.
Luckily no-one in DeeDeeReddit shouts at you for asking dumb ass questions so i only every seem to be in the dark for a few moments at a time (that and the Wiki). Within an hour i was in Curse being given a handful of free ships (most of the mods wouldn't work at this point due to me learning Survey to lvl 3 for the first day!) and then managed to fuck up the first two fleet instructions as Madlof Chev tried herding cats with us - teaching the basics of flying internet spaceships in combat.
He and Nikolai did kill me mind, so I think we're even.
As i went to collect another ship Pidgin popped up. letting me know a fleet was forming in H-ADOC.
Thanks to a Family Christmas party (hosted by My wife and I) the next day I already had my wife giving evil eyes as I joined the fleet. Given my experience during the rest of the day I figured I would be dead within minutes anyway so largely ignored her and tried to figure out how to warp to a Titan (by the way these things are fucking huge).
Moments later we're on the other side of Eve and I’ve lost the fleet again - I warp in to a random member @10km as the fleet jumps to another system. Burning to the gate (I can use a Micro Warp Drive by this point) we jump into the hostile fleet as they sit off gate.
It's around now that someone in DeeDeeReddit mentions that Tengu's, Skimitars and Command Ships are the most prized ones to tackle. Since i have no idea what a command ship looks like and all the Skimitars are 100km away from me I frantically Zerg towards the nearest Tengu 30km away…
28km… 25km…
Fuck I've forgotten to turn on my MWD. The hostiles warp out, we follow and land 30km from them again. Second chance.
I activate the Drive and get shot before I start moving. A Tengu on my Overview has a red box around it - i vaguely remember that means something bad so i lock him up and head towards him. Second volley hits me and my armour vanishes slipping into hull. The FC shouts to get tackle on a Tengu as they warp out again. At this point i'm still zooming towards the Tengu - 18km away. I Wonder what the range is on my Warp Scrambler and decide to try to activate it anyway. It turns green and a little icon appears next to the Tengu. Moments later the fleet catches up and melt his ship. Thankfully i think he shit bricks at some point as he thankfully stopped shooting me at 20% hull.
Over the next few minutes i tackled a few more and learnt the value of keeping distance from the enemy fleet until tackle is called for. In the afterglow of the fleet my name got passed around. Shadoo the FC donated 500 million ISk to me as a thank you for getting the first Tengu, moments later 50 separate pilots did the same. My wallet exploded to over a billion isk. A few hours before i had been wondering if i would ever afford a 1.2 million high speed manoeuvring skill book and now i had no concept of just how much isk i had.
My first night playing Eve wrenched me from pure terror, to utter glee in moments. Flying through a fleet of 150 heavily armoured battleships - trading blows with another fleet 100km away was a thing of beauty. The though of going back to empire and running missions (or god forbid mining) now seems like an alien concept.
Thank you to everyone in Dreddit, i'm now fuly subbed so will hopefully be dying gloriously in more fleets to come. Mind I’ve since turned down my settings so my PC doesn't melt though the desk, and may need a divorce lawyer soon.”