Honour

Nearly every clone soldier in existence has some kind of military or combat background, from Mordu's Legion or the various empire militaries, from a time when military units were close-knit and death had a more permanent effect than just a financial loss. Honor was also an often used concept within these military units, dishonourable acts and betrayal was greatly frowned upon and led to severe repercussions, sometimes even death. When these mercenaries and professional soldiers then became clone soldiers and started forming their own corporations, many of them kept on their concepts of honour. Then when these corporations began assaulting districts in Molden Heath after they became available, they faced a nasty surprise, awoxing.

Basically, someone from their corporation betrayed them, turning against their own friends and wreaking as much havoc as possible, through friendly fire mostly, to make sure that the opposing side would win. I met the member of a corporation, where the recently promoted CEO went rogue, emptying the corporation wallet and disbanding it entirely, and this member was very angry. He was shouting about finding that traitor and reporting him to an empire to remove all his clones and permanently kill him. His corporation's motto was even "Death before dishonour", which kind of explains the irony of honour within capsuleer and clone soldier circles.

There simply isn't any.

Ask yourself, how would a regular soldier get punished if he were to awox, kill his own friends, destroy his squad's assets and relaying intel to the opposing side? He would be killed, or discharged permanently from duty, that's pretty much it. Among capsuleers and clone soldiers, death is irrelevant and a financial loss at best, and the only discharge of duty possible would be to fire that person from your corporation, CONCORD or the empires don't even lift a finger to deal with these sort of things. Repercussions of betrayal are minimal at best, and when you can do pretty much anything without suffering negative consequences from it, it brings out the worst side of humanity:

People are selfish, self-centered idiots who only care about themselves when the call comes.

There is a common saying we say to capsuleers and clone soldiers who get betrayed or scammed in some way: "Welcome to New Eden", which shows how normal betrayal and distrust is in here. The only way to really combat betrayal and make sure it doesn't happen to you is being very careful of who you trust, those who trust people too much usually get betrayed easily.

This dishonour also applies to places which might not always involve corporation management and ISK scams, for instance within ground combat. For instance, after we gained access to flaylock pistols, people noticed how powerful these things were and began using fits with two flaylock pistols and absolutely wrecking everything. People cried foul, saying that it was "dishonourable" to use this kind of equipment, and demanded that we used less optimal equipment in the name of "fairness". Of course this is simply a fallacy, and the continued use of flaylock pistols would have kept on forever, if they wouldn't have been tweaked to be less effective. This doesn't mean that honor is non-existent though, sometimes I have witnessed two scouts, facing off each other with nova knives, while nobody else interfered with them in the name of having an enjoyable duel, for instance.

But point is, in a world where death is meaningless and dishonour leads to basically no repercussions at all, people quickly turn against each other for their own selfish gains. That is the sad truth and all you can do is to adapt or fall with those who stubbornly cling on their pre-capsuleer and clone soldier ways. As for myself, my loyalty stays with the Intaki Liberation Front, and I can't think of a better offer to join another corporation right now. But this might change later down my career, I'll never know for certain. Whatever comes in my way, all I can do is adapt, or die.

ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ