Intruder Alert… (Stories from MY early daze in EVE)

If you follow this you know by now one of the reasons I love living in Wormhole Space is ‘cause there are only… I repeat ONLY, two kinds of people here… my corpmates, Allies and friends on the one hand… and the dead, frozen blue corpsicles of EVERYONE else on the other. Wspace is -1.0 space… my very 1^st kill, both ship and pod, were in wspace… and the pilot I killed did not even have a weapon on her ship...

Sounds terrible don’t it? All piratey and dreadful and bloodthirsty… Actually, it was a lot less that and a LOT more me scared witless but doing what I had to do anyway. You see 99.999 times out of 100 when a ship warps through a WH it… well, first off it doesn’t happen by mistake.

You have to SCAN down wormholes. You will never just run across one in normal travel between gates and planets and stations and moons etc., etc. … because WHs spawn out of the way of ALL normal lanes of travel so you have to go actively seeking them in order to find them and it is first, a skill you have to learn and second, it requires that you buy a probe launcher and fit it on your ship and buy probes for the launcher… and load them… and then use them. Once you find (scan down to 100%) a wormhole, you have to make a bookmark and then warp to it… Now is the moment of truth… do you warp through to the other side?

Those who do are 2 kinds of pilots… 99.999% are pilots looking for either Sleeper, Grav or Ladar combat, mining and gas mining sites from which one can make really large amounts of I$K or… they are pilots looking for other pilots in order to engage in a little hopefully lucrative PvP. They are looking for POSes or simply pilots running sites or WH mining or such.

The other 0.0001% are the rare noobs who have reached or finished the scanning tutorial but who don’t read well, or if they do they are either not too bright or simply don’t listen well and they do not harken to the DIRE WARNINGS written in many, many places about the serious and very deadly consequences of mucking about in wormholes.

Among those consequences are… getting Lost in Space. And when I say lost I mean you can’t get there from here... I mean you really actually literally cannot get back THERE, where you came from, from HERE, where you are now.

Let’s say you scanned down a system and BMed the WH that you found AND you popped just inside the WH and scanned down, oh let’s say, a Grav site. Grave sites have asteroids... Grav sites have really valuable asteroids! So you pop back out and run by a nearby station, swap out your probe launcher for a miner (cause your frigate won’t fit both) and cause you read that mining in a WH can make you a billionaire!! You warp back to the WH (you BMed it just like the tutorial said) and you pop through and head off to the BM for the Ladar site... AHHH!! Arkonor! Biskot!! Crokite!!! Yer RICH! You start happily mining away… now several things can, and probably will, happen to you.

One possibility, the lowest, is that you fill your paltry frigate’s cargo hold and… wait, where’s the WH? Ah… oops, in your haste you forgot to BM the INSIDE of the WH and now you are fuked. I mean you are as truly and completely screwed as a skinny, girlish prison inmate on his first day in the state pen. That’s it… as the man said, “Game over man, Game OVER!” Your options at this point are, (1) hope you have a friend who can scan down WHs, hope he is willing to travel to whatever system you were in and do so, then pop into the WH and fleet you so you can warp to him and get out… or if not you can always (b) asplode your ship (or eject and just asplode yer pod) committing “There’s No Place Like Home” cloneicide… really. I personally know someone who has used this option to get out of a WH... and he KNEW what he was doing.

One other possibility is that as you are mining away strange, fugly, black ships begin attacking you out of nowhere and basically melt your ship like buttah on a Florida street at noon in July. You see these are Sleepers, and Sleepers defend their wspace… and they will spawn at mining sites and they are VERY VERY tough to kill. They do omnidamage and have very strong armor tanks… and they HATE you. Yes, YOU,  personally.

Now let’s say that your ship IS capable of fitting both a miner AND a probe launcher… cool, you fill your hold w/ ABC and upon realizing you dint BM the inside of the WH you can just scan down the WH and head on back out to riches and fame… right? Mmmkay. So you start scanning, but you are getting sigs and stuff you have never seen in hisec… you BM a “Perimeter Hangar”, hmmm now what could that be? You wonder as you warp to the BM… just to get killed much faster by even larger and vastly more angry Sleepers than the ones that guard mining sites… oh and there are MORE of them too.

Now, let’s say you decide to err on the side of caution and you keep scanning until you get an actual wormhole to 100%… Yippee! Yer home free… right? Uh… let’s see, if you do scan down a WH inside wspace… it will probably not be the one you want as most wspace systems can have up to 7 (4 confirmed by CCP devs) other WHs inside it that “can” lead back to Hisec Empire space… or down to NULLSEC... where things that laugh at Sleepers live…

One other, possibly worse, possibility is the WH is occupied or the sites are being run by other pilots who immediately respond to your probes and prepare for your arrival… as I and FR did that fateful day. We both saw core scan probes in the WH on dscan and we hightailed it back to the Alliance POS in the C1. This was during the first weeks my corp had joined the Alliance and we were undergoing intensive WH training… (and having the time of our lives lemme tell you!).

Standard Operating Procedure for an incursion into the WH is:

(1) EVERYONE immediately stops whatever they are doing, warp back to the POS and get into a PvP ship;

(2) one or more pilots gets into cloaky scan frig and attempt to find the intruder(s);

(3) call in any reinforcements if available;

(4) gather intel and formulate a response.

The responses range from KILL IT (THEM)! This is the desired response. We have setup a POS, we use this wspace as a resource and we defend our wspace from all intruders. If it is a fleet, or if there are simply more of them in better ships than we have at present, then the response can range down to a shutdown of all normal WH ops in conjunction with preparations for a possible siege or POS bash (attack on the POS).

This particular day FR went out and scanned down the intruder while I changed from my Drake to a Rifter… The report back from FR was, “A single ship, frigate, mining at a site.” Next thing I hear on TeamSpeak from FR is, “Tura, warp to me NOW! And prepare to engage.” I warp out, as I land there is a frigate in range, I bore in, lock up the frigate, scram, web and start the music of my 220mm guns as I take my Rifter into a tight 1000m orbit around the hostile. FR flies up in his Myrm and adds his DPS to mine. The Frigate melts in seconds… and the pilot’s pod appears on grid and is not warping out, I lock ‘im up and call out, “I have the pod LOCKED!” FR calls back, “Kill it.” I open fire and the pod instapops…

At this moment I realize I have, for the very 1^st time, won a PvP encounter. I have been in several by this time ingame, and I had lost ALL of them and been pod killed twice myself… this was my first win. I was shaking so hard I almost couldn’t use the mouse or keyboard. FM told me to get back to the POS while he cloaked up and scanned to see if there were any more hostiles.

After I got back to the POS, FR talked me through checking my Combat Log and pulling up the killmail for that fight. It was then that I discovered the “hostile” I had asploded, and then podkilled, was a noob and did not even have a weapon fitted on her ship. And you know what…? I did not feel bad at all. She was in OUR wspace. She was mining OUR resources. And this is the SOP for everyone who lives in WHs in EVE, period. No one can assume that a stranger in the WH is NOT a hostile… because if you do, you will be wrong 99.999% of the time… this just happened to be that rare 0.0001% noob in a WH.

Do I feel she “deserved” what happened? What I did? Yes.. if she didn’t heed the warnings about how very dangerous wspace is… then she will after today. After a week had passed I inmailed her and offered this…

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Sub: Hello

From: TurAmarth

To: Xxxxxx

I wanted to say I am not keen on podding noobs. I vastly prefer to fight those with more experience.

But you were:

(1) in our wormhole (we have based a POS [Player Owned Station] there) and,

(2) Wormholes are 0.0, or null sec, space and,

(3) we were defending our territory,

...so my actions were well within the 'rules' such as they are in EVE.

I just wanted to say that I too was pod killed more than once when I was new.... and I hope you will learn (as I did) never to go into lowsec, nullsec or a wormhole w/o being armed and very, very ready to defend yourself or run.

I hope there are no hard feelings... and I am sending you enough I$K to cover your losses.

Fly safe... if you ever want to talk, please look me up. I can be reached at HBxxxx in chat, it is our public channel

TurAmarth

HB corp / Xxxxxx Alliance

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I received this reply…

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Re: Hello

From: Xxxxxx

To: TurAmarth

Hi,

Thanks for the message and info..... No hard feelings.

I did realize (at least in principle) that null-sec is high-risk. Being podded wasn’t the highlight of my day but that is part of the game as you say. It was actually a learning experience. I will take more care, and also use other probes to be able to spot POSs (a lesson learned). No permanent harm was done, and your "donation" was surplus to requirement.

K

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I sent her more than enough I$K to cover her loss. I did this because of the 3 times I was podkilled in my noob daze, 2 were by people I ended up being friends with who did the same for me.

Only once was I podkilled, and laughed at for it, by a group of sheer assholes… well EVE has them too. In the human race they are as unavoidable as cockroaches… and often as hard to kill.

Strangely this missive started as a post about last night’s incursion into the C2 we now share with an Alliance corp and where we have our own POS… but the story sorta told itself… guess I’ll write up the other one when my muse decides it is time.

Fly Safe and see you in the Sky =/|)=