A Funny Thing Happened on the Way Home from the Ganking…

~or “Look Before You Jump...”

We had a really good holiday weekend… we ran a ton of sites, made a pile of ISK, got a nice set of kills and had one hilarious ‘incident’…

We live inna C3 wormhole and like most wormholers we used to live off our home sites and the sites we raided from the normal random connecting holes… well, we don’t do that anymore. Nowadays we prefer to scan down all-the-things and actively seek out C5s with decent pipes to/from home, preferably uninhabited or with inactive occupants and… loaded with C5 Sleeper sites.

One reason is our corp has grown quite a bit in the past few months, there are a couple of RL friends of Sov and Tsra that have joined who are basically newbies. One of our newbros is a veteran player I met through my blog, he was on a ‘break’ from EVE and decided to come back and also joined us in the hole… and added to that is the completely unexpected and unplanned EVE takeover of my IT Dept IRL…

So far one of my coworkers has joined us in the hole, one is mining and doing the std. noob in Hisec thing, one has just joined and is testing the waters so-to-speak and one has purchased EVE via Steam and is going to give it a go sometime soon… plus one guy, in another section of the IT Dept, is going to rejoin… he used to play back some years ago and his son is one of the guys in my dept who has joined us so he’s considering trying it again… sheesh.

Now those who don’t live in Anoikis need to understand that any given wormhole system can support only so many players… C1’s can support soloists and very small groups, say 2 to 3 guys max… as you go up the class chain, C2, C3, C4… each hole produces more ISK then the last and therefor can support more players… C5’s and 6s can support quite large groups. When we were in SYJ an appreciable portion of the ISK the Alliance and its membership made was from shares of the ISK we got from Merc Ops in addition to the very lucrative C6 Sleeper site Capitol escalations we ran. But there is a upper limit even then…

Now keep in mind I’m talking about PI and the sites in your home hole… Combat, Gas & Ore and Data & Relic sites… of course most if not all Anoikis corps and groups do not limit themselves to just their home sites, they readily and normally raid adjoining holes for ISK, be it running combat sites or ninja gas mining… keep in mind also there are no taxes levied in Anoikis (other than at POCOs and many don’t charge their membership, we don’t at least) so for many corps ‘taxes’ are paid to the corp in PI for POS fuel. I personally make Robotics and Supercomputers in equal amounts with my PI… and I ‘donate’ all my Robos to the corp and sell the Supercomps for myself.

But, as I said, we have grown quite a lot and we now have more people than a C3 can properly support if we limited ourselves to our home sites and normal raids… The second reason we actively seek C5s is that the vets in our group are capable of fielding ships that can effectively run C5s. We now primarily run an Ishtar/Basi/whatever comp for C5 Sleeper sites but we just don’t trigger the Capitol escalations. C5’s make us all enough ISK to support a larger membership than our home hole normally would. This means we are doing even more scanning than before ‘cause we have to scan down not just everything in home but also in our adjoining holes and in the local lowsec group our static has connected to.

OK, so over the weekend we had an opportunity… Sov was out deep scouting the lowsec and connected systems and he found a group of 4 Procurors, a Retriever and a Miasmos hauler on a mining op inna wormhole four hops over from our stat low… sweet. To get there we have go out to our static lowsec (1) then through a wormhole (2) into another hole system that leads to a hole (3) to another lowsec… the mining op is taking place inside another wormhole (4) inside that lowsec system… We ship up… Ishtar, Lachesis, Moa, Prophecy, Prophecy, Vexor and I’m inna Onyx HICtor because, bubble.

We warp to the hole and run the pipe and the fleet lands on the hole they are mining in… Sov has Endy in the Lach’ go in first… dscan immunity FTW… and make initial point, as Endy is in warp Sov calls the rest of us to jump the hole and warp to Endy when he lands… Endy calls landed and initial point, we go to warp… as I enter grid I see one of the target ships warp out, on landing I pop my bubble trapping the remaining 3 Covetors, the Retriever and the Miasmos… I set my inifini-point on one of the Covetors, call point and start the missiles... we all set to work and…

Pop, Pop, Pop, Pop and Pop… as the ships are assploding we get all pods locked and then…  pop, pop, pop, pop and pop… And, being the civic minded souls that we are, we loot what's worth looting, pop the wrecks and even clean up the MTU... pop.

So, we head back home… now we are all clapping each other on the back and in a great mood as you can well expect, we jump the hole out to lowsec, warp to the hole we have to transit back to our static low and on jumping in… we land right in the middle of a bright RED fleet sitting on the other side of the hole.

Oh fuck...

Now I say bright RED I don’t mean Russians… I mean every ship in that fleet, at a guess easily 10 or more ships, I say guess ‘cause I was a wee bit freaked out (you should have heard comms LOL!!)… they were all flashy red… -10 sec status… and our gang of seven is easily outgunned… Sov calls out “Hold cloak!”… thinks for a second, then orders us all to try for the hole and jump out if we can… we all turn and burn hard for the hole praying we don’t lose too many ships… I did get lit up, saw some red creep up in my shields as I burned to the hole… but I hit 5000m and spammed jump so hard I was worried I would break the mouse. I jumped through and Sov was calling for everyone to dock up if possible, then he asked who died… no answer… he asked again… no answer. We had all made it out!!  LOL

The chatter on comms… well, I wish to the gods I had been recording… you had to be there, I’m glad I was, it was hilarious. Initially we assumed they had a scout and had either seen us doing the op and were waiting for us… or saw us land and jump in so they were at least somewhat ready for us… but their reaction was so disorganized that in the end we felt mebbe we were as much as surprise to them as they were to us…

If so, that means quite possibly their comms may have been something like this…  =]

Fly reckless and see you in the Sky... =/|)=