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...
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... =/|)=
If so, that means quite possibly their comms may have been something like this… =]
Fly reckless and see you in the Sky... =/|)=
