Raid on R1O-GN - Part 3

Up until now, I had just been hunting in the P-B2NE constellation, as it is a very target rich environment. But during all these adventures, I had spent several days more or less in the same spot. I'm a Dad, and can't usually play EVE for big blocks of time, because I have to be fully present for my kid. I grab a few minutes here, a few minutes there, then log off at a safe spot if no friendly stations are available. But after a few days in the same spot,  I was interested in exploring a little more the the Kalevala Expanse. Dotlan was assuring me that many NPCs, and occasionally players, were being killed throughout the region.

To get there, I had to run the gauntlet on the only dangerous gate around - the Q-GICU/R1O-GN gate. The Beanstar, Horde's great home citadel, overlooks this gate. One would think that they would have it bubbled 24/7 and that they'd be ready to kill any foolish neutrals who blunder through. One would be wrong, though. The Horde guys, usually 2 dozen or so standing fleet members, just sit on the undock of their Keepstar all day long, watching the traffic pass by. They might try to chase you down if they see you, but for some reason they prefer to camp their own station rather than camping the gate right next to it. I mean, I can understand not wanting to camp anything at all. My own patience with gatecamping lasts for about 5 minutes tops. But these guys are just sitting there anyway. Wouldn't it be more productive to sit on the gate rather than the station? Maybe throw up a few large bubbles or something? Or bring an interdictor? I guess they must all be afk.

The Beanstar

Anyway, I warped to my perch on the Q-GICU gate, checked and confirmed that nobody was on the gate itself, warped to it and jumped through. A couple interceptors came from the Beanstar and chased me through the gate, but neither caught me. This may have been the first time they even noticed me. My little bird reported lively chatter in the intel channel about where I might be going and what I might be doing.

I shook off the pursuit easily, and set about exploring the region, checking Dotlan for systems with high NPC kill numbers and poking my head in to see if there were miners or ratters about. Most of them ran for their forts the moment I appeared in local.

Stabber 1 vs. Procurer 3

It was a long, slow roam. Away from Horde's staging system, nullsec was just as dead and empty as I remembered it. Finally, in HPV-RJ, I jumped into system and detected 4 Procurers on dscan. I immediately warped to the first mining anomaly that I saw, hoping to get lucky before they noticed me in local. As I landed on grid, I spotted a Procurer just warping off. "Aha," I thought. "Now at least I know for sure where they are mining." I dropped a bookmark, then warped to the Fortizar where all the miners were hiding. I burned perches while taunting them a bit in local, trying to get them to undock. They seemed mad, but apparently not mad enough to come out of their station and try to fight one guy in a Stabber. I shamed them a bit for this. One guy undocked a Gila and sat there tethered with it, but no amount of teasing could get him off that Fort.

HPV is a dead end system. It occurred to me afterwards that maybe they might have one of those new-fangled Ansiblex gates in there, but I never thought to look at the time. I figured they might try to leave, now that they knew that big scary Stabbers were roaming the neighborhood, so I jumped to the next system and camped the gate as long as my patience level would tolerate - about 5 minutes. Nothing. They didn't run.

Instead, they went back to the exact same spot and resumed mining. Guessing this (no little birds in the treetops this time), I jumped back into HPV and warped to the bookmark I had saved at their mining spot. Four Procurers were aligning for warp when I landed. I just managed to catch the slowest one, Ms. Ahsoka Novar, and successfully confiscated her mining equipment.

GF

While she was dying, Ahsoka actually made some effort to sic her drones on me - the first Procurer to try this yet. She didn't make much impact on my shields, but nevertheless, I gracefully offered a "gf" in local as she warped off with her pod. Killmark #7.

Stabber 1 vs Stabber + Vexor + Gnosis

I made my way back to R1O-GN. I bounced around safe spots at bit, logged in and out a time or two, sent my little bird scouting around a bit. It seemed like all of the systems in the constellation, usually full of miners and ratters, had become quiet. I kept spotting DEMONS ENABLED guys hunting around for the same targets I was hunting. They seemed to have scared all the carebears into hiding, and stirred up the standing fleet - Horde guys were roaming all those systems both alone and in groups looking to hero tackle intruders. I came up dry all day.

So I thought to myself, "I've got 7 killmarks on this Stabber. I've done a respectable amount of damage here. Maybe its time to risk a gudfite."

Sportster Soelberg was roaming around RQOO-U in a Stabber of his own, and all my instincts told me he was looking to fight me. I didn't know whether he had the blob on standby, or whether he was acting alone. I was very curious how I would do against another Stabber, and I was ready to die finding out.

My dscan informed me that Sportster was at the R1O-GN gate, so I warped to a perch 200 km off the gate and began orbiting at that range. Mr. Soelberg was sitting right on the gate. Horde has a Fortizar overlooking that stargate, where a fellow by the name of deLiekedeler sat on the undock in a Vexor. 

My interpretation of the situation was this - Sportster Soelberg was in a PvP fit, looking specifically to fight me. Mr. deLiekedeler was in a PvE fit. I was pretty sure he had been ratting when I arrived in system, along with a couple other guys who had docked up. However, the fact that he was sitting outside the Fort made me think he was considering whether he wanted to dogpile on me as soon as I engaged Sportster. I didn't have any idea who might be on the other side of the gate. 200-odd Horde guys were always in that system, but that didn't necessarily mean that any of them were ready and waiting to join the fight.

So I mentally prepared myself for the idea that I would engage Mr. Soelberg, and then Mr. deLiekedeler would probably warp in with his ratting Vexor. Since the Vexor was PvE fitted, it probably would not have a point, so if I could kill the Stabber I might be able to disengage. Or I might even be able to pull range on the Vexor, take out its drones, and potentially kill it too. Of course, I had no idea if I would even be able to kill the Stabber, and the 200 other guys next door were a big wild card. But nevertheless, it seemed like a reasonable plan. 

I warped to the gate at 50km. My hope was that I could get the other Stabber to chase me off the gate a little, so anyone who jumped in from R1O-GN would at least be some little distance away from us. Sportster wasn't falling for my tricks, though. He jumped through the gate. "Fuck it," I thought, burned for the gate and followed him through. 

In R1O-GN, the Stabber was sitting on the gate again, 13km from my position. I plotted a vector away from the gate, warp disrupted him, opened fire with autocannons and light missiles, and unleashed my brace of Acolyte IIs. He chased after me, his own autocannons, missiles, and Warrior IIs blazing fire. Sportster began taking shockingly heavy damage to his shields, while my own tank remained rock solid, only peeling back maybe 10% in the time it took to strip his shields away completely. I reversed course and ran directly at him, hoping I had put sufficient distance between ourselves and the gate. His shields went down so easy, I thought he might have been armor tanked, but his armor took damage fast and heavy as well.

As we fought, deLiekedeler jumped through the gate from RQOO-U, as I had expected he might, and sicced his Infiltrator IIs on me. My shields began to feel it. "Finish him and run," I thought, and that's what I attempted to do. As Mr. Soelberg dipped into structure, a Gnosis appeared on short range dscan. Was he coming to help, or a random passerby? I found out soon enough. The Gnosis, piloted by Panixc, landed on grid at close range - just as Sportster's Stabber exploded.

1st Stabber kill in a Stabber

Seeing that I was free and clear of any points, I attempted to warp off to a safe, but just at the last tick as I aligned, the Gnosis landed a warp scrambler on me. My microwarpdrive useless, deLiekedeler's Vexor was all over me, and Panixc's Gnosis added more dps to the incoming damage I was already taking.

Stabber 1 died fighting, killmark #8 on her hull, and I warped off, exchanged "gfs" in local, then podded myself back to Hek.

 

Stabber 1 down

Lessons learned:

I probably only got the Stabber kill so easily here because Mr. Soelberg apparently forgot to activate his X-Large Ancillary Shield Booster. 

When I get into a fight, especially a hairy one like this, I know I always forget things I should remember. In particular, I get tunnel vision on the health bars of the person I'm shooting at and the modules I'm supposed to be managing, and I forget what is probably the most important thing - keeping track of my position in space relative to the other combatants. This gets me killed regularly, yet I still forget it almost every time.

It's a relief at least to know that my enemies forget things too. Anyway, I'm happy with the way the fight went. I'd killed enough ships that I was psychologically prepared for Stabber 1 to die, and I gave it a good death, taking someone else down with me.

Post Raid Thoughts

I'm still feeling a bit like a ship without a rudder playing EVE in this new era. What I'm really looking for is a niche in the player ecosystem which will keep me logging in. I want to love EVE. I recognize that it's still a great game, even though it has changed a lot. I don't want to demoralize newbies with a lot of bittervet moaning about the way things used to be.

But the fact is, it was the old wardec mechanics that hooked me on this game - first as a defender, then as an aggressor, then finally finding my perfect niche as a solo aggressor. Man, I loved a good wardec. I don't want to shoot structures. Defending structures, as a solo PvPer who has a life and a family in the real world, is just unfeasible. I want that good old solo wardec experience - scoping out a target, planting spies, learning everything I can about them, dropping a wardec on them, watching them freak out, and then hunting their pilots to the ends of New Eden until they either pay me to stop or I get bored with them and move on to another target.

That's the EVE experience that I'm struggling to find some equivalent for in today's game. So far, nullsec seems like the best approximation for it. My expedition with Stabber 1 showed me that it is possible - even somewhat easy -  to survive in a cruiser in some of the hottest hostile space for an extended period of time, and successfully kill off noncombatants and solo PvPers while doing it. Gang fights are a little trickier, but I am at least taking people down with me some of the time when I fight gangs. I'm confident that if I stick with it, I'll get good at taking on groups, getting kills, and then successfully disengaging and surviving. Solo fighting multiple players who somewhat know what they are doing is one of the hardest things to master in the game. It's going to take getting a bunch of losses under my belt before I can have any stories to brag about. 

So the PvP is challenging and different than highsec wars in many ways, but there are also parallels - most nullsec alliances are 95% (or more) carebears and F1 monkeys. You kill these nullbears, you get plenty of tears, roughly the same salinity of those which are shed in highsec. Having a whole alliance living in terror of me just isn't going to happen in null like it did in highsec, so I miss that. But I believe I can still reasonably terrorize certain subgroups of nullbears if I apply myself to the task.

Random screenshot of a Vigil in Jita

When I started this blog up again, a few weeks ago, my intention was to write an AAR for every fight I got myself into. Since then, though, I have continued to PvP in nullsec and lowsec. I've lost quite a few ships, and have killed quite a few as well. So the content is definitely there. I'm getting more action than I can possibly keep up with, as far as blogging goes. This is remarkable to me, considering that I only play for a few minutes here and there. Maybe an hour a day at most. Going forward I'll just stick to the highlights, as well as some tips and tricks that I'm learning along the way. 

Contrary to a lot of what you read on a lot of EVE forums, solo PvP is alive and well. Until I get bored with this game and quit again, I'll be exploring some more of the solo PvP experiences that are out there, looking for that magical niche that tickles me in the same way that wardecs used to. I believe that nullsec has a lot more to offer than just roaming around the Kalevala Expanse in a Stabber looking for Procurers that warp off too slow, so I'll be diving into that. I may take a deeper look at lowsec too, or wormholes. I'm not even sure if I've ever been to Thera, so at some point I should check that out too. Seems like it could be a fun place to base out of and find PvP action all over the map. 

Hek, I may even see if I can find some friendly war eligible corporation out there willing to let me drop some wardecs on targets of my choosing, without expecting me to participate in structure fights, and see how that goes. Are there even suitable war targets left? Seems like all I see is massive war evasion alliances, and structure holding corps that don't have any real members. I'll have to find out. There's probably still some carebear corps out there whose pride demands that their ticker be shown on their shiny new Raitaru or whatever.

More shenanigans next time!