It’s been a while since I’ve updated, but I’ll try to keep this from getting too long-winded.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I did get pod-killed for the first time. I decided to go for a roam through null-sec. My course took me from Heimatar, through the low-sec pipe at Eifer, into Geminate, and through Geminate into Metropolis. I gassed up my Jaguar, jumped into a clone with no implants, and started off.
I must suck at this, because I found no “prey” at all on my trip. About halfway through the Geminate section of my trip, I happened upon a very large Red Alliance/Solar Fleet gate camp. I jumped through, but an Eris and two inties followed me through to the other side. The Eris dropped its bubble right away which gave the Stiletto and Malediction time to tackle me. The other members of the gatecamp slowly trickled through the gate, and I just couldn’t manage to get close enough to either of the inties to take them out. A Rapier multiple-webbed me, and they proceeded to finish me off. It’s like Ron White said, and I’m paraphrasing here: “I don’t know how many of them it would have taken to blow up my ship, but I knew how many they were going to use”. As I got into structure, the Eris was smart enough to spit out another bubble for my pod, and I woke up back in Lustrevik. It was thrilling, but it wasn’t “fun”. I never found a fight; that was, in my opinion, a blob, and that’s something else entirely.
The other night I scanned down an MR just starting a Worlds Collide mission. TL;DR version, I swiped the ship’s crew (hooray for mission objectives that don’t belong to the MR!), put them up for contract, and EVE-mailed the MR. He didn’t bite, and no tears, he just politely laughed me off.
The night after that Chagatia announced in The Ninja Alliance channel that he found a Paladin in a mission area, but the pilot wasn’t moving or fighting, just sitting there being shot at by the rats. So I got my PvP Raven and figured I’d go ninja some bounties. When I showed up, the Paladin pilot took off, so I started popping the rats. As I was unfamiliar with the mission, I ended up triggering more than one spawn, resulting in a mission area with quite a few cruisers and battleships. My buffer being unable to handle such sustained pounding, I took off and called it a night, but would imagine the MR to be a little surprised when he comes back and finds it chock full of ships.
I’ve been having good results with my new scanning technique, thanks to a couple of posts on the forums, so thanks to the SN and TEARS folks for that. I’m getting really itchy for a good mission-runner kill, so I think I’m going to go hunting this week.
Locke Mueslix
March 9th, 2010 at 9:34 pm
Speaking as a null-sec resident, and one familiar with the preferred tactics of null-sec gatecamps in general, and Red Alliance and Solar Fleet’s in specfic… that wasn’t a blob. That was a well-run gatecamp. A blob would have been forty or fifty of them jumping you at once. Seen it happen, been on either end of both gatecamps and blobs, and there’s a definite difference. (For example, when I get blobbed, I barely ever even see my pod before I’m waking up in my home station!)
March 10th, 2010 at 12:43 am
Point well taken. To clarify, though, there were at least 20 of them on the other side, but apparently only a handful chose to jump through. So I would classify that as a blob on the side of the gate that I jumped through, but I will stand corrected and say that I did not “get blobbed”.