Low-sec piracy

It's a new day. I have loot to trade in for a Golem marauder. Whether I can do that or not depends on how kind w-space will be to me today. There is nothing new at home and resolving our static wormhole is as easy as ABC, that being its signature reference. It all starts so easily, maybe w-space is on my side at the moment. Jumping to our neighbouring class 3 system has a tower but no ships visible on my directional scanner, which is a good result for wanting to bring an expensive ship home, and scanning only needs me to sift through three signatures to resolve the static exit. The wormhole leads to low-sec empire space, which obviously isn't as convenient as a high-sec connection, but quiet low-sec is almost as good as high-sec.

Exiting w-space puts me in the Bleak Lands region. I'm close to a trade hub but in a system with a bunch of other capsuleers, making my return home far from guaranteed. Undeterred, I launch probes and scan, hoping to find a lucky link I can use. Instead, I find sites that suggest I'm in the middle of some faction warfare. Only two signatures stick out, one holding Blood Raider rats and the other being a wormhole, a K162 from class 3 w-space. That's not encouraging, as the C3 will probably be a dead-end. It's still worth a look, though, so I jump in. The system holds an unpiloted Orca in a tower, and twelve anomalies and twelves signatures, none of which are other wormholes. It looks like I'm not getting the Golem just yet. That's okay, it's the day after getting the ISK to buy one, I just need to be patient. I head home to grab some food.

I return to see my glorious leader on-line but unresponsive, at least until I jump to our neighbouring C3. It seems a Probe frigate is on the loose somewhere and Fin is monitoring our static wormhole for jumps, which is how I caught her attention. As she keeps watch for the Probe, which may be gone or hiding, I scout C3a and let Fin know that it remains empty. Or not. A Bestower has appeared on d-scan. The hauler is not at the local tower, or at a customs office, but d-scan places it near the wormhole to low-sec. I warp there to see, yep, the Bestower is here, but only briefly. The ship jumps to low-sec, which is too tempting a target for me to ignore.

I decloak and burn to the wormhole, following the Bestower out of w-space. In low-sec the hauler is slowly aligning to a stargate, an act I soon put a stop to with my warp disruptor. A few volleys of missiles later and the Bestower explodes in a shower of blue sparks. Security status be damned, I aim for the pod, but the pilot warps cleanly away.

Not hitting the pod isn't a problem, as I doubt I really want my security status to take another nosedive. The pocket clear, I take a peek in the wreck, definitely not wanting to shoot it after the Scythe debacle, and see it stuffed with tower fuel when, hello, an Iteron from the same corporation as the Bestower warps to the wormhole.

This is getting silly. Ships are just throwing themselves at me now. I know that I do quite well stalking salvagers and planet goo haulers, but when they warp right to me, like the Noctis being exported or the Bestower interrupting our Sleeper combat, it all feels a bit easy. But I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. I lock on to the Iteron, now quite undecided as to its intention to jump to w-space, and destroy the ship as the pilot ejects early to save himself. Apparently it's all too much for him, and he rants a little in the local communication channel.

I find it amusing to be called a noob for attacking unescorted haulers between low-sec and w-space, yet the pilot doesn't see his own actions as somewhat naive. And I have no idea what he means about us taking over their system. Anyway, I have more pressing matters, in that my security status is almost non-existent now. Two soft kills and I'm almost a criminal! I'm ruined! The amount of ratting I'll have to do to recover from this loss will be mind-numbing. The horribly asymmetric nature of security status gains and losses is almost as if they don't want you to attack anyone in low-sec. I thought low-sec was supposed to be dangerous, but time and again it just shows itself to be stupid.

Oh. There's an off-line tower in the C3, which Fin and I both remember at about the same time. Fin has come in a Crane to collect the loot from the Bestower, returning to the C3 in her cloaky transport ship to locate the off-line tower. Finding it to be owned by the corporation whose members I just shot in stupid-sec space explains their little rant. It looks like a competing corporation set itself up in their system and is perhaps forcing them out. The off-line tower doesn't look attacked, though, merely off-line. Without knowing more details, it could simply be incompetence that caused the tower to go off-line, and opportunism that brought the second corporation in. Whatever the reasons, now seems a good time to go home and collapse our static wormhole, isolating us but keeping the other pilots paranoid.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: bestower, crane, eve online, iteron, low-sec, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, probe, pvp, scanning, w-space