After that last post I thought I’d better post about the extreme fun I had in an alliance op yesterday. We took a bunch of cruiser hulls (number varied, but 7-8 gives you the idea) and me in a blockade runner to carry the ammo and loot) into a wormhole down in Grincanne. While we were looking around, we encountered and destroyed (popped and podded) a couple of players in battlecruisers. Then we went two jumps deeper into deep wormhole space (this took a lot of time and probing).
From there, we found a wormhole that led to “unknown space” (that is to say, less deep and closer to high sec). Our FC in the Covert Ops jumped in there and scanned down a trio of ratting battleships. By that point we were down to five cruisers (including one Blackbird) and the gang was not enthusiastic. But the FC, rightly, pointed out that they were (a) not fit to kill cruisers and (b) not expecting “Ninjas! Thousands of Them!” or the Spanish Inquisition either one. Then he waited until one battleship warped off somewhere, before warping the gang (not including my toothless Blockade Runner) down on their hapless heads.
It was a slaughter, and not by our side — the battleships couldn’t track well enough to hit us and were heavily jammed by our Blackbird. The third battleship came back, took one look, and fled again, while we chewed the first two down to rubble.
Their pods got away, but we saw where they went, which made probing their exit wormhole fast. We popped out in Annaro just before the server crash, with about 1,000 cubic meters of loot worth about 17 million ISK. (Most of the ships killed were cheap t1 fits, but there were two high-meta lasers that were worth in excess of five mill each.)
I don’t think we lost anybody and it seemed like a good time was had by all. Some of the combat pilots aren’t happy with the time spent probing for wormholes, but the longest we spent was about half an hour. Many hands (and core probe launchers) make light work, as they say.
I realize that if I posted this story on the forums I’d get a “so you went roaming in a cruiser gang and got a few kills, what’s the big deal” troll. Tough. You gotta remember, we mostly operate alone or in small groups, in high sec space. A successful roaming gang is pretty good work for us. Add in the wormhole factor and the “killing ships bigger than us” factor, and it made for a very nice day.
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March 13th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I think the most interesting thing about W-space is how much people will have to learn to deal with the unexpected. It really is exploration of new space, with new rules, and I’m curious to see what portion of the EVE community likes the uncertainty, and what portion stick either to empire care-bearing, or 0.0 blobbing. I hope W-space turns out to be economically worthwhile, or at least better than low-sec living.
March 13th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
What’s appealing to me about w-space is the lack of certainty. There are too many areas of the game where the likely outcomes are known. “I can’t anchor a POS in low-sec because it will get hot-dropped by capital ships.” “I can’t rat in 0.0 because I’ll get gate-camped on my way home.” “I can’t mine in low sec because I’ll lose my barge before I make enough to (a) exceed what I can make in high sec and (b) pay for the barges I’ll lose.” Sure, there are ways to finess all those things but in general, a great many strategies are know to be full of fail, or at least to be more trouble than they are worth.
Perhaps w-space will shake out the same way, but I’m not sure it will. There are enough variables with the wormholes and the tactical environments that we may see strategies that sometimes work extremely well and sometimes fail miserably — and this will always be true for that strategy. That sort of unpredictability-of-outcome won’t appeal to all, but I think it will lead to more fights and more fun for many.