Friday, October 5, 2012

Some days/weeks/months the bear gets you

Sometimes you get on a roll.  Sometimes it's not a good roll.

August wasn't great - I was away for a good chunk of it, offline for the most part, and when I was online I wasn't very effective.

September was a near-complete washout, although it ended with an LP dump that left me with substantial asset value (though LP dumps invariably are accompanied by market crashes, so the assets remain illiquid for the time being), and one good fight that may have been envisioned as a chess match, but ended up as a bar brawl.

Well, actually, it didn't strictly end with that fight.  The real end came when I rolled out my mission bomber to gather a few more LP for the dump, and collided with a pirate's heavy smartbomb shockwave at the outbound gate in Abune.  Stealth bombers react to faction smartbombs about like a bug trying to power its way through a windshield, so two seconds later, I was back in the hangar at the medclone station with my learning and maneuvering implants blasted out of my skull.

Again.

Then a couple of days later, I got asked to do a favor for an alliance-mate whose security rating wouldn't let him get to Jita to buy fittings for some ships.  I rolled out my trusty Viator transport, assembled the materials he wanted, and set off for the low-sec base via the Nourvakaiken/Tama route.  The cloaky hauler had always managed to get me through gate camps before, so I was fairly confident.

Except for several problems.

One: a pirate group operating in Tama, on friendly status with our alliance, had set up a gate camp on the Tama side of the Nourv/Tama gate.

Two: they had heavy boosts to lock speed thanks to a Loki cruiser with fleet bonuses, so in the time it took for me to transition from the cloak everyone hides under right after a jump to the cloak generated by my own ship, I was locked and tackled.

Three: they opened fire with heavy artillery without checking whether I was a friendly.

My ship and its cargo were gone in less than three seconds.

They must have realized what had happened pretty quickly, though, because there were shocked exclamations in the local channel when it dawned on them that they'd just blown up an ally for a quarter-billion-ISK loss.

The pirate alliance chief ended up compensating me for his subordinates' trigger-happy ways, so I got into a shuttle to head back to Jita, from where I needed to buy a brand-new Viator and another pile of equipment for the alliance-mate.

I stopped off 100km from the Nourv gate in Tama, to look at what was going on with the gate camp.

And one of the campers shot my shuttle out from under me.

A few days later, I lost a plexing ship in an anomaly, but that was my own fault for running the anomaly while too tired to see straight.  I wrote it off as an expensive lesson.

Haven't made it into a fleet since the beginning of the month, and haven't been in a combat situation that didn't resemble a curb-stomping, so my killboard stats look nightmarish.

Some corps and alliances will throw out members based on poor killboard performance.

Thankfully I'm not in one of them.

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