Life in a Wormhole: WAR (or something like it) #eveonline

I log in a few days after our last big day to find a notification of War Declaration in my mailbox, so my evening plans are put on hold to make proper preparations.

War declarations are something in EvE that never fail to amuse me a little bit, probably because of when and how I've experienced any wardecs during my time in the game.

The basic idea behind the wardec is that war between corporations or alliances in high-security space is illegal, according to the Yulai Convention. In order for one group to declare war on another group, the instigating corp has to pay a fee to bribe CONCORD so that they will leave the aggressors to attack their target without getting mobbed by a bunch of peacekeepers. The bribe lasts for a week, at which point in time it must be paid again to keep going (with, I think, increasing costs every week), or allowed to lapse, at which point in time the pencil pushers at CONCORD finally notice the shenanigans and call a halt to the whole illegal mess.

It makes me smile, because the process has a very heavy EvE flavor to it. I know the folks that suffer from (or instigate) a lot of these wardecs are aware of more than a few deep flaws in the system, but that's pretty far outside my arena of regular activity.

Which brings me to the reason that I've always found wardecs personally amusing. The whole point of the things is to allow you to attack someone you otherwise would not be able to attack, while in highsec space... and I've never been in highsec when I've been wardecced. I remember two wardecs while living in Curse (to which the corp responded "we're right here, come get us!" -- it was a very quiet week) and now while in Wormhole space which (I believe I've mentioned) is a lawless frontier wilderness.

When you can safely assume that everyone is trying to kill you, it doesn't matter that much if a particular group is paying an extra special fee bribe to do so.

So why worry?
Well, as I understand it, the group in the process of deccing us specializes in ganking inattentive haulers as they move in and out of (and between) market systems, and they're associated with a wormhole alliance that doesn't much care for ours, so it would seem that their goal is to get some easy kills and screw with our lines of supply. This affects the whole alliance as well -- not just the three corps in our system -- which at this point numbers something like 20 inhabited wormholes. That's a fair amount of logistics.

The war goes into affect 24 hours after the fees bribes have been paid, which gives me about 22 hours to get ready from the point where I get this notification, and pretty much everyone else in our home system is doing the same stuff: scan down the exits, get some hauler ships out into highsec, grab whatever tower fuels we're a skosh low on (in our case, there aren't many), get any lingering ship/drone reparis done, update the Planetary Interaction colonies to make sure the tower fuel we can make will be entirely sufficient, double check everything...

And then wire the doors shut and just ignore known space for awhile.

If these corporations want to come and find us in our home systems, they are welcome to: this is our home territory, where we understand the rules and idiosyncrasies, and where we fully expect trouble. To try to function around a high-sec 'griefer' wardec corp in their home arena -- where they are the ones who know all the little tricks and exploits and can turn them to their advantage -- is pretty much the height of foolishness and (despite evidence to the contrary) we try fairly hard to avoid being foolish.

So, 20 hours later, we have closed up the wormhole, taken stock of the activities with which we can amuse ourselves for a week (quite a few gravimetric signatures indicating mineable asteroid fields), and settled in.

It's only then that realize I never brought in any mining vessels. My time-killing options just got a *lot* more limited.