Life in a Wormhole: Bad Time to Stop Sniffing Glue #eveonline

It's a new day, and it's clear that we've been penciled in for another round of "spot the invisible ship" with our old friends.

Super.


Everyone's laying low right now, but unlike the last time when we were playing it cool in the hopes of misleading the enemy about our intentions or level of activity, this stretch of silence has nothing to do with tactics or, in fact, EvE. We're just really busy.

The last tussle was a huge time investment, and pretty much every pilot we had was active and online. This time?

• I've got about five deadlines to worry about, I'm Solo Dad for the whole week, and my kid has a terrifying-sounding but ultimately treatable case of the croup.


• CB, Shan, and Gor are working really long hours.


• Em is actually physically out of town, only able to log in via some sort of wifi-enabled GoToMyPC-funded seance.

The list goes on, and includes (I'm sure) a couple guys who just flat-out don't want to go through the same marathon hole-crashing session again. It's kind of tough. We mostly stay offline and shoot a lot of emails back and forth, trying to figure out what our best options are.

No one has any great ideas, aside from the obvious.


Basically, even if we wanted to fight, we don't have enough people available to make it more than a blood sacrifice.

Our alliance has offered assistance, and we have a few discussions with the more vocal members about various possible options, all of which boil down to two main choices, each with their supporters and detractors. The pace of this discussion picks up a bit when I log in a day after the first fight and see that our visitors have shot up one of our Player-Owned Custom's Offices (POCO), which has locked down in 'reinforced mode' and will come out of that mode in a day and a half, ready to be either defended or destroyed.

An artist's rendering of the presumed POCO-bashing events. Screenie by Pell Helix, embedded photographer.


Option 1: Sneak a bunch of pilots into the system in stealthy ships, while the enemy pilots are logged out. Set up some kind of believable but attack-worthy target for the enemy to bite on, then ambush their ambush. This is seen as too nuanced and 'weak' by some, and as the only really viable option by others. I'm in the second group, since I believe I understand the enemy pilots well enough to know they aren't going to take any fight that looks bad, so a bait/ambush thing seems like the only way to actually get a fight that MIGHT result in expunging the pilots from the system.

Option 2: Fly in a fleet of battleships with heavy logistics support, form up on the damaged POCO and get ready for a big fight when the reinforcement timer ends. This is seen as the 'strong', 'decisive', show-of-force or 'swinging dick' option by some. Me? Well, if I were commanding a small fleet of billion-isk cloaky cruisers designed to mulch unsuspecting haulers and miners -- I'm not going to be baited into a fight with a bunch of battleships. Obviously.

As plans go, I feel like I've heard better.


Still, I'm not going to look a gift fleet in the mouth because frankly without any help at all, our big move for the coming weekend is going to be "nothing". When the group consensus settles on option two, I make room in our tower and open up a ship's hangar to alliance pilots, so everyone has somewhere to bunk down.

I want to be clear: I may not think much of the plan, but the pilots who voluntarily leave their home systems, strap into ships, and fly over to join in on an operation versus an unknown force, all for guys they barely know? My opinion of them could not be higher.

In any case, it hardly matters. While I can't be on all the time, I can be on at the right times, and between my watchlist (which still has all the enemy pilots on it from a few weeks ago) and some meta-intel, I'm able to confirm within 24 hours that six of the seven pilots involved in the fight two days ago are no longer in our system, and are in fact busy blowing up guys in some other wormhole. That last pilot is worrisome, as he's the one guy who wasn't in an expensive cruiser, but a relatively cheap stealth bomber, and as such he makes a great 'alt' to leave hidden in the wormhole for yet another fight down the road.

But that's a concern for another day. The main enemy force is gone -- probably left before the response fleet even showed up, actually -- we repair the POCO, everyone flies back home with our thanks, and I start vacuuming up the potato chips and putting the couches back in their normal locations.