4/28/2012

Cretinism in Eve or How to be a Gate-Camping Spaceship Pirate

Captain's Log: Edna Ironsides
Fearox (Ferox-Class Battlecruiser)
Tactical Pounce, Huola

What a bunch of obstreperous f*****s!

Of the breeds of pirate in Eve Online, arguably more than the Hulk ganker and the market hub scammer, none is more frustrating, or more certainly fatal, than the gate-camper.


We've all been there, you've jumped into a system, notoriously it is often the high-to-low sec gates that are the worst (i.e. Osoggur->Amamake, Nourvukaiken->Tama), and upon your overview loading, it is filled with large, hostile bars of bright red that informs you that you have blundered into a hoard of pirates and you've almost certainly lost the ship you're flying. You now have at most a minute to contemplate the premature death of your starship (assuming you didn't mean to lose it in such a situation) before the gate-cloak drops and a disproportionate amount of force is applied in the destruction of your vessel.

So it was that I found myself on a gate pounce with fellow pirate and obnoxious bastard Darc Kaahar, waiting patiently for our next victim to stumble through the gate. As is common practice, we have eyes in the next system to give us a warning that something was coming. Various things come and go, and we shoot up a few particularly hapless frigate pilots. Quite commonly this gate is constantly watched by our pirating comrade, Tyrolen, who is somewhat infamous for camping this particular gate, racking up kills into the hundreds.

Most of the time was spent talking shit and hatching unrealistic ideas for PvP, but, once again, my evening was made by a miner, a Covetor pilot. We'd dropped on the gate in fact to try and catch a Wolf that had landed on the other side. We see the gate flash, we wait, weapons primed... and the Covetor de-cloaks. Apparently he'd passed the Wolf and just barrelled on in in his slow, undefended mining vessel. To add insult to injury, after we'd obliterated his ship, he sat quietly in his pod while our battlecruisers locked him up. And what a pod it was! Baffled by this lack of tactical awareness, we returned to our pounce, wondering how on earth, given the amount of time he had (it takes us nearly 8 seconds to lock a pod), he had not managed to get out. We concluded that the shock of losing his Covetor impaired his will for self-preservation.

Not that we were complaining.

Signing off,

Ed

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