The Quiet
Discord chattered placidly along while I tried to decide if it was time to setup that PI farm I’d been putting off for 1.5 years, or if I should join the small gang of Amarr militia pilots patrolling the frontlines of Amarr-Minmatar faction warfare. Another break from EVE Online meant I was rustier than usual, and I didn’t have my usual desktop PC battle station to rely on – just a small laptop that could render dozens of pixels at once. There were oh so many EVE chores to do and so little time. Who could make room for casual PVP roams?
Calm comms turned to bubbling curiosity in Discord. “There’s a cyno out here, on a wormhole?” The reporting pilot confirmed, yes, indeed, a mobile cynosural beacon was deployed right on top of a wormhole. Cyno’s are normally only used to safely jump large capital ships from one safe structure to another, or to jump a fleet into the middle of a fight. Seeing one on a wormhole meant someone was trying to move something large, unsafely, through whatever route the wormhole chain was currently pointed to. Odd?
Our small gang decided to put cloaked eyes on the wormhole to see if something juicy could be caught in transit. An EDICT alliance Heretic cloaked off the wormhole, but I expected we’d probably already missed whoever had used the beacon.
Cloaky camping a likely fruitless wormhole sounded infinitely more fun than setting up my PI farm, so I pushed that back on the calendar once again and rushed to my home station to pick up a rusty Stratios with a horrible fit. But it could cloak, scram, and maybe live long enough for something bigger and better to grab on to our mystery target.
The Confusion
A few minutes later and I had replaced our cloaked Heretic on the wormhole. Boredom and the siren call of Loyalty Points to be earned had drawn our small gang into some light skirmishing in the faction warfare complexes of the system. My Stratios couldn’t enter the plexes but I warped over to the entrance, to see if I might catch something on the outside before it could escape down the complex entrance. After all, surely we’d missed our cyno target.
But there he was in Local chat – the same character who had dropped the cyno beacon. Shit. I raced back to the wormhole and took up a position just above the beacon. A cargo hauler decloaked on the wormhole and jumped through. Was that all that was left of this weird move op? A Crane running cargo? I chose not to follow.
A minute later, an Astero decloaked on the wormhole and jumped through (or into our system, it’s all fuzzy now). That was the Crane‘s eyes, and the Astero leaving likely meant their move operation was over. We’d missed them. On the off chance anything else was coming through, I stuck around a little longer.
The Climax
Within a minute, the warble and flash of a capital ship jumping into system rocked my overburdened laptop with a tsunami of agitated pixels. The laptop stabilized and I could see a carrier, a Chimera, had just landed on the wormhole!
Rusty, and way too excited, I yelled, “Whoa-whoa-whoa, Chimera!” on Discord, as if that was supposed to mean something. I decloaked and pressed all the wrong buttons trying to race to within jump range of the wormhole. The Chimera went through ahead of me, and by the time I caught up on the other side I was afraid I might have missed him. Missing that carrier would be like shooting fish in a barrel but missing the barrel by five yards, and then telling your buddies what you did – should have stuck to my PI farm.
The Chimera was still there though, still cloaked. Now on the same side of the wormhole with the carrier, I raced back to the wormhole exit to be ready to bump him away from it. He decloaked, I rammed and tackled him, squawked in Discord again, the cavalry was on the way.
Now the horribly fit Stratios would have to tank a carrier’s DPS. I’d never tackled a carrier on my own, and I had no idea how long a cruiser like mine could stay alive under his fighter guns. Our pilots started trickling in and adding their own tackle and DPS.
Nothing was coming back at us. The carrier hadn’t launched fighters, none of us were being neuted or in any way engaged by the Chimera. Holy shit, was he not fit? The carrier pilot offered us a billion ISK in Local chat to disappear but we kept shooting.
He was, in fact, unfit. Kill secured, the merry band of Amarrian’s returned home to shower the Empire in renewed glory!
The Warzone
Faction warfare was revitalized over several expansions and it’s become the most fun I’ve had in EVE Online. Fights are often only minutes away from you, wherever you undock, and it’s not uncommon to hear someone unironically say, “But we have to go five jumps for this roam, ermagherd it’s soooo FAR!” Like any other slice of New Eden, we have many kinds of player groups out here, but most are dominated by the idea that ISK is meant to explode. Welping Marauder’s is an average Monday. We’ve lost three Dreadnaughts in an I-hub bash by Thursday. We’re a smoldering corpse with high-grade Amulet’s by Saturday (thanks Dato).
Thanks EDICT alliance, for being Amarr’s sexiest, Canadian-est, most-full-of-fishermen-who’d-rather-be-out-fishing-est alliance in the warzone.
Send me a message if you’d like to join us, want to know more about faction warfare and the groups out here you could join, or to just hop in comms and fleet up with us on a random night. We’re mostly US Timezone but we have some fantastic people on the upside-down side of the globe as well.
