Operation Tuts My Barreh

Our plan, like any good plan, did not survive contact with the enemy.

I am an habitual checker of POS's, with a library of wormhole POS bookmarks entering the hundreds, so I get to look at quite a lot of POSs and know which ones are fit well, and which ones are a disaster waiting to happen. Occasionally, more occasionally than some people, I even find the odd POS which has no shields.

I had discovered a C2 with C1/Hisec statics, within which lived a collection of small nooby, alt-ish looking corporations. Some of the POS fits were laughable - hardeners outside shields, ECM only, no scrams. This by itself invites attack; but to see so many corporations living cheek-by-jowl in a wormhole when so many were clearly incapable of survivng? That's unusual, and piqued my interest.

Of further interest was that all the POCOs in the hole were owned by one of the corps, which was a 4 man corp. Generally, you would need to be OCD to pop the Interbus installations with a 4 man fleet. So again, unusual. Something didn't add up. I decided we would poke, and see what we could make happen - often the only way of getting fights in wormholes is to threaten people with losing assets. 8 POCOs, a bunch of shitfit POSs....there would be a fight. Depending on whose alts these were, maybe we'd make Exhale. or HAHA a bit richer, yet again.

Our plan, let it be recorded for posteriors, was to troll the residents with the POCO reinforcing, reinforce some POSs - mostly the smalls, because that's an hour with 10 BS's - and see what we could get. This started Friday night AEST and rolled through 2 days of sporadic tent-setting and quite a bit of Ishtars orbiting small POSs while permajammed, letting their sentries do the work.

Hindsight being 20/20 (and despite the egregious claims of this being "common knowledge" spewed onto the EVE-O forums), the fact Eve Uni turned up and bagged a Legion of ours who took the all-too-obvious bait, and a Sleeper Social Club scanner logged off in-system should have clued us in a bit quicker. But nevertheless, 4 hours before our timers were coming out, it became abundantly clear that this hive of hug-fiends had friends.

Credit where credit is due, they timed it well; I locked myself out in a collapse devoter, respawning the B274, and within 10 minutes it had been infested with 30-40 ships. Again, there's claim and counterclaim but I counted 9 Proteus, 8 Legion, 5 Guardians, 2 ECM armour Tengus, Damnation, 2 Lokis, Deimos, Astarte, Arazu on d-scan inside the hole, and more outside; the parties were Kill It With Fire, Sleeper Social Club, Future Corps, randoms.

We knew the operation had worked...it had sadly worked too well. We were clearly outmatched; we had a mixture of BS, Ishtars, tier-3 sniper BCs and nubs in Drakes and Caracals. Our alt-corp siege POS was going to be attacked, rapecaged, and bubbled. We decided to pull the pin. So we instigated warps to safe, loggoffski'd, and went to have a real life until people got bored. Of course, this being EVE, and BUGRY being spread across timezones, people hadn't read the liner notes or were just lazy, so this didn't all go 100% to plan.

However, it wasn't the slaughter you may think. We effected decent escapecage tactics, getting a dozen ships out of the rapecage and through the T2 large bubbles on the highsec. We even tried a few fights on the hisec, to show we were willing, and I now have grudging respect for the ECM Tengus, which realy rained on our parade. We lost a couple of things; a Tornado whose jump through the wormhole caught lag (meh), n orca who didn't understand the escapecage would work and fucked up the timing, and a nub in an honestly terribly fit Drake who didn't check his mail and doubtless got combat probed at a safespot and sent back to highsec.

So...Operation Tuts My Barreh, how did it go? Disappointing. It seems we had found a wormhole of proscribed space, defended by self-righteous white-knight tard-herders and hug-hoarders spoon feeding a "wormhole lite wormhole life" experience onto 'graduates' from EVE Uni. This artificial potted environment is preserved by the much more organised, dedicated wormholers whose e-peen and e-honour demands they defend people who could, if left to fend for themselves, learn quite a few valuable lessons. It is actually quite ironic.

For instance, if you toss your hardeners outside your shield, you are advertising you are a noob. You lose the POS, and ask the experienced mentors what went wrong, and the problem is swiftly described to you and you have gone through the experience with a chafed and raw arsehole, but you won't repeat the mistake. If you never lose the POS, if you in fact never sign in for the whole rapecaging experience, you won't learn anything - you only know how to properly escapecage if you've had a rapecage hapen to you.

This, sadly, is the extent that SSC/Red Circle/Future Corps/AHARM have not actually helped these guys out. Our nubs who turned up, well, I have made it abundantly clear what to do in the future. Only those who are too stupid to learn will make the mistake again - and they will be booted.

So. Life goes on, and the forum smacking gets direly boring.