It is the Mistakes That Get You

Today I wanted to talk about two recent losses I had to gatecamps. In both cases I could have survived, but I made tactical errors that cost me my ship.

The first fight led to this lossmail: Jaguar Lost In Providence

After a long run through null from syndicate I had been bumping around near the Dital and Assah entrances to providence looking for some action. Withe the recent changes to Assault Ships I am still looking for my 'New' Jaguar fit. Jaguars now have the tracking bonus so in theory the web is no longer as needed. This plus the extra low-slot makes for several interesting possibilities. The fit I was in was a heavy tank, some gank MWD fit with two medium shield extenders giving it about 15k EHP and + decent shield recharge rate. This is a very tough nugget. A nanofibre in the new low slot makes this ship about as fast and maneuverable as the shield Rifter. On the downside, damage is only mediocre.

The problem with this fit vs a more ganky fit is that with the lowish DPS it can take a long time to kill a target. I was not going to be popping anyone under the eyes of their gang. Unfortunately all I could find were a series of 5-10 ship gate-camps in the area.

In the end it was one of these camps that got me. In 9-FOB on the 4B-NQN gate I jumped into a HIC bubble. There was a gang on the other side so rather then bump back and forth a few times, I decided to burn away. I failed to realize the significance of the Ashimmu on the field :(. With it's high price tag and bonus to webifiers it was likely fitting a faction web extending it's range. Not realizing that this was the major threat on the field, I was more concerned with the small ship tackle, my escape trajectory brought me within about 15km of this ship where I was promptly stopped cold. Going 300m/s 20km from gate while under MWD was not going to get me to safety.... I died.

The loss led to this loss-mail: Jaguar Lost In Syndicate

This was a bit of an experimental fit, an active armour tanked Jaguar. I have seen these before and thought, with the extra low-slot, it was quite viable. In this case however it was the pilot (me) who led to the loss. There was a gate-camp on the FD-MLJ to PF-346 gate (pretty much always a camp here). However the gate to X-M2LR was clear. I jumped through and held my cloak. 'Perhaps something interesting camping the other gate would come and chase me' I thought. Not a bad plan but execution is key. I held my cloak until something came through, in this case a stealth bomber uncloaked. I gave chase but couldn't catch it. At this point a Sabre came through and launched a bubble. Not having aggression and still 20km from the sabre I was safe. I could outrun a sabre or burn back to the gate. Unfortunately at this point I mis-clicked my overview and resorted everything by name. By the time I had my bearings (which entry was the gate) the sabre had moved into range and I was tackled. With other ships pouring in certain death came soon later. Oooops!

The importance of both of these losses was not that gate-camps killed me, it was that they killed me ONLY after I made avoidable tactical mistakes. Gate camps are a fact of life in 0.0. Some of them will be un-escapable. However most of them are not perfect. They can be dodged in a fast ship. It is the mistakes that get you.

Sidenote: Today is the 100-year anniversary of the tragic sinking of the Titanic. For e the historical significance is this.... it is the first of many huge, and entirely avoidable, tragedies of the 20th century. Pity the 21st is off to an even worse start.

Using Gate Aggression Mechanics to Split Apart the Enemy

Recently I left on a nice long round-about roam. Or at least that was the plan. Oddly I seem to have been stuck in Providence. I can't seem to make it very far without running low on ammo/cargo space for loot :). Earlier this morning I logged on and had a very quick fight on the 9UY-H to H6-CX8 gate. I thought that this fight represented some very basic strategy that any pilot aspiring to solo pvp must know.

The situation was this. I was in an Enyo and saw a Jaguar on d-scan. A Jaguar vs an Enyo is a good fight, could go either way. The main issue being wether or not the Jaguar tries to pull range or not. Anyways, I engaged him on the H6 gate and quickly started taking him down stripping him of his shields and well into armour. Unfortunately his buddy in a Sabre popped through the gate. With the added DPS from the Sabre + the likely additional points and webifier, this turned from an easy win to a likely pod-loss. Aligning for the sun I hit the overloaded MWD bailed out. :(.

At this point I decided to keep on trying for these guys. My systems were damaged (but not offline) from overheat so my effectiveness was reduced, but I figured if I could take on one of them alone I should still come out on top. Warping back to the gate I took a quick glance at them and jumped through.

With only the two ships against me I was in a very safe situation. Neither of them alone or together could prevent me from getting back to the gate. Of course they were also 'safe'. No way I could engage them both at the same time. What I needed to do was get it so that they were both in a state of aggression on opposite sides of the gate. That way they could neither get out through the gate, but help would have to wait the full 60 second timer to come in.

Clearly they were on to my plan. I couldn't get either of them to aggress. So I started giving them a little encouragement. On the side of the jaguar I inched slowly off the gate. My plan was to convince the jaguar to engage me since I could not immediately go on through. It worked. I was about 4000m from the gate when he opened fire. I quickly motored back to the gate and jumped as soon as I could. Shields were dropped to about 50%.

Now I had a very small window to act. I had about 60 seconds before that jaguar could come in. Fortunately the Sabre decided that he was willing to play into my plan and he launched a bubble, giving him aggression. I immediately locked and approached the Sabre, scrambling it once in range and opening fire. He returned fire but, with only a slight DPS advantage, and a much weaker tank, he went down before the Jaguar's aggression was up. Thanks to his own bubble I was able to get the 90m+ isk pod as well :). The jaguar finally came through but, after the drubbing I had given him solo earlier, was in no mood to play without help. I probably could have engaged him, but I did have significant damage so I just played it safe. I looted the wreck, popping what I couldn't hold and left.

TL;DR: I used gate aggresion mechanics to isolate each member of their gang on opposite sides. This included baiting the Jaguar by moving somewhat off gate to encourage him to take a chance. These same tactics can also be used in larger gangs.

EVE 2009 and 2012 ... Gate Crash Bug

So after a couple of days cursing and moaning at my machine I have re-installed EVE, re-installed windows, updated drivers and the like, yet I still crash on about 5% of the gates. For example, going from Otou to Hek crashed my EVE client 100% of the time. Not all gates, and it seems not all players, but something is totally broken. With the game now completely broken for large numbers of players, we all look to CCP for answers. CCP Habakuk | EVE Quality Assurance places a nice post on the issues thread saying assuring us that 1. The know what the problem is and 2. Fix almost ready. But then, 36 hours later, bug is still there and no more information is forthcoming. I know that it is the weekend and all but, geez get your act together and talk to us.

Of course this is all familiar. A couple of years ago during the Apocrypha expansion CCP started monkeying about with cloaking and module activation. They broke the whole MWD-Cloak warp trick eliciting huge tears from the player base. They undid the changes and broke gates. Basically, everyone was disconnecting every three or four gates. Made roams very very frustrating. It took them days to fix :(

So CCP, get your act together. You are right now competing with that Star Wars game which has suffered from some serious bugs. Fix your stuff, or at least talk to your players about progress on a solution. Bugs happen, it is how you deal with them that matters.

Edit: New post from CCP https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=729810#post729810. Looks like the fix will go in on tuesday. Let's keep our fingers crossed.