Hooligans

This is not the blog post I had planned on writing today; however, there are :opsec: considerations so it'll have to wait longer.  For a quick update, though, I am out with my new corp, Sky Fighters, Doing Things to People.

Yesterday evening was, in fact, full of Doing Things to certain specific people, but last night as I was getting ready to log out I caught a concerning message from a friend of mine - some random people had been camping her wormhole, and at first she wasn't terribly concerned as, well, they were horrible at it and it's not unkown for corps to camp k-space connections in the hope of a juicy gank.  However, these guys were remarkably persistent - they had, apparently, been camping her hole for eight or so hours now, and one of them just declared ownership of her system and demanded that she pay rent.

Oh my.

My friend is a very new player to Eve, having started around the end of March.  She has also been incredibly enthusiastic about w-space; actively exploring every day, earning her first plex as a newbie by running herons into nullsec and hacking sites, things like that.  She's shied away from PvP since she is definitely more of a builder than a fighter, but when I was getting started on my newbie corp I actively recruited her for her awesome YOLO attitude and her motivation to get out and play the game instead of just sitting somewhere 'safe' all day.  When the newbie corp failed to launch, she decided to go make her own corporation and do things her own way then, scouting out her own C3/LS hole, shelling out for a POS on her own (I helped her plan the defenses :D), and moving in the fuel and scanner alts and things she'll need to start operations.  And, now that she has Things she wants to defend, she's looking at options to get herself set up for home defense PvP.

I am very proud of how she's doing.  Like, seriously, I am tearing up a little writing this.

So, when I heard that some no-name bunch of punks were harassing my friend, I took an interest.

Like I said, they were actively camping her k-space connections (she had two low sec ones at the time), but they were horrible at it; one of her scout alts got podded out several times, but she didn't have trouble getting it back in.  Once they anchored a couple of large bubbles and brought in a sabre she scaled down the transit activity, but she has everything she needed to sit them out for a couple of weeks.

Although no POS is unconquerable, we had made sure it would require a significant investment to try and bring it down - the hooligans made some threatening noises at her and growled about seigeing her POS, but they clearly didn't have the guns to do so at the time... and trying to starve someone out of a wormhole is a horrible thing to ask your pilots to do, since depending on the fuel reserves in the tower, you might be doing a lot of sitting and hole watching for two or even three months.  So after a bit of baiting (what, going to feed your loki to my tower?), they threatened to drop a fleet of Marauders on her POS.  That had us giggling.

Just in case you are unfamiliar with Marauders, and their prices, an *empty* hull runs about a billion isk.  A properly fit one can cost as much as a dread.  They are tough ships, but they are also huge targets.  Especially if they're glued to a POS that will only shoot them, and not your friends who come to get on the killmails. :D

My friend baited them a bit more, running her scout (who couldn't cloak) between their camps to keep eyes on them and openly laughing at their attempts to charge her rent, hold her hostage, or threaten her tower.  Have I mentioned that I really like her attitude?

Sadly, I was unable to come to help in person, being stuck in a remote piece of uncharted space; instead, I ended up sending one of my out of corp alts to keep an eye on things, and began poking some of my contacts to see if anyone was in the area and interested in ganking marauders, should they actually show up.  I discovered that this group of hooligans had in fact managed to piss off another friend of mine to the point where he would gladly bring a dozen or two guys to kick the punks in the nuts and collect their sweet, sweet tears, so I put him in contact with Lori.  Bane, one of my corpmates/the diplo for Sky Fighters, also caught wind of it all and helpfully decided to convo the aggressor's CEO to see if they wanted to talk.

The CEO tried to charge Bane a two billion isk ransom.

Their CEO.  Tried to charge Bane.  A two billion isk ransom.

That got some laughs out of us as well, and I think around that point Bane had got his scout into the C3.  This was too much heat for the Rejects - they pulled stakes and scampered, growling about our Huge Fleet (that was still five jumps away, not sure how they would have seen that) and that the POS wasn't worth their time to bash.  Bane ran a scout up the chain to their home system; I wouldn't be surprised if he demands a ransom from them tonight.

Shout out to everyone who had my back, you guys are great.  Sorry they blueballed you and bailed.  To the Rejects: don't be dicks, guys.  Yea, we all play rough here in w-space, but when you get put on someone's shitlist they'll come looking for you if they get a good chance.

The evening was sadly lacking in explosions, but it felt like a nice bit of diplo pvp.  And hey, I'll remember those guys; I've got a C5 static, so I'm sure I'll run into them again. :D

o7
-K