However, when they discussed salvaging I was like, "I'll do that."
So, the goal is to kill mission runners decked out in shiny, shiny expensive loot. The probability for each item equipped to your ship is 50% that it will drop. The goal is to scan the mission runners, find the ones in the most blinged out ships, and blow them up. Prey that some of the shiny bits drop and clean them up.
This is true piracy.
The mind set that I have developed as I have lived and 'grown up' in low sec is such that reactions are different. No one cares that there are 69 people in local. People are not checking their dscan for combat probes. It is a mission running system full of mission runners. Ships are everywhere and they take zero notice of that fact. An entire fleet of flashy pirates is hanging out in space and no one notices it.
I can't comprehend it.
It is danger in plain site and no one sees it. This is that great gap between PvE and PvP that is often spoken of. The carebears say that the PvPrs are going after them. The PvPrs are like, "we're right here shoot back". The carebears rage that they should not have to because they are in high sec space. The PvPrs say that everyone can be shot (because they can). Concord punishes it does not protect. It is up to each player to protect themselves in a game that is PvP oriented.
So, we are in space, killing mission runners, and no one notices. We are talking smack on local and no one notices. Our sec status is plummeting and no one notices. We undock in a huge blob of yellow and red and no one notices. The lack of awareness is, to someone used to low sec, horrific. I've said before that high sec feels ridiculously safe and it does. Except today, we were making it distinctly unsafe. Yet, as we exploded billions of isk in mission runners, others ran around, safe. 11 GCC people in local and no one noticed.
Anyway, the game works quite simply. One or two people have out of corp alts hanging around the undock doing passive scans on shiny ships that undock. When a ship is located with bling, they watch to see if it warps to a mission in system. Then, they drop probes and find them. Then, everyone warps to the gate, the scout goes in cloaked and checks range, and everyone runs in and pop.
Then concord comes and destroys all of the gankers.
Then the ganker looter comes in and loots and salvages all the wrecks. Today, that was me. I'd been shying away from the ops itself because the idea just felt a bit weird. I'm good with preying on people in low sec and being the prey. It was different to come into high sec and slaughter people.
Because it was slaughter. One guy called us pussys. One was pretty even tempered about it (in local), lots of people freaked out at all the GCC pirates in local. One guy was not even at his computer when we killed him. Another popped almost instantaneously and he never said anything. 4 people down and 4bil made from drops.
The system was a .05 system. Watching concord spawn was interesting. My Noctis would start taking all of the damage as everyone left. A few guys stayed around in pods. My fleet commander would start to panic as my damage increased. Then I'd warp off with all the loot. A few times we sent in another ship to tank the mission while I finished looting. All of the wrecks are looted and the T2 salvage added to the total.
It worked out nicely.
It was a different thing. I feel much more pirate then every before. It was a true prey on others type of situation.
Ship kills equaled:
So why did none of these ships protect themselves? The Paladin was AFK and burning out of his own mission with the NPCs chasing him. We chased him for over 100km, orbited him while everyone caught up and then killed him. He did not notice *any* of that happening.
When we went after the scorpion navy issue, his alt was sitting on the gate in a Noctis. He was duel boxing but must not have been duel screening. An entire fleet of 10 ships, all yellow and red pirates, landed on his alt. They then activated the gate and went and nailed him.
The Vargur pilot's pod sat there forever after he was killed.
The Maelstrom's owner tried to fight back. He didn't notice himself ganked, but he did reship into a hurricane and try to harass us on the undock of the station we were staging out of. After we killed the Vargur he nailed one of the pods. The side effect was that he was then Concorded. Kill rights don't = pod kills in high sec.
All around us, people continued to undock and go to their missions. It was as if they could not see us in plain sight.
Except for the one person, that came in an hour or so after we started when we were about to shut down and asked, "Are the pirates gone?"
"No."
As someone who suffers from some deep paranoia, this is really amusing to read. Of course, the only time gankers visited me while I was running missions was when I was trying out the new mobile tractor. They shot that poor thing up and apparently thought I would then feel pressured into shooting them back or something. At that point I was already burned out enough I didn't really wanted the loot and I had already stopped salvaging.
ReplyDeleteSo when I ignored them, they got miffed and left, I think. I MJDed a bit farther out, warped around a bit and bounced back later, just to be on the safe side.
(Later I learned that, yes quite a lot of people were deluded enough to think a PVE-battleship could fight engagements with PVP-ships baiting them.)