Friday, January 22, 2016

It's just not meant to be

After scoring a free kill of a guy who thought was cloaked, but was not - one of my biggest fears I might add, it was time to move on. I knew I will be moving out of the wormhole that I have been stalking in for almost a week. I now needed to find a good connection and since I didn't have any, I parked my ships cloaked for the day and went to watch some TV.

Before logging out, I do a routine sweep of surrounding systems. I visit the system where I scored Stratios kill. Almost six hours have passed so it was already an ancient history. Well, maybe not, but certainly a long time for a random gank. D-scan reveals a battleship somewhere in the system.


I resolve it at the tower and find him warping to high-sec. I see him jump in and jump out. A rolling battleship! Connection still looks healthy so I guess he just started. I get my Domi fleet positioned on the neighboring wormhole. He goes in again and goes out, only this time he is greeted with "innocent" Proteus and his friends. With active sensor booster I lock him instantly.


Another rolling Megathron goes down. I'm so happy to see full lows of bulkheads and not warpcore stabilizers, even if it takes hella long time to kill it. If you roll the wormhole you should roll it like a man. I 100% approve of this.

Next day I find a c2. When viewing killboard history, one particular element stands out. Can you guess what it is?


After recent failure to get smartbombing Proteus it almost felt like Bob wanted to give me a second chance. A lot of scanning frigate kills have dictor on it, but some indeed have Proteus. I already have a bait Astero fitted for the purpose, so why not give it a shot? I call my friend.

After watching locals for awhile I got to know how they operate. During quiet periods they stay cloaked on wormhole and/or data/relic sites. I manage to get a snapshot of d-scan just after one logs out. I narrow the guy at one of the relic sites.


Once he logs back in, I instruct my friend to come to the system and warp to the site where Proteus presumably is sitting cloaked. I am making it easy as I can. I have system scanned and there are some connecting wormholes and I have spotted Adhocracy scout earlier. Adhocracy is a well known, active wormhole pvp corp. I do not scout the neighboring wormholes as I do not want to be seen. I will gamble and hope that I don't get stomped by a big fleet. Since Adhocracy operates mostly in US timezone, I don't feel too worried, but still concerned.

Since my friend does not have the bookmarks I tell him to bounce of my scout at the site, which then I realize what a bad idea it is, especially with Proteus watching. If he hears warp exit sound and checks EVE client and sees Astero warp at 300 and then to a can, that won't look suspicious at all. No sir.

Astero starts hacking the site and I wait 10km off him. He hacks one can, then another, but nothing happens. I start to get worried. I saw these guys kill a tourist minute from him entering the wormhole. I just know they see Astero, but Proteus not making his move gets me worried. It's quite possible they see through the bait. These guys know their way around and I was careless to suggest my scout as a warp in. I tell my friend to have preselected celestial or even the sun and be ready to warp on moments notice. I expect them to come in a dictor. If Proteus did not make his move by now, I doubt he will. As expected, I see Eris on scan. My friend doesn't manage to warp out, despite me yelling as soon as I see him on d-scan. He gets tackled and I watch him being murdered.

Astero is tanked so I am in no rush to reveal myself and still hope for that Proteus to show up. He does not and so I decloak and try to save my friend. I grab Eris and proceed killing him very slowly.


I am in no rush to reveal all my cards. Perhaps his teammates will come to help. Maybe not Proteus, but something still interesting enough. Eris pilot gets quite confused. Looks like he expected bait, but did not expect me.


I guess there really is Adhocracy somewhere nearby and he has been expecting them. Perhaps if timing was different and without "dangerous" neighbors, they would have risked Proteus. But I do not care, I was not in the mood for another elaborate trap. I simply used the opportunity. At least this time I did not come out completely empty handed.

The killing was slow and took time. The guy tells me he unplugged all his inplants to deny good kill. It's quite funny, because he kept shooting bubbles up and managed to trap himself. I did not expect to get his pod anyways. Perhaps he was hoping for Adhocracy to jump in on us any moment.

As for my friend, I did not instruct him not to use scram on anything else than Proteus. Since he did scram Eris he now is on the killmail and is now a quite obvious bait. At least until this particular kill is pushed back far in the history.

I don't rush to leave the system. Adhocracy gets active, more parties join in and local gets lively. Some interesting dialogues pop out in local.


Of course I keep my mouth shut.

6 comments :

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Jumping an astero from HS without probing out the hole right to a relic site...wowsers, if that don't scream bait, well shit...
    But also I'm sure the other local traffic made them cautious too. a little bad luck, bad timing but still came out with kill...not all bad!

    Nice read :) It's too bad the bait got identified in that kill...although only noticeable to those who do their homework, it's still a possible tip off now...it happens!

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  3. I thought the name looked familiar: https://zkillboard.com/kill/50821642/
    Ran into him before :)

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    1. Here's the story:
      http://destitutescrublord.blogspot.ro/2016/01/baiting-smartbombing-t3-cruisers-part-1.html

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  4. Lately the Astero is the bait ship of choice apparently. Nice tank for a frigate. Wich makes me even more paranoid when i see one.

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