You come home late from work, kick off your boots and get some tea water boiling. In the meantime your computer, of course already turned on, is quietely humming away while discord is filling up with fellow corpmates on comms, bantering, pvping, mining and huffing gas. Without much thought you click the agency pop up away, undock in an Orca and get some laid back mining going, cup of tea in your hand, grateful that the workday is over and you can relax a little before heading out on a corproam or strat op for some more adrenaline focused gameplay. You step away from the computer to get a another cup of tea, clean the dishes, do some chores while your Mining Drone II’s stack Veldspar into your Ore hold.
As you come back your tanked Orca is in 20% structure. Two diamond Kestrels got you tackled with a wing of Caracals, a Blackbird and Osprey having a go at you. Your light drones barely making a dent in the Kestrels as you watch your Orca go up in flames followed by a desperate outcry on comms “lol I just lost my Orca” and the subsequent reply “lol get rekt”.
Little did the Guristas know you have a ship set up to take a FOB down, payback. You grind the FOB down to 10% structure as a NPC Hauler undocks from it. Yes… undocks. He looks at you, you look at him, he looks at you and you look at him and you get vollied by the reinforcement wave called in by the hauler right ontop of you.
The FOB has claimed another victim and within one evening you have welped over 2bil.
Welp, guess I am gonna roam for a little…
My fault for going AFK in an Orca
My fault for not checking agency for FOBs
My fault for not understandings FOB mechanics properly.
Once I found my orca in 50% shield and had enough time to wear down the frigate scrambling me with Medium tech II drones. Then I could warp out without major structure damage. Light drones doesnt have enough bite…
I mean, sounds like things are working as intended. You made mistakes, and paid the tritanium price for them.
Anyway, I’ve heard some people say that there should be some sort of warning mechanic for when FOB’s are in system (like incursions have the incursion effect icon and influence bar, and trig minor victory systems will give a warning dialogue box). I’m not sure how I feel about that, but if there are going to be warnings, I’d rather them be diagetic in nature (i.e. a different skybox or something). In fact, rather than having a warning dialogue box pop up, maybe a “skirmishing” rat that was reasonable to deal with could be the first thing to warp on grid. And as long as you weren’t afk and could kill him quickly enough, you could break tackle and warp off before his buddies showed up. perhaps he should be weak enough that a lone procurer with decent skills could take him out in time, but I don’t think things like lone covetors should be able to do the same. Anyway, just a thought.
By the way, @Archer_en_Tilavine do you guys offer standings improvement for FOB factions/diamond rats?
FOB Diamond rats are affected by faction standings, but the United Standings Improvement Agency [USIA] is unfortunately unable to directly boost faction standings like we can corp standings due to mechanics limitations1. We can do things to make it easier for clients to raise faction standings themselves, however. Regarding FOBs: we can unlock the Guristas epic arc for clients to run themselves for a massive standings boost (that arc is quick and easy to run and requires a cheap ship with low SP requirements). As for Blood… well, we can technically unlock L4 missions for clients if they want to run those to generate L4 storylines, but if their faction standing is below -2 then they’d be restricted to L1 missions, so that’s unlikely to help. We’re always happy to provide advice, but otherwise it’s pretty much a do-it-yourself endeavor to raise those standings.
1 Technically faction standings can be shared via epic arcs, but we do not offer this service due to the impracticalities involved.
@Captain_Creampie sorry to hear about your loss. It happens! Today I had the privilege and pleasure of being ganked by Her Highness Princess Aiko because I mistakenly thought I was docked for a bio break when I was in fact not - there are worse ways to die. Glad you’re taking it in stride, though
I personally don’t think there’s a problem with FOBs per se, but I do think there should be visual cues for their presence other than in The Agency and D-Scan/Probe Scanner window. There are visual cues for trig victories, incursions, warnings for entering potentially-dangerous systems, etc, but none of these exist for FOBs when there very much could and probably should be. Even vigilant players spamming D-scan are usually on the lookout for other players, not rats, but at least they’d switch their setting for those affected systems when the visual cue appears on their HUD.
