Ok, I just experienced something really strange which I never seen before and I am bit confused as of how that happened and how the player behind it was able to do that.
So the situation, I found 2 covetors in highsec, 0.5, name of the sector and characters will keep for myself for now.
I scanned, them, I jumped, I warped my catalysts to them, I arrived next to them. Right now there is an Orca, Procurer, Covetor, Covetor.
I target lock covetor with my first catalyst pilot and press F1 (blasters) and F2 (warp scramble).
In this moment I move to the next client with second catalyst and there are no covetors anymore but skiffs.
So Im guessing that what happened is that the covetor pilots ejected ship, orca scooped it and they assembed skiff from orca ship hangar?
Even if thats so, there are two things I don’t understand.
how is this possible when I scrammed the covetor. (combat log confirmed, I screenshoted it)
how was this guy able to do that so rapidly fast when he wass clearly multiboxing (based on character names)
Can someone explain the situation to me? If I was outplayed I take it just tell me how it works.
Orca had skiffs in the ship maintenance bay, already assembled and fit. Miner sees you arrive, swaps covetors for skiffs?
I think you can swap your current ship for one in the maintenance bay, not just eject and grab one. So that should be pretty much instant (just gotta jettison all ore first since a maintenance bay won’t accommodate it).
I’d be suspicious of the speed. That sounds too fast for a multiboxer to do legitly assuming you were as fast swapping as most gankers.
As long as they don’t have a weapons timer though it doesn’t matter that you were shooting and I’m pretty sure ejecting breaks locks so they can scoop.
I use alt-tab for multiboxing. I was controlling one account, and after arriving, there were 2 covetors, I targetted and agressed one, then I alt-tabbed to second account and then I saw 2 skiffs out of sudden.
That fast makes me wonder about a macro or something. But in terms of other stuff its all legit gameplay. Just maybe automated from how perfect the swap was
It could be a bot but probably you were just outplayed by someone laying in wait for your gank attempt. It’s perfectly legal and easy to swap ships from the appropriate hanger when you don’t have a weapons timer even if pointed. It is just one click to swap them and if the miner was paying attention they have plenty of time to swap just two ships before you get very far into shooting a Covetor.
It’s a good counter for being attacked in highsec, but one only seen used a two or three times in many hundreds of highsec ganks, probably because it requires the miner to actually pay attention to react instantly. But if you are purposely trying to bait some gankers you know are active in the area, it is a very good gambit as there really is no response for them once the criminal has started shooting and you pull the old switch-a-roo.
I hope you gave them a ‘gf’ for their effective use of the mechanics.
It’s the way they swapped both ships in the fraction of a second that he alt tabbed. If it was legit multiboxing I’d expect one to go then the other. Because the miner would have to alt tab also.
That’s what makes me wonder.
Don’t worry, as I said it’s rare but possible bait is something you should always consider.
Only two Covetors can fit in an Orca (for some reason they take up twice as much space as a Procurer of which an Orca can hold 4) so it is only something you have to consider for one or two ships.
But yes, if executed properly there is nothing you really can do. You should scout more stealthily to not raise the alarm, and if you were pretty sure it was a trap, you could take a page out of the AFK cloakers playbook and leave a Catalyst in d-scan range tethered to something fo a long time until their attention wanders. As you know for a Covetor they only have what, 5-7 seconds to make the swap after the the first volley lands so they really have to have all the cargo windows open and ready to click and be waiting for you.
Usually though they don’t manage to pull it off. While it looks good on paper, most humans aren’t capable of the constant attention it requires unless they know you are coming because your scout is obvious or your habits predictable. If one does manage it I just congratulate them for being on the ball and make a note of it.
Maybe, but with Eve-O preview and hot-keys I can send commands to multiple ships pretty fast and the pro multiboxing gankers can get 2-3 ships shooting per server tick. It’s not impossible to swap just two ships in a few seconds if you have your pointer over the Skiff icon and are just waiting for the bad person to go criminal.
Unfortunately a sample size of one isn’t enough. If the target was able to do it when scouted by a cloaked ship and attacked by an unknown gank alt I would be more willing to believe the bot theory. Otherwise, the simplest solution is just that a more clever miner than usual figured out a ganker‘s modus operandi, spent some time practicing alt-tab and swap ships, and laid a trap.
Multi-boxing is only slow if you have to alt tab if you have 2 screens its actually really fast, I do think that the ability to scoop a pointed ship is probably something that needs to change as that is very easy to exploit as this guy just did.
Im 99% sure my scan alt wasn’t known to them. I went into region I rarely visit in a sector I never been before. And the target I selected was never ganked by me before.
I was there in Imicus for about 10minutes undocked.
There were only 4 characters mining and me nobody else in the sector.
The moon they mined was 120k km from gate.
I didn’t use probes until my gank fleet was warping to gate. However it is true I couldn’t deploy them out of range because the sector was 12AU big. So they had what maybe 30 seconds to see the combat probes on dscan?
The person didn’t respond to the “gf, what the hell just happened :D”.
And, I will discover that the miner I choose to gank belonged to goons. (Something I noticed after the action.)
You sure? I am using alt-tab because I don’t need to move mouse this way and the alt-tab itself takes less than second. I tried having screens next to each other but moving mouse from window to window seemed inpractical to me. But thats probably just me.
Probably just you I pvp atm with 2 char’s and 2 screens side by side its perfectly fast enough to not make mistake’s. But if I had to alt tab I’m not sure I could do the same thing maybe its just practice lol but interesting none the less.
Having to alt tab thou would make it difficult to have your 2 chars operating in different system’s unless your alt tabbing constantly to check overviews and d-scans.
