Warp Bubbles - A Tale of Loss

Communications Center General Discussion
1

Me: Started playing in 2014 for a few months, took a break, back in 2017, break, then back again a few weeks ago.

The Scene: Spun up 10 alts on the weekend deal (3.75 for 3 days omega + 50 plex) in addition to my 3 main accounts. Goal was to get the alts in retrievers + porpoise, mine high value ore, then plex as many of them with the 250 plex / 14 days omega deal which from there I could plex the alts and my main accounts for future months. I really like the economy/industrial aspect so I joined an industrial focused corp with my 3 mains.

The Loss: Hisec no juice, low/null too risky, so I started in the corp C3 WH mining the belts. All was good for about 1hr, then a neighboring c4+ started poking around and saw my miners. I got all of them out before the 3 Praxis jumped me. Later brought them back in, but Praxis showed back up so it was obvious there was a cloak sitting in there giving them intel.

I had set up a POS in my own little c2 - played in it for a week+ with little to no signs of activity outside of the occasional T1 explorer/hauler. So with c3 too hot, I move my fleet to my c2. Get everyone in, mining away with my 9 ret’s, porpoise, and drake to deal with the rats. My covops main sitting on the hisec WH to keep an eye out for intruders. Then my final alt sitting in my POS to D scan the area that was out of range of my fleet and to look out for bubble setups.

I’m sitting fat, dumb, and happy mining away making about 30-40mil/hr per ret for about 2hr, then enemy tackle warped in (I think it was the Arazu?) and insta bubbles on top of me. Then Loki and friends (I think it was 3-5 ships in total) warp in/de cloak and it was a shooting gallery from there.

Opinion: I don’t think warp bubbles are in a balanced state right now for Econ/indust/miner players. They can be deployed by one ship to lock down a whole fleet. In my opinion, bubbles should have a ~10 sec deploy time intended to be a preemptive tactic, such as camps or locking down an area, not an offensive tactic. For insta tackle (<4 sec), it should be limited to 1 ship, 1 tackle. If it was a fleet of stealth bombers that locked up each of my ships, I’d be ok with it. But one ship able to lock everything down, from a relatively inexperienced/new player’s perspective, is insane to me. This is compounded by the fact the bubbles pull you into them when warping on grid (reason I quit in 2017 - “why did my ship go somewhere I did not tell it to go?” after warping in 100km off a gate then getting pulled into the bubble)

Notes:

  1. “Don’t fly what you can’t lose” - I know, I was ok with losing them. It’s the manner in which I lost them I don’t agree with and genuinely don’t feel is a fair mechanic for the miner in its current state.

  2. “Should’ve flown more firepower/defence” - I guarantee they could’ve gotten more buddies/firepower to take down the additional 3-4 defense ships I could’ve flown. It only would’ve prolonged the inevitable. I took what I needed to kill the rats since a group that could kill 1 defense + 9 rets/1 porp was going to kill a fleet with 4 defense + 6 rets/1 porp.

  3. “Why post this?” This is mainly for the other industrialists to see if they share a similar view or if I’m just a whiney baby. I know the pvp enjoyers are going to see me as the latter, and I don’t blame them. Just sharing my perspective as someone relatively new to the game.

I hope bubbles get reworked but until then I’m not sure if I’ll play again. The desire to play that I had before this is just not there anymore and I don’t see the game as fun anymore. Eve is already a difficult game for new players to get into, and I believe the bubble mechanics are a big imbalance for players wanting to get into industrial/mining.

TLDR: Casual player spins up 10 alts trying to plex them, takes them all to J space to mine, gets reemed due to warp bubble mechanics and posts about it due to sodium poisoning

2 Likes
2

Welcome back. Everything you described above is EvE working as intended.

Have a good day, now. :grin:

7 Likes
3

I know, I don’t expect them to get changed from one post, but if there’s 100s that share the same opinion then devs may decide to rebalance

4

Tens of thousands of players whined about cloaky camping in nullsec for almost 15 years before they changed it. I wouldn’t hold my breath. Having said that, working as intended.

3 Likes
5

I’m not really expecting it to change which sucks. I feel ccp is just going to continue to cater towards the PvP focused players to keep the lights on, and the game will continue to slowly fade into obscurity until everyone ages out of it and there’s no one left to kill.

6

Terrible change idea. Imagine having to wait 10 seconds to pin down a hostile fleet in actual combat. At that point you might as well have to politely ask them to stay still.

Crikey, a carebear in wormhole space! They don’t often roam so far from their natural habitat.

3 Likes
7

Still a level of skill in needing to identify the bubble probe and warping everyone out in 10 sec. And you’re not getting the big ships out in that time.

Thanks for not being a narcissist like half the player base and welcoming new players. Wish you the best in killing the same people over and over again until there’s no one left to kill, and being in all the huge headliner fights that you definitely still hear about in the news since there’s so many new players joining and staying in the game

8

Interdictors can’t use covops cloaks. That means you have the tools to know whenever one is within 14.3AU of you. it’s called dscan. You didn’t die because bubbles were overpowered, you died because you were lazy, ignorant, greedy, or a combination of the three.

2 Likes
9

If you hate it that much, quit. No one wants to listen to you whine.

3 Likes
10

Prob will, if it bothers you that much then get off the forum lol

4 Likes
11

Who’s the one here complaining that the devs aren’t catering to their every whim? :thinking:

12

Everybody who pays for a sub is a consumer and has the right to voice their opinion on this product…

2 Likes
13

And we have the right to mock them for their trash opinion.

3 Likes
14

And of course you’d know about that since you’re the Dark Lord Trump of all trash opinions…

How about doing the community a favor and re-read the forum rules… definitely does not say it’s ok to mock others…

1 Like
15

I’m sorry you lost some of your ships to a bubble.

It looks like you are unfamiliar with some of the mechanics around bubbles, which may have led to this loss.

If you play in parts of space with bubbles more often you will in time get to know much better what to do and what not to do around them. For example, warping blind to a gate without d-scanning it for potential bubbles or bubble-capable ships is going to land you in drag bubbles and stop bubbles occasionally, which can be avoided by using d-scan in advance.

Likewise you could have used d-scan in advance now to get that “10 second delay” on bubbles that you are asking for; bubble-capable ships cannot warp cloaked.

The Arazu you mentioned is a Covert Ops recon cruiser. While it can warp to your fleet cloaked, decloak and after a 5 second delay start targeting and warp disrupting 4 of your mining ships with it’s vastly extended warp disrupt and scram range, it cannot bubble.

To instantly throw up a bubble like that you either need an Interdictor or a Heavy interdictor. Neither ship can warp cloaked, so you can see them coming if you pay attention to d-scan.

Eris, Flycatcher, Heretic, Sabre. If you see one of these names on dscan on your next gate or on short dscan in warp towards your mining fleet… get away!

The only way these ships can instantly bubble your entire fleet is if the bubbling ship was already present on the grid where you were mining, cloaked. In that case you walked right into a trap.

Hopefully now that you know you may not get surprised like that next time, because now you know to keep your eyes (and dscan) open while mining in wormhole space!

8 Likes
16

yeh that sucks. you might have better luck mining in a low sec deadend system. also spacing out your miners would help. that way some wouldn’t get stuck in the bubble.

1 Like
17

Who’s the one here that already has all their whims catered to and doesn’t want to be forced to click more than 4 buttons :thinking:

18

Thanks very much for this, probably one of the best responses I’ve gotten. I had the warp bubble double fist twist suck 9000 happen on a loaded Astero in 2017 which was why I took a break then lol.

I’ve come to find out it was an indicator that dropped the bubble which can’t warp cloaked, but it could still cloak+mwd warp which wouldn’t have much of a difference in timing. I was hitting d scan on my Drake in the fleet, my alt in my POS that covered the other J doors, and my main sitting on the hisec door in a covops. But I still didn’t pick it up until it was already on grid. I was scouted out by a Loki so they knew the setup coming into it. Knowing the defense that it would take to prevent this kind of attack I probably wouldn’t have rolled the alts in mining at all and instead ran them in drone boats for hisec combat sites

19

I agree with the low sec, it’s maybe a 10mil/hr difference but at least I have local. Most of the time I just had the rets following the porpoise since the good aesteroids are tiny in C2 and I was already constantly having to lock new rocks and move around in addition to staying in range of the porp

20

Note added for you:
4. Ships are ammo. You don’t quit EvE over losing ammo.

The important questions are, 1) did you have fun at least ; 2) Is your plan (nice one, btw) working for you and do you see progress; 3) looking back at the attack, what would you try differently ?

2 Likes