Warp Bubbles - A Tale of Loss

Communications Center General Discussion
21

MWD + cloak is only an alternative for a covops cloak in the situation that you safely want to get into warp from a gate or wormhole.

MWD + cloak does not allow you to warp cloaked, unlike the covops cloak.

This means the Interdictor must have been visible on dscan for the time it took to warp to your site and land on grid with you, which gives you plenty of time to react.

That does mean you must be dscanning regularly to see potential threats, especially in wormhole space where local chat doesn’t tell you about potential threats.

Maybe another part of space is a better option to mine in if you wish to use dscan sparingly instead of all the time.

A downside of other parts of space though is that it has other types of hunters. That Arazu for example could have lit a covert cyno in LS or NS to bring through a dozen bombers to kill your miners. Pochven doesn’t allow that but has the same challenge as wormholes: no local chat.

Only HS mining is relatively safe and predictable, you just have to warp off when a ganking group enters system. Downside is the lower mining value in HS, but reward comes with risk.

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22

How does one do the fast bubble drop on a target ? Here’s an example (time marked for the start of the attack - finding the target was as straightforward as using dscan on the anoms, then warp at distance)


All it takes is one cloaky scout, a shared bookmark, and a short warp-in distance for the bubbler. Mining in w-space without active backup ? Have to be lucky no one spots you. And that is the moral of OP’s story, not “bubbles”.

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23

I’d guess the “desire” roadblocks you run into are due to the mismatch between your expectations and the various outcomes. The base expectation on your part appears to be that if you come up with a good plan and execute it reasonably well, then you should be fairly assured it will work.

The problem is that EVE is broad enough with enough situations that you’ll often miss some detail or some crucial second of timing and the plan falls apart and you get nuked. “The best-laid plans of mice and men” etc. And so far, you’ve been using that as an indicator that “the game is no fun, time to stop playing”.

You made a series of risk assessments here that didn’t work in your favor. You envisioned a plan that basically required perfect execution at all times (boxing 10 ships for high profit in dangerous space). You decided to put your “I’m back a few weeks” level of skills up against the people who hunt that space 24/7. You offered a juicy target and then reacted somewhat predictably (you moved, but you kept doing the same thing, even after the alert went out).

You planned for a bit too much, too fast, because an opportunity presented itself and you wanted to maximize your results. In cases like that, sometimes you might get lucky and it will work out, but your plan appears to have required decent luck to hold out for a couple weeks of play.

You’ve seen Gerard’s very good explanation as well as points made by others, so you know “the mechanics are unfair” isn’t really the issue here. The primary issue is that you bit off more than you can chew, broke a tooth on it, and are feeling the double pain of both the loss and your knowledge that really, this is your own fault (several of your points in your OP show this underlying feeling).

Your attitude should be more along the lines of “Okay, here’s the plan, but I realize it’s quite risky and requires constant fast attention, so I’m basically writing these ships off when I undock. The hope is that they at least pay for themselves before I get blown up, but even that won’t always happen. And I have an alternate plan in place if things look too hot, rather than simply moving to a different nearby space and continuing on.”

If the game is only fun for you when you come up with a high-risk/high-reward plan and it works out profitably, then EVE is guaranteed to disappoint. The expectation of some loss should be in the plan from the start, as well as how you’ll respond to shifting levels of risk.

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24

Casual players simply do not multibox 10 accounts. I think every reasonable critic would agree that a player who multiboxes 10 mining barges in J space is a hardcore player who has consented to hardmode EVE. You were well over on the deep end of the pool.

Bubbling a mining fleet is no easy task. You basically have to catch them snoozing. You got caught snoozing. Bubble mechanics are fine. They’ve already been heavily reformed over the years to cater to casual travelers.

As an aside, I think I encountered the aftermath of this battle when I was scouting around. Just goes to show that in wormhole space, you have to assume you are being watched.

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25

You probably don’t remember where you saw it, but I guess this is the location:

Looks like 3 ships involved, Loki, Eris, Ferox Navy, so 2 out of the 3 wouldn’t have been able to cloak in warp and would have been on d-scan.

I agree with your comment about multi-boxing 10 accounts, OP says he was making 30-40m/hr (call it 35m average) it would take 80+ hours/month plus setup time for scanning/rolling/hauling, just to break even, that doesn’t seem very casual to me.

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26

Hmm. 800m ISK in 2 hours of grind. That’s about 1 minute of mining £5 worth of Walletanium with zero risk of warp bubbles, gankers, losing ships, etc. Just skip a Starbucks. Then you don’t have to waste ISK on mining ships and can buy nice shiny, blingy, PvP ships.

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27

Whatever delusion helps you sleep at night, bruh. :roll_eyes:

Again, I’m not the one crying and getting defensive here. Maybe stop the emotional incontinence, grow up, and use your brain for more than space filler. :thinking:

28
  1. had fun until the bubble incident. Did not feel it was fair I lost all of them to such an attack
  2. plan wasn’t viable had I known this about indictors and bubbles. Better plan would’ve been to roll all alts into drone boats and run individual hisec combat sites for the same isk, if not more, and less risk
  3. I skill and fit them into myrm drone boats for hi sec combat sites and not do wh mining in the first place. But the sp is spent, loss was had, and time is up on the weekend pass.

Project was an L for me rolling them into miners and not drone boats. I still have monthly omegas on my 3 mains, not sure if I’ll try something else or just move on with my life

29

Yes I know the age old adage of irl makes 30bil/hr. But PvP is only one aspect I like, and the main type I like is taking over null space territory from other corps/alliances. I mainly like economy snowballing within the game. Goal was to get the 13 accounts sustained and ramp up to real snowballing, buying injectors/accelerators, renting space/n64 moons, renting fleets/muscle for other projects.

30

But aren’t you crying from not wanting to have to put more than 10min into planning and click more than 4 buttons for 3 ships to get 1.6bil killmail :thinking:

31

That’s what I’m saying. And I had 3 days to print 1.3bil for each acc to get the 14 day omega. I usually only multi box my 3 main acc’s, this was just a project/challenge I wanted to do. Had I known what I know now I would’ve fitted them all in drone boats for hi sec combat sites and probably been successful

32

Yes and I knew there was a reasonable likelihood of losing some if not all of them. But it’s the manner in which I did that I don’t feel is balanced in this scenario.

Bubbling a mining fleet is very easy. Here’s how the whole thing went: T3 scouted > d scan which belt I’m at > warp in > shared bookmark nearest rock > dictor enters > warps in with 3 sec align time (assuming no mwd/cloak trick) > warps for 3-5 sec > lands on grid and drops bubble. I have 8-5 sec to react, depending on d scan timing, with a fleet that has a 10 sec align time. That is very much not difficult to do. I could easily do that if I were boxing the 3 acc’s, let alone 3 individual players.

33

Excuse me?

Like, this comment is so utterly ridiculous that I’m having difficulty framing a response. Absolutely nothing about it makes any sense…

How the f*ck did you manage to clear a gap in logic wider than the planet Jupiter?

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34

Yes this is my point. The firepower/SP needed to pull this off is minimal and opens me up to this kind of attack to a way larger pool of players that a 2-3 player gang can pull off. So may as well just not bother mining in WH solo with this setup, which I felt was pretty beefy in terms of total ehp

35

I note that you didn’t refute anything I said though. Only thing needed is an indictor, a covops, and a dps which isn’t that much SP to learn all 3

36

And?

Nothing there needs changed. Once again, it is the game operating as intended, where 3 combat ships can easily mess up your mining op.

The gap in logic is where I’m the one crying here. “Game working as intended” vs, “Change the way the game has been for 21 years because I don’t like it after playing a few months total.” Not sure where the crying on my side is, please point to it.

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37

I had the expectation of losing at least a few if not all of the ships. But the c2 I was in was pretty quiet for a week+ so figured it was the best option at the time with the c3 a no go.

I figured the chances of a covops fleet big enough to take the whole fleet down deserved the kmail, this was before knowing that a 3 ship fleet can take down everything. I had no illusions of not losing any ships. I just figured I had a fair chance of only needing to avoid a large fleet popping into the c2, and if a smaller gang showed up and took a few down then that was ok. But that wasn’t the case, and a 3 ship fleet does the trick, which is not balanced in my opinion.

I want to say you could probably do it with a 2 ship fleet if you swap out the Loki with something with more dps and just timing the entry/warp in correctly.

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Game’s been on the decline for 21 years too. It’s ok, you won’t need to worry about it changing, it’ll be just you and your 4 clicks until there’s no more people to click

39

I assume the Loki was Covert Ops fit and provided the warp-in destination for the Eris straight into the middle of your mining operation.

But yea, looking at the fits I assume just the damage from the HAM Loki and blaster Eris combined could have been enough. Maybe if you had set all drones on the Eris in time you could have killed it, but I guess such an action may be hard when surprised and multiboxing a dozen clients.

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40

yeah that ain’t happening since I can’t do input broadcasting. I damaged the Loki a little with my drake but I got sucked dry by the Ferox. After Drake went down I just closed all the clients and ate a burger

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