I go out ghostbusting again, in Catch this time. I scour from 4-07MU to HP-64T and back, finding a single ghost site on the way back. Nobody in local. I try to run it, but as before fail the minigame and blammo. Nothing to show. I think I need better skills to make any ISK this way.
In the nullsec system where my wspace exit hole is, there are two sigs. I have not been paying attention to them, but since I am headed back in anyway I search it down, and it is a relic site. Hmm. I don't have an analyzer fit, but I have one in my hold, along with a mobile depot. I am eager to try it out.
I make a safespot, then fly to it. I launch the depot for myself. It then counts down 40 seconds or so, and I can refit. Very handy. Unfortunately, I do not have the analyzer I thought I did. Oh well, I grab the depot back in (which takes no time), and head back to wspace.
I get back into my home system with several hours to go on our wormhole. There is a new signature in our system. Dutifully I move out, fire probes, and search it down. Another wormhole. I fly to it, and examine it. It is a K162 from "dangerous unknown" space, and it is yellow. This means it comes from C4.
Do I enter it and search it down? Or should I refit and head out to get that relic site? I decide to have a look. At the least I can trigger all the sites.
I enter. C4b is a black hole system (yuck), and there is no tower on scan. Sixteen anoms, and eleven sigs. Whoever lives here has not been very active. I fire probes and throw them out of the system, then I bookmark the wormhole and check the system map. I can see all the inner planets, of which there are four. But there is an outer planet. I warp out to it to check for towers: no towers. This system is unoccupied. Not too surprising given the black hole and the many sites.
Now I bring in my probes and start scanning. I expect to find at least one more wormhole, because whoever activated the wormhole I came through (an X877), had to get into this system somehow. I find lots of gas. Gas, gas, gas, data, gas, gas, gas, data, relic, gas. Um... that's all of them. And no wormhole! (Not other than the one connecting to my system.)
This is a fantastic bit of luck. It means that in a few hours when our static wormhole expires, without lifting a finger, my corp will have a completely zipped up duo of systems -- and one of them packed full of juicy sleepers to kill. But right now I have to go work in the real world.
Back into the real virtual world. I am still the only person in my corp around, but I can make some ISK by myself. Our static wormhole is gone. In C4b there are seven gas sites including two intermediate ones. And also three ore sites. I triggered all of them earlier; I always trigger all sites in C4. So their sleepers will be present. I refit into a Drake and head out. I check the number of signatures: it will be eleven if nothing has changed. It will be twelve or more if a new site (likely a wormhole) has appeared. It's eleven. Nothing has changed.
The lesser sites I can solo in a Drake. Usually I can also solo the harder ones, but today the damage is too much. (I have the feeling the sleepers are moving faster due to the black hole and that is reducing my damage.) Anyway, I warp out the Drake and come back in a Venture to salvage. Then I come back to finish the last two sites in a Tengu. All told, about 50m in loot. And again I have attend to the real world.
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| Zooming around the anchor as sleepers perish |
I'll be busy as long as I want. The system has clouds of C50, C72, C28, and C32. I fill one Venture and run back home, and return. Right after that, Jayne logs in. I fill him in on the situation; he gets two more characters gas-mining. Jayne pings Timmay while I ping Hiljah. We extract more gas for my reactions. We manage to clean out one of the sites entirely. So, ten sites to ignore.
About 7:30, Timmay shows. Jayne and I could start running sites in C4b by ourselves, but having one more person (two more characters) makes it much easier. Now we load up, checking missiles and whatnot, in our standard sleeper-killing fleet. Ravens and Ospreys, although Timmay flies a Rokh and a Noctis.
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| The sites left after the first hour |
We work through the Barracks, which are mostly in the inner system. I time one: almost exactly 10 minutes. Hiljah appears at about 9:15; we are almost through the Barracks. There is one in the outer system, but with the outer planet 60 AU away, I am going to do all the sites out there together. So I target the three sites remaining in the inner system: one more Barracks, a Sleeper Information Sanctum, and an Unsecured Frontier Digital Nexus. With Hiljah adding two more DPS-chucking Ravens, these drop quickly. The Nexus is not completed; you have to trigger the later two waves by messing with a can and failing. We'll come back and do that later.
Now we warp to the outer system and start in the sites. First the Barracks, and then all the Frontier Command Posts. These have a lot of frigates, and take a bit longer than Barracks do. Still, ISK is ISK. And the other Digital Nexus.
By the time we through all these sites, it is about 10:45 and the natives are getting restless. It's enough. We take a short break. I fly the fleet to a safespot, then I eject from my Osprey and pod home to get a Heron to trigger the two data sites. (Are there still three sigs in the home system? There are. OK good.) Jayne takes the loot so far back for safekeeping: over a billion ISK.
I fly back to trigger the data sites. The first site triggers on the second try. I have a brief moment of excitement when my Heron hits the nearby sleeper-structure and does not warp out quickly. The sleepers red-box me, but they are too far off to hurt me before I warp. The second site takes quite a few failed hacks to trigger. I am on the 6th try when the sleepers appear. I warp off easily.
Back to the safespot, and I reship back into the Osprey. The fleet is ready, and we compete the two data sites. These are notable for the damage they deal in the final wave: four Sleepless Safeguards with 1928 DPS that scram, web, and neut. Nasty. But our hard tanks and the Ospreys can handle that easily.
We wrap it up trying to hack a talocan artifact. This works, but the guys miss a single can which evidently had the good stuff. Too bad. The total take for the night is 1.5 billion ISK of salvage and blue loot. During the day I got another 50m or so of the same, and we got perhaps 100m in gas as well. A banner day for Complex Systems.
This is exactly what I want to be doing. Do you find most Wormhole corps want people with lots of experience - or skills to pilot T3 ships?
ReplyDeleteI can't say what most wormhole corps want, since I have never applied to one. We homegrew CMPL as a largely carebear corp. Formed it a year ago, found a C1/hs system and moved in. (We were doing heavy PI manufacturing.) At the time, I could not even fly a Tengu. Later we moved up to C4/C3 for the much better sleepers.
ReplyDeleteI can tell you what my corp wants. I basically don't care about pilot skills beyond a minimal level of competence needed for wspace. One needs to be able to fly a covert ops and have scanning skills and ideally some experience with scanning. CMPL uses Ravens for PVE moneymaking, so I want to see some Caldari Battleship skill. But this can be learned pretty fast. T2 cruise missiles would be nice, but one can learn that. And we want at least Gallente Industrial 3, so the pilot can fly that fine line of transports.
You don't need much skill to succeed in wspace, if you've got a corp to bring you along. (I can tell you exactly what skills the corp can use, and it is not a lot of them.) What I care about is the player's attitude and general fit with the corp. I don't want tourists; I want players that play every day. And I want players that are a good social fit in the corp.
I do want my pilots to be able to earn their own money, and to be capable of finding ways to entertain themselves if nobody else is on. But a low skill character can do both of those. PI in wspace is quite lucrative; in our system one can earn PLEX using two characters doing PI. (Most of us have two accounts with four characters who do PI.) As for something to do, since we have access to lowsec, null, or highsec via our C3, there is always something one can do. Hiljah rats. I explore. We all hunt in wspace from time to time. We all pitch in for logistics operations when we have a highsec. And highsec is also the time when you can get out pilots to get skillbooks or go to a hub and shop for new shinies.