Life in a Wormhole: The Simplest Answer #eveonline

So there are a couple reasons why I posted the story of our last fight from the point of view of the guys on the other side of the gun barrels.

1. I was really busy on Wednesday, and this let me post a fight without all the tedious… work.
2. It’s important to remember that there are always at least two ways to look at a situation, often more than two, and that your perspective might not be the best one.

Mostly it’s that second part. Let’s see what we can learn from looking at things from that point of view:

• That’s a group of guys who are obviously very familiar working with each other.
• They know their jobs and responsibilities.
• They make mistakes, they aren’t perfect, they don’t always or automatically get what they wanted out of a fight.
• They get excited and shout and miss things.
• Say what you will about camping systems in cloaked ships, or pulling “loginskis”, they’re really pretty damned good at what they do.
• They were waiting for us, specifically.

Now, all those points are true, but I’m going to focus on that last one, because it’s relevant, here; if you read that last post, especially the part that led up to the fight, you should understand that our read on the situation was that we had discovered the presence of the enemy pilots, and that based on what we’d decided the situation was, the best thing to do would be to quickly close the connecting wormhole before we found ourselves right back where we had been.

Now, the whole time we were getting ready to do that, we were on voice comms, audibly shaking out heads and saying – over and over – “What are the fucking odds, man. What are the fucking ODDS?”

Yeah. What are the odds?

A small group of pilots with a really good track record of stealthily terrorizing wormhole systems with a pack of cloaked-up cruisers got into our system and started warming up for a pretty good weekend. We got them thinking that we were pretty non-active by staying quiet and cloaked up, then sprang into hole-crashing action as soon as they acted on that assumption and had a few guys leave the system. As a result, instead of explosions and mayhem, they found themselves in a scanning war, with the ousted pilots racing around New Eden trying to get back in, and eventually losing their inside man. We lost a couple ships, yes, but it would be fair to say that when the rubber hit the road, we ‘won’ that round.

Then, a few weeks later, we “open” our connection to class two wormhole space and see those same guys, but just a couple of them, blowing up ships next door.

There are 2500 wormhole systems. Of those, we will randomly connect to, at a minimum, one of the 499 other class two systems every day. Assuming that other class two system connects to high security space (it did), that’s 1090 different systems to which that other system might be connected.

So what are the odds that a small group of wormhole natives happen to be out in highsec known space for some reason, happen to be scanning, happen to find an entrance to class two wormhole space (500 of 2500 possible wormhole systems) which in turn just happens to be connected to our system via our outbound connection… and that all that happens on the same day?

I’d say those odds are pretty low.

What are the odds those guys wanted a rematch, waited a few days, then set about locating our system or following one of our pilots back home… or simply always still had one more ‘alt’ pilot in the system, ready to open the back door once we let our guard down a bit?

I’d say those odds are quite a bit higher; that we’ve moved from the realm of “vanishingly small” to “obviously, moron”.

We were in a rush. We were looking at things from only our limited point of view with only about a half hour’s worth of gathered intel. (We didn’t know that those enemy pilots had come into the class two from our system; the pilots that knew that were in our alliance, but opted to log out rather than communicate. Oops.)

Also, probably, we just didn’t WANT the more obvious answer to be true. No one wants the policeman to say “The call is coming from inside your house.”

It wasn’t until we had time to go over the fight, access our losses (not terrible, despite the loss of the orca — it could have been a hell of a lot worse), and evaluate our performance and ship selection (the Onyx was worse than useless – it was actually harmful; Em’s cloaky proteus turned out to be completely inappropriate for the fight that developed, and we were woefully short on proper sit-and-fight combat ships that would have evened the fight up a bit) that Em said:

“You know… they could have been in here, and just shooting the guys in the other system until we logged in.”

“That… yeah. Damn. That’d make more sense.”

“Yep.”

“It’s not very good news, though.”

“Nope.”

Are we making assumptions?

That’s the question to ask, when something like this happens. Maybe you don’t have a lot of time, maybe you need to move quickly.

But make sure, as you rush off, that you aren’t driving your 425 million isk bus right off a cliff. The simpler explanation is often the right one.

Lesson learned.