Life in a Wormhole: Tipping Point #eveonline

The fact of the matter is, we’ve been talking about moving to a different wormhole for awhile now. Let me speak frankly about why:

• The system itself isn’t really suited for us, anymore. It certainly was for a long time, and our roommates from Walrus and Cab’s corp are fantastic, but we feel like we’ve done this kind of system long enough, and we’d like to try something new.
• Bedbugs. I’m not gonna lie to you, Marge: one of the reasons I haven’t been logging in as much for the last month or so was simply because I felt like my play options were limited. With a spy in the hole, even the most basic wormhole-related activity seems to require a fleet of ships to act as lookouts, backups, bodyguards, and so forth. I might be willing to risk ships, but if other’s aren’t I’m certainly not going to browbeat them into it. It starts a vicious circle where “not enough” people are logged in, so the people that do log in stop doing so, since there’s nothing to do, and soon no one’s logging in.

• 

  LoJack. Related to the above, I personally don’t feel like I can leave the system and go do anything else, either. I’ve given up on casual roams in Syndicate, and stopped going on the RvB Ganked booze cruises because I feel like every time I head into known space I’ve got a locator agent saying “okay, he’s out of the house, get on in there.” Hell I don’t even go to markets anymore — I just have someone else bring stuff back — it’s basically house arrest. I don’t mean to sound like I’m whining, so don’t read it that way — it’s just the way things are.
• The Alliance. Although I don’t talk about it much, the fact is I don’t see eye to eye with many of the folks in similar leadership roles within our current alliance. There’s a strong movement in there toward a kind of structure that I and my pilots see (right or wrong) as strongly reminiscent of a null-sec alliance, and we don’t think that’s a model that works in wormhole space. (And even if it did, we’d want no part of that kind of setup; we’ve got too many scarred, ex-pat null-sec vets.) Given that, and the fact that I don’t feel like I can leave the system to participate in mandatory ops, it seems logical that the best thing for everyone is to get out of the Alliance, and that the best way to achieve proper separation is to also leave the system at the same time.

So that’s basically where we’re at, sans drama — it’s just the facts of the situation. This has been something lurking at the back of our minds for quite awhile now, hence our on-again, off-again efforts to shift our underused assets out to known space. When Gor emails me to let me know he’s moved all of his stuff entirely out of the wormhole and will be letting his account lapse for awhile, I decide it’s time to take some serious action before anyone else starts winning at EvE. Up to this point, I’ve put off the final push to take our tower down, because it will leave us vulnerable to attack, especially with a spy in the hole, but I’m now to the point where I don’t care; some loss is preferable to death by stagnation.

When Em tells me that some of our pilots spotted that same lurking bomber pilot in some other, completely unrelated wormhole only a few days after our bomber run was cut short, that just adds another bit of momentum.

“It probably just means they put a different spy in the system.”

“Maybe. Or it means they’re done with us. Either way, doesn’t change anything.”

In contrast to our last move out of a wormhole, CB is one hundred percent on board, and stiffens my resolve on a number of occasions when the to-do list starts to look a little too daunting. Within a few days we’re down to the bare minimum number of ships (most of which can be flown by either of us, equally well), and I’m offlining defensive modules and packing them away. The next few days are a blur of moving ships and taking down bits of the tower.

(Luckily, April 1st comes along during this effort, which is a day that always makes me incredibly productive, since I avoid the internet like the plague.)

Prior to this decision, we’d been suffering through a long patch of really terrible connections to known space, but it’s as if the system knows of our plans and approves — we get a string of fantastically convenient connections to high-sec space, one after the other and sometimes two at a time — a day’s worth of concentrated effort and some assistance from Em lets us move the few remaining ships to the Walrus tower for temporary storage and use, strip the tower, remove all fuel, and shut it down. By the end of the day, we have only a handful of necessary ships on hand, and everything else is out in known space and aboard Red Frog freighters, heading for our home office.

And what about Walrus? I’d let those guys know what we’d decided to do, and it turns out that very little discussion was required before they decided to make a similar move out of the wormhole. It sounds as though their follow-up plan is to move into another Alliance wormhole, but for now we’re not thinking that far ahead, except to acknowledge that we’d all be happier if we stayed together in some way, and then focus on the logistics of our collective exodus.

During all of this, we see no hint of the pilots who had once lurked in our system, though I find myself in more conversations with their CEO.

“You guys should really get out of that system and get into someplace better,” he comments, unknowingly ironic. “Come join us!”

“I can’t really move haulers out with your bombers floating around,” I reply, trying not to think of our pilots’ probable response to that invitation. “I’m stuck in the system, and as long as I’m stuck in the system, I’m stuck in the alliance. Your fault, by the way.”

“If you were leaving that alliance,” he quips, “I’d send over haulers to help you move.”

I don’t take him up on the offer, but regardless, we get all of our stuff moved without any complications.

Em was fairly surprised at how fast we got our tower down and, thus inspired, goes to work on the Walrus tower the next day, making use of the continuing string of amazingly good high-sec connections we’ve been blessed with. Two days after our tower came down, the Walrus tower shuts off the lights, with the last of our ships floating inside the force field of the system’s remaining tower — Cabbage’s corporate fortress, which we’ve all decided will remain until we find a buyer for the wormhole system and (hopefully) the Rorqual, which is too big to remove from the wormhole as anything but self-destructed scrap.

The other two CEOs give the high sign, and I contact our broker, asking them to list the wormhole system for sale: Class Two, good connections, good planets, well-loved, comes with Rorqual (only driven on Sundays, mostly to compress ore).

The end?

Hardly. More like the end of the beginning.