Left Behind at Burger King

Not every day is eventful in EVE Online.  Not every day is a huge space battle… or even a string of POS destruction.

Some days it can be like work.  You haul stuff around, shop for stuff on the market, go pick it up, list other things, fit out your ships, and generally to the maintenance required to keep things going.

And then some days you think it is going to be a big day… and it isn’t.  At least not for you.

Today was one of those days.

We had a big fleet op planned because White Noise did as well.

Очень важная операция,делаем первый красивый бой, просьба всем быть.

Внимательно следим завтра за альянсовой почтой.

-Official White Noise Notice

There are no secrets in EVE Online.

This was translated to us as “Very important OPS. Possibly the first awesome fight. Everyone please show up. Pay attention to alliance mail tomorrow.”  And I was a bit keen to go, having just finished up the skills for the recommended ship for this sort of operation, a Maelstrom.

My First Maelstrom

Unfortunately, I was off to a bad start.  The op started when I was still asleep.  And since I had the day off, I was not keen to get up.

Still, I did have a bit of luck.  Once Gaff got me on the right channel to find the reinforcement fleet (I was in a channel that *almost* had the right name, with about 100 other people which made it seem like I was in the right place) I was able to join up for the convoy out to the fight.

A convoy was required because there were groups out there, like these guys, camping gates to try and knock off small groups of reinforcements. (They ran off to safe points when we passed through their system, so the convoy worked, but I would have liked to have gotten a shot in at them.)

And convoys do tend to be slow.  People join late.  People fall behind.  People get ahead and get lost.  Jump bridges run out of fuel causing you to have to make extra jumps (which happened to us).  And the fleet commanders tend to be a bit cautious because they want to deliver as many ships to reinforce the fleet as possible.  That is their job, but it takes time to do it right.

So we were moving at a snail’s pace.  You think system travel in EVE is slow, try it while attempting to keep about 100 ships together while one guy scouts ahead.

Fleet Warping Again…

But we were buoyed during our travels by reports from the fight.  A kill mail came through that showed an engagement where we killed 76 White Noise ship for the loss of only one of our own.  The enemy was out and looking for a real fight it seemed.

One of our scouts finds an enemy fleet

And then we started slowing down… even more so.  We halted at one point to get jumped in by a titan, but that never came to pass.  Then we moved on, turned around and moved back, then eventually halted in a system whose designation made me immediately thing of Burger King, hence the reference in the title.

Eventually we formed up around a titan who was going to bridge us into the action.  So we sat and waited to be called.

Waiting at Burger King

After a while and some confused messages, we were told to jump back to where we started.  Our initial fleets had broken contact to refit and replace losses and to avoid the 77 titans that White Noise and their allies managed to get onto the field of battle.

The Enemy Titans En Masse

At this point I was about ready to head back to a system with a station where I could log off.  I had been traveling around with this fleet for about three hours at that point.

And then the news came that we were to sit tight and wait until the main fleet finished refitting and reforming and joined up with us.

So I was sitting there at Burger King, with no password to that POS bubble (nobody seemed to know it) and no access to the station in system (it appeared to be bugged after the sovereignty change) when my wife got home and said it was time to head down to the post office to renew our daughter’s passport. (Both parents must be present for that.)

At least that was an activity that made running around in space for 3 hours seem not so bad.

So I had to simply log off in Burger King.  Now hopefully that system will continue to be a staging point for operations, because it is a long and dangerous route home… or a quick one if I run into a gate camp.