Tuesday, April 27, 2010

The More Things Change .....

The more they stay the same.

In this post I just wanted to take a second to note some very distinct similarities I have experienced so far moving to a C6 from our old C2.

By far the biggest is the shear amount of scanning needed to accomplish anything.  In our C2 almost all of that scanning fell on two or maybe 3 people.  Guess what, in a C6 with several hundred people in the system, the scanning still falls on 3-5 people per TZ.  Keeping in mind that we really only ran a single TZ operation in our C2, and our C6 is more active.  The key here is probing really is one thing that has a "real" skill to it.  By that I mean you can train all the skills in game very high, but still suck at probing.  Maybe its just more apparent as I guess you can train all the ECM skills and still suck at that too, its just not as obvious.

The second very obvious similarity is the "feast or famine" of W-Space life.  It is the same here in the C6 as it was in the C2.  Connections are fluid, situations are fluid and therefore life is very uncertain.  We can have a series of connections result with good sites, be left alone and be busy every night (and make an insane amount of isk/hr), or we can have a series of active systems, run down systems, or simply keep getting interrupted in our ops and end up spending a lot of time watching the paint dry on the side of the POS.

The last thing, and the best in my opinion, is the "fog of war".  I LOVE the fact there is no local channel that gives an overwhelming, and unreal, amount of information away for free.  I love flying around systems truly unknown.  The ability to control the knowledge of your presence is amazing. 

Case in point, I was returning up a pipe from a high sec route we had scanned out and came upon a few friends that had slipped into one of the systems in some Battlecruisers.  Now we had seen another prober on scan when we were scanning that system also.  We knew there were two Null Sec holes in the system and were pretty sure that's where they had come from.  Now if this was Null Sec, the BC's would have known in seconds they had company and been able to asses the risk by looking at my bio, my killboard stats, etc etc.  All because I appeared in local. 

Now in W-space, I knew they were there, but if I was lucky and he didn't hit the d-scan in the few seconds I was uncloaked, he had no idea I was there.  Advantage to the cloaky thing.  Now in quick order our corp had the ability to gain an advantage by using our tools to hopefully complete a successful operation. 

Long story short and details omitted, we missed cause we guessed the wrong null sec hole (hey was a 50/50 guess), we had a third party from who knows where throw probes and flushed the prey early, and overall the BC's were seconds from getting blown to bits.  We did manage to chase them back into Null and there we lost all real use of cloaky measures and element, because the damned Local let the prey know the entire time who was in system.

So overall, while things are much different, they are still very similar, from C1 to C6, W-Space offers some very unique environments, and for that I am thankful.

Mick

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