Warfare & Tactics

Yesterday I was running into Ebolfer looking for some war targets to kill. There where even a few in that system, but unfortunatelly they where hiding in a Novice Plex which I could not enter in my interceptor. I was a little bit annoyed and started to warp around to check out the other signatures I had on the long scan, as suddenly a new war target jumped into the system. A few seconds later... a Drake appeared on my long range directional scan. Whow I thought... this must be a mission runner. What a juicy target!

I just started to search for him, when he disappeared from system. Taking into account that before he disappeared from system he has a few seconds earlier disappeared from my long range scan I concluded that he must have gone to the only gate which was outside my long range scanner. So I warped to the Sirekur gate and jumped into the system.

Bingo! There he was and a mission was popped. I immediatelly warped to the mission gate at 10km... and... there he was outside the mission interestingly at range to the warp in gate 50 km off me. I immediatelly pressed the orbit button and tuned on my MWD. But what the ****... my ship was going straigth towards him... PANIC! And then... damn you CCP.!.. you have resetted all the settings with the last patch! So instead going for a 20 km orbit my ship went for a 1 km orbit... thanks god he had no Scram nor a Web so I was able to correct this and went into a stable 20 km orbit around the Drake... naturally I also put a warp disruptor on him and started to fire my missiles at him.

My pathetic DPS was just able to get his passive shield tank down by a few percent while he unleashed his drones against me. Hehe, he used Hobgoblin II, much too slow to catch me. I was already wondering why I did not used any Missiles agsinst me, when the first salvo of precision heavy missiles hit me. Ouch, this was hurting. So I immediatelly started to yell at me bros in my corp to join me and put some DPS on the guy to lay him down. Three salvos later my shields where down... then he started to chew up my armor... I had a small repper installed so I started to rep up which I bearly managed to do. It took an endless minute for my first mate to appear on scene with a Destroyer... oh man I thought he will die in a fire... and yes 30 seconds later he was dead.

Slowly more of my friends appeared on scene, but all in frigs or trashers. It really looked like they where in suicidal mood today. But then the war target just enabled Self Destruction. I though WTF is this? It took him endless two minutes until he finally Self Destructed... he killed two more of us inbetween and we bearly got his shields down to 50% within this time.

Conclusion: He self destructed because the fight took him too long. His ISK/h ratio was seriously broken by a) we where killing him and b) even worser we needed damn long to start killing him. Guys, really... this game is about fun. If you are really serious about ISK or $/h then get out into real life and find yourself a job. This is a game!

I mean, I can understand that it was frustrating for him that he was not able to get rid of a damn intercepter. But it was a good fight going on and he killed three of us... and he would have killed even more of us if we really would be forced to break is incredible good passive shield tank. And maybe he would got have some help from other Amarr mates if he would yell loud enough on their channel. I really don't understand this behaviour. Everybody is crying about not getting good fight.. and then you get a good fight and you self destruct?

moral of the story, bring more dps so your enemy doesn't get tired of waiting and self destructs.

You are so right. Next time I will not move any meter without my own blob next to me.

He at least said something in local like "this is taking me too long".
If you join faction warefare then you should be aware that PVP is part of the game.

I do not want to blame him, and I do not say self desctruction is not a viable option... I was just wondering that he did this and I found it an interesting story to tell and get some opinion on it.

making money sucks, the more you make the less actual minutes, hours days you waste not playing the game you want to play.

yes people are serious

spaceships are serious.

get serious.

First, we haven't killed him within three minutes and he still has 50 % of his tank (passive shield tank!)... so he would have a real chance to get some friends to help him out. However, maybe he just didn't have some friends, or Amarr don't help their mates if their ask for help in Milita Channel.

With regards to the wreck and killmail. CCP has changed the mechanics. You now get loot and salvage including kill mail even though someone selfdestructs.



I suppose this is the point... he is "just" a mission runner and at the end of the day fighting with us is just taking away his precious time to run missions.

Thank you OP for explaining how you couldn't kill a lone drake in at least over 3 minutes (1 min of waiting + selfdestruct).

Also, you got your killmail. Stop bitching.

Did he specifically state that he was self destructing because it was taking too long? If not your entire wall of text is based on an assumption. It's much more likely that he was trying to prevent you from getting a killmail.

Hey, that's quite interesting. I'm the Drake Pilot that self-destructed.

I simply had to go AFK and did not want to loss my pod.

The fight was already taking quite long, but suprisingly my tank was only dropping slowly.
Beeing alone in a cheap PVE-Fitted Ship (No Web / No Scram) and against 7 Wartargets at once (4xT1/T2 Frigs / 1x Destroyer / 1 x Cruiser / 1x Cynabal) I did not stand a chance anyway.

So i took the quick way out, initiated Self-Destruct and warped my pod to safety...and quickly went on with my rl-Business.

If my action would puzzle you so much to write a lengthy Forum post about it..why didn't you just ask me afterwards? We left on good terms ("GF") anyway. No need for wild speculations/assumptions.


But it's really been a nice, thrilling fight and good and welcome closure to my gaming-session this day.

TIME!!! = MONEY!!! MONEY!!! = TIME!!! I use to get up half an hour before I went to bed. Work 26 hours a day. And when I got home. Our father would beat us about the face and neck with a broken bottle. If we were lucky!

Couldn't help myself.