Warfare & Tactics

For some reason the words intel and scouting sprang to mind while reading this post. Best defence against insta-lock gate camps is not to be there in the first place.

Tips hat to insta-locking gate-camping pirates that cull the herd of ******** squids.

. . .

On second thought, wags finger at insta-locking gate-camping pirates that are depriving me and my colleagues of juicy loot piñata and comedy pod killmails.

Dont fly thru systems that are known for instalock gangs? Also 1st rule of eve

Oh FFS!! Long reply inbound ….

Quoting Hellen Kurvora: “… genuinly a problem that needs to be looked at..... Insta lock gate camps.”

Gate camps certainly are a problem for the unwary, unprepared, and incompetent. Gate camps supplemented with fast locking high alpha / dps ships and fast moving decloakers / tacklers +/- bubbles can be very demanding to negotiate.

Quoting Hellen Kurvora: “It is just too easy to set up a 10 to 20 man insta lock gate camp in low sec to which a person has no defense whatsoever, and are pretty much assured to lose whatever ship they are flying AND their pod.”

No co-ordinated 10 – 20 ship gang is ‘too easy’ to setup. It requires a number of people to work together and to apply themselves to the task.

As for ‘no defense’, well that is complete and utter bovine-excrement. Just as a tier-3 fleets’s best defense against a large bomber gang may be to not engage, your best defense against a decent gate camp gang is not to jump into them while they are active. If you know you are outnumbered and outgunned then it’s suicidal stupidity to engage on the terms they have set for you.

Use you intel resources to ‘see’ their activity and either take some other route or wait them out. They are only gonna stay there if they are being fed idiot killmails, or if the camp has some higher strategic purpose (such as the pipe-bomb gangs we see during our current war deployment)

Quoting Hellen Kurvora: “Other then avoid low sec all together there is really nothing to do to defend yourself.”

There is lots you can do to avoid dying to such gangs, and intelligence (in both major meanings of the word) plays a big part in all of them.

Quoting Hellen Kurvora: “Which eliminates many of eve's more fun elements like faction war. Its at the point where I am afraid to undock and do any faction war gameplay, in fear of some pirate griefing camp at a gate poding me. I have lost over 2 billion isk worth of ships and implants to gate camps in two weeks. I just flew through tama, and I kid you not, there were 31 frozen corpses at the gate from a gate camp. 31.... That's f'ing ridiculous.”

If a few gate camps ruins your ability to enjoy eve then it is probably not the game for you.

The fact that you have lost over 2b isk worth of toys to campers reflects more on your own poor approach to lowsec play than anything else. Get yourself into a corp with helpful experienced folk. There’s lots you can do to avoid this happening.

Quoting Hellen Kurvora: “We are not talking about pilot error, or strategy, there really genuinly is no defense when u have 20 insta lock thrashers sitting off a gate.”

Actually we **are** talking about pilot error and poor strategy. It is an error to jump through a gate into a powerful gate camp. It is very poor strategy to not use all of the intel tools available to you … e.g. DOTLAN and the ingame map tools do not require people to be reporting intelligence info to a chat channel.

Perhaps you are driven too much be an instant-gratification ethos and not prepared to stop, look, think, and plan. Nothing you’ve said suggests the dynamic is in anyway broken or malfunctioning. The only ‘broken’ things seem to be your approach, expectations, and attitudes.

Quoting Hellen Kurvora: “Intel is not always good, or available, and it is not exactly reasonable to wait for intel before every jump in low sec.”

I think this is the crux of your problem. If you are unwilling to make use of the intelligence resources that are freely and readily available then you will get killed, time and time again.

I’m sorry but your impatience and laziness is not a valid reason for CCP to have to alter ingame mechanics.

Quoting Hellen Kurvora: “This is not some regular gate camp in which if u fly properly u can burn back to the gate, or align and warp off, we are talking about gate camps that can lock you and your pod instantly while eating dinner and sucking a lolly pop, then ruining your night.”

Eve involves myriad arms races, at every level of engagement. If your gate camp loses too many people because they burn back and bravely run away, then you escalate to include high-alpha fast lockers and / or fast-locking webbers. The downside of those ships is that they are purpose focussed and so die quickly when confronted with a well run utility PvP gang … one-trick ponies.

Mebbe you are missing something here … they want to ruin your night and they want to suck on their bacon-flavoured lollipops. They are not out there to pursue some elitist gudfites ethos, they want you dead, they want you crying, and they want you mad … and you are feeding them all of those things.

Quoting Hellen Kurvora: “Come on guys, this is not pvp, this is pure griefing. Its one thing to set up a genuine gate camp, it's another to be able to exploit ships so easily so as to turn that gate camp into an impenetrable gate of doom for every ship who wonders by. This is not null sec where all bets are off, this is low sec, its ridiculous. Milita are the ones who are getting hit the most because pirates are having a field day griefing every ship that passes by in faction space. Its truly broken gameplay. Please fix this”

In summary you seem to be unhappy because other players in eve are not playing to the rule set you want them to. You want to define PvP your own way, and ‘genuine’ gate camps according to your own rules, and have CCP preclude others from doing those things differently.

I’m sorry, but I think you need to grow a pair and get yourself in with a helpful noob-friendly gang that can teach you more about how eve works … in a nurturing supportive environment.

A gate camp in Tama of all places?!?! I presume you did the smart thing and continually flew into Tama repeatedly until you'd blown through 2b worth of **** before wondering if something might have been amiss...

Gate camps happen, it's part of the game. Combat wise it shouldn't be very hard to kill all those ships who've severely nerfed their ability to actually fight if you can form a gang to do so. And if you can't get a gang together, you probably shouldn't be soloing in expensive ships in the first place.

Part of the problem is that you're looking at this as a problem rather than an opportunity. The type of gate camp you've described is basically begging for you and 30 or 40 of your closest friends to hop into cheap T1 frigs, jump into the camped gate, burn point blank at the most expensive thing you can, and kill it. If you're really lucky, your gate campers will cry in local about what a bunch of horrible, terrible blobbers you are, thus completing the cycle of elite pvp.

You say this like it's a bad thing, or some problem that needs to be addressed.

This is a definite case of a need to HTFU.

sniff sniff.....yup them be tears



you forgot Old Man Star as well

For all the crying about insta lock, I have never had anyone succeed in locking my covops frigs, or cloaky nullified T3. I have regularly jumped both into large gate camps of all variety, I certainly have lost my share of covops frigs to competent decloakers, a few to really unlucky jump in locations, and some to incompetence on my part, but never to the instalock.

Also, whoever suggested jumping frigates into an arty thrasher gang... lol. You really want to kill em, bring a few BC with 720 arty and have a field day.

cloak+mwd anyone?