EVE New Citizens Q&A

I don't really care about losing ships, my only problem is with getting podded. I just got gate camped, whatever, i knew there was a risk of it in the area I was flying in. The problem is, I was transporting a nearly empty Tristan and got scrammed almost instantly after dropping gate cloak. I thought it was weird that they were able to target me so quickly, but whatever.

As soon as I saw there were a bunch of them, I started spamming warp and didn't stop until after I was podded. I had a post on here a week or so ago and the advice from many people was that you should be able to get away if you spam the button. I don't see how that's true. I was literally clicking the button from before my frigate got destroyed and they locked me nearly instantly. Is there anything I can do to not get podded? Within the constellation I've been working in, I've been having fun doing a bunch of different stuff and I'm making a lot more than I'm losing, but half the time when I try to run out for supplies, I get ganked.

I know people are going to say to get with some friends, but that's really not practical for me since I'm in a low-pop time zone and I have a very irregular schedule. Is there any way to get through gate camps without getting podded by myself? I don't care about losing ships, I just want to be able to keep some half-way decent implants.

That post is helpful. I thought I already started aligning, but maybe not.

- Using starmap and checking statistics, especially "ships destroyed in last 1h" will help you predict if the low sec system you are heading to might have gatecamp. Few kills might be fine, but if the system has higher number of kills per hour, might want to avoid it.

- Especially high sec -> Low sec -> High sec shortcuts see lot of gate camping. Sometimes FW low sec as well. If you are worried about camps, avoid those.

- Most of low sec is relatively safe to enter. If you are looking to have solo lo sec career, find yourself some nice system or constellation where you would like to settle, observe the locals and eventually you know who to avoid and who to hit. Most likely you will make friends and enemies in local in no time. Surely your eve experience will be more interesting.

- Low sec life can be quite profitable, especially 0.2 - 0.1 systems where clone soldiers with most expensive tags spawn. Making a hundred million a day without actually grinding or looking to make isk is not impossible. Sometimes you get lucky and get one of those mordus ships. Just check belts every now and then and that's it.


- Don't loose your thirst for adventure. Don't be afraid to interact with other players even if it means shooting things. My best eve experiences have been getting destroyed by people, making friends and eventually flying with them.

The most dangerous gates are the hi/low border systems on the LS side obviously.

Some gates are notorious like Amamake and Tama, but you quickly get to know which ones to avoid as you get used to an area.

If you are heading somewhere new check a KB for the system before you travel through.

I use : https://eve-kill.net/?a=search

Change type from 'Pilot' to 'System' and get a report like this: https://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=29104861

Beware of recent kills by Arty Thrashers, Svipuls or smart bombing Battleships.

You soon get a feel for which systems to avoid.

Yeah, I'm training skills for prospect, about a week away. I've been trying to use cloak trick, sometimes I get it to work, sometimes not. the time I died most recently, i was just trying to ferry a tristan out to my remote base for ratting.

People who tell you that you should be able to get your pod out every time are lying. It's true with practice you should be able to get your pod out of almost every combat engagement in the game. However no where in Eve and under no circumstances are you ever 100% safe. Gate camps are a special situation where people are set up to quickly lock players. With remote sensor boosters they can nearly insta lock you so there is a risk. You can get past most gate camps with your pod just not all. Your best bet is to avoid them all together and use intel gathering tools like has been mentioned already.

I know that you didn't want to be lectured on trying to play an MMO solo but this is an MMO and in Eve friends are everything. Just because you are in a low pop time zone does not mean that you can not make friends nor that you can't join a corp. Irregular play times also don't exclude you from playing with friends.

I personally have never used this approach but I'd bet that the best way to learn how to avoid getting caught by gate camps is to join a good gate camping group. My guess is that when you see how it works and who gets away and who does not you will have a better feel for it.

The gate camping group will always be at an advantage when getting your pod because they are already loaded on grid and you have to reload grid or something like that. I'm not sure exactly what happens server side but I seems to me that there is some kind of brief pause when you loose a ship. Maybe it's the notifications thing that has been mentioned already I'm uncertain but just avoiding gate camps altogether is what I think the solution is. I've not tried this either but maybe ejecting from your ship that you know you are going to loose anyway could help as you are adding some unexpected timing element that is out of the norm for the campers.

If you would like to move goods you can scout ahead on an alt in a free ship and a free clone. It's possible for trouble to show up in the time that you log back and forth but at least you can check for the gatecamps that are currently sitting there. If you really wanted to be able to move stuff safely you could have a second account and run two clients and have your scout run just barely in front of you. You could then train that second account up for something jump cappable like a black ops Battleship and fit out a Redeemer as a mini jump freighter. Or you could get friends and set up cynos for each other and help each other jump stuff around. Or you could pay a professional courier company to move the stuff for you.

TL;dr
you are NEVER 100% safe in Eve and having friends is the answer to almost every problem that eve throws at you.

I think the best advice in this case might be to go around. Now that you know where the locals camp and who they are just put them on a watch list. If they are online then go the long way.

It's a shame that you are losing your pod every time. If you are doing it right you should get your pod out most times, so you are getting a distorted view of the dangers involved.

There is some mystery about it all which is down to game mechanics, server ticks, pings, lag ... or as Terry Pratchett would say "it's all down to quantum". I actually live geographically close to the CCP servers, and yet I seem to suffer more than most from annoyances. On many occasions I manage to warp away from an enemy, only to get pointed and "dragged back" out of warp as the server decides that I got caught after all. Since my ping is very good I can only assume that the game runs some sort of code that is compensating (or over compensating) for the latency of the other guy.

On the other hand, I can never instalock anything small. I have used a double SEBO inty with an alt remote boosting, and even with a scan res of 5000+ I can't catch interceptors.

Sometimes you just have to shrug and work around it.

To improve chances of getting your pod out, I suggest to:

. Select a celestial (moons are the best, because some pro smartbombers will easily chase you to a planet)
. Click 'align' once
. Then start spamming warp

That's because if you spam warp while you're disrupted or scrammed, your ship will do absolutely nothing.

On the other hand, if you click 'align', it will align (= move towards the selected celestial). When your ship explodes, your pod gets 'spit out' in the direction your ship was moving before it popped.

So, the pod already being aligned should help in actually 'instawarping'.


PS. Remember to 'bounce' of the moon (= warp some other place) as soon as you exit warp, else you may get blapped by a POS! It takes a POS forever to lock a pod, so you have time. Just don't sit there!

If your connection has a lot of lag it's going to make it harder to warp off in time. You might want to see if you can reduce the lag by using a wired connection, etc. If you're in Australia, oh well.

But mainly, learn what systems to avoid as mentioned above. Learn backdoor routes, and make perches inside the gatecamp systems.