EVE New Citizens Q&A

Your ship and pod where destroy be a 280mm Howitzer Artillery II. You may want to check your overview settings to include T3 destroyers.

You should have received an automated mail telling you what happened to you, called a "kill mail".

There are several "killboards" that log player owned ships that are destroyed in the game.
Google for Eve Killboards, go to one and search for your character.
It looks like there is a particular player corp in that wormhole who do not like visitors.

I got the in-game email and saw the kill on zKillboard but it was so fast that I was still trying to figure out how it happened.

So best guess is:

- he was lurking nearby but I didn't see him
- he had something that auto-targeted anything in the area (?)
- he targeted me so fast that I didn't know I had been targeted
- he blew me away with 2 shots from his 280mm Howitzer Artillery (I get how this happened)

Is this about right?

So, is there something that can auto-target even if you're AFK or was he sitting there waiting for me to uncloak? Did he have to literally click on my ship when I showed up in overview and then target/shoot? Or did he do something else?

And, is there anyway to avoid this (without a much better ship)? Even if I saw him on dscan and knew he was there, could I have prevented this? Would an Astero with Covert Ops Cloak have helped (what I'm probably getting next)?

Thanks for the help

1. This being a PVP game, the devs are very careful with automated actions. There's no way to automatically lock a target, and after the target is locked, there is no automated way to activate your guns ON the target. You must be at the keyboard and pushing the buttons to do this stuff.

HOWEVER, most people don't "look around" in space to find you. There is an "Overview" list in the upper right corner of the screen, with ALL the ships and other things of interest in the vicinity. Sort it by distance, so that things that are near you are at the top. Make it wider so you can see all the info, and make sure you have at least the following columns enabled:

Icon, Name, Ship Type, Distance, Velocity

All he had to do was wait for you to "do something" (which removes the invisibility that the wormhole gives you - normally lasts 60 seconds to give your computer a chance to load up the solar system and give you a chance to form an escape plan if necessary), then target you and shoot you.

The fastest way to target someone is just ctrl-click their ship in the Overview list.

The fastest way to activate weapons on a target is to activate the weapons FIRST (with no target), then ctrl-click a target in the Overview. This sends a request to the server "I will shoot as soon as there's a target" and then "There's a target!", and the server will deliver both commands at the same time, thus no warning to you.

In addition to proper use of the game's UI for best results for him, the guy had his ship prepared and fitted specifically for the kind of trap he sprang on you. Artillery weapons are long range guns that do huge damage but fire very slowly, so he used those specifically to kill you in 1 shot, rather than a prolonged battle. And also, sensor boosters make his ship target other ships very fast, again to quickly catch people coming through a gate or wormhole.

At its core, this is what EVE is: a strategy game. A lot of the fights are determined by the ship or the fittings, and the plan behind most of the fights is "fit your ship for the purpose or scenario that you want, then go looking for fights that match that scenario, otherwise run / warp away from situations that do NOT match that scenario."

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2. (Prototype) cloaks make you invisible. Covert-ops cloaks let you stay invisible as you warp around from spot to spot in the solar system. There's no way for anyone to find you when you're cloaked, with the caveats below:

1. A cloak will be disabled (you become visible) if you get within 2.5 km of anything, or if any ship flies within 2.5 km of you. If I double-click your ship from the Overview list, my ship will immediately start moving towards your ship, and will continue to do so even if you cloak up. If I have a microwarp drive (or afterburner) for extra speed, I can be on top of your cloaked ship within a few seconds, maybe even before you have a chance to move 2.5 km away.

2. All your other modules get disabled while you're cloaked (you cannot do much besides move around slowly).

3. If anyone targets you, you cannot cloak. As I said before, ctrl-click starts the target-locking process so I target your ship, and there are sensor boosters that can make that very fast.

So basically, if your ship appears in my Overview, however briefly, I can combine 1 and 3 above and ctrl-triple-click your ship to target you AND move towards you. If I target you or if I get close enough, your cloak won't work.

In addition, as you travel from solar system to solar system, or through wormholes, you are FORCED to become visible for at least 1 second.

1. The gate or wormhole transports you to the destination and gives you a 60-second invulnerability+invisibility timer. We call this the "gate cloak".

2. During the 60 seconds, you can look at the Overview, look around, and d-scan to see what's around you. But if you move your ship or activate any weapon or any module, you immediately cancel the 60-second gate-cloak and become visible instantly.

3. Your covert-ops cloak is a module. You must activate it to go invisible. You cannot activate it if you have the gate-cloak invisibility, so you must first move your ship a bit then activate your cloak. Your computer will show this happening very fast, as fast as you can manage clicking it.

4. But the server processes requests from the players every 1 second. So the server will see your request to move and will cancel your gate-invisibility, then after 1 second it will see your request to cloak up and activate your covert-ops cloak. Other players in the area will see you visible for 1 second.

5. Other players in the area can certainly ctrl-triple-click you during the 1 second, that's plenty of time. The server will then process their request to target-lock you, and possibly grant them the target lock before granting you the covert-ops invisibility.

Thus the covert-ops cloak is invaluable for letting you move around AFTER you pass through the wormhole, but will NOT make you invulnerable while you use that wormhole.

This is why a lot of EVE PVP happens at transit points (stargates or wormholes).

So I learned a lot from your question and the answers, glad you asked it.

But I imagine one can setup macro commands to do things quickly like combine ctrl+lmb click to get a lock faster. I know I have a gaming mouse and it would be easy to program that into it. Let alone my gaming keyboard which again I can setup in 30min to do everything in EVE from my quick pad on the left side of the keyboard.

Just FYI, you have horrible luck. I can't even remember the last time I jumped a hole and somebody I wasn't expecting was on grid on the other side. Don't let this discourage you. Hundreds of millions of ISK lie in pirate relic sites in lower class wormholes, without rats to kill you! Just make sure it's a pirate, not sleeper site.

ctrl is already the default command for "target lock this". Just click it on your overview and push ctrl - voila.

You can look up the J number on zkillboard.

Great reply, one comment:


Offensively, but defensively you can enable Auto Target Back in ESC, General Settings and the game will auto-target things when they target you, up to the maximum number of auto-targets that you set.

Of course this feature is generally considered rubbish if not suicidal in many cases (it may well cause you to fire on the wrong target, like a friend in a fleet who is trying to help you) unless you're paying really close attention (in which case why did you need it in the first place) but if you're flying solo into wormholes etc., then maybe it would be helpful. If you pre-activate weapons then it will shoot at the first thing to target you (whether you want it to or not).

But defensive PvP is more about running away than shooting back in many cases.

For completeness, there's also the Auto Targeting System I/II that grants a +2/+3 to the ship's max number of tracked targets (still limited by skills though), and when you click it it will try to auto-target everything near you. Hardly ever used for its auto-target function for some of the same reasons as auto-target-back, but it's there. Eats up a high slot.