Trading – My hi-sec research POS got wardeced

So, I log in one day in my market toons and realize I’d been wardeced more than 24 hours ago. Also, my completely undefended small POS had already been attacked.

I went to check on my POS and it was all fine. The attackers had not reinforced it. I decided to play it safe and took all the unresearched and researched BPOS out to local station. Still I had some jobs running. Couple of T1 Cruiser BPOS researching from ME 18 to ME 20, a Bomb BPO that costed 80mil to submit the job and some other stuff that was still running. Should I abort those lengthy/expensive jobs or just risk it. I tried to gather a bit more intel to make my mind.

Hostile corp had 5 toons, 3 of them obviously belonging to same person due to name similarities. They had no kills for last 3 months. The toon that had attacked me was already out of the hostile corp. Only PVP record any toon had was like 6 month ago when they were in CFC and even then had a total of 30 kills or so. Checked their war history and they had achieved absolutely nothing in their 2 or 3 previous wardecs.

I got greedy and decided to keep the pending jobs running, meaning I had between 500-700mil worth of BPOs inside the POS. Also, decided keep my POS completely undefended. It’s a small POS anyway and all the advice I could find about small POS was “take it down and then back up later on!”, so did not put any guns on it at this point either.

Some days after, I get a fuckload of notifications… My POS got reinforced… Dang! It seems that one guy shot at it during 5 hour so achieve that… I laughed so hard! He was probably semi-afk using drones, but still funny. I did the math and figured out the POS would come out of reinforce at 12:30. That’s during my lunch hour, so I could give it a shot to defend and repair it, but I had to plan it…

I have 2 accounts. 1 of my trading toons has 90 mil SP and can fly a lot of PVP stuff decently. As backup toon I’d use Rtb from A4D.

1^st I needed some defence DPS. I sorted 1 Golem, 2 old school RR domis, cloaky prober, a couple of cap stable basilisks for POS repair and some POS repair Ospreys to give in case I got any mates to help out. Dodixie is close by, so if anything happened I’d just go there and buy something.

I had accepted a couple random allies to the wardec and talked to them into showing up to defend and repair. Sure, I looked my allies stats and they were even worse than my offenders. None of my allies had any kills in the last couple month, but oh well… I just needed warm bodies to press F1.

Plan set, conversations were made with allies, was time to wait for it.

Next day I turn on computer, and try to log into EVE….. Nothing… Can’t contact server… What…?

Is EVE down? I check reddit to see if EVE is down, and my browser acts weird… I cannot connect to google, youtube, and some other sites. My internet is all messed up, connecting o some sites, not connecting to others! W….. T……F……!!!

I contact my internet supplier for support and they are unable to help me out in short notice, postponing future support within 24 hours! In the meantime, my lunch break is getting shorter and shorter. I have bigger problems than my POS right now. Not having working internet is way more troubling!

I hijack my wife’s laptop to see if it can connect to EVE and other sites via Wireless. It can! Ok then time to log in and see what happening. Once I finaly log in, 1 hour after reinforce timer has ended, I have 3 war targets in local and my notifications tell me my POS is at 15% armor. I jump into a Dominix and warp to the POS. 

Talos, Vexor Navy Issue and Prophecy lie stopped near the shields. I rush out and engage them, killing the Talos and the Vexor Navy Issue. They were surprised I showed up to save the POS. Resistance was not expected, do they dock up! Now I have a sour taste in my mouth… I “won” the “fight”, but cannot save my POS because I have to work. The moment I log off, they going to jump right on top of my POS again… Ah well, seems I’ll just have to accept defeat and say goodbye to those 500-700mil BPOs inside.

Unless… unless I bluffed. They did not knew I was during my lunch break, so I went to grab my Ospreys and started to repair the POS. Chatted a bit in local to look active as much as possible. The war targets warp to the POS at range in a Pod and noticing I’m there repairing it, they decide to leave system. Bluff worked for now. I left my Ospreys AFK repairing the POS, went to work and hoped for the best, As for my allies, no sign of them…

I returned from work, checked the computer and both my toons were still there alive orbiting my POS! Awesome. I quickly took all the remaining BPOS out and re-stronted the POS. I wanted to put some guns in it, but at the time I didn’t had the opportunity as I had to take care of the kid and just do stuff around the house.

I also needed to fix my internet connectivity and ended up figuring out the problem was my computer clock. For some reason my computer was living in 2022 and it prevented it from connecting to EVE and some sites… go figure… I almost lost my POS due to a date problem… pfffff.

Later on that night I logged to put some guns into to POS, as well as update my market orders, kill something around with my PVP toons, etc, etc, and realized those guys had reinforced my POS AGAIN!!!

Sigh… 

It came out of reinforce at 7:40 in the morning, Saturday. PFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!! No freaking way I’m going to show up. At that time I’m sleeping and I love my sleep pretty much. Right now the only thing I had at the POS was an empty research lab and an empty corporate hangar.

Another decision… Should I let them kill my empty POS and then put another one up with some guns, after the wardec end or… or should I just hire some proper mercs to defend it and repair it. There is no way this would be remotely “isk efficient”. My setup costs less than 200 mil, but I’d prefer to deny those guys a kill.

I talked to 2 different mercs corps. They would wardec my targets, defend the POS, even though it was quite obvious my war targets would not poke their head out with any merc around, repair it up to 100% and stay around until 12:00 in order to give me time to wake up, have breakfast, watch some cartoons, play with my kid and then finally log in and Stront the POS. Hell, who knows, I’d even maybe put some guns to prevent it being reinforced by 1 solo AFK  guy. This cost me around 1.3 Bil… How logical is that?! It ain’t, but my Blueprint endeavour can pay for it and those guys would learn to not mess with me!!!… Or they would escalate it…

So, I did as planned and once I log in I noticed my mercs has already repaired my POS (both armor and shields up to 100%), and that my hostiles had ended the wardec. Fighting would be over in 24 hours. How cool is that! I re-stronted the POS, put in some guns to dissuade any solo AFK wardec and called it a day.

As a last analysis, what was the impact of this wardec into my day-to-day EVE Life?

-       -  Lost 2 nights doing defence preparations. Instead I could be roaming!;

-       - Spent around 1.5 bil in wardecs and accepting allies;

-       - Managed to score 2 kills from guys that did not expected resistance.

My hostiles ended up spending lots of time shooting the POS (even if semi-AFK) and dodging the mercs camping the main hi-sec trade hubs, losing  some isk in the form of wardec costs and ships lost, and probably more important, lots of their research time looking for an easy prey. Considering how much they feared any opposition, I bet it took them lots of time looking, thinking and planning this “attack” that came up as a loss to them, both isk and time wise. 

I’d say it was really not that bad in the end, especially because I did managed to get some kills, but it brought back memories on what I don’t like in EVE. Timers and idiotic feelings of virtual internet pixels property ownership and such… I hope no one decides mess with my POS again soon because this is NOT my kind of warfare…