Saturday, August 24, 2013

Waiting for a Wormhole to Expire

It is a slow evening.  We have logged on to find our static wormhole strangely present, and in its end of life state.  (EOL as we call it in bookmarks.)  We thought we opened it yesterday -- obviously, not.  Someone seems to have opened it this morning.  There are no other wormholes.  But we have things to do in system.

There are two new gas sites.  So a couple of us slurp out all the good gas.  Now we've got enough people here, so we run anoms.  We finish the two sleepers left over in the one site we were experimenting on earlier this week.  And there is a new Frontier Barracks, so we do it too.

By now the sleepers should have spawned in those gas sites we sucked earlier... so I take my PVE Tengu straight there from the Barracks.  First site, killed, and I let our Noctis know.  Then on to second.  Killed.  Back to base and back into my exploration Buzzard.

Check the static... still there, EOL.  Go away stupid wormhole!

Well, OK. Er... what to do?  Time to do my PI!  In fact I need to do the "long" version, hauling goo out to many of the planets while moving other goo around between them, and bringing back intermediate and finished goo.  So I get to that.  Four characters.  Sit watching on the hole with one at a time, while doing PI on the other account.  Log off, log on.  Shuffle.  Log off, log on.  (CCP please make this nicer.)  An hour later, finally done with that.

Meanwhile most of the corp has logged off.  They've done their PI too, and gone to bed. 

Check the static... still there, EOL.  Well, this is getting vexing.  It's been two hours, I should have at least a 50/50 shot that the stupid thing goes away.

One more thing I can do is suck the small amount of near worthless gas from one of the gas sites.  This will make it despawn, keeping my pretty system nice and tidy.  So, I get in Ventures and go do that. This takes about 20 minutes.  OK, site is gone, hurrah.

Check the static... still there.  Sigh.

Nothing to do.  So, I sit watching the hole on my main, and log in my Jita alt.  He spends most of his time in Otela, where there is ice.  Maybe there is some here.  I pop out: yes indeed.  Well, this might even be interesting, because the CFC's Caldari Ice Interdiction is on.  I warp over to the ice in my Procurer.  Procurers have a huge tank even if fit poorly, and mine is fit well.  So I am not very worried about being ganked.

Tracking the elusive prey
I show up, get my stuff running, and start mining a nearby ice-asteroid.  Just as I am looking around, a gank wave shows up, and they gank a miner -- not sure what type, but I am guessing Mackinaw -- that is about 7 km from me.  This is pretty close, so I move straight at it.  Two of the gankers open up on me, as I notice later, because I get kill rights.  At the time I don't notice; they don't perceptively lower my shields.  Concord goes to work, and the gankers are all killed in a nice fireworks display.  I fill my cargo hold with loot from the gankers; together it's worth about 2m ISK.  I wish I had salvage drones.

I mine.  I watch the our static wormhole.  It stays.

12 minutes pass and my ore hold is full.  I warp to station, drop ice, and return.  The Goons have pulled Concord, so it is very likely they're coming back.  There is one Mack in the ice, two retrievers, and several Procurers including me.  The Mack is in my fleet; I warn him that he's probably next.  He dismisses my warning saying he's got a 32000 EHP tank.  Sure enough, he is next; boom. 

I mine a few more cycles.  The goons have not pulled Concord; there are 6 squads in the belt.  So I am feeling quite safe.  I almost pull out my Retriever, but decide it is probably not wise.  It's not like I have anything else to do: the static is stubbornly there.  So running back and forth to a station to dump ice is no big deal.  I start reading EVE blogs to pass the time.

One more gank arrives, killing the last Retriever in the belt.  OK, I had not expected that.  Very wasteful -- six of them will have only gotten off a few seconds of fire.

It's after midnight.  I have stayed on longer than I would otherwise because I want to see the Goons in action.  But now the belt is down just three of us, and all in Procurers.  It's not much of a target.  I check the timestamp on the bookmark for the static.  01:08.  And now is 4:31. Time to give up.  Good night, accursed wormhole.

1 comment:

  1. I was pondering an EOL static wormhole one day, when Mick Straih, wise as he is, pointed out that the time spent outside of the system is almost negligible and thus the risk of getting isolated is almost no greater than forcing the collapse of non-EOL wormhole.

    Consider: the session change timer is a mere ten seconds now, and you should be taking care about polarisation to start with. That means you are outside of your own system for maybe twenty seconds maximum, given jumping delays, and it would be really bad luck for a wormhole to die in that time.

    Realising that either the wormhole will die whilst we're waiting for polarisation effects to dissipate (five minutes inside home instead of ten seconds outside) or we collapse it with massive ships on schedule gave me a new perspective on killing EOL wormholes. It's actually not a big deal, and the wormhole will go one way or another.

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