Tired of the fact I couldn't engage anything bigger than a cruiser in my Vengeance and Merlin, I took my old ratting Hurricane out for a little solo roam (refitted of course). I had some fun dodging an EVE Uni gang, but anything smaller than me ran for the hills, and I wasn't confident enough in my ship (or my experience in it) to attack the few battleships I saw. I roamed in circles for awhile before getting bored and chatting in Local to some guy. One thing lead to another and...
Well basically, I ended up sitting on the HighSec gate into Ami with the random guy and a pretty terrible plan we'd worked out between us. He was in a Thrasher. We'd seen a couple of haulers jump in and out recently and wanted to get some LOLNOOB kills on them. So we agreed that he would bump them before they could warp off, and I would pew pew them. We would then split the loot (if any) and run happily into the sunset.
Yeah that didn't happen
Instead, while we were dicking around in Local chat (like shouting PEW PEW and humming the Jaws theme tune because we found it hilarious) a pod jumped to the gate. He landed 20KM off. I have no idea what he was doing warping to 20KM either, but I wasn't complaining about a free kill. Weirdly, he made the decision of making a run for HighSec rather than warp off in my twelve second lock time. He was 14KM away from safety when I finally got a lock and blew him into a new clone. Laughing as I warped off to avoid gate fire, I opened the killmail hoping to see lots of expensive implants. Erm nope, totally bare pod. What a waste of time. Then I noticed my new security status.
-2.71. Balls
I could no longer enter 0.9 and above systems. That meant Amarr, Penirgman, Jita, etc. Basically all of the systems where I keep my stuff and make my money. While I know I can gain this security status back by ratting, I wasn't expecting to be forced into doing it quite so soon. I was planning on slowly letting my security drop as soon as Zendrak made me a steady enough income stream to fund my PvP.
Then I realised it wasn't quite as bad as it seemed. I could feasibly live in LowSec right now if I wanted to, selling off my Incursion boat would give me a decent fund of ISK to PvP from. Plus I was planning on getting into full mass production on Zendrak soon anyway, and the corp's pet calculator (aka our CEO) had estimated I could make 3 billion a month if I kept 10 slots running 24/7. The only thing stopping me was that my corp was still based in HighSec, and that was a little restricting in terms of what I could do "as a team" so to speak. While we're planning into moving to LowSec soon, we're not in an optimal position to do so right now and that would leave me all on my own until the move happened.
Not fun.
So it looks like it's security grinding time for me, but it's nice to know I could move into LowSec pretty easily if circumstances demanded it. I was expecting it to be a big thing, but when you have an alt with no security problems, it's much easier to move than I expected. Infact, I'm almost looking foward to the day my main gives up HighSec forever.
It's going to be an interesting journey in the next few months...
You can still pod around in empire. If you can run industry jobs in hi-sec in your pod, you don't have to grind sec status :)
ReplyDeleteI used to live in Daran with my alt Anjali (2 jumps from Ami I think in that low-sec pocket). There are 2 plasma planets in that area, so you may want to watch out for PI guys at customs offices. What I'm not sure about is if that pocket of low-sec connects to the rest of low-sec, or if it is just a pocket. It'd be worth looking into before you dropped so much sec status that you couldn't get out in a ship.
Low sec is awesome. I moved there a couple months ago and havent looked back. I do have a Jita jump clone though, since thats where orders come from, but generally speaking, I do nothing in High sec now other than sneak in to gank a miner. =P
ReplyDeleteLow sec life, its an adventure!
Truen - Thanks for the info, but I plan on moving most of my ships out before my sec gets that low again :P And I'll check out those plasma planets a few times, easy targets are always fun!
ReplyDeleteKorvus - I'm defintely seeing that LowSec is far more exciting than HighSec, that ability to attack or be attacked without warning adds a huge amount of fun to exploring :)
I remember giving up high sec after joining the Tuskers. Man, was that scary.
ReplyDeleteBut then a weird thing happened. One day, _high sec_ was the scary place. All those people in local, too much stuff on D-scan to keep track of, hotshots wanting to tangle with an outlaw. What a mess.
Low sec went from being a barren wasteland to unlimited freedom and wide open spaces. High sec went from security safety to a choked out urban ghetto.
After experiencing true low sec, very few people go back. It's just getting over that first psychological hurdle that's difficult.