High Sec War Dec

I get a text massage while having dinner with some of my colleagues celebrating a birthday. It is from my industrial corps CEO telling me we have been wardec'ed by some corp neither of us have ever heard of. The next day the war goes live and nothing happens, the enemy doesn't make any real effort to engage my corpmates. While this isn't a surprise the opening few hours of a wardec are often occupied with recon of targets and checking to see what your opposition is flying, how they are operating, what systems they are in, and how these patterns have changed from before the wardec was sent.

The next day (Sunday) I log in to find out that the ceo of the wardecing corp is in our home system and has one of my guys camped in a station, another of my guys is outside cloaked watching and reporting on what is happening. I come in and so do three others, for a total of six of us online now. We get the fleet up and the audio comm system going, and I sketch out a plan of action. Pretty simple, cloak guy get closer we warp to him, scram, disrupt, web and BOOM...seems simple enough but virtually none of my guys has any pvp experience and while the warp in is in a reasonable position the pilot doesn't realize that the target is in instadock range of the station. So of course we arrive they dock.

We all dock and the waiting begins, the wartarget undocks and I give the order to undock after her but we aren't fast enough and she jumps away into a neighboring system. Given her main base of operations I guess which system she is headed to and we pursue. I am partly right, she is going in the direction I thought she would but to a slightly closer system.

My little fleet (still just the six of us) jumps several systems after her but we loose her and I order the fleet to hold up as we attempt to figure out what direction she has actually jumped away in. As I warp the fleet to a gate, she arrives at the one we were just at. 10 more seconds and we would have had her, but she is through the gate and we miss her. By the time we get back to the gate she has cleared the other system and we totally missed her.

I give the order for my guys to set up a gatecamp along the route she has used to reach our base figuring she might just come back to see what happened, she has doubled back on us once already, hence the missed gate earlier. We sit and wait, eventually we find out through some allies that she has docking in a nearby system and we move out to try and get her on the undock. I warn my guys about the instadocking and that we need to watch her, but I fail to tell them about sitting right outside and bumping her away from the station.

We arrive and she plays undock/redocking games with us some more, I get annoyed at this and we move out a few systems to set up a new gatecamp and wait for her. We have some allies feeding us intel that she is sitting at the station but still in instadock range just waiting for us. We sit on the gate and wait for her to become bold enough to come out and jump into our trap. After maybe 15 minutes I notice that an geddon has dropped out of warp at the gate we are on and it is the ceo of a known associate of theirs. Out camp is now totally blown and I give the order to recover the drones and jump back into the system, I fleet warp us to a new spot and jump back out of the system trying to loose her spy. We succeed in loosing them but mostly because I set my destination wrong and wasn't paying enough attention and jumped us in the wrong direction. By the time I get us back to the main target system our allies have informed me that she has docked up yet again. I give the order for the fleet to dock at the stations in the system we are in, spread out to prevent her from camping us all and to log out for dinner.

We all agree to come back on about 2 hours later and to try another fleet to see about killing her. So after I have dinner I log back in and she isn't online, none of the targets are. My guys tell me they were but left a short while ago, never having seen the target undock and presume that she is still in that same station waiting. I move some stuff out to the markets for sale and log out after another hour of all the targets being offline.

So net result for the whole weekend with this wardec....nothing at all. The ceo of this griefing corp has refused to engage us and decided to play docking games with us instead.

Now having done high sec wardecs before with Gama I know that this happens but I have never seen the people that started the wardec go to so much trouble to do nothing. The ceo ran intel on us for over 2 weeks, my fault I thought she wanted to join us but she was just running intel, I should have seen it but wasn't paying enough attention.

So I have learned some valuable lessens for doing stuff and got reminded again about the rush of pvp combat in eve and how much fun it is to know that a real human intelligence is trying to destroy your ship and the rush of knowing that you can destroy theirs. I have to give credit to my guys they did an excellent job given their lack of pvp experience and followed my orders even when I jumped us in the wrong direction, a mistake that I don't intend to make again.  I am sure that my mistakes cost us that kill for the night, but eve has always been a game of learning and thus we will all learn and get better.