Doing it Wrong and Being Terrible: How To Lose Your POS The Easy Way
In hindsight, this post could almost be written as a guide of sorts: “Sophia’s Guide to Doing It Wrong and Being Terrible”. Essentially, this is how NOT to behave when your small industrial POS-based corp finds itself wardecced.
During a small window of my holiday travels, I managed to squeeze in some time away from the family to log in and update some invention/build lines. I got in game, started clicking away, and then noticed my inbox blinking:
Merry Christmas!
And this is where I began doing everything bad.
First thing: checking out the aggressing corp, I see its a 1-person outfit; red flag #1. However, in my head, I assume this is a bored alt just looking to get cheap kills on the Jita undock, and I must be the first of many corps getting this lovely Christmas Day notice.
I pondered a little bit about my options, but ultimately decided that my priorities were to get in some Jita shopping before that undock became a shooting range for my Orca.
Badness #2.
My very first action should have been to immediately take down my labs, bulk up my hardeners, and online an offensive amount of ECM modules. But, that would be much better placed in a “doing it right” guide, and lest we forget, this is a “how to be terrible” guide.
Instead, I started some new invention attempts and onlined about 2 more hardeners and about 10 ECM modules before logging off and calling it a night; I cringe a little inside thinking about this now. The thought process in my Christmas-addled brain was that my one-man aggressor would get bored rather quickly, if he even knew I had a POS.
…I think most of you know where this is going now.
A little over a day later, I finally got back home from holiday travels, and logged in:
crap crap crap crap crap
My one aggressor was now 6, and they were apparently very aware that I had a POS; also, they’d brought lots of guns.
The one smart, or at least “not totally dumb”, thing I’d done is empty mostly everything out of the labs, and all the BPOs are kept in a corp office anyways.
My tower nicely put into reinforced, I found a ransom offer waiting in my inbox. My new acquaintances had offered to cease and desist for the very reasonable price of 400 million isk, which is actually a very nice deal, except for one teensy fact: this is Eve. Anyone with half a brain should know that an offer such as that from people with no previous track record who are currently tearing down your livelihood means you have a very easy choice: lose a 700mil POS setup, or lose a 700mil POS setup and a 400mil ransom; I decided to stop being bad.
I offered a counter that I’d be willing to use a 3rd party service to broker the ransom but, shockingly, I received no response. The next night, the fireworks began:
my poor tower
There are lessons to learn here, but I think they’re so blindingly obvious that there’s really no need to list them. What I do know now going forward is that I need to prepare for this better, which probably means upgrading to a large tower for maximum Dickstar ability. Then there’s part 2:
I’ve decided that a very small high-sec industry corp, especially one with a blog, makes for a nice little “shoot me” sign. It stands to reason that I should probably change that, and so I’d like to announce that I’m now in the market for an Alliance! I won’t mince words: what I need is basically a shield to keep me from being easy pickings for tower-wreckers and shakedowns. I don’t bring much muscle to the table, but I’m a pretty fun lady to have around (lots of character vouchers upon request!), and with good mid-sized production capabilities, I’m sure I can be an asset. Contact me in-game if you think you might have a home for me!
The tower loss is a bit of a setback, but mostly its my ego thats a little bruised. I’ll need to get cracking with paying for another corp standings service to get another POS up sooner than later to get production going again, but first I need to crunch the numbers to see if running a large one is going to put me in the poorhouse. Updates to come.
Lovely Little Vagabond 
I know of an easy going alliance that would most likely fit your needs. Contact me in game and I can get you in contact with them.
Morg
I don’t think you were being that terrible. While you made rookie mistakes (which are almost unavoidable if you don’t have veteran mentoring), you learned the right lessons from them. Like the idea of using a 3rd party escrow service to handle the ransom.
As for the POS, a large dick star is certainly one way to go. The alternative is that of a disposable medium POS, which you account in your books as loss the moment you set it up (I do the same with my haulers). You’d still have to take care that you don’t lose lab contents when taking a few days off, and that you keep your faction standings, but it could pay for itself quickly just by the fuel you save over running a dick star.
FYI, I know that in traditional dickstars ECM are used to make the process more teeth-grindingly bad… not having your tower aggress neutrals helps mitigate opposition’s help.
Not sure how it works now with the new crimewatch, but the last thing you want is your tower flagging a neutral repper so they can then legitimately help destroy the tower.
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