THE STAGE
On January 11 at 11:00:11 EVE time, in the system of Jaymass in Derelik, FILORO, previously a member of INFAMOUS, lost a rigless and gunless Erebus packed full of blueprints to the titan-hunting REKKINGCREW. As many of you may notice, the Erebus, which was worth and estimated 118B ISK, was killed 11 seconds after official downtime. This is no mistake.
[ 2016.01.11 11:00:11 ] (combat) 804070 to FILORO – Oblivion – Hits
This kill was not only pretty unique, but also shows just how on-edge the kill was. The timing is possible because, although there is an official downtime for the Eve server, actual clusters may shutdown a few seconds after 11:00 EVE. The backstory and hunt for this titan is quite long, and an interview with RoCkEt X covers all the details below.
PERSONAL ACCOUNT
TMC: Let’s start from the beginning. Tell us how all of this happened.
RoCkEt X: The story on this kill is more interesting than most. On Christmas Eve, just before downtime, a cyno went up in Jaymass, and an INFAMOUS Hel jumped in. This was about 60 seconds before DT. He cloaked up on the cyno, and one of our guys jumped in after the cyno when up. He wasn’t on scan and he didn’t have the time to warp, land and cloak, so we knew he was there at the cyno. We knew we couldn’t kill him because there was no way we could decloak him and get titans on quick enough, so we didn’t show our hand.
TMC: So this seems to be a super carrier hunt turned titan kill. What did you do next?
RX: We found all of his alts. There were three characters in Jaymass: Bundylicious (the Hel), his cyno alt Filoro (we didn’t know that he was flying the Erebus at this point) and a sitter for the Hel he bought from the character bazaar.
For reference: A sitter is an alternate character than can fly a supercarrier/titan, but is only used to “baby sit” the ship, so that it is not left pilotless in space. When the super/titan is needed, the sitter character and the actual character log on and switch out.
RX: After DT(downtime) he didn’t log log in. We logged HICs out on his spot and started to camp. Then, his sitter logged into the system and shortly after so did the Hel. We logged on all of our hics, but the sitter was just sitting there in a pod at the safe spot. This was because our HICs landed faster than the Hel, so he just slowly slides onto grid, gets tackled and was killed after being volleyed to 20% structure by my Leviathan’s DD.
TMC: Alright so you killed his Hel.. How did this related to grabbing his titan?
RX: Well we were going to ransom him in the Nyx. I opened up a convo with him asking for 10B for 24 hrs of safety.
RX: He went on stating that he was pretty sure we didn’t have Filoro’s spot, thus confirming that he was flying a titan – otherwise he would have rejected my offer right off the bat. So then we had to work out whether it was an Avatar or Erebus. The characters eveboard showed he could fly an Avatar perfectly, but was training Gallente Titan IV. This implies that he’d plugged it in, so he had a character to fly/move the supers he was building. This lead us to believe he was flying an Erebus. He told us that he was sure we didn’t have his titans spot, which was his basis for rejecting our ransom offer and effectively said that his titan was not on the Hel’s spot.
TMC: So you know his titan is there, but just not on that bookmark. What was next?
RX: So, we did more digging. We had bookmarks from his previous cyno spots for his JF, so we thought it could be one of them. We parked HICs there and then it clicked! The character he was originally using for cynos was Dale Seti, which also happens to be a full Leviathan pilot and also happens to have been purchased by one of our guys! So we used this character to open up his bookmarks and bingo! We had 20+ cyno bookmarks across our constellation.
TMC: He sold a character that still had all of his cyno bookmarks saved. What luck!
RX: Right! Ultimately we never expected him to accept the ransom. We only did it because I wanted to judge whether or not we had a larger target. So now we had everything in place, but he was doing downtime cynos, which is a problem. Another problem was that since he jumped in, an Incursion spawned in Faspera, so we couldn’t cyno in and he had his exit cyno in Dooz. Thus, we logged all our titans out on his titan’s spot in Jaymass, due to the Incursion jamming the system. Plus if he did manage to jump to Dooz, we’d need to be cap ready and not have jump fatigue timers in order to follow him. So yesterday he logged his alt in five minutes before DT in his exit system. He then logged the titan in and we logged our alts into Jaymass to see which spot he landed at. At the same time, I logged my HIC alt on into his destination system. His cyno alts sees me and instead of jumping his Erebus lands next to one of our cloaked HICs and he cloaks up.
TMC: So now you know exactly where he is!
RX: Exactly. Now, little Jimmy gets smart and decides to use another system to cyno to and moves his cyno alt somewhere else after downtime. We track him across highsec and find he is heading into Catch via Kari. At which point, we called it that he was heading to the TA3T pocket and we sent a dictor alt. This is the only place he can go from Jaymass unless he jumps into Providence staging. At this point the plan is the same. I’ll log on the HIC pilot in Dooz, to convince him he has outsmarted us. Then at the same time, we’ll log in all our dictors in TA3T and all our titans on his spot in Jaymass.
TMC: Now he has nowhere to go. If he lands he is bubbled and dies and if he jumps he will be bubbled and you all jump to the dictor cyno.
RX: Yeap. As soon as he logs the titan in, we invite him to fleet. He accepted the fleet invite, we use the regroup command to break his invul and he dies to DDs.
TMC: Why would he take a fleet invite though?
RX: When you log in to jump, you’re expecting a fleet invite from a cyno alt. Most people don’t look at who is inviting them and when you are pressed for time, some folks don’t remember if they invited themselves or not. So you just invite him before he invites himself and in a hurry, he accepts. It was really awesome seeing my DD hit him 11 seconds after downtime.
TMC will update this article should any new information come to light.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Lemba.
