My Loot, Your Tears

I know I've been neglecting the blog. I won't apologize. Take that!

The other day I had a few hours to kill and went checking on some of my long-dormant infiltration accounts. There was one character that had been part of Wormhole Engineers for about five months. I had discovered when I got into the corp that they had a pretty good arrangement: The Greater Realms alliance had about half a dozen corps, and on joining you were assigned to one of them. This meant that their losses would be limited to only a fraction of their total holdings in the event of a bad apple. After I joined with my newly-created alt I got sidetracked by other things. Eventually I stopped training that infiltration alt, changed the API keys, and rolled another scanning character on that account for another project. Well, when I checked in I found that there were a few T2 cruisers, some faction frigates, and a bear-load of Drakes. Oh well. It doesn't look like they're going to grow very much from here, so I might as well grab what I can, right?

Wormhole Engineers lives in a high-level wspace system -- either a C5 or C6, I don't remember. Like many corps, they take comfort in knowing that a thief would have a hard time moving ships all the way out to hisec. Unfortunately for them, I'm a relatively accomplished scanner. Even with this alt's crappy scanning skills, I scanned four jumps through wspace into a hisec system in about half an hour. I made off with two Basilisks, two Nocti, a few drakes, and a bunch of fittings. Sure, it's an eight-jump round-trip for each ship, but I did it while watching a movie. Scouts? What for? They're not my ships, so what do I care if I get jumped in a relatively cheap stolen ship? There were a few corp members on, but they appeared to be AFK and never said anything.

Now, you might be discouraged when you join a victim corp deep in wspace only to see that you only have access to a hangar full of Drakes. Do not despair! The trick is to board each drake, strip all the T2/meta modules into a can, rename the drake to "stripped", and move on. Oh, don't forget to destroy all the rigs, just in case. If you do this efficiently you'll spend no more than your 30-second session change timer on each ship. I found more than one Drake fitted with 'Arbalest' Heavy Missile Launchers. Each such Drake you find is worth 70M in fittings alone, not counting the hull itself. One Drake had T2 rigs and two faction BCUs. Facepalm. I also stripped and renamed all the battleships in the hangar. Yes, you can self-destruct the battleships for insurance money, but it's going to be very clear on an API check who did it. I like plausible deniability.

Wormhole dwellers are frequently very clingy about their ships since theft is such a frequent issue, so leaving a SMA full of stripped and renamed hulls is almost as bad for corp morale as leaving an empty one. It usually isn't long before the finger-pointing begins, and everyone wants to grab a ship to replace the one that they had "stolen". Eventually, there are more people taking ships than there are ships left. In my experience the resulting drama can take any relatively weak corporate leadership into emotional structure pretty quickly. Will Wormhole Engineers fail as a result? Who knows! I never spent any time online talking to anyone.

I transferred all my loot to an Orca/Freighter alt in-space, so my API shows nothing. I figured I'd get about 500M out of my throwaway Drake alt, but ended up with just over a billion ISK. The nicest find was a member's anchored can in space, full of advanced skillbooks and a dozen Quafe Zero. Theft of limited-run items, best theft.

This entry was posted on May 15, 2011 at 8:24 AM by paul and is filed under Capers.