Keera fails on a Safari

Last time, I wrote about my first Awox and the associated explosion of an Orca. Now it is time to pick up where we left off and share with you the end of that particular adventure. I would love to tell you an exciting story about how I tackled two battleships, extorted billions of ISK and went down in a blaze of glory - but alas, none of these things happened.

Instead, the aftermath of the Orca’s destruction turned out to be less than thrilling, as virtually all corp members logged off and left me camping an empty home station. Truth be told, I actually missed out on killing one guy who went right by me in a shuttle because I was trolling the AG channel, but I guess I would not have been able to lock and scram before he went into warp anyway, so whatevs.

So there I was, sitting in my Thorax, thirsting for blood and with no targets to shoot at. I even entertained the idea of going to work on the corp’s undefended POS for a moment, but then I remembered that I had a lowskilled char in a T1 cruiser and that it would probably take ages to even make a noticeable dent on the POS, so I warped to a safespot a few systems away and called it a night (choosing a German corp to play with turned out to be pretty cool because of the same TZ).

The next day came and I planned on causing some more chaos and destruction. My character was still sitting in his safe, that was good – but nobody else was logged in, which was bad. With not much else to do, I placed a handful of containers around the corp’s home station to commemorate the loss of their Orca and played around their POS for a while (and with me knowing next to nothing about POS mechanics, I even learned a few things!).

My nice little safari cam screeching to a sudden halt when I received a phone call from my boss and found out had to get to work for a few hours. Seeing that it was roughly 11:40 Eve time, I realized that this meant I would not be home during and immediately after downtime, which in turn meant that I would probably be kicked from corp before I got back home. Even worse, I had to leave immediately in order to catch the bus, so I had no time to make my way to one of my off-system bookmarks. I did the lazy (read:  dumb) thing and warped to the POS, foolishly hoping that the bubble would keep me safe for those 20-odd minutes until downtime.

 A few hours and lost nerves later, I came home, looked at my PC and saw the familiar surroundings of a station. Yay!

Turns out, one of the guys in corp logged in a few minutes before downtime and actually managed to bump me out of the bubble before blowing my poor little Torry to smithereens.  While I was sad my awox ended like that, I fully appreciate that guy’s decision to take matters into his own hands and use the awesome power of the bump to get rid of me. I can only congratulate him on that feat; he totally deserved to send me those smug evemails afterwards.

Since I figured that it’s probably best to get right back into business, I applied to a few corps right away and once again was accepted to a few apparently very trusting outfits. I signed up with a group called Kamikaze Kings, because I figured that name is as good as any for a corp being about to be awoxed. 

Sadly however, that whole operation was pretty much doomed from the get-go. I had very little time to play Eve and even less time to play on Esteban, so I just logged in from time to time and did a whole lot of nothing while telling myself that I was collecting intel or whatever it is that competent people would do in that situation.  I once again got some free money as one dude gave me 10Mil ISK to “get started”, so thanks for that, I guess. I did what I was told, got started and bought myself a new Thorax as well as some cheap modules to make it somewhat useful. 

With the timer to Tiamat (and thus the implementation of the dreaded anti-awox tickbox) ticking down mercilessly I began to worry about not getting any kills (in retrospect, my panic was not at all justified as the majority of corps seems to have friendly fire still set at legal right now). My corpmates did not want to play prey as all I saw were unblinged missioning boats (which I did not feel comfortable attacking) and the odd exhumer here and there. I was about to give up and even thought about dropping corp and trying my luck somewhere else when I realized there was a Hulk+Orca operation going on while I was busy dicking around with various other things. After scolding myself for being such a terrible spy, I decided for some reason that I should not warp to the belt with Esteban without having scouted the area in a neutral (it make sense to me at the time, don’t ask why and how). So I went ahead and grabbed my indy/logi dude and made him my scout as well – with the one problem being that the only ship he had was the logi vessel – not really what you would call subtle.  I quickly bought the only frigate available in station and warped to the belt at fifty. In a move that can only be described as derpalicious I was now scouting a mining op in a Slasher with New Order Permit in my bio. It is not hard to imagine that my targets got the message and warped away before I even had a chance to think about how to reach that Orca sitting almost 100km from warpin.
I tried to save the situation by moving the scout to a different system and doing some Venture-mining on Esteban, but those efforts turned out to be in vain, I never saw this Hulk or Orca again. 

This operation found its less than satisfying end when somebody read this article and actually went to the trouble of looking up my character, finding out which corp he was in and alerting the CEO that he had an awoxer in the corp. I found myself back in Aliastra when I logged back in a few hours later. That was unfortunate, but I once again have to tip my hat to the guy that actually cared enough about all that to ruin my operation – smart thinking.

Here’s what I took away from those two adventures (apart from the ISK and killmail, of course):

The implementation of the awox-switch is something that will only help those careless CEOs and so called recruiters that do not bother with any kind of background checks of interviews. Both corps I infiltrated here have accepted my application without any knowledge of me and my character. Had they requested an API (even just a character API) they would have seen that Esteban received a significant amount of ISK from Keera Erquilenne, and quick google or killboard search would have shown her primary occupation, which in turn should have raised quite a lot of suspicion. Even a superficial interview might have prevented me from joining, as I am a terrible liar and did not prep for that at all. Essentially handing CEOs a tool to completely remove the danger of being awoxed is (another) step towards protecting those who cannot be bothered to protect themselves. This is, in my opinion, not desirable, because I would much rather see rewards for diligent CEOs and recruiters than a removing a threat to incompetent people. As many people have stated before, leading a corp is a privilege, not a right – and if people do not pay attention, they should pay the price for their laziness and not be protected.