My scouts Covert Ops had been setup for High Sec exploration, so I spent some time refitting it for use in Low Sec. That took a bit of running around as I needed to use a specific mix of named T1 items for everything to fit. I then flew to the gateway of my first target area and then… was disconnected. Taking that as a hint I logged off and figured I would come back and try again later.
When I tried a second time, EVE wasn’t available. It had been taken offline as a precaution after a Distributed Denial of Service attack. (I assume this was related to hacking concerns – I would hope that a company like CCP that lives by its Internet access would have the infrastructure in place to handle the average DDoS attack.)
I waited for things to return to normal (it was down for 4+ hours), and finally logged back in again. Things looked ok so I warped to the Low Sec Entrance gate, jumped, and… could see people in local, but had a blank overview and could not move or warp to anything. After a period of time with nothing improving I had to log off. Anyone with experience of EVE’s “Spatial Anomalies” knows they have a tendency to cause very unfair and rather expensive ship losses.
A couple hours later and I logged back in to try again. Thankfully I am still in my Covert Ops. I finally get started on bookmarking the system. Half way through bookmarking a spot on the inbound gate I get disconnected again. I try again later, getting a couple more bookmarks in before again being disconnected. Still later, another disconnection, and finally an EVE emergency reboot.
I have finally finished scouting that first system – I have 8 hard earnt bookmarks, an idea of what Alliance uses the system for its 0.0 logistics, what pirate group also lives there, and who the pilot is who likes to sit cloaked in a Rapture on one of the station undocks. All well and good – but it took a full day, and there were half a dozen times where I might have lost a ship due to no fault of my own.
I am cautious to a pedantic fault – but the whole process should have only taken an hour. When EVE is unstable, it is a cow to play. I’m in two minds if I bother to continue, or just focus on something else for the next month or so, until CCP stablise the 1.6 Patch and subsequently Incarna.
(I know CCP isn’t responsible for kiddies attacking their systems with a bot net, but still I would have hoped they would have been a little more robust in the face of it.)
Evehermit 