Monday 1 July 2013

Sleepers Change Strategy, Occupy Lower Class Wormholes

The NPC race known as the 'sleepers' have abandoned their sites in Class 5 and Class 6 wormholes and appear to have travelled to Class 1 and Class 2 wormholes. The change was first noticed straight after downtime on Sunday. During said downtime a minor patch was deployed that fixed a few visual bugs, however it also seems to have caused the migration of sleepers.

Although there has been less than a day since the migration started, it has already had drastic effects. One C5 resident described their exodus. "I was sitting cloaked scanning on the wormhole and waiting for a flare, when I saw my cloak had been deactivated. I minimised the map and saw hundreds, if not thousands of sleeper ships coming towards me. They were a variety of sizes, from frigate to battleship, which stretched out in a line that went off-grid. Before I had time to take this fact in, my deadspace fitted Proteus was destroyed in one volley from around 300 of the ships."

Although losing a 2 billion isk Proteus isn't a great way to start your day, lower class residents would have it much worse. The foreign sleepers have consolidated the numbers of the drones already there, making taking them on in a C1 site much more risky than a C6 escalated site. Although these sites are just over a day old, reports of them are being uploaded to the Wormhole sub-forum. On of the easier ones is detailed below:

Perimeter Super Citadel Bastion 
Initial Group
50x Frigates (Emergent Swarmer) [rr, neut, scram, web]
20x Frigates (Emergent Fastackle) [scram, web, net, rr]
25x Frigates (Emergent Rifter) [scram, web, neut, rr]
10x Interdictor (Emergent Bubbler) [bubble]
40x Cruisers (Awakened Heavytackle) [scram, web, neut, rr]
30x Cruisers (Awakened Missilespammer) [rr, scram, web, neut]
10x Battleships (Sleepless Annoyance) [scram, TD, SD, TP]
20x Battleships (Sleepless Permajammer) [ECM, ECM, ECM, ECM, ECM]
3x Dreadnought (Insomniac Hotdropper) [AoE Doomsday???]
1x Battleships (Sleepless Idiottrigger

Second wave unknown
Third wave unknown

It also seems that the sleepers have not confined themselves to anomalies and sites, of which there are now hundreds per system. A POS owner in a C1 wormhole reported a force of around 500 sleepers put his POS into reinforced within minutes of warping. After taunting the terrified residents of the system, the force appeared to jump out. The free capsuleers breathed a sigh of relief, only to see their overviews were contracting. The sleepers were now killing every POCO they could find.

A wave of anger has surged across the thirty regions of wormhole space at the migration. CCP is yet to officially acknowledge the problem, though CCP Fozzie tweeted "We're aware of a bug that is causing high end sites to spawn in low WHs" he continued onto the next tweet: "We expect to have it fixed by the release of the next expansion, around Christmas." In response, a member of a well known C6 corporation tweeted "I am entitled to make billions of isk per day running wormhole sites. This five month delay to my isk making is completely unacceptable. To top it off I won't be able to kill C2 scrubs any more, because they'll all have been wiped out by the pathetic groups of sleepers." 

C1 corps have been affected even more, as stated by the terrifying recount of one CEO. "I was idling at the POS when I heard the unmistakable sound of XL guns screeching. I quickly looked in the tower fuel bay, only to find there were no strontium clathrates. I had left them in an Corporate Hangar Array! I quickly checked the shield level, which read to be 75%. Plenty of time, I thought. I flew the 3000 metres to the Hanger Array in my Iteron, scooped the Strontium, and tried to put it in the fuel bay. But I could not. The shield level was now at 45%. For some reason we had built 5 Carriers and 10 Dreadnoughts in the wormhole, so we had to get them out. But then I remembered we couldn't get them out because we lived in a C1 for some reason. Minutes later everything in the POS, including the capitals, was dead."

Since sleepers have somehow being granted with interdictor ships, they can now camp wormholes and have been doing so quite effectively, bubbling everything within a 100KM radius of a wormhole. Although some nullified T3s have been able to get through, everything else stands no chance of ever seeing k-space again. Many poorly equipped players have either pod jumped out or biomassed themselves.


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