For whatever reason, Rooks and Kings don't gate camp much. Twos and threes fly through our home system all day and we tend to only form up if there's a proper fleet around. But in regard to this, some things I'm wondering:

- How would a fleet get home? Let's say we go and engage 80 Maelstroms or Tengus on a POS in low sec, with 30 Navy Apocalypse and triage carriers. If we win, we have to fly back. But our generally 0.0-based enemies, with hi-sec status, could then simply bridge tacklers in front of our fleet. If they tackle one faction BS, only he can aggro back. If the whole fleet aggresses, and then triage carriers drop to rep him, we'd have less than a triage cycle to kill the 0.0 fleet before the gate guns kill us.

- Essentially, that would mean we'd have to carrier jump back, using an alt on a cheap clone to jump in a carrier to store the faction BS, pass the carrier to the HG slave clone, who then jumps it home. We could do that but not all alliances would have players financially placed to all have multiple capital alts.

- What happens in a fight on a gate? We regularly put multiple capitals on gates and not to camp but rather to engage fleets of 0.0 alliances returning from Tech moon sieging and such-like. Their sec-status will be good, so we already take gate gun aggro and are likely to be vastly outnumbered in the fight.

Now you might argue that since RnK have low sec status we're the bad guys and since the powerbloc fleet have 5.0 status they deserve to be immune to us jumping them. However, is Eve really always as simple as that? Does it reflect the emergent gameplay of Eve? It's always a matter of perspective, of course. But, for example, do Goons even want to be 'the good guys'? I think they want to be good bad guys, so to speak (at least some of the time). Isn't it a little odd that Rooks and Kings, with our occasional bursts of e-honour, would not be able to jump them in low sec?

In this sense, there's more to Eve than a sec status.


- If you consider the changes, a lot of great low sec fights would no longer happen. For example, in this fight we engaged a CFC camp that was escorting freighters. Although they had 100 guys, including supercapitals, they were after all not flashy and so we were taking gate gun fire to intervene.

If you consider this fight, we were engaging with many triage on a gate against White Noise and co., who had been baiting with capitals and Abaddons. The general talk of the channels was that they were looking for trouble and we felt obliged to spring the trap. But although they were seen as the 'predatory' 0.0 block members who'd come to the region, they were not flashy and no local group would have the sec status to have engaged them under the new changes.

If you consider this fight, we would have been unable to go home by gate after killing all the Maelstroms, due to being flashy and vulnerable to counter-drop. Ironically, that fleet had come specifically to the area to fight us for the experience of it, an invitation we'd no longer be able to accept under the new guns.

And that's just glancing through a page or two of Failheap's Low sec thread, the largest thread on the battle report forum.


- There was recently a four-way fight in Black Rise that involved Shadows of the Federation dreads, Snuff Box carriers, Wolfsbrigade dreads, Only For Fun supers, Fatal Ascension dreads, NCdot supers, X13 carriers and dreads and a number of other parties. This all took place on a gate.

Rooks and Kings attended with a Pantheon fleet, which survived intact. Now, under the new changes, aside from the fact that there would be no chance of survival (certain death can be romantic sometimes), there is a broader issue: the 'low sec alliances' would not be able to attend a party like that in their home.

SOTF, Snuff Box, Wolfsbrigade, Only For Fun and co. all have players who were taking gate gun aggro in that fight. I can understand home territory not 'boosting' groups or offering an advantage but why would all these groups be made unable to fight against 0.0 capitals in their back yard?


I'm not against increasing low sec traffic but surely there are fairer ways - e.g. spawning faction police on the low sec side of high sec gates after a certain period of time, or making special warp core stabs against insta-locking HICs, or preventing an Orca jumping a gate when carrying aggression timer ships, etc.