Originally by: ShinChan

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Edited by: ShinChan on 04/04/2007 14:08:14
So I found that 3 unkown signals, scanned all and found 3 drone plexes, INDEPENDENCE, HIERARCHY and RADIANCE. I call a friend and we start with first one. No escalation. So we make 1 jump and start with second one. No escalation. So we make 2 more jumps and start with RADIANCE.

Finally! After 1 hour we get an escalation from the third and last plex.
Radiance send us 4 jumps away. We enter the 2on escalation and kill them all. Good! We get another escalation. 40 minutes to complete that one. And now he send us 12 jumps away.

We enter the third escalation and complete it. That one was a bit tougher, but we were rolling eyes because we got a 4th escalation out of it. 50 minutes to complete the 3rd step. But we move on. 13 more jumps to do.

The 4th escalation was pretty huge. Lots of drones at warp in point. Not to mention this time my friend was the one allowed to warp in. So he tanked himself a bit more and I use remote shield repairers just to be safe. While we were killing the waves of drones we received the 5th and final escalation! So we warped out before killing the rest of drones and proceed to do 7 more jumps. time to complete 4th step: 60 minutes.

This time I was the one who received the escalation. I tanked my apoc to his max and my friend's raven equipped armor drones and remote reps. Yes! We were ready to collect the big treasure reward, nothing will go wrong, noone will die. After 4 hours of dedicated effort, ending up ~40 jumps away from starting point, here we are. 2 against 100. Our plan was to kill the scrambling frigs and the proceed with the Supreme Alvus Commander and then the rest of the Supreme Alvus something. I warp in first, and to begin with, a pop-up appears in my screen with big letters saying: DEAD END and strange text detailing how the queen was out for business. But as soon as my screen finally loads, it certainly didn't look like a dead end. 100 drones were awaiting me at their main hive. So I proceed to aggro them all at the same time my dual faction repper with faction stuff starts to lose against their damage. It's time to call for my repairer Raven since all drones have been aggroed. He will able to to safely repair me. Wrong! At the same time he warp in, new waves of supreme drones appear on scene. Bit overcrowded to be a dead end I was asking myself. He requires to warp out since he started to take damage. I allowed him since I'm a good boy and don't want my friends to die, so he warped out and I warped out after him to warp back asap. Wrong again! The expedition has dissapeared from my journal. We sit in TS, grumbling but mainly not saying a word and spitting on whoever designed this pos.

After 5 hours, 40 jumps crossing 3 different regions, intense tanking and highly risking our ships traveling in 0.0 contested regions, we get a slap in the face by CCP. It was not because we got not an escalation, or because we lost our ships in some random alliance blockade, neither we lost a ship against the drones. Poor coded plexes, escalations or whatever these are called now. POS for me. So I hope this is the kind of feedback you need to avoid something like to happen again. These are my thoughts.

P.S. Almost forgot. Since they are drones, we got not a single isk the entire time, no bountys. And there was no way we can bring an indy to collect all the alloys. Who's collecting alloys through 40 jumps in 0.0 anyway?

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