Gate Camping

Here is your Eve Online Tip of the day.

Gate camping. A core mechanic of eve gameplay that is simultaneously boring and a bit like submarine hunting.

The essence is simple - Eve is based on asymmetric warfare. One side wants to fight, the other doesn't. A gate camp is banking on the fact that people don't pay attention the map well and just yolo their ship around. When you approach a gate, you don't know what is on the other side. You could place a mobile disruption field somewhere that 'drags' ships into it, forcing them to run away from your waiting group. This is the primary method of combat for a large chunk of eve that isn't us. Low sec'ers do it a lot.

There are 4 basic strategies. we tend to do the last.

- Setup a bubble or 10. Wait for targets. Use webs to stop them from going far or burning back to gate.

- Setup a ship or two as 'bait', like a sigil is fun. Then, once you've grabbed something valuable, send in everyone else.

- Solo camp it in a bomber or a dictor. Wait cloaked for a target of opportunity.

- Hang near a gate till hostiles show up to kill you. 😄

The 'ideal' gate camp is composed of a couple roles.

- Scrams and 'points'. warp Scramblers (scram) are most important because they shut off microwarp drives, which prevents people from burning back to gate or burning away. Less warp disruptors (point!) as they just stop people from warping off.

- Web. These stasis webifiers slow these people down to 60% of their speed, or up to 90% with the expert ships.

- DPS. You need ships to kill them. 😄

- Ewar. These prevent these incoming ships from doing damage to friends and family.

- Logi. Most times you don't bother with logi with this style because you jsut run if bad things come. I find that frigate logi is often more effective as well, just to keep up with tacklers.

Want to gate camp? Go join standing fleet. They do it a ton. But you can easily setup a small bubble somewhere, see what you catch, and maybe kill them. 🙂