NOTICE: Pobs in Nomad Systems

[A Magpie]

The Iota encounter is kind of a pita to even get to, anything over a certain tonnage will arrive damaged thanks to the weapons platforms gate camping, and Nomnoms can arrive at the encounter zone in 60 seconds or less thanks to Lanes to Dur’Shurriken and Altair leading straight to it… if the gamers are fighting a pitched battle against the whole encounter fleet and not the optimal method, which I will now describe.

The usual methodology to farming the Iota encounter is a surprisingly simple “ignore literally every other NPC except the Carrier and whale on its engines with Scorchers on a cloaked Bomber, with a carrier 7k away to resupply”. The nearest NPC base is 2 TLs, both of which end in “zero your energy and levy % of hull damage” platforms and another 50k or so to Capetown right past another Nomnom NPC base to actually repair and resupply. Docking modules do not sell cloak batteries, so the farming is limited to how long the bomber gamer can keep their cloak battery count above 100. And the kicker: to avoid interaction, all the carrier has to do is also cloak or simply point their ship in a random direction and Cruise and they’re pretty much home free unless nomnoms are camping zeta gate in which case a simple F1 somewhere in Assoros and they’re out. The actual second they see a nomad log, they can /cloak and make good their escape. There is no need for a pob to do the “dock and log off to avoid interaction” game the way the encounter is already optimally farmed.

I can’t speak for anyone else hitting Iota to farm, but for pretty much all the time I was hitting it, I think Godslayer and the boys only ever showed up maybe four times (and all PvP was at the encounter zone or by the Zeta gate as we were bugging out anyway).

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Any pob near the encounter zone would be spotted and rekt pretty much instantly on principle, but I received word Nomads spent hours sweeping Iota looking for a POB that wasn’t even there. To make matters worse, unaffiliated pobs are deployed like that so the operator can slap an IFF on it, but IFFs are no longer strictly required until a base wants to become Core 4… and Nomads should not be docking on POBs anyway per their ID.