Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Close Call

I had a very close call the other day that only veteran players who've been around a long time and gotten arrogant can have.

Aideron Robotics is moving to a new staging area away from the main Gallente Hub of Nennamaila in Black Rise. I had a lot of stuff in Nenna, so threw a lot of it in my alt's Rhea jump freighter, Montezuma's Revenge, and a load of expensive ships in my namesake Chimera carrier, the Ninveah.

I logged my cyno alt into the destination system and had a conversation that went like this.

"Hmmm, its the middle of the day so not a lot of traffic. And I remember moving my Wyvern and Chimera together before... but was that on two machines or triple boxing on one? Oh, who cares, this machine can dual box fine, and its just an easy undock twice, jump twice, and redock... I'll be fine!"

Now, a normal player would say to themselves "Are you sure putting 10 billion ISK worth of capitals and cargo all at once on the stability of your PC is smart here?" but longtime veterans who have not been burned lately can forget that smart voice.

So I undocked the Carrier, lit the cyno, switched back to carrier, hit the jump button, and switched over to my jump freighter and hit undock.

And my computer froze.

And not just dead frozen, but coma frozen. Like I could hear the sound effects of the jump completing and the jump frieghter entering space, but the screen did not change and I could not move my mouse. I was paralyzed with two ships valuable ships in space... in low sec.
Oh crap.
I tried alt+tab, ctrl+alt+del, shaking mouse, screaming at the computer. Best I got was a few seconds of slide show of clients flashing up and down, teasing me with thoughts of control before wresting it away. I tried clicking on dock buttons that were there and then gone, I tried shutting down clients using the windows red X, ctrl+q, ... everything. But the horror slide show continued. At one point I saw a war target, A FUCKING WAR TARGET!, arrive on grid with my paralyzed carrier.

I did the only thing I could do. I pulled the plug. I hard shut downed the computer with prejudice. Screw safe shutdown, OFF NOW!

A few minutes later after I rebooted my PC I logged my characters on one at a time. The Carrier managed to get a docking command during my fevered clicking and alt tabbing and was safe. The jump frieghter was in space, but alive. It warped back to station and I docked it up.

The rest of the asset movement was a lot more careful and very uneventful.

8 comments:

  1. Sipphakta12:27 pm

    Quote: "Hmmm, its the middle of the day so not a lot of traffic. And I remember moving my Wyvern and Chimera together before..."

    Do you really mean a Wyvern? As in the mothership? Or do you mean Rhea, as in the Jump Freighter.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, I have a Wyvern supercarrier as well, but moved it later.

      Delete
  2. Anonymous12:50 pm

    This one time I lite a cyno at my instant undock and jumped a rhea to it and wondered where the station was . . .

    I was lucky too and made it out safely

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  3. That sounds terrifying! I'm glad your ships made it back alive!

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  4. A few months ago, I decided to do run the gallente epic arc (as it was the only one I had standing for). After more than 2 years and at least a year after I had the skills trained up, I finally convinced myself to dump the isk on a T3. I took my shiny new loki out, ran a few missions just fine. And then, after finishing the first room in one mission, I turned on the AB and pointed my ship toward the acceleration gate 60+ km away. On my other screen, I pulled up a browser to check email or something. Upon hearing Aura's dulcet tones of "warp drive active", I look back on my other screen and see my loki head into the next room, with my alt nearby in a noctis cleaning up the first room. I attempt to target the tackling frigates, but my client chooses that exact moment to freeze up. My machine was fine, and my alt's client responded just fine on the other screen, but my poor loki just sat there, frozen in space. I relogged, and warped my noctis in to hopefully grab a bit of NPC aggro, but to no avail. My first T3, not a week after I had purchased it, had gone up in flames.

    That's the only time I've petitioned a loss, but of course, there's no reimbursement for client errors, and "the logs show nothing."

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  5. Anonymous9:17 pm

    I truly loathe those moments: landing on grid for furious combat only to have the client decide to wander the fuck off somewhere and lock up on me...in a fragile little ship...with hostiles...and a billion plus pod.

    Or those moments when it's vitally important to my ship (and my sanitys) well being to be notified of probes on scan only to have the d-scan decide to take 20 seconds to refresh.

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  6. Just out of curiousity would you say your virtual assests at risk there are worth more or less than your computer in real world money?

    And I think I would also freak the f out.

    ReplyDelete