After I covered the most common PVE activities in the last three posts, I got a little tired of shooting red dots and decided to start my first PVP activity to lose my newly gained riches.

I decided to start with gate camping, which is a quite easy and chilled PVP activity that – when done right – results in easy kills and can even make you a little profit on the side.

The basic idea is to wait on a stargate in low or null security space and destroy whatever ships jump through. For this guide, I want to focus on camping low sec gates, which has slightly different mechanics than camping null security gates.

Low Sec Gate Mechanics

To understand how to camp a low security gate, I will first give you a short summary how the game mechanics around shooting players on these gates work.

Low security gates have two so called gate guns placed around them that will start to shoot any player who engages another player who is not a criminal. These guns do 440 dps in mainly thermal and explosive damage, have a range of 150 km and will hit you very well even if you are in a fast frigate. If multiple players engage a ship, the gate guns will start to fire on the first player who takes a shot, but will switch to another player after less than a minute. If a player warps or moves more than 150 km away from the gate, the guns will stop firing at this player and will also not start again if the ship comes closer again.

Shooting a non criminal player will make yourself a criminal for the next 15 minutes. This means that if you are attacked by a hostile player in low sec, the gate guns will not start to shoot your opponent. Furthermore, players will even be able to shoot you in high sec as long as the criminal timer lasts without concord protecting you.

Another point to mention is the loss of security status when engaging a non criminal player. Each time you will loose around 0.1 security status for shooting a ship and about 1.0 for shooting a pod. The exact number depend on a number of factors and are described nicely in the Uni Wiki. As soon as you security status gets below -2 the faction police will hunt you in some high security systems depending on the security level of the system. This effect gets worse the lower your security status becomes until you reach -4.5, when you will be hunted in all high sec systems. With a security status of -5 even other player will be able to shoot you in high sec without concord protecting you.

How to set up a gate camp

To successfully camp a low sec gate you need several things covered.

Tackle: You need a ship with a fast lock time, a Warp Disruptor and optionally a Warp Scrambler to lock and stop your target from warping away once it decloaks. This ship must also have enough tank to be hit by the gate guns for some time until the unfortunate player who has been pointed is dead or another tackle ship takes over.  Hence cheap T1 tackle frigates are not ideal for this.

DPS: You will need enough damage to kill your target. If you tackled a frigate or destroyer, this might not be a big deal, but the amount of DPS required to kill a battlecruiser or battleship is much higher. So bring plenty of dps ships if you can.

Stasis Webifiers (optional): These are great to slow down the enemy ship to apply more damage and to prevent it from flying back to the gate and try to escape on the other side. Especially fast ships with MWDs can burn back to the gate or out of point range very fast without webs on them. The web ship should also have a fast lock time to apply the web quickly.

Logistic Ship (optional): A logistic ship to repair your tackle ship while under gate guns or the damage done by your target.

Scout (optional): It is a great plus to have a scout on the other side of the gate you are camping. The scout can tell you what kind of ships are going to jump through and warn you if there is a proper fleet or other dangerous ships landing on the gate. If possible, the scout should be cloaked. Otherwise more experienced players will suspect a gate camp on the other side and not jump through.

Where to Gate Camp

Now that we have the basic roles required sorted, you need a proper location to set up our gate camp. The most common gates to camp in low sec are the ones that lead from high into low. These gates get a lot of traffic by players that are on their way into null sec, explorers and PVP players. Especially border systems into factional warfare territory have a lot of traffic in small ships coming through. To check the traffic of a system, Dotlan offers good statistics about the number of jumps into a system. I prefer systems, that have at least 100 jumps per hour.

One problem with these gateway systems is, that they are very often camped by the local pirate groups that also often live in these systems . So it is a good idea to check if the gate is already camped by somebody else before forming your fleet and go there. Other good systems are so called pipe systems in low sec, which have only one entry and one exit gate.  These pipe systems usually get a lot more traffic, since often they are the only way to cross a region.

Let’s start with the action

After looking for good systems on Dotlan for a bit, I decided to set up my camp in Aunenen, a low sec system in Lonetrek that borders high sec.

Aunenen is a quite busy system that gets a lot of traffic by people travelling into northern part of null sec. Furthermore, it has a public Keepstar Citadel right on the gate that leads to high sec, which is quite handy to repair your ship or switch ships if needed. Also logistics are quite easy, since you can just transport the necessary gear through high sec to Nonni, which is the last high sec system before Aunenen just 5 jumps away from Jita. Since, I am a member of Horde atm, Aunenen is also far away from friendly space, so the targets will most likely be neutral for me. A big problem of camping gates close to friendly space is, that most traffic is friendly, so although you get a lot of traffic, the amount of targets is rather low.

I have three characters available to setup my camp and decided to use them in the following setup:

• The first character will be used as fast tackle and dps in a Svipul and sit on the Nonni gate in Aunenen .
• The second Character will provide additional dps in a Gnosis battlecruiser and also has a Stasis Webifier fitted to slow down targets. This character will also sit on the gate.
• The third character will be in a cloaky interceptor off the Aunenen gate in Nonni. This character will be my scout and also can be used to switch into a logi ship and jump into Aunenen to provide repairs.

This setup is far from ideal, but covers most points mentioned above. The dps of this setup is not great and not enough to kill battleships and battlecruisers. For this, I will stock additional battlecruisers and battleships in the Aunenen Keepstar to switch into if there is need.

These are the fits I am going to use:

Svipul Fitting

 

Gnosis Fitting

 

With these fits, I will end this first part of my low sec camping guide. In the next part I will further discuss these three fittings and tell you the story of my hopefully successful camping trip to Aunenen.