Are wormholes into Jita usually camped?

Question

Although the EVE universe has many tools like killfeeds etc., here's one detail I don't see how I can figure out meaningful observations (mostly due to lack of timeseries of WHs into Jita):

Should I expect that wormholes into Jita are camped on the other side of the hole to Jita, and also any other exits in the same WH or its chain? Are there any other external helper-sites that I am missing?

(And obviously I don't want to run suicide missions myself to find out ;)

Answer 1

Short answer is - Yes, you should definitely expect that hole in Jita are camped. I would even say - you should expect any hole in the system up to 3-4 jumps from Jita to be camped.

Long answer follows:

• If it is some big entity opening into Jita, they most probably would like to benefit from this opportunity as much as possible with minimal time/effort. Meaning they are going to bring to and out from Jita whatever they need. They will put someone to guard the both sides of WH connection, which means the moment you start scanning hole they will see it, they will se you warping to WH and the moment you jump. Based on what you will be flying they will act accordingly and no matter what - you will get podded. The point here is that you should understand this is not done to get some easy kills, this is to protect ongoing operation of moving assets, which is important. As soon as they are done they will roll the connection asap.
• If it is smaller corp with small amount of pilots online depending on what type of content they are looking for - they might camp the hole for hours, or roll it immediately.
• If it is random explorer jumping through every hole they are not going to camp Jita hole as it can bee too risky. But the hole will be scanned within a minutes once it appears and someone will go and camp it, again on both sides, to be prepared for anyone who warps to it.

To summarize it all - If the hole stays in Jita long enough - it will be camped, not 24/7, but you should expect it to be camped all the time.

Answer 2

So, there's a reason why you haven't observed wormholes in Jita being camped.

Wormholes do not originate or connect to Jita.

Having said that, wormholes can originate or connect to systems as close as 1 jump away from Jita. So, to answer your question with this slight adjustment, the short answer is "generally no" but the longer answer to this (and almost any question about EVE Online) is: it depends.

For the most part, wormholes that connect to the area around Jita will live for about 24 hours. Camping a wormhole for an entire day is quite the effort, especially since wormholes can go for several hours at a time with no activity whatsoever, making it a somewhat boring endeavor. Having said that....

Some entities that live in wormhole space will have static high-sec connections (https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Wormhole_space#Statics). Due to the mechanics of static wormholes, that means some corps/alliances can spend some amount of time in order to get a wormhole connection to a particular area that they desire. When this area is near Jita, those organizations may camp the J-space side of the wormhole while some groups who are seeking to force certain content may camp the high-sec side in order to do some high-sec ganking for certain ships they expect.

This sort of camping does happen for the reasons you'd expect: people living in that wormhole know what area the other side is connected to and have the resources on-hand (Interdictors, Heavy Interdirector Cruisers, insta-lock Confessors and T1 Destroyers, Assault Frigates, T3 Cruisers, other T3 Destroyers, etc) in order to effectively camp the wormhole side. But, it's also dependant on having the people available to do said camping and some time zones might have less people available to keep the wormhole camped.

Even if it is camped, there are some things you can do and use to avoid getting blown up. Before you start exploring, consider doing some prep work.

• Learn how to use your direction scanner (https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Directional_scanning) to identify threats.
• Related to this, set up your overview to help streamline the information being presented to you (https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Overview). If you're not sure how to do so, then consider installing the Eve University overview pack (directions here: https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Installing_the_EVE_University_Overview). This circles back to your direction scanner, allowing you to use specific presets to identify exactly the things you're most threatened by.

If you take no actions and do not move after jumping a wormhole or stargate, you have 60 seconds of gate cloak (invisible, invulnerable). Use this time to analyze the situation and sort out your plan.

• First, take a deep breath.
• Bookmark the wormhole.
• Check to see if you are within 5000 meters of the wormhole, which gives you the option of just immediately jumping back out.
• Identify the sun/planet/moons/anomalies that are in system. These are all things you can warp to in a pinch. Moons can be a bit dangerous to warp to because they can contain a POS with weapon and tackle platforms or mining Upwell structures, both of which could shoot at you if you linger at those locations too long. Anomalies can (usually) contain NPCs that might lock you up and shoot you if you linger too long.
• Warping to distant moons, while quite risky, can be a sneaky way to evade chasers, since it will appear to others that you're warping to the planet the moon orbits instead. Just make sure to immediately warp to something else before they realize what happened or if something else is on grid with you when you exit warp.
• Keep in mind that when you finish warping to something, you are untargetable for several seconds unless you perform some action (target something, move, activate a module). If there is stuff on grid with you, don't panic and take a moment or two to decide your next course of action.
• While warping around, keep dropping bookmarks mid-warp. These are going to be safe spots for you (https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Safe_spots) where you can hang out for a minute or so and are extremely unlikely to be warped to by others unless they are using combat probes to scan you down. If you see combat probes on your directional scanner, then you'll want to stay on the move. If you have a cloaking device, then you can hang out at a safe spot while cloaked pretty much forever. If you're spending any time at a single safe spot, then pick a random direction (I use up or down relative to the system's horizontal plane) and manually fly in that direction so that you're always on the move just in case something does attempt to warp on top of you.
• Find a moment between warps to drop scanner probes if your exit is being bubbled (https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Tackling#Warp_disruption_fields). You'll now need to find a different way out.

From a ship/cost perspective, here are some tips:

• When undocking a ship in EVE Online, you need to be OK with the idea that you're going to lose it. You might make a mistake and get visited by Concord, jump into a camp, get ganked in high-sec, whatever. This is even more true in low-sec, null-sec, and wormhole space. When you click "undock", plan to lose your ship.
• Given that, only use ships that are cheap for you and easy to replace. "Cheap" is a relative term. If you're a new player, that might mean sticking with T1 exploration frigates. If you've been around for a bit and can understand the dangers of wormholes and are a proficient explorer/hacker, then upgrade to an Astero or a T2 Covert-Ops Frigate. If you're a veteran with income streams in the billions per month, then fly whatever you're comfortable with.
• Equipping a cloak is extremely useful as cloaking will make you immediately untargetable.
• Equiping a microwarpdrive (MWD) is also useful for burning back to things and burning away from POI's and other players.
• Equipping both a MWD and Cloak allows you to execute the MWD/Cloak trick to enter warp. https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Cloak_trick
• Even better if you're in a covert-ops capable ship, which means you can just cloak and warp out. The Astero is the common "starter ship" that can fit a covert-ops cloak since it's easier to skill into, but it's also more expensive than the 4 empire designed T2 Covert-Ops Frigates.
• The T2 Covert-Ops Frigates can also equip a interdiction nullification module, which allows you to warp out of and through interdiction bubbles while it is active. If you're expecting to warp into or out of an interdiction bubble, make sure to activate this module before clicking the warp button. The Astero, unfortunately, cannot fit one.
• Worst-case scenario, make sure you have some filaments (https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Pochven#Pochven_Region_Filaments) in your cargo hold. Using an inbound filament will teleport you somewhere into Pochven from pretty much anywhere. Outbound filaments will teleport you back into known space (k-space). Generally, the recommendation is to keep Border-5 'Pochven' and either Glorification-1 'Devana' or Proximity-5 'Extraction' filaments for this purpose. Doesn't hurt to keep 2-5 copies of these filaments in case you do not like where you end up in k-space.

But ultimately, you need to be comfortable that you might get blown up. Depending on your skills, your ship, and what you've jumped into, there might just be nothing you can do. Take the loss, maybe EVE-mail the attackers to ask what you could have done differently (most are totally happy to talk to you about how they blew up your ship and how to avoid it), and then jump into another ship and move on. Ships are just like ammo: both are methods to experiencing content within the game. Keep that in mind while flying, and good luck!