Tuesday, October 15, 2013

A Series of Fortunate Events

“You just missed a fight, Susan.”

I hate logging on to hear that. I want to log on to hear “Quick, get into fleet! We’re about to kill all the things!”

But today, my story starts at the end of a fight, and at the beginning of a rather strange day playing EVE. In order to fully understand it’s strangeness, you’re going to have to understand some of the strange politics that go along with it:

As of Saturday, we had several primary groups living in the Huola-Kourmonen-Kamela area. This area, including the Auga, Amamake pipe, tends to be the ‘hottest’ part of the Amarr/Minmatar warzone, usually with both militia and pirates lurking about.

Death by Design, led by x-Amarrian Predator Elite moved back into Kamela within the last couple of months. They were followed by Tempest Legion, who ended up joining the Minmatar militia and wardeccing Late Night Alliance.

We also have several Amarr groups in the general area, as well as newcomers Mafia Redux who moved into the area after leaving their alliance, Black Legion.

I don’t know the whole story, but there’s some sort of bad blood between Predator Elite’s group and Tempest Legion. Hearing snippets of this and that, apparently, Predator’s group and TL were friends with each other, with Predator ‘batphoning’ them to drop capitals on various people. The way I’ve heard the story, he teamed up with some Late Night folks at one point, and turned on Tempest Legion, killing several of their capitals.

This would explain why shortly after returning to the warzone, TL started attacking Predator’s Corporation’s assets –POCOs, etc. in Kamela, and wardecced LNA.

I’m not sure what had transpired before I logged on this weekend, but when I did, people were posting killmails, and there was a random Tempest Legion in local smacking people.

Quite a lot of Late Night were active, which is somewhat unusual these days. Included in the mix was our alliance CEO, Bahamut420, and one of our FCs and best pvpers, TeaEarlyGreyHOT.

Well, you should never smack LNA with Tea in local unless you are willing to put your money where your mouth is. He immediately challenged the TL guy to a 1v1, to which the TL guy agreed. After discussing the ‘fairness’ of it all, Tea ended up inviting the guy to our fleet, and I grabbed a bag of popcorn and prepared to enjoy the show.

Timing is everything in EVE. And as it was, just after inviting the Tempest Legion guy to fleet, an Amarr gang shows up.

Killing the Amarr always takes priority over killing inter-militia wartargets, so we were instantly distracted from the 1v1. Hearing what was going on, the Tempest Legion guy offered to join us in killing the Amarr, and asked what he should bring to the party. He was Minmatar, too, afterall.
One thing led to another, and before long he was also on our coms, and was joined by another Tempest Legion who also joined our fleet.

Now, if you’ve ever flown with LNA, you will know it’s not for everyone. We don’t have FCs in the traditional sense, and this often makes people nervous. We’ve all flown together for so long, that usually we just decide what we want to do and do it –and everyone knows more or less what is expected of them. The term ‘FC’ is more a fancy label for the target caller, which is usually whomever lands first on the field of battle. It can sometimes be chaotic, but it works –most of the time.

You could sense the TL guy’s blood pressure rising, as he was not told exactly what to do and where to meet up with everyone. “Does this fleet have an FC?!” he kept asking. “Is anyone leading this operation?!”

Finally, he snaps, and starts barking orders. Kudos to him for that. Most people snap, and leave—never to return. I’m not sure we’ve ever had someone jump into a LNA fleet and take over before.
Especially not someone who is currently at war with us. (lol!)

We chatted about him a while in our super secret alliance intel channels. Some people were very grumpy and demanded he be removed from our Team Speak channel, and fleet immediately. While others shrugged. “Let’s follow him and see what happens. Maybe he’ll get us kills –it’s not like we’re picking out curtains with him or anything.”

I’m not sure what happened to the Amarr group, but we ended up roaming out to Metro. Jokes were told, stories were shared, and Amarr were killed. We trolled him a bit, which he didn’t really pickup on. Needless to say he amused us, even though he talked more than anyone should have breath for.
“Does he need to tell us 10 times to hold on the gate?” someone asked in a private intel channel.

We even started discussing the possibility of helping Tempest Legion take down some Death by Design assets that were coming out of reinforced mode soon. (In another channel I was talking to Predator Elite about the fight with TL they were about to have over the POCO. Whom we would have ended up supporting is anyone’s guess –we never got there.)

And, while we didn’t know it at the time, in yet other channels, Tempest Legion was organizing with Mafia Redux to possibly attack us in the near future.

And then, Shadow Cartel shows up.

Now, the thing with Shadow Cartel is they are bloody hard to kill. They fly around the warzone with this tinker tank setup with Tengus and the like, and even a decent gang of neuting battleships usually can’t break them. (We know, we’ve tried!)

“Susan, you want to go kill Shadow Cartel?” Predator Elite asks.

After some diplomatic bantering on coms about what we wanted to do, we decided to go for it. We end up using our fleet, but getting on Death by Design’s coms.

And we aren’t the only ones Pred invites to the party. The gang is a mixture of LNA, Death by Design, Tempest Legion, at least one Amarr group, and even a Goon who lives in the area.
We are rather large at that point, and I kind of thought SC would run from our rather staggering amount of DPS. But, kudos to them, they took the fight.

Our much-talking Tempest Legion guy dropped a triage carrier into the mix, in spite of being at war with most of the people in his fleet.

We rolled SC pretty soundly, killing their Tengus and Domis. I couldn’t tell if they were fighting, or trying to de-agress and run away, we killed some of them so fast. Especially after we broke the first 1-2.

Amusingly, a group of PL ishtars showed up to the party.

“Should we go after those ishtars?” someone asked when SC was dead.

“Nope. They were helping us kill Shadow Cartel.”

Now THAT I have not heard before. Though, we were expecting SC to light a cyno when things hit the fan. And Pred has been known to batphone PL before.

After drooling over shiny killmails for a half hour or so, everyone ended up parting ways. However, for LNA and Death by Design, it didn’t end up being the last, nor the biggest fight of the evening.

Much later that night, a strange neutral gang was spotted romping through the warzone. I say strange, because we had some difficulty in identifying who they were.

“Every name I show-info on is in a different corp/alliance!” someone complained. “What on earth?!”
There was only one explanation: Bombers Bar!

(We found out lately that it was originally an incursion fleet, that decided to go on a PVP roam and invited all the people out of the bomber’s bar channel.)

We ended up engaging them on the Ossogur gate in Amamake. And from their affiliations, to what they were flying, they were about as kitchen sink as you can be. We killed tons of battlecruisers, an Ishtar, a Loki, a Damnation, among other smaller things. Even in spite of them having 6 logistics on field. After killing one of their logi, the rest seemed to act like deer in the headlights, allowing us to quickly pound through their fleet members.

We lost some battleships of our own, but soundly held the field. Judging from coms, and the gfs and other comments in local, everyone obviously had a good time blowing things up, on both sides.

Their FC private convoed me later to thank us for giving them a really good fight.
I must admit. Extracting tears is fun. But the most satisfying fights tend to be where everyone leaves with killmails and a smile on their face.

Sadly, I don’t think Tea ever got his 1v1. And, we never found out who would turn on who among our strange Saturday night crowd of devious frienemies.

But I guess that saves some stories for another day.

31 comments:

  1. I used to fly with Predator Elite (Soulless Brutor) back in CalMil. He's pretty competent as an FC, but not enough to tolerate his consistently rude behavior. Generally he is only as civil as absolutely necessary to keep people in fleet. If he's not being an asshole, he is getting ready to stab you in the back or wants something from you. If you have the opportunity to extract tears from him, I expect you would have a long trail of allies.

    To be fair though, this was about a year ago; so perhaps he has matured or calmed down.

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    1. Dont count on it. Just ask those in the Amarr militia.

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  2. These are the best EVE stories and why I love this game.

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    1. I know, right? Usually I'm reading these sorts of things. This time I was in the middle of it. =D

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  3. In retrospect, we had a couple operational & intel failures on our end that led to us taking the fight, when we should not have. Yes, after the first domi and tengu went down we were indeed trying to deagress..

    Thanks for bringing the fight, grats on the win.

    - Chandaris/Shadow Cartel FC

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  4. Sorta makes me want to come back to EVE...

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  5. i used to fly with predator elite aswell sometimes (FENDIN).. Imperial feydakin ftw :P

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  6. Surprised Pred didn't ask you to meet him in HED-GP....

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  7. Hah, I was a member of that incursion fleet thingy, but I parted ways while the gang was frigs only. I missed all the good fights :(

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  8. at least its fun to see all you guys jump on our tiny little cheapfleet like that We shouldnt have taken the fight but everyone had run from us all evening and I think a few of us where a tad to tired and bloodthirsty. But.. no biggie Lady Naween, SC.

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    1. you have to let people win once in a while, or no one will ever want to fight you =p

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    2. Yeah, even now we see you undock a little less each day. This will be a fun, long engagement.

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    3. oh yes we are really undocking less. we only had 6 ops yesterday. shame on us for slacking so. *chuckles* and Susan, rematch! :) tbh we want more fights so.. see you out there :) win or lose, lets have good fights :) show those zero zero types that lowsec is fun! Lady Naween, SC

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  9. Want to hear more about the TL plot with mafia redux, hehe ^_^

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  10. Your lack of understanding of the totality of the situation is truly astounding. ;)

    As the random TMPST "talking guy" who FC'd your fleet - garnering many kills and op success - and later in the evening as the same random TMPST "guy" who had the balls to drop triage on the gate against Shadow Cartel (fully expecting escalation btw), I am somewhat offended by your commentary.

    More so, I am offended by your thorough misunderstanding and poor representation of the facts involved and the players behind those facts, especially regarding the relationship between TMPST and URGD.

    It is good to know that anyone who helps LNA is looked at as some sort of laughable person. The reason behind saying commands multiple times is because your "fleet" was so grabastic and poorly controlled and full of noobs that a good FC knows to tell them the commands sometimes 3-6 times before they *actually* listen. Its about command and control.

    I was under the impression that we had an understanding with each other regarding the nature of my FC'ing for you that night, and that it was appreciated to get so much win into one night for LNA.

    I guess I will not make that mistake again...

    Cheers!

    MG

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    1. thanks for dropping triage gost, <3 tempest

      -wil

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    2. It was and will always be, my pleasure.

      --Mjolnir Gost

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  11. I was lucky enough to catch predator elite solo once. Maybe he was off guard but it was a good fight and I walked away with a nice assault frig km :)

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  12. Pretty sure Tempest Legion war-decced LNA because you guys are one of the few Minmatar alliances worth war deccing, not out of any bad blood. They're on the Minmatar side of FW because it was easier on them; they're here to shoot everyone.

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  13. If only I had the time for Eve again! Sounds like a lot of fun :)

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  14. Sheesh. I actually coulda logged on last night. Ah well, what are ya gonna do, eh? Maybe tonight though...

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  15. Hey I was one of those logis on the sorta BB sorta TVP fleet and I feel the need to defend our honor for a second. The big issue is that yall neuted the hell out of us right at the start. I could get about 2 cycles in each time my cap injector went off and other than that I was mostly a spectator. I think I whored on some kills with light drones and finally got out of range of the neuts, but by that time our damage was mostly broken.

    But was a fun fight even though yall rocked us pretty hard.

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  16. I think what you missed here is that TL has been summing you up from both outside and within. Prepare your proverbial bell. It's about to get rung.

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  17. LOL Holy shit I brought 4 of my corpies (Dropbears Anonymous, from Brave Newbies Alliance) on that "Bombers Bar" Incursion runners fleet. When you guys warped in on us our FC went dead silent, and we literally had no primary for almost a minute. So we started calling primaries for the fleet. And yes, our logi was awful. All in all though, I think we came out with 5 BS kills, among other things, including two fleet issues. Good fight was had and everyone got KMs. Thanks and 7o! ~a DAMN PATRIOT

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    1. No need to insult the logi's. Not all incursioners pvp often. Most are picking it up quickly. The logi description of "deer in the headlights" was great. Proof at the lack of pvp experience from not only the logi, but throughout the fleet.

      It was still a fun fight. o7

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  18. Susan Black, I enjoy your writing immensely - if and only if because it is the most one-sided egomaniacal perspective of things that literally did not happen.

    I look forward to pushing your shitty little alliance's shit in with Tempest Legion.

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  19. This is why I love eve nice to hear from you Black

    The annoying fucker,
    Melvin Coulter

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  20. What a cool story. I enjoyed the read. Perhaps i should try and find more blogs like this.

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  21. I have no idea who any of those mentioned are (with the exception of PL and SC) but I truely enjoyed this story. Very well presented. I found this link via CCPs Facebook page. I'll surely be back for more :)

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  22. was part of the "other amarrian group"
    we never got on to the fight since we were still forming when the call came to engage.

    and yes we were surprised to find minmatars in the fleet since the only info we got was a call from pred saying there might be capital kills to be had.

    good read tho.

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