We're all going on a summer Pewliday

I’m pretty sure Ludis made that word up the other day when he said “Oh, you’re on pewliday” to me upon noticing that I’d left Serene Vendetta with Jay to re-join Concentrated Evil. This may be obvious, but pewliday is a portmanteau of pew-pew and holiday and the only reason I’m mentioning this is so that I can have an excuse to use the word ‘portmanteau’.

So, yeah, Ludis had seen this before. I’d call it a PvP sabbatical, myself, but Pewliday works also. So, the idea is that if I wasn’t getting enough PvP in a particular place, I’d put a toon into a different corp so I could chill out and shoot stuff when not much else was going on back at the ranch. I’d flown with Concentrated Evil before as part of learning more about PvP and brought 13. Into F.E.R.A.L. to learn more about nullsec. This time, there wasn’t much learning involved, except for how highsec PvP worked after crimewatch.

The other motivations were completely different this time around. CEVL were now part of the Marmite Collective, who seem to polarize opinions as readily as their namesake would imply. My initial thoughts on them was that they are just a carbon copy of the 0rphanage. The irony there is that the 0rphanage’s dominance of highsec trade routes was ended by the Privateers who were assisted by Concentrated Evil and Count With Teddy Mercs (whose notable members were Cannibal Kane and Tora Bushido). Given how easy it was to break these guys up, it’s no surprise to see these high sec groups come and go like flash in the pan. This time last year, Marmite were playing second fiddle to Whores in Space, but MYM8 was still there, so the way I saw it, Tora Bushido had to be doing something right.

While I was intrigued at how Tora had managed to keep things going for as long as he had, what I was really looking for was a place where I could log on, get some easy kills to pad out the killboard while being safe enough to sit in a +5 set. For this, it was fine. But it was very different from before. Gone were the days where we'd add all the war targets to watchlist and then go hunt those foolish enough to log in and prepare traps for them once they developed a false sense of security. It seemed like Tora managed things by deccing half of Eve, and maintained this by taking huge ransoms from people to end the wars early. It made hunting pretty difficult and most of the guys tended to camp trade routes or hubs. This is not PvP. It's scarcely even actually playing the game but I can see why they do it. Without going out and working for the kills the old fashioned way, they can still kill faction battleships and freighters.

In between effortless ganks, I still had toons in Serene Vendetta. I'd not intended the pewliday to be a permanent thing, but it seemed I'd lost diplomat and recruiter privileges. Fair enough if people want full commitment, but only having 2 people turning up to PvP ops had left my appetite un-sated - plus, I can take a hint. So, time to find a new corp! I'd seen United System's Commonwealth had a recruitment post up and knew that the active members of Delete Inc had joined them and Calgura had said they were a good group. Despite threats from certain BLK members about if I ever joined up with Cal, they'd hunt me down (for which I can sort of understand - Cal can take some getting used to, but is just about the most loyal and dependable guy I've ever flown with), I got in contact and made the switch.

Straight away I was getting the type of fights that I knew I was missing. Proper small gang fights that weren't a foregone conclusion from the outset. First kill was some ex-test/ex-goon that BLK had recruited and in their home system. Apparently, he and a couple of guardians had remained on the hole after their fleet (which outnumbered ours) had run away. Just an interceptor, but an auspicious start nonetheless. The week continued with small, but frequent kills and culminating with a very enjoyable fight with Team Pizza.

Then we received a notification from CONCORD that tickled my fancy; a declaration of war from the Marmite Collective. Now, I'd made sure that I'd asked very specific question about these kind of situations to Kypp Durron before I joined and his answer was: "We don't care where your alts are..." I'm not quite sure why he put the ellipsis in there. I'm fairly convinced he wasn't sure either so I will assume it's merely a misguided way of trying to look both dismissive and clever while ending a sentence.

Also, he might not have meant it that way, but I took it as carte blanche to bring fights to these wardecs. Knowing that the guys would have been very complacent just gatecamping, (which I had seen before with Privateers after they took down 0rphanage - and in the same spot too) I was going to exploit that complacency.

We hadn't found anything to shoot at in the hole, but had found a highsec connection 3 jumps from Madirmilire. I suggested a quick expedition to not only retrieve my Orca (1 jump from the highsec) but to get some easy kills in the process. I was very quickly accused of being a spy - to which I couldn't deny, being on USYSC and MYM8 comms simultaneously. I'd never intended to be a long term fixture in Marmite anyway. Concentrated Evil was a shadow of its former self and it was sorely missing pilots like Cuckoo and Black Wrath. It wasn't just their skill that was missing, but their positively was  needed as a foil to the perpetually grumpy magic preacher. So the plan was to break up the Madi gate camp, which had dwindled in number to four very bored pilots, one of which was me. While I was making up the mainstay of MYM8's dps on the Madirmilire camp, I was also going to be bait for UYSYC. Obviously I'm not going to be applying that dps to myself, especially not in expensive tech 3's. No, Jay was there to give them a false sense of security and while they were engaging the Proteus, then hopefully they wouldn't notice the fleet moving through the next system to assist.

Sounds like a bit of a double-cross, right? Burning bridges and breaking hearts? Quite likely. But they declared war on me first and rather than have a conflict of interests, I picked a side. Plus, I didn't tell them to engage me and if any of the old CEVL guys had been around, they'd have known. As things stood, the Stiletto and the Jaguar both tackled the Proteus as soon as I decloaked. 3ulldog's Loki wasn't far behind them, leaving my Loki orbiting idly... since I was busy on the other screen, popping the Stiletto who had got a little too close to the Proteus. At this point, I called in the fleet to join in the fun. MYM8 did spot the trap before it was sprung, but it was too late. They were red-boxed and when 3ulldog called for fleet to get out, it was too late for him (although I loyally followed his orders with Jay). I had him scrammed and my fleet and I were rubbing our hands together with glee at the impending Loki killmail. Highsec Loki's were surely blinged up to the nines with deadspace and faction modules, so imagine our disappointment when this horrible, scrubbyfit appeared to disgrace the killboard. [EDIT: Hi to my MYM8 fanbois - just remember this is not supposed to be a big secret - it's a blog] 

Subsequently, I moved Jay to where my Orca was parked (already packed full of my WH gear) and dropped out of MYM8  to switch to other team. It wasn't long before we moved a fleet into highsec again and Marmite fell for a similar trap. Once again, they lost some tackle and a horribly fit HIC. One of their Vindicators got out by the skin of his teeth as he took advantage of USYSC's lack of highsec practice to execute a tactical withdrawal through a gate after de-aggressing. I was a second or two too late with tackle, but late nonetheless. The better fight was on the way home when we found a Loki, and Astarte and a Harbinger camping the highsec. The Harbinger managed to escape through the WH but the others made quite satisfying explosions. More, let's call them 'progressive' fits though, but at least they put up more of a fight than highsec's finest.

I'd elaborate on than one a bit more, but I had intended to make this post short and sweet since I haven't put anything on here for a while and I have been intended to put a post on here, but something a little different and a little special. It's actually nearly finished, and hopefully it should be a good one, but I'm not going to end this one here. I will mention a really good fight we had with Trapped. We noticed them in chain since midday, but they didn't start logging on until the evening, by which time we were itching for a fight. The only problem was our guardian pilots had logged off by then, so if we wanted a fight, the only option was to commit an Archon. Thankfully, Trapped got this one on fraps. I would have also, but I have a habit of turning off fraps if it looks like we're going to lose or I don't want people to see me de-aggressing to save ammo if enemy logi is holding. Anyway, hats off to Trapped and here is their vid: