The Masterfully Procrastinated Meta-article

I seem to begin a lot of posts on here by stating how long it’s been since the last one. I’ll try not to do it on this occasion, despite it being a long time since the last one. What I’ll do instead is acknowledge it and change the subject so hopefully no one notices the huge gaps between blog articles becoming akin to the time between Tool albums.

There’s been a lot of changes since the last entry, but what’s been the most significant? Citadels? Sov stuff? The massive botch that has been the WH PvE changes? Well! I now have an Aquarium. That might seem a little random, but I’ll tie that into something nebulously relevant at some point… somehow. But, yes, I tend to not include too much out of game happenings here. I think that last time I did, I mentioned the new job would probably mean a reduction in articles since I wouldn’t be able to write them at work anymore.

Getting back into the swing of things is always pretty hard though. For something like this, you need a little more inspiration than trying to give Tuscor something to read at work or just to write any old thing because Barny likes seeing his name mentioned on the internet somewhere (welcome back to eve btw Barny!). 

In truth, there has been plenty to write about; the self-proclaimed ‘Fortizar Police’ and our citadel losses, accidentally soloing nullsec fleets after some mass calculation errors (i.e. not noticing it was crit) or the huge chips that certain members of The Projects still have on their shoulders (which is always such a delightful salt mine /smug). The fact is I just lost interest when the accompanying video projects crashed without saving a number of times consecutively.

It is here now, though, albeit after many a false-start that was reminiscent of the procrastination that used to occur whenever I needed to do coursework at university. Some people say that making yourself a coffee before typing a single word is procrastination. I call it a necessary pre-requisite and as I was boiling the kettle for the hopefully creativity inducing beverage, I noticed the coconut I bought when I went food shopping at the weekend. This isn’t because I’m particularly partial to coconuts, but I’ve seen the shells used as an alternative for bogwoods for anchoring aquatic plants, which may or may not be of interest to aquarists (that’s a person who keeps an aquarium). In short, even making the coffee got put off. Well, shit. It also looks like changing the subject failed somewhat.

Meanwhile, in game, Enigma Project have been enjoying flying around in remote-repair Svipuls (with Hecate’s and Confessors for those too lazy to train minmatar T3D’s). They pack a punch and have a staying power that belies the destroyer class and because of this, have gotten us some really good fights. And as an unintended by-product of my lack of articles or videos in the recent past, a couple of guys from the 13. have put together the odd video or two.

I’ll start with Znoran, who at least made a start with his “Wrong Hole Stories”. He does mean the pun, despite suggesting the contrary in his first episode – but I suggest skipping to episode 2 purely to remain topical to the Svipuls thing. Of course check out episode 1 if you think it’s a good video or if you think Znoran’s voice is soothing and as silkily smooth as his beard looks – you’ll just have to take my word on that one. He’s also put together a random fight compilation from last year, which is worth checking out.

I will preface the video by say that getting this fleet doctrine off the ground was always going to be the difficult part, especially with some of the newer guys we’d took on, or anyone used to F1+approach style brawling and the video is a good indication that after a couple of attempts, some of the guys were by no means the finished article. Collectively, we’re getting better I will be able to post some more proof here soon™ (if Dan lets me link his video)!

And after all that, what’s so meta about this article? I’ll get around to adding that at a later date…

Gone Fishing

Wardecs to WH corporations are nothing more than an irritation.

Normally, we'd have little cause to travel around in highsec unless we were buying ships. Fuel stuffs I tend to haul on an out of corp alt anyway, but for whatever reason, we found that our old friends The Marmite Collective were at war with us again.

Among ourselves, we had a sweep-stake on who would be the first to forget that we had a wardec. I don't think any of us would have guessed that Myst would go AFK on our way back from an op with No Vacancies which went tits up, losing his sabre and pod.

As far as the op itself went, NVACA had found some guys ratting with an open lowsec but had sent in the tackle before any of the dps was ready, let alone in the lowsec system. Or even 3 jumps out. I wont go into how that worked out. The only 'eventful' thing to happen was someone poked me on TS to say: "Enigma Project are still a thing? Thought you guys were a PvE corp."
"Still a thing? Never were." I replied, realizing any in-jokes or irony would be lost on whoever it was. 

And I had no idea who the guy was or how upset he was with us, until he started shooting at Enigma Project ships on the lowsec wormhole, along with a certain Peter Moonlight. Then it started making a little more sense. Our buddy Pete got quite precious over a post Odi made of the WH forums after he had somehow made a connection with what Odi had said and Lazerhawks, who Petey was a member of at the time. He accused us of rolling away from them, which just plain didn't happen. The guys we rolled was Peter's farming corp, when it was obvious we weren't going to get any content out of them. Is that enough for a guy to be so mad he shoots people joining a diplo-channel organised op? You'd have thought 'no', but maybe his cohort, Luft Reich would have better reason. 

Now, I had no idea who that guy was, but I did look him up on eve who just to make sure I didn't know him, but if the comments are anything to go by, he's a class act. Eve Who isn't the kind of site where you use the comments for high praise either and this guy has quite a few comments on his page. My personal favorite is "runs away in logi". Something I've only seen once before, when Isogen 5 were flying logi for us on a joint op.

I may have digressed a little, but the fact of the matter was we were now losing the war with 2 losses (the sabre and the pod) valued at 88mil. Sure, not the end of the world and not really something a WH corp would care greatly about, but I had to redress the balance as a matter of pride. So I set off in my Bustard.

Of course, there is more to it than that, but all in good time! It had confused the good folk of 13. as well. I had a second fleet up and people were asking which one to join. I didn't want to bring anyone with me though. The last time we had a tangle with Marmite, we brought a WH space T3 fleet and ganked 3ulldog's shitfit loki hard. Knowing then what I know now, my Proteus could have quite happily solo'd that gatecamp. The thing with these highsec 'mercenaries' is they don't gear their ships for PvP. There's a lot of sensor boosters with tank and dps added as an after thought. The sebos are necessary though. I mean, if you can't get on that hauler killmail, what kind of merc are you? And it's highsec, so nothing shoots back and is probably AFK anyway.

Hence the choice of the bustard. Firstly, if you want to lull someone into a false sense of security, don't change their routine. Autopiloting haulers are the bread and butter of the crème de la crème of highsec PvP, the Marmite Collective. Nice, expensive targets that don't return fire. While the bustard may not be the ne plus ultra of their preferred targets, I had to give myself a bit of a chance and while you can fit an almighty tank on these ships, the armament of 2 missile launchers, should you choose to use them, leaves a lot to be desired. I chose not to use them. 

Earlier, I'd spotted a gang from Gate is Red moving up the Amarr pipe from the Kamio, but by the time the ponderous bustard had arrived, there was no sign of my quarry. I knew they tended to operate closer to Dodixie, so I headed that way. From the Amarr pipe, the route takes you past Uedama, the headquarters of the Marmite Collective, but as I passed, the bustard continued unmolested. 

2 more jumps and I'd found a Cynabal sat alone on a gate. Perfect! As he was alone, he'd have to call for help to keep the bustard tackled just in-case he missed bumping it of the alignment for the warp. He didn't disappoint. He bumped away like a trooper, missing only a couple as I made an effort to do my best impression of a big fish flopping helplessly on the deck of the boat that just landed the catch. There was probably a couple of occasions I could have warped off, but that didn't deter our friend, who was soon joined by 2 garmurs, a svipul, confessor, stilletto and a broadsword, who all joined in with the tackle.

The whole plan was predicated on giving the appearance that there was no threat and get them to redbox. They got hold of the cheese, so now it was time spring the trap. I personally would have thought that guys who live in highsec would know their mechanics better than someone who's lived in wormhole space. Especially when people pay them ISK for that kind of thing. But maybe they didn't see my out of corp alt in the Bowhead steaming towards the bustard as they piled the points on. The ship hangar of the Bowhead contained my flagship; The Locust Star. A 425mm autocannon Loki, built lovingly by my own hands (as far as the industry interface allows you to actually build stuff). 

I knew what was going to happen before I even set off for highsec. At the first sign of something that shoots back, their gang would be gone quicker than Usain Bolt on rocket skates. Which was why the Loki was perfect. A shade over 700dps with webs and point to over 30km. The 425's provide that little extra range and in concert with the webs as well as a target too panicked to worry about transversal, tracking is not an issue. I hadn't expected 7 ships on grid, but if they were to stick around, it might be a good fight. My plan was to go for the Cynabal, give the value in comparison to the other ships, but I opted to go for quantity rather than quality. Plus, I thought it was reasonable to assume the Garmur might have been shiny. Well, a little, but the value from the loot he hadn't dropped off at station made up for the lack of anything substantial (which includes tank!).

Next was a Svipul, which tanked slightly as the ancillary shield boosters kicked in, but only as a token gesture. The speed and agility dual nano's might provide don't help when you burn away in a straight line.

A quick scan of the field showed that the stiletto had done his best brave Sir Robin impression while the other Garmur was seriously testing how big the new grids can extend to. Sadly, the Broadsword and Cynabal were pushing 50km with no sign of slowing down, leaving just one poor Confessor to fend for itself. Which didn't work out too well. At least that one looked more like a PvP fit. I'd like to say that he stayed to fight, but it's because he couldn't run away as fast as the others with his afterburner. The Confessor's explosions punctuated the end of the fight, but to Marmite's credit, they had depleted my shields. 

I thanked them for content and made my way home, but I have to say that a small part of me was hoping they wouldn't fall for something so simple, yet the vast majority of me was overwhelmingly smug that they did. As well as the fact that war report ended with us being positive on both kills and ISK.

Keeping Up Appearances

Yeah, it's been a while, but you know...

Well, I did do the whole vacation thing though, inclusive of Typhoons and food poisoning - seriously, there isn't a good time to get food poisoning, but a 12 hour flight has definitely got to be one of the worst times to get it. The only saving grace about bringing your wife and kids along in that situation is that you can use their allocation of air sickness bags. Every time I've mentioned this, people did ask the very same question. I wont say what that particular question was, but the answer is: Yes. Both ends.

So... moving swiftly on...

I'm not sure I mentioned it in another blog post (somewhere in what is now ancient history, even with my previous posting regularity), but somehow, Enigma Project are in the WH diplo channel. Yeah, I fucked up. Apparently, our masterplan of staying firmly under the radar failed somewhat. There was originally some contention over how shit the channel name was, but in the end no one was bothered or motivated enough to change it. It's been amusing though, and I might humbly suggest renaming it to "The Salt Mine" should people tire of "PraiseBob". Nothing quite like the tears of other CEO's. And no, I wont be posting endless steams of said tears, but here's something that made me chuckle:

Kazen Orilg > is 13 in here?

Eisu > I'm pretty sure they are, whether anyone from them is on though, idk

Eisu > oh, jay's down there

Jay Joringer > o/

Jay Joringer > I can pretend I'm not here if you prefer

Eisu > maybe he thinks you smell funny or something?

Eisu > or, like the rest of us, jelly of the goggles.

Jay Joringer > Could be that. I get that a lot

Kazen Orilg > we woulda been down to tango, not sure why you rolled us off

At this point, it seems fairly innocuous, but allow me to put this into some context. Kazen Orilg was speaking for The Desolate Order, who were in our chain. We knew that they don't have a big presence in the EU timezone, so we hadn't bothered them... but we had noticed their neighbors trying to roll the connection to The Desolate Order's home hole. We engaged them without fear of getting back-doored by Brave. We blew some stuff up but the hole got rolled anyway, although despite Kazen's comment, our route back to Lazarus was firmly intact though a couple holes out their static. I felt I had to appraise Kazen of the situation:

Jay Joringer > I'm pretty sure we're still connected

Jay Joringer > I've always preferred calypso, but I'd be remiss to turn down a dance

Having intel on Desolate Order's numbers, I knew Kazen's comment was just a display of pure bravado for the higher echelons of the wormhole community to see. The PraiseBob channel is littered with ridiculous comments like this that amount to nothing other than keeping up appearances. On this occassion, it was compounded by the fact one of his guys had already convo'd Dan telling him they didn't have the numbers to fight. But still, they had to see if we were still actually in their chain...

PraiseBob:

FeistyOne > Alayne Mastema buzzard jumped into laz

..meanwhile, on Teamspeak:

Jay > Dan! You've just done an Athanor!

FeistyOne > I haven't, have I?

Jij > Who Posted intel in public channels?

PraiseBob:

An Albatross > lol

Jay Joringer > Guys, we need to stop posting intel in non-corp channels

Eisu > 10/10

But, yes. This is all a thin veneer of having something to say, when I don't. It just a little bit of topical waffle to keep up appearances myself, as an apparent blogger. But I'm confident there will be more content to provide blog content soon. Afterall, holidays and summer are all but over and Enigma Project recruiting again:

The Eye of the Beholder

We try to have some kind of special event occur at least once every month in XIII. I'm not counting this month's as the sexual health advice clinic we had to set up for one of our members (who will remain totally anonymous). Apparently, he had managed to contract chlamydia in his eye. Now, I wasn't even aware that was possible, but then again, I've never been quite careless enough to have any kind of fluid mishap to that area of my face.

Needless to say, we were all very sympathetic. 

OK, we took the piss mercilessly. We also have a tradition of granting a title for notable actions, so to celebrate such an incredible feat (more admitting it to everyone than catching it), we gave him the title of "The eyes have it".

This did end up giving me an idea, though. I'd read about the Eve portrait competitions run by Reality X (below).

If you've not visited www.eveportraits.com, I would definitely say it's worth a visit. Basically, Reality X runs Eve Online's closest thing to a beauty contest and gives out prizes for the best portraits. What is interesting is how unexpected the winners have been, but afterall, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I came up with idea of running XIII's own portrait competition. This would have been easy enough for me to do, however, Reality X had experience in this sort of thing and would likely choose some interesting winners, given how left-field some of the winners of his official contests have been - in my humble opinion. So, I got in contact with him and he agreed to judge our own private contest. Top bloke!

I announced it to the guys and some even made their way to K-Space to find a station, a NEX store and a character re-customisation button. A few days later, Reality X sent us his verdict:

1st Place - Gabriela Arch

RX - "Gabriela: I really liked the simplicity of Gabriela's portrait, the elegant posturing of the figure looking away, and the neutral brown colours of the background, hair, eyes and clothes. It's very well done and comes together nicely."

JJ - Interesting choice for a winner. Wouldn't be the one that I picked, but that's the whole point have having RX judge it for us. Can't argue with his reasoning though.

2nd Place - Athanor Ruthoern

RX - "Athanor: Most of the time when I'm looking for outstanding portraits I try to see if the player spent time with it, maybe by changing the structure of the face, or adding little details (instead of just keeping a "default" face). I can see time and effort was spent with Athanor's portrait. Also, the shadow placement, background choice, and again the posturing of the face looking up is well done."

JJ - To be fair, Athanor did re-do her portrait for this. Definitely better than it was before, but I'm not sold on the blonde cornrows! She did put effort into the new portrait though, so that's fair enough.

3rd Place - Thornir

RX - "Thornir: I picked Thornir because he just looks like a bad-ass dude I woudn't want to run into in a dark alley. The Guristas coat is a nice touch with the background, again with an overall brown colour scheme which works."

JJ - For fuck sake. Really? I was expecting some left-field choices for winners. When I announced the winners to XIII's directors, there was much swearing about this choice. Not because it's a bad choice per se, but for the effect it might have on his ego. Oh well, hopefully it made his eye feel better ;)

Unlucky for Northern Associates

In XIII, we're developing something of a glossary of our own slang terms. For example, "Pink-boxed" means someone has been lost to wife/GF aggro. "Arting" is the completion of a mundane, ordinary task with...

"Content day" is what happens on the rare occasions when you log in and fight until you log off.

I'd logged in as our people were scouting a new static chain and an incoming C4 chain. The static C5 had a C2 static and a bubble-camp had been spotted in the B274 to highsec in the C2. Stillborn Sun had a bunch of ships. Highsec WH's aren't the best place to fight anyone, so we needed some bait they couldn't refuse. Odidi volunteered his Orca, hoping to pull them away from the hole to tackle him as he landed in the bubble. We fleeted up with as many webbing ships as possible to keep them from jumping to highsec. Given how light the composition was, I foolishly decided to dual-box a Svipul and a Daredevil. It hadn't occurred to me until we were in warp to 'rescue' Odi's Orca how fragile my choice of ships was, and for a moment, I wondered how I'd direct the fleet while keeping both ships alive.

Jay > "Er... Kill.... things. Kill all the things. Kill them hard."

Utari > " . . . I can't believe you just said that."

And we've now got the appending of "...it hard." in the glossary as

Still, even with such epic fleet direction, I still managed to almost lose the Svipul. I was considering how not good it was to hear an armour alarm on a local tanked shield ship when reps from Utari's scimitar landed. And after all that, I only managed to get on killmail for the Catalyst, missing out on the Vexor completely, with my Daredevil seeminly useless and a couple of their ships made it through the connection to highsec.

We thanked them for content and as they were expressing their disbelief that the Orca was actually bait, we realised why they were camping the highsec with a bubble as a Gnosis landed in the bubble.

As we head back, we get called to jump out of a direct null as one of our pilots bit off more than he could chew. At the same time, Gab notices a familiar tag in the chain through an incoming C4 - Unseen Wolves. As a corporation, we'd had our first big fight again these guys a while back. On that occasion we'd be outnumbered by around 3:1 and while our numbers had grown, I still wasn't confident we could field comparable numbers. We had to get guys checking that C4 chain while we committed a fleet to null, where to local renters had expressed their intentions to fight in local - something of a rarity.

I'd usually link a battle report at this point, but things got messy. As we started to engage the locals, Unseen Wolves had beat us to the punch and had moved through the chain quicker than our scouts could find where they were coming from, dropping a once again impressively large fleet on us as we prepared for an altogether different fight. The initial exchange saw us lose several guardians in exchange for a Sacrilege,2 Navy Exqurors and a Svipul. We could have easily lost more, with Unseen Wolves fielding about 10 more ships than us so we called in carriers in an attempt to keep the fleet up, but not before CommanderCane's proteus went down. The Wolves bugged out while they still had the killboard advantage.

All the while, O'nira was lamenting not taking the fight in nullsec. We'd engaged some of their bait on the wormhole to Lazarus, but we knew full well they were waiting with some backup behind the only gate out of the system. And their backup included a Thanatos.

The brawl with Unseen Wolves hadn't taken too long to fizzle out, in terms of some eve fights, so I was still confident that Northern Associates would still be up for fighting. After all, you know renters are serious when they are prepared to commit carriers for a roaming gang. We replenished our fleet guardians and took a couple of ships to engage their bait/tackle.

That was enough to get their carrier both committed and tackled. We'd brought neuting ships in anticipation of this, but as they ship-scanned the Thanatos, they noticed it was fitted with a cyno. I wont pretend that the new information had given me a dilemma. No, we had already committed our fleet and the guys wanted the Thanatos to go down. Northern Associates had other ideas about the fate of the Thanatos and warped in 3 archons to keep it up. Now, this was a dilemma.

With the hole already massed from the fight with Unseen Wolves and knowing the Northern associates carriers were rocking cyno's, our fleet needed a little something-something. Oh well, what's the worst that could've happened, eh? I went and got the Naglfar...

Apparently, they'd called for help that they could cyno in during that fight, but were told it was their mess, so no cyno's were lit. The most interesting part of the evening was squeezing everything back through the wormhole. Cane was the last ship through with his Bhaalgorn before I jumped the Nag home. I instructed him to think thin as he jumped. Thankfully, it worked and the emergency cyno I was preparing wasn't needed.

Battlereport

Unlucky for: No Vacancies

WHY SO LATE? WHY SO LATE!?!

I know. I've been slacking on here, but there's a few other things I've been working on, so I'm playing catch up with the blog. This probably wont be followed up be a another post for at least a few days either, just to make up for the lack of posts. I don't even get hassled by Utari either, but I think he's also been slacking on his blog, so I've not been feeling too guilty as a consequence.

I know a couple of people have been looking forward to my version of the No Vacancies fight - yeah, the one that was about a month ago... well, a month and then some. Not being able to write at work anymore -thanks to the new job- has really taken a toll on updates, but I don't think that's the problem. Writing at home is probably easier anyway. At least it would be if I didn't log in to teamspeak. "Jay, we've got pew." "Jay, do you want to interview this guy?" "Jay there's some russian talking in local!"

OK, OK, no more excuses.

So, yeah, there's a tiny bit of completely friendly history with us and No Vacancies. Firstly, there's the part where I nearly joined them when they were still under the guise of Void Legion and I was disillusioned with Disavowed. Then Red Coat Conspiracy rocked up to evict them (which was blogged about in The Centre of the Universe). The outcome was disappointing, with Void Legion becoming part of Disavowed, but the guys moved on again and formed No Vacancies after I'd joined United System's Commonwealth. While under the USYSC banner, we fought NVACA in their home system. The mass on their C3 static caught us out, allowing them to escalate with capitals, which did turn the tide to their favour.

Then I was contacted by my old buddy, Moore McRay, who was once again looking for a WH corp. I didn't think he'd fit in with USYSC, so I sent him over to Viscis, who recruited him. The first time I'd flown with Moore, he got really freaked out by a random mail he got from someone passing him in highsec. It was a simple greeting followed by "I really like your portrait" and nothing more. So, as part of initiating new members to [XIII-], our new guys have to mail him something complementary about his toon.

Moore McRay > jaaay

Jay Joringer > Hey Moore :)

Moore McRay > i need to put all those mails on reddit soon

Eisu > agreed.

Jay Joringer > Can you help me pick a winner?

Moore McRay > you're not hitchhiking here

Moore McRay > uhm as for the best mail

Moore McRay > i need more

Jay Joringer > No problem

Moore McRay > LOL

Then we have 'Doc', AKA Zerolaws. I've mentioned him before since I have NVACA to thank for him joining XIII. They blew up his multi-billion ISK Stratios and refused to let him join them because he had no PvP experience. I've also mentioned that Viscis said "Fuck you!" after I told him I recruited Doc because Viscis rejected him, but I think it's worth covering again, not least because he'd been awesome for us. Still got lots to learn, but is taking it his stride.

So with all that background, the next meeting between our two groups was always going to be an interesting one. Especially with the old USYSC guys joining XIII wanting round 2 with NVACA, and with me and Utari wanting to get Doc involved in a good old dunking at their expense. And then it happened.

"Loads of stuff on scan in the static. [№] Anyone recognise this tag?"

We knew it would happen eventually - such is WH space. But in all honesty, it happened a little sooner than I was hoping for. At the time, XIII only had 64 members with NVACA breaking the century on membership. Of course, this doesn't mean massive amounts if you take PI alts and their timezone crossover into consideration, however it's still a reasonable indicator and I was fully expecting to be outnumbered.

Fighting outnumbered is something regular readers know that XIII delights in. To do so successfully, you need every dirty little advantage you can get your filthy mitts on. So, I felt inclined to remind them of something in the pub channel

Jay Joringer > Biscuits promised he'd bring the fight to us next time.

"Biscuits" is my pet name for Viscis. I don't think he's taken to it, which doesn't surprise me to be honest. It's a tiny bit condescending and doesn't even really sound like Viscis, but what the hell, let's throw some subtle provocation into the mix.

Galdur provided some extra incentive by parking his Phoenix a few clicks off the hole. The NVACA boys went for it and started streaming subcaps through the H296. They probably weren't expecting Galdur's Phoenix to be fit for nailing subcaps and it started raining torps on their fleet as out own warped in.

While this was going on, I was watching the fight unfold in a covert ops. I'd noticed that Viscis had logged on his alt, Andur Konnake and was only on grid with T-X47b, his boosting toon in a Damnation. What this probably meant was he was holding Andur, his dedicated Naglfar pilot, in reserve. Warping back to my POS, I prepared my own Naglfar for a showdown.

I wasn't waiting long. The wormhole disrupted as Andur's Naglfar jumped in and I warped 'Rising Sun' into the fight, despite NVACA having a HIC on grid with a bubble up. It was a gamble to split our dreads up, but I thought the odds were good.

This overly optimistic opinion was reinforced by the appearance that I was getting the better of the initial exchange between the two dreadnaughts, so I left the Phoenix to increase the heart-rate of any subcap pilot he decided to lock up - something that was becoming increasingly difficult with our own subcap losses starting to become worrying. No Vacancies quickly responded, switching all their damage and neuts to me. It's at this point that I found that after I had imbibed a mild(ish)quantity of rum, that the 'consume' option on my blue pill booster wasn't as apparent as I remember it being. I was staring at the context menu thinking: "Where the hell is it? Shouldn't be too hard to find. It's just one word, and it begins with 'C'. Ah-ha! Compare, there it is! Wait, no...".

As the fight went on, the combination of the damage and the energy neuts starting taking a heavy toll on the Nag. I probably should have got the fleet to engage my opposite number, but other problems took priority. Losing the dreadnaught was not an option I was prepared to entertain, and the timing was favourable for me to drop out of siege and get capped up from the Archon that was now on grid, albeit 20km away from me. Well, at least Galdur would be able to refit if he needed. I called for the Archon to lock me up as the siege timer ticked down and eventually expired as my Naglfar hit structure. It was still bleeding hull as the reps landed, but didn't drop much lower than 80% once there was enough capacitor to restart the shield tank. They must have thought they were close as the damage stayed on me for a little while afterwards, but when their focus started to swift, more of our support ships went down.

No Vacancies went balls deep, bringing an Archon into the fight. Props to the boys - they really meant it and perhaps they scented blood after depleting our subcap fleet. That's the problem with flopping a strong hand; if you don't read your opponent right, he can still bad beat you on the river. And XIII were rallying. Despite having less numbers, I knew that home advantage would make the difference and alts of the guys who were podded started warping in to the fight to reinforce what we had left on grid. A second Archon made sure that the remaining subcaps would survive and as the my Naglfar approached a state of readiness to drop back into siege, Utari bought my Moros in to help out with Odidi bringing in an additional Naglfar. With that much firepower trained on it, the Archon lasted close to 2 minutes. The NVACA subcaps started to bail as soon as their Naglfar hit armour. We tackled whatever was too slow to escape, but relented pursuit in respect of them bringing one hell of a fight. We offered to show them the way out, but their scouts were already on the ball.

The fight was as fun as it was intense, but it wasn't the best part of the night. As we were looting the field...

Orange Aideron > so ... pew pew

Orange Aideron > ?

Blue-Fire at their subtle best. Galdur suggested over comms that we do the same to them. Thanks to No Vacancies, we had little choice with our PvP ship stock suddenly in a less than desirable, depleted state. I consented, with more than a strong feeling that Blue-Fire would not take what was being offered. I was not disappointed, and the guys were treated to some glorious rage with additional fat-finger syndrome, courtesy of Orange Aideron:

Orange Aideron > lol oh come on

Orange Aideron > the gayness is sooo stronk

Orange Aideron > 2 archons

Orange Aideron > you guys suck

Orange Aideron > seriously guck you
Orange Aideron > im so fucked off right now!

Orange Aideron > okay well gl rolling it tell your guys to log its over for tonight.

While Irish Saint apologised for not having the numbers to contend with what we had, there was a collective smugness going around XIII. And it was probably a good few days before we stopped saying "guck you!" to each other.

Otherwise, here is the battlereport for No Vacancies. Guck them too.

And the vid. Guck youtube.

All The Small Things

A few people have been asking about a certain fight that happened this week. This isn't it! This is just a quick little something-something until that's written up (soon™). 

Sometimes it's not the big fights or the big kills that make you smile the most.

Every now and again when we got a Wolf-Rayet static with a quiet chain, we'd take advantage of the system bonus and take out a fleet of Coercers and Catalysts backed up with Augorors to run a few sites. It something that a few of the newer guys to the corp had never tried, and given how refreshing we had found it compared to cap escalations, it was something we were eager to get them in on.

The static had some activity earlier in the evening, but it seemed all OEG Industrial's pilots seemed to be offline - something that was not unusual for a russian corp with low activity on the killboard at that time of night. Sherpa watched the connection while I set up an Eos in a safespot, while being acutely aware that the Eos cost more than our entire ratting fleet combined.

It's no secret that the Wolf-Rayet bonus in C5's gives certain frigates and destroyers in the region of 1000dps and a low enough signature radius combined with resists decent enough to handle the incoming damage from a sleeper site with just a couple of Augorors. A single site will pay for the whole fleet with some change, but it's easy to lose the ships if you aren't careful with transversal and sig bloom from MWD. And as PvE in Eve goes, it's actually pretty fun.

After a couple of sites, we'd brought in a Noctis to clean up after us. That was when I noticed a Loki appear briefly on Dscan. Odi said the tag was something he'd seen on the ships before the Russians logged off. If they were logging back in, I doubted they'd take kindly to us running their sites. Despite how the Destroyers performed versus the sleepers, the small amount of armour hitpoints didn't make them viable for a sustained battle against a balanced fleet. The raw dps a group of them ought to be enough to deter solo gankers, however the concern was for the Noctis.

We sent the Noctis home as soon as the combat probes appeared on Dscan. With no new signatures and nothing having jumped past Sherpa, it had to be the locals. And it has to be said, they were crap at scanning. Eventually, we caught the probes on close range Dscan to our fleet. A few minutes passed, while they must have been getting eyes on field and perhaps a warp in, but suddenly the probes moved and started to home in on the Eos.

If I'm flying the Eos, it usually means I'm dual-boxing, so I tend not to put a point on it. The midslots I interchange for various types of EWAR. On this occasion, it was still fitted with sensor dampeners. Just as I was lamenting this choice, a Proteus landed on grid and started to lock up the Eos, perhaps expected a helpless offgrid boosting ship. Oops! I couldn't have been happier that he'd gone for the Eos over anything else. I returned the lock, setting drones on the aggressor. What was worse for the Proteus pilot was that I fit my Eos with neuts in the spare high slots, so it would only be a matter of time until he was dead in the water. The only problem was that he could still warp out.

This is an eventuality we had planned for, however. Sherpa decloaked his own Proteus to point his opposite number. To add insult to injury, we warped the ratters, along with a Sabre in to get on the killmail and the pod.