Monthly Archives: July 2011
Epic fights and raging ex-corpmates
I took a day off missioning which provided me with a much needed break that I mentioned in the previous post. It also made ISK, which is nice!
I jumpcloned back to find that 3 Blues had been kicked for a variety of reasons, the main one being that these 3 continuously used “gank” ships to score easy kills (arty canes against frigs) and repeatedly crashed fleet fights with larger ships (dropping cruisers into a frig fight, for example) and despite multiple warnings continued to do it and as such were kicked.
Obviously we abused director roles in doing this and we all suck, so they’ve set up a corp and war dec’d us. Good, we’ve been wanting one for a while!
Last night saw a series of frigate fights which all kicked arse. The first 3 involved about 20 aside (and we won them) then we had massive brawl in Hageken. Both sides continuously reshipped till by the end there were at least 100 wrecks on the field. We had about 60 kills to 50 losses.
Oh, and RvB is currently running a Tech 1 Frig Hull weekend! “Back to Basics”
Should be excellent fun!
Kill milestone and FC Burnout
Today (actually, yesterday because it’s 1am) I hit the 1000 Real Kills (non noobship/shuttle) milestone.
o/
The day started off in a negative fashion. An hour of scanning nearby systems for Radar sites had netted me no ISKies and upon my return to Red HQ there was a Blue BC/Cruiser fleet already camping. *sigh*
Join fleet, get Megathron, undock overwhelming firepower, enemy run, assume command of Fleet, reship to frigs, off we go!
The Blues are all over, so I decide to camp in Akon on our own system’s gate. A good move, because an Arbitrator came through. The Arbi promptly exploded. Then a Hurricane came in. Boom. Myrmidon? Very nice tank (I adore triple rep myrms) but boom.
All within 15 minutes of each other yet none reported us to the other Blues. *sigh*
Moving the fleet to the Autaris gate we had a tank Thorax jump in, followed within minutes by a Harb and a Cormorant, followed by a Caracal, followed by another Myrm, followed by a Drake.
So many kills! Battle Report: http://redfed.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=10248457
We hung round on a gate for a further half hour before eventually moving round into Vellaine and into the BHQ system of Autaris. We then sat in a belt for 20 minutes advertising our presence in local to the Blue fleet who were sat at a Safe. Who then accused us of playing Hide and Seek.
Haha. No.
I got bored of waiting and had us warp near the BHQ station. Eventually a Blue Slicer ran in close (close for them, 25km) and in came their fleet with 2 more people than us, 2 cruisers and a fucking slicer and kiting hookbill to boot. Needless to say, we lost.
A merlin during the fight was my 1000th kill, so huzzah! \o/
I log in later in the day to find a pair of Blue ‘canes warping in and out of our HQ grid, sniping at frigs then warping off. So we undock sniper BS’s which they proceed to complain about. Of course. After an hour of nothing happening I took us out in Frigs, leaving the Blue “clique” (which was now in 2 taranis, a kiting hookbill and a slicer) to go actually fight something. We engaged a Blue fleet on a nearby gate and we won by about 2 guys. You know, the 2 guys that we would have lost by if the Blue “clique” had bothered to stop picking off the new guys and helped their corpmates. But anyway…
The Blue fleet disbanded, meaning all we had left to fight was the kiting aforementioned Frigates. Which never fought, merely swooped in and ganked any outlyers.
No point in having a fleet, so I logged.
——————-
Lately I’ve been running a majority of the EU timezone Fleets and it’s getting to me. I know 0.0 guys will read this and think “pshh, 25 guys? In Frigs? That’s nothing” and yet day after day after day it is. I love FC’ing, but with all the bitching and moaning and seeing our guys getting ganked and their guys getting ganked and people not listening and not working together I’m reaching a breaking point. I’m running fleets every minute I’m online (with the exception of the occasional fleet).
I contemplated taking a break from FC’ing but then noone would lead. The other day I didn’t set a fleet up. Guess who set one up instead? Noone. We went 4 hours with no fleet, people claiming “no FC” and asking others to set it up. I was not a happy capsuleer.
I’m not a very good FC by any means. My tactics are primitive and I get annoyed easily but apparently I’m one of the very few that actually bother to try, which is why if I were to stop FC’ing there’d be a problem but if I don’t stop FC’ing I’m going to burn out of RvB completely.
RvB GankED Night – Rifters errywhere
Tonight was the first ever Red vs Blue public GankED night. And it was awesome.
The premise of the GankED night was thus: Bring a Rifter hull. We go to nul-sec. You do not return with your ship. Shoot everything not fleeted.
We formed up the fleet at about 19:30 EVE time in the Blue system of Autaris. Some of the Blues were out in force station camping the new 3rd party war decs, so we were missing a few of them. By the time our RIFTERS were together, we had about 51 pilots, with about 10 being neutrals. Fuck yeah.
Off into Lowsec we went en route to Tribute, looking for fights. Upon jumping into the Nul-Sec entry system of M-OEE8 we encountered some BUBBLES which until very recently had played host to a gatecamp. Sadly, they ran away as we jumped in. Boo.
Moving onwards, we saw some rats off a gate and went to pewpew. Unfortunatly this meant moving off gate and as we did so, Chribba came past in a Tengu. Missed him!
There's a neutral in the system...
Further into 0.0 space we went, hoping to meet up with Azual of Agony Unleashed in the next few jumps.
Then epicness went down.
We jumped into N-FK87 and were met with a a T3 Cruiser+Logi gang.
With one aim in mind, we decloaked and engaged. We knew we couldn’t win, but we would die taking down some expensive shit.
A scimitar was called and it fell in mere seconds to the autocannon onslaught. Second was a Stabber Fleet Issue who melted. Next up was an unlucky Tengu who boasted a hell of a tank that took a solid minute or so to chomp through. However, he too died horribly shortly followed by a Loki. We started on a Loki but couldn’t break his tank, so we obliterated the last scimitar to try and weaken it. Sadly by this point we had about 7 on grid and we knew that that was it.
Oh, and we did meet up with Azual. Technically.
[ 2011.07.22 20:26:02 ] Azual Skoll > caught up with fleet, promptly died
2 of us, myself included, got out with our Rifters and back to High-sec despite the camp in M-OEE8. Unfortunately, I fucked up and drifted off an undock in Autaris and got killed by someone who had kill rights on me from the other week.
Oops.
We slowly began regrouping for a second run, this time opening the fleet to “any ship you want”.
Something odd happened when a Red member in the fleet engaged and destroyed a Blue ship and pod that was also in our fleet. Podding isn’t allowed between Red and Blue, so we immediately primaried him and blew his pod into a thousand pieces and booted his arse too. The Blue pilot was afk as well, and confused as hell when he returned. The ex-red posted this in r-v-b just before we kicked him.
[ 2011.07.22 21:09:47 ] Storeslemm > got poded
Yes. Yes you did.
Some years later, we finally had the full fleet assembled and headed out in a different direction. We came across precisely nothing except an afk dominix (we think) and a stealth bomber that decloaked on a station.
As we moved past our old battle site, one of our members who had dropped back a couple jumps took a slightly different route to reach us and died to a camp.
Revenge must be had.
We shifted into top gear and warped to the system, trying and failing to catch a Dramiel that was nearby in the process. As we jumped into KLY-C0 and warped to the gate, we found nothing. As most of us landed, someone called that the Dramiel had engaged on the gate we’d just warped from. We fleetwarped back and all hell broke loose mid-warp.
“Cane. Two canes warped in. Agressed.”
We landed mere moments before the enemy fleet. A HAC/BC heavy gang from Raiden. and the NC.
Let the fun begin.
Our FC starts rattling off targets and I see a few targets go down but within a mere minute my Rifter is primaried and promptly blown up. It seems the enemy fleet had primaried our Frigates in an attempt to stop their Vagabonds being tackled. It didn’t work, as we took down two of them within short order, our two Battleships ripping holes in their hulls.
We obviously lost the fight but we did damn well against such a force. Great fun and kuos to Mangala whose FC’ing brought us a much better result than I anticipated.
Battle Report: http://redfed.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=10211987
(I have a short video of this one uploading now, but it’s taking a while)
That was it for the night, so I warped my pod into a bubble and took the pod express back to Highsec.
Overall it was an utterly fantastic night and a great success for the first RvB GankED roam. I cannot wait for more in the future. Get yourself in one!
Some great fights
But I didn’t screenshot any, and what’s a battle report without screenshots?
In the mean time, this happened not long after DT yesterday.
http://redfed.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=10189405
9 kills to 2 losses? I approve.
Edit: It happened due to sheer luck and a good warp in thanks to the Slicer.
We’re moving!
RvB is in the process moving from our current HQ systems of Halle and Jurlesel in Everyshore to Autaris and Hageken in Lonetrek. The primary reasons for this move are:
- Closer to a market hub (Jita is now 5 Jumps)
- Easier Low access (2 jumps to lowsec)
- Easier Nul access (4 jumps to Tribute 0.0)
Moving 800 people isn’t easy. To put it one way, a majority of us used the well known Courier corp Red Frog Freight. Red Frog Freight use a scale to indicate how busy they are.
Small – Med- Large – Huge – Kong – *something* – Kraken
We contacted them a day in advance, warning them of the impending move so they hired in a few extra pilots.
Half an hour before we announced the move, they were at Medium. 4 Hours later, they were at huge. I logged on this morning, and they had added a new busy-level onto the end: Cthulu. We were pretty amused.
Once I had sent out a couple of corp wide evemails regarding the move, I began packing my own things. It was a weird sight, seeing my usually busy hanger organised and packaged into containers. Even weirder was the fact that, for the first time in my EVE career, I was to be basing out of non-Gallente space. So far from the systems I had called home for the last year. So far from Dodixie, and my mission Dominix which would not be coming with me. So far from my old still-full-of-relics hanger at Eglennaert.
The HMS Echovald preparing to be couriered
I loaded my crap up into the courier contracts, leaving my old Taranis (flown 4 times in BTEK) as my moving-ship and away it all went. 4 Freighter loads for me. Some corp mates had barely an Iteron III full, whilst others had over 25 Freighters worth.
Joining a “MOVING DAY!” fleet with some corpmates, we chatted our way through the move as I jumped in my Taranis and followed Captain Hurrdurr’s Navy Slicer over to the new battlegrounds. After spending the day making bookmarks, trying desperately to pronounce the system names here (seriously Caldari, WHAT THE FUCK) and generally being asshats as Purple was on for the move duration and we couldn’t shoot Blues, I logged for the night.
This morning brought the pleasant surprise of all my stuff now being in my hanger! Woohoo! I checked all my stuff, rearmed all my guns and jumped into a fleet to prat about since Purple was still on, bar one nearby system.
So we obviously camped said system. With space-cop spaceships.
This yielded the first two kills of the new RvB Battlegrounds.
http://redfed.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=10153226
http://redfed.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=10153378
Shortly thereafter, we discovered one Blue in system. Captain Hurrdurr warped his Dramiel off, calling “Warp to me” 2 minutes later.
Did we land on a Blue? No.
He’d brought us to an NPC site.
DIE RATS DIE
Minutes after our crushing victory over the Pirate Scum we got word of some Blues incoming to the system so I hauled the fleet over to the gate. An equal sized Blue fleet jumped into us and we engaged will all guns blazing. Well, as the only Assault Frigate my Wolf was primaried, so I actually just held aggro before jumping in low armor to buy my fleetmates more time. I jumped back into the fight to help finish the remaining ships (kudos to Sayyahdina for stepping up to target call after I jumped out) and we scored a convincing victory. This marked the first RvB fleet fight in the new systems and as someone on comms said;
“I was there”
From one of the engagements
P.S. I was going to write a Frigate small gang guide, but I hit a writers wall. More should come on that front shortly…
