Renovating Providence

I was able to participate in my first CTA for about one and a half weeks today – a lot has happened since my last decent battle report.

The long story short is that Providence region is being divided up into small little pieces by Atlas, Against All Authorities, Systematic Chaos and Ushra’Khan. Sylph alliance has completely gone from the influence map and it won’t be long before CVA disappears entirely also.

Sir Pewalot on an Erebus, waiting for a jump bridge

Today’s CTA was called in order to complete the take over of R3-K7K just before downtime. It was planned that Systematic Chaos were going to have this system, but -A- and U’K had brought a fleet to assist.

I had the pleasure of flying with my corp mate and long-time blogger Wensley of Rifter Drifter in the tempest here

The first part of the operation went smoothly – we had to take two titan bridges to get from our home system of GE- into the target system of R3-K7K. The middle system was 9UY – the Ushra’Khan-owned station system that fell a couple of weeks back.

Using only carriers/supercarriers and sub-capitals, we jumped into the target system on top of a small battlecruiser-heavy gate-camp which sensibly bugged out as fast as they could. We then warped to a POS and jumped our small dread fleet in.

carrier fleet aligning to POS

Next it was the station – We warped everyone to the station and started pew pewing it. I knew that we would likely be doing this so beforehand I contacted my mate at CCP and got them to refit my Megathron with Special GM lasers as you can see in the shot below. This meant the station dropped far more quickly than it would have otherwise.

Super-mega-ultra-pew-pew railguns

As you can see here: Wensley was a bit slack and didn’t call in any CCP favours and his weapons are somewhat lacking

Note the station name: “Science and Slave Augmentation Facility”. This is honourable work we are doing here, removing the slaver blight once and for all.

Nevertheless – there cannot be a battle in providence without some kind of drama. In all this time, despite the fact that Systematic Chaos were going to be given the system, there were no Sys-K pilots in our fleet, nor in local until just before the station was about to die (about half structure). Then a couple popped in and unanchored their Sovereignty Blockade Units, rendering the station invulnerable and preventing the system take-over just before down time.

I don’t yet know the fallout from this, hopefully it is not a prelude to war between -A- and Sys-K. I don’t think so because they’re involved in their own war at the moment apparently and they probably just didn’t want the system to be theirs anyway, but they went about it the entirely wrong way.

Now, after downtime, we’ll have to anchor our own SBU’s and wait for three hours while they anchor and online, then siege the station again – another five days of sieging……. bah. such is life in 0.0.

Also: Hi everyone reading this via Capsuleer! *waves* It feels good to be part of the blog pack! I’d appreciate some feedback: I base my blog very heavily on screenshots. is it easier to read the blog with full shots like above, or with clickable thumbnails like this:

Unity Station 9UY4-H

I can almost hear the tears of joy in the voices of the Ushra’Khan members on voice coms. After many years of struggle against the Amarr, they have finally reclaimed the station that they created and was taken from them so long ago.

Unity station
Haven for the Ushra’Khan
Freedom for the Slaves

A glorious moment even if the station was relinquished without a fight.

May the Ushra’Khan use it wisely. -A- are going back to catch and I’ll be able to dock for the first time in a week.

In other news, Razor and Morsus Mihi alliances both declared war against -A- the very moment the station fell, and then Wildly inappropriate shortly after. We’ll see if anything becomes of this, I expect Mostly Harmless and Tau Ceti Federation will follow suit.

Thoughts and ramblings

Before I continue, I would like to say that I mean no disrespect of any kind to the people in providence region. nor am I trying to contribute to a propaganda campaign.

I just have a few thoughts on gaming in general which this campaign in to providence has made me think about. Particularly the part where today, with 400 in local, the vast majority of which were -A- and Ushra’Khan we reinforced the station in 9UY without even a wimper of coordinated resistance.

TL;DNR:
My new theory: Role players may not be of the type of person that are able to beat those that are playing the game for the purposes of being good at it, for winning.

Let me explain:

—

I am a type of gamer who plays to be the best, I don’t play games for fun, I play for the satisfaction that comes from winning. I joined the Northern Coalition and then Against All Authorities because they are among the best in the game at what they do. I wanted to experience all there is to experience, and I want my alliance (and by extension, me) to win. As a result of this, I will shut up on Team Speak when the FC is talking, I will do exactly as he/she says, I will bring the best ship I can, fitted exactly as the alliance leaders dictate. When there’s a CTA on I will be in fleet and on voice chat and I will do my absolute best to be the best at my role in fleet. I try to have my “game face” on at all times.

Recently, during the lockdown of D-G one of our FC’s said that when CVA + pets were bubbled in their own POS, instead of jumping out, they should have dropped the POS forcefield and started shooting. That’s what our FC’s would have done.

Recently in a campaign against the goons, the goons defeated the -A-/IT attack by reinforcing their own ihub. They wanted to win, they used game mechanics to do it.

-A- are committed to winning this war and we will use every legitimate tool at our disposal to do it.

My alliance leadership are the same. They want to win at all costs, it’s what they enjoy doing. I am going to reproduce a post from the -A- forums here – I hope it doesn’t get me into trouble, but I’m sure it’s fairly harmless:

During this campaign: DO NOT EVER EVER EVER TALK IN LOCAL….If you have something to say ….do it in corp/alliance/ and if its damn important ..gang. Kill provi with silence. Kill Provi with guns. Kill them any other way but trying to do it in local. Close local.. Keep it closed. I know that the smack comes from other alliances as well. -A- will not do it. Burn it all to the ground with a grin on your face.

What is providence supposed to do in the face of such cold determination?

Does a roleplayer even play for the same reasons? I don’t know, I’ve never really met any.

My theory is No. I believe having dedicated roleplayers who truly get pleasure out of playing this game for those reasons at the head of your alliance will cause them to be less focussed on winning and more about “fun” or whatever roleplay reasons they have chosen to adopt.

Perhaps I am an ignorant non-role-player, but I have an image in my head of a fat guy playing mock up medieval battles with foam swords Vs a hardened heavy cavalry knight from the actual middle ages.

Proviholders

-A-/U’K

or perhaps this image would be a better representation of the current state of affairs:

Am I being too harsh/Ignorant? do I have a valid point perhaps?

This is a campaign that relies on the morale of the enemy breaking, one of the reasons that 9UY was chosen as a target. Please tell me that CVA wants to actually hold their territory rather than just go off to empire with a wimper at the first sign of a fight.

First impressions of the South

So I have recently joined Against All Authorities. I originally applied to Ushra’Khan, but weighing up the options and pros and cons of each option, -A- suited me better. I’m used to being in a large space holding alliance while Ushra’Khan is more of a roaming-bases alliance. Every corporation generally has requirements to remain part of it and the Ushra’Khan corporation that I applied to required a payment of anywhere between 2 and 10 million per month per member to support the role-playing wardec against the providence members. The corporation that I have joined as part of -A- requires that every member get 20 killmails per month to remain in the corporation. This was more to my liking, and so I chose to join them. There were some other smaller reasons that also contributed. The 20 kills haven’t been hard to accomplish, having been on 26 ship kills in 4 days. some of those were of course as part of the large battle for D-G, but nevertheless I think it won’t be hard to maintain a good rate.

Before I go any further, I’d like to set the record straight about Goons and the Providence holders. I blame Podded Podcast for the source of this misinformation but I have since seen many people on both sides of the battle lines deny that the goons and providence holders are in any sort of non-hostile agreement, including seeing declarations to that end in Ushra’Khan pilots bio. I’d like to apologise for perpetuating this myth.

Against All Authorities Market system of G-E

First Impressions of the south:

Against All Authorities
This alliance seems extremely well organised. It seems like there is almost 50% russian pilots and so every fleet that I have been on except the small roaming gangs have had the fleet commands translated from english into russian either by the FC himself or a translator. Most of the important fleet commands are also transliterated into fleet chat in english, which most of the russians can apparently read better than they can understand spoken english. This is quite cool. I think though I will make an effort to at least learn how to count in russian so I can get an idea which gate they’re talking about before the translation comes along.

It is hard to compare it to my previous alliance Mostly Harmless because there has also been some changes in the sovereignty mechanics since I last participated in large fleet fights. It seems that Capital ships are deployed with an almost reckless abandon compared to what I’m used to and Battleships are relegated to an almost support role. This is good in a way as it increases the incentive for pilots to train for capital ships. I’m certainly inspired in any case. on Saturday night we had a CTA to go and destroy some goon POS’s in Querious and the battleship fleet wasn’t used for anything except destroying cyno jammers so that the capital fleet could warp in and do its thing.

General fighting
The highlight of the evening was coming back from querious to Catch via empire, where the fleet of 50+ battleships stumbled upon a 5 man war target camp in a 0.9 security system. our scout mentioned they were there and one of the alliance undocked a freighter at the station and warped it to the gate. The wartargets must have been so busy wetting themselves that a freighter had been stupid enough to warp to the middle of their little camp that they didn’t notice the battleship fleet jump in. We killed Two Loki’s. Very cool.

Also of course, we had the huge fight in D-G the other night, the same day I joined.

Fleet Salvation Initiative
My first thoughts when joining the alliance and reading alliance mails about CTA’s was that everything was fairly similar to what I’ve been used to for so long. Get the Teamspeak details, get the jump bridge map, bookmark all gates along the main routes etc. but then they kept on referencing “FSI” as in: “CTA 18:00 Dreads > Carriers > BS > FSI > support” which usually tells you what to bring in order of priority. After asking around I found that FSI stood for “Fleet Salvation Initiative”. this is simply the most organised bunch of logistics ships that I’ve heard of in a nullsec alliance. if you can fly a logistics ship but can’t afford, or don’t want to afford one. just grab an alliance logi ship before the op and hand it back afterwards. Pilots are encouraged to rotate out from damage dealing ships into the FSI every now and then.

Casual Roaming
My prior experience to frigate/cruiser roams have been mixed. In the north, unless we stumbled on a gang of empire guys wanting a bit of pew, or some pirates that ventured into nullsec for a change, most of the fights were close things. We would go roaming down through cloud ring and syndicate where Evoke was at the time and during these roams we all knew it was only a matter of time before an equal or more powerful fleet of evoke or Sons of Tangra was formed to take us down and it would be an intense fight on a gate somewhere, after which only one side would emerge victorious.

My first roam through providence however was completely different.

I dusted off my Onyx, which hasn’t seen action for a couple of months and joined up with a mixed cruiser/frigate gang that was going for a little roam through southern Providence. Ga’len a fellow blogger from Ushra’Khan joined up in his vagabond and about 20 of us roamed free, back and forth through a few dozen systems owned by CVA and Paxton Federation. No one stopped us, no one seemed to care. We hit a little bit of a gate camp at one point but they were quickly dispatched. We went to one station system and bubbled the station, staying there for a few minutes while unsuspecting proviholder members undocked and died. Now, when I first joined eve, I spent a little bit of time down in severence’s space and I had access to their intel channels. When a red was reported nearby you safe’d up and waited until they went away or got destroyed. I find it hard to believe that providence’s intel channels have degenerated so far that people were so willing to die to our fleet.

Bubbling a station

Perhaps it is just a lack of morale after losing D-G to -A- or perhaps it’s just a general incompetance. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but my initial impressions are not good.

What was good however, was getting back into my Hictor. they seem to be appreciated a little bit more in this alliance. I did stuff up at one stage – that station in the screenshot above is an amarr refinery. I’d never seen one of these before and moved to the other end and bubbled, not realising that the undock point is the flat end, not the pointy one. “Fail bubble” on teamspeak and a sorry from me in fleet chat and I changed to the position you see above. I won’t make that mistake again.

Other thoughts
I am in the same corporation as Wensley of rifter drifter fame. he is also a new recruit. it will be interesting comparing our blogs. I think we have different blogging styles and we come from different backgrounds in the game so there shouldn’t be too much overlap. hopefully he’ll pick me up when I exaggerate too much about -A- victories

Business is War

I am a business man by nature, as are most of my race. The Caldari have always been and will continue to be in the foreseeable future. Supply and demand. These are the two irrefutable laws that we live with just as other races live with gravity and the principles of thermodynamics.

My decision to apply to The Ushra’Khan is not, therefore, based on any political motivation, nor is it a self-righteous crusade to free the Minmatar slaves. Although I can sympathise with them, I also understand the desires of their Amarr overlords. Yet still I believe the practice of holding slaves inefficient. Amarr society should be freed from this burden, the slaves replaced by automations, “robots” if you will, which are far more cost effective.

Nevertheless, the demand that has compelled me to join with the Minmatar freedom fighters is a purely selfish one. I have a grudge against the Goonswarm and all their allies. A grudge which has caused great demand, and vengeance must be supplied. It has become apparent that the Amarr loyalist Providence holders have chosen their side in this conflict. It is my decision, therefore as a business man, to free them from themselves, from their inefficiencies, from their mis-placed loyalties, from their yet still living corpses.

Business is War, as they say…. and I have business to attend to in Providence.