Friday, April 13, 2012

when preparation meets opportunity

Dian Lung > "maybe we should say sorry to all the people we told to fuck off" "NO GODDAMNIT, IF YOU TELL ME I'M TROLLING FIVE TIMES WHEN I SAY I HAVE A NYX POINTED I'LL FUCKING WELL TELL YOU TO FUCK OFF"

it's funny to me- i sat down this week intending to write a blog post and really dragging my feet about it. now it was hard for me to go to bed and get through work before writing this next one

the reason should be obvious:
http://ransm.killmail.org/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13047561

holy shit

gunpoint diplomacy's first super cap kill \o/

it went down like this:

we had just finished ganking a slippery drake in atlar and our little gank gang was headed back to bosena to dock up. me for the night, the rest to get drunk and spin until they had to go to bed at the time normal people go to bed~

as we're warping home, titus veridius, who's obviously not ready to stop killing for the night, announces on ts that he's going to go scout and probe the istodard pocket before coming home to bos. people halfheartedly acknowledged and we trudged our way home

about 15 minutes later, i was doing my nightly rituals: adjusting market orders, minor ship logistics and just shooting the shit, procrastinating my inevitable bedtime when titus blurts out:

"nyx on scan in sakulda"

now, you should know that this happens fairly often. plenty of alliances use backwater systems in dead end pockets around mh and derelik for supercap logistics. hell, even some raiden. and quam singulari guys use their supercarriers to run level 5 missions from the republic fleet agents around mh

nobody really cares

"it's at a pos, right?"
"what time is it?"
"fuck man, he's got a titan buddy in there"
"CARE"

titus didn't give up though

"i'm pretty sure he's at a safe"

i'm already refitting my devoter for super tackling

i was landing on the oddelulf gate when titus announced that the nyx was actually at a safespot, not within the safety of a pos

"i've probed it. i'm sitting 50km off of him and he's got 0 velocity"

now we're fucking talking

suddenly gripped by a sense of urgency, a lot of shit started happening really fast. the call for more heavy interdictors to come to sakulda started hitting every friendly(ish) channel we had characters in. cynos were shifting all over the place. friends self destructed pods, clone jumped and podded through high sec to get into the area

titus gang-warped my devoter to the scan result the instant it hit sakulda local. not seeing a nyx on scan, my heart was pretty far sunk as i warped to the result. i'm good at dealing with disappointment, but near misses on careless supercapitals has become almost a regular occurrence in my life

"nothing here dude. you sure you weren't seeing thin-"

::bump::

my devoter bounced off the cloaked nyx, now 700m from my ship

"point"

that was it. batphones were ringing off the hook, every channel was now fucking SPAMMED with us begging for help

the call was hictor>armor logi>dps>whatever... and people just couldn't believe that i was serious

xxxalloxxx jumps on comms:
"are you serious?"
i'm urgently repeating ship orders and system name
"yes i'm serious"
"get to sakulda. hictor, armor reps or dps"
"are you fucking serious?"
"yes, i'm serious. nyx tackled. i need backup BADLY. sakulda. hic, reps or dps"
"this is a troll"

and i lost it

"DO I SOUND LIKE I'M FUCKING TROLLING? NYX TACKLED. SHUT UP AND HELP ME OR FUCK OFF"

responses pretty much cleared up after that. some time in the huge chat mess, titus had landed on grid in a hictor followed by his alt. vanderie was along shortly after adding yet another point... and the guy logged off. maybe he didn't know about the new aggro and logoff mechanics? no matter. let's burn him down

people kept offering to bring dreads to help tear him down faster~ don't get me wrong, they were awesome to offer. the problem with supers is that where there's one, there's typically 20 more. the last thing i wanted was to have this nyx tackle turn into a clusterfuck of friendly(ish) cap losses should he light a cyno and bring in whatever support to help try and shake him loose. that and a supercap fc in burn eden [nc(dot)] had responded to my spammed plea for help and was on his way with a gaggle of supers

awesome

from previous run-ins with nc(dot), i knew better than to have anything on the field that i would regret getting blapped by a titan. i figured that while this ran the risk of the guy coming back and managing to self destruct before we could murderize him, it was the safest way to halfway control the absolute shitfuckery of chaos that was forming around this dude

sure enough, as he was going into structure, the nyx pilot logged back in, activated his tank (capital armor rep, hardeners, pesky fucking damage control~) and initiated self destruct

oh well

friendly cyno on the field not 10 seconds after self destruct initiated and out poured 10 nc(dot) supers and their 9 supporting carriers

in the end, a nyx and his empty pod died, there were no friendly fire incidents and everyone walked away happily with a km

oh! and allo remembered to start fraps!

thanks everyone who came out and made this possible. i'm still trying to figure out what that guy was doing out in our neighborhood with his pants down but so far coming up dry

maybe i'll never know~

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

spring update 2012

Dirty Protagonist > quick! someone say something funny
Dong Orson > hatchery is good at pvp

it's been a while since i posted anything to this here blog i run so i figured it's time for a quarterly update~

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i guess i'll start with the most recent first: marauder ganking~

ransm has ganked miners in molden heath high sec for ages. roaming bands of thrashers would often show up in teon local accompanied by hilarious(~) gifs and followed by honoure-fiilled(~) gfs. often there would be multiple casualties. hulks, mackinawsretrievers, covetors and pods.... sometimes even assault ships

we used to get multiple alts providing multiple warp ins on multiple hulks(~) and it was AWESOME. we would be able to alpha one, hit his pod as we warped to the next, land, hit another miner, hit his pod, etc. our best record was 3 warps yielding 5 mining ships and 2 pods

unfortunately, ccp declared this shoot and warp thing to be an exploit and has since patched the game to prevent us from achieving such glory~

we couldn't let this hamper our suicide ganking so to the mathboat we went. after doing some timing experiments with concord in high sec, we determined that we could use 12-15 catalysts to suicide gank an orca if i didn't fit a reinforced bulkhead nor damage control

AWESOME~

but why stop there? once again a'sail in ye ole mathboat, we determined that we could use 10 catalysts to take down mission fit marauders. the call went out, alt probers got busy, ships were scanned and it wasn't long til the first vargur and pod went up in balls of blue fire

after that it has been nearly non-stop the past week. eve-kill estimates us at ganking over 36.7 billion isk in assets

holy fuck~

kane rizzel also has a fantastic write-up on these shenanigans over at his blog, a pirate's perspective

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i wanted to take a second to plug a molden heath resident and fellow pirate joe struck

joe is the owner and operator of Joe's Signpainting, Pinstriping and Tatoos (http://spacejoe.blogspot.com/)

his work is top notch and his prices are more than reasonable. i'm talking to him now about doing a much-needed banner for the blog and maybe a matching forum sig

check him out if you're into eve art and stuff

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omg armor hacs. ARMOR HACS~
our latest fleet doctrine to be met with insane success has been ab armor ships. i think that most of eve knows about the afterburner propelled, low sig, high damage, low range cruisers by now so it's not like it's anything new, but i like our spin on it: ruptures

the fit is silly, but we've had a lot of success with them. from forcing carriers to self destruct (another story entirely) to killing 3b isk bhaalgorns 

basically, it's a burly armor tank, little bit of low range dps, some smartbombs for clearing drones and a handful of guardians to make them ridiculously hard to kill. it works really well with 8-10 guys and only gets better from there

i know i posted about this back in january when it was still relevant, but here's a vid of us using a similar gang to cause all kinds of problems: laktos's "tale of two pocos"

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i guess that's it for now. i hope you're all enjoying the crucible patch as much as i have been