Declarations of War – Revisited

Noir. Pilot Prometheus09 lays it out for you.

“Mister Petition Response Copy Pasting GM” is up!

Link to EVE Forums thread with all True Heroes download links.

5 PM. Friday. Getting off work.

Check forums.

Big fuckoff topic : EMERGENCY CONTRACT LOG THE HELL IN with bold and flashy bits. Oh, and they want shield ships, and my Gallente soul groans.

Oh well. Log in, get the Lach and the story: Basically, an indy corp in a Wormhole was being attacked by a group called Adhocracy, and their tower was being attacked. They allowed as to how they didn’t like this, we allowed as to how it would take a lot to make us step to on such short notice, and I guess they came up with a tolerably round number, hence the aforementioned post.

We all linked up and headed for the target system. Sadly, the WH was 50% finished and we couldn’t get our fleet through without having them split. So we collapsed it with some judicious jumpthroughs of heavy ships followed by small ones.

The static highsec wasn’t far, but was at less than 10% mass and camped, so the employer sacrified a BS to the targets to collapse it. The fleet then carried our happy ass halfway across EVE to the next system and FINALLY got in the wormhole.

We zipped to the friendly tower after popping an Exequeror trying to anchor bubbles on the new wormhole, and managed to snag a couple of ships. Their HIC had JUST dropped its bubble, allowing a bunch of them to escape to their own POS. We proceeded there and began the shooty-shooty.

Adhocracy had a bunch of ships inside and we looked at each other through the forcefield for a while. One guy, Porlis, was so close to the shield boundary I was mentally willing him and spending a lot of :effort: to force him out. They did come out en masse at one point in a well-executed maneuver that got a Rook. We managed to put a Raven in structure but didn’t quite get it. They didn’t repeat that and after a while the employer and our boss discussed the situation.

We came to an agreement- they’d leave and we’d rep their modules so they could unanchor them. They keep their stuff, the employer keeps his WH, we get a bunch of time back and everyone’s happy.

Maeve Trinity, one of the target corp members and a former Hellcats member, posted about the op on her blog, providing an amusing report from their end.

Adhocracy were quite good sports about the whole thing and were also much more pragmatic than most targets we run into, so props.

As many of you already know, Noir. did not win our second round of the EVE Alliance Tournament :sadface:

You can take a look at the Battle Report on the EVE site for Alek’s comments and an overview of the match. The video is not up at the time of this post.

Now, why is this post leading off with the phrase “SI Radio is Awesome!”, you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you. SI Radio, in addition to being a kickass internet radio station (http://www.siradio.fm) where yours truly is a DJ, is also a corp in EVE Online. They’ve been living down in our little pocket of Providence, doing T3 production, and doing it damn well I might add. And because they like us and we like them, they gave us some great discounts on the Tengus and the subsystems used in our most recent match against Indecisive Certainty.

Although we did not win the fight, Noir. Mercenary Group is extremely grateful to SI Radio for their assistance with the ships used in the Alliance Tournament. We also heartily endorse SI Radio as THE place to go for your T3 needs- contact Quivering Palm or Merinid Dormer in game and ask what they can do for YOUR T3 production needs.

That’s right, folks- I’ve got a DJ spot on Split Infinity Radio (http://www.siradio.fm). Get over there and check them out, tune in and listen, because it is an awesome station with good people and lots of good music and talk.

My current timeslots are 7 PM to 10 PM Friday and Saturday nights Pacific Time. That’s 10 PM to 1 AM Friday and Saturday Eastern, and 0200-0500 Saturday and Sunday morning for the GMT types. In BST, it’s 0300-0600.

Expect lots of tunes, fun and some talk about both EVE and general geek/gaming news. If things work out long term, and I have no reason to think they won’t, I’m going to try for a regular “Declarations of War Broadcast”, which would be a talk-show version of the podcast! So… get loud, get mental at Split Infinity and enjoy!

The Declarations of War iTunes Feed seems to be OK. It shows the latest episode, at any rate.

Is there someone having a problem with the iTunes feed able to tell me exactly what’s up? Note that there’s an old version of the podcast on iTunes with only the first 3 episodes, but we had to move to a new home with Episode Four.

For some reason I’m getting reports that the podcast isn’t showing up on iTunes. I don’t use it myself so wasn’t aware, but I’m looking into it.

Apologies for that.

In what might be the silliest use of social media ever, Declarations of War now has a Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/DeclareWar

Noir. recently completed a contract against Primary. Alliance.

Primary.

Overview: 13B ISK damage done, 3B received, 81% efficiency.

Primary. Plus Scalding Pass in General

When targets aside from Primary. (such as their blues, others in the area, etc) are included, the damage done goes up to 21B and damage recieved to 3.8B. Overall efficiency is 85%.

In general this was a very good contract for us. Primary. played it relatively smart, staying docked and/or only moving in groups. They had some friends in the area, specifically Gentlemen’s Club, who are no slouches themselves. Primary. tended to be in T1 hulls, which did a good job of keeping their damage down.

However, on top of the damage done in direct hulls+modules, there is the (quite probably much larger) amount of damage delivered via denial of assets. During our time as guests in their constellation, ratting and plexing dropped precipitously. When they were observed doing such things it tended to be in capital ships or in large groups making it difficult for us to engage them. Even with this, however, it was obvious their activities were significantly reduced.

Quite a bit of frustration was evident on the part of Primary. pilots at times, with local smack being levied at us. Overall, a fun contract against relatively intelligent targets with blues who would come down to play with shiny toys.

(edit) I should add that after the contract was over and I was trying to extract, Primary. managed to scramble a gatecamp that caught me by surprise and nuked my Arazu. Well done- and goes to show how important scouting is. With most of us having left, our scouting assets were thin on the ground when I logged in that evening. However, Primary. gets credit for getting that camp together rickety-tick to catch me.

Arazu Loss

I’d had that ship for quite a while. Note the large rigs. She was a good ‘un.

So, I’m still here. After a 3-month hiatus engendered by a massive increase in real-life activity (read: My job got really busy), I’m back and back at it. I’ve found that one’s PVP skills do rust, just like everything else.

Noir. is currently on the second of back-to-back 0.0 contracts. We recently completed a contract against Primary. alliance:

http://noir.pinacoderm.com/alliancekb/?a=cc_detail&ctr_id=104

Note that it’s on the shiny new Noir. Alliance KB. With GIS having joined Noir. recently, we’re having a lot of fun.

So, we have a few things to say about the Primary. contract in the upcoming podcast (yes, there’s one coming- by Wednesday!) but I’ll just offer a few tidbits here:

Primary. are the worst smacktalkers I have ever seen. And believe you me, I’ve seen a few. I don’t mean they talk a lot of smack- the amount was about average to a bit below average- and I don’t mean they talk really offensive or deliberately bad smack (a technique perfected by Goons)… I just mean, it’s- bad. Like someone can’t be arsed to make a real effort to smack, but still feels like saying *something*.

Other than that, the contract wasn’t bad, if a bit slow at times. One thing I often find interesting is the apparent perception on the part of a lot of EVE pilots that if your enemy only engages on HIS terms, that he’s a bad player.

Folks, if you didn’t know already, this is something you need to staple to your forehead whenever you sit down to play EVE: If you are in a fair fight, you failed. Never- NEVER- fight fair, never give the enemy what they want, always be where they aren’t.  There is no “fair”.

More later…