No time or inclination to put up an organized post, so instead you get a bunch of random stuff I’ve been meaning to share.
February was our corp’s second-highest kill total since the corp was formed. Only December (when we were part of Ushra’Khan and involved in many fleets violently and constantly clashing over the Eugidi constellation) was higher, and only barely. February was also (no surprise, really) highest in terms of ship losses, though we still came out well ahead in the end.
FNGs: We’ve brought in quite a few new pilots – mostly guys recovering from post-boredom wormhole syndrome – and they have taken to Faction Warfare like ducks to water.
Anyway: welcome to the corp and quit making the rest of us look like we’re fucking afk. Jesus.
Our monthly combat efficiency would be better if we hadn’t lost a bunch of pods early in the month (I was certainly not immune, and I have the newly-retrained Battlecruisers 5 to prove it 🙁 ). That got a lot better in the second half the month, so I’m going to chalk that up to a string of bad luck and smart-bombs.
My dislike of ECM system has been replaced by the broken mechanics around off-grid boosting alts. It’s getting harder and harder to find a fight with anyone who doesn’t first “need” to get their their half-billion-isk tech3 cruiser in-system to hide at a safe spot and provide ridiculous boosts to a pack of shitty little frigates.
The guys in our corp could do off-grid boosting — we certainly have the skills required — but we don’t because off-grid boosting is (in terms of risk to reward) broken, and I don’t like using broken mechanics.
Following a particularly ridiculous fight with whatever I.LAW is calling itself this month, Em and I have established a new policy with regard to boosters: if you want them on the field, great. If you bring them in system and hide them off-grid, you are not going to get a fight. Period. Full-stop. No exceptions.
So: if your goal is to have everyone avoid you and have nothing to do, then congratulations – you win. If your goal is to actually play a PvP game and doing PvP things within that game…
One way of looking at this is that it’s just good target selection. To quote a certain FC: “If I see a fight, and know we have no chance of winning why should I fight?”
But it’s not really about that, it’s about rewarding certain kinds of behavior. To go back to my playground analogy, if you’re trying to organize a dodgeball game, but you always bring a medicine ball and the flubber-enhanced sneakers, no one’s going to play with you. Sure, it’s legal. Yes, it’s currently ‘working as intended.’ Fine.
But it’s not behavior I intend to encourage. Sometimes, I censure my kids’ behavior by simply walking out of the room — if they want to be fucking annoying, that’s fine: they’re 2 and 7, their brain chemistry is ridiculous at that age, and maybe they can’t help it. But I don’t need to subject myself to it, and I’m not going to. I find the same sort of response is the easiest option for me in Eve as well; there are people who don’t roll with off-grid boosting bullshit every day, and I can easily go and find them. Denying known off-grid booster addicts a fight doesn’t hurt my game at all.
You want to leave the medicine ball at home, you’re welcome to rejoin the rest of us. Until then, you can pound sand.
… and that’s it.
How can you tell if they have an of grid booster? My knowledge of the mechanics is shaky but I thought the whole point of being of grid is that you couldn’t be seen.
Well, first off, it’s easier in Faction Warfare, because the guys on each side kind of know each other, so we’ve figured out who in Local are the off-grid boosters — when you come into system, there’s only one guy there, and you see (with d-scan) that the only ship in system is a loki, sitting inside POS shields, named “totally not a booster”, you pretty much make a note of that guy.
Or you see a guy with a bunch of alts. Maybe one is named CheezePizza, one’s named PepperoniPizza, and one’s named BoosterPizza. Ridiculous, but pretty much what happens.
But in the middle of the fight, it goes more like this:
You’re fighting some random guy named Johnny90210. Each one of your normal hits is landing for 100 points. Suddenly, another guy arrives in local. You do a d-scan, and it’s a tengu. In faction warfare, tech3 cruisers really only have one use (aside from some guys that use them for missions). And suddenly, like magic, your hits are landing for 70 points.
Or – and this is my favorite – you’re flying around in a really fast ship – and you encounter a Caldari Navy Hookbill. You start to fight, and he gets a long point on you. You see his friends showing up, so you decide to leave… and you can’t. Somehow, that Hookbill is (a) keeping up with you, even though you’ve overheated your microwarpdrive and are going well over 6000 meters a second and (b) seems to be able to keep a point on you from over 40 kilometers away. You check d-scan, and sure enough, there’s a Loki out there, sitting at a POS. Awesome.
A lot of the time, you realize it after the fact: you’re fighting a group the same size as yours, same basic fleet comps. You all focus on one guy, and you SHOULD tear him to pieces: you’ve fought him dozens of times before, and you know how he fits his thrasher, but it’s taking AGES to die. In fact, by the time he dies, everyone on your side is tackled, and you end up getting 1 kill and losing 4 ships. You look at the kill mails, and see the same fit he ALWAYS flies — you fly it yourself, and you’re pretty goddamn sure an armor thrasher can’t take 17000 damage before exploding. It doesn’t make any sense.
Until one of your guys says “unless they had boosters.”
And you scowl and vow not to fight that guy again, because fuck that noise.
I’ve started doing something similar with Rifterlings, though I’m willing to make an exception to not fighting people with boosters if I can be a giant douche instead (legion-boosted vengeance? meet 3 griffins, a sentinel, and 2 battlecruisers).
I support this tactic.
“Following a particularly ridiculous fight with whatever I.LAW is calling itself this month, Em and I have established a new policy with regard to boosters: if you want them on the field, great. If you bring them in system and hide them off-grid, you are not going to get a fight. Period. Full-stop. No exceptions.”
Then don’t fight us. Or a better idea, do what we did for years and try different things to negate your opponents advantages. Dictate the location of the fight, don’t fly cookie cutter fits, and get some damn implants. Then learn to call primaries right. If you know that one guy in the thrasher is going to be armor tanked with slaves then DON”T SHOOT HIM FIRST! I can’t tell you how many fights that should have been a lose or at least very painful turned into a turkey shoot because the opposing fleet can’t follow a primary or if they manage to do that the FC calls a stupid primary.
As for the name issues, we had our corp name stolen so we made In Exile. Once we had the The character to make the alliance we got our name back.
You misunderstand the purpose of leaving when boosters show up.
It’s not about winning.
It’s about giving the boosted fleet nothing to shoot at. It’s about denying them the ability to reap the benefits of that play style.