Posted by: Havohej : Category: ¶ It’s been a hell of a long time since I chronicled the progression of my corporation’s development in EVE, and I apologize for that. So much has been happening, and so quickly, that I’ve been kept pretty busy. And when I have had time to make an entry, the things that I would have to write about have been of such a sensitive nature that they couldn’t be spoken of so publicly.
¶ That said, I will do my best to bring anyone who has been watching this blog develop up to speed. Note that any inaccuracies or vague statements are due to my not being able to disclose every detail for security reasons.
¶ The last Chronicles entry saw [DFIAS] in VENOM Alliance and annoyed by a wardec from Privateer Alliance - that motley assortment made up mostly of gankers who hunt lone haulers in highsec space, with only a few actual PvPers among them. So few actual PvPers, in fact, that if you do put together a gang to go hunting war targets, as soon as their scout alts (which they keep in the NPC rookie corporations to protect them from hostility and scout/spy with impunity protected by CONCORD since they never leave highsec), they dock up rather than face the risk of defeat.
¶ The only exception to this rule seems to be that if they can catch a poorly led, disorganized fleet, they will nip at its soft flanks until their targets figure their lives out and tighten up. I saw them do this in Hek - they had a scout, likely in a covops and cloaked, in system watching us assemble outside of a station. The order to align to the stargate we’d be leaving through came, so we all aligned. Five minutes later, we’ve all traveled quite some distance from having aligned and gotten up to speed for the fleet warp that was supposed to come, but instead of being fleet warped to the stargate, we listened on teamspeak as the FC chatted with a couple of buddies within the alliance about nothing at all because we were waiting for two battleship pilots who were supposedly 4 jumps out. Add to this that, out of the 20 or so pilots in the fleet, only 12 or 13 were on Teamspeak, even though VENOM Alliance has a mandatory TS policy.
¶ Suddenly, 4 PRVTR fighters jump into the system… within 10 seconds, all 4 of them are on top of a Rook-class recon cruiser. One of the hostiles was in a Vagabond, two were in Ishtars, and the last was in an Amarr Recon if I recall correctly. The Rook died quickly… the four Privateers were gone as quickly as they’d arrived. The FC berated everybody who was ’seperated’ or ’spread out’ from the main group of ships, saying that they were stupid noobs and shouldn’t have gotten themselves separated. Excuse me, Mister Fleet Commander, YOU gave the order to align, never warped us and never withdrew the order. Your fault, not his, and you should be responsible for replacing that Rook. Over the course of the next half an hour, the fleet fell apart before it had even gotten started, and I’d clone jumped to empire and flown 9 jumps to assemble with the war fleet for nothing. I was not amused.
¶ But don’t misunderstand me - I don’t mention that affair to insult Privateer Alliance for their tactics. Some of them are actually very capable guerrilla fighters, quite well suited to the mercenary lifestyle. I mention that affair as but one example of the lack of solidity, the lack of organization, the lack of friendship, the lack of togetherness that I saw in VENOM Alliance.
¶ For another example, I’ll cite an incident that occurred weeks ago:
¶ I was on my way back to D2EZ-X, VENOM’s HQ system, from picking up a purchase at the TCF station at 6T3, when the intel channel lit up. A hostile in a nano-Ishtar was inbound. The name was familiar, this guy came through every other day, burned straight for D2EZ-X, killed anything he could get away with on the way in, hung out for a few minutes, then left. By some stroke of terribly poor luck, the first report came from a mere one jump away from my position - I was in AXDX-F, the first report came from KR8-27. I was in a Hurricane, so I wasn’t overly worried about whether I’d make it to D2EZ-X - it’s a fairly fast battlecruiser, even with a solid armor tank fitted. I entered LOI-L1 at the same time as the hostile, give or take a few seconds, and we met at the Y-MSJN gate. Both of us activated the gate and waited for the other to uncloak first, during which time I x-ed up on the intel channel to join the defense fleet that was forming. Seeing that the nano HAC was going to wait me out, I found the planet that would be easiest to align to and called for a Warp to 50km, so as to give my ship’s systems time to coordinate with the gang (after all, I didn’t want to get held up at the gate, unable to jump). I warped to another planet immediately, and then to the MJ gate, as that is the shorter path to D2EZ-X. As expected, he took the longer route through 3FKU-H. That let me get into M9-FIB just a bit ahead of him, but the lead wasn’t much - he was on the gate into D2EZ-X right on my heels and despite my jumping first, he’d gotten in just in time to get a point on me before I could warp to the station to wait for the rest of the fleet to get their shit together.
¶ Now by this time the fleet, such as it was, had been ‘forming’ for about five minutes. I looked at Local and saw no less than 49 blue stars. Of those, 9 of them wore purple tags, indicating members of the gang I’d joined. 9 of the 49 VENOM pilots in our HQ system were interested in defense… the other 40 were apparently not. The entire time, from LOI-L1 to D2EZ-X, I kept the fleet aware of my movements and that the hostile Ishtar was right on my tail. They surely saw us both pop up on Local. I told them that I hadn’t managed to warp fast enough to avoid the Ishtar’s warp disruptor this time - but I wasn’t worried, after all I’d made it to D2EZ-X, to the safety of the rest of the Alliance. All they had to do was warp to me at their optimal ranges, with one tackler frigate to put a web or two on the Ishtar. Right?
¶ Instead, what happened is I was granted the privelege of tanking the Ishtar’s T2 drones and Caldari Navy missiles and his quick blaster passes for a little over 2 minutes. Being fit for short-range ratting, I had no chance of keeping him in range - when he’d slide through for a quick blaster pass, he was moving at such a high rate of speed that his own inertia carried him out of web range before the web could really cut his speed at all.
¶ THIS, I thought to myself, is VENOM Alliance? A single HAC can 1v1 a bc for TWO FULL MINUTES in the alliance’s HOME system? I couldn’t believe it… I had a Rifter set up with 2 webs and 4km/sec top speed right there in my hangar at D2EZ-X. And there in my hangar it stayed, while I watched the ‘defense fleet’ fail utterly via fleet chat, the intel channel and listening to it on teamspeak. The Ishtar was joined shortly by a nano-Curse, and the two of them proceeded to kill 3 more ships that night, 2 of which were battleships. With a 12-man gang hunting them. Instead of intel, like “Hostiles now in PEM, Ishtar/Curse, I am engaged at the 6T3 gate!” I saw reports like “I lost my Thorax :(” followed by “Where?” “How many hostiles?” “Ship types??” (Despite the fact that the number of hostiles (2) and the ships they were flying (Ishtar/Curse) had been known for the last ten minutes).
¶ It would’ve been just as easy for them to undock when the Ishtar was having its way with my AC ‘Cane and warp to the gate to chase him off. Having aggressed, the Ishtar would’ve had to either run away quickly or die. We could then have camped the gate and trapped him. He’d've warped to 0 on the gate and jumped out, followed by us, frigate tackler catches him before he warps away, ???, Profit. But no… that would’ve been too simple. Better to give the enemy a false sense of victory by letting them win for a few weeks.
¶ When I confronted them on that epic failure to defend D2EZ-X, I was greeted with replies of “STFU noob” and “you should’ve docked” (I wondered if English was their first language, seeing as I said the guy’d chased me for 4 systems and I’d warped before he could target every time, but this time he got his point on me before I could align to anything).
¶ I decided then and there that VENOM was not going to be the final home of The Defias Brotherhood, but that I would keep the corporation with them until such time as a better opportunity presented itself as our own power grew. Little did I know, I’d be leaving the alliance much sooner than that.
¶ Fast forward a month, during which time VENOM’s ‘leadership’ commits all possible resources to fighting Band of Brothers in Delve alongside GoonSwarm (which suffers the complication of not being blue with Against ALL Authorities) and Privateer Alliance maintains an almost constant wardec vs. VENOM (as opposed to just rotating VENOM through the wardec schedule) making maneuvering in Empire more of an inconvenience than it already is. Stain Empire, and now some neutral corporation with no alliance has been running through Omist like it were their home territory (and of course, United Legion and Tau Ceti Federation do NOTHING to contribute to defense, despite holding sovereignty and having outposts in the lowest truesec constellations in the region), taking advantage of the fact that VENOM’s best PvPers are all in Delve fighting in the big war. For that same reason, trying to fight PRVTR in Empire space at all is an exercise in futility, simply because nobody else cares about fighting Privateers to begin with.
¶ Despite the nanogangs from Stain Empire and this neutral corporation running around, Omist is still safer than Empire, so I tell my people to get their asses to 0.0 ASAP. I open up a limited offer of corporate stock to raise funds to get a POS online to manufacture and profit, as we haven’t really taken advantage of our 0.0 access at all, beyond simple ratting. Over the course of this time, things get no better at all… in fact, one might say they got worse. The infighting continued, and certain CEOs start accusing other CEOs of having hidden agendas, tainting the sincerity of alliance fundraising drives intended to raise funds for another Outpost and a Jump Freighter.
¶ At that point, I started looking at my options and asking my pilots how they felt about the situation, providing what limited information I could. Given the details I had to work with, and the general consensus among my corporation, I decided it would be in our best interest to move to Anthrax Death alliance, in hopes of avoiding any problems created by the scheming going on inside VENOM Alliance right now. Hopefully for VENOM, they’ll get their act together and learn to work together, but right now it’s just not a very hospitable place to be… like the eye of a storm, where you don’t know which direction it’s going to move in next.
-Havo out.
