Tuesday, June 12, 2012

FWeddit is one month old!



Its already been a month in FWeddit, and we have already exceeded every milestone in FW so far.

Flipping Systems Solo? Check.
Largest FW Alliance? Check.
Largest FW Corp? Check.
Most Kills? Check.
(Probably) Most Losses? Check.
Most Points? Check.


Tomorrow, at a unannounced time, our battle badgers (will attempt) to blot out the sun!

Sunday, June 10, 2012

This is my barrel.



There comes a time in every capsuleer's life where the start to find something that feels like their 'calling' or what they enjoy the most in EVE. Its a complicated game, there's lots to do, little time to do it, and often a daunting skill training plan that is constantly yanking you on the collar saying 'not so fast nublet'.

Over the past 9 years, on 11 different pilots, I've experienced what I thought was just about everything there was to experience in EVE (that interested me anyway). I started out much like everyone else, the budding mission runner (after they were introduced and we could stop belt ratting/mining for isk), flying my (then) merlin to glory, dying occasionally and marveling at the wonderment of battleships; even if their hefty price tags taunted me. I moved on after about a year or so, joined some little nullsec alliance called Maru`Kage and stayed in High Sec anyway (which is of course fortunate since they re-negged on Noir. and got annihilated, you know, back when Noir. was capable of such things).

I did the wormhole thing, I did the 'I'm gonna make ships and be a trillionaire' thing, I did the drug manufacturing thing, I did the High Sec Mercenary thing (for real) and then I joined the 0rphanage and did it for fake. I even did the RvB thing, where I learned what ships were capable of, how to FC and even managed to kill Lukka. I did the nullsec thing again, went back to high-sec again... The long and short of it is, I did just about everything new players want to aspire to (I didn't mention Industry and Market playing, because I still do that, on an alt; and my god does he make me filthy rich).

Then I discovered faction warfare. Back when I was 'thing' hopping I tried it for a week or two, granted I had no idea what I was doing, and capturing systems was completely dependent on what time zone you played in, and how bored you were at 4am on a non-workday. Now, its a completely different beast, its actually fun. Even though we are playing for the major underdog in the FW Arena, we are doing it nontheless, stacking up LP's from kills, plexing it up and taking systems when we can, and generally just having fun.

The discouraging things about Empire PvP was the abuse of out of corp alts, corp hopping, in space corp hopping and just about every other dirty trick you can think of. CCP has done a marvelous job completely destroying the war dec mechanics so that its a griefing griefers paradise, but those nobs all say 'they want pvp' anyway, so who knows.

The downside of nullsec pvp is that its all about numbers, numbers and fleet doctrines. While I was never one to turn down the possibility of a full scale fleet on fleet thunderdome; trying to do anything but was just a fools errand, heading out with a small gang you would eventually and inevitably run into something that you just could not kill, and could not get away from, and often times, these types had a full wing of ECM, Logistics, and enough EWAR to make your screen light up like the strip in Vegas.

So- I headed to lowsec (on an alt at first) to test the waters, pulling Xolve out of nullsec was no simple feat I could do on a whim, especially given my outlaw status, and multiple carrier loads full of ships, ammo, modules, etc., and as it turns out. LowSec is Amazing. Granted I am completely able to fund my PvP either on the corporate dime (we give out free ships) just swapping the occasional module here and there, or on my own (I have a pretty large collection of my own ships).


My new home affords me the opportunity to slug it out in a fleet of 50-100 nerds in Arty Thrashers ownzoning its way across the warzone, or even in a small gang of 5-7 duders taking the initiative only opportunists can love; to even simply heading out on my own in a Vagabond seeing what I can catch.

Faction Warfare has some flaws, and it's far from perfect; be either mechanics flaws or simply the other people (trolls and know-it-alls with their laughable opinions), but nothing in this game has given me the simple pleasures FW has up until this point.

Every fisherman has his 'spot'; well my friends the Minmatar/Amarr Faction Warfare area is my barrel, and my opponents seem to enjoy not only my presence, but the active roaming gangs and plexing fleets of Fweddit. Fight on friends, Fight on.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

It's the weekend..


We have some 'strategic' level 'things' to do this weekend, that falls inline with our goal of participating in the Empress' Space Chikun Liberation Initiative and the re-conquering of the Minmatar Menace.

Get in your thrasher, load up your slaves, grab a stack of EMP S, get your repair paste (if you trained for it). Its dinner time.

Amarr Victor



An Introduction of Sorts...

The Long Road Thus Far.


FWeddit kicked off as an idea, a thought even. A bunch of people from reddit, excited about the new changes to faction warfare (yet sick of the mechanics elsewhere) came together to have as much fun as possible in EVE.


It really doesn't matter how you play EVE, what you do, what you fly, who you know.  Being e-famous is honestly 100% forum warrioring, 0% actually playing the game. Look at Mittens or even Mintchip, how often do you see them log in? Two completely different play styles, yet well known anyway (love or hate).


At the start up of FWeddit, many of us had no idea what to expect; it was literally a melting pot of about 70 nerds on the first day. No direction, no leadership, no ideas where to go from here. I piped up on an alt I was playing at the time (Shylari Avada) about some little things, Mumble, Jabber; all the staples of an organized space guild. Almost instantly I was promoted to director of 'things', which was exciting and daunting. I understood what we needed but had no clue where to proceed, computers are all black magic to me with gnomes inside the box banging on things with hammers and randomly whirrrrrrrrrring to make things happen. Up until this point in my life I had no care whatsoever about being a part time computer dork  with no understanding of these things.


Thankfully we had a group of people step up to perform computer sorcery and get all this necessary things in place. Its still a work in progress as our now alliance continues to swell in size, but everything is coming along quite nicely for us.


In The Beginning


Before FWeddit got accepted into Faction Warfare (before the Inferno patch) we worked for a day or two doing the Data Center tag turn ins, and a few people ran missions to help earn .50 standings to the Amarr Empire; We had a problem. We had 170 pilots on the second day of the corp, what we didn't have was anything to do. What we did have though- was a rather generous donation from a fellow Reddit based corporation to the sum of 10 billion ISK. After receiving this, we decided to start up a free ships program for our members, which at inception was just 'TEST Free' Rifters (that was later changed to standard MSE Rifters- not that we fly them). After a bit of talk between some of the more active members and the directatorship we decided to include MSE Thrashers as well, which as the Minmatar Militia knows, has become our standard fleet doctrine at this point.












Being one of the more outspoken people in the corp at this point (probably still), they asked me what we could do instead of running missions, doing turn ins, and generally not enjoying run-of-the-mill EVE PvE content. I had the answer... while this may look like it was some amazing battle, it wasn't.




Essentially we fooled around in Y-MPWL (Volition Cult) space for about an hour or so, after roaming most of Providence with absolutely no luck finding a single living soul. So anyway, we we're sitting on the Kari gate, doing a 'Minmatar Interdiction Patrol' when a few battleships landed on the gate. They all locked us up, didn't say anything and just sat there, yellow-boxing. Being the FC and Diplomancer, I told my people to jump into Kari. I did a quick check of our standings on the website, and found us neutral, decided to go for it (free ships lol) and as we jumped back in the all warped to the station.




We didn't really accomplish a whole lot on our visit there, we did manage to snag a Naga that undocked into a small group of thrashers, killed/podded the same guy in a velator a bunch of times, and finally had a friend bring in his Mega Navy issue to engage them on the gate after they had formed up a 15ish man gang. Apparently they had to wait for the go ahead from CVA leadership to shoot at us, which is what took so damn long.




We came back the next day, after we were not only informed we were KOS, but somehow we engaged in hostilities against the Amarr Militia (which I thought was hilarious) and could undo the KOS standings by paying CVA 5 billion ISK; I told them to get fucked. Diplomacy hard at work. After which they refused to engage us for about an hour, we got really bored, and decided a Thunderdome was in order (we killed each other).




Meanwhile, in Lowsec... the birth of 'Space Chikunz'


With CVA unwilling to engage us, regardless as to how much we taunted them in local, we had to find something to do, the corp was still days away from its first standings update; and we we're getting even more bored than sitting in Providence looking at each other.


We all rounded up in Frigates and headed into lowsec, we had mixed success killing both Amarr and Minmatar militia members; Taunting and Spamming Local, and generally just putting it out there that we were coming to FW. Unbeknownst to us at the time we were about to learn a valuable lesson in EVE, Yesterday's enemies are tomorrow's bros. We had gotten into a few fights with some of the locals in Kamela, Drekla Consortium.


With a few skirmishes, they obviously were not interested in even remotely fighting anything resembling 'fair' (which is okay, I don't blame them) undocking HAC's, Sniper T3's, and assorted other mean things with lots of dps, teeth, and angry in them. I had a pretty Famous Conversation with one of their Zealot pilots Force_Fire; this conversation was obviously later posted on Reddit and became the basis for much of the corps culture. The Space Chikun reference is actually taken from the Encylopedia Dramatica's description of EVE Online, and the racial description for the Minmatar (which is hilariously racist, wrong, but still funny).


Also- We had a much better idea to keep our idle hands busy until we got the green light for Faction Warfare. The War Dec Picture, unfortunately I fail hard at actually using director roles for anything other than occasionally being a complete asshole whilst intoxicated and messed up the voting thing half a dozen times (you need to distribute roles first? who knew!). So anyway- we had a little war dec with the Drek guys, which didn't really result in anything to my knowledge, but later- they joined the Amarr Militia, and are now a regular facet in FWeddit Mumble.


Trials and Tribulations: 
FWeddit vs. Literally Everyone




When we finally got into the Amarr Militia (post-inferno, we couldn't get our standings high enough before hand) there was no warm welcome; not even the smallest hint or subtle notion that we had friends with different tickers. They flat our did not like us.


We were new.
We were inexperienced.
We were 'Nullbears'.
We didn't know what we were doing.
We didn't understand plexing.
We didn't understand how to fit thrashers (lol).


There were no praises for our 240 man corp in the beginning not a one. In fact we butted heads with so many people at the start that we damned near declared war on our own militia. We were despised, hated, loathed and most of all unwelcome.


Quick Aside- Just a bit about FWeddit's member 'make up', at the beginning, when we were small several of us came from TEST, GoonSwarm, GENTS, and even some of our enemies (and bitter ex-girlfriends). For the most part the corp was 80/20 Nullsec alts, sick of sitting on Titans and structure grinding; all emblazoned on the 'next big thing' about the ideas we had in our head about what Faction Warfare could be. This question has been brought up alot, and we are not Dreddit 2.0, Goons Reincarnate, or Pandemic Legion's new training corp.


We started clashing with the 'old guard' Amarr Militia types. We were minutes away from going to war with Amarr 7th Fleet, when we had a quick director sit down, and a very timely conversation with Stalking Mantis (from 7th). I'm not going into some long winded re-telling of all the backstory here, because, its already on reddit.


It started with the convo heard throughout Myyhera and continued with Some EvE-O Love and finally spiraled into me being called a 'super sensitive caustic moron' after they saw that we personally set some of their members -10.


Just as we started on the warpath, our spy leaked us an evemail from Stalking Mantis. We sat down with Mantis, invited him into our Mumble and worked out a way for our 2 Alliances to mutually move forward together. Since then we have bridged the huge tear in the Amarrian Milita and from what we can tell, things are starting to get alot better. I guess making people realize that EVE is not only a game, but should be played in a fun manner simply did not occur to many of them. Sure losing freighters full of destroyers weekly, might not sound like fun but- ask me how many of my members run from fights then observe the sheer amount of :smug: on my face. 


Moving Forward






We keep expanding, growing, and learning as a corp. We have new FC's standing up to take out fleets to die gloriously while hopefully killing something to keep the remaining :killboardstat: fanatics off our backs.


Over the past three weeks or so, we have learned that we can take the bitter vets, the nullbears, the carebears, the miners, the complete newbros and jam them all into tech one fit Thrashers, point them at our wartargets, type 'bok bok bok' in local, and have a really good time.