A Fresh Start

Murder-Face

It has been some time since I blogged. That's mainly due to the fact that a lot of what I was up to wasn't
particularly interesting to read about (playing around with industry) or required some degree of opsec. Also, I tend to have a seasonal lull in video game activity at this time of year.

To catch some of my readers up, since my last post I rejoined Suddenly Ninjas and spent some time stealing from carebears and trying to bait them into shooting me, with only limited success. I'm not quite sure what I'm doing wrong lately in that regard - my 50% success rate at baiting seems to have dropped to about 5%. Or maybe the local bears are starting to get savvy to my tricks.

Anyway, somewhat discouraged with that, I decided just for fun that I would roll a brand new PvP alt and immediately start solo wardeccing people. Some of the most fun that I have had playing EVE has been hunting war-targets, and I wanted to see if it was possible to succeed at that with virtually no SP whatsoever.

Murder-Face and Evil Astronaut Guild
I created a new character, a female Gallente pilot, dutifully made her breasts as large as the character creation process would allow (of course), and introduced her to New Eden. The first thing that she did was to train Corporation Management, and then she founded Evil Astronaut Guild.

I actually thought briefly about using the fresh start to build a totally legit industry corp in preparation for the coming expansion, but after two days of trying to recruit I remembered why I hate recruiting people, and decided it was time to find a war-target.

During these few days, Murder-Face was training her core skills up to 2 and skilling to fly a Meta 3 fit dual-rep Incursus.

La Academia
I took a gander at Eve Who, and looked at the fastest growing corporations. Some of them seemed to be lowsec or nullsec entities, so I ignored those. There was one on the list who had picked up 30 members in the past week, called La Academia. After digging a little deeper, I found that they were primarily a new player corp, about 40 members with a few older players, founded in the last week and based near Amarr. They had never been wardecced. They were perfect.

The wardec went in, an I went off to work in the real world for three days, ignoring EVE and letting them build a false sense of security. Some of them seemed slightly incredulous about who had wardecced them.


"War?
From: Runeko Nishin
Sent: 2014.05.10 12:48
To: Murder-Face,  

We're a Alliance formed with 5 corps with more 300 members. A trade corps, an indusltrial corp, a PvP Corp, a PvP Corp and a WH Corp. And this is The Academy Corp.

You're a 2 member Corp. Are you serious or is an error? :3 "

"Re: War
From: Grimlock Lope
Sent: 2014.05.10 12:58
To: Murder-Face,  

deja de tomar esa medicacion que te sienta mal"

Hostilities Begin
The day finally came when I could start hunting. The fight got off to an easy beginning when I logged in at Amarr, fitted my first Incursus, and noticed a wartarget in local. I undocked and found that he had a default-named Probe somewhere in my immediate vicinity. Dscan quickly revealed that he was sitting on a station undock.

I warped over there and found Shigeru Tekagas, evidently afk, sitting on the station, so I blapped his probe and then podded him. My watchlist revealed 10 war-targets online. The hunt was on.

Next, my spies investigated the Academia home system of Remoriu, and found two targets mining in two different belts, in a Venture and a Retriever. I warped over, killed the Retriever, missed his pod as it warped out, then noted the Venture still on dscan, so I warped to the next belt and killed him too, then podded him.

The first stage of this corporation's first war was well underway - the glorious slaughter of mining vessels. Unfortunately, my wife was calling and I had to log off.

The Battle of Nafrivik
The next day, I got up early and logged in. I figured I would check the systems near Remoriu, and quickly identified an Academia Retriever mining in neighboring Nafrivik. I warped in, got point, and burned him down. I noted that he had anchored a Mobile Tractor Unit in the belt, so I started grinding that down as well.

The two war-targets in system quickly grew to five as I was hammering away at the structure with my T1 Ion Blasters. I kept a watchful eye on dscan and a Thrasher and Corax soon appeared. Weighing the odds, I decided to stand my ground.

The Thrasher appeared first. I set my orbit to 500 meters and opened fire. The incoming damage was fairly heavy, so I started cycling my reppers and feeding navy booster charges into my capacitor. I was holding up fairly well like this when the Corax landed on grid and began adding his dps to the fight. I was momentarily confused until I realized that I only had the skills to target two things at a time, and had to untarget the MTU in order to target the Corax.

The fight carried on for some time as I juggled cap boosters and reppers and managed orbits. My feeble dps was enough, however, and I was able to finally destroy the Thrasher. I turned towards the Corax, who was at 11km range, and burned towards him, but the pilot (the same guy who was in the Retriever, incidentally), realized his danger and fled the belt.

Then I gave a "gf" and went back to work on the MTU. A couple more enemy pilots appeared in local. My blasters and Hobgoblin I ground away at it's structure, and I spammed the dscan button every five seconds or so for the next threat.

Suddenly, the Corax reappeared. I burned to him and attacked. No other enemies were on scan and I was able to kill him quickly. His tank was much squishier than the Thrasher had been and his light missiles seemed unable to apply much damage to my armor. Then I finished off the MTU, scooped my loot, gave another "gf", and headed back to Amarr to empty out my cargo and load up more cap booster charges.

Just for fun I awarded myself a medal for the fight.

Later that day I check Nafrivik again and found another Retriever with another MTU. So again I warped in and layed waste to it. Again local filled with enemies, most of whom just docked up in station and failed to provide any assistance to their friend. This time, only the CEO himself, Ego Ero Nummorum, had the courage to attempt to intervene. He warped in with a Vexor while the Retriever was in structure.

I considered dropping point and focusing on the Vexor, but in the end I got cocky and decided to finish the Retriever first. It worked. The medium beam lasers that he had fitted to his Vexor (yes, you read that correctly), and his Hammerhead I's turned out to be completely unable to hit me. So the Retriever died, and the Vexor died, and then the MTU very slowly died while nobody else attempted to stop me.

Skirmishing in Tash-Murkon Prime
At this phase, the war slowed somewhat. Many of the corporation members moved to the far reaches of highsec and others stopped undocking. I roamed and blapped another Venture or two, and gave myself another medal for it just to troll them.

Then yesterday evening I found a wartarget Thrasher, apparently afk on a station in Tash-Murkon Prime. I warped in and started killing him, but he returned to the keyboard and docked up in low structure. Again local filled up with war-Targets, but this time dscan showed them in space in combat vessels - 2 destroyers, 4 frigates, a Caracal and a Sacrilege.

I decided to see what could be made of this. I docked for a bit, then undocked through their station camp and warped off to the Bhizheba gate. I orbited the gate and waited, and soon enough the fleet landed. I kited away as they chased me, and soon they were strung out away from the gate. One MWD Rifter gained on me while the others lagged behind. When I caught up I opened fire and burned him down to low structure, then had to disengage and run as the fleet began to get me in range of their weapons and I started taking heavy damage.

I then moved over to the Remoriu gate and repeated the same tactic. They followed and the same Rifter caught up to me again. With no armor hp left he died fast and I ran away again.

We played cat and mouse like this again, but they had caught on to the game, and were holding most of  the fleet back to warp in on the tackle frigates. I decided to go all-in anyway, since all I had to lose was an Incursus, and engaged a Rifter and a Kestrel, knowing the fleet wasn't far behind, just on the off chance that I'd be able to disengage when things got too hot.

My gamble failed, and I died, suffering the first loss of the war. Since the tally stands at 20-1 and I only lost a T1 frigate, I'd call that acceptable losses.

Following the battle, I retreated to Amarr to reship. I anticipated that at this point they would come and "camp me in the station", and they did not disappoint. I used the next hour to scout out one of their corp members who wasn't participating in the fleet. When I alt-tabbed back I found a convo up on my screen (didn't you used to have to click "accept" when somebody convoed you?).


[ 2014.05.15 23:50:35 ] Ano Marraano > hey
[ 2014.05.15 23:50:46 ] Ano Marraano > dude, we are waiting :S
[ 2014.05.15 23:51:04 ] Ano Marraano > u want to kill us pls, come :D
[ 2014.05.15 23:52:00 ] Ano Marraano > u want to surrender?, we ask u 1100 m isk only, toorrow 1200 m
[ 2014.05.15 23:53:15 ] Ano Marraano > at least we can talk T_T
[ 2014.05.15 23:55:24 ] Ano Marraano > u cant run, and we can wait lot of time, we are in a party here, so... u have no options
[ 2014.05.15 23:56:25 ] Ano Marraano > where u from?
[ 2014.05.15 23:56:54 ] Ano Marraano > europe - spain, england?
[ 2014.05.15 23:59:50 ] Ano Marraano > maybe french.. they like to run
[ 2014.05.16 00:00:23 ] Ano Marraano > my friends say that we can duel 1v1 u if u want
[ 2014.05.16 00:00:33 ] Ano Marraano > we have no problem, u choose the order

Anyway, I ignored it, undocked, warped to my instant undock bookmark through their supposed hellcamp, then warped off and went to kill and pod their corpmate, Grimlock Lope, in his Venture. This war has been fairly light on "tears", but I'm pretty sure that Grimlock was displaying some kind of butthurt when he sent me this mail.

Anybody speak Spanish?

The Next Phase
It came to my attention, sometime in the early days, that La Academia is a training corp for a larger highsec alliance called Nuevo Imperio Galactico [IMGA]. Further investigation revealed them to be a hive of carebears with lots of vulnerable assets. I had been expecting them to ally to their newbie corp and help them out in the war, but they failed to show even this little bit of courage. Their failure to help the newbies obviously cannot be allowed to go unpunished.

Unfortunately, they did not take the deal.