Tales Of A BoB CEO

Last Call At The Bar - Finish your drinks it's time to go home!

2007-08-08T19:48:00.000Z

This post is long overdue really and could have been made a month or two ago.

The Eve adventure is over for now and I'll not be updating the blog anymore, not that I've really had the time or motivation to do much of that in a long time anyway.

I didn't post any farewells on Eve-O as it would just be trolled to death by a minority of the playerbase who have their knickers in a twist about my character, corp and alliance's actions in Eve over the years. I did however post this on SHC when I left on the 24th June..

Well, as the in game hand over has been completed, the corp and the alliance notified it's time to let the general Eve playing public (that are interested) know and head off any nameless alt troll's from announcing it before I do.

I'm retiring from Eve indefinitely and have handed the CEO of BNC over to Coranor who has been acting as my COO and number two for the last year.

After playing for 4.5 years and being a member of the community for over 5 it's time for me to bow out and have a long break. As with all things they lose some of their gloss over time and Eve has certainly done that for me.

There's no specific event, series of events, change in mechanics, people issue, action by CCP, behaviour of the community or any other reason which has brought me to this point. I am simply a bit worn out and bored with a game I've played for what almost feels like a lifetime.

This will be of no consequence or even interest for lots of you but as what BoB gets up to is often at the centre of so much attention and the departure of one of it's CEOs is, after over three years at the helm, a relatively significant event I figured it was worth some sort of announcement. I do have to say though that it speaks volumes about the state of CAOD and about the shining light that SHC is amongst the Eve community that I choose to make the announcement here rather than on CCP's own forums.

Anyway, I'm off, don't know if or when I'll be back or in what capacity I'll be back if I do return, it could be a few months, could be a year or it could be never.

Thanks to all my friends, corp mates, allies and enemies for some fun times and a great gaming experience. I hope you all continue to have a blast in game (literally) and that both sides of the current epic conflict continue to have fun beating the snot out of each other for a long time yet!

Best wishes

Blacklight

I'm actually playing a bit of World of Warcraft for a bit of a change of pace at the moment and it is an incredibly refreshing change from Eve. I've always had a character on one of the US servers as I beta-tested WoW when I was living in Canada so it made sense at the time to have a character on the US servers when the game went live. Although I've played intermitently over the past couple of years I have met some very cool people over there and already have a level 70 character, so I have a little bit of a headstart switching games at this point :P

I'm probably going to start blogging about WoW as well but given the nature of the game the flavour will be a little different, in fact the blog's already set up and is awaiting me finding the time to do a few posts. If anyone's interested the address is http://holdingaggro.blogspot.com/

As for my continued involvement with Eve, I'm still going to DJ for BoB Radio although less often and only on weekends really, I'm going to continue helping to moderate SHC and I am continuing to train all my characters... just in case! For the forseeable future I won't be playing though.

Thanks to everyone who made playing Eve such a great experience over the past few years and thanks to everyone who read this blog. It was a great ride and fantastic fun.

Best wishes and good luck to you all.

Lost My Muse.... However....

2007-06-06T00:37:00.000Z

One of my fellow BoB pilots, who shall henceforth be known as 'Constipated From DICE' a.k.a. CFD apparently prints off my blog to read when he is taking a shit.

So as I haven't blogged for a couple of months CFD hasn't taken a shit for a couple of months either.

Therefore this little blog entry should be considered medicinal in nature as it is intended purely to provide CFD with a couple of moments material until his bowels relax and let go. It must be awfully embarrassing when you have to tell the doctor that you can't shit because your mate from an internet spaceship game isn't writing pages of drivel to occupy your mind whilst you're sat on the throne dropping the kids off at the pool (to use a popular and most amusing analogy for pooping).

I hope you enjoy your poop CFD and that you can finally set both your doctor and your shrink's minds at rest regarding your mysterious case of constipation.

:D

Returning From RL!

2007-03-05T01:55:00.000Z

Well I've had a pleasant few weeks off Eve recently. I was moving house back from the south of the UK (near London) back to my home town of Leeds in the north east of the UK. As always in the UK getting a new phone line and my internet established was made far more difficult than it needed to be as I had to go through the incumbent supplier who still has a monopoly on the actual connection to all the homes in the UK. British Telecom are a joke. Anyway, I got moved, settled in and connected again a couple of weeks ago right before going to France for a week on a skiing holiday. All in all I've been pretty much offline for 3.5 weeks now.

My timing has been both awful and priceless at the same time given the events of the last few weeks. Awful in that we'd kicked off another big campaign, had a lot of the scandal of Dev missbehaviour and had half of Eve decide to go to war with us so ideally I should have been around to lead the guys. Priceless in that I've managed to miss the worst behaviour from an online community that I have seen in about 10 years of online gaming. Whilst I am as disgusted as the next person at the actions of a couple of CCP employees I think I am actually more disgusted at the way in which common sense, capacity for independant thought and self moderation have fled from the community at large to be replaced by idiocy, mob mentality and lack of self discipline.

Anyway, I'm back and have quite a few entries in the works based on recent events that I'll be posting in the next few days.

Northern Monkeys & The Stench Of Fear

2007-01-29T02:56:00.000Z

So last weekend BNC had a much promised and often postponed team building op for the corp and 50 BNC/E set off from Delve, we went pretty much right round the map with gangs fluctuating from 20 to 55 over the weekend.

This week DICE go on a bit of a trip up north, not sure about gang sizes but probably similar to ours. Of course they were spotted moving a couple of freighter loads of supplies to H-PA and our latest wannabe News of the World reporter decides it's an invasion!

Coincidentally MC declare war on some of the northern monkeys as they've been contracted to hit them.

OMG FULL ON BOB INVASION!!

So obviously with one corp on holiday up there and MC declaring war it's a full on invasion.

Then this comedy happens.

PANIC!

So they only had the following alliances all NAP'd and friendly...

D2 - 2206
IRON - 665
FLA - 1168
Morsus Mihi - 1012
RAZOR - 937

Total = 5988

BoB = 1888
MC = 315 (and who knows how long these guys will be on contract but let's include them at the moment for shits and giggles)

Total = 2203

Sooooo despite the fact that D2 and IRON especially will spout all over the forums about how uber they are whenever we stick a forum post in their ribs and laugh at them for being the new ASCN.... the fact that they outnumber us 2.7 to 1 is STILL not enough and they go and NAP Triumvirate who have been shooting at them for months!

Add another 151 pilots to the D2 NAPtrain.

Numbers won't put us off, the 5000+ in ASCN when we started dismantling them didn't put us off and the northern monkey's amassing 5-6000 pilots won't put us off if we decide to hit them either.

However, I can't help pointing and laughing at how far the mighty D2 have fallen from their days as G. They must seriously have zero pride whatsoever.

It's utterly hilarious how much of a spin we can send the silly buggers up north without even trying.

The joke will be on them in the end though, I'm laughing already.

Quite The Weekend

2006-12-11T13:08:00.000Z

Lots of fun stuff going on this weekend and well worth me writing a few words on several events including :-

ASCN forgeting to refuel a POS in C9N and giving us a foot in the door in the process
The take down (largely through deception and infiltration) of 0OYZ-G station
CYVOK's rather amusing recruitment post
Band of Brothers win our third consecutive Alliance PvP Tournament

I'll start with the C9N POS comedy and a bit of background. Last weekend we steamed into AZN in the heart of Feythabolis with the fleet and deposited a large POS tower to stage out of. The objective being to tweak ASCN's collective nose and see what sort of a fight they'd put up for what is arguably their capital system. So we've been loitering around Feythabolis beating the snot out of ASCN for about a week now, long enough for our tower to start claiming soveriegnty. ASCN have tried to attack and kill the POS a couple of times. They managed to reinforce the POS once losing two dreadnaughts in the process and then failed to reinforce it a second time losing five dreadnaughts in the process (and to be honest were very lucky that they didn't lose all ten dreads in the attacking fleet).

There's lots of armchair generals in ASCN and otherwise crowing about the fact that BoB is incapable of taking a station in Feythabolis through force and the fact that we've had a POS in AZN for a week but have not taken out any ASCN POS's is apparently evidence of this fact. When we start to assault Feythabolis properly ASCN and probably every other Tom Dick and Harry in Eve will know about it. We took our time about assaulting Paragon Soul but when we deemed the time was right it fell very quickly indeed. We're taking our time with Feythabolis as well and when we deem the time is right we'll assault it properly. It's not time yet, so keep waiting and speculating.

However, whether the time to launch an all out assault on AZN is right or not we are not going to look a gift horse in the mouth and pass up a good opportunity. So when one of our covert ops pilots, whilst having a nosey around in C9N on saturday morning, noticed there was a tower offline we weren't going to sit back and ignore it. C9N has only a limited number of moons and every one of them had an ASCN POS on it. Needless to say having even one BoB POS in system would make our assault on the system considerably easier when the time comes.

Early on saturday morning, well about 8:30-9:00am GMT which is pretty early on a saturday to me, all available BoB pilots in the area moved into C9N and started attacking the tower. Over the next couple of hours more and more BoB resources moved in to try take the tower out including some carriers, a mothership, the titan and eventually a couple of dreadnaughts. However, most of the firepower was coming from battleships, HACs etc. i.e. whatever fleet ships any of our guys had available.

ASCN's response was limited. Despite them having a fair number of people online and at least 20-30 active pilots in the area no serious attempt was made to resist us as we downed the POS and put up one of our own in it's place. We literally deployed the tower 1 minute and 16 seconds before downtime started, good timing!

As with all good comedy there has to be a punchline which our good friend Mr McCreedy supplied upon discovering that an ASCN corp had slipped up with refueling a POS and allowed BoB to get a foothold in AZN.

[EDF] John McCreedy
O.K. Allow me to be clear. I will cut your balls off with a rusty spoon if I find another POS is offline. Fuel your POS. You have been warned.

The irony of this little statement will not be lost on anyone reading this blog when we get on to the comedy in 0OYZ-G from Sunday morning.

Good to see that the Sha Khan guys have the same opinion of old Madeye's leadership style as we do when we read his posts, a couple of choice replies to that little declaration of John's are well worth quoting.

[Sha K] Jasmine Dupre

Thumbs down
Quote:
Originally Posted by [EDF] John McCreedy View Post
O.K. Allow me to be clear. I will cut your balls off with a rusty spoon if I find another POS is offline. Fuel your POS. You have been warned.

Real nice asshat

[Sha K] Iceyreloaded

I have no respect for that sort of leadership. NONE.

I kinda like the Sha Kharn guys, they were a fun bunch on BE's TS server during the extended downtime for Revelations deployment and don't seem to take too much shit from the nutjobs running their alliance.

As a backdrop to these fun and games the alliance tournament was going on all weekend but I'll get to that in a moment, firstly it's time to discuss Sunday morning's fun in 0OYZ-G.

Of course I'm not going to explain how we did it, a thousand paranoid minds in ASCN are currently trying to work that one out and good luck to them in their little investigation. As for what happened, well basically we'd prepped our guys for an early Sunday morning op and not told them what we were up to. On Sunday morning bright and early we swooped into 0OYZ-G with a fleet of 80 people including half a dozen carriers, a mothership, the titan and half a dozen dreads. Just as we arrived the last of the EDF POS's were offlined - drama!

0OYZ-G has only 6 moons in it. The station was owned by EDF and all the moons had a POS deployed also owned by EDF. We'd arranged for all the POS's to be offlined when we arrived so that we could destroy all the structures, empty the towers of fuel, get them unanchored and then picked up or destroyed before downtime so that the system would have no soveriegnty after downtime. As I said before I'm not explaining how we did it, needless to say a very cute piece of subterfuge in one shape or another had taken place to give us this opportunity.

We successfully locked down the system, offlined all of the towers before downtime and managed to take the station as soon as the servers came back up again. The rest of the day was spent setting up BoB towers on each of the moons. There'll be no soveriegnty in the system for five days so ASCN can play station ping pong with us but we've now got a POS on every moon starting to claim soveriegnty. In five days if ASCN can't knock our towers down we'll hold that system rather securely and have our first station in Feythabolis.

Some reaction from the enemy, firstly from a post by our favourite Madeye McCreedy on the EDF forums...

There's been a lot of disillusionment with ASCN in EDF over the last 4 weeks and there's been talk of our future in this Alliance. Well BoB, your "clever" plan just backfired and you've earnt the full brunt of EDF's wrath. Something you've not even begun to see. We will retake 0OYZ-G, we will retake Paragon Soul and we WILL kill every last fucking one of you motherless sheep shagging peices of skunk shit.
Congratulations. You just pissed EDF off. I hope you're prepared for the consequences.

This one is just gold. Especially when you link it to some of his posts on the ASCN forums, like the last couple of paragraphs of his official internal response about it...

5. We will retake 0OYZ-G. Because it's the home of EDF? Because BoB have a foothold in Feyth? Because from there they can strike at 7 station systems within a single Dread jump? Nope, because ASCN needs to hurt BoB once and for all. Because ASCN needs to kill these fuckers for not having the honour to bring it and take it in a fair fight. Because BoB are the lowest of the low and cannot face the FULL might of ASCN when we have our expereinced FCs running the fleets. They die each and every time they do. You all know this is not spin. They know this is not spin. The proof of this is on our killboards.

BoB are tards. If they could PvP as well as they can forum smack, we'd be fucked. We'd of lost this war by now. But they can't. They're nothing more than a bunch of quake kiddies who know no honour and who's underhandess proves without a shadow of a doubt that they know in their hearts that ASCN cannot be beat on the battlefield. Todays events have made me believe that more than any thus far.

They also pissed me off and you know what happens when I get pissed off.../me goes to get the rusty spoon...

So EDF were getting pissed off with ASCN and were considering their exit strategy but now he's going to froth and rant about it expecting the rest of ASCN to fight to get his station back! Drama! Excellent, we're glad you're staying EDF, we're even happier to tell the rest of ASCN that as they put their capital ships on the line to retake your station that you were considering leaving the alliance and that the only reason you're now staying is because we've got all your shit locked down in what is now a BoB station. Priceless I couldn't script this stuff better if I had the opportuntity.

Let's hope old Madeye sticks to his guns and the personal aim he so clearly outlined with the classic statement "They and I are in a game of chess that I intend to win". Just a quick note of advice regarding chess, it's your opponents peices you're supposed to be taking not your own. 0OYZ-G was 100% down to old Madeye and when the truth comes out he'll only have himself to blame.

So that was a hoot! Score 1 to The Darkness! Which nicely brings me on to comedy topic number three from the weekend... CYVOK's recruitment post and why BoB is now named after a rather crap rock band. Let's quote the knight in shining armour himself first.

Stand Between the Darkness and the Light

A darkness unseen since the days when the ancestors left the old world behind and journeyed through the gate at New Eden has fallen upon our galaxy once again. In the old world, left behind, our people were consumed by greed, controlled thru Corporate propaganda and driven to the brink of extinction through senseless violence. Our ancestors escaped through the New Eden gate to chase the dream of a new life, a free life, a greater life.

They Failed.

The second age of our great races grew into the same divided & violent factions we sought to escape, perhaps it is simply our nature to destroy creation. We now approach the precipice of yet another violent and fiery end to creation. The battle between good and evil rages here, in our own mists once again.

On one side, the mighty forces of the BoB Alliance and their dark slaves seek total domination over man and space. They do not fight to build an Empire or create a legacy for all the citizens of New Eden, they fight only to destroy and enslave. They are driven by ego, greed and evil.

The Ascendancy was born out of war and designed to follow a greater path. Our Dream, is a dream shared by all those in New Eden. The creation of an Empire, free from the ravages of greed and the importance of social rank. A dream to build an Empire where all Citizens are equal under the law, where all have a voice to be herd and all work for the greater good of their fellow citizen.

Since its inception the Ascendancy has faced many challenges and created many firsts in the history of New Eden. We were the first to build a market in deep 0.0 space that rivals those in the heart of Empire. The first to build a new Station in 0.0, the first to build a Titan Class vessel. Now, we are the first to draw a line in front of evil and say NO MORE.

We have built 14 New Stations in deep 0.0 space, built a robust and thriving market so our citizens do not need to return to empire for their goods, we have built 100’s of Capital Ships, a titan and tens of thousands of space vessels. Yet our dream is in danger.

The Great Evil pushes against our borders with all of its might. It calls in help from the forces of darkness that reside in every corner of space. For nearly 3 months The Ascendancy has held the line against the darkness, another first. No other organization has ever stood in the path and not crumbled in a matter of days.

As the forces of Evil continue to grow in size and numbers the Ascendancy now call upon the forces of light in New Eden to make a stand. Join us, Join the fight and reserve your place in history as a free citizen of New Eden, the alternative is to live as a slave to Evil, a worthless cog in their machine of destruction. You will have no freedom to build your own future, you will not control your own territory, you will not have your own stations, outposts or complexes. Your ships & souls will shield the Evil and all that you could have been will be lost in time, forgotten.

The Ascendancy is looking for fighters, builders, miners, haulers and free citizens to hold the line against the Evil that consumes New Eden.

Join us. Fight at our side and win your place in history. Be a part of another first in New Eden, the first to defeat the Evil and build the new frontier.

-CYVOK-
The Ascendant Frontier

Three (ironic) cheers for the forces of light! Hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray!

I was almost tempted to do a full disection of this post just to amuse myself but couldn't be bothered in the end. Three amusing points come out of it from my perspective and I'll mention them briefly before sharing a couple of pictures with you.

ASCN's biggest problem stems from their mass recruitment. It dilutes their experience levels, dilutes the skill point levels and pilot capability, it introduces people into 0.0 space who don't know how to live there, it doesn't facilitate the easy creation of close bonds within the alliance and promotes an environment where selfish people can flourish. Why when internally they complain about not being able to match BoB's skill levels, T2 sniper fleets etc are they mass recruiting again I do not know. Why when they get 10% turnouts from alliance members online to combat ops they are mass recruiting again I do not know. You have enough people you daft sods you just haven't worked out how to lead and organise them effectively. Not to mention the fact that if you dilute your combat forces by adding 10% of nubcakes who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag you're just going to give us more kills and more phat lewt which just makes us giggle.
ASCN's second biggest problem is linked to the first and is simply that they leak intel like a rowing boat that's been for a jaunt on a Royal Navy firing range during testing time. They are riddled with spies at every level of their organisation (not just BoB spies either, every man and his dog has spies in ASCN - hi D2 hypocrites!) and it hurts them, it hampers their combat effectiveness, it hampers their ability to organise, it hampers their ability to knit together as a team - in fact it affects every element of their alliances ability to exist. So why oh why open your doors wide during a war against the one alliance in Eve that is going to take the opportunity to stick even more spies in? It beggars belief to be honest.
Finally and most amusingly, actions speak louder than words. For all ASCN's HC still crow on their forums about how they are going to beat BoB they are basically crying for help. They don't know what they need to do, who they need to do it or how they are going to do it.... so they resort to their old strategy of just getting more meat for the grinder and throwing it at the enemy. It's a good indication of the real state of the alliance that such desperate measures are being taken.

Now for the piccies!

Thanks to Hostagetaker for my new signature, I really don't like The Darkness but the album cover from their album 'One Way Ticket To Hell And Back' seemed awfully appropriate for a bit of mickey taking.

Thanks to Hippoking for making the following banner whilst we were all having a good laugh at ASCN in the #evetv channel on irc during the Alliance PvP Tournament.

That provides a nice link into the final topic I wanted to cover from the weekend or more precisely the last two weekends, that of BoB's third consecutive Alliance PvP Tournament victory!

Being the winners of the first (see this blog entry for a detailed description of the inaugral PvP tournament and my participation in it) and second tournaments put quite a bit of added pressure on us to perform well and live up to our billing as one of the favourites during this tournament.

We got a reasonably good draw in the group stages avoiding some of the bigger names and tournament favourites like BoB-Lite (The Five a.k.a BoB's second team), MC, IAC, The Sani Sabik, ASCN etc. Although Cult of War who were newcomers to the tournament and relatively unknown came second in our group and proceeded to the semi-finals. We got through the group stage with four wins out of four losing only one ship in the process to one of the random warp aways that plagued the first day of competition.

The finals featured an impressive selection of some of the favourites and some of the newer less fancied teams with BoB drawn against Against ALL Authorities in the first knockout round (AAA being fancied to do quite well being largely made up of RAT and ex-SE corps). We defeated AAA to face Burn Eden's team Terra Incognito in the quarter finals. I have to admit that we were a little concerned about Terra Incognito who had fielded some wildcard strategies during the group stages to come out of the 'group of death' alongside strongly favoured IAC. Besides which, losing to BE would have given Shin Ra and his boys unbearable bragging rights on the forums!

As it transpired Terra Incognito were fairly easily despatched before we faced Nebula Rasa in the semifinals, another new team to the tournament who really acquited themselves well and deserve a lot of respect for their performance and sportsmanship. Of all the teams we faced Nebula Rasa probably gave us the hardest fight and at one point the fight could have gone either way. The BoB team led once again by TWD prevailed through, in my opinion, their superb teamwork, tactics and logistics.

BoB's command channel on irc was quite the laugh throughout the tournament, dbp and I in particular are a right pair of old women at times fretting, worrying and getting more nervous than the guys actually fighting! I got the shakes and could hardly watch before every match, I love these tournaments and I really love being able to watch on EveTV as the fights happen (I think I missed a couple of the early fights and thats it throughout the whole tourny). Much respect to the EveTV crew for bringing us such good entertainment.

The final saw us facing R0NIN, a lot of old friends of BNC's from our days in NORAD and I was really pleased to see they had done so well and reached the final. Unfortunately for the R0NIN we had the perfect counter strategy to their team and the final was won fairly convincingly.

Great to see BoB win all three of the tournaments so far and keep our crown! We're off to get some football shirts with the BoB logo and three stars on the left breast just like world cup football teams now!

All in all a very good weekend, lots of fun and lots of drama, just how we like our Eve to be!

Oh My God!!!

2006-12-07T05:56:00.000Z

This is going to be a little difficult to explain but I'll try anyway.. expect a long blog entry! We had a bit of a fight in AZN-D2 tonight, ASCN's home system, and it went remarkably well considering the odds!

Now it's fairly common knowledge that BoB is predominantly Euro and that our US/Aussie TZ's are not as strong. This fight happened during our weakest timezone when ASCN are still quite active and can field rather large fleets. In fact ASCN usually pick this timezone to hit our POS's, they still fail repeatedly though as I am about to explain.

With about 130 people in local and BoB gang numbers at 40 we moved a Wyvern (thanks to our Tournament winning teams!) and Archon to the station accompanied by about 10 support (mixed frigs, inties, cruisers) and deployed two medium warp bubbles. As ASCN were hiding in their holes we thought we'd try baiting them out by camping the station.

Needless to say we got no organised response from ASCN... quite why was apparent about 20 mins later when they logged on/jumped in about 10 dreadnaughts. They were obviously waiting to get their fleet prepared to hit our POS again.

Local started spiking to 170, BoB still having 40 in gang and the rest being ASCN. Our FC went to the toilet leaving me in command just as ASCN started moving dreads in and building a larger fleet. I had the mothership and carrier warp back to our POS to get safe and people start taking down the two medium bubbles on the station. As we were preparing to leave our station camp ASCN started undocking people from the station, initially a few frigs undocked and just as we were about to engage them several battleships started undocking behind them before their whole fleet warped in to the station.

All the BoB ships around the station bailed out, arrived at our POS and realigned to the station. A covert ops ship was ordered into position so we could warp back in on ASCN (as we knew that they were undocking people into our bubbles). By the time our covert arrived in position ASCN had cleared out, we warped in and had to turn around empty handed and warp back out.

Messages were sent out across all our comms channels to get people logged on in AZN. We sat in the POS shields regrouping and filling out the gang (big thanks to Algorythm for sorting out the new gang structure!) whilst ASCN sorted themselves out. One of our coverts kept an eye on their dread fleet which was aligned towards our POS at full speed.

ASCN warped their fleet in to our POS at a loading point just as we warped our fleet out of the POS to a safe spot close to the tower. The BoB fleet reached 80 people with approximately 12 BS, 1 Wyvern and 2 Carriers, the rest being support ships. ASCN warped 10 Dreads in to our POS and commenced seiging with a fleet of about 25 BS and 75+ support sat 350-400km from the dreads at a loading spot.

The BoB fleet regrouped at our safe spot and alligned to our POS, massively outnumbered and very heavily outgunned. The general impression amongst our fleet was that as we were so heavily outnumbered we would warp in at long range, try to pop a couple of ASCN battleships and warp back out again, standard long range hit and run tactics, the intent being to whittle down the ASCN fleet and then get on the dreads to save the POS from being reinforced.

I was pretty sure ASCN expected exactly those tactics from us and would have ammo fitted accordingly. I had slightly different plans though, it was balls to the wall time! So, as our covert ops reported the first elements of ASCN's fleet warping down to their dreadnaughts I ordered our guys to warp to a covert ops right on top of the enemy fleet. To be precise our support and interdictors warped to the enemy fleet at zero kilometres and our battleships at optimal for close range high damage ammo.

I have to admit that as our battleships were outnumbered about 2:1 and our support about 3:1+ when we warped in I had the sinking feeling that this was going to be my most glorious fuckup since I started commanding BoB fleets two years ago! In fact not to put too fine a point on it I was shitting myself and the first few moments were painful until our fleet had all loaded the scene and some well ordered target calling had started. I was pretty concerned that we'd hold our nerve to be honest as we came under immediate heavy fire by a more numerous enemy.

Target calling commenced from a couple of BoB FC's who shall remain nameless but one of whom in particular stayed alive throughout and kept very clear and concise target calling going during the whole fight and was absolutely superb. First class work you miserable Aussie git!

ASCN with a massive support advantage swarmed our battleships and it was awful to watch as they were under heavy fire sat there aligned to warp out, largely warp scrambled but plugging away at the primary and secondary targets anyway. This is probably going to be one of many major ass kisses throughout this tale but our battleship pilots started that fight outnumbered 2:1, warped in at close range with a mass of enemy support ships bearing down on them and stuck to their task without a whimper. Bloody well played guys, BoB discipline at it's best.

The simple instruction for our battleship pilots was align to get out but hold your position and keep firing. The guys in battleships had to trust myself for calling an apparently suicidal move, the target callers to keep clear targets communicated over teamspeak and their support pilots to fight outnumbered 3:1 yet keep the battleships free to warp out when they needed to. That takes balls of steel. This may be a game but it's a very unforgiving one where a loss can be painful and carries some weight, not to mention the fact that if you are a BoB pilot you have to win every single time (or you feel like you do, although of course we don't!). Those battleship pilots have my respect.

The covert ops watching the enemy fleet kept calling the enemy battleship numbers for us "20..... 19.... 18....." and so on. The Fleet Commanders calling targets were getting a bit twitchy as ASCN's support swarmed all over our battleships but right or wrong I had a pretty clear vision of how this fight was going to proceed and that meant staying in until our position was utterly untenable or as I hoped, we were getting on top of things. Communicated via teamspeak to the guy calling targets and running the battleship fleet was a very simple instruction that I'll quote pretty much word for word...

Unless it looks totally fucked DO NOT warp out

So the guys stayed, our support worked their way through the enemy support and our battleships whittled down the enemy battleship numbers whilst all the while 400km below us 10 ASCN Dreads pounded away on our POS.

12..... 11....... 10 ASCN Battleships left.... 9..... 8..... 7...... 6....

As we were obviously getting well on top of the ASCN fleet at this point the BoB interceptors were ordered down to the enemy dreadnaughts to start getting scrambles on. Our battleship fleet was still swarmed with enemy support but the decision was made to move all our surviving interceptors away from our fleet to get scrambles on the enemy dreads. There was some consternation amongst our battleship pilots at this point as their only defence against the still numerous ASCN support was drones and a few close range HACs.

The remaining enemy battleships went down and our battleships started coordinating their drones to clear out the remaining enemy support whilst aligning for the POS and the enemy dreadnaughts. Once clear of enemy ships our battleships warped down to the enemy dreads and began engaging them. Approximately 10 BoB battleships and 30-40 support engaged the first dread, a Naglfaar within about 40-50km of our POS.

Somehow we managed to lose scramble on the Naglfaar when he was in structure and he warped out as did four other ASCN dreadnaughts (our support pilots were spreading their scrambling power out amongst 10 dreads and we had lost a lot of support by this point). Scramblers were assigned to the remaining dreads and a primary was called (Dash Riprock in a Revelation). Guns, launchers, drones and fighters (from the mothership and 2 other carriers) were placed on the primary. ASCN spent the next 10-15 minutes warping more and more ships in to try and defend their dreads. All guns and fighters were left upon the primary targets whilst drones and some HAC firepower was diverted onto incoming ships. No doubt a check of the kill mails from later in the fight will show that many people actually diverted firepower away from the primary onto incoming ships but the principle remained the same throughout... keep main firepower on the dreads and take out incoming support with secondary fire. Nothing that warped in to try save the dreads survived more than about 30 seconds from that point onwards.

Whilst the fight around the dreadnaughts was raging ASCN kept regrouping at a spot 350-400km away from the POS before sending in groups of ships to engage us. Whilst we were working on the second or third dread (can't remember exactly) ASCN were building quite a large gang at the loading point and preparing to warp in to engage us. Bearing in mind that the BoB fleet had taken some attrition by this point and was considerably smaller than the ASCN fleet to begin with the last thing we needed was a concerted ASCN defensive response as we were trying to kill five dreads. So we called upon 'Evil Steve' a.k.a. Shrike's Avatar!

The Avatar warped in to a covert ops to position itself on the ASCN reinforcement gang, approximately 150-200km from them and 400km from our main fleet and the fight around the dreads. Shrike was lagged out totally upon warp in and couldn't see anything, as he appeared one of our covert ops pilots and myself simply yelled "FIRE, FIRE, FIRE... FIRE THE FUCKING DOOMSDAY!!!" on teamspeak..... so he did! That was pretty much the last we saw of ASCN warping reinforcements in to help their dreads, the Avatar got about 15 kill mails, good timing Molle!

Gradually over the course of about 15 minutes five enemy dreadnaughts were destroyed along with any and all ASCN ships coming in to support. In total it took over an hour to clean up all the loot and salvage all the wrecks. That one fight has probably financed the whole campaign in AZN with loot alone. Thanks ASCN!

Hero's of the fight include BoB's battleship pilots for their nerve to stay in when the situation looked utterly FUBAR, a certain BoB FC (who if he mocks me about the ashes again is going to get sent to a fiery death every time I am in command (good job mate!)), BoB's support pilots who whilst utterly outnumbered kept a swarm of ASCN pilots off us long enough for everyone else to do their jobs and some of the ASCN pilots for not giving up and continuing to try defend the dreads despite the situation being hopeless for them.

Awesome fight, massive props to my brothers and sisters in arms!

Propaganda

2006-11-22T09:38:00.000Z

Apologies if you've already read this on the Eve-O forums! I did a rather lengthy essay on people's attitude towards propaganda in the Corporations, Alliances and Organisations section and I think it's worth sticking on the blog to save it from being too buried in the smack fest that the thread this is lifted from has devolved into.

The original question and point of discussion was whether BoB's propaganda war against ASCN had changed the general Eve public's view of us as an alliance. The thread had a mixed bag of responses but if you give the CAOD forum reader base a chance to have a dig at BoB then they by and large will, so they did!

Anyway, I didn't want to just reply in that thread "omg our propaganda r0xs joo n00bs, the more we post the more horniererer I get for my alliance dude" so I wrote a piece with my take on the general sort of attitudes towards propaganda and BoB style aggressive forum posting.

This was the original thread.

This was my little essay on the subject...

My take on this issue is that the community is utterly schizophrenic regarding propaganda, attitude towards other players, the nature of Eve as a very PvP centric game and very specifically the content of this forum.

For starters Eve is a very PvP centric game, the very essence of Eve is the harsh death penalty and the competition between players in almost every aspect of the game. Eve is not a game where everyone reaches the same level cap, grinds for the same Sword Of A Thousand Truths and can all roleplay that they are the champion of the world and legitimately claim to be correct because they've been to the Castle of Ultimate Darkness and killed the ebil Warlock and his horde of minions (despite the fact that everyone else has). Eve by it's very nature has winners and losers.

This same community that gets it's knickers in a twist about aggressive forum posting will defend the rights of any one of us to go into a 0.3 system and repeatedly kill any poor pilot in his fourth week into the game as many times as we can pull it off because that's the nature of Eve. There are dozens of posts in the General section of this forum every week where the issue of Eve being full of griefers/ebil people/sociopaths is raised by someone relatively new to the game and a very significant proportion of the community always comes charging in to refute those claims and sing the praises of CCP for creating a game where true competition and meaningful PvP exists.

Yet whilst it's ok to reduce some tearful newbie to 1isk and a Bantam just for giggles in low sec it's not ok to wage war with words on another group of players in a different section of the same forum?

It's been clearly stated by the development team on more occasions than you can shake a stick at that Eve is a sandbox where anything goes, where players drive the real content and that to the Dev's collective amazement and joy we as a community continue to surprise them and take the game to new levels. New members of the community will regularly decry the lack of content within the game mechanics, code, back story etc. and every time they do many of the same people who read and write in this forum daily will go to great pains to point out the Dev's vision for the game and advise those new players to make their own content.

Why then in the context of Eve and it's community would we place artificial limits on the degree to which people take that sandbox idea to create player driven content? We know Eve is a harsh virtual world that we all inhabit, it says so on the box, the Dev's tell us it is and we all defend that fact to people who criticise Eve's model. We collectively, even those of us that play the 'white knights' within the game, can and indeed regularly do some pretty harsh things to each other in game. Not only can we do nasty things to each other but Eve is one of those games where achievement and success require a pretty significant investment of time, effort, cooperation with others and ultimately a degree therefore of emotional involvement so those nasty things hurt that little bit more. The Eve experience is to some degree like watching a horror movie, we all know what we're paying to watch, we all know that it's not real and we all know that it's going to frighten us and make us feel bad.... that's the reason we're there paying and watching.

As a small example of the degree of immersion and attachment Eve fosters I can think of numerous occasions where the advantages of two corporations merging are significant, that from a game play perspective would undoubtedly advance the experience for all their members and yet they can't give up the name of their corp, the reputation it has created for itself and the sense of investment and attachment associated with it. We all know this, in fact I am sure we all relish the fact that even for the most casual player Eve breeds those feelings.

Given that freedom of play style, the model of meaningful PvP and the indisputable fact that the very nature of Eve creates emotional involvement (which we all enjoy) why would any of us want to see a war between two of Eve's largest player factions occur in the game in a vacuum detached from those feelings of immersion when ever it is portrayed in all the other community media surrounding the game? I would suggest that we don't really want that, I would suggest that it would even be strange if it did occur.

I know that many people who do not participate in the rough and tumble of the CAOD forum and do not post the things they think or feel about their opponents and enemies in game still say and think all the same type of things that those of us who do actively participate in this forum post in here. I know they do because it's in their own forums, it's in their corporation or alliance chat channels and at times they'll even communicate it directly to you in game (hate mail anyone?). So who is the more honest, who is participating more in the spirit of the game and the community, those that pretend in here that such sentiments, thoughts and feelings are bad and shouldn't be communicated (yet do it anyway in other media) or those who just openly communicate in CAOD and share it with the wider audience?

The argument that wars and all the communication of thought and feeling surrounding them should be kept in private or in game and that these forums are not the place for it should ask themselves the question why these forums exist. Why is there an Events forum? To communicate about events in game, including associated roleplay and therefore make the experience more accessible and more involving. Why are there Roleplaying sections of the forum? To expand the roleplay experience from within the game out of the game and facilitate more opportunity for participation and involvement. Why therefore is there a section for discussion about the achievements, actions, announcements etc. of corporations, alliances and organisations? For exactly the same reasons of course, to widen the availability and therefore involvement in the actions of those same organisations. The forums exist specifically to broaden the scope of interaction beyond what happens in game.

Taking therefore the sandbox nature of Eve, the harsh realities of the game, the degree of time invested, the deep sense of immersion and attachment we all have for our characters, corporations, alliances and the achievements associated with them and then combining that with a media provided specifically to broaden the opportunities to participate in those things of course we will have propaganda in CAOD.

I can recall posting myself during the FIX war about how much I enjoyed fighting them and what good enemies they were to have. There were a lot of people posting in those threads the equivalent of a virtual vomit over the nicey nicey nature of the posts (they weren't that kiss ass either!). When there is a lot of aggressive forum posturing and propaganda going on in CAOD people complain about it, when there is a lot of nicey nicey posts people complain about it. This community is schizophrenic regarding it's response to the state of this area of the forum.

To lose this forum would deprive the game and the community of something special. To make this forum too nice and remove a lot of the vitriol would make the whole Eve experience much too depressingly clinical and PG in nature. In the main the majority of content on this forum is merely a reflection of the degree to which Eve succeeds in creating a free form environment where player driven content flourishes like no other game on the market.

I sincerely believe that only the tiniest minority of posters in here really are too emotionally involved and transpose their feelings for another player or group of players into real life dislike. The majority of us know what this forum is about and enjoy the colourful addition it brings to the in game experience. I would even go so far as to suggest that if there weren't posts in CAOD that people can complain about then they would miss the opportunity to complain!

When I meet people in real life who play on opposing factions in Eve we have a laugh about it, we all know that we're playing our parts in game, that someone has to be the knight in shining armour, someone has to be the clown, someone has to be the bad guy and all the other variations of style that bring such a diverse gaming experience to life. I've played the good guy and had as much fun doing that as I have playing the bad guy, the guy behind the keyboard hasn't changed. I have a very old friend in Eve from our days in NORAD who left BNC when we 'turned to the dark side' I'd still love to buy the guy a beer in real life and I still enjoy chatting to him when I bump into him in Eve, I am 100% certain he feels the same way. He's playing one style and I'm playing another, he's still a friend. When we fight in game I'll still post propaganda about his faction and I'll still expect them to do the same or at least refute mine, it doesn't really change our personal relationship or ability to chat about the conflict and say how much fun it was. Perspective is the key.

There will be a time when this current phase on the CAOD forums has ended and we go through another quiet spell, love or hate what is going on currently there will be posts by people on both sides of the coin who lament the lack of content we are currently experiencing, it's happened before and it will happen again.

If we have war in Eve without the surrounding drama, roleplay and polarising forum debates then Eve would still be fun to a degree but more along the lines of people playing Civ online building empires for the sake of building, playing the game for the fun it brings and enjoying the win.... but not with the same feeling of satisfaction and immersion we currently enjoy.

As far as BoB in particular is concerned I would just ask what fun would a film about the Wild West be without the Indians, what fun would the X-Men movies be without Magneto, what fun would Lord of the Rings be without Sauron etc etc...? Eve would be a lesser place without the bad guys believe me and as the current bad guys we wouldn't be nearly as hated (in the context of the game I sincerely hope!) without all the aspects that make us what we are and one of those aspects is the way we like to tell it like it is in the CAOD forum.

After all that ramble I should go on to talk about the fact that whether you like it or not propaganda works .. but I think I've said enough for now.

OMGLOL You Haven't Killed ASCN Yet!!

2006-11-22T04:17:00.000Z

So this blog entry is dedicated to all the comedians that think BoB are somehow weak because they haven't killed ASCN off inside a month, by the way let me just say up front if you really believe we should have been able to then you are an idiot and I am about to explain why.

Ok, so with that off my chest and the purpose of this blog made clear let's press on.

I'll start with explaining what Bob was looking for in starting this war with ASCN. The answer to that question is very simple, we were looking for a proper war with all that it entails. We weren't looking for a skirmish, the odd fleet battle, a boost to people's killboard stats or to take the odd new region... we were looking for a war, a real war, a nice long, challenging, at times dirty war. We wanted something to occupy us for a long time. Six months is a long time not a long weekend or a two week holiday in the Balaerics. We wanted a proper fight that would engage our members, give us something to do with all our hardware and challenge us to prove we are still the number one alliance killers in Eve.

I'll come back to the points in the above paragraph shortly.

Now let's talk about who we were targeting and what we expected from them. ASCN were a 4000 account alliance, AXE their nearest neighbours and allies were a 1200 account alliance. BoB has 1600 accounts. When we decided to kick off at ASCN we fully expected to be fighting ASCN and AXE together, so it would have been 5200 accounts against 1600, nice odds that suit us down to the ground. Fighting such odds should have leveled the playing field taking account of the quality/age/sp of our pilots, the skill of our fleet commanders and our experience compared to ASCN/AXE. Of course it didn't quite turn out like that as AAA attacked AXE in force just as we started on ASCN. Still, 4000 vs 1600 should have given us a challenge.

ASCN also had more Outposts/Conquerable stations than any alliance in Eve, so we knew we'd have to fight our way through a bazillion POS's and therefore make maximum use of our Dread fleet in order to make serious progress in terms of taking territory. In fact in our worst estimates we expected ASCN to be able to deploy large POS's on pretty much every moon in their key systems such that we had to reinforce and kill literally dozens to take a station system (and we had 21 station systems to conquer before we were done).

ASCN are also or were also known for their very deep wallets and industrial ability. We therefore expected an unprecedented number of mercenary corps to be hired against us, to have their players instantly back in ships once they lost one and to be incredibly adept at POS deployment.

So assuming they would outnumber us horribly, they would have very deep wallets, we would have mercs crawling all over us and they would not only be able to afford to POS spam but would be very good at it we kinda assumed that it would be a very lengthy and grinding operation to even take one system let alone a region.

Rightly or wrongly we also assumed that it was nigh on impossible to have an alliance of 4000 accounts and not have some decent fleet commanders, so it wouldn't always be a walk over in large scale fleet combat (and I think it's reasonable to expect that fighting the blob masters and attacking their infrastructure we should plan for a LOT of large scale fleet combat).

ASCN have also put it about that they had approximately 100 Carriers and we therefore assumed a similar number of Dreads. Of course a) they've got a lot less now and b) they haven't got the balls to use them but those potential capital fleet numbers had to be accounted for.

If you're reading this blog I kinda expect that you'll have half a clue as to what it takes to take out a lot of enemy POS's, however just in case you don't let's get into the detail. If we deployed every dread we own then we could probably field 60-90 of them given that every corp in BoB has 15-20 Dreads (allowing for the fact that TAOSP are much smaller than the other BoB corps and therefore have less), however with timezones to consider and leaving plenty in Delve/Fountain/Period Basis just in case that means we field 10-20 normally during offensive operations. It takes 10-20 Dreads against a hardened POS about 40-80 mins to reinforce and about 20-40 mins to kill it once it comes out of reinforced depending on the number of Dreads. It also takes 10-15 mins to re-arm and re-fuel 10-20 Dreads in between attacks. All these times assume that there is no significant hostile disruption in operations and if you are outnumbered 2.5 : 1 then you expect some disruption.

If you work that out it takes about 11.5 to 22.5 hours of real work to take out all the POS in a station system assuming there are 10 large POS defending soveriegnty (see my comments about ASCN's apparent deep wallets and assumed POS capabilities, we expected at LEAST that number). The other factor those numbers don't take into account of course is the times that POS come out of reinforced and that BoB has enough fleet superiority 23/7 to engage in Dread operations at all times. If you also take into account player tiredness, concentration levels, 2-3 days stront in every POS (leading to long reinforce times) and an extra day to gain soveriegnty (as it takes a downtime to process) so that we can actually take the station (another hour or so) that means that it takes 4-5 days per station system.

There were 5 ASCN/AXE stations in Paragon Soul alone, that's 20-25 days to take those stations, assuming we take them in series and not in parallel. Just a quick comment on that strategy as well, although we have carried out some parallel strikes, a key element of any war is logistics, over stretching ourselves was never going to be an option so we planned to take one inch of space, one station system, one region at a time. In our plans we therefore allowed 3-4 weeks to take Paragon Soul depending on buggeration factors such as losing a day to patching, reacting to enemy strategy and any acts of god that would get in our way.

If you take then expand this to include Feythabolis and Esoteria (not even counting Prime Orbital System's stations) that equates to 21 station systems or about 80 to 100 days, still assuming we do it largely in series (reasonable considering the odds we are facing) and that no other factor slows us down. You never plan for a war to go smoothly or for advantageous conditions all the time. No matter which way we looked at it the minimum amount of time we could therefore expect the campaign to last in order to take all of ASCN's space was three months.

Now before I go into any details on how we are actually progressing there are two other facts I need to explain from our planning. I alluded to one at the start of this post, we were looking for a war that would last i.e. we were not in a hurry. Central to all our preparation, planning and conduct in this war is that fact, we simply are not in a rush. It serves us no good at all to rush through this and kill ASCN off in a couple of months. As Oveur stated in his presentation at the fan fest recently, Eve has a lot of life left in it... up to 10 years in fact if you take his comments at face value. If this campaign (and every other) took us six months that means we have another nineteen to do, well actually if you assume an average of two months between campaigns to restock, clean up and prep the next one that actually means another fourteen after this one. That's a lot of campaigns in anyone's book! So let's just agree that we really weren't in a rush to finish this one.

The second key point in our approach was that as we weren't in a rush we wouldn't deploy our capital ships, get involved in deploying POS's or fighting over stations until the middle of November (we started properly going for ASCN at the start of October). I know all the ASCN/AXE tinfoil hat wearing, conspiracy theorists and HC believing people won't believe me when I state that we were seriously not planning to get the capital ships out for the first month or two but that was our intention none the less.

So we have about 1.5 months during which we were just going to raid, probe and test ASCN whilst polishing our fleet skills again. We then have a minimum of 3 months to actually take ASCN's station systems.

Even if you factor in a total loss of morale and an internal collapse (leading to the removal of lots of POS from ASCN space) it would have been ridiculous for us to expect the war to be complete in anything less than three months. As we were in no rush and assumed that we would have to react to ASCN's own strategy during the war a 5-6 months timeframe looked much more realistic to us.

Of course ASCN quote back at us that it only took them about two weeks to take Paragon Soul from Tribal Souls. What an utterly ridiculous comparison. With all due respect to anyone in Tribal Souls at the time, ASCN outnumbered them closer to five to one or more if you allow for AXE. TS also had far less deep pockets and POS reserves than ASCN apparently had. Quite how anyone can compare BoB's assault on Paragon with the one ASCN conducted is beyond me and speaks to a strategic niavety of the highest order.

Comparing the above analysis with the current state of the war is of course interesting, it's the 22nd November and we'd planned to have been actually working ASCN's station systems about a week by now. Even our best estimates therefore had us taking Paragon Soul in approximately two weeks. The region is already ours.

A lot of you armchair warriors commenting on how long it really takes to fight an alliance war need to actually try fighting one before you open your mouths and make utter fools out of yourselves.

We're not in a rush and we're ahead of schedule.

ASCN will die.

Something From The Archives

2006-11-21T02:32:00.000Z

One of the guys posted a screenshot of the old BNC forums from before we left NORAD where I announced the likelihood of us leaving, that inspired some reminiscing about the past and a few of us digging through our archives to see what we could find from a couple of years ago. I found the following mails that I sent to the corp in game and posted on our forums back when we were leaving NORAD and prior to us joining BoB, in retrospect there are some quite amusing elements to these mails so I thought I'd share them in my blog.

The first is a six part (yes 6 parts! I seem to have been consistent in sticking to the technique of never using one word when a thousand will do over the years!) mail sent to announce to the corp that we would be leaving NORAD and the second is a four part mail sent shortly afterwards confirming that we were leaving NORAD and moving up north to fight alongside what would become BoB. The second mail series contains what was a rather contraversial standings change at the time but which is in retrospect quite amusing!

My favourite quote from these is "WE WILL NOT PIRATE & ALL OTHER PIRATES WILL REMAIN KOS!" ah the naivety of our youth in Eve

Anyway, without further rambling, here are the mails enjoy....

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2004.09.14 01:51
Dear All,

After much deliberation amongst the management team (DG, our 8 Directors and myself) we have agreed on the initial elements of a strategy for the corporation's future.

Firstly and most importantly we hope that this plan appeals to as many of you as possible and that you will join us on the next phase of BNC's journey. However, we are well aware that there will be elements of this plan that do not appeal to everyone. One very important, in fact critical, aspect of our intentions is that only people who want to share a very similar gaming experience in Eve should be on the team, we should not be attempting to be all things to all people and I will come back to this point. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have participated in the forum discussions that have helped so much to shape and inform the management decisions contained in this message.

2004.09.14 01:51
The six key elements of our intentions going forward are as follows:

1) BNC's primary focus is on team based pvp combat.
2) We expect that 90% of the corp's members work together for the majority of the time they are online.
3) We do not believe that players who wish to exclusively solo mine/npc/hunt/manufacture really belong in BNC.
4) Good communications are critical to our success, therefore we believe active participation in the corp forums is important and the use of Teamspeak is mandatory (at least to listen even if you cannot use a mic).
5) We expect all our pilots to behave respectfully, with honour and to always convey BNC in a positive (if slightly mischevious) light.
6) We remain an anti-pirate corporation but acknowledge the political realities of politics and combat in Eve, life is not black and white.

2004.09.14 01:51
As such, we will be moving forward with exceedingly high expectations regarding people working together as a team. When we are on offensive operations 90% of the time you log on the first words out of your mouth should be 'where's the gang and where are we fighting?'. If we need to replace ships we will all go mine for an evening or a day or two and replace losses together as a team. The days of many members soloing all the time are over.

There are a few but only a few exceptions to this rule, pilots who currently do a great deal of good work with agent missions, research and production but who's focus is on supporting the pvp team (they and we know who they are) and are not just doing their own thing.

2004.09.14 01:51
If this direction sounds right for you but you know yourself that you have not been contributing to the corp or not been involved in team operations then now is the time to change your gamestyle. Be empowered, create and participate in teamwork and we promise you an even better gaming experience in the future.

If this does not sound like the way you wish to play the game please speak up and let us help you to get placed into a corp that better fits your playing style. There is no shame in any of us wanting to play the game in different ways but let's be realistic about not trying to force square pegs into round holes. One strong recommendation I have in this respect is that the more peaceful of you consider joining The Merchant Marines, they are very well led and are building a superb mega-corp with good manufacturing, mining and research divisions.

2004.09.14 01:51
The BNC management team strongly believe that we should focus our efforts, promote teamwork and get back to our roots as a pvp corporation. I personally believe that we need this kind of strong focus and clear leadership and that we have the pilots to be very successful. The final and most controversial element of this announcement is that as of Friday 17th September BNC will no longer be a member of the NORAD alliance. After considering all the feedback in the forums and in game the BNC council and executive have agreed 100% that we should go independant.

It is our firm intention to leave NORAD on good terms as we have a long history and a lot of great friends in the alliance. I am advising the alliance council this evening of this decision as I pass the information on to you. We will however make no official announcement until Friday so please keep this within the team until Friday.

2004.09.14 01:51
BNC moves on to a bigger brighter future free of alliance ties and politics, I look forward to the next phase of our development and hope that you will all join us in our next challenge.

Many thanks

Andy/BL

P.S. This message is also on our new forums at www.BlackNova.org

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2004.09.17 02:52
As posted in the forums today, The whirlwind of change is upon us!! D-Day tomorrow and we already have a HUGE amount of fun lined up!!

The announcement to the Eve Public will be made tomorrow evening (when I get home from work at approximately 8:30pm Eve time). The announcement will cover two points:-

1) BNC leaves NORAD, with all the thanks for the memories, props to our friends and pleasantries about NORAD that you would expect in a departure speech!

2) Our next move and first new adventure. I'll make it clear that we are going to Venal to join back up with our old partners in crime Reikoku! I will also pull no punches and be very clear that this means that we will also be flying with Evol/m0o/ATUK in the campaign against the PA.

2004.09.17 02:52
In order to help kill off PA once and for all we will be NAPing m0o. That means we will not only stop shooting them but we will be in gangs with them and Evolution as well as Reikoku. If we carry on fighting m0o we are shooting ourselves in the foot in terms of our ability to help RKK/Evol in fighting PA. So as a necessity of the situation up there we will NAP m0o for the time being.

NOTE:- WE WILL NOT PIRATE. ALL OTHER PIRATES WILL REMAIN KOS.

We are NAPing m0o ONLY to allow us to fight PA again on their home turf. We have almost unanimous support of this move amongst the council and
the exec as we all understand it is a necessity of the war. Leaving the alliance allows us to do things that are a little bit shadier and we will have to get used to seeing the Eve universe more in shades of grey than black and white. However, I'll stress this again to make sure we are all clear... WE WILL NOT PIRATE & ALL OTHER PIRATES WILL REMAIN KOS!

2004.09.17 02:52
Now for the first part of the really exciting news!! I have yet to agree the time but either tomorrow evening or on saturday RKK/Evol/m0o/ATUK are going to bring a massive fleet to Torrinos to meet us and fly with us up to Venal as we start our campaign up there!! We also have very good intel that there will be some seriously hot fighting going down this weekend and we should see some large fleet battles as soon as we get to Venal

This is a very exciting opportunity for us to get back in the saddle alongside our close friends Reikoku and to fly with the very best pvp corps in the game as soon as we go independant! To say that this sets us off on the right foot just as we go independant is a massive understatement!! I'm so excited my head's going to explode

2004.09.17 02:52
So that's the plan guys, (I'll explain a few more of the more mundane details like offices, mining etc in another thread) but most importantly on this our first weekend as an independant corporation and our first weekend flying with RKK/Evol we need a huge turnout from the team. If there's one weekend a year you can call in favours from the wife or miss the friday night beers in the pub with the lads this is it!

I'll confirm the time as soon as I can but when the RKK/Evol fleet come down to meet us in Torrinos I'd be over the moon to see as many BNC there as we can possibly get together. I'll be the happiest CEO in the game if we can get about 40 of us there and at least 20 battleships.

So the challenge has been laid before you, we are going to fly with the best and wage total war on the PA! Let's get everyone up to Torrinos asap and give it our best.

Thanks

Andy/BL

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

One other thing to throw into the mix. This is the Alliance Map from the time of the start of our adventures shortly after player conquerable stations were released and BNC, RKK, DSIN, CELES and HUFF were fighting RSA, COD and FE in Fade.

http://www.slackerindustries.net/map/dpm/08-03-2004.jpg

Fun times

Kills to Losses Ratio vs ASCN

2006-11-10T14:33:00.000Z

As ASCN's leadership keep claiming that they're improving in combat against us I thought I'd graph our Kills:Losses ratio against them and have a look.

The data set is 19th Sept to 9th November inclusive (pretty much the period of the war so far including the early skirmishing period before we got serious) and is taken from our killboard (so corps such as ArsC that aren't showing as in the ASCN IGA on our board won't be counted).

The results are pretty much as expected.

All Ships

Battleships

So there's another little lie that ASCN HC keeps making to it's members debunked.

This war's a lot of fun!

Disaster!!

2006-11-10T02:36:00.000Z

I was late to this battle, in fact I turned up just in time to get a random couple of kills from people fleeing the area so regrettably I can't write it up, Dianabolic covered it on RKK's forums though his report can be found here. Our killboard stats give a pretty clear view of the end result as well, they can be found here.

Having lost 3 Dreads and about 50 BS (give or take a couple) in a fight raging across half a dozen systems whilst killing ZERO BoB battleships and only a handful of BoB support Mr McCreedy's (ASCN's military commander in chief) response was....

[EDF] John McCreedy

Disaster? I didn't see a disaster happen. I saw a disaster averted due to quick info passed from Shanzem to myself to the Dread gang. 6 Dreads deployed and an entire BoB fleet op top of it and only 2 destoryed. Without the fast thinking of Shanzem to warn us so we could deactivate seige mode, our losses could of been a lot, lot worse.

John, you got absolutely bent over, lubed up and ripped appart, quite how you can spin this any other way is beyond me but as you are so convinced you're doing so well I thought I'd comment on it. Well played, if you ever wake up and join the real world enough to wonder why your credibility is shot to pieces there's a clue in the above quote.

[:roll:]

P.S. You lost three Dreads, I'd have thought ASCN's military supremo would have known that but I guess competence has an entirely different meaning in BoB and I shouldn't judge you by our standards.

Rapid Responses!

2006-10-26T16:35:00.000Z

So lastnight was a fairly normal night as far as the war with ASCN goes. We had a group of recon ships buzzing about down south in Paragon, Feyth and Esoteria, we had the alt gang chasing ghosts around Delve and babysitting a small RKK moon mining POS that was coming out of reinforced. A lot of us were simply chilling out on irc, having a laugh at the 'Spin This' thread on the forums and generally winding down to go to bed.

The recon gang was buzzing about near H8-ZT0 and one of our other guys was online down there checking on the POS we'd set up in system, when at about 2:20 to 2:30am they noticed the number of hostile pilots in local starting to gradually increase. Our interest was fully aroused when the guys in H8- reported cyno's in system and that ASCN were bringing in Dreadnaughts.

There is only one response to hearing that enemy dreadnaughts have been spotted near one of your POSes if you're a self respecting BoB member and that response is "wooohhhooooo!! Dreads in the open, it's ganking time!". So Dreads in system, ASCN number's rising and a camp being set up on the inbound gate .... only one thing for us to do and that was to gather a fleet and head down there.

We diverted the gang floating about near NOL-M9 consisting of approximately 20 pilots in mixed ship types to TPAR and then collected stragglers from TPAR and GQ2. As usual BoB's repsonse time to assemble a fleet to do a job is pretty bloody quick, it's one thing even the most ardent BoB hater usually can't avoid grudgingly admiting, our response times are fast. Between spamming in game channels and buzzing irc within about 20 minutes we had a fleet of 50-55 (including a few alts) leaving GQ2 for the seven jump trip to H8-. The BoB gang consisted of the four recon ships and couple of covert ops already inside H8-, 24 battleships and approximately 15-20 support of various types. I remember seeing gang at 51 members just before we arrived at the target and that rose to about 60 with more stragglers coming from GQ2 and TPAR by the time we were cleaning up the loot.

Our covert ops in H8- watching the ASCN gate camp reported that it consisted of 24 battleships, exactly the same number we had and between 30-40 support with 10 Dreads seiging the POS. The ASCN battleships were largely off the gate at sniping spots, their support were around the gate which was bubbled by an interdictor and there were 2 or 3 carriers in system with fighters deployed to the gate camp.

We harried, chived, chased, badgered and hassled our guys to move as fast as possible once we'd heard the dreads had started work on our POS, knowing we had a small window of opportunity to hit them and that we had to fight our way through a particularly nasty gate camp before we could warp in on the dreads. To be honest I wasn't really thinking that we had a POS to save, I was more interested in getting amongst those 10 dreadnaughts and trying to kill a couple of them.

Not one for too much in the way of fancy tactics when the situation doesn't demand it I gave out a fairly simple set of objectives for when we jumped in, explained what I wanted everyone to do and how we were going to do it, repeated it half a dozen times (because in my experience, even with an experienced group, the magic number for giving out instructions is seven, if you tell a group of people less than seven times what you want them to do then someone will not get it! seriously, it's the magic number try it some time!), crossed my fingers and hoped the lag wouldn't be too bad on jump in and gave the order to go.

Remarkably jump in lag was very low and we all loaded pretty quickly into a sea of red! There was an amazing amount of little red crosses buzzing about and I would like to offer my condolences to ASCN for being dolts and deploying drones before we jumped in, it made me feel all warm and fuzzy to kick your teeth in after that little stunt :)

Our battleships started work on theirs with the usual level of efficiency whilst our support cleared the enemy support around the gate. Given the number of enemy support and the danger they posed to our battleships in a prolonged fight it was critical that our support pilots overcame theirs on the gate. I knew there was no doubt our battleships would manage the ASCN battleships given our superior firepower and coordination but if we found our battleships mobbed by their support was going to be messy even if we were killing their BS faster than they were killing ours.

The BoB support pilots in lastnights gang performed brilliantly and had the gate cleared and our battleships protected in double quick time.

The ASCN carriers certainly took their toll lastnight and I am sure we would have lost a lot less of our battleships had they not been there, more than one of our battleships died at other locations in the system trying to escape pursuing fighters (not all of us had the POS in system bookmarked so getting to it quickly to evade fighters was a tad harder than normal, in fact probably the one mistake I made with that fight was not nominating someone to sit at the POS as an emergency warp to point).

Having cleared the gate we ended up with half a dozen ASCN battleships quite a long way from the gate (long enough to be out of range even for our T2 fleet BS setups) and had to warp up to engage them, again brilliant work from our support in getting on them quickly.

As we were mopping up on the gate another ASCN gang started arriving from outside of H8- bringing more battleships (about another 6 if I remember correctly) but we knew the dreads would be trying to get out of seige and escape so our window of opportunity to kill the dreads was starting to close. We abandoned the loot at the gate and warped our fleet onto the dreads at our POS, support in close and scrambling as many as they could get hold of and our battleships in close with short range T2 ammo fitted.

10 BoB battleships and 10-15 BoB support > 10 ASCN dreads and the remnants of their fleet.

Once again our support really carried us at the POS by scrambling so many of the enemy dreads and the concentrated fire of 10 T2 fitted BS at close range was too much for the dread's tanks. Seven enemy dreadnaughts died within three minutes. As we were finishing off the dreads ASCN were warping more support and battleships into the middle of the fight, they were scrambled and died to a combination of our fleet and the POS guns.

Not much more needs to be said really, we had waaaaay too much loot for the fleet to carry, all T1 junk and drones had to be popped rather than collected and we had to fetch haulers all the way from TPAR to carry the capital loot from the dreads (no corp hangar array on the POS, a schoolboy error!).

Once we'd cleaned up, relaxed for 5 mins and done some backslapping, we insta jumped all of our pods back to TPAR with the fleet so no-one got left behind and those needing their sleep could get to bed! Needless to say we ganked another 2 ASCN battleships on the way back to TPAR just for good measure :P

End result of the fight (not including ganks en-route or on the way home) :-

ASCN Losses

7 Dreadnaughts
25 Battleships
66 Support Ships

BoB Losses

0 Dreads
14 Battleships
8 Support Ships

A big thanks from me to all of our fleet for assembling so quickly, for behaving with their usual high levels of efficiency and for making it a joy to command. Special thanks to the support pilots for their great work and to the other FC's and target callers who backed me up and took over when I was being chased by a bazillion fighters around the system :P

Thanks guys, it was a pleasure!

Is A Bruvva A True Bruvva?

2006-10-25T23:07:00.000Z

I'm going to have some fun debunking a popular angle of propaganda attack by our enemies in this blog entry. It seems that it's DICE hunting season amongst the ASCN and associated hangers on this month. So I'm going to lay my cards on the table about Bob's 4th corp and have a bit of a laugh at our enemy's spindoctor's expense.

An appropriate starting point with any discussion regarding DICE's role within BoB is the alliance's early days and an examination of who belonged. This is a quote from The History Of Reikoku Part 18 : BoB.

BoB was initially formed with ATUK (who had come up from a long time CA campaign), Evol, m0o and RKK.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=109070

RKK's Brothers in arms for a long time had been BNC so we asked them to join us too. Eventually they agreed and BNC between the 5th member of BoB.

Finally and more recently, some ex-m0o members made up a corp named "Rough Necks". Under Val Duane's leadership, they filled the last slot of BoB.

Notice who the very first corporation named in that description of the formation of BoB is, for the slow of reading it was ATUK a.k.a. DICE. BoB was started with six corporations ATUK, BNC, Evolution, m0o, Reikoku and Rough Necks. Since those early days m0o and Rough Necks have disbanded and most of their players landed in BoB corps, primarily Evolution and Reikoku.

Throughout the GNW ATUK mostly did their thing in the south east, for which they deserve an immense amount of credit standing largely alone against all their enemies and never being cowed. However, it was always understood amongst the leadership of the other BoB corps that regardless of the fact that ATUK were not always on the same path as us the day they requested our assistance it would be given unequivocally and that same commitment was made in return.

After the GNW when BoB moved south to engage and kill FA (yes the main objective of us moving from the north was to take on FA) we did so with ATUK in the vangaurd and already engaging FA. Many has the forum post on Eve-O been about the fact that BoB merely finished off FA after ATUK and Shinra had done the dirty work and broken their back. In response to those posts I simply state that ATUK were always part of BoB, their wars were our wars and that in the brief time I flew with Shinra (a matter of weeks) I came to respect them a great deal, Chow is a stand up guy. So yes, the trail had been blazed by others but the fact remained, ATUK were and are BoB.

Around the time of the FA war (or shortly thereafter) came the time of POS, soverignty benefits and the alliance system in game. BNC, RKK and Evolution formed the BoB in game alliance at around the same time that ATUK formed 'the Five' alongside Shinra, BOS, Supremacy and Black Reign. Despite the tinfoil asshattery on the forums at the time it was always understood amongst the BoB leadership that ATUK were still BoB. Membership of the IGA didn't matter, once a brother always a brother. Both BoB and The Five were constantly goaded by faceless alts to fight each other but the reason that never happened was simply that ATUK were BoB so it was about as conceivable as a very inconceivable thing living in inconceivable town.

As time progressed we ended up with BoB enconsed in the south west and the Five fighting in Venal up north. Then came the EC-P8R event with the BoB IGA, ASCN/AXE and The Five (primarily ATUK) holding the system whilst we annihalated the Trust POS in system and took the outpost in there.

BoB already had a plan to follow on from the EC-P8R event, namely that following the single biggest act of cooperation between players and groups of players ever seen in Eve (and quite possibly in any MMO to date) we would put into operation what we called Phase 4. We had a huge amount of fun teasing our members as to what Phase 4 really represented. Phase 4 was in short our standings reset and a return to our everything is a target approach to Eve.

Unbeknownst to us at the same time as we were planning Phase 4 and carrying out the EC-P8R event ATUK were coming to a watershed in their existence, largely prompted by Script's departure from Eve. We were approached by an ATUK Director (a good friend of mine who had always had my respect in dealings between the BoB IGA and our brothers in ATUK) regarding ATUK joining the IGA, he explored our feelings regarding this move, we discussed how it would work, whether it would be ATUK or a resurrection of the corp under a different name, how they would fit into the alliance and a myriad of different elements of merging ATUK into the IGA.

The response from BoB's leadership was simply "welcome home and it's about time".

I have to admit that given how slick the BoB IGA was at that time, how well organised we were and how the relationships between the three member corps was so well developed I was very nervous about how incorporating a fourth corp would effect us. Despite the fact we had always considered ATUK to be the fourth BoB corp it would have been a very niave leader who did not consider the negative ramifications and potential points of conflict in bringing ATUK into the fold.

We announced Phase 4 (to receive a barrage of criticism from the same retards who criticised us for NAPing too many people, as usual our enemies are nothing if consistently inconsistent) and within a couple of days the closure of ATUK was announced and quickly followed by both the formation of DICE and their admittance into the BoB IGA. For the first time since the alliance's conception we were complete and all the BoB corps had come home.

Given all that background, the months even years of support and the unwavering standpoint that ATUK were BoB it should come as no surprise that the general feeling amongst all our corp's members was one of euphoria that finally we had all of our Band of Brothers under one roof.

Since DICE joined we've had remarkably few problems regarding all the logistics that all alliances must face on inviting an enitity representing 25% of their numbers into the fold. Office space, access to moons, factory access, fighting style, FC's, use of different ship setups in combat and all the many other minor differences between the corporations.

BoB has always, even with the creation of the IGA, stuck to the principle that each corporation is independant. I could take BNC on a 6 month roadtrip to a different part of the Eve universe and abandon the alliance's current goals and still know that I and my corp are BoB until the servers close (and probably beyond to be honest). The upshot of this culture in the light of DICE's inclusion into the IGA is that because we respect each other's differences implicitly the integration of DICE was remarkably easy. Of course the whole integration process was greatly eased by the fact that DICE are so damn destructive and more than pull their weight in terms of damage to our enemies.

As far as BNC was concerned we made a concerted effort to ensure that we spent a lot of time with DICE, gave them what they needed, bent over backwards to shift our operation to accomodate theirs and generally made them welcome. Partly that was due to my personal friendship with Stan prior to the creation of DICE, partly it was because of the long standing 'BoB is BoB' attitude, partly it was a calculated effort to ensure the IGA continued to be successful and partly it was because we genuinely recognised a lot of characteristics of DICE that clicked with BNC (RKK and Evol are filthy commies, BNC and DICE are not :P).

BNC decided that we would go on a roadtrip up north shortly after DICE joined, we'd been putting it off for weeks and months in order to further our capital fleet and deal with some of the more failed alliances giving us grief at home (hi VC and SA!). Although we'd had our roadtrip in planning and on the cards for months we discovered DICE had already gone on a roadtrip up north before ours started. This presented the perfect opportunity to work with DICE and do some bonding.

I'll just digress into some BoB history for a second before I go on to discuss the dynamics of BNC's relationship with DICE.

BNC was a founder member of BoB primarily because of RKK. See my earlier quote from DBP's history of RKK to understand that we'd been brothers in arms before the war with PA kicked off. In fact NORAD was dragged into the GNW because of BNC's relationship with RKK forged during the fighting over the Fade region's conquerable stations. BNC and RKK have often been referred to as two parts of one whole and although that is not factually correct it is true to say that we left our anti-pirate, m0o hating, comfortable, FA allied and alliance leading position within NORAD so that we could continue to fly with RKK (when you recognise a soul mate you stick with them in game just as you would in RL - if you have any sense). BNC's relationship with Evol was more complicated, as I've outlined in an earlier blog (yesterday) Evol thought we were incompetent noobs to begin with and if I am honest it was probably not until the FIX war that we truly overcame that, so our early relationship with Evol was rocky (as I have elsewhere admitted they were right initially by the way and I still appreciate the fact that they helped us become what we are today). Since the start of our move down south and subsequent campaigns down there BNC has however forged a strong relationship with Evol that these days is as strong as our links with RKK. A year ago I would have without a doubt supported RKK over Evol, now I couldn't pick between the two, it would be like asking someone which of their two drowning siblings they would save if they could save only one!

So, BoB had evolved into a very close knit alliance and here were DICE thrown into the mix.

BNC headed up north on our roadtrip regardless of the fact that DICE were already in the area. Tholarim and I had a brief IRC discussion about it where he offered to move DICE on and I offered to pick a different location for BNC's roadtrip so that we wouldn't step on each other's toes. Instead of seperating the two corps we decided to work together for a while and it poduced the best of results.

To a man I think all BNC pilots would say that they formed a special bond with DICE during that roadtrip up north. We got used to the way each other fights, we got used to each other's FCs and we had a fuck load of fun together.

Close on the heels of our roadtrip up north we had the CODA infestation of Querious which brought both corps home again to the Delve area, the Goonfleet incident and then the Celes/Outbreak move to Fountain.

I can freely admit that when BoB first responded to the Celes/Outbreak influx to Fountain we came off worst. We'd been shooting T1 frigate swarms and podding Goons for over a month and proper combat against Celes/Outbreak was exactly the wake up call we needed.

Rather than send all four BoB corps to Fountain and outblob Celes/Outbreak we decided to rotate the BoB corps in and out of the region. BNC and DICE got the first shift and after the initial hassle of us relocating from S-U in Syndicate to Fountain and the losses incurred in this time we soon got ourselves sorted and in position.

Although I missed a lot of the fights initially I soon started getting more in game time and FCing alongside Tholarim from DICE. It was very apparent that our roadtrip up north had helped gel DICE and BNC. Regardless of the outcome of some of the earliest fights against Celes/Outbreak BNC and DICE had together got their measure and were consistently bettering them when it came to our turn to rotate out.

On a personal level I can say with confidence that when working together Tholarim and I have never lost a fleet fight in any conflict against any opponent in the months since we started working together after DICE joined the BoB IGA.

Our roadtrip up north and our fighting alongside each other in Fountain has created a strong bond between BNC and DICE. Just as our initial closeness to RKK rather than Evol evolved into strong bonds between our three corps as far as BNC is concerned those bonds are just as strong with DICE.

That's the story of ATUK, DICE, BNC and the rest of BoB from my perspective. I hold DICE as a corporation in equal esteem to RKK and Evol. More than that, I have friends within DICE who I value just as much as I value my friends in Evol and RKK.

Tholarim, Dread, QD, Tiger, Traffic, the other leaders of DICE (including my old and very good friend Stan) and all their members are just as much members of our Band of Brothers as Galavet, Molle, TWD, Fitz, Dian, Gunstar, Dafuzz, Valora, Biz, Kally, Druid, Haze and all the members of RKK and Evolution (apologies to all 400+ people I didn't just mention in person!).

There is not now and there will never be any split between DICE and the other BoB corps as long as BoB lives and certainly not as long as I am CEO of BNC. DICE have my and my corp's respect as equals amongst our 'tribe' (look up what the BoB logo represents).

ASCN you need new and far more competent spin doctors.

More Than An Alliance?

2006-10-25T02:55:00.000Z

What is BoB?

We started out during the Great Northern War in Eve as a collection of PvP corps dedicated to the downfall of the Phoenix Alliance (PA). Back then we knew very little about each other other than the fact that we made an effective combination of corporations.

Since then we've grown to know each other well, we've fought many large campaigns alongside each other and we've developed this 'thing' called Band of Brothers that none of us ever intended to begin with.

Our alliance started life as the "Cookies Cake and Pie Alliance"! However, CCP (Crowd Control Productions - the makers of Eve) soon asked us to change that for obvious reasons. We'd been thrashing our opponents so regularly that there were many accusations of us cheating, hacking or receiving preferential treatment from CCP that it made sense to change our name, cool as it was, because we needed then and need now no preferential treatment from CCP or anyone to achieve what we have acheived. Our achievements are based on one simple fact, we are there for each other on the field of battle no matter the personal loss and 'accursed' (you'll get that reference in a minute if you don't already) do we consider ourselves if we miss the opportunity to stand by our brothers and sisters.

As a purely irreverant act the alliance was named Bob with no deliberate meaning behind the three letter monicker. Immediately there was a deluge of suggestions as to what Bob stood for by our enemies from Band of Blobbers to far less savoury (and often dildo related o.O) versions. I don't remember who came up with Band of Brothers and should therefore be partially be credited with the creation of our online gaming brand but someone did and it stuck.

We've grown to fulfill that name which stuck to us and these days a Band of Brothers we are indeed.

When we discussed what BoB stood for internally we of course recognised that it was never intended to mean anything other than two fingers to CCP for nerfing our original alliance name, however we understood at some level the important opportunity this gave us and got into the search for a theme behind the irreverant Bob name which started out as a joke.

Lots of people assume that the then popular HBO series by the name of Band Of Brothers influenced our decision and perhaps for some of our members it did. The story of Easy Company, the 506th Parachute Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division is easy to identify to for a group of mainly young men enjoying the camaradery of a wargame of Eve's nature. However, it was a much older refererence highlighted by one of our members that really made the monicker of Band of Brothers stick internally and it comes from a much more classical source.

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Taken from Shakespeare's Saint Crispin's day speech allegedly given by Henry V prior to the battle of Agincourt this passage is what convinced us that Band of Brothers was the right name for our alliance, forged in the bitterest of Eve wars to date and tested on the field of battle the messages in Hal's speech are what our alliance has come to embody over the years.

Why do I bring this subject up now?

Well I suppose it is partly because people who do not understand us or seek to score propaganda points currently try to expose a weakness in our unity and it is partly because I got home this last Sunday evening from one of Evolution's Director's houses after a weekend of beer, friendship, damn good lamb curry(!) and a reminder of how much more than an amalgamation of a few Eve corporations this alliance really is.

Fi'tzeh of Evolution hosted five other BoB CEO's and Directors at his house for a weekend of fun and games. In attendance were Fitz, Rift Scorn (of BNC), Dianabolic (of RKK), Alasse (of TAOSP), Farjung (of TAOSP) and myself (of BNC).

It wasn't a particularly exciting or enlightening weekend from the perspective of the current ASCN war other than the fact that it took several of our best FC's and most charismatic leaders out of the fighting for the weekend but it is indicative of how BoB is not just a group of counterstrike kiddies contributing nothing to society, enconsed in their mother's basements looking for the Sword of a Thousand Truths!

Of course one weekend with six players out of the 1600 accounts (and approximately 500-600 real people) in BoB does not make us anything special. However, it is indicative of what our alliance is like.

Whilst we were arranging to have our weekend of curry, beer, Eve, fireworks called 'Apocolypse' (yes we really found one and yes we bought it and set it off!), giving Fitz shit for being a Chelsea fan and generally having a damn fine lads weekend, another two BoB meets were being planned on our forums. Some of the UK guys are getting together next weekend and we are already planning our annual barbeque for 2007 somewhere in Europe.

My general point is that our Band of Brothers has evolved way beyond a collection of faceless gamers strung out across the globe, we're as united as ever before and we're more than determined to stick together through thick and thin in Eve because quite simply we are friends and brothers (and of course sisters!). We're not the only online gaming group to create real life friendships and we won't be the last but (and I've been a part of a fair few in various games) we're one of the tightest I've ever come across.

To ASCN's rather hopeless spin doctors fueling their membership with the sort of bullshit I haven't seen since I used to peruse PA's forums during GNW, BoB's morale is nowhere near breaking you silly buggers. Remember, "gentlemen in England now a-bed, shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day" and so do all members of our alliance feel because "we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers".

We're in this for the long haul and we'll expose your weaknesses, make public your mistakes, trample on your corpses and triumph over you just as Hal's army did to the overwhelming French force at Agincourt. Whilst we're doing all that we won't be sat in our parent's basements being useless members of society either, we'll be socialising, going to gigs together, having parties at each other's houses, barbequing in the sun and living life to the full. I hope you will be too.

If Ever There Was A Time To Blog!

2006-10-25T01:55:00.000Z

Well this is the time I suppose, if I was ever going to resurrect my blog and start writing again now would be the time.

I've not had much that's inspired me to write a lot in Eve recently, I know there have been campaigns, there have been battles and there have been moments that should inspire the creative juices but if I'm honest something has been lacking.

The fact that the missing 'something' has returned with this ASCN war is probably most evident in the fact that it's made me want to blog again. Little wonder then that I'm up at 5am having been writing all night despite having to get up for work at 7am (although the fact that my computer doesn't like Eve at the moment despite being allegedly fixed at the weekend, may have something to do with the fact that I am writing rather than playing!).

So I'll be adding entries to my blog as often as I can during this war, the first two having been posted tonight.

I'm going to start with saying that all of my blog entries regarding the ASCN war are going to be my own opinion and I fully understand the risks involved with objective reporting of events. I do not propose to write my memoirs of this war with a deliberate slant, far from it, contrary to how our enemies would have you believe it I propose to quite simply tell the truth.

BoB are quite well known for our forum propaganda so this is a point worth dwelling over. To begin with BoB's forum propaganda from my perspective as one of the 5 CEO's in the alliance (SirMolle of Evolution, Galavet of Reikoku, Tholarim of DICE, TWD of TAOSP and myself of BNC and BNC.E) is based on one precept and only one, the effective use of facts to expose our enemies shortcomings.

We do not deal in lies. Our members would recognise them for what they are. Not only would our members recognise them if we told lies but they would also then question our ability to lead the alliance and undoubtedly expose us as the frauds that we would be if we did. BoB has a remarkably open communications structure, we do not censor our members on the Eve-O forums, we do not censor our members on our own internal boards. 90%+ of our decisions as an alliance are made within an IRC channel that all of our Directors have access to and we poor neglected hard working CEO's (:P) very rarely keep information back from our Directors and management teams.

In short we have no need (and I personally have no need regarding my own corp) to lie or missrepresent the truth about how our alliance is performing in Eve. To lie about the way we are performing would mean we are lying to ourselves and not acknowledging our defeats and attempting to improve.

I have an anecdote regarding the early stages of the Great Northern War to share with you that illustrates how we do not lie to each other. During the seige of BKG m0o, RKK and Evolution were permanatly engaged with PA camping BKG and fighting as soon as the enemy stuck it's head out in local. Other allied forces were directed elsewhere in the north. BNC were still a part of NORAD and because we couldn't fly with m0o (we were very anti-pirate in those days before we grasped the new model of conflict within Eve i.e. inter alliance warfare) were assigned to empire wars against targeted PA corps as well as to hold the EC-P8R corridor.

Following a couple of very successful empire space campaigns against PA corps we moved back to Pure Blind and to our EC-P8R operations. It soon became apparent that we could be better used elsewhere (as Pure Blind was becoming increasingly less hostile) so we were assigned to lock down Venal whilst RKK, m0o and Evolution held BKG. So BNC moved en-masse to Venal.

We lost a shit load of ships. There was no hiding the fact to begin with that the PA corps left in Venal gave BNC an incredibly hard time, we lost more than we killed. In head to head encounters with equivalent fleets we more than held our own, in fact the BNC Amarr Navy gank squad was to be feared back then, we used to hunt with 6-10 Armageddons and 1-3 Apocolypses and could alpha strike anything that came within locking range. However, we had a lot of noob pilots who did not know how to survive in 0.0 space and were ruining our kill stats and boosting the PA's morale.

Bearing in mind that BNC had just come out of a successful war against RSA/COD/FE, were on a high and that myself as CEO and Doctorgonzo as COO had effectively run the NORAD alliance we were unused to being told we weren't hacking it and were very unused to facing up to any shortcomings (we simply hadn't been adequately tested at that point) it was quite a surprise for us to discover that most Evolution pilots thought we were useless noobies.

They were of course right and Molle soon made a point of telling us.

This was weeks before BoB was created and BNC were included anyway. Molle gave DG and I a dressing down about our corporation such as I haven't received since I was in the British Army and forgot to polish my boots! He was right with everything he said. Several weeks later we were officially in BoB anyway.

Why were we allowed into the alliance? You could ask Molle, Galavet, the CEOs of Ruffnecks, m0o and ATUK to get their views but I'll give you mine. We accepted the facts as presented to us and we did something about them. More to the point we booted over 100 characters from the corp who couldn't hack living in 0.0 space, we got even more active in fighting our opponents, we stopped losing ships and we killed more. In short we addressed what we had to address.

BNC has progressed to be a full member of BoB in the months and years since the GNW, we have consistently performed equally as well as the other corps in the alliance and at times outperformed them. Why have we been able to do this? Simply because someone took the time to honestly tell us that we needed to improve, so we have.

So how is that relevant to an opening discussion about me updating my blog about the ASCN war?

It is relevant because it illustrates the fact that right from day one BoB as an alliance has never shirked from telling each other what the score is, we have never felt the need to lie about our performance and as illustrated by BNC in this particular example we have always taken steps immediately to move ourselves forwards, to evolve and to succeed in the face of adversity.

ASCN do not do this.

ASCN's leadership, as I will go on to demonstrate in future blogs about the war, continue to lie to their members regarding how the war is going, they make spurious claims about their success, about their kill ratios and about their progress.

I've decided to restart my blog in order to make a record about the ASCN war from the perspective of a BoB CEO so that unfettered by the moderation of the Eve-O forums I can report what is actually going on.

I will no doubt at times fall foul of embelishment but I do not mean to.

I will no doubt suffer from the bias of an involved party but I do not mean to.

I will do my best to be as objective as I can be.

I will not discuss strategy, tactics or how our Fleet Commanders win specific engagements exept in the broadest terms, I don't want to give away trade secrets! I will however explain how events are unfurling from our broad perspective.

Here commences my record of the war between two of Eve's largest and greatest alliances.

Enjoy the read as much as I enjoy the writing.

Blacklight

Regarding GoonSwarm

2006-07-27T19:45:00.000Z

As I am trying to not get drawn into the forum war with GS's retarded forum whore spammage of utter shite division it looks like my blog will have to be my venting engine for the upcoming war.

This thread on the Eve-O forums http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=370578 is particularly difficult to restrain myself on because for every post I make I know I'll get 300 moronic gooners posting "omglol internet tough guy". Yeah no shit sherlock, it's Eve, the game where we 'roleplay' (dirty flower picking wand waving word) the big bad ebil BoB.

So for anyone reading all Goon's sudden attack of utter hypocrisy as they repeatedly post how offended they are that we are tarring them all with the same brush or using a dead friend's memory as an excuse to whack them, this is my reply.

Understand the following..

1. The sig incident is the straw that broke the camel's back (the sig was current so the whole 4 month old joke line is just garbage).

2. Having started as an amusing sideshow and a new initiative to be cheered on, Goons have shown their true colors.

3. We don't like you.

4. We really don't like your CEO.

5. We think your attitude stinks and you're a blight on this community.

6. We are going to fight you because of 1-5 and because we can.

We don't give a toss what Goons or anyone else for that matter thinks of our reasons for targeting you as we are doing it anyway. We have [b]never[/b] needed anyone else's approval for doing anything in Eve nor do we now. There are numerous people we would rather be singling out for our next major project however you, your retarded forum antics, your attitude and your idiot CEO have gathered enough points on the "nextalliancetodie-o-meter" that we are going to end you.

See you in space.

It's a long time since I've seen so many BoB members so utterly pissed off and angy towards another group of Eve players, no doubt this could be a very long and vitriolic war. So be it, we have business with Goons now and we're going to see it through.

Oh well, as that thread was getting out of hand I posted anyway, no doubt it'll get spammed to death and chewed over by a few hundred morons from SA forums now.

Killing The FIX Outpost! (Easter Bunny Hunt Part 2!)

2006-04-20T20:57:00.000Z

Well on the weekend in question we had been attempting to break a few kill records ganking everything within 100 jumps of Delve starting a round the universe road trip from Delve on Friday after DT which lead us around every region on the map until we got to Stain and Catch.

After playing about in FAT on Saturday, and omfg Stain and Huzzah are fucking shite they had a large BS fleet in system and refused to stand and fight our 40 man frig and cruiser gang the lamers (bagged 6 BS kills and numerous small ships due to their total incompetence however before taking the Outpost from under their noses in our friggies!), we decided to regroup in Delve and play about in Paragon Soul and Feythabolis on Saturday evening (the relevance of this waffle about Saturday will become clear when I get to Sunday evening and the beginning of the egg saga from our perspective).

So we took another 40 man frig and cruiser gang down to Paragon Soul and jumped into a large TS fleet with a bazillion bubbles on the gate in GQ2S-8. After much hilarity warping in and out of their gate camp onto 2 different covert ops warp in points we managed to blow up about 24 support ships and 9 BS's for 16 support ship losses before TS brought in support from ASCN and Prime Orbital Systems. Despite the fact we'd brought in reinforcements and got up to about 60 pilots involed we decided to do a runner and I had to lead 40 of us back through Feyth and Esoteria with 140 hostiles (using better bookmarks than us) chasing us back home. A 50+ jump round trip and two gate camps (we lost another 4 support ships at one of them) later we arrived back in Delve at about 00:00 GMT.

With such a large TS/ASCN/POS fleet around Paragon/Esoteria the only sensible thing to do was to get into more ships and take a full fleet back down south. So we did and predictably beat TS and ASCN into a pulp in the early hours of Sunday morning with 33 BS killed for 9 lost across two engagements (a minor one vs TS and a major one vs ASCN) despite being stupidly outnumbered and jumping into ASCN's heavily bubbled camp during the second engagement (support kill loss ratio is uncountably positive).

After all that fun on Saturday night Sunday morning we couldn't resist going back down there during the day on Sunday, which is why despite the fact we knew FIX were egging it in ED- we chose to sail back down to Feyth again at about 18:00 on Sunday. After some huge battles down south and a general raping of ASCN and allies we had to take a fleet back down to reinforce our guys down there on Sunday evening. Our reinforcements (about 40 pilots) arrived in Feyth at about 1:00am on Monday morning after the last meaningful ASCN fleet was destroyed, doh! Total of 74 BS killed for 12 losses I think (manually counting off the killboard so +/- 2-3 each way!).

That left us with about 80 hyped up BoB pilots having just broken both our BS kill record for one day and our total kills record for one day (120 and 340 respectively) and no other blobs on the map except SA/Huzzah and FIX up around ED-.

Avernus from FIX had convoed me at about 00:50am asking for assistance in ED-, the convo having gone like this...

Quote:

[ 2006.04.17 00:53:10 ] Avernus > this a good time?
[ 2006.04.17 00:53:19 ] Blacklight > hi
[ 2006.04.17 00:53:31 ] Blacklight > so so, if I am slow to respond bear with me
[ 2006.04.17 00:53:38 ] Avernus > np
[ 2006.04.17 00:54:17 ] Avernus > FIX needs some help, and we want to know if BoB is up for helping us out. I know that's an odd request, and you may just end up shooting us instead, but I had to ask.
[ 2006.04.17 00:54:40 ] Blacklight > what kind of help?
[ 2006.04.17 00:54:59 ] Avernus > you may have heard from Dianabolic already, FIX is placing an outpost
[ 2006.04.17 00:55:13 ] Avernus > we have incoming from RA, SA, and Huzzah
[ 2006.04.17 00:55:43 ] Avernus > FIX has a 100 man fleet formed, and may have reinforcements coming, but this is going to be tight
[ 2006.04.17 00:56:34 ] Blacklight > I can't promise any help we are kinda busy with ASCN/OS/TS tonight
[ 2006.04.17 00:56:59 ] Blacklight > and we have reset all standings
[ 2006.04.17 00:57:08 ] Blacklight > so if we turn up it'll be a 3 way
[ 2006.04.17 00:57:21 ] Avernus > understandable, and I wouldn't expect anything on such short notice, nor with the consideration of the standings.
[ 2006.04.17 00:57:31 ] Avernus > was just looking to see if there was a possiblity to be had
[ 2006.04.17 00:57:49 ] Blacklight > well was worth asking I guess
[ 2006.04.17 00:57:59 ] Blacklight > you have our response for now though mate
[ 2006.04.17 00:58:06 ] Blacklight > good luck, fly safe and kick ass
[ 2006.04.17 00:58:11 ] Avernus > kk, and thanks for the time.
[ 2006.04.17 00:58:12 ] Avernus >

I have to admit to being a little surprised at the request so soon after our standings reset but with 80 bored BoB pilots all looking to kill more stuff the possibility of a 3-way fleet fight was too much to resist, so we hot-footed it back to Delve to refit, take on ammo and repair (half our fleet had almost no ammo left and half the BS had structure damage after fighting down south all day). We were really hoping that we could get there and jump into SA/Huzzah first before fighting the FIX guys

I got convoed by Command0 from FIX as we were heading up north and that convo went as follows..

Quote:

[ 2006.04.17 01:28:04 ] Blacklight > hi
[ 2006.04.17 01:28:13 ] Command0 > you guys looking for a fight?
[ 2006.04.17 01:28:32 ] Blacklight > lol we've just killed about 80 ASCN BS
[ 2006.04.17 01:28:41 ] Command0 > 100+ sa/Huzzah in 3-f
[ 2006.04.17 01:28:49 ] Command0 > FIX is asking for Help
[ 2006.04.17 01:29:14 ] Command0 > they are preparing to jump capship in
[ 2006.04.17 01:29:24 ] Command0 > to kill the outpost being deployed
[ 2006.04.17 01:30:38 ] Blacklight > Give us Querious, pay rent and we'll save your outpost
[ 2006.04.17 01:31:08 ] Blacklight > 300m per corp per week to live there in BoB space
[ 2006.04.17 01:33:13 ] Command0 > o_O

We decided that as we'd already made it clear that we weren't going to come help and that a 3 way was most likely when we arrived we would get into full BoB RP mode, hence the demands on Command0 Mentioning SA capital ships got us all really horny for a fight to be honest, it's dissappointing we didn't arrive early enough to jump in and warp right into the middle of FIX fighting SA/Huzzah

When we found out FIX had raped SA/Huzzah (we had a covert ops watching the fight) there was much cheering and laughing on TS!

Despite the fact that it was about 3:15am or something when we were reformed in NOL-M9 everyone was still so excited we had about a 70 man fleet regardless of the hour. We saddled up and moved out towards ED- arriving in 60M-TG in time to kill Cougar One

Our covert ops had been watching all night inside ED- so we knew exactly what we were facing on the jump in, I have to admit some of our lads were actually a bit nervous because we knew FIX had multiple carriers and at least one dread in the system which we'd have to face when we jumped in. As usual though the main ego's in BoB (lol) were more than comfortable with the challenge so with hardly any hesitation or hold up we raced up to 3-FKCZ and jumped right into ED-L9T.

The fight on the gate was a LOT of fun and surprisingly I didn't die, despite having to warp out and back in twice (FIX I am not always in command, frigging well pick on someone else ok!). The fight on the gate raged for about 5-6 mins before we overcame the defending FIX fleet and started to consolidate our position. I think we lost 7 BS in the fight to get into the system killing 17 and lost 5 support ships in exchange for 28-29. Whilst securing our position Coranor warped to Planet 3 hunting stragglers and got ganked by the FIX fleet gaurding the egg (04:09) so we warped the fleet in and bagged another 5 BS kills.

Then we were on to killing the egg.

We debated bringing the capital ships over and could probably have rustled up 10 dreads and 5-10 carriers as well but decided to do things the old fashioned way primarily because we thought if we strung out the time it took to kill the egg FIX may get reinforcements and come in on us again thus leading to more killage and fun fights!

Whilst shooting the Egg I was in convo with Avernus and valhallan from FIX who approached me to see if terms were available to save the Outpost egg. Needless to say we were in full ghengis Khan mode at that time with a lot of very drunk and 'yarrred' up BoB pilots, so it was going to have to be a very good deal to save the egg. To be totally honest I am a big softy and felt sorry for FIX when we stonewalled them with the offer given to Command0 being repeated again i.e. hand over Querious, live in BoB space and you can keep the egg.

After much pisstaking at my expense in our command channel (for being such a soft git!) we decided to stick to our ebil conquer the known universe RP and not budge on our demands. I don't mind admitting that I encouraged FIX to not accept and to tell us to piss off and save their dignity if not their outpost! I was actually very proud of the FIX guys for eventually telling us to piss off, that was the best decision they'd made over the whole weekend.

Having declined our kind offer FIX rallied and warped about 20 BS into our fleet at the Outpost at 0km range! Naturally the bastards called me primary, Molle's turn to do the negotiations next time if that's what happens! Was a bit of a slaughter really with 20 FIX/BAPWN BS going down in the next 5-10 mins (including a couple hunted down around the system after the fight). We lost another 6 BS in that engagement.

After that fight and Marko Debrault's mail to me which just said "Leeroy!" we settled in to kill the egg and those of us that had died went and got into new ships and came back.

The egg went pop at 7:30am, there was some debate about leaving it with about 1% structure just because we could(!) but the lads wanted to see the explosion and after so long shooting the damn thing we couldn't really back out. FIX had rallied together yet another fleet by this time which was lurking one system out. We thought they were going home when we blew the egg but as we jumped from ED-L9T into 3-FKCZ the FIX fleet jumped back into 3-FKCZ as well. Charge! We warped across the system into close range and engaged them. Another 15 BS killed for 2 losses! There was much rejoicing on TS at this point both for a very successful night, for hitting 111 BS kills by 8am (OMG!) and for FIX being such fine opponents with huge balls of steel.

So eventually at about 8:30am we arrived back in Delve, so tired we could hardly focus but highly elated.

Respect to FIX for being awesome.

Easter Bunny Hunt (part 1)

2006-04-17T16:48:00.000Z

What a weekend, what an incredible weekend of wanton destruction and roadtripping madness!
This is a tale that is going to need some serious telling and I don't know if I can actually get it all down on the screen without missing too much out. We've literally visited 90% of all the regions in Eve this weekend and fought 90% of the alliances in 0.0 space in one long grand orgy of destruction starting immediately after downtime on Friday and ending at about 9am GMT on Monday morning. In the process we've broken several of our own records, broken several of our own people and broken a LOT of other people's hardware.

So how did all this come about and what actually happened?

On Tuesday 11th April in the late afternoon there was a thread in the BoB Directors forum suggesting an idea for some fun and games over the Easter holiday weekend. The basic premise of the idea being, let's do a tour of the whole map of Eve and shoot at everyone! Or in slightly more detail the original plan looked like this...

4-hour shifts, 2 hours breaks. Totalling 4 shifts in 24 hours.

Shift 1;
NOL - YZ-LQ - HOPHIB - 4C-B7X - Orvolle
Rest in Orvolle.

Shift 2;
Orvolle - Syndicate - Cloud Ring - Fade - Torrinos
Rest in Torrinos

Shift 3;
Torrinos - Deklein - Branch - Venal - Tribute - Obe
Rest in Obe

Shift 4;
Great Wildlands - Scalding Pass - Curse - Catch - Empire
Rest in Keberz

Shift 5;
Catch - Esoteria - Paragon Soul - Querious - NOL
Rest in NOL

Needless to say we went just a little off track by the end of it and shift 5 blended into shifts 6 and 7 which then led to shifts 8-15!

The first stage saw us depart from NOL-M9 immediately after downtime on Friday with approximately 70 support ships of all different shapes and sizes, we raced up into Fountain and swarmed all over the area around YZ-LQL, A-1CON, MN5N-X etc. looking to see whether there were any FA or VC harassing Xelas. What we found died but as is the way with the our little zombie infestation around Fountain they run and hide whenever we show up. So we blasted straight through towards D4KU and Hophib only to find the area again pretty much deserted barring one rather unfortunate NPC hunting Megathron that died to our over eager scouts before the main swarm could arrive. A certain person would have tried to take it on his own in a rifter if there had been no other support nearby, loony, luckliy a friendly Deimos coming from the other direction arrived to support. There were howls of dissappointment from the baying pack of interceptor pilots closing in on our covert ops when they heard the Megathron had died before they got there - it was going to be one of those weekends!

After confirming that hide and seek VC crowd around Hophib were indeed hiding again we headed up for Outer Ring and blasted through 4C-B7X bagging a few NORAD BS on the way. Alasse and I as always at the forefront of fleet discipline and setting a prime example to all our other pilots as Molle said "Hold on the gate two jumps from 4C-, do NOT jump into LGUZ-1"....

[ 2006.04.14 13:49:20 ] EVE System > Channel changed to LGUZ-1 Local Channel
[ 2006.04.14 13:49:27 ] Alasse Cuthalion > I think we're both newbs
[ 2006.04.14 13:49:30 ] Alasse Cuthalion > \o/
[ 2006.04.14 13:49:33 ] Blacklight > whoops
[ 2006.04.14 13:49:37 ] Blacklight > ;)
[ 2006.04.14 13:49:40 ] Alasse Cuthalion > indeed
[ 2006.04.14 13:49:42 ] Alasse Cuthalion > ;)
[ 2006.04.14 13:53:48 ] Alasse Cuthalion > killmail hoes!
[ 2006.04.14 13:53:52 ] Alasse Cuthalion > TALLY HO
[ 2006.04.14 13:53:56 ] Blacklight > charge

Funneh!

So we bagged a couple of BS kills and so forth from NORAD before rolling on towards Syndicate. We paid the Supremacy and 3FA peeps a vist, ganked a few 3FA whilst Lacrimae threatened Molle with dire consequences ;)

We spotted a Rage of Angels gate camp on the Reblier gate in 6-CZ49 but it's a rather long warp to the Reblier gate so they did a runner although our support did catch a Moa of theirs at a planet. Whilst we were chasing RoA around in 6-CZ49 we had a scoutin Reblier having a look around who found some BS in a belt, so in the spirit of total mayhem we jumped in and blew them up!

Time to head back to Orvolle and rest for a couple of hours after stage one was complete.

Two hours later the BoB suicide support ship fleet regrouped in Orvolle and the second shift commenced.

--------------------------------------------
I found this draft of an incomplete blog and as it's ages (like 6+ months) since it happened I'll never finish it, however rather than it never see the light of day I thought I'd just post the incomplete version.
--------------------------------------------

Damn HACs

2006-03-14T08:47:00.000Z

Bloody HAC prices and availability – stop the whining about it already.

A classic example (one of many) of the subject of my ire is this thread http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=307834%5B/ . That’s probably about the twentieth thread in the “General Retards Whinefest” section of the Eve-Online forums on this subject in the last six months. Just fuck off already with your “omg HACs are so expensive whaaaaaaaaaagh”.

I really don’t understand what the bloody problem is, why do so many people just expect that everything in the game be available to them at low cost? I would love to fly around in nothing but Caldari Navy Ravens or Rattlesnakes with fully pimped out faction setups. Can I? No can I fuck, even my deep pocket doesn’t stretch to that. Why can’t I fly about in the ships I want to fly with the kit I want fitted all of the time? Simple, supply and demand. The supply is relatively low because the source of the supply is fairly limited. The demand is relatively high (amongst my peer group in Eve at least, i.e. 3 year vets with deep pockets and plenty skill points).

Why on god’s green earth, or in CCP’s beautifully rendered space can the whining carebear masses not accept the fact that some gear in Eve is not easily accessible and that HACs are one of those things?

All the economics and market forces “experts” that reply in those threads get right up my nose as well to be honest, some of them obviously haven’t got a Scooby what they are banging on about.

The laws of supply and demand are not exactly complicated and debating whether it’s the build time, number of bpos, RAM supply or whatever causing the problem doesn’t really matter. The fact is the ships are rare and expensive. Good. Get over it and fly something else if you can’t afford them.

What’s the point in introducing high end content if everyone gets access to it immediately? There should be something to aspire to, something to aim towards, a new shiny toy to save your pennies for and if that happens to be a HAC then so be it.

I love the fact that members of the intellectually challenged General Forum mob think that there’s some kind of price fixing going on or that if ‘they really wanted to’ HAC manufacturers could drive the price down. You are being exceedingly niave. Prices are high due to supply and demand, drop the prices and someone will buy the ships and resell …. and why? Simple because there are people out there who can’t be arsed waiting and have the isk to buy that new HAC for 150m+ right now… and they do.

The other dirty secret of the HAC world is that the number of bpos driving open market availability is a LOT less than the total number of bpos released (twenty of each I think?). For example, before we traded one of them a short while ago, BNC owned 3 (yes three, 3, the number after two and before four, THREE) out of the 20 Zealot bpos in Eve. They were pretty much all used to supply the corp. So just us, little old BNC had 15% of the total supply of one type of HAC and we weren’t sharing. We currently have 6 HAC bpos out of 160 in game, that’s 3.75% of the total market supply. Count the rest of BoB’s HAC bpos in and we control probably closer to 5, 6 or 7% of total supply.

Assuming that every other alliance in Eve has at least one HAC bpo driving internal supply and it doesn’t take long before the open market only has access to about maybe 60% of total blueprint availability.

Great!! High end content for players at the high end of gameplay, an isk sink for the rich and a rewarding edge in combat for those who put in the effort and teamwork to deserve it.

Of course, you’ll say, you would have this attitude you have 6 HAC bpos in your corp. Fair enough comment but I assure you I have exactly this attitude about Recon ships, Command ships, Capital ships and all sorts of other stuff where I don’t have direct access to a large market share.

You see the thing is, I’m not an unrealistic, grasping carebear ;)

Christmas Road Trip (Incomplete Blog)

2006-03-13T21:28:00.000Z

The 2005/2006 christmas road trip!

So yeah, let's just start by clearing this rather important point up - it really was a road trip and not an invasion! We have two or three big campaigns/objectives in the pipeline (we might not go for all of them hence "two or three" and not just "two" or "one" or "three"!) but the timing wasn't quite right to initiate any of them and the guys really needed something entertaining to do as we'd had them chasing ghosts around Fountain, Outer Ring and Aridia (which reminds me, I really do need to finish my other blog about how utterly hopeless VC are!).

So where do we always go when we need to have a laugh, poke some old enemies and get into some good fights? The North of course. It was rather convenient that in going up north we'd also be providing a major distraction to G/IRON just at the time that they were throwing their weight around down south. However, despite the fringe benefit of helping ASCN out our main motivation, by a country mile, was simply to give the guys something to shoot at. We weren't even focused specifically on G/IRON when we went up north, there are all sorts of people up there that just love BoB including RAZOR, F-E, PA, G and IRON so we thought we'd get some action even without G/IRON being active in the north when we first arrived. So the speculation and rumour about us just going up north to save ASCN's bacon or that ASCN had paid us to do it or that we were on a long term invasion plan or any such drivel is just that I'm afraid... speculative drivel.

What's amusing is that G leadership definitely knew what our intentions were, I've seen them quoting posts/corp mails of mine which spell out our intentions. Despite knowing we had a G spy in our ranks I detailed our plans to the BNC membership as we set off up north. This is probably why most of the propaganda and spin about BoB 'retreating' in the face of G/IRON superiority in JU- is from IRON members or alts, whilst G keep their usual respectful (and respected) enigmatic silence on the forums about it. Fuffel, Woody, Bratzo and the other G commanders knew we weren't up there to stay.

Moving up north on the day we deployed turned into a COMPLETE NIGHTMARE, the lag was shocking and our fleets moved at a snail's pace with the usual emergency warps from every gate, people dropping out etc.. It's a good job we weren't piling straight into action when we got up north otherwise day one would have been a complete clusterfuck. As it was we just concentrated on getting the guys moved and setting up shop in X-7OMU, a nice system to base out of for easy access to empire, to attack RAZOR, to hit G/IRON, to raid G pets in Fade, to go north to hit PA or to bez through to Tribute and smack F-E about a bit.

You could tell that we were on a Roadtrip for laughs as we moved half a dozen of our Faction battleships up there and flew a pimp fleet gang every night just to take the piss with and get a load of faction BS on kill mails! Led mostly by the Fitzinator in his Pimpwagon BoB Vindicators and Navy Tempests roamed the north on an evening in small gangs. I decided not to miss out on this fun so popped back down to 4C-B7X to pick up my Caldari Navy Raven. I hate fitting warp core stabilisers as they gimp your ship so badly so even with a ship worth 3-4 bill isk I couldn't bring myself to fit WCS and set off from 4C- in full combat kit. With Kryztal scouting for me, in a shuttle so not a lot of support there, I set off! I got spotted by a NORAD pilot just as I was leaving 4C- and the normally timid wee beggars decided to give chase!! I hadn't even got up north and was already in the shit. A couple of times they nearly had me scrambled then on one gate they got lucky and I think I had an interceptor and a Thorax on me. The old heart was racing as several more NORAD jumped into system and I couldn't get away, so concentrating fire and using my faction Nosferatu (the eighth high slot on my CNR) I stayed aligned ready to warp and tried to knock out the scramblers before I was overwhelmed. The silly buggers apparently believe I had stabs fitted, some NORAD wannabe even referred to it in 4C- this week about 6 weeks later(!), but it was the power of 7 T2 Cruise Missile launchers and most importantly the heavy Nosferatu that got me out of that scrape! After calming down whilst bouncing between a couple of safe spots I waited for NORAD to bugger off before setting off on my merry way again!

Leading up to the christmas holidays we basically roamed around all over the north from Cloud Ring, through Fade, Deklein, Venal, Tenal, Branch to Tribute and of course all over Pure Blind. We had a few nice fights against F-E early on, well I say nice fights, to be honest F-E are awful in combat and got their arses kicked. Why do people think that warping in outside of everyone in their own fleet's optimal range is going to do them any good? What is it about people giving up on perfectly defensible and viable positions/situations as well? We went over to IMK for a fight pretty early on in the road trip with dbp and I in command, there was a small BoB gang over there blobbed in by about 35 F-E so we thought we'd go help the boys out and took about 20 people over to hook up with the 6-8 already over there and spank F-E a bit. Our gang was split and had to jump into IMK through two gates, we had to jump into F-E and they were set up in a nice camp with support on the gate and battleships sat off at range. Now with even numbers I'd have had our guys sit there and duke it out until we were getting hopelessly spanked or had annihalated the enemy. F-E lost a couple of ships and then buggered off, I couldn't believe it - a fairly even fight, F-E with the tactical advantage and they ran almost straight away WTF? Stand and fight goddammit! Following that all the ghey warping in at inneffectual ranges started, so we kept killing anyone we could capture before their fleet warped out again until we were just bored with their hopelessness and buggered off back to X-7OMU. How bad is that? We actually pulled out of a fight because it was so dull it wasn't worth the time and effort, F-E are pretty hopeless at PvP to be honest. To be fair to F-E they have admitted they're more of a traditional alliance with a very heavy element of industrialists so I shouldn't give them too hard a time, it's just a bit of a shame that a name with a history like F-E's is now largely associated with a group of carebears.

Then just a few days before the holidays properly kicked in our people raiding Deklein notice how badly defended the IRON outpost system was and Molle got an attack of the crazies. On an impulsive whim we decided to take soveriegnty in JU- and steal IRON's outpost for a while. This was bound to stir up a hornet's nest and take our little road trip up a level in the fun stakes. Evolution rushed up a couple of Dreadnaughts and all three BoB corps got large POS kits and fuel ready. Actually taking the outpost seemed to happen very quickly and was almost a non-event as IRON defences were as bad as we had anticipated. What was frustrating about this time for me personally was that having moved into a new appartment my bloody ADSL wasn't cooperating and I had bugger all time online until right up to Christmas week.

Despite my very shoddy internet connection I had quite a lot of fun when I got online during this campaign as I had only recently started flying HACs, yeah I know thirty odd million skill points and no HAC what can I say I like battleships (subject for a new blog there I think - "Ships I like to fly and why!"). So I scooted about in a Zealot up north for the first time on this roadtrip and despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth that has been associated with the RMR changes to module stacking and their effect on the Zealot I had an absolute blast in it! A great ship for quite long range support and equally heavy damage dealer at close range I find it's only problem is right up close against inties. Anyway considering I spent so little time online and dropped out of all but one fleet engagement without getting a shot off I still racked up a few kills and broke in my new HAC!

So yeah back on topic and back to IRON's defence of their region and outpost. Can I just say right now, IRON you're shite, no really, without G to hold your hand you're completely hopeless even with your uber blob of every carebear north of Nonni. Like any group of players I'm sure you've a few who are individually very capable but as a group, oh my god you're a disaster. I can understand why G keep IRON around because having such a huge number of meatshields has to have it's advantages but the average quality of a G fleet must drop about 50% when they merge with IRON. The only other alliance I've fought who are as militarily inept is NORAD and I think both NORAD and IRON's kill:loss ratio against us is similar as a result. I lost count of the occasions up north where a superior sized or relatively evenly matched IRON gang got absolutely whalloped by us, some of the lads have christened IRON's tactics 'Spray and Pray' as a result of our experience fighting IRON only gangs, which of course makes me chuckle no end.

I found the whole 'omg we can't get back from the south to defend our home, so you are only shooting a handful of carebears' arguement to be totally without merit as well. How come even through intense lag we can move BoB in it's entirety from one end of the universe to the other in about 12 hours and yet after 7-10 days we were still getting the same excuses from IRON about their PvPers not being able to get back to Deklein? Garbage to be honest. I have to commend some of IRON's late crew the US timezone guys that Ripp Tyde led against us during the first week or two of us being up there, they did a great job in terms of enthusiastically putting up some resistance despite getting a kicking time and time again. The other (up to) 50 odd IRON pilots that managed to get back from the south quite comfortably but hid in stations rather than defend their turf until G came to bail them out do not deserve to live in 0.0 space on this showing.

What definitely seems to be a problem with IRON, garnered from their internal communications, from their behaviour in game and from their effectiveness in combat is that their leadership is weak. Command authority seems to be very much limited to being in the hands of a few individuals without whom they suffer from headless chicken syndrome. IRON are particularly weak at the fleet command level as on very few occasions did we feel they deployed effective tactics or had sufficient discipline and control within their gangs - regardless of the skill, experience and self control of the individual pilots a good fleet commander will through personality, credibility, leadership and example ensure their team performs as instructed. IRON's fleet command often seemed to be all over the place, small bits of evidence from FRAPs reports, kill mails and anecdotal reports by members of our fleets after a fight support those conclusions.

The reason I've digressed into those last three paragraphs regarding IRON's competence is to answer in some way the quite honestly deluded view of themselves that they portray both in their internal communications and in some of the external propaganda, both of which were available by the bucket load during our little road trip over christmas. If IRON is a PvP alliance then frankly I am Eve's most successful industrialist or maybe Santa or a monkey's uncle... you get the picture.

Something changed towards the end of the holidays as our road trip entered it's final 10-14 days. G gangs started showing up in support of IRON, not only did this have the effect of increasing the numbers of hostiles we were facing significantly (bearing in mind we were already facing IRON, elements of Ekliptika and a myriad of G/IRON pets) but it also increased the quality of their fleet command, tactical decision making and effectiveness in combat significantly.

Not much more to add after this point anyway to be honest as we had almost reached the point where we had planned to go home, still if I get the urge I'll add the rest soon (tm).

Eve Fanfest 2005 (Incomplete Blog)

2006-03-13T21:25:00.000Z

So the story of the Eve Fanfest 2005 definitely deserves it’s own blog entry!

Things started on Monday evening before the fanfest with me ‘popping’ around to DG’s for a few hours to surf the net, have dinner etc. Two days, a bag of skunk and some Gregg’s cheese and onion pasties later I managed to get up to go into work for about an hour on Wednesday!

I stopped off on the way home from work on Wednesday to stock up on the essentials for a long weekend in a new drinking location!… a new digital camera, an iPod Nano and a long sleeved England football T-Shirt! DG and I then drove to Heathrow on Wednesday afternoon and got in a good 3 hours of speculation during the drive about geekfests, Eve plans, BNC/BoB strategy etc…

Despite the fact that the long stay car park at Heathrow appears to have been built in Spain it’s that far from the bloody terminals we arrived in good time and met SkaffenAmtiskaw by the Iceland Air desk. Several book purchases and of course a couple of Economics/Business monthly’s, so I at least attempt to pretend I am a grown up(!), we proceeded to the bar in true BNC style.

For some reason it was apparently the CEO’s responsibility to provide the drinks at the start of our little adventure so off I trotted to get in two pints of lager (for DG and I) and a pint of bitter for Skaff. Strange that the two professed northerners were drinking pints of San Miguel whilst the southern jessy was drinking Courage’s Directors Bitter, Skaff obviously feels he needs to prove a point drinking a solid northern bloke’s drink whilst DG and I are comfortable in our Yorkshire-chic approach to lager drinking!

Amusingly we’d been sat down for about half a pint (time after all being best measured in volumes of beer or the mysterious ‘beard’ e.g. “I’ve been waiting about 2 pints for you” or “I haven’t seen you in beards”… but I digress…) when a couple sat at the table behind us and might as well have had “We Play Eve” tattooed across their foreheads! Turned out the lad had met Skaff before at a London Eve get together and was actually in Geeklab, for those who don’t know it Geeklab and BNC have a very long and chequered past – we really don’t like them (see one of my earliest blogs about my story in Eve to find out why!). Like any other arch enemy from Eve they were of course perfectly nice people so DG wouldn’t let me gank the guy in public! I’d have taken great pleasure in bogwashing an Geeklab pilot for real though :D

Three pints and the usual take off delays later we were happily sipping champagne on the plane all three of us with iPods plugged in and Skaff handing around drunken teamspeak recordings for our airborne entertainment. The recording of Rohann’s brother (or whoever it really was) on teamspeak remains as funny today as it was back then! Funnily enough sat directly in front of the three of us were about 10 girls whose sporting kit all bore the label “Canarie Islands Netball Team” (well pretty much that but in Spanish of course!). I think we quickly came to the conclusion that 7’ tall girls with mustaches and adam’s apples were not attractive no matter what sport they play!

Landing in Iceland we collected our bags and walked out into the airport to be met by a guy in a BNC baseball cap with ‘Hegemon’ printed on it, Hege looking pretty much exactly as I expected him to and was exactly as laid back as I expected. So we’ve only just landed, it’s still two days before the fanfest proper was due to start and we have four BNC together in Iceland – looking good!

We also met a young guy working as a porter at the airport who apparently played Eve and when questioned admitted that he was from Imperium! Yay, our first encounter with someone who should hate us for wtfpwning them in game!! We chuckled as he told us he’d lived in the Outer Ring until recently, I wonder why on earth he moved out ;) Only later in the weekend did I discover that was actually Zelota, a well known Xirt fanboi and maker of many utterly terrible Eve movies!

Skaffen headed for the bus to his hotel, the Nordica and we trundled off in Hege’s little hire car into Reykjavik as he told us everything we needed to know about tourist life in Iceland i.e. it’s very quiet, fairly easy to navigate around, everyone speaks English and you need to re-mortgage your house to buy a beer!

The hotel was a comical experience as we pulled into the car park on the wrong side of the hotel and for a few minutes I could have sworn the place was actually closed! Finding our way inside and waving Hege off, it was getting late and he stayed at a different hotel, DG and I checked in and went up to our room to discover to our dismay…. it had a double bed!! After several comments along the lines of “we might be family but we sure as hell aren’t that close” we managed to get a change of rooms to one with two single beds but in another moment of comedy the hotel had lost the key to our new room, so let us in with the master key and had to get another one cut to give us after breakfast!

The morning of the first day DG and I got up, had breakfast, got our room key, sussed out the wireless internet in the hotel on my laptop and then wandered into town. We had a wander around the city centre, the docks and then down towards the fanfest venue. Hege found us wandering about down there about 2 hours before registration for the fanfest was due to start so we jumped in his car and went to find Skaff.

Skaff had a carebear in tow that he’d met at his hotel, so we picked them both up as they wandered along the sea road in Reykjavik and went into town to find a bar for food and beer. So began our four day relationship with Nelly’s bar a very pleasant and apparently cheap by Icelandic standards bar in the centre of town. Naturally we hit the beer immediately and then after a few pints wandered down to another bar in search of food (this second bar was the information centre for the Iceland Airwaves festival and was next door to Pravda, I can’t remember the name of the place, so I’ll just call it the Airwaves bar from now on!). We sat drinking beers, eating lunch and forum whoring on Skaff’s wireless Mac (half of Iceland seems to have free wireless internet!) for another hour or two before deciding we were ready for the fanfest i.e. were half cut!

We strolled down to the fanfest venue to get ourselves registered, pick up our wristbands, generally check the place out and have more beer. Quite a lot of people had turned up to register on the Thursday despite the fact that the fanfest proper didn’t start until Friday.

..... might finish this one day and include the bit how I managed to throw up in Minmatar alley during the first proper day of the fanfest due to the first day/night's boozin' session) just as Oveur walks past with about 10 other Eve players in tow and I'm wiping snot, tears and vomit from my face.... very embarassing!

Incomplete Blogs...

2006-03-13T21:20:00.000Z

So yeah I'm getting really bad at this blogging malarky and not posting anywhere near often enough. I have started loads of entries but they kind of grow to epic length and I never finish them!

So I've decided to just post some incomplete ones anyway so I've not wasted my time writing what I have so far and so I don't deprive you all even further of my astounding wit and insight!

Prepare for more bloggage!

Caldari State Alliance PvP Chamionship!

2006-01-02T18:05:00.000Z

On the evening of 22nd December 2005 I noticed a post in the BoB forum regarding a thread on the Eve-O forums regarding an alliance PvP championship. Naturally this caught my eye and I followed the link for a quick read before toggling back to our forum to read everyone's comments so far.

The key early discussions were twofold and probably best summarised by the following quotes..

"how we gonna choose?

Molle, Gal & BL ?"

as we wondered who would be in the team and ..

"I've been trying to imagine all possible situations."

..as we tried to wrestle with possible tactics.

The team had to be submitted by 12:00 on the 26th, Boxing Day no less, so we only had 4 days to sort out a team and do that over the holiday period with half the guys away from Eve doing family stuff at least intermitantly if not constantly.

Job one was to sort out our tactics, then fit pilots to ships to tactics in order to select the team. We settled on our tactics very quickly thanks to our tactical mastermind TWD (a few of us would have got to the same answer he did 'eventually' honest!). Our tactics are on record in plenty of public places now so no harm in discussing some of them here, which I will in more detail below, but suffice to say for now that we pretty quickly arrived at the CNR, Eagle and Taranis combo.

Reading the thread back, the discussion amongst BoB leadership appears to be quite brief from initial post to deciding the team etc.. I guess that reflects how much direct communication we have with each other in game, on irc and on teamspeak that so much of this was sorted through sidebar discussions over the 2-3 days with little use of the forum.

I was actually out of touch over christmas other than very brief forum access and then due to a problem posting I couldn't actually confirm I would be flying in the tournament until quite late, so our team was actually agreed as TWD, Alasse, DBP and myself as reserve (with SirMolle spectator, of course!).

It's an interesting insight into how we work that when we all finally got onto irc together, I confirmed I could make all the matches and so a quick discussion started as to whether dbp or I should be the battleship pilot (we'd already picked the CNR, hence all the Caldari lovers in the team) . The interesting point was the fact that no-one was at all precious about being in the team, all we all wanted was a good showing (WIN!) from BoB and personal considerations were way way down the list. So a conversation along the lines of "you fly it mate", "no you fly it", "well I think you should fly because...", "ah but you can ....", "yeah maybe but I really don't care so long as we put the right team out.." ensued! In the end I don't think it would have made a great deal of difference who piloted the BS the deciding factor was simply that one of us had cybernetics lvl 5 and (at the time) the other didn't. It's just a micro-example of why there's never any difficulties between the BoB corps, we're all focused on one objective - winning Eve as a team.

Our corp/alliance channels and forums were buzzing with talk about the championship, who we'd have to face, tactics, ships, team etc. We made the decision to keep the team a secret outside of the CEO's, Directors and actual team simply to give us at least one round where our opponents would really not be sure of who they were facing and in what ships. So other than about 2% of BoB pilots no-one in the alliance had a clue who was representing BoB or in what ships until the first fight started.

The tournament schedule was finally published on 27th December, in this thread on the Eve-O forums. We drew Phoenix Alliance, our old enemy, in the first round and very quickly worked out that we may have to fight Mercenary Coalition (who were strongly fancied) quite early in the tournament in order to progress. Also on our side of the tournament and potential oponents that I certainly thought required some consideration were The Rock (Homo, Jim Raynor, Tyrrax etc.), Lotka Volterra (the Shinra guys) and our enemies down south Vertigo Coalition.

I actually bet on BoB, how shameful is that betting on yourself? I put 10m on BoB as a laugh with Omber Zombie, just so I could say I'd wagered something on the tournament. To be honest I actually favoured The Rock and [5] to meet in the final, I thought The Rock's experience, skills and resources would defeat everyone on our side of the draw and that [5] with Kayosoni's Rattlesnake would be pretty much unbeatable on their side of the tournament. I just didn't feel right betting on someone else though!

I was so incredibly excited about the tournament, probably exaggerated by the incredibly short timescales involved (8 days from announcement we were in the ring!), that I could think about very little else and spent a fair amount of time pratting about with CNR setups rather than working or doing the 100 other things in Eve I should have been!

On the evening of the first round I got out of work early and was a nervous wreck, seriously I know it's only a game but I was like shaking, so ploughed through a bottle of red wine by the time we had to fight just to calm my nerves! The first fight against PA was at 17:40 on the 28th of December, we had to be ready 30 mins before our fight so final rushing around for ammo etc was completed by about 5pm that day. It was only at about 5pm that the rest of my team finally told me about the chat channel for competitors that I was supposed to be in! Our communication is so very good, oh yes! Actually it was probably my nerves and attention span that caused me to miss that fact until almost the last minute!

The participants channel was a good laugh before, during and after fights every day of the championship. All the usual in game 'hate' was shelved or toned down into pretty good banter, the harshest of the banter being reserved for everyone's friends and allies rather than in game enemies. That for me was a very positive point of these championships, (almost) everyone participating did so in good humour, with respect for the other participants and kept the usual in game animosities sensibly in check.

I'll link to Galaxions excellent commentary of the event so you can get his reports on how the fights went, my memory of what actually went on in the fights is a bit blurred and unreliable. As I look back I can remember setting up for each fight then everything goes into fast forward as I remember the fight itself and slows down again afterwards! Conversely when it actually happened the lead up to the fight seemed to pass very quickly and in a confused nervous rush, whilst during the fight itself I could concentrate, see clearly, think things through with clarity and almost felt that we were in slow motion... then as soon as the fight had finished it seemed that it had passed in the blink of an eye. Amazing what adrenalin and memory can do!

Another great resource throughout the tournament was provided by Stratego of RKK, who took the CCP schedule and updated it himself after every fight to show the current status of the competition.

Round 1

I was a bag of nerves before round one, I think I must have checked my fitting, drone bay and cargohold/ammo about 40 times before we were transported to RU- where the tournament was being held. We grouped up and formed a gang before being transported to the arena. I don't remember who arrived first, us or the PA but pretty quickly we were faced off 50km appart and ready to rumble. Lemonde started proceedings and we got straight on with our gameplan. Our tactics, as stated, have been broadly published so there's no harm in saying we went into the first fight intending to take down the HAC first, then the support and then the battleship.

The fight passed very quickly with only one hiccups and (sorry PA) I have to say was a total walk over and a real confidence builder. The only problem we had was that killing the enemy Stilletto, which seemed curiously unwilling to get stuck in and kept clear of the fight until the end, which we didn't nab early as planned but took out last. The enemy dominix was hitting me for about 40 damage at one point, goodness knows what with, my T2 Cruise absolutely ripped into him though.

Galaxion's Ship Report & Commentary

Round 2

In the second round at 17:40 on the 29th December we faced the little known Nova Republic.

Another relatively early finish from work to get home in time for our second round fight and doubly excited because we potentially had two fights tonight, with the third round following on later in the evening.

Nova fielded an ordinary battleship, a Megathron, an Ishtar and a Wolf and the fact that it was only a normal battleship, I have to say, calmed my nerves down a lot. I was less nervous than the first night because I knew what to expect and we had at the very least not suffered the shame of going out to our old enemy PA in the first round. However, the desire to proceed further was also kicking in now and I decided I really wanted to get to the semi-final and that then I'd be happy.

We decided that Alasse and TWD would go after the AF first, I'd start on the HAC, they'd join me to finish the HAC off and then we'd go for the Megathron (which we knew I could tank for a month in the CNR if I had to).

Now's probably a good time to point out that when I say 'we decided' what I really mean is TWD told us this was how to play it! My ego reminds me that I came to some of the same conclusions as he did regarding how to approach a couple of the fights and my ego assures me that I would surely have reached the same conclusions as he did regarding all the other fights if I had just had a little more time! Of course thats bollocks and the absolute truth of the matter is that TWD is a genius at small gang tactics in Eve, which is what this scenario equated to, and the experience of 3 years of war in Eve leading such gangs inspired his tactical leadership of our team throughout the whole tournament. The man is an Eve god and should be respected as such. Back to the fight after that sychophantic ramble ;)

The Wolf popped very quickly to fire from TWD and Alasse but whilst they dealt with it I turned my CNR's firepower onto the HAC. Amusingly the poor Ishtar had died by the time Alasse and TWD killed the wolf, precision missiles are mucho fun against frigs and cruisers! We all jumped on the Megathron and he died in short order, our quickest fight in the tournament I think although rivaled by the PA fight, both of which were over in under two minutes.

Galaxion's Ship Report
Galaxion's Commentary

Round 3

In the third round at 22:00 on the 29th December we faced Aegis Militia a roleplay alliance that we had little experience or knowledge of.

I think I must have listened to the Eve-Radio commentary for every fight except our own at this point being absolutely enthralled by the proceedings, fascinated by the ships & setups used and incredibly curious about the tactics employed by each team, particularly those we would be facing. It seems half of Eve is equally enthralled with forum threads exploding with activity, irc channels positively buzzing, corp/alliance chat discussing little else other than the championships and Eve-Radio hitting record listener numbers.

You'd think that after two fights I'd have been fairly calm by the time the third came around and I probably would have been if it weren't for the fact that Aegis Militia, our next opponents, had knocked the Mercenary Coalition out of the tournament in the first round and the minmatar roleplayers Electus Matari in the second round. In both fights they had used a stock Tempest but with a tanking setup that looked absolutely indestructable! So my would have been calmness was instead replaced by concern that this Tempest would tank my damage, suck my cap dry and fubar my shield tank, thereby costing me my CNR and the team our chance at the title.

Imagine my 'relief' a.k.a horror to see that Aegis Militia had upped the ante and brought along a Machariel! So at this point I'm remembering that indestructible Tempest AM used in rounds one and two but with more hit points, more firepower and more speed... bugger! We have a gameplan and stick to it, going for the enemy HAC first, then their frigate. The Zealot dies fairly quickly and at that point the enemy Retribution has no future with an Eagle, Taranis and CNR all focusing fire on it. The AM Machariel warped right up to us and we had a very hairy moment when he had NOS'd Alasse's cap dry, if the Machariel had not switched it's attention to me at that time Alasse would probably have gone down. Alasse managed to get out of NOS range and clear whilst the Machariel and I pounded on each other and my cap gradually decreased as I was heavily NOS'd.

Although I had a cap booster on with charges left I actually decided to stop boosting my cap and let it sit at zero towards the end of the fight to nullify the Machariel's endless ability to tank. The fact that we had the Eagle and CNR's firepower on the Machariel started to break it's tank anyway and it soon went down whilst inflicting minimal shield damage to my CNR.

Galaxion's Ship Report
Galaxion's Commentary
Aegis Militia Video Of The Fight

Quarter Final

In the Quarter Final at 20:30 on the 30th December we fought Tribal Souls, an alliance we have very good relations with in the south of Eve.

I drove from the south of England up to my brother's place (DoctorGonzo) on friday to fight in the final rounds of the tournament up at his house, where I was staying for New Year anyway. I was actually not too nervous on the final day, although the road conditions were making me a little concerned that I might actually not get up north and logged on at my brother's in time for the first fight. I arrived with about an hour to spare and logged onto irc and into game to a flurry of "where the hell have you been slacker?" and "have you got everything you need?" type questions!

We were actually ready in plenty of time and I was really looking forward to the evening's fights. The quarter final against Tribal Souls meant I'd be fighting against some allies and against another Caldari Navy Raven team. Knowing the power of our Caldari Navy Raven I wasn't looking forward to facing another. However, we'd discussed our gameplan and decided by this time that we knew what the key to winning these fights was and guided by TWD as always we decided to concentrate on eliminating the HAC as quickly as possible to give us a firepower edge over the enemy battleship.

In order for our tactic to work we were reliant on keeping Alasse alive as long as possible and for the first time in this fight adapted our tactics to focus on that objective. I had been training throughout the day a skill I had missing so that we could use shield maintenance drones as well as a shield transfer array on Alasse's Eagle powered by my CNR.

When the fight kicked off we followed our plan targeting the Cerberus and the Hawk of Tribal souls first and second respectively. Our ship setups and ammunition choices proved decisive again with the HAC and AF of Tribal Souls both down to our concentrated fire within a minute. As we expected the CNR of Tribal target's Alasse's Eagle so after the CNR's first volley is in the air I deployed 5 medium shield maintenance drones onto Alasse along with a medium shield transfer array. Alasse managed to successfully tank the Tribal CNR for pretty much the entire fight in this manner. The CNR deployed some weaponry, possibly it's drones, to take TWD out and succeeded but finally buckled under our combined firepower.

I was elated after this fight because I knew we'd made the semifinals, which is what I really wanted to achieve. It was incredibly important to me, as I'm sure it was to the other guys in the team, to give a really good showing for BoB. Heaven knows we give it some on the forums sometimes and to get away with that you need to be able to prove it in game. I felt that getting tothe semi's was enough proof in this scenario that we were able to back up our words and reputation in game. Of course I was already thinking on to the final and were it not for our next opponents I would have been feeling a lot more confident at that point!

Galaxion's Pre-Fight Build Up
Galaxion's Ship Report
Galaxion's Commentary

Semi Final

In the Semi Final at 22:00 on the 30th December we faced The Rock, a team we were very familiar with and quite concerned about facing given that they included the very experienced pilots Homo Erectus, Jim Raynor and Tyrrax Thork and also given the fact that they were known to have a selection of faction battleships of considerable power to select amongst, so their tactics would be unpredictable and difficult to cope with.

Having said that The Rock were likely to be unpredictable we had amongst ourselves decided that in all likelihood they would deploy a Caldari Navy Raven (we knew they had access to one), we suspected there was also a possibility of a Rattlesnake (we didn't know if they had one but we knew how effective they are, suspected Jim could fly one and were therefore prepared for one to come out of the woodwork) and we believed that they would not risk the Imperial Apoc or Armageddon against us (a little bit of hubris on our part perhaps but we thought that anyone sensible would judge it unnecessarily risky to use one against us).

So our fears were confirmed when we were transported to the field of battle, The Rock had indeed switched Jim Raynor (who I was convinved had far better missile skills than me and possibly a full crystal set of implants, whereas I only had a set of low grade in!) into a Caldari Navy Raven. With Homo Erectus flying a Gaurdian Logistics Cruiser (oh fuck!) and Tyrrax in a Crusader.

I'm a little bit worried at this point that Alasse and I aren't going to be able to break the Logistics cruiser's tank (which was formidable) before Jim broke Alasse's tank that I was again supporting with drones and shield transfers. True to form the Logistics Cruiser is a swine to take down, luckily Alasse is holding just as well against The Rock's CNR. Both teams attempted to take out each other's maintenance drones which we succeeded more quickly than The Rock did.

After finally getting the right ammo type and all 7 launchers firing at the same time my volleys and Alasse's supporting fire break the tank of the Gaurdian and bring it down. TWD's Taranis pops as does Tyraxx's Crusader as Alasse and I switch our attention to Jim in the CNR, who I am convinced is far better equiped to fly it in terms of skills and implants than I am. I've lost all my maintenance drones at this point and we struggle to maintain Alasse's tank under Jim's concentrated fire. Alasse finally pops and we are left with CNR vs CNR. The irony of the situation is that the CNR I am flying I bought off Jim about 3-4 months previously! As Jim has already been heavily battered whilst taking out Alasse I win the dual of the Navy Raven's and have a chuckle about the irony of my ship's origins!

Galaxion's Ship Report
Galaxion's Commentary

A Note About Eve-Radio

There's a few things I want to say about Eve-Radio and any place in the second half of this tale would be an appropriate place to go through them so I'll do it now before I talk about the final!

Firstly I thought that the commentary was laughable and utter shite on the first night, better but distractingly amusing due to the DJ being pissed on Stella Artois on the second night and by the final night highly entertaining, very exciting and actually pretty damn good. By the time we got to the quarter and semi finals I had continued my unbroken run of listening to the commentary of every fight on Eve-Radio. The post fight analysis of Levin, Ifni and Urban Mongrel was fantastic as well, after every one of our fights I was waiting to hear what the guys would say about our performance.

Secondly I think that in terms of overall engagement, publicising, entertaining, backing and covering the whole event Eve-Radio were absolute stars. I have never known another event in Eve engender such a huge amount of interest and enthral so many people over a three day period. Eve-Radio's coverage was absolutely integral to making the whole experience so highly engaging, I think despite the crap job of the commentators at the start Eve-Radio deserve a gold star for this one!

The Final

The final of the Caldari State sponsored Alliance PvP Championship between BoB and Kaos Empire took place at 00:00 on 30th December 2005.

I have to say that I was getting exceedingly excited and quite hammered by this point! I never believed that we would make the finals, shame on me for not realising that my mates would cover my inadequacies and take us through to the final with their amazing knowledge, experience and coolness under fire. We spent a mad hour or two with all in game channels, eve-mail, irc and teamspeak going absolutely mental about us getting into the final whilst we tried to get ships replaced, ammo replaced and drones replaced. In between the semi-final and final I was getting chased around in a bestower picking up shield maintenance drones by a war target in a cruiser. Eventually my brother's wisdom overcame my half-cut excitement fueled idiocy and prompted some of the corp to help out clearing the way and fetching me the stuff I needed! Daft that I was far too wound up and excited to remember to ask for help when I needed it!

We were ready on time and moved to the Polaris system where the background scene of the cosmos had been changed to a firey hell-like panorama of red and orange nebulai - quite the backdrop to what was to follow!

We knew with Kaos Empire that we would most likely be facing the Gallente Navy Megathron which had killed 2 Caldari Navy Ravens in earlier rounds on it's progression to the final. The other two Kaos pilots would be flying a Deimos and an Ishkur, very Gallente! I can't say I was overly confident facing a team who had killed two CNR's already and was about ready to read mine it's last rites! However, we also knew we had a solid gameplan with some surprise elements.

Our strategy throughout the whole tournament was to take out the enemy HAC and support more quickly than they took out ours so that we could get a firepower advantage as early in the fight as possible to give us leverage against finishing off extremely tough battleship tanks. We'd studied Kaos's tactics in previous fights though and were sure that the Navy Megathron was equiped with remote armour repairers and nosferatu/neutralisers only i.e. no guns but was boosting a Deimos set up for maximum damage delivery.

The answer from our perspective was easy, don't get caught up in the trap that other teams had when fighting Kaos and bang away endlessly on the uber-remote tanked Deimos to no avail whilst the Navy Megathron sucks away all our BS' cap and the Deimos pounds it to death whilst happily tanking away. More specifically and in brief... take out the Megathron first!

The fight started as we confirmed that the Navy Megathron had indeed got no guns mounted and that our plan would go ahead. I locked and began firing on the Mega annihalating it's shields and hitting heavily into armour within 3 volleys thanks to having just the right Fury Cruise loaded. The Navy Mega started armour tanking at it approached us.

The Kaos Deimos supports the Navy Megathron with armour maintenance drones, whilst I support Alasse with shield maintenance drones and a shield transfer array. The Navy Mega is taking all our fire and Alasse is being orbitted and shot at by the Diemos. We go for the armour drones and then continue pounding on the mega which is starting to NOS me and I'm burning through 800 cap charges to keep my shield tank running as the Diemos switches to beating on me. My cap runs out and shield tank breaks as the Navy Mega is going into structure.

I have literally no cap at this point, am getting beat on bad by the Deimos and am watching my cap booster deliver cap to hit shield boost and then my hardeners if there is any cap left each cycle before I get hit by nos/neuts again. I'm doing that as the Navy Mega pops and I am down to half structure. I finally get a volley of cruise onto the HAC and am, it feels, a mere millisecond from hitting my shield booster again when the Deimos finishes off my Navy Raven.

Alasse is left on his own in an Eagle with a Deimos and an Ishkur literally sat on his head, I and we all are sure that this is it, we are fucked and we are out. A miracle then happens! Alasse is tanking the Deimos and the Ishtur as TWD harries Alasse with questions about what his status is, what the enemy ship's statuses are etc.. TWD then directs Alasse to take out the last of the armour rep drones repping the Deimos. Alasse has two assault launchers firing at this point as he struggled for cap to tank and fire his guns. Two assault launchers take out the last drone then switch to the Deimos and slowly begin eating through it's armour and into structure.

I was absolutely convinced we were out and beginning to think of all the ways to put a brave face on my dissappointment at not winning having come so far. Then I hear Alasse say the Deimos is going into structure, my heart started pounding again as we all encouraged him to keep going and started to beleive we might pull this out of the fire after all.

Despite being up against a close range HAC in a medium range setup, despite being critically low on cap and out of cap booster charges and despite being nos'd by the Ishkur Alasse managed to tank both enemy ship's damage and take out the Deimos. Hearing Alasse report the Ishkur's shield, then armour and finally hull being worn down by his assault launchers (as he reassured us he had plenty of ammo left!) was just incredible and when the Ishkur finally went pop I was awestruck!

OMFGHOLYSHI-ITEWTFBBQWE'VEONLYGONEANDWONIT!!

Galaxion's Ship Report
Galaxion's Commentary
Levin's Movie Of The Final

Total Kills and Losses For The Tournament

Kills

1st - Dominix
2nd - Megathron
3rd - Machariel
Qtr - Caldari Navy Raven
Semi - Caldari Navy Raven
Final - Navy Megathron

1st - Eagle
2nd - Ishtar
3rd - Zealot
Qtr - Cerberus
Semi - Gaurdian
Final - Deimos

1st - Stilletto
2nd - Wolf
3rd - Retribution
Qtr - Hawk
Semi - Crusader
Final - Ishkur

Losses

1 x Caldari Navy Raven
1 x Eagle
4 x Taranis

The Awards Ceremony & Aftermath

I have to admit to being totally thunderstruck that we'd won and proud as hell to have been a part of it with two such quality pilots as TWD and Alasse. I was a bit of a space cadet immediately after we'd won and during the award ceremony mostly out of total disbelief that we'd pulled it off (being distracted by a mass of convo's in game, convos in irc and congratulatory eve-mails didn't help with my concentration at the ceremony either!). I know we in BoB can be pretty vocal about our abilities at times and are perceived as being quite arrogant but we're also very very conscious our opponents abilities and are respectful of skillful opponents when we meet them, so I was genuinely amazed and happy that we'd pulled it off against such good opposition because the opposition was of exceptionally high calibre.

As I said the ceremony was a blur but it's worth just explaining the prizes:-

Defeated semi-finalists [5] and The Rock received a Caldari Navy Raven and two Caldari Navy Caracals as prizes.

The defeated finalists and second placed team, Kaos Empire, received a Caldari Carrier and two Caldari Navy Ravens as prizes.

The winning team received a Caldari Mothership (Wyvern) and two Caldari Navy Ravens as prizes.

It was interesting to note the Kaos prizes going up on auction in the sell forum on Eve-O within hours of the end of the tournament.

We actually got interviewed for Eve Radio after the fight and I was a) a bit tipsy by that point (1am after 3 fights, a bottle of red wine and more...) and b) pretty fucking giddy with excitement that we'd won. It shows at the start of the interview where the guy asks us to introduce ourselves and Alasse and I immediately talk over each other! Then Alasse gets his introduction out, I do mine but then like an idiot go to say 'and of course, the planning mastermind... TWD!!' thinking to get right out in the open what a hero he was for masterminding it all. To my embarassment on playback it sounds awfully like I am referring to myself and being big headed! I can assure you I felt most humble and in awe of TWD's skills at that point.... besides which I'm much more expansive and direct when I'm being arrogant!! o.O

I also seem to have a disturbing little chuckle to myself before answering a couple of questions in that interview so as you can imagine I'm not all that fond of it and think that all in all it sounds like I'm some kind of demented egomaniac ;)

I still can't get over what a fantastic event this has been, how engaged so many people have been, how supportive all our alliance were or how bloody amazing it is to have won!

The Arrogance of BoB!

2005-10-01T12:57:00.000Z

The arrogance of BoB! A subject that many of our enemies will wax lyrical about given half the opportunity but generally they'll do so with less than half knowledge and way less than half understanding. Given my position in Eve and in BoB I would say this but we're woefully misunderstood by the player base at large. We are definitely very confidant in our abilities and we believe rightly so because of our achievements, which I'll go into shortly. If we were truly arrogant though we'd have no respect for any of our enemies and would look down our noses at everyone else in Eve, which I can categorically state is not the case. Part of the issue is that we have a fairly vocal minority who cannot refrain from telling it as they see it on the public forums and we've never discouraged nor censored our members from doing that, well that's a slight misrepresentation, whilst it's not banned in BNC forum posting in the usual smackfests of the Corporations, Alliances and Organisations section of the Eve-O forums is discouraged. Anyway, my point was that because we have a fairly vocal minority who are very confident in our abilities there's more often than not a visible BoB presence which comes across as arrogance, particularly when our enemies try to misrepresent facts.

So why are we so arrogant? I don't want to steal Molle or Galavet's thunder too much by talking about their corporation's histories prior to the formation of BoB although Evolution's escapades are well known and I will touch on a couple of campaigns in RKK's pre-BoB period. Since we established BoB though we have gone from strength to strength and overcome just about every other group of players Eve has been able to throw at us.

Pre-BoB Achievements

Evolution establish Fountain alliance and are pivotal in it's running, have successes fighting up north during the establishment of the Venal Alliance and very publicly split from FA setting the trend for self-sufficient unaffiliated mega-corps with a strong military. I could go on into more exploits and detail but this was before I really knew the Evolution guys and I don't want to misrepresent anything, a high level summary suffices for the purposes of this part of my narrative. They were groundbreaking and successful in so many ways during Eve's first year.

RKK become established as a successful mercenary corp in the days of Kestrels and Blackbirds long before the Mercenary Coalition was a twinkle in Seleene's eye! Defender's of lower venal and pivotal to the NVA's southern fleet presence prior to the demise of the NVA and resurrection as the Phoenix Alliance. Founder members of the Coalition of Deklein that became NSA and today's IRON. Went on to shun alliance ties and go it alone in the times when every pod pilot in Eve wanted to be in an alliance for security and safety in numbers! Successfully fought alongside BNC, Celestial Apocalypse and Huff Technologies to bring down Rising Storm Alliance despite their Forsaken Empire supporters. Went on to spearhead the assault against the failing Forsaken Empire. RKK's pinnacle achievement pre-BoB was having the balls to declare war on the whole Phoenix Alliance on their own, despite odds of 30:1 against them. Ballsy, confident and ground breaking.

BNC formed out of a merger of Black Nova Mining Corp with Kraft, two corporations who had lived in Great Wildlands early in Eve's history before merging and moving to the Outer Ring where they merged with Swedish Vikings and Tranquillity Drinker's Club. Led the rebellion that brought down the corrupt ORS regime in Outer Ring and were a founder member of NORAD. Grew in short order to be, alongside Nemesis, NORAD's main fighting force and led the alliance in terms of it's policy and foreign relations. Secured the Fade region upon the release of player conquerable stations and were amongst the first corporations to own stations and a region in 0.0 space in their own right with no real alliance backing (the rest of NORAD never really supported us in this venture!). Fought the RSA war against the RSA, CoD and FE coalition alongside RKK, Celes and Huff, defeating the aggressors and being central to the creation of the Fade Union alliance.

In their own ways all three BoB corps have rich histories, were groundbreaking or visionary in their peer groups if not in the Eve universe as a whole and brought a successful past with them into the Great Northern War and the creation of BoB.

BoB Achievements

For the purpose of this discussion I'm treating the GNW and defeat of the PA as a BoB achievement, although in truth the three corps didn't come together full time until toward the end of the war. RKK and Evolution worked fairly closely together and with mOo during the siege of BKG "Burger King", whilst BNC did a lot of our early fighting in Pure Blind, lower Venal, Fade and Deklein (partly so BNC and mOo could avoid each other! We had a little bit of a problem in that we were both on the same side but KOS back then!).

Defeat of the Phoenix Alliance, victory in the Great Northern War and the annexing of Venal, Tenal and Branch as BoB territory.

Defeat of the Fade Union Alliance, who no matter what anyone else tries to tell you definitely started it(!), annexing of Fade and Pure Blind.

Defeat of Northern Star Alliance, annexing of Deklein.

Control and defense of 6 regions (everything from Cloud Ring to Tribute!) for several months against everyone else who lived in the north.

Total relocation of the whole alliance to the south of Eve practically overnight to commence a new campaign at the other end of the map.

First alliance in Eve to voluntarily give up 6 whole regions to go off and start a new campaign in order to challenge ourselves and prove that we could!

Fought FIX to a position of mutual respect and signing of an NAP.

Annexed Delve and Period Basis following the eviction of first Fountain Alliance (from both regions) and then Vertigo Coalition (from Period Basis).

Assault on Fountain and total demolition of the remnants of Fountain Alliance, annexed Fountain.

Negotiation of a deal with Blood Raiders regarding Delve.

Re-population of Delve and Period Basis.

Orchestrated the creation of a southern hegemony with the signing of an agreement between BoB, FIX, SE, ASCN and [5], a fundamental stepping stone necessary for our next campaign.

Assault on Outer Ring, removal of Imperium from 0.0 space and annexing of Outer Ring as BoB Territory.

Always outnumbered, at times with up to 5000-6000 enemy pilots against our 700-800. Huge tracts of 0.0 space controlled as effectively as any other 0.0 alliance, often more so and more securely. We have conquered and taken ownership of 10 regions of 0.0 space from under an occupying force's nose during the last 18 months. Tenacious and determined like no other force in Eve, we have proven time and time again that when we go after something we get it.

All three corps have hugely positive kill to death ratios despite not pirating, not going for easy targets and almost always being outnumbered (if our enemies can organise themselves!).

.....and people wonder why we come across as arrogant? If you'd achieved the things we've achieved against the odds time and again, wouldn't you feel pretty confident in yourself and your team mates? Wouldn't you be proud of your achievements and not be afraid to say so in public? We come across as arrogant sometimes because our members are proud of what we have achieved, have confidence in our ability and know that experience tells us we can achieve even more.

However, and this is a big 'however', we have a lot of respect for our enemies if they put up a fight and try. Funnily enough you don't have to be uber, you don't have to beat us, you don't have to be as tenacious as a bulldog, you don't have to do anything other than 'try' to get our respect. FIX fought us long and hard and always tried, that garnered them a huge amount of respect from BoB. We have a lot of respect for G because they are so disciplined, so determined and will stand up to be counted, they are 'tryers'. We're also not so niaive as to think that we can rest on our laurels and stay on top forever. We're actually looking for (and planning for) that nemesis of ours to find us some day and give us the ultimate challenge.

The people who most often consider us arrogant are in my opinion usually those who we consider to not be 'tryers'. We will look at you and think you're a waste of space if you won't stand up to be counted when the time comes, especially if you talk the talk on the forums but then fail to deliver in game. If you tell us that we're arrogant smacktalkers and that you're going to hand it to us you had sure as hell better try as hard as you can to make good on that promise because we will think you're a joke if you don't. Most of the people who probably feel like we look down our noses at them forget the fact that they put themselves in that position by shouting loudly and publicly on the forums that they were going to own us and then spectacularly failed to do so in game.

A saying I am particularly fond of in real life is "you're all mouth and no trousers". If you come at us with nothing but mouth then why on earth are you surprised when we tell you you're hopeless? If you come at us with spirit and determination then win or lose we'll respect you for it.

I don't believe this is arrogance, I believe it's the warrior's confidence in his abilities and the expectation of a hard working man that other men will be equally hard working.

The most important point to remember is that we are ALWAYS ready for any one of you to prove us wrong, we'll relish the challenge in proving ourselves right!

(DISCLAIMER: Tongue in cheek circuits activated!)

Time To Get Blogging Again!

2005-09-30T14:26:00.000Z

After a long period of inactivity I'm going to start blogging regarding Eve again. I've been in a state of flux for some time in real life because of relocating back to the UK from Canada and starting a new job so Eve time and blog time to write about it has been limited recently.

I've got a couple of lengthy entries written already which I'll get posted as soon as I next get my laptop connected up to the net (using a friend's computer at the moment).

Hope you enjoy reading the new stuff!!

BNC and The Great Northern War 3

2005-06-09T03:24:00.000Z

Part 3 - Empire Wars!

At the end of part 2 we left BNC mostly fighting in Pure Blind based out of Torrinos and the war really in it's early stages. Considering the war raged on for as long as it did it should come as no surprise that at about 2-3 months in when BNC got involved in Empire wars against PA corps we can still look back on it and consider it the early days of the war.

With Evolution and Reikoku fighting further north in PA territory, NORAD being a huge dissappointment to BNC due to their lack of participation and at this time the EC-P8R corridor relatively secure BNC started to look for other ways to influence the war.

Our management team decided to look into Empire wars. At this time it was possible to war dec individual corporations within an alliance without dec'ing the whole alliance. So we thought that taking out the PA's industrial heart in empire would be the way to go. On the 30th of June 2004 BNC declared war against Riders of Rohan and RONA corporation, intending to work our way through any PA corps active in empire.

To be honest I don't remember activating the RONA war at the same time but according to our corp sanctionable actions we did!

The war started and we moved to Yulai to wage the war mostly between Yulai and Nonni. It was a slaughter, we soon discovered that appart from Reptar (the then CEO of Rohan) that Rohan were a mostly carebear corp. The war kicked off around Yulai and Kemerk, with us not having to travel too far as it turned out that Rohan had their main empire HQ a couple of jumps from Yulai (can't remember the exact system).

The hero's of the war were Earthan and Doctorgonzo in a Vampthron and close range Tempest respectively, these guys absolutely destroyed everything Rohan could throw against them. I remember one memorable afternoon when Earthan in his Mega, several others of us and myself in a Raven were hunting around Yulai. We were jumping in and out in systems around when Earthan called out that he had two enemy BS engaged on his own. I hightailed it to join him and listened as he took them both out using his vampathron, just as I thought I'd missed it all several enemy frigs/cruisers jumped in on Earthan with a third enemy BS. He quite calmly dispatched the 3rd BS as I jumped in and helped clean up with some of our support. I'd never seen a BS take on 2v1 and then a 3rd before and win. About this time we declared Earthan our champion, especially after offering CA's best a 1v1 (was that EternalDark who took up the challenge, I don't remember) and beating him.

Rohan split at this time under intense pressure from BNC with their more carebear element leaving the PA and forming IBM corp (I think that name is about right but can't be sure, it'll do for now). We were very divided on whether to let this ride or not but were persuaded that IBM would not support PA and therefore ended the war and let IBM go on their way.

There then took place a concerted effort against RONA who were split between RONA, RONA Midgaurd (their newby training corp) and KIA their main PvP wing.

To be honest I remember RONA getting slaughtered in empire with some players getting ganked 2 and 3 times a week as we whored our location agents. I particularly remember the fact that their Chief of Operations (or some similar title) would not undock and we would search him out and camp him in for hours on end.

Having waged empire war for a month or two targets dried up and we moved back to Pure Blind, which is where part 4 of this tale takes over.

The GNW & BNC Story

2005-05-25T07:14:00.000Z

I'll get the rest of this written up soon, just not had time recently.

Part 3 will be about BNC and empire wars, then I'll move on to the Pure Blind Campaign, the Defence of Fade and Deklein, BNC joins BoB and the Battle for Venal, Tenal & Branch and finally the final stages of the war including the demise of the FU and NSA.

The Eve-O General Forum

2005-05-25T06:56:00.000Z

I just give up on the General Folder on the Eve-O forums, well that's not strictly true I know i'll keep banging my head against that particular brick wall in the hope that even one newbie gets the message but by god it is getting frustrating!

FOR GOD'S SAKE GET A ******* CLUE PEOPLE!!

Is it just me or is Eve actually hugely difficult? I just do not understand it at the moment, I've started new character recently (or at least started using again an old but untrained character) who I log into for a mere few hours a week and give hardly any help from my main... she's already FAR more capable, better off and successful than my main ever was at her age. I refuse to believe for even one millisecond that Eve is harder now than it was two years ago, in fact given advanced learning skills, different ship types, +1 and +2 implants, vets you can ask for advice etc.. I KNOW for a fact that it is a hell of a lot easier.

So why on earth is the General folder on the forums full of such whining drivel these days? Every man and his dog seems to be crying about one thing and another.

I can tell you readers for a fact that I would not have dared to whine about some of the stuff that gets cried about in there these days because I have some pride and was to busy when I was a newbie trying to work it out for myself. I would be utterly ashamed of some of the whining nonsense on there if I typed it myself, I'd be looking over my shoulder when I went to the shops in real life wondering if everyone was looking at me and realising what an utterly hopeless case I was!

I'm sorry if I am in a minority here but a) Eve is not difficult to get on in, b) Surviving and succeeding in Eve is easy, c) Eve has a fairly steep learning curve but it is not insurmountable, d) Eve is a MMOG so GROUPING UP IS THE ORDER OF THE DAY.... playing on your own and then whining that you cannot get access to the highest end content or that another group of players deliver some serious pwnage onto your soloing-antisocial-lameass-whining-ass is the most ridiculous and incomprehensible load of old bollocks I have ever heard.

Have some bloody pride, get a grip and learn how to succeed. Get the hell off the forums and stop whining. Make use of the experience of veteran players and LISTEN to them, they are not bullshitting you out of some maliscious intent to screw you over!

.... and I am going to delcare empire war on the next whining ****wit who complains about how difficult it is to get into 0.0!!!!

(of course I am not but for goodness sake get a grip and sort yourselves out you pathetic excuses for gamers!!)

Oh and before some retard posts about powergamers etc.. I have a demanding 12 hour a day job, can't put uber amounts of time into Eve but I still succeed. Shut up with your whining, have some self respect and get on with winning at Eve!

Lag Lag and More ******* Lag!

2005-05-23T01:41:00.000Z

So we came up north on a road trip this weekend looking for some fun fights.

Instead we've been confronted by the dreaded lag monster in extremis. The lag up in Pure Blind, Venal etc.. has been simply atrocious all weekend. Our first fight up here was jumping into a hostile camp in EC-P8R from Torrinos and it was a complete joke, about half of the ships jumping in never got a shot off for the whole fight (although our support murdered theirs and we still had equal BS kills).

Every jump has been a joke with a gang of more than about 10 with upto 2 minute loading times and instajumping through a camp of more than 10 people has been a farce, even with autopilots on it's taken so long for the screen to render and then the autopilot to jump that we've lost half a dozen ships to it.

I've never heard of so many pilots being podded before either, time after time all weekend (and I know people often blame their pod deaths on lag but the frequency this weekend has been ridiculous) people have had thier ships blown and then had their pods blown before they even know their ship has gone.

It's a crying shame because we could have had a lot more really awesome fights all weekend if the servers had been up to it, all in all it's a major let down.

G

2005-05-23T00:59:00.000Z

(This blog entry is written a little tongue in cheek for those of you reading it and getting hot under the collar!)

So G, what a weird bunch, I can't stand em and yet I respect them.

I absolutely despise, detest, sneer at, ridicule, am disgusted by and generally revile their total and utter lack of balls. I struggle to express how utterly lame I think their approach to the game is at times. They must have some sort of computer that works out the % chance of success before they'll engage, they run at the first sign of significant trouble, safe spot unless they have greater numbers and won't jump in on you to initiate a fight unless they vastly outnumber you.

Of course all that vitriolic ranting is inspired by the fact that we clearly have two very different styles of play, even with fewer numbers I'll take BNC into a fight and if necessary jump in or warp in, take on the lag and kick a fight off. We probably take on some fights we shouldn't, we definitely lose more ships than we should due to being a bit reckless but we have a lot of fun doing it. One thing is for sure I will never have anyone tell me that BNC are too scared to attack or don't have the balls to engage. This approach is totally contrary to the lame ass ultra conservative approach of G.

I actually understand and appreciate the way G fight, it's a cautious and actually very successful way of fighting. They must have the patience of a saint to wait people out the way they do and their losses are certainly minimised because of it. When they actually get into a fight they are very disciplined, effective and their Tempest fleets are awesome damage dealers. I just cannot comprehend why they would want to play the game that way, just get it on for goodness sake.

A case in point was yesterday when we had a gang of 20 BS plus about 25 support sat 60km off a gate with a G/Iron fleet on the opposite side of the gate with approximately 30 BS and 10-15 support. They also had 10-12 BS 3 jumps away to our rear. Now under no circumstances would I have missed the opportuntity to engage with those odds but G refused to jump in and engage. Why on earth not? Get it on for goodness sake, take a few risks and have some fun.

It's an interesting clash in playing styles and perhaps cultures I suppose. That clash leaves me with this set of love & hate feelings towards them though (although love and hate are too extreme a pair of words). I love their effectiveness when they actually get into a fight and I hate the way they play the percentages so much.

I guess to be fair I should also mention that these days we extend each other a bit more respect than we used to and are getting over our rivalry and distaste for each other's playing style. I should also say that because of the more cordial and respectful relationship there is a lot less smack in local than against some people we've fought, in fact G don't smack much at all, another reason I respect them.

G if you would only grow some balls you'd be a truly superb alliance and highly respected.... until you do I'm looking down my virtual nose at you!!

Addendum To The Whole Passing Out Business

2005-05-15T15:35:00.000Z

Saturday morning, up all night & quite drunk.

NPC hunting in Delve in a Raven, doing famously, then ....... zzzZZZZzzzZZzzzzz

Found by an ally in a belt rapidly losing structure to a spawn and then b00m!

Raven + arbs + C5-L + named hardeners + named ballistic controls + PDU II etc etc... Probably about 300-400 mill down the drain, only way to die passed out is in style (eh Dianabolic?!?!).

Funny shit, first I've lost in ages to being blind drunk and having no sleep!

Top 5 Lists

2005-05-08T20:53:00.000Z

I really don't know why some people have so much of a problem with the "Top 5 xxxxx" threads posted on the Eve-O forums. Ok so there's a lot of individual bias that goes into everyone's responses but that's the whole point of the damn things, they're supposed to be an expression of personal opinion!

We tend to go through periods where we don't get any top 5 threads and then all of a sudden someone will post one and then we have a rash of them. It's when we get a rash of them that a lot of trolls come out of the woodwork bemoaning the idiocy of these threads, rattling on about epeens etc.. I can understand people getting a bit frustrated when there's 10 top 5 posts on the first page of the alliances forum but most of them are just good fun and once the main threads have run their course they dissappear for a month or two.

In Eve your reputation and public image counts for quite a lot. It must count for production corps getting customers, it must count for mercenary corps getting clients, it counts for pirates who need to be feared to inspire the odd ransom and it also counts for up and coming corps who want to get into an alliance or move to 0.0 space. The top 5 threads that deal with corporations, CEO's and respected players are a pretty good vehicle for both promoting and sense checking your image and reputation in Eve.

The best of these threads is the Corp Recognition test, the first of which we had well over a year ago and now is resurrected every few months. I personally love those threads, I think it's great to see people's views on other corps, after all it's the player driven content that corporations and alliances drive that really makes Eve the great game that it is.

In general I just think these threads are a lot of fun and I always participate, the moaners should butt out and go troll another forum area whilst those of us that enjoy it participate in them.

War With FIX

2005-05-08T20:10:00.000Z

This war with FIX has got increasingly weird.

We came down south a few months ago with a clear plan, the very first step of which was to batter FIX into submission in Querious as quickly as possible so we could move on to the second and thrid stages of our plan without getting our supply lines through Gehi/A2-V27 harrassed.

To be honest FIX were crap when we first came down, timid as hell, wouldn't fight without the big blob or without one of their top couple of fleet commanders on and when they did engage we just slaughtered them. Amusingly one of their guys actually told me one evening that despite outnumbering us 2:1 and us hanging our arses out so they could warp in on us and pick the range, they couldn't engage until CougarOne showed up!

So we started to drift into the next stage of our plan and never really brought the hammer down on FIX. Although they were a bit crap to start with they were always polite and respectful with no smacktalk in local.

With 20:20 hindsight we should have moved en-masse into 9CG, taken that station and then moved on to take the rest of Querious. However, the friggin game wasn't helping because of the insane lag taking stations at that time. Funny now that I think about it we changed our usual tactics for fighting 0.0 based alliances which really gave FIX a break.

After their crap start though FIX started improving a lot, responding faster, getting a little bolder and even engaging without Cougar being there! In terms of kills and losses and battles won FIX made some great steps forward.

FIX caught another lucky break for 5-6 weeks as well and I don't mean this in an arrogant way at all but I took a break from Eve and like any corp when the CEO is not around BNC went through a pretty slow period. So I don't mean 'FIX got lucky cos I wasn't around and I r uber" but they did get the benefit of our campaign stalling a little as BNC had a quiet period.

When I came back to Eve and BNC started getting much more active again BNC, RKK and RN fought FIX more and more together and a pattern started to develop. FIX had learnt some tactics they liked to use, had got more confident and were more willing to bring it on. This led to some pretty good fighting with one clear characteristic i.e. both sides gave each other a lot of respect and the aftermath was always good natured chat in local.

A fairly strong mutual respect between the BoB corps and FIX developed, leading to some posting on the forums that probably made half the rest of the community stick it's fingers down their throats lol!

I could list a lot of good battles and talk about the details of the war raging backwards and forwards but that's covered in other places and isn't the purpose of this particular blog entry, suffice to see we've had some really good fleet fights from the small skirmish to the 50 vs 50 slugfest.

Recently BNC took a little time out of the fight to do a couple of other things, had a quiet couple of weekends on the trot and didn't hit FIX much at all. We actually started getting messages from FIX asking if we were ok and when would we be coming to visit again, they missed us! I've never had that from an opponent in Eve before now except the smacky "bring it you tards we're gonna own you" and that was certainly not the tone from FIX.

So now we come to Eve's second birthday and that damn Titan event! I was reading the forums from work when I figured out an event was going on and then saw a post that we were NAP'd with FIX. Naturally my response was "WTF?" so I jumped on irc to find out what was going on to discover that we had indeed NAP'd for 24 hours and were going to participate in the event together.

I dashed home from work as early as I could, logged in and jumped on TS to find a 70-80 pilot BoB/FIX fleet working together, us all on FIX's TS server and a shared channel set up in game! Weird!

We actually had a lot of fun working with FIX and they were a blast to hang out with. At one point in the event when it became apparent that it was getting politically very messy indeed with friends and allies having totally conflicting objectives we actually considered ditching FIX in the middle of Fountain to team up with our more traditional allies. The fact that this consideration didn't get much support and that we stuck by the FIX chaps speaks volumes.

So after downtime the day after the event our NAP ended and we're back to killing each other but and it's a big but... our shared chat channel remains! How weird to be sharing a chat channel with your enemy and shooting the shit with them when you're still trying to blow them up! We now have this direct open channel where we can tell each other what a good fight we just had and have a laugh about people doing silly stuff, getting ganked, having crap ship setups etc..

This is simply the strangest conflict I've ever participated in during my nearly 2 years of Eve. Compared to the GNW which was filled with vitriolic forum ranting, smacktalk in game that would make your eyes bleed and strong genuine dislike (I would say actual hate from some people) between antagonists, this war with FIX is like going on holiday to Ibiza for a week with some mates!

I have no clue how things will progress but it's been a lot of fun, continues to be a lot of fun and hopefully will be a lot of fun in the future!

Infamy!

2005-05-07T22:09:00.000Z

I don't know whether this is a good or a bad thing really but it's certainly a funny thing, I have kind garnered a reputation in Eve for a) being a bit of a pisshead and b) often passing out at the controls of my battleship after a particularly heavy session!

So I asked the guys in the corp to try remember as many occasions as they could of me passing out at the keyboard and all the amusing situations that created. I'll start with perhaps the most infamous incident of all!

1) The Raven Video!

If you've not seen this little gem here's a link ! Passed out on apirate hunting op in Syndicate back in the days when you put heavy launchers on a Raven, this was when having a full rack of arbalests and a C5-L was pretty uber, cost me 300mill and started my infamy!

2) The cricket bat incident!

One of my finest moments! After being up all night on the b00zor and I think ganking in Fade, I decided it was time to get serious on teh b00ze so went for a multiple gas chamber finale!

Cricket Bat In Three Parts

Needless to say I was zzZZZzzzZZZzzz pretty soon after that.

3) Road Trip To HLW

Back in our NORAD days we decided to go on a trip to Curse to see if we could get to HLW gank some shit and get out alive. Disaster and comedy set in whilst we were enroute. I had the gang and set auto-pilot for HLW then promptly passed out. No-one realised I'd gone for quite a while as my scorp happily sailed down to Curse with the rest of the gang! The lads bravely chased my auto-piloting Scorp down to Curse but needless to say I met an untimely end before I got there!

4) H-PA Incident

Quoted from Twaddle:-

In H-PA we'd been picking off PA and you did a "back in 15 mins" on us. Fortunately I had the gang so we could gang warp you to a safe. Unfortunately it was before you could gang warp to bm's so we had to bring out a nos ship to drain your cap and gang warp you a couple of times on 0 cap to get you into a safespot.

5) 3KNK

Quoted from SkaffenAmtiskaw:-

Oh, and no ship loss, but before I was in BNC I spent the hour and a half before downtime babysitting his raven in my blackbird on a gate in 3KNK, hoping to hell the legitimate businessmen wouldn't engage

6) CZDJ Helping(?) CoD Defend Against PA

Half a dozen of us camping the station and I'm in a scorp about 50km above the station. KIA jump into system warp to the station, there's a brief skirmish and my guys have to leave... needless to say my narcoleptic self was popped!

7) On The Way Home From Tribute

Lost a scorp fighting Gangster Nation in Tribute and was cutting back across to Pure Blind in my pod when I passed out at a gate on the route from H-PA to Torrinos. Slept like a baby, gaurded most of the night by Wakka Rast. Woke up fit and healthy in my pod on the same gate in the morning unmolested by the PA o.O

8) Outer Ring & Rohann

I passed out in a Raven on a gate 3 or 4 jumps from 4C-B7X, Rohann had left BNC recently and was fighting a one man war against FA. He found me and proceeded to remove my shields and dink my armour in his frigate, then left me and carried on his merry way! I woke up in my ship with just a teany bit of armour damage the following morning and couldn't understand why!

9) 4C-B7X and the Minefield!

Passed out outside one of the Chemal Tech factories an hour or two before downtime and a) for a laugh to surprise me when I woke up and b) to give me some defences that didn't require someone babysitting me, one of the NORAD lads setup a huge minefield around my ship! The minefield dissappeared after DT and I was once again unmollested when I finally surfaced!

10) A Bored Blade K'Os

I passed out in a BS outside a station in 4C-B7X again and blade being drunk sat next to me in his Apoc all night giggling on teamspeak as he stripped all my shields off, watched them recharge then stripped them all off again! I don't know who's the saddest in that incident!

11) Hunting Trip to Fade

Set off from Torrinos with Endersgame in my Raven to go pwn some people NPC hunting just south of L-C307. Autopiloted all the way jumped into system already fast asleep and got whalloped by the guys we were supposed to be hunting!

12) Solo Hunting Trip vs RSA

In our NORAD days during the RSA war I set myself up a scorp in 4C-B7X, set my autopilot for C4C-Z4 and set off! I got drunk en-route and jumped into C4C asleep at the wheel. RSA mailed me afterwards to say "how come you didn't shoot back, are you ok" lol!

13) Bumpage and Petitioned!

Quoted from Ponieus:-

I remeber lil bit more about that time. We had a mishap in gang and you decided you were to pissed to lead and said fook it I am off for the night. About an hour later you logged back on in BKG and rallied up me and one other person and were dead set on pwning some peeps.. We get like 3 jumps and you go silent. Then you dont move. Then you dont respond. Then we call everyone back and laugh at you. Then we decided to thebest course of action would be to bump your apoc(I think the mega modulated tach setup) off the gate.. About an hour into it we got you aout 120km away from the gate but your damn ship kept on going back..

then we filed the stuck petition..

There are many more but there's some of the high/lowlights! I must have lost over 20 battleships to drunken silliness!

Tuesday Morning Fun With FIX

2005-05-03T23:26:00.000Z

With just a few of us in corp chat on a Tuesday morning (EST morning that is) I decided to go solo hunting down in FIX to test out the world's most ridiculous Moa set up for a laugh. I was in a bit of a crazy mood and fully expecting to die I kitted out a Moa with blasters etc. for some short range fun and games!

Just as I'm about to set off a couple of the other guys decide they are coming along too, so duly warned about the likely consequences they grab cruisers and we're about to set off. Other people are also logging on and before we know it we've a little gang of five 1 HAC, 3 cruisers and 1 frig. We all know it's a suicide run but are looking forward to catching a FIX BS or two NPC hunting or mining in South Querious.

The route down was pretty dead all the way to 9CG and even when we jump in there it's still very quiet with only half a dozen FIX pilots in local. So off we head through to NDII thinking we'll hit the refinery systems further south. Just as we enter NDII I hauler warps to the gate and instas past us, we double back to try nail him but he insta docks in 9CG... first missed kill of the day.

So we head for 3BK, at this point it's fair to say I should have handed command to someone else, I was rather tired (up all night) and more than a little intoxicated (scotch 4tw!), Taalgar's also working on a good old booze up so despite the fact that in neither of our timezones is it even mid afternoon, 2 out of the six of us are already hammered and everyone else is in high spirits! Nothing like going on a suicide run knowing you're all going to die but intending to get some kills first :)

We jump into 3BK and there's an Apoc and Armageddon in system, scanning around we can't find them, they obviously instantly safe spotted, then one of the two logs. We do a little jump out, wait, jump back in routine to try catch the other BS with his pants down but find as we jump back in that he's logged. No luck here today then.

So we all meet up at the gate, jump out of 3BK and find 7 FIX waiting for us! Surprising to be honest as there were only 7 of them all docked in 9CG when we came through there and for them to get all of those guys mobilised and down after us in jst a few minutes was impressive. They're not at the gate when we jump in so we hit a safe and scan them. Oh joy, we're in a frig, cruisers and one HAC and they've got 2 BS, HAC, BC, cruiser and a couple of inties. So a frontal assault is out of the question!

Luckily there's a few systems you can loop around in that area so we move to a different gate and get behind FIX. However, just as we do this they work out where we went and jump through to the same system as us. Our options have opened up a bit though because there are 4 gates out of this system and although 2 are to dead ends that leaves FIX with some decisions to make regarding splitting their forces or not.

Our friggie pilot has to leave, another cruiser has joined us and we have another on the way a couple of jumps out. So we've more options and a bit more firepower available. Needless to say we're still outgunned with our 5 cruiser and a HAC but things are looking good for some hit and run tactics.

FIX decide to cover two gates and leave one a little light with 45au seperating the two gates. Awesome, we're going to warp in to one gate, take out a cruiser and a couple of inties, avoid the Raven there and get out before the Megathron, Diemos, Ferox etc. arrive. Good plan!

In we go, the Thorax goes down ok and we're looking good so I change the plan and we start to hit the Raven, then in comes the rest of the FIX gang. We decide to bail but two of us get caught and we lose a Thorax and a Blackbird, oops!

Back at the safe spot we decide to try again knowing that FIX are all at the one gate now and have also ben joined by a Dominix and I think another frigate. We go in at 40km to try and lure their support to us, kill it and get out before they can take us. We start off well enough but their support is very fast moving and refusing to die when we have to again bail out before the three BS pound us into dust. however, yet again one of us in a Moa gets caught and despite taking two out of the three enemy support into low armour and tanking like crazy can't get out before the Raven's cruise missiles do the damage.

So the 'suicide' element of this morning's crazy op is going well! 1 Thorax killed and 3 cruisers lost o.O

Deciding descretion is the better part of honour given the fact that we're down to 2 cruisers and a HAC vs Domi, Raven, Mega, Deimos, Ferox plus support it's time to make a run for it. We all align and get ready to instajump out on the count of three. Then the intoxicated idiot in charge (me \o/) hits the wrong distance to his bookmark and we all drop out of warp 15km from the camped gate! One cruiser dashes for the gate and gets through, the HAC makes it out to a safe spot, the pods all make it out but we lose a Rupture! FIX four, crazy idiots one!

So enough of this we log the HAC off before we lose that as well and the rest of us instajump ourselves back towards empire. As usual the chatter in local with FIX is very friendly and as usual BNC despite being outnumbered and totally outgunned still brings it to the enemy!

FIX lose 1 Thorax
We lose 1 Moa, 1 BB, 1 Rupture, 1 Thorax and finally our cruiser that escaped gets nailed going through 9CG!

Remember folks, if I'm drunk and about to go solo hunting on my own in a cruiser fully expecting to die what the consequences are if you come with me ;)

BNC and The Great Northern War 2

2005-04-29T10:33:00.000Z

The lines were pretty much drawn for 6 months plus of warfare, just to recap we had PA vs RKK, Evol, BNC & NORAD, JF, CoD, FU and 2 or 3 other unafiliated corporations.

NORAD's war declaration can be found at http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=84539

PA must have been wondering whether they'd bitten off more than they could chew by aggravating RKK! From one lone corp they thought they could intimidate they were suddenly faced with about 50 corps including Evolution, LOD and BNC, Evolution of course needing no introduction but BNC and LOD being relatively unknown included some of the more capable pvp pilots in the north outside of the PA, RKK and Evolution (when they arrived).

However, in true PA style their arrogance hit new heights with incredible forum smack at the start of the war. In retrospect they were made to eat their words like no other group of players in Eve's history has... thank goodness! They certainly deserved everything coming to them. At this time it was my perception that PA really looked down on just about everyone else in Eve and that they had a really hard time controlling their pilots who it seemed, from the repeated diplomatic incidents they caused, were allowed to run riot with no recourse to the alliance as a whole.

There are all sorts of famous posts by Halseth Durn, Inkz and Eddz from around this time talking about how our little coalition was gonna get mullahed by the PA. In retrospect they are of course highly amusing but at the time I remember PA's arrogance giving slight pause to our intention to attack them.

It looked like a long bloody war was in store.

So BNC mobilised and encouraged as many NORAD as possible to come with us. On day one of the conflict a NORAD fleet of 60-70 converged on torrinos and proceeded to move north into Venal to engage the PA. Sadly over the next week the involvement of the other NORAD corps declined so that to be honest at the end of week one only BNC and half a dozen other assorted pilots (most of whom eventually ended up in BNC) represented NORAD up north in the war. So began the rift that led to BNC leaving NORAD.

It's worth a paragraph or three to talk about NORAD's position and involvement in this war. To begin with BNC were the only NORAD corporation with strong ties to the other protagonists in the GNW with perhaps the exception of Chon who had been involved in the taking of the Fade stations and the RSA. DG and I persuaded the NORAD council that entering the war was the right thing to do, NORAD had a strong isolationist policy up to this point that DG and I tried hard to break, believing strongly that an inward looking NORAD was never going to prosper and succeed. How true that proved when 6-8 months later CA disolved and half of the ex-CA corps moved to the Outer Ring!

After the first week most of BNC totally lost faith in NORAD due to their inability to lay their mining lasers aside and participate in a conflict beyond their borders. I think that we already knew by this time that BNC would be leaving NORAD and spreading it's wings. I am being polite if I say that NORAD, outside of BNC, were totally and utterly inept at fighting a war let alone fighting one away from their home soil. DG and I had to exerpt considerable pressure on the NORAD council to even keep the alliance in the war... that is when we could be bothered to even attend the council meetings, participation seemed fruitless at this time because of the frankly pathetic nature of many other NORAD corps.

So the war moved on past the initial week which saw huge PA blobs of 100-150 pilots defending their territory against smaller coalition forces. PA probably felt rather confident at this time, their blobbing tactics were in the main succeeding and they clearly had a huge response from their members.

BNC quickly slipped into a niche of operations that we repeatedly returned to throughout the war i.e. basing ourselves out of Torrinos and working on keeping Pure Blind clear of enemy shipping. With help from RKK and JF Pure Blind and EC-P8R soon became very hot for PA pilots. Unless PA brought the blob from Venal down EC-P8R was held for long periods by allied forces.

Allied forces soon became known as the Northern Coalition Of Allies, NCA being far more convenient than listing the individul corps/alliances on our side, which led in turn to various hilarious sigs, banners and our own forum.

Coming next.... BNC and The Great Northern War 3 (Empire wars)

Tunes For All Occasions

2005-04-29T06:49:00.000Z

This should amuse, delight and horrify you... depending on your music taste of course

http://hardcorewillneverdie.com/Flash/newframe.html

Click Mixes and either select a year or search for a DJ, there's a couple of hundred mixes from the UK dance scene at it's best! You'll need realplayer to listen.

10 of my personal favourites include:-

Easygroove - Obsession 3rd Dimension (I was at this and remember this set, 10,000 people, massive warehouse, mental tunes, was a VERY messy party!)
Easygroove & Lisa - Fantazia takes you into 1992 (was one of my favourite tapes for years)
Easygroove - Fantazia Showcase (uber tunage, MC Bassman 4tw!)
Easygroove - Fantazia Second Sight (after Fantazia Summertime, which sadly isn't available on this site, this might be the best Easygroove set ever, 7 mins in "why do I always get the nutter" priceless and at 12:20 mins whatever that tune is I love it. The highlight of the set is at about 25:30 "You don't have to be Jesus" madness! We freaked a house party full of acid heads out sooo badly by playing this set loudly over and over, lol! OMG the more of this I listen too the more awesome tunage there is on here, side 2 at about 6mins wicked track.)
Pilgrim - Studio Set (I've lost my copy of this and was delighted to find it here, what an awesome set)
Grooverider - Universe Big Love (reminds me of Universe Tribal Gathering, DG will remember dancing our asses off to Grooverider there... not long before DG threw up after too many pills )
Randall/Mickey Finn - AWOL (OMFG jungle!)
Producer/Tanith - Universe Mind, body & Soul (Technotastic, Producer and MC Ribbz 4tw \o/ )
Top Buzz - Big Bad Head NYE 1991 (omg Top Buzz on the mic at the start giving Londoners shit is hilarious.. "I'm from London and i don't give a fuck about 'em" haha. I actually always thought Top buzz were shite but the start of this set is just too funny)
DJ Hype - Helter Skelter (now that's dancing Jungle, no idea which Helter Skelter this was but there's a good chance DG or I were there, we went to a lot of helter Skelters because our friends and one of my ex's were stage dancers for them. Ooh 15mins in top jungle tune and at 24:30 another favourite!)

Any of the Easygroove, Ellis Dee and Mickey Finn sets rock as well tbh.

This is what I'm listening to when I'm blowing the good people of Eve up ;)

Enjoy

My Thoughts On How To Access 0.0 As A Newbie

2005-04-29T06:35:00.000Z

I'd posted this on the Eve-O forums but as posts on there have a habitof dissapearing I thought I'd repeat it here. To be honest I have no clue why people make such a fuss about getting into 0.0, it's accessible to any idiot with half a brain and a modicum of intelligence and patience. Anyway, my post.......

As this topic is doing the rounds in rabid fashion on the forums again, here's the thoughts of an 'orrible ebil griefer on the realistic options for softy fluffy carebears trying to get into 0.0 [)]

1. Hazzard the risk of operating in unclaimed territory e.g. Pure Blind or Syndicate.

You'll still have to go through choke points and there will be pirates but there are npc stations you can use, there are NPC's to hunt and there is better ore than in empire. No the ore is not as good as some of the deeper 0.0 regions and you won't find bistot or arkanor. Yes, it's still better than empire for both of the above (except lvl 4 missions for npc's) and yes it's a good way to get your feet wet to 0.0. Most alliances are far more likely to accept a corp or player who can say they lived in 0.0 independantly even if it's only for a month because it shows you know how to cope. You'll be far more likely to succeed in making it if you do your research, are in a group, use plenty scouts and have instas.

2. Join/Merge with a corp already living in 0.0

Yep you're gonna have to change your ways and play with new people but no you don't have to lose all your existing mates. I know how attached people can be to their own corporate identities and mergers can mean a lack of control over your own destiny to a degree. However, if it all goes horribly wrong and you want to start your own corp up again you'll be wiser and more experienced for doing it.

Before I settled in BNC I'd been in a corp that split, created a new one, merged that into BNC surrendering the CEO role and the control that went with it. I've also helped merge about half a dozen other corps into BNC. It doesn't all work out all the time but I've been better for the experience every time and it led to more great friends, good experiences and eventually me living in 0.0 full time.

This is also the quickest and most likely route into 0.0 space, probably also the safest if you pick the right corp. You're almost 99% certain to get a good set of instajumps, depending on what conflicts your new corp/alliance is in, the chokepoints may be safer for you and you'll benefit from the experience of living in 0.0 from your new corp mates. You are going to have to have something to offer though and this is perhaps a good next step for after you've proved you can achieve point 1 above. Just joining to rape the local roids and hunt npc's without contributing to the corp/alliance is not gonna fly.

3. Join an alliance.

You can always apply directly to join an alliance. It's essential to have something to offer if you do this and it is almost always advisable to make friends in the alliance first and get someone to sponsor you. Your chances of success are FAR higher if you can demonstrate a willingness to help defend and show some pvp experience.

Let me just stress again, you are going to need something to offer. Your alliance of choice is likely to look at your member count (realistically 20+ s a good number to aim at as a minimum), your experience in 0.0, your pvp experience, whether your existing corp has a high profile and whether your application implies you just want to come drain their resources or whether it reads like you really want to be a part of something big.

This is probably, second to the ninja aproach, the hardest route into 0.0.

4. Ninja!

Ok so not only do you want into 0.0 but you also want to retain your current solo or corp identity but you also want the really good stuff. You're gonna have to be very patient about getting in and out of 0.0, you'll have to time it right for when chokepoints are clear, you're gonna have to be very savvy with your ship setup, people will be trying to kill you and using stations is going to be dodgy.

If you have the patience and can do the prep to get set up then this approach is not impossible. Sneak a couple of secure cans out to your target area first and anchor them at a good safe, one for supplies and one for loot. Get the right set of instajumps before you go. Spend time scouting in a fast and small ship for quiet out of the way systems with the right minerals and npcs.

Many alliances, seeing a 1 person blob in some out of the way system won't ever investigate because they'll assume you're one of their own.

This is the riskiest route into 0.0 and if you can pull it off you've proved yourself.

5. Buy a pass or get sponsored.

Ok so not many alliances do this anymore and you're gonna pay for it or be taxed to hell but it is still possible. Do your research, read up about all the alliances, find out who's at war and who isn't, find out where they operate, what the minerals and npc's are like. Look up their official contacts and write a nice mail explaining what you want to do, that you're prepared to pay up front or be taxed and wait for a response. If you're also considering 2 and 3 above then if nothing else this establishes a line of communication and some contacts. Be pleasant in your mail, be sure to offer to pay in some way, don't pester and be gracious if rejected.

Obviously a voice on the inside of the alliance is going to help tremendously in getting your request approved. As with applying directly to an alliance it's just as much about who you know as it is about what you know.

6. Regarding implants, ships, insurance and getting ganked.

Implants are a luxury, it's been said many times. If you're in this game for anything approaching the long haul then you shouldn't need to worry about them (I very rarely use them and when I do I use them 2 at a time when I know I'm going to do a couple of lvl 5 skills requiring certain attributes over the next few weeks). So relax, don't worry about them and you'll enjoy the game more for being free of the worry.

Pick the right ship for the job. If you're going into 0.0 scouting then pick something appropriate. just sauntering out into 0.0 on a jaunt for the day in a battleship or cruiser is asking for trouble. If you want a look around take the fastest ship you can get your hands on. If you know you're going to stay for a while you have to weigh up wether you are going to be able to dock/undock to refit against the perfect setup you need to do the actual activities you are going for. If you're intending on mining then you're going to either need to find a quiet station/time to dock and refit or you're going to need your own POS.

Getting ganked. The only two important things you need to worry about when getting ganked are a) you are not your ship, get over it you will get another, your PC didn't meltdown, your girlfriend didn't dump you and no-one blew up your dog b) how did it happen, what can you learn and how can you prevent it happening next time.

So thats my brief brain dump on this subject. The options are pretty clear and although they may not be what you want to hear that's the reality of the situation.

In summary the absolute key things to sort out are:-

1. Do your research, learn everything there is to know about 0.0 regions and inhabitants.
2. Use the right ship for the right job.
3. Teamwork is your friend.
4. Get some contacts.
5. Be patient.

Hope that helps.

The Worst Day In Ages

2005-04-29T02:28:00.000Z

What a bad day, all started ok with the usual work stuff and should have been a great day as I was heading back to the UK tonight for 5 days of partying for DG's 30th birthday.

Things went from bad to worse whilst checking the forums from work.

First thing one of the Directors, a very old friend in Eve, a very hardworking Director and a guy who's heart is always in the right place and does everything for the corp he can, resigns from our management team. Fuck, this is all I need and is not good for the corp. All this over a stupid spat we had in our Directors forum over something trivial that got out of hand and was misshandled by everyone involved.

I'm hoping that this can be rectified, it's a huge personal blow if not. However, being me I'm fairly confident it can be fixed (edit: It has been fixed \o/)

Why is it in Eve that everyone underestimates the effort put into corps by the Directors? So many members that are happy to whine and complain about stuff but never put the degree of effort in as the Directors who are trying to resolve the cause of the whining and make everyone's gaming time that much more fun. I often get the feeling that our Directors are a bunch of really unsung heros a lot of the time.

What's also pissing me off at the moment is how hard it is to maintain harmony amongst a team of people that normally get on very well and work together well. Sometimes I feel like I'm always refereeing the stupidest of issues that should be totally avoidable if people were a little more relaxed and tolerant with each other. Perhaps it's the booze levels in BNC ;)

The next highly dissappointing incident is the news that one of our Execs has deleted both his characters from Eve. I knew immediately why, RL comes first and he has flirted with focusing more and more on his RL stuff than on Eve recently so in some respects it came as no surprise. However, the lack of surprise doesn't take away the sting of dissappointment at losing such a key member of the team. In Eve terms he'd really come right into his own recently as well with good fleet commanding skills/experience, top scoring killboard stats, highly respected member of the team and providing the community with very high quality video entertainment.

Uther and Mistress Agnois you will be sorely missed from BNC and from Eve.

The coup de resistance of the perfectly shitty day now ensues....

I get myself home, sort my stuff out and head to the airport. I'm running a little late because I've left leaving the office too late and as usual had my flight time wrong! So I arrive at the airport stressed, with road rage, sweating my ass off rushing to check in. As I stride into the airport ..... I start getting heart palpatations. I've had a hole in my heart since I was a kid and every now and again it likes to remind me that I'm supposed to stay fit and healthy as opposed to tired, stressed, unfit and a heavy drinker!

So thats me fucked now, I manage to get checked in and heart fluttering away like a bag of rabid stoats I get sat down in the airport lounge praying for it to stop before I have to board the plane. Needless to say an hour and a half later it hasn't, so in a dizzy cold sweat I queue up to board. I'm about 3 people away from the airport peeps checking boarding passes when I start getting tunnel vision and stars before my eyes. An indeterminate period of time later I wake up on the floor surrounded by airport peeps feeling weak as a baby.

Needless to say that despite protestations on my part I am not allowed to board because I'm not fit to fly....ARSE!

So after getting fussed over in the airport until I'm feeling ok again I have just managed to get back to the appartment. Fingers crossed tomorrow is a better day and I can get a flight to the UK sorted :/

When Will I Ever Learn?

2005-04-25T23:15:00.000Z

Sunday evening, I'd been taking it easy all day and had logged off Eve due to all the lag issues caused by the ebil h4x0rs. At about 11pm after a couple of Vodka Redbulls and a bottle of wine I decide to log onto Eve, pick up some stuff I'd bought in Yulai and head back down to Gehi. I figured I'd be in bed by midnight, get a good nights sleep and be in for a meeting at work bright and early Monday morning.

Whilst I'm travelling I'm chatting to a guy I know from Planetside who I'd only just discovered plays Eve now and to a couple of the Directors/Execs in the BNC command channel. We're shooting the shit and I'm having a laugh so I figure a couple of shots of Voddy before bedtime won't do me any harm.

All is going to plan until I get to Gehi and realise I'm actually a bit drunk and it's now about midnight. In the Gehi station there's about 3 hostiles and one of the m0o guys. Thinking "what the hell, if I'm in bed by 1am I'll be fine" I load up a Raven with scrambling kit and go outside to camp the station for half an hour as I'm feeling a bit lively now. Patron from m0o joins me outside and we camp for 15-20 mins waiting to get lucky with a hostile undocking. Soon enough one does... frigate bah... don't even get a lock.

A few reports come in of 4-5 FIX in A2-V27 from BoB pilots passing through but no visual on the bad guys. Patron heads to bed and I decide that FIX will probably be in frigs so I'll go play with them in my Raven. Despite mild intoxication I realise that taking my Dread gear off might be a good idea so I refit in more standard kit, Arbies, C5-L etc.. and head down to A2-V27.

As I arrive Kurt Hectic from Evolution logs on in an Apoc in A2 and we both set up shop on the Kaira gate. In warps a Typhoon at long range and begins sniping us. Kurt's taking a bit of damage and we warp about to a few cans trying to get close to him to no avail. Marko Debrault also appears then in his Megathron also sniping us. After a litle bit of verbal jousting in local (well behaved of course) Marko warps in on me whilst I'm sat off the gate without his wingman in the Typhoon. I get him scrambled and unleash volleys of cruise missiles, align to depart and Kurt warps down to lay on the hurt. Marko's pounding the crap out of me with a full gank setup on his megathron so when Kurt's also in range hitting Marko I warp out with 50% structure just as Marko goes down.

1 nil to the good guys.

I'll edit more of the story in later but to cut a long story short we ended up in 9CG fighting FIX, i lost an Apoc and went to bed at 5:30am before having to get up at 7:30am for work :/

When will I ever learn that I need more sleep!!

BNC and The Great Northern War 1

2005-04-24T05:16:00.000Z

BNC's involvement in the Great Northern War all stemmed from our relationship with Reikoku corporation. During the RSA war we'd formed a very close friendship with RKK having fought alongside them for so long and found them to be, if less drunk/hammered/wasted/high, a corporation very similar to BNC and with similar values.

To recap a little BNC and RKK (along with Huff Technologies, Celestial Apocolypse and Deah Star International and a few other NORAD corps) had been instrumental in the defeat of the Rising Storm Alliance and removal of FE from the Fade region. The terms of the end of the RSA war were that BNC and RKK would have unlimited access to Fade, mining, NPC hunting and travel rights through Fade in addition to military and logistical support should either BNC or RKK be involved in any major conflict in exchange BNC and RKK promised to be there for the newly fomed FU if they ever needed military support (I still have the sound recording of the negotiations somewhere).

Also worth noting is that BNC's love hate relationship with KIA began towards the end of the RSA war with KIA hitting RSA and CoD in a few engagements (these encounters between KIA and CoD/FU also helped lay the building blocks for later resentment between CoD/FU and PA). This brief period of cooperation (although we never saw much of each other in space) was the first time BNC and KIA crossed paths.

The political situation up north was fairly stable after the RSA war with Coalition of Deklein (CoD) in the Deklein region, Fade Union (FU) in Fade, Phoenix Alliance (PA) in Venal, Tenal and Branch, the usual random unaffilliated corps (including Jericho Fraction) occupying Pure Blind and the remnants of Forsaken Empire (FE) in Tribute, Vale of the Silent and Geminate. BNC were still in NORAD occupying the Outer Ring and Arcadia were based in Cloud Ring but were in the process of collapse as their corps moved on one at a time to other areas. Around this time the remaining corps in Arcadia joined NORAD and NORAD laid claim to Outer Ring, Cloud Ring and considered Syndicate a protectorate. The period following the RSA war was probably the height of NORAD's power and success.

The major player up north at the time was the PA with probably 20+ corporations including the likes of GODS, CDI, RONA-KIA, 20th Legion etc. I have no idea what motivations were behind the move but at this time Halseth Durn (of Oberon Incorporated, a PA corp) representing the PA began building the NAST (Northern Alliances Security Treaty.. or some such name, can't remember exactly). The idea behind the NAST was to align the three alliances in the north together in a mutual defence and cooperation pact and secure the area. CoD and FU signed up as NAST members alongside the PA. Halseth and I also talked briefly in the one conversation I ever had with him prior to the war about NORAD joining NAST, which would have effectively locked down the regions of Outer Ring, Cloud Ring, Fade, Deklein, Venal, Tenal, Branch and Pure Blind under the control of four cooperative alliances. If the events leading to the Great Northern War (GNW) had not occured then I believe NORAD would have joined the NAST alongside CoD, FU and PA.. the north would then have been a far different place, just as the political history of Eve would have been far different.

Whilst all this political manouvering was going on after the RSA war RKK, FU and BNC (to a lesser degree) continued to fight FE in Tribute. Many FE members at this time were leaving Eve to try other online games with a major exodus to Lineage so FE were weakened.

The much dreamed of united and peaceful north of Eve seemed a realistic possibilty with FE being pushed back and allied pilots all over the north. You couldn't fly anywhere up north at this time without bumping into friendly forces.

In more or less total control of Tribute RKK and allies held the Tribute player conquorable stations, FE was more or less a spent force and things were looking good. Three things then happened in short succession which lit the fuse that eventually caused the erruption of the Great Northern War. Firstly Halseth Durn representing the PA in forming the NAST did not include independant corporations operating in the north such as RKK, which caused a lot of resentment as RKK, DI and Celes had been so important in securing the north. Secondly, CDI and other PA corps began harrassing RKK in Tribute and a couple of messy incidents over the Tribute stations started to fuel people's ire towards PA. Finally, a couple of Evolution pilots were shot by PA when entering PA space allegedly under the protection of a previously agreed safe passage agreement. The validity of that safe passage agreement has been the subject of an enormous amount of debate ever since.

Very quickly the situation between RKK and the PA deteriorated, culminating with RKK declaring war on the PA in the face of continued aggression and to be honest downright underhand tactics by the PA. Relationships between all the corps in the north are complicated at the time with RKK, BNC and allies feeling (in retrospect) pretty arrogant due to our success, PA having a generally shite attitude and superiority complex towards their neighbours and CoD/FU regrouping after their defeat in the RSA war.

Due to PA's attitude towards CoD and FU, which was at best condescending, both CoD and FU threw their lot in with RKK. There's lots of history of individual incidents that led upto this decision that I am probably not best to comment on.

At this time BNC was several hundred pilots strong, the most dominant and influential corp in NORAD and felt very strongly that RKK was being wronged, that PA were out of order and that we should be militarily supporting RKK. So DG and I commenced a war of influence against the rest of the NORAD corps with a view to joining the war against PA. What's worth bearing in mind regarding NORAD at this time and it's council (Sunday afternoon council meetings for the yawn) is that BNC had so much influence that we never proposed anything that went to a vote and did not succeed, we were very good friends with most of NORAD's CEOs and along with Nemesis were 90% of NORADs military might (such as it was).

NORAD's view of the PA was coloured by the joining of The Merchant Marines (TheMM) to NORAD and the acts of GODS (a PA corp) towards TheMM. TheMM were formed by a group of exiles from Earth and Beyond and some Merchant Marines players from E&B had also ended up in GODS. There was bad blood and an incident over account ownership that is best not discussed in public. GODS actually visited Outer Ring with a fleet to hunt TheMM and were driven off by a NORAD fleet that I led after a brief and bloody battle.

Given all this background, BNC's involvement in the north combined with DG and I's inflence over the NORAD council (there were desenters of course) we forced a vote to join in the war against PA which was successfully passed. Talks with our contacts in CoD/FU led to NORAD being announced as a NAST member at the same time that CoD/FU/NORAD ejected PA from the NAST.

Arrayed against the PA were CoD, FU, NORAD, RKK, Jericho Fraction, Evolution and several other unafilliated corps.

So began the Great Northern War which led to close on 9-10 months of fighting, the strengthening of a friendship between BNC and Reikoku, the death of Fade Union, the formation and death of the Northern Star Alliance, the formation of BoB and BNC's friendship with ATUK, RN, m0o and Evolution.

Much, much more to follow!

My First 12 Months In Eve

2005-04-24T04:39:00.000Z

I’d been playing a game called Mankind for about 2 ½ years and was in a guild/clan called Fight Club. The game was dying due to lack of decent development support and was about 4 to 5 years old anyway, so was getting a bit outdated in the graphics and game play departments. Many of the senior players in the game, Fight Club included, were actively looking for the next game to get into. I had three on my horizons Planetside, Star Wars Galaxies and Eve. So being the MMOG addict that I am I tried to get into beta for all three. Amazingly I got into two beta tests Planetside and Eve.

Many Mankind players were making the move to Eve and Eve beta had half a dozen mankind corporations in it, the largest of which was Xenotech, which the likes of Lungorthin and myself joined. I dipped in and out of beta for Eve because my Planetside addiction had blossomed by that time and I couldn’t quite get into Eve back then. I found myself on the command staff of the largest outfit in Planeside the 666th Devildogs and was playing that a hell of a lot.

When Eve went gold there was a huge exodus of Mankind players across to Eve and many notable corps were formed including Hooded Monk Mining Industries, Confederation of the Red Moon, Eye of God, Aquelia Stellaris, Xenotech, Clan black Scorpions and my own team from Mankind Fight Club Soap Industries.

Ghostwing and Tyler Durden from Fight club joined Eve immediately it went gold and set up Fight Club Soap Industries. The corporation settled up in the Citadel region and made the Kaimon system home. At this time I was still charging around in Planetside ordering hundreds of New Conglomerate Soldiers to their deaths and spamming the 666th forum in my usual style Wink

I kept in touch with the guys in Eve through our old Fight Club forum and at the beginning of July decided I would give Eve another go. I bought the game, created Blacklight (the name I’d used in Mankind since day one) and sailed on up from Kisogo my starting system to Kaimon to get signed up.

Fight Club grew to about 8 or so guys as more of the team from Mankind came over to Eve. Eventually Ghostwing, Tyler Durden, SingleJack, Fcfirststrik, Jackson Freeburn, FCFirstright, Skilo and myself all came over from Fight Club in Mankind to Eve. At about this time I bumped into a guy called Captain Fringe fighting NPCs at a gate in Citadel chatted too him and we ended up recruiting him and a RL friend of his MavericktheGreat.

My brother, Stevie, had never got into MMOGs when we used to play Mankind but had started playing Planetside with me and obviously hooked on the cyberworld and interested by my enthusiastic rantings about Eve also joined up. Two other gamers came over from Planetside at this time drawn by DG & I posting about Eve on the 666th forums, so NeoGhost and Powder came to Eve and joined us in Fight Club.

With Fight Club expanding nicely so began the dreams of world domination and we began to look for ways to strengthen and enlarge the team. We shared Kaimon with another corporation at the time and soon a merger was affected. So came Gupster, Joffa Fett, TKLONEWOLF, Ickk and LordSpliffsend into Fight Club. There we have it upto about mid-August of last year the formation of a core group in Eve that stayed together, at least in part, through over a year of gaming, a falling out of old friends, participation in alliances and at least 3 corporations…. but more of all that to follow Wink

So we’d built up a corp of about 25-30 accounts, all very close-knit, good mates and a relaxed atmosphere. We more or less had Kaimon to ourselves, had decent minerals in Kaimon (for a 0.8 system) and better minerals/npcs only a few more jumps north. We bought an infinite run Moa bpc from our ex-Mankind friends in HMMI (for a knockdown 15mill) and basically set about becoming a self sufficient empire based corp of carebears.

Gradually the corp continued to increase in size by the odd account here and there, people got skilled up more and more and the itchy feet started to set in. We made our first few tentative steps into 0.0 up towards Tribute and Pure Blind. Back in those days M3G4 corp, Space Invaders, Jokers and others were running riot up in the north and the famous Jan blockade prevented access to the North East. Needless to say we got ganked a fair bit on our initial forays out into 0.0. I remember us chatting about the fact that if only we could get 5 or 6 of us in our Moa’s out there then we’d be good to go. The first time we managed those numbers a M3G4 Apocalypse ripped us a new asshole lol!

It was about this time (late September early October probably) that “The Great Battleship Race” started. All anyone could talk about was whether they had the skills to fly a battleship or not and how we were going to build them. DG and I were the very lucky benefactors of a gift of an Apocalypse and an Armageddon (don’t ask!) at this time, which wowed all of us. We couldn’t believe the size of the things & felt invulnerable in them, oh the naivety! So off DG and I sailed in our shiny new BS with medium lasers on!

Struggling to get access to any 0.0 space without dying a lot we started to migrate to Gehi and down into CFS space every weekend for Sunday mining ops. We’d head down with 8 to 12 of us on a Saturday evening and on Sunday we’d do a group-mining op for Bistot and Crokite. Then I’d haul our weekend’s load back to Kaimon and we’d spend the week mining commons to build BS. We were up to about 2 or 3 a week and thought we were the bee’s knees! DG and I also started experimenting with NPC hunting in 0.0 and even managed to fit large guns to our battleships!

I can clearly remember the nerve wracking intensity of trying to hunt Sansha’s NPC or cover the corp mining ops with just DG and I in our BS, barely able to fit large guns and really looking back on it being barely up to the task! How we managed to keep that Geddon and Apoc for so long (we literally had them months before they died) I do not know!

So we approach the end of the year, many of us in Fight Club have really started expanding our horizons and really want to get into pvp. There’s more and more of us flying around in BS even becoming moderately competent in them and looking for some adventure. We NPC hunt in Syndicate and down south below Khanid quite a lot, LordSplifsend starts an amazing trading career and coins his piratedodger nickname for constantly running the PF/FD blockade and things are generally moving out towards 0.0 but as a corp we remain firmly based in Kaimon.

The guy that really broke the mould for us was Maverickthegreat. Mav was always one of the wildest and most adventurous and would frequently get into places he shouldn’t and places we still considered too dangerous. One weekend he upped and headed off through PF/FD and into Syndicate and the Outer Ring in his Thorax. I can just remember how nervous I was about us all following him down there. At the time I can remember that we were forever losing cruisers, like 5 to 10 a week because people were trying to stretch themselves and explore. It felt incredibly reckless to have a few of us go trucking down to the Outer Ring to hook up with Mav who was reporting how great the resources were down there.

So DG, myself, Mav and some of the other more adventurous members of the team upped sticks and moved out to 4C-B7X, which was the beginning of the end for Fight Club. We soon made a load of friends amongst the locals, mined it up a storm and learnt to chain spawn NPC’s in our BS. We’re all having a ball out in the Outer Ring whilst half the corp is still in Kaimon “not feeling ready for 0.0 space” (when they had the same or better skills etc as those of us out in 0.0 – you can see the rift coming already!).

Then one day this guy called Umlat appears out of nowhere in 4C with some other guys from the Geeklab corporation. Umlat asks in local who is up for forming a “no strings attached, informal society” of corporations in the Outer Ring to provide mutual protection against pirates. Almost to a man everyone in the area thinks this is a good idea and The Outer Ring Society was born.

Needless to say those of us out in OR think this is wonderful, DG and I are well excited because we’re in a real alliance, in 0.0 space no less!! The stay at home types in Fight Club are less comfortable and the rift between the adventurous and conservative halves of the corp begins.

ORS goes from strength to strength as more of the area’s legitimate corps join up and both DG and I agree we need to be at the forefront of this fledgling alliance. We therefore wade into the politics, organization and generally participate wholeheartedly in the development of ORS. Almost immediately Umlat’s desire for ultimate power in the region becomes apparent, he declares himself de-facto ruler of ORS and controls the alliance with threats of violence.

Most of us go along with Umlat, to be fair to the guy much of what he did was good for everyone back then, we’d have been a badly organized rabble and easy pickings for m0o, c0w and TLBC who are the notable pirates in the area. However, Umlat made as big a mess out of his interpersonal interactions and his approach to running the alliance as I have ever seen. So needless to say despite the fact that the alliance is growing and developing bitterness and resentment starts to grow.

It was at this time, the early days in OR, that we got our first real taste of pvp i.e. not the one-sided “shit I just got ganked again by ten bad guys at the jump in point to Obe” but actually fighting back. The sweaty palms, shaking hands, thumping heart and general feeling of panic I felt in my first fleet battle with m0o is well documented elsewhere so let’s just say I loved it!

Back to the tale of the ORS banana republic and the Umlat style of management culminates with him declaring that ORS is only allowed to exist under Fountain Alliance’s sufferage and that he has the backing of Evolution and Fountain. Declaring that it’s his way or suffer the consequences Umlat really starts to lose it. Crowning moments at this time were the way he booted Thaibog out of ORS for not doing as he was told (he was told to gank a guy he had been chatting to for 10 mins and who he was asking to leave the OR area peacefully, Thai refused and Umlat’s toys went sailing out of his pram!), threatening the whole alliance that if we disobeyed him Evolution would come and blow us all up and him declaring war on Arcadia despite us not really having the muscle or experience to pull it off.

Umlat makes DG & I official officers of ORS at this time (just prior to Christmas 2003) which we accept thinking “holy shit someone needs to keep this lunatic under control and influence the situation”. The fact that we accept the position creates a rift with some of the stay at home in Kaimon carebears in Fight Club and things within the corp really start to deteriorate. Some of us were thinking “we can put up with this idiot in ORS until we’ve mined some more rares and found a better place to live in 0.0” others wanted to over throw Umlat and still others just had their panties in a knot about being anywhere other than the safety of Kaimon.

The good times back then were when Umlat was not online or was on an even keel and we used to do a LOT of pirate hunting. Lots of the more capable pvpers in NORAD now are the same guys who back then used to go and camp PF/FD hunting m0o, c0w and TLBC. Happy days ganking pirates J

The internal pressure in Fight Club finally comes to a head with SingleJack accusing DG and I of putting ORS and our own personal interests above that of the corporation. A couple of days of mudslinging occur and eventually DG and I leave Fight Club to start Tranquility Drinkers Club (still love that corp name!) as joint CEO’s. Half a dozen FC pilots, mostly those who had originally come to Eve from mankind, remain with SingleJack in FightClub and Ghostwing takes over as CEO. Approximately 20-25 pilots come to TDC to join DG and I.

If truth be told the difference in playing styles between Singlejack, DG & I really broke the whole corporation back then and even after forming TDC it wasn’t quite the same. We lost a few players out of the game and enthusiasm dipped.

Two TDC pilots really start pushing back at Umlat about this time, Lungorthin and Kiruren. They constantly challenge him and stir up a shit storm. In the background DG and I are being approached by ORS CEO’s and members constantly to do something about Umlat. Myggan in particular is conversing with DG in secret and we are all hatching plans and conspiring all over the place. Eventually on one fateful evening the bubble bursts and I take the floor in the alliance channel, declaring that Umlat was out of order, that I withdrew my support for him and so on. About 6 or 7 other CEO’s all speak up most notable of which was Ariakas the then CEO of Black Nova Corporation and all hell breaks loose.

ORS continues under Umlats rule but the 6 ‘traitor’ corporations form the NORAD alliance. Both groups occupy the same territory in the Outer Ring and there is friction between the groups, amplified by more and more corporations adding replacing ORS with NORAD in their corp descriptions. NORAD is a true democracy borne out of the tyranny of a dictatorship and all the CEO’s vow that history will never repeat itself in the Outer Ring, hence NORAD’s strong adherence to the one vote one corp democratic approach to decision making.

I took the best part of a month out of Eve at that time to get a break from the game and from all the politics and shit that had been going down. The break up of Fight Club was a personal blow as the guys I fell out with had been mates in Mankind for over 2 years and I’d met some of them in real life. I’d really wanted ORS to work (the name’s cooler than NORAD!) and I had to a certain degree betrayed Umlat’s trust in the way I helped to dethrone him. I needed a break and took one, as did DG, in fact we had 3 weeks of partying and skiing over Christmas and New Year which was the real life fun and games needed to take the sour edge off the cyber world stuff!

When I came back to Eve in January NORAD had absorbed 90% of the ORS corporations and there was an uneasy truce between NORAD and ORS with little temper tantrums flaring up between the two here and there. As a consequence of our involvement in the overthrow of Umlat a lot of dialogue and cooperation went on between TDC and BNC, friendships started to form between DG, myself and Myggan, Ariakas, Melchior & Cell. It didn’t take long to work out that a merger of TDC and BNC would be to everyone’s advantage. Early in 2004 the merger happens, 90% of the active TDC members join BNC and I become the Director of Diplomacy for BNC.

BNC had recently merged several other corps including Swedish Vikings into the team and adding TDC seemed to give the corp some serious critical mass. I remember us growing more, adding some really good people and having more and more influence in NORAD. We spent a lot of time fighting Geeklab, hunting pirates and leading NORAD’s defense.

CCP then introduce player owned stations and everyone in Eve decides they need one! We make arrangements to have scouts out hunting all over the map looking for them as soon as the game comes back after downtime. As it turns out there were none in the Outer Ring, Cloud Ring was taken by Arcadia Alliance who lived there, which left Fade as the next nearest opportunity. Typically we missed the boat, of the three capturable stations in fade Arcadia grabbed one, CHON grabbed one and a few local corporations banded together to take the refinery in C4C-Z4.

I’m working from home one afternoon about 2 or 3 days after the capturable stations are released and log onto Eve. Myggan and I are bored so in typical myggan style (and I did kind of have a reputation for resolving diplomatic incidents with cruise missiles) he suggests going and taking the station in Fade not currently owned by an Arcadia or NORAD alliance corp. myggan, Thaibog, myself and about 5 or 6 others set off to Fade. We group up on the C4C-Z4 gate in L-C307 and jump into C4C. Myggan immediately declares in local “we want the station, move away and you will not be harmed” or some other more mangled English declaration. Before the words are even typed we’re on our way to the station to find a group of locals camped around it in battleships. They engage as soon as we come out of warp and a fight ensues. We royally kick their arses and gank half a dozen ships.

So commences the RSA war!

The official standpoint from NORAD on Fade was that as the North of Eve was so plagued by pirates at that time we needed to safeguard the route into Cloud and Outer Rings for both NORAD and Arcadia. We decided with Arcadia that holding the stations and holding Fade would help keep the pirates (Forsaken Empire etc.) out of our home territory. That’s all true and that is the political reason why we made the move. However, it kicked off the way it did because myggan and I were bored and wanted to blow some shit up!

BNC then take up occupancy in C4C-Z4, move our assets up, set up shop and start mining & NPC hunting. We set minimal fees on the station and impose the same mining rules that we’d used so successfully down in the Outer Ring on all the local corps mining in the area. To be honest we really did try to help organize things, make the area safe and profitable for all. We also didn’t really see any evidence that there was any kind of alliance working in the area. Melchior Zaal (then a BNC Director) invited a Swedish corporation called North Star Networks up into the area to work with us & that’s how the friendship between NSN and BNC was born (even though they are PA atm I am still mates with the likes of Graltok, Bamsefar etc.. from NSN).

Many of the local corporations were genuinely appreciative of what BNC were doing in fade and we didn’t really anticipate problems but they occurred. A number of the local corporations lead by the ebil Phonix and Sweatysack (who were BNC public enemies number 1 and 2 for doing this) formed the Rising Storm Alliance and attempted to remove BNC.

In order to counter the fact that BNC was quite numerous and prosperous (this was the first golden age for BNC, we were on a high) the RSA made a pact with Forsaken Empire to help remove us. One fateful evening FE attacked a mixed BNC and local fleet decimating it. As it turned out members of our fleet in supposedly allied corps had been passing intel to the enemy fleet and betrayed BNC, that was really the night of long knives and the start of a low point for BNC.

We ended up with many of us scattered and trapped all over the north west of Eve, in Fade and down in Cloud and Outer Rings. There were BNC players trapped in the station in C4C-Z4 who could not get out without being ganked by FE and RSA pilots. We had a very low week or two trying to recover and regain Fade. In the end two daring night raids one led by Sledgehammer, not sure who led the other rescued the trapped pilots and a lot of BNC hardware.

This was a low point for the corporation though. We lost several key personnel and the corp lost momentum after taking a licking from FE. Ariakas stepped down as CEO and left Eve to deal with some real life issues, Sledgehammer left at the same time as did Michael Cybermac and our then military director Tealnye - four of the senior management team including the CEO gone in a matter of weeks. So the corp had a period of reorganization and recuperation.

Following Ariakas’s departure the remaining Directors discussed his replacement and stitched me up with the job Wink I think this must have been around March time but can’t remember at the moment. With DG as Chief Operating Officer (a position he’d taken to support Ariakas as CEO) we set out to appoint a new management team, to deliver on the goals the corp had set itself and to regain the corp’s honour by kicking the shit out of RSA.

There is a long strategy document I’ll have to dig out sometime that deals with our long-term aims for BNC, we started developing it before Ari left and it was the template for a lot of what’s happened in BNC over the last 6 months. You’ll all laugh when you read it and hopefully it will illustrate just what we’ve achieved, there really was a plan all along Wink

BNC then spent weeks fighting tooth and nail up in Fade against RSA and Forsaken Empire, it was always more about proving we could not be kicked out and regaining our pride than actually winning Fade back. To a certain extent Fade and owning a station had been a fun experiment but wasn’t the be all and end all for us.

We soon bumped into Reikoku, Deathstar International and Celestial Apocalypse who were all also fighting FE and therefore RSA by association. Out of this conflict was born the strong friendship between BNC & Reikoku and more personally my friendship with DB Preacher and Galavet.

That was a new high time in Eve for me and the birth of BNC’s second golden age. A combined BNC, NORAD, Reikoku, Celestial Apocalypse and Huff fleet engaged FE in one of the largest and longest fleet engagements of Eve. I had the honour of commanding a total of approaching 120 people that day and I believe that battle was the first time the elite pvp corp Forsaken Empire had ever been driven off the field of battle.

It was working with the likes of DB Preacher, Galavet, Toulak, Bandit and Frakri that taught me a lot about pvp and fleet commanding. Undoubtedly the RSA war was where I really earnt my fleet spurs.
After many weeks of fighting RSA finally agreed to terms that ended the war, RSA died and Fade Union was born. Again I was lucky enough that the likes of DB, Galavet and Toulak allowed me to represent our little coalition in negotiations that ended the war.

So I find myself as CEO of quite a large, now battle hardened corporation on a high from winning a war that’s been away from home in the Outer Ring off and on for months. That’s when we entered our major growth phase, when I really started thinking of us as being in the big league and when, for me at least, I felt we could call ourselves a pvp corp.

I then concentrated on maintaining our image as a pvp corp, growing the corporation and working towards the goals we’d set ourselves in the strategy for BNC.

When we returned home to the Outer Ring we pretty much helped finish Geeklab off once and for all. Where they had been ganking the odd euro miner from NORAD who was having a late night in game the geeks suddenly found themselves faced with a returning BNC with a larger US time zone contingent and a thirst for pvp. To be fair Geeklab's guerilla tactics had been succeeding against NORAD but they couldn’t handle us. Geeklab logged on less and less, lost more and more ships and eventually faded away.

It was also at this time that I started talking a lot more to some old friends from Mankind currently in HMMI in Stain Alliance. For various reasons the HMMI folks felt that it was time for something different and time to leave Stain, we had renewed close ties and so HMMI left SA on good terms and came to the Outer Ring and NORAD as BNC’s sister corp. My goal was always to complete a full merger but I guess sometimes baby steps are needed!

BNC and HMMI therefore shared a chat channel in game and used that as our corp chat and gradually came to do more or less everything together. The inevitable happened and after a couple of months of this HMMI merged into BNC. The merger kind of coincided with some other BNC directors becoming inactive and another management reorganization happened with HMMI Directors taking up Director positions in BNC.

As a corp we then continued to sally forth to anywhere other than in NORAD space, hunting pirates, the remnants of FE and CA.

BNC started aggressively recruiting pvp oriented and experienced pilots from other NORAD corporations. DG and I took an even more active role within NORAD, helping to continue shaping the alliance with the recruitment of corporations like Snarling Halibut, ORC and TheMM. We conducted a lot of successful merger activity in this period as well, in fact we really raped a lot of NORADs other corps in a drive to make BNC the biggest and best. Not sure how ethical all of that was in hindsight but did it achieve the goal and as the CEO would I want to do anything different – yes it did and no I wouldn’t!

I guess that really brings us more or less up to date. After 6 or 7 months of me being CEO of BNC we finally took the final step in the strategy document that a group of Directors agreed to back when Ariakas was CEO – we went independent! Funny that we first planned this before I was CEO and then I got the opportunity to help make it happen.

That’s pretty much the story of my life in Eve and funnily I guess that reading back up it’s also a history of Black Nova Corporation since Tranquility Drinkers Club merged back at the start of this year. I love this game, it has its highs and it’s lows but it’s simply the greatest MMOG ever invented!

That's copied from a post I made quite a while ago now and doesn't cover all the events from the start of the Great Northern War onwards... so more to follow later!

New Blog

2005-04-24T04:19:00.000Z

Well after gaining inspiration from someone else who blogs for their Eve-Online character I thought I'd start blogging as well.

Goodness knows I spend a hideous amount of time in Eve and am blessed with having an enormous amount of fun through the game and the people I've met there.

No doubt I'll flit between in and out of character posts in this blog, one thing is sure though throughout everything i write I'll be very cognisant of the fact that Eve is just a game and in or out of character some perspective is required.

For those easily offended beware of foul language because I swear like a trooper and to be honest think it adds some colour to the English language!

To anyone that I comment on in this blog, I hope I don't offend you too much and remember this is all in the context of a game, I don't know most of you in real life and those that I do I'll likely only praise anyway.

I'll likely use this blog as a brain dump to begin with and will think about releasing it in a few weeks.

Have fun reading what goes on in the head of a BoB CEO ;)