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

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....

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!

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

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

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!!!

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

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!!

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

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

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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

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!