EVE Corporation - Page 278

It was luce's first time scouting us so shit was inevitably a bit rough. We had several instances where luce would jump into a system, find shit on gate and immediately ask me if he should engage without describing local to me which is a bit -_-. If you're not gonna tell me what's there how can I possibly tell you what to do about it. The first time he jumped into a gatecamp he just said there's a shitload of stuff here which doesn't mean anything. Then he said they're jumping when half their fleet exposed themselves but didn't tell me what it was which shit. When I asked him to scout again he broke the cardinal rule of covops scouting and tried to decloak and recloak and sit within a bubble and promptly had himself decloaked and would have died if they were competent. He seemed surprised they charged at him with drones.

Anyway, eventually after 5 jumpins we eventually tried to jump in and nano off. This was our first time trying it in a combat situation so I'll just go over what should happen here so people can memorise it in their own time.

Step 1
Jump
Step 2
Hold cloak
Step 3
FC calls align point
Step 4
Pilot looks around manually without decloaking himself, checks how enemy ships and objects change the situation for you personally. Don't tell me, just make sure you don't suicide yourself by charging at align point.
Step 5
FC gives burn order. You overheat mwd and go head towards the align point unless it violates step 4.
Step 6
You are now out of immediate danger. Start engaging shit, do not expose yourself, you have links and are nano fit, dance on the edge of their fleet and shoot at shit for laughs. If you are not heading to the align point move around the edge of their blob without exposing yourself so you have a clear route to align point.
Step 7
The regroup, we start to all approach each other on the align side of their blob. The ships that can are already harassing their shit. We start to get overlapping layers of protection in terms of neuts, reps, jams and recon shit.
Step 8
The nano, now we're grouped we call a primary and start to isolate targets. We're in a perfect situation now, we can neut off tackle, we can scram off shit burning towards us, our scimmy is 70k behind us and a full 100k from the enemy. We can now do it exactly like we do off stations in war.
Step 9
We win.


What happened today was a number of people including (very significantly) our blackbird failed at step 4 and suicided himself into all their shit. An enemy recon stopped VoV being able to do step 5 and because we lacked blackbirds to break the scram VoV was gunned down. The rest of the fleet got out to the edges of their blob successfully and began to align and regroup towards sun but the scimitar got sensor damped, then got confused and thought he was out of range, then stopped and got tackled by a merlin. The rifters whose entire job was to kill tackle on the scimitar didn't notice and the scimitar pilot didn't call it. Comms was a fucking mess at this point with people calling out random crap and not giving specifics like the name of who it was they wanted shit done to. Instead of getting "Merlin X has tackled scimitar, rifters take him down" and having the scimitar nano out and keep everything alive we lost the scimitar. At this point I got the fleet to disengage myself (who had also been tackled) and called a dock up. The rifters somehow all died after the gtfo order.

We lost a scimitar, hurricane, blackbird and four rifters. We killed a blackbird.

There were four main issues.
The first was the scout. I felt the entire op was a constant battle with the scout for intel as he kept warping around and asking questions I couldn't answer without him telling me the situation and just not telling me what was going on. That was a practice issue but I won't be using him again in nullsec for a while because it's just a massive headache. It sucks but a bad aspect of having him buy his account is that he has absolutely no idea how to fly recon.
The second was the speed we were moving and that was a mixture of scout blame and my own. We took forever to get anywhere and therefore it is entirely unsurprising a camp got up. While we knew about the camp and weren't threatened by it we should have been sufficiently fast moving to catch shit off guard. I should have made the decision to say "we're moving too slowly, this is a risk to the fleet, vov scout, new destination is X".
The third issue is comms. People were clogging them with shit and giving bad reports. There are keywords such as on gate, off gate, pirate, neutral, tackled etc we can use to keep things clean and clear. If we have the same keywords that everyone knows and uses then we understand the reports and we can act better. Similiarly we don't need "SCIMITAR IS GOING DOWN" because I have a watchlist, I can see the scimitar is getting fucked. I need "merlin X tackling scimmy, rifters get on him" coming as an order on relatively clean comms.
The fourth is practice. This was our first nanoing off a blob from the middle of it fight. Nanoing in space or off a station is simple because you land in the same place with regards to the enemy and you can easily stay in a cohesive group and do it right. This was different and a lot of people either were unfamiliar with the above steps or forgot them in the heat of battle. We had a lot of people trying to just get within optimal of primary while ignoring align points and enemy ships when you can't do that until the regroup. In the first stage points and guns are optional, it's all about minimising the losses from the gatecamp while getting a successful regroup. Hopefully we can get better at that.

Anyway, we gtfo and docked. We got camped for a while because after I told people to dock up the fucking arazu said "should I dock up?" rather than "should arazu dock up?". Again that's a basic comms mistake people shouldn't be making, describe shit clearly using unambiguous keywords. I told "I" to dock the fuck up because I'd just told the fleet to dock up.

The fleet that owned us cleared out and we limped our way back towards lowsec with yet more failscouting. The arazu found a camp "THERE'S A CAMP!!!" and again failed to tell me what was there or how many. Turned out it was an unrelated (to the blob that killed us) pilgrim, blackbird, enyo, drake and tristan. We eventually got our shit together and hit it killing the enyo and tristan while the others jumped out. As we got just 2j away from lowsec we got ambushed by a very high SP pilot from the fleet which had previously owned us. He was previously in an arazu and had switched into a heretic (dictor) with t2 salvagers (insane SP). Anyway, his fleet was holding at 0 on the third gate into the system so although we knew ingate and outgate were clear they were still ready to ambush us. The moment the scout left our ingate the heretic set up there and bubbled.

Naturally we jumped into the bubble and local spiked. I called an align to outgate, mwds on and heated (fb actually reminded fleet cause I forgot to remind but I shouldn't have to remind anyway), all guns and drones on heretic. With links we burned very fast and he went down just as their fleet landed. The links and heated mwds were enough and we were clear. I told the fleet to warp and kept my links up until their huginn threw webs on me at which point I gtfo cause a cane was about to point. We jumped on contact and had a clear road to egbinger.

We had yet more arguing with the scout with me trying to extract any intel I could from him. As we proceeded we noticed two guys go red (commit a crime) in local and we got the arazu back to probe them. It was a red pest and cane who were 70k apart. Arazu tried to decloak himself to point them personally rather than wait for fleet to land but I had a word with him about decloak targetting delays and actively sabotaging my fleet and he changed his mind. We got a point on the pest but the cane warped out before anyone got on him (although the arazu perhaps could have hit him in time if he'd been paying attention and overheated). At this point firebolt decided he needed to join the incompetence brigade and rammed the pest with his nanocane. We had no scimmy, no war, absolutely no ability to break a tackle. All we had were links and a long ranged scram so he couldn't move and a longpoint could easily be escaped. Obviously if you go into tackle range in that situation there's no way you're getting out, you're fucked. Therefore it is annoying to me that fb rammed the guy in his nanocane and promptly got stasised. Had the guy not been fitting a disruptor web combo (god knows why) then fb would have been fucked, as it was he made it out in structure. The cane warped back in on us at 70k and local spiked by 3 and the arazu (with links on it) said he still had probes on the area and could easily warp out and warp back on the cane closer if I wanted him to point it. I explained (in less than polite terms) that given he already had a point range of 90k because he was in a linked arazu perhaps he might like to learn which ship he's in and just point the guy. As we went for the cane a curse, cyclone and geddon landed on us and I called a nano and disengage. Again with links and heat we could get out (although a heavy neut curse would have fucked me cause claymores have no cap) and we disengaged and docked.

We then proceeded back to teon, only briefly threatened by luce warping to outgate when he was given no orders while on the ingate and I needed him to recon disengage a potential geddon camp. I had a chat with him about orders and following them and not doing his own thing and he seemed to understand. It is therefore frustrating to me that the following happened.
Bosena was the last lowsec and therefore the Bosena ingate was the last place we were in danger because you can warp to a hisec gate at 0 and jump on contact. There were 30+ guys (a lot) in Bosena. We were in space awaiting the all clear on our ingate with a cloaked guy scouting us. Obviously if the guys in Bosena were competent they'd see us go to the Heild outgate with the cloaked ship, immediately warp all their crap to the Bosena ingate and have a massive blob there to kill us in seconds. Being a competent FC I was aware of this threat and asked the arazu to scout the ingate. It was clear and we warped, jumped and warped to hisec. However as we jumped I got the following report "hisec exit is clear". The arazu had, without orders, fucked off and left his post. He had not been checking my gate was clear, despite the orders to, me having an enemy recon in local with me and there being 30 guys in local. Instead he was making sure that we couldn't be attacked while at 0 on an exit from any fight. It was just another display of the same randomly warping around instead of staying where I told him to be and not understanding basic pvp concepts (hisec gate at 0 = safe) that had underlined the entire op. I had a few more words with him as we escaped into high.

On the way back we actually killed around 240m of shit whereas in the nullsec massacre we lost in the region of 200m so amazingly we were actually up on the op. But it was one of the most painfully incompetent roams I've been on.