The Capatains Log 2/7 23:44
Round One
About a month ago my alliance found a group of neutrals hanging around in Stain who we decided to attack. After engaging them we got hotdroped by some carriers so we left the system as we didn’t have any carriers or dreads to combat them with at the time. We naturally thought we would be safe down in our space, which turned out to be wrong. The corp we attacked, who happened to be Burn Eden, sent some scouts down into our system a few days latter, which resulted in us putting a gate camp up to trap him in there as we thought we had a easy kill. We were very surprised when a Arazu uncloaked on the gate even though he hadn’t being caught in the bubble. We were even more surprised when he lit a covert cyno field and jumped in around 10 black ops ships, composed mostly of Redeemers and a smattering of other black ops including a widow. The end result was a slaughter of Syndicate ships. However, Burn Eden didn’t let up there, but permanently stationed ships in our system to cyno in their black ops fleet.
We tried a number of tactics to remove them from our space, but none of them worked. At one stage while camping a gate in a attempt to catch on of the cyno characters we managed to capture a neutrals Ravan as he ejected it from before it could be destroyed. However, we could not board it as someone in the fleet would not unlock it, this resulted in the FC doing a group warp in a attempt to break every ones locks, but resulted in one of the Burn Edens pilots stealing the Raven when the group warped off.
Another notable event was when Burn Eden jumped in a titan and a couple of Motherships to kill a Dominx. A little bit of an overkill but it made us realise we couldn’t take them on and hope to win. So we talked to Stain Empire who got us to put our own cyno alts into 37S-KD where Burn Eden had set up the headquarters to cyno in their cap fleet if the titan or Motherships happened to show up. During this time period we also located some Burn Eden POS’s, which with the help of Stain Empire we managed to put one into reinforced and destroy the other. We came back the next day without Stain Empire and destroyed the second one. After this Burn Eden came on our voice coms and said they would not continue to camp our home systems if we did not camp theirs, which we readily agreed to.
However the fact they were able to access our secure voice coms was worrying as it indicated we had a spy in our ranks, we therefore did a security check on all our members and found that a recent recruit named Wind Maker, who joined on the day the attacks had started, was present in most fleets where we tried new tactics to attack them and was also present when the Raven was captured. There was other stuff as well that made it conclusive. He was soon kicked from my corp, the only regret I had was that I hadn’t kept him long enough for me to pod him before he ran off.
- Wind Maker; the face of a spy
Round Two
A couple of days ago one of the alliances new recruits had this conversation with a Burn Eden member
Psychotic Turtle and Hallan Turrek. The two antagonists
EVE System > Channel changed to GQ-XQ Local Channel
Psychotic Turtle > lol, that aeonyx guy is a fucking loser. I have fought his alliance for a year, they are the most pathetic alliance in game with worst pvp’ers. You guys are 100 times better pvp’ers than his pathetic alliance.Coms out.
Hallan Turrek > Why hello! You seem like a nice guy, will you be my friend?
Psychotic Turtle > i was reffering to stain empire, you guys are a whoile different story on your own i will not go in to right now as to not crush your spirits, i suggest you guys keep playing and keep learning.
Hallan Turrek > Oh thank you so much, I am so new to this after all. I appreciate you holding back for me.
Hallan Turrek > I’ll be honest, I could never raise hand in anger.
Psychotic Turtle > learn to.COms out.
Hallan Turrek > Oooh, that coms out thing is so cool.
Hallan Turrek > I wish I’d been able to think up something so incredibly original like that.
Hallan Turrek > /emote sighs
Hallan Turrek > I’m just stuck with the same old thing I guess.
Psychotic Turtle > stop talking or i will come back and live in your home systems for another week
Hallan Turrek > You see, that right there? That’s a promise you can keep.
Hallan Turrek > All this talk of being bad, that’s total BS, you can keep saying it, but saying you’ll live somewhere, that’s something you can actually do.
Hallan Turrek > So go on, live. If you can.
Hallan Turrek > I get the feeling you’ll get bored after a while, but by all means, have fun.
Hallan Turrek > Cat got your tongue? Too bad. “Coms out,”
Hallan Turrek > No it seems pretty stupid when I say it too. Heh.
As Psychotic Turtle promised he came back down to our home systems and began to cyno in more black ops fleets. This really shows you why you shouldn’t smacktalk in local. Fair enough he was new and didn’t now that Burn Eden had given us a hard time, but never smacktalk in local unless you can deal with it. This time though we had better defences as we had sov three with cyno jammers up and running so we didn’t have to worry about their motherships and titan and we didn’t have a spy in our corp anymore. Due to this we undocked some of our carriers, which the black ops fleet did not engage but withdrew from.
This development was particularly upsetting to me as had just finished training cyno 5 on a alt was planing on taking a group of our Stealth Bomber and Recon pilots out on a op with my widow. As it turned out this did not happen due Burn Edens rude interruption.
So now we are back were we began with Burn Eden members preventing us from doing what we want do due to fear of the being hotdropped by black ops. This is a particularly hard fleet to fight as they are well trained with good ships. We have been attempting to take out the cyno pilots, who are in a Rapier and a Arazu, but have failed to so because the black ops ships release heavy repair bots to fix any damage they acquire. Furthermore, they only engage on their own terms and will not attack a BS squad.
Socialising with the enemy
It was noticed at one stage that one of the Burn Eden members left our home system and was traveling up the pipe. I decided to follow in my Manticore to see what he was up to, though I was unable to find him in any of the systems further up pipe, leading me to assume that he had left our space for the time being. I decided to use our Jump Bridge to travel back to our home system so I jumped in the system that contained our Jump Bridge and was surprised to see a Burn Eden member, Lily S, flying a Falcon and sitting on the gate uncloaked. As I knew that none of the surrounding systems had any hostiles in them I decided to engage the Falcon. I knew that I had no chance in hell of killing him as he would be able to permajam me, but I thought I may get lucky and catch the Pilot while they were AFK. Unfortunately for the me the pilot was present and warped the Falcon out after it started take damage and didn’t even bother to try and jam me (probably realised the futility of it, Lily couldn’t kill me and I wouldn’t be able to kill Lily). After this I started a convo with Lily and go the impression that Burn Edens recent interest in us was based more on a personal vendetta on Psychotic Turtle’s parts against Hallan Turrek rather then a desire to destroy us outright.
Discussion
The tactics used by Burn Eden raise a few interesting points. In particular it shows that black ops ships are not as useless as some people believe them to be. If they are used by the right people with the right methods they can be quite formidable. Also it brings up the issue of cloaking where anyone who cloaks up is invulnerable as they can not be found. While I would not like any changes made to this as I my favourite ships are Force Recons and Stealthbombers, it would be nice to be able to locate AFK cloakers, though the method would have to cumbersome to balance it.
It is also interesting to note how the alliance members responded to Hallan Turrek once people knew the reason behind Burn Edens recent interest in us. A lot of the members were extremely hostile towards him and going so far as threatening to pod him if they saw him in local. This reaction is understandable when you realise that a lot of players lost a lot of ships when Burn Eden first came to our space and were unable to make more isk to replace their ships from fear of being hotdroped. However, this does not make kind of behaviour shown by some members acceptable, as it is very counterproductive towards the alliance as it can create division in the alliance that can tear it apart. Hallan did apologise for enticing Burn Eden to come down as he did not know about our past history with Burn Eden. I personally believe Hallan did not mean any ill harm to the alliance, though I hope this will show how a bit of smacktalk can get out of hand.
