An Out of the Hole Experience…

or~  How Hiril Gets Her RvB On…

I have noticed a tendency for most EVE bloggers to blog from one of two perspectives… (1) RP commentary (RP to various degrees) as Main Char or (b) metagame commentary as RL self…  When someone discusses/includes alts, they are basically always referred to as alts, IE “my hauler alt”, “my ISK making alt”, etc., etc. (Jester’s evil twin notwithstanding as Garth is moar blog ‘device’ than a true RP of an alt as I understand it)…

My alts are different for me… firstly I call em Apprentice Lieutenants or A-Lts, and second… I tend to RP on them same as I do when logged in as TurAmarth. Now my Role Playing is sorta halfassed… I mean I discuss things like my family vacation to our property on the Chesapeake Bay as “…warping the family to a lovely spot on Uurth…” as if it happened in EVE. I add RP elements into my game and blog when it fits my needs and ‘feels’ fun or interesting.

TurAmarth is ‘me’. Tur is how I see myself in EVE. Hirildur (Hiril) and Angelesa (Angel) are my A-Lts. And when logged on as either of them I tend to adopt the persona I feel each has. This has been sometimes interesting… very interesting… I have upon occasion used the EVE-Voice voice changer to give both Angel and Hiril fem voices for contacts I have had outside of HBHI… When Angel first joined EVE I had her set to a fem voice and so spoofed my corpmates that when I broke down and could no longer hold in that it was really me, one of em actually logged off… LOL. There are some out there in the black who believe Angel and Hiril are fems IRL… this has made me wonder how many of the fems we ‘hear’ on TS, EVE Voice, etc., etc. are actually fems IRL…  makes one stop and ponder now doesn't it? on to my A-Lts…

Angel (in my blog background, Angel is on the left) entered the Capsuleer program very young. She is a bit headstrong with strongly held opinions and yet is a little unsure of herself due to her youth. She is Tur’s right hand in HBHI and his personal assistant. When Tur is away from Serenity Station she acts in his stead and has full authority to fulfill his duties for corp and in the POS.

Hiril (on the right) is moar mature and, while junior in rank and respectful of this, she is moar Tur’s equal. Hiril has her own agenda and Tur fully supports this. She is not an HBHI corpmate but prefers to be in Red vs. Blue (RvB), fighting on the side of  the Blue Republic where she can learn about small and midsize gang PvP, fleet ops, how to one day hopefully gain the confidence to FC, but most of all… how to handle the high intensity of PvP in EVE. Due to this, Hiril is… ahh… somewhat ‘high maintenance’ to say the least.  =]

Everytime I logon as Hiril lately I have found myself afterwards with things ‘she’ wants to say… so with all the above said, I have decided to give Hiril (and Angel if she ever feels the call of the muse) a ‘voice’ here.

Tur

Fly Safe and see you in the Sky  =/|)=

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Red vs. Blue. The BEST PvP in EVE. Period… well, IMHO at least the best PvP I have ever experienced in EVE. Hello, I am Hirildur Eleririen, Apprentice Lieutenant and mate of TurAmarth and corpsman (yea, I said corpsMAN, wanna make something of it?) in the Blue Republic of RvB.

RvB is by far the best minute to minute PvP to be had in EVE as far as I am concerned, Keep in mind my home corp, HBHI is not a pirate or ganker or griefing corp, they’re Wormholers and they definitely don’t mind a bit of pew pew and won’t run from it unless it is just a suicide run, and even then sometimes not. But I found very early on working with Tur that I was very, very interested in (preferably) watching and creating explosions in space… and I accepted that this meant I would be seeing far more of them from the inside than the outside, at least to start with. So initially I worked as an O.O.C. (Out Of Corp) A-Lt. Scout/Spy for HBHI and DemSal Alliance. This worked well for a while but it meant that I, in this role, basically avoided PvP… this I did not like at all… boring to say the least.

Tur had once spent a few weeks checking out RvB, which he liked intensely but he was uncomfortable as his place in EVE is and always will be in W-space with HBHI, so when he came back to the hole I decided, and asked for his support, to join RvB full time to work on my PvP skills and seek the fun and explosions I so craved… well, he was supportive and I got just exactly what I was seeking, in spades! Due to ‘space/time continuum’ constraints we have no control over, I am not able to be online nearly as often as I would like, but Tur tries to balance things as best he can, anyway…

First let me tell you a little about RvB. You request to join, and fulfill the requirements which are, uh… asking to… Fly to the HQ system of whichever corp you joined, in my case BluRep (how to join) in Liekuri, and setup shop in BHQ. You will need a bunch of T1 frigs, some T1 Cruisers and a T1 BC or two. The vast majority of RvB ops are T1 frigs…

My first day in RvB, I got to station, checked and there was a fleet up so I joined, opened voice comms (EVE Voice ingame) and lo and behold they had just had an engagement and were reshipping to go back at it… Hmmm… OK, I undocked, said  Hi and I was new around here and asked where fleet was, got a Hello and fleet location, warped to the gate and thru and warped to the FC… 20+ frigs were all just goofing around waiting on the FCs and within 5 minutes we warped to a gate, the Red fleet landed on the other side and warped through… and we were at it boys!!! I think I got in on one KM before I popped and warped off to reship… only to remember I had JUST arrived insystem not 10 minutes before and I had only the ship I had come in!!! LOL First day, in fleet in less than 1 minute, fleeted up in less than 5 and in a fight and whored on a KM and exploded in less than 10… beat that.

They do a wide variety of ops, Lo and Nullsec roams to the death, Mangala Solaris’s famous, or infamous, “Ganked” events where they fleet up and roam with the dread intent that EVERYONE comes back to HQ in a POD… they have been doing very well in this year’s EVE Alliance Tournament “X” as well. And, of course, the basically 23x7x365 daily fleet up and the occasional FFA (Free For All) one of my very favorite regular events.

FFAs are held under “Purple” status, meaning there is a temporary truce between Red and Blue so we can ALL fight to the last man standing… however many pilots, from both sides, who want to join show up at a designated location with a BC or BS as the anchor. Tactical radius is set, exit the ‘arena’ and you are disqualified (and often targeted and popped by the FFA FC in his BC or BS), at the ball drop everyone goes at everyone tooth and nail until there is only one pilot left alive… he wins a pot of ISK set by the FC (usually approx 100M ISK or so depending on fleet size and wallet access etc.) These are very, very fun events and can often see 60+ frigs hammering at each other as hard as they can for a really enjoyable length of time…

There are some rules in RvB, but there is one that is instacorpdeath, NO PODDING. In RvB we do not, ever podkill our opposition inside RvB… podkilling is acceptable for 3^rd party War Targets and ganked and roam targets of opportunity, but inside RvB we do not allow podding, ever. It is the surefire best way to get kicked. And the rule is once you DIAF you are supposed to instawarp your pod out to avoid any “accidental” podding, which of course does occur from time to time in the heat of battle. You are expected to make immediate apology and restitution for any ‘accidental’ podkill you are involved in…

This, for me, has led to some weird behavior on my part… I have, occasionally, stayed on grid in my pod after getting popped just because I (1) felt I was semi-safe and (b) I simply couldn’t tear myself away from the fight… I just HAD to stay and see how it turned out.

The pic above is of a pretty standard daily Blue fleet, well part of it, of about 30+ T1 frigs mixed with a few T1 Cruisers. We were all orbiting each other while forming up as our FC and the Red Fleet FC worked out an engagement. They don’t set a bunch of rules as such, but we and they prefer the better fights we get with similar numbers and fleet comps… nobody likes to get wafflestomped by an upshipped fleet. Everyone in RvB wants the Good Fight… that’s why we’re all here. You can get all the 5v1, ganking, gate camping wafflestomping you could ever want throughout all of the rest of EVE, in RvB we want the fight to last a while.. we want to blob each other with fleets where the outcome is not a foregone conclusion… we want pure, unadulterated, knock-down, drag-out pewage… and that is most often exactly what we get.

We want fleet fights that are fun and, yes, fair fights. We want good even matchups where everyone, from the newest noob to a veteran of 9 years are on basically equal ground. One of the things I am most interested in is FCing. I am still so swamped by the simple act of trying to keep my head on straight in a fight that I fear attempting it yet. To work out how to listen to primary calls, find them in a highly crowded OV that I have to scroll to see all the Flashing Red icons on, work out ranges & vectors, target them in order, put scam/web/DPS on target, fly manually and defensively by either brawling in close or kiting depending on the ship type I am engaging… pant pant…

I have just enough skills ATM to fly an all T1 fit Rifter badly… add that to sheer sensory overload and, well, I go through a LOT of Rifters! The ONLY reason my KB is at 37/12 is because I am in such large fleet engagements that you would have to be AFK not to get to whore on a load of killmails… I may be at 37/12, but I have ONLY “1” last blow kill of my very own… and I am often listed in the last half of most KMs with under 5% damage done and with that weird “unknown” for damage type.

I sometimes feel I will never be able to be that calm collected voice on comms calling Primeries, Secondaries and keeping up with it all fast enough to call target switches as Primes etc., go down… MUCH less keep an eye on scout reports, how the fleet is holding up, if we are losing ships fast enough to need to break engagement, if we can break to a pounce and reengage or do we need to bug out and regroup/reship… pant pant… I really don’t know how they do it. And most of the FCs we fly with are in the fight flying and fighting their own ships at the same time… By The Gods… how do they do it?

I surely don’t know how but I hope and plan, with Tur’s support, to keep at it until I do… until then I guess I’ll fly as dangerously as I can, tackle and try to assist my corpmates take down the Terrible Red Menace (and whore on as many Killmails as I can!!!).

Then… I shall sit quietly beside the wreckage of one more of a long long line of trusty Rifters… in my pod… and watch, in awe, as the black is lit by beams, rockets, blasters and cannon fire and by the wonderful wonderful explosions of so many ships.

Slow down so I can get a lock dammit!  =/\=