Oct 022013
 

Its that time again, just a brief round up of various items from the past few weeks, from CSM to Ganked to RvB and EVE in general.

CSM_LOGO

The Summer Summit Minutes are coming on a treat with the old guys of the CSM putting us kids to shame and doing 4/5 sessions each, cant say when they will go public as that relies a lot on CCP, although should be noted that some of the content unveiled with the Rubicon announcement makes certain sessions moot.

In other CSM news, as you may know I held my first Watch with Mangala during the Winter Expansion announcement last week, and it went very well. 50 of you were on comms for this as well as many more hanging in the RvB Ganked channel ingame too.  Lots of good discussion during & after the Rubicon announcement, especially during when being “live” people had less of a chance to think their responses to new features through.  I’ll certainly be repeating this for future expansion announcements as well as any other live streams that CCP do – just as long as it isn’t a live stream of a roam as I will be logged in shooting at it!

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The RvB Forever War (just the war between Red & Blue) has been running (nearly uninterrupted) for 4 years and 4 days, and at 02.57 UTC 29/09/13, we hit the 500,000 kill milestone. Yes, HALF A MILLION kills in a little over 4 years.

This is the kill that took the 500,000 mark, typically it involved a Maller. Well done to everyone who got us to this point over the past 4 years, old & new members alike. The winners received this special medal:

I Was There [500,000]

This Medal was awarded to those pilots involved in the 500,000th Forever War explosion.

Accept this award on behalf of all past, present, and future RvB Members

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Plans for Ganked 100 are really firming up, I will have my final decision on shield or armour caps before I depart for EVE Vegas on the 15th.  Regardless of how this goes if you are one of our prospective cap pilots please add to this spreadsheet, as well as get yourself training the same skills on SISI, as we will be having a training session or two on how to use caps in the run up to Ganked 100. 

The schedule for the Autumn & Winter has pretty much been settled amongst your FC’s – there is still room for some changes if anyone else wants to give it a go of course.  Check this spreadsheet here.  As you can see a good variety of roams coming in the next few months, as ever logistics will be welcome on all of them, so if that is what you like do not feel a need to stay home!

Ganked also passed 9,000 kills over our 94 total roams this past weekend, and it was this kill that took us there.  Red Bishop won a Armageddon Navy Issue – courtesy of our sponsors at SomerBlink – for snagging Final Blow & highest damage on the pod.

RvBP is also back playing Planetside 2 every thursday night from 18.00 UTC. Give us a look on the Vanu Sov over on the Mattherson server.

For those who missed it, here is a video of the final part of our last minute roam against CCP on Friday 27th September:

 

Remember that this weekend see’s the first Crossing Zebras Community FFA. This free for all will feature CSM, Podcasters, Bloggers & of course YOU! So from 20.00 UTC on Saturday make sure you are in Asakai to take part in the fun – you can even get to shoot me!  For more details check the Crossing Zebras site here.

Sep 252013
 

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Ganked 84 & 85 both happened this past weekend and they were pretty good roams when all is said & done.

Rebbeca Neresh broke his Ganked FC cherry with a Thorax hull roam for Ganked 84. He took us over to Barlegeut to see Brave Newbies, along the way we steam rolled a gang lead by fellow CSM 8 delegate, Chitsa Jason.  Was a fun, if intensely tidi’d fight.  And I lived – surprising as I was in a Deimos (Rail Shield Kitey fit, but still…). BNI played a little – there was way more than that shows, but 1 we fail at points, 2 they got scared by Green suddenly appearing inside of warp range near them – but we did not hang around there too much.  Syndicate was pretty quiet, except for PF, were we scored this Proteus kill, thanks to the pilot being dumb. Rest of the night was a quick stumble around Black Rise, with an eventual whelp into a Snuff gang, that could have been much different if people had been listening correctly.

Sunday came round and I took us out on Ganked 85, and to my huge surprise Geminate was damn busy! Makes sense I suppose when its ruskies who live there and Sunday afternoon is their prime.  We killed a shiny in one system, then suddenly next door as we started free burning somewhere we run into an organised frig/cruiser gang that pretty much rolls us as we were split up, not really focused and what not. It happens. We went out again and ran  into another large gang, a gang that felt the need to bring in twice our numbers via cyno & phone a friend or two. Oh well. Still at least I learned that Geminate is a fun place to go at the right time of day.

 

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As usual we had sponsorship courtesy of Somer.Blink, the following people won prizes:

Ganked 84

Spots: Comet x5 – Bogdan Yassavi, Verse Askold, DocFloyd, Abriel Claire, Morgan Zarkov   – You guys won for them final blows on certain kills or highest damage on those same kills.
Disctinction: Navy Brutix x2 – Kitty Baugh, Angelus Infirim
Excellence: Navy Mega – Daneel Trevize

Ganked 85

Spots: Fleet scythe x4 – Billius Zabub, tgl3, quinten sarn, bridg – You chaps won prizes for either avoiding church to fly with us, hero tackles or top damage on kills.
Distinction: Fleet Cane x2 – IgnasS, Andrew Butcher
Excellence: Fleet Phoon – Rick Silva

Sep 242013
 

 

Xander Phoena, the host of Crossing Zebras, one of the foremost podcasts in EVE, came to me with a great idea. A community FFA featuring the CSM, the podcast community, bloggers and best of all YOU, the public!  So join us on 5th October 2013 from 20.00 EVE in the system of Asakai. Bring frigates, destroyers or even cruisers and meet us at the Sun. 

Do not miss out on a killmail of your favourite CSM members, or podcast hosts!

What we would love from you is people to stream the event live & in person, so if you use Twitch and stream ganked, or solo roams or indeed anything, drop by the system and get the coverage rolling. 

We will have some prizes to offer, including random contracts of Slicers & Firetails from me, courtesy of Judontknowme a former RvB Ganked regular, as well as other items to be arranged between now and the 5th October.

Check this post out over on the Crossing Zebras site for more details, or to ask any questions join the ingame channel CZ Community FFA

I’ll see you there!

Sep 062013
 

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Attentive Ganked folks will have noticed a small mention about Ganked 100 on the Autumn/Winter schedule and started wondering, this post is mostly for you guys; However, the rest of you should read along as well, as this may interest you.

Long story short is that in working on the schedule for the next few months I realised we would reach Ganked 100 in January 2014 – the 18th to be precise – and it got me thinking about making it something special.  And somehow I decided it would feature capital ships – preferably carriers & dreadnaughts.  Initially Ganked 100 was to be a roam, although I – and others (thanks Daneel!) – soon pooh-poohed that as it is A LOT of organisation, even for someone as anal as me. After a wee chat with Daneel – who also made a handy post on the idea over on Failheap – it is now going to be similar to the Flight of a Thousand Rifters event that we crashed back in May – see my write up of Ganked 67 – but instead of a solo Supercarrier taking part, it will hopefully be large number of carriers & dreadnaughts undocking in some random low-sec system (incursion locked or not…) and inviting the world to “COME AT US BRO”, while other Ganked attendee’s attempt to stop them/whore the capitals/shoot blinkies etc. 

Which is were YOU guys come in.  

If you would be willing to take part in this, then say so in the comments along with what you are or could be capable of fielding as far as Capital Ships are concerned. If you have ideas on the subject, wish to maybe help out with logistics nearer the time, basically anything related to this event, say so in the comments. Any pertinent ideas that do appear from comments, will be added in to this post.

I know I am over 4 months early for this, but an event with the potential that this has to escalate beyond our wildest dreams/nightmares demands it don’t you think? 

 

 

Aug 282013
 

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Well what an interesting weekend we had guys, with Putting the BANS back together & Oh Look a Bank Holiday! both happening and what not. Thanks to everyone who attended, put up with whatever the hell happened, and generally dealt with a severely annoyed Mangala. We still managed around 200 kills between both roams over the weekend, so not bad considering that Saturday may have seen one of our more expensive whelps right at the start of the night!!! Although on reflection the tactics used by certain members of the Proviblock just shows that they believed themselves unable to beat us any other way! The Sunday session was interesting in that we found things that make Talwars not work, making our jobs as tackle that much harder. Anyway, the fights with BNI, PL & EUNI were pretty good so made up for the stuff with BALEX for sure.

As ever we had Somerblink sponsoring some prices, and additionally several people provided other items to be awarded over the weekend.

SomerBlink sponsored prizes went to:

Vexor Navy Issue: Lotta Vageena, Ravingone, Carathas, Ragnar Alestorm, Mandelbrot Fracture
Brutix Navy Issue: Lemming Malgalad, Captain Jonathen Archer
Dominix Navy Issue: Atlas Jaynar

Blink will get these to you as soon as possible.

 

Other prizes provided last minute went to:

Quake BPC x2: Abstemious & Waitangi

Sleipnir: Rebbeca Neresh

Machariel: Gyouzac

I will have these up on contract shortly.

 

In other news, I am currently working with our guest FC’s to fill in the Autumn & Winter Schedule for Ganked.  We have our spreadsheet for this, but I have copied the contents to a publicly viewable one here.  So keep an eye on that future dates, as well as the mailing list “RvB Ganked”.  And yes, you read Ganked 100 right. It says Caps. If you have suggestions for a theme, pop them in the comments to this article, and maybe a Guest FC – or even little old me – will take it & run with it.

 

Finally, I would just like to talk about what makes Ganked fun for ME.  Mostly its the feeling of 150+ pilots from varying walks of eve life coming together to have a laugh & kill some stuff along the way, with no real attention to ingame politics & allegiances. However it may seem to some that I have not been enjoying this as much lately, and I will say I agree.  

And here is why:

I think that at times comms has been too unruly, yes its fine to speak up when we are free burning or waiting on a scout to find “something”, but try not to do it when action is on the near horizon, its a bad thing at that point. The same goes for singing, although Cal spends so much time working on his lyrics he can be forgiven (PS Anyone got those recorded?!). If you cant hold your beer enough to stay quiet at the right times guys, maybe you should drink girlie drinks.

Lemmings.  Its getting very old now. Align doesn’t equal warp, hold does not equal jump, Primaries are not optional. Seriously guys, you can spook targets by warping/jumping too soon, you can prevent a gorgeous kill by splitting your deeps too soon etc etc. Fun can still be had by playing your A game you know.

Sebos. “Its Ganked” is NO BLOODY EXCUSE to feel that fitting more than a single sebo to something cruiser hull and above is fine.  You gimp your fit, and you gimp your fleet in doing so. When fitting SEBO’s think about it first. As for you frig guys that do it, unless you are a scouting inty, do not bother. Arty thrashers/Talwars, its expected you fit them!!!  While saying this, just note that users of extraneous sebos will be excluded from winning Blink prizes in the future, not that they win much anyway ;)

So yeah, I have been feeling a little burnout from things like that above, lets see if we can still enjoy Autumn & Winter, but without as much of those as the Summer held. 

Going forward lets have a stunning few months in the lead up to Ganked 100!! I hope to see many of you there.

 

Aug 232013
 

On September 25th 2013, RvB turns 4 years old.

And as usual we will be having several events to mark our birthday, the final of which is also the largest & most spectacular of them all!

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Yes.

You read that right.

On October 26th 100,000 frigates will be set loose for RvB members to pilot & explode in what is going to be our largest Frigate Free For All to date.

I know many are wondering how to get in on this action, and to you I say simply join RvB prior to October 26th and you’ll be all set to take part in our largest event ever; In fact possibly EVE’s largest FFA ever.

If anyone wishes to donate, please contact Northern Misfit or Del Delvechio regarding any donations. Note that ships, modules & even offers of free time to help fit ships are all appreciated. Right now our dedicated fitters have set up over 40,000 ships for this event with 5 weeks left to go!

Thanks must go out to Sindel Pellion of The Angel Project for a sizeable donation to the cause, as well as to RvB members like Dracoth Simertet, Sylacx, Ringusworm for their donations of ships & prizes for the event, as well as to our many, many ship fitters for all the time they have given up to ensure this goes with a huge bang!

For a taste of what these FFA’s entail, check out these videos:

Keep up to date on the progress of both the event prep & the event itself by regularly checking this RvB forum thread, or by following @rvbeve on twitter.

Aug 012013
 

alliance-tournament-xi-header

The Tournament Team would like to announce a live streamed Developer and EVE TV Commentator roam that will be occurring Wednesday July 31st, between the hours of 13:00 and 16:00 UTC.

Members of the CCP Tournament Team, along with our commentators, Apathetic Brent, Bacchanalian and Shadoo will be heading out through Black Rise and The Citadel to take in the sights and sounds of low security space with the intention of bringing a little of the tournament action to your doorstep.

So, if you’d like to shoot at your favourite EVE TV personalities, including CCP Fozzie, CCP Rise, CCP Dolan and many more members of the Tournament crew, feel free to keep your eyes on the areas mentioned above, and maybe you’ll even see us around hotspots such as Tama and Asakai.

Prepare your spaceships!

The above was a notice put out with very little fanfare by CCP, but enough people saw it that I decided to run a roam with the intention of killing the Commentary team and so Ganked: Dev Hunt Edition was organised. Wednesday rolled round and CCP extended DT for an hour, but that didn’t stop us we just sat on comms talking about bee’s, until suddenly the server was up and it was go time.  Fleet formed and we had 50 guys raring to go, by the time we burned to the lowsec meet up, we had over 120.  Along the way, fleet member Phiksus did this to a stupid tengu… Kind of apt when you consider that the local spam for the day was this:

While in Kinakka we exploded a Vagabond, and then invited his corpies to fleet, before the CCP stream got going and we moved off towards them.  We swiftly burned through lowsec until we ran into CCP in Ostengele & Alperaute where much chaos ensued, and CCP’s obsession with Roigon began. We took down Dolan, Logibro, Loxy & Rise in Alperaute and over in Ostingele we got tackle on Fozzie & Bro as well as rolling over a Moon Warriors gang camping the Alperaute/Ostingele gate.  And that was the end of the first CCP outing.

CCP then trolled our fleet by appearing in Tama, so we burned once again in that direction and when we arrived we doubled the local count, & found Mad Ani’s fleet there too!!! Tama itself turned into a clusterfuck of epic proportions, we fought CCP, we fought Ani’s fleet, we fought randoms and we even fought a small Urine Alliance fleet that showed up too.  All in all we had a huge amount of fun in system fighting everyone we fought – or simply exploded – until CCP bailed to reship for round three.

And again they moved elsewhere, this time to Rakapas. Moving there we dropped a few blinkies that gate jumped with us, and then found ourselves chasing CCP around various FW Plexes in Rakapas while killing various gangs over and over.  We were doing so well, that a Bombers Bar gang in system joined the Ganked fleet as it was the only way to get on kills! Eventually, after much warping and burning and fighting, CCP left the system died and that was that.

[ 2013.07.31 16:04:40 ] CCP Manifest > Thanks all for coming out!

Now I have to say, yesterday was really good fun.  CCP doing any sort of roam in that timezone was excellent, we had many Crims & Kiwi’s in fleet who for once did not have to alarm clock for a Ganked roam, as well as many people from other TZ’s who got up early, or put off the gardening etc to come along and fly with us. Even better was the many new people who joined us thanks to the word of mouth about the roam, as well as Fozzie retweeting my tweet about it!

What made it really special for many of us, was actually being able to take part in something like this without the “big dogs” of EVE hotdropping the event or similar. In fact, it has been pointed out that WE were the big dog this time. 

To see the CCP point of view of the afternoon, check out the archived stream on Twitch:


Watch live video from twitchernest on TwitchTV

 In closing I just want to thank CCP & the Commentators for doing the roam, especially Brent for inspiring our ship names, and to everyone we exploded for just inflating our scoreboard for this roam. We topped out at 300+ kills for 26.5 billion isk in damage done. Making this one of the most successful Ganked roams in our 2 year history.

Jul 232013
 

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July 22nd 2011.

RvB – and some friends – went out on a roam, the inaugural RvB Ganked roam.

The theme was Rifter hulls. And it was glorious.

Apparently I even FC’d part of it.

 

And now here we are Two years later

82 roams under our belts, 7375 kills, 575 Billion isk destroyed & 10 other FC’s “discovered”.  

In short its been epic.  I have – regardless of views to contrary – enjoyed every minute of every roam I have either FC’d or attended, and its all down to you all. So thank you.

gnosis

For our 2nd birthday roam, I settled on Gnosis – shield fit to go with our shield logi, and never once did I think we would get nearly 100 Gnosis in fleet. Yet we did, and all that while I was flying for RvB in our first Alliance Tournament Eleven match against Why So Serious:

 

The roam itself started pretty quiet, we rolled over a few guys in Rahadalon, wandered through a really quiet Providence and generally saw nothing much to kill.  After a short break in HED, we heard about a couple of gangs that were around and tried to get them pinned down, however that didn’t work either. Then I joined a convo with a member of Severance, who had seen the intel of our gang and wanted us to come and fight a BS gang he was in. We assumed tarp, but said yes anyway as why the hell not. We arrived in the target system, hung around until suddenly “CYNO UP”, and the Severance gang cyno’d in to the other side of the system. 

It was on!

We warped to 0 at the gate they had warped to from their cyno, our logis came in at range behind us, and as it turned out, their logi was also at 0. So it made it 100 times easier to fully commit to the fight. Their logis dropped before I even had time to call each one, swiftly followed by their deeps and anything else that caught our fancy.  It was pretty much a whitewash, they lost 40+ ships to the 15 gnosis we did…

And that was that, we decided that once again we would end the night on a high, which for me was perfect as I had been on a high ever since the Why So Serious match in ATXI! 150 kills, 11.5 Billion exploded and a ton of fun had.  Love it!!!!

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We had numerous prizes to give away courtesy of our sponsors at Somer.Blink – including a couple for the winners of these polls – and here are the winners:

Spots:

Dramiel – Roigon, Bald Rikk

Succubus – Atlas Jaynar, Mirzam Tectrin

Daredevil – Cosmo Blink, Duckslayer

Cruor – Chester Waldron, Captain Jonathen Archer

 

Distinction:

Ashimmu – Tgl3, Daneel Trevize

 

Best Year 2 FC:

Bhaalgorn – Mangala Solaris

 

Best Year 2 Scout:

Cynabal – Green Gambit

 

Finally, a reminder that there are no Ganked roams for the next two weeks. We are taking the remainder of the alliance tournament off, so that various members can focus on the serious part of the tournament. 

We return to our scheduled programming in August with the following roams both hosted by Guest FC’s:

Ganked 78: Cherry Poppin’
Saturday 10th August
TGL3
Artillery – BC and smaller.

Ganked 79: TBA
Saturday 17th August
Larkonis Trassler
Drakes>Talwars>Tackle>Links

Jul 172013
 

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Recently there has been some talk on the RvB forums about a website called Fleet-Up.com and whether it would be viable for a group like RvB to use it.  Personally given the nature of how we operate I do not think so as frankly too few of the FC’s would use it, let alone the members.  Also it’s a cost we really cannot afford in the long term if member uptake is low.  

However, after having a look around the website, I thought that it could be something for Ganked to use, at least for the guest FC’s and more involved attendee’s. So I stumped for 4 months usage of the site for a group of up to 250 people.

The site allows you to create groups, set up “events”, upload fits and even add those fits to doctrines for group members to utilise. Additionally it can help you create fleets, track those fleets and even see how well those fleets do compared to previous roams and so on.

I would like to give this a go on various Ganked’s over the next 4 months, and so would love it if many of you would join the site, and the RvB Ganked group using this link. I’ll give other FC’s full rights to create roams and doctrines, regular members the ability to upload fits – SENSIBLE FITS – and everyone else, just basic access.  This is not a compulsory affair, but I would appreciate as much support from you all as possible.

Jul 112013
 

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If you follow anything I write you will know that Ganked is two in a few days, and as with last year I thought it would be a fun idea to have some awards for various people involved in Ganked.  This will include your favourite FC, who in your opinion has been the best scout this year, as well as write in votes for your top roam & most entertaining person in fleet.

Now the awards will be kept secret until I secure agreement from Blink, but please vote in the polls and use the comments for everything else.  I’ll be throwing in some random prizes for best comments too, so remember to use your character name!

Also, note that following the 2nd birthday roam on 20th July, we will take two weeks off to allow various people to focus on the Alliance Tournament, including me. We will resume Ganked on the 10th August.

So here you go, the award categories are:

[poll id=”4″]

[poll id=”5″]

Which roam from Ganked 32 to Ganked 76 was your favourite & why?

Who would you say has provided the most entertainment in fleet this past year?

As an aside, I would love to see your ideas for themes for our Third year, so get to it!