December 7th, a fateful day in history. And for Ganked, a day to take Navy hulls out to play in the wilds of space. And so the order “Niitaka yama nobore” was given. CCP also had chosen this day to have a telethon of sorts to raise funds for the survivors of Typhoon Haiyan, with many many fun events arranged as part of that.
We formed up in Black rise while watching the live stream, getting some interesting kills & waiting for a rumoured Dev roam to happen. Around 20.00 just as we were to set off, CCP Bro, CCP Dolan & CCP Guard appeared in Heydelies. So off we went moving as quickly as we could to that system to take those Devs down! Fast as we could got slower & slower the closer we got due to ever increasing TIDI, however we did get there in end. When we landed we started clearing out the grid the Devs had called home before burning towards Bro & Dolan (Sadly we missed out on Guard exploding) wherein they eventually exploded. We lost like 3 frigs during that whole thing – obviously the Ganked killboard doesnt show that, and no other board even with some doctoring will ever display Heydelies correctly – for nearly 100 kills.
Following this we moved onwards for we had a fight between TEST (& some RvBers) & BNI to interrupt. However we got word that BNI had left their reinforced target system and were moving toward Heydelies, so we setup in Melmaniel and waited. And waited.
Until local shot up by 400+ and in came the BNI hordes – a horde that had more Thorax in fleet than I had fleet members! And yet we fought. And it was slow, very slow. TIDI shot down to 10% very quickly. And still we fought, until Suddenly Spaceships & Shadow Cartel appeared on field in HACs & Tech 3’s, and we moved off the field allowing BNI to play with them. Surprisingly we had not lost that many – I had died though – and so TGL3 took over the fleet and moved them into Murethand to ambush the TEST/RvB fleet, which had been fighting a Provi residents fleet in Heydelies. However BNI also came in on that fight, as did CVA, an RvB Null Roaming Talwar gang run by Alphastarpilot & even Suddenly & Shadow. It was a mess, and you could feel the TIDI a region away, however some kills were gotten! While this fight was raging the Ganked fleet broke off and moved over to Hysera where we had been asked to kill a carrier belonging to Ganked regular Darius Caliente (Certified are recruiting by the way!) and we did kill it, plus other things, including Alpha’s talwar fleet!!!
After the fun with the carrier, I realised it was coming up hard on midnight, the time I understood to be the deadline for PLEX donations to the cause, and so TGL3 took the roam out for a second round. He had this to say about it:
We set out for the illustrious destination of VFK, with a brave 30 pilots in tow. A quick brawl with a few TEST ships in EC- gave us some early kills but null-bears and elite bubble campers alike scattered ahead of us for the rest of the initial journey. Upon reaching VFK our scouts went to work. Our first major kill was a Vargur, who jumped into our scout. Despite calling in local for help, the Vargur died without assistance. Our scouts then went into overdrive in the surrounding systems. An Ishtar, Vexor Navy and a second Ishtar all died in 3 seperate systems within 15 minutes. A Tengu then evaded a scout thanks to some lucky Gurista Jams from the rats, but he then undocked from his Caldari Research Station into our fleet. He was bumped and killed. A hulk followed shortly a couple of jumps away.
We had no further fun with VFK, the local goons refusing to undock anything, so we trekked back through Cloud Ring towards Kinakka. A hostile camp on the high-sec exit gate were surprised when our hero frigates went in and tackled the lot of them, giving us a half dozen more kills to end the night on.10/10 for Green Gambit, ScummyB, Angelus Infirim and Nuos Ono, the scouts who got us those kills.
All in all a spectacular evening of fights & fun times – with the night easily making it into our Top 5 roams in terms of kills and isk destroyed!
You guys donated enough for me to purchase 35 PLEX and of course ensure that Ping Wu & myself had take a large hit when upholding our individual pledges, resulting in over 50 PLEX being donated on behalf of RvB Ganked. This may not have been as many as Somer Blink donated, or as many as what Chribba & Amarr Citizen 155 raised ISK for, but it all helps. CCP eventually announced that some $190,000 had been raised for the survivors of Typhoon Haiyan, which is an amazing sum and makes me very proud to be both a part of & a representative for the EVE Community. Check out the devblog on this here.
We did have sponsorship for the roam from our sponsors at Somer Blink and these are my chosen winners, you guys will be receiving your prizes soon:
Dramiel: Elenor Kharne, Melkor Valor, Amera Khan, Swornn, Edward Tivruskii, Xearo001
Cynabal: Nuos Ono, Ilik Tankalot, Jorel Antonius
Machariel: Andrew Hoffman (this kill he was FB on: http://rvbganked.co.uk/kills/index.php/kill_detail/15014/ was our 10,000th kill – if we had held a ccp member longer ccp bro would have been it, but oh wells!)
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