Mar 132014
 

gankedsponsor23

 

After a small issue with our sponsors – basically my guy there vanished from EVE for a short while, we are now back on track.  He got in touch recently and informed me that he has paid out all the outstanding prizes from roams 103, 104 and 105.  I never submitted requests for 106 and 107 due to my guy going awol.

 

The prizes & winners for roams 103, 104 & 105 were:

103:

Spots: Fleet Scythe – Lilith Ves, Angelus Infirim, Tical Davis, snowman1, Silent Cyborg, DECE GOO’BA
Distinction: Fleet Hurricane – Melkor Valor, Velkar Funaila
Excellence: Fleet Tempest – Verse Askold

104:

Spots: Navy Exeq – Fishysquirrel, LAPS3D P4CIFIST, Sick Artley, Araneatrox, Joe Ionan
Distinction: Navy Brutix – kiemai, House2twist
Excellence: Navy Megathron – Pew Terror

105:

Spots: Dramiel – Lord Shevan, Lodavier, AMON ARDAILLES, TheParadine, Yngvarr Khshayarsha
Distinction: Cynabal – Bobinu, Jena Jamson
Excellence: Machariel – Shemmy

As said these should all be paid out by now or are in the process of being paid out, congratulations to all.

Mar 082014
 

During Fanfest 2014, CCP will be unveiling a monument to all EVE players past & present. 

In addition to engraving all our character names upon it, CCP will be sealing a time capsule beneath the monument that will contain messages from the playerbase. And I would like to give one of you the opportunity to write a message on behalf of the Ganked community to the people who will open the time capsule in 25 years. Feel to talk about Ganked, what you think of Ganked, notable things Ganked has gotten itself involved in and so on.

As an incentive, I am offering a hard copy of EVE Source (not the limited editions as I thought this up too late to snag any of those for this), to the entry I deem the winner.

So if this competition interests you then please get writing! 

 

Things to note include:

1) Must be no more than 1000 words.

2) Must be submitted to me via evemail, or shared google doc, or posted in the comments to this post by downtime on 25th April. I will then chose my winner and start the submission ball rolling.

3) Follow CCP’s small print at all costs

All texts, videos, and other submissions for the monument must comply with the EVE Online End User License Agreement and Terms of Service. Players may not submit texts, videos, or other materials that include harmful, threatening or obscene language or content that may infringe on a third-party’s intellectual property rights. CCP reserves the right not to include any texts, videos, or other submissions we deem inappropriate. No refund will be given for inappropriate submissions.

4) If I can swing it, the prize MAY even be signed by members of the Dev team & CSM 8.

5) I will cover all submission & postage costs personally.

Feb 102014
 

Ganked has been doing its thing for over 2 & a half years now, with this website not far behind it, and while Ganked has evolved the website itself really has not. Its still mostly a blog portal with an attached killboard. However I fancy a change round these parts and so over the next few months I want to make several improvements to both how the site looks and how we all interact with it.

My current thoughts on what to do are many and varied but include:

  • Unified theme across the site;
  • Easier access to Fleetup;
  • Some form of chat/out of game communication;
  • Directory of all groups & individuals running public roams;

If you can help out with anything on that list, or have suggestions for other things I may have missed, use the comments!

The last item on the above list is something I want to get going sooner rather than later, so if you run, or know of people who do run public roams & public event fleets then please use the comments to get me their details or have them get in touch so I can get something up & running.  

 

Dec 132013
 

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.

gankedsponsor23

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!)

 

Videos:

Nov 082013
 

Yulai – Acting on behalf of the navies for the Amarr Empire, Caldari State, Gallente Federation, and Minmatar Republic, CONCORD has put out a one-time call for capsuleers to provide backup on a “massive, sustained assault on high-priority targets”. Kilkkuken Mallen, Chief Intelligence Operative for CONCORD, said, “We are currently unable to provide details on the target, as this would represent a significant security risk in the operation. However, this threat is considered extremely high to all law-abiding citizens of New Eden. We ask that any capsuleer who wishes to protect civilized space gather up at our two rally points in Sarum Prime and Meves on November 7 for departure at 18:50.”

The above was an announcement made earlier this week and as usual piqued my interest enough to mail the RvB Ganked mailing list saying “yeah lets do this”.  Yesterday rolls round and I move myself into Sarum Prime with around 4 hours to go and already the system is getting busy, as was the Live Events channel. Now due to confusion on my part I was not originally going to run a fleet, just join a CCP run fleet, however me being me and all of you being, well all of you, that plan went out the window. Next thing you know I am taking x’s from around 150 people, many of them regulars to Ganked or members of RvB, and many more people sent my way by folks in the Live Events channel including my fellow CSM delegates, Chitsa Jason & James Arget.

Around 18.00 GMT we started getting reports from fleet members moving to join us that Sarum Prime was under traffic control, much like Jita on a Sunday evening, however it must be noted it was sitting at around 1300 pilots all looking for fleets for the event, so this was very much expected. It was not long after this that when Fozzie tweeted that the people in Sarum should make best speed to Ihal in Derelik, which meant my fleet was one of the first to get going as we had several twitter uses in fleet. By all accounts, moving off so early was a Good Thing, as a wave of ever increasing Time Dilation (TiDi) followed in our wake, with late joiners moving from Sarum 20-30 minutes after announcing endlessly in fleet about 10% TiDi on each jump.

Arriving in Ihal we formed up on the Mifrata gate while getting eyes into that system. Scouts reported a Naga gang set up off gate for a good while, a gang that got themselves a few kills when random eventers would just jump right into them from Ihal, before they themselves moved away and into Curse. While waiting on our fleet to regroup we set to spamming local with this:

[18:53:01] Sami Okuuda > Warriors of the State, jump into Mifrana and engage the Sansha’s forces at the second Planet!

Unintentional typo that still caused many to jump into Mifrata, while we giggled in fleet chat.

Finally we started to move towards RMOC – obviously knowing we had to pass through Doril caused us to nearly rethink this, but as TiDi was so insane we just went with it, as going to any other nearby Null entry would have been too time consuming. Instead I announced that we would wait till around 400-500 of the people in Sendaya local had moved on before we would follow.  The rest of the plan was made up as we jumped into Doril, while most of those before us were dying horribly to the numerous fleets setup on & around the gate.  And who knew, such a simple plan as “burn off, kill the sabres, warp to bottom station” would work? Not me for sure!

Yet it did, and all our fleet lost was like 10 dudes, including a Nighthawk – but he took it well, and the fleet chucked iskies at him for being a hero about it. 

Once we got out of Doril, TiDi fell away and we moved to RMOC as quick as we could, however we arrived seconds too late for the event, as all Angel installations & ships had either been “protected” by the locals of Curse, or self destructed in a show of Pirate balls! Either way the Empires had lost. However we wandered around system getting a few kills, getting killed a few times, until we decided that it was time to head back to Empire.  And that was pretty uneventful.  Arrived back on the Sendaya gate in Doril to see a pretty large fight going on, but with heavy TiDi and bombers on field we decided NOT to whelp into the centre of it, and instead hit lowsec and got a few more kills there, most of stupid flashies that do not warp when pod squads land at 0 on them!

When all is said & done, we had a good time.  Lots of new people – well new to pvp – flew with us and came away with a good impression of Ganked & RvB as a result of us NOT whelping / freezing up on the jump into Doril or at the first sign of TiDi. I am still finding kills we either achieved as a fleet or whored on to, just keep an eye on this campaign – and if you do find it, post that bloody suspect Cynabal from Ihal!!!

Here is a few quotes from people who flew with us:

Was in the fleet with RvB FC – we didn´t jump right throu and we avoided to be bombed … from 150+ we only loose 10 ships and then finaly got into 0.0 – but the event was over. We had only 4 to 6 logi (include myself) for a 150 man fleet ;D. 

It was a goog experience for a newbie on my side and iam looking forward to be in such fights again thanks to the FC !!! From what i read here the other fleets are not so lucky to have a propper leader so i think the expierience was awful and thats not how you drag people into pvp. You scare them into highsec and so I dont unterstand some of the comments because 10 year old chars with huge experience in fighting.

 

[ 2013.11.08 14:10:35 ] Phobia Severasse > Mangala Solaris it was great, mostly cos we had decent FC it would have sucked to be cannon fodder. Perfect Eve event though

 

Completely forgot to say this: turns out that, if not for your watchfulness with the twitter, we’d all get stuck in 23 jumps of 10% tidi instead of getting those nice fights in null and lowsec. I was just reading forums and realized how bad it was for people who didn’t get lucky to have a good FC like you.

 

Anyway thats enough food for my ego, what did I think of the event itself?

As a pod pilot: it was messy, it felt very disorganised, exactly what was the goal? what was the time frame the Empires needed to achieve this goal in? However while I say this, I still enjoyed myself massively. I primarily went to shoot dudes, with taking part in the “RP” side of the event as a distant secondary.

As an FC of a public high-sec fleet: I was shocked at how little information was put across by the event “actors”, especially in the few hours before Sarum filled up and once in Ihal & Sendaya, together with how poorly their fleets seem to be lead – let alone the other high-sec fleets I came across along the way.  More information would have certainly been great here. Still now the dust has settled, as an FC I really loved it.  Having many new people in fleet who “got it” right away and were willing to follow really made me want to impress, and while I think I did not do as well as I could, my fleet members seemed to enjoy themselves.

 

How would I suggest things be ran? Especially events that have the possibility to reach the scale of last nights event, which had some 3000 involved pilots across two regions with many many more trying to join in and facing numerous perceived hurdles.

Well I would always count on the null based attendee’s to be more organised – regardless of the Event location. To that end, while you cannot ever organise high sec residents to that scale, draft in people who have a proven track record of doing so and get them to be your shepherds.  Yes its nice having CCP actors leading fleets, but do they have much experience cat herding people who have never pvp’d, never so much as jumped to low sec and so on? On this topic this says it all:

[19:51:51] Ren Karetta > Alright people, we’re going to make a run for it

Approach the people who have done this & offer to name check them in follow up reports as chosen reps of the empires or such things, or invite people from across the cluster to put their names in the hat for this opportunity so as to avoid any claims of bias, hell I could name half a dozen organisations and/or pilots who could be tapped for being the player “reps” at such events, and yes that would include myself!

Additionally to the above, if you do go with player reps – or at least more experienced “actors” – go with more form up points.  For a 4 empire event, having 2 initial form up points just did not pan out as well as it should have.  If the people had been spread out then the initial moves would have been less of the drama bomb they became.  And also geography can play a part here too for example, a Caldari force could have reached Curse from one direction – yes it would have meant a run through GW, but hey quietest region ever! – while the Amarr groups came over from Sarum.

If TiDi is to factor in, can CCP ensure that the most likely route is reinforced or as close to it as possible, yes you wont avoid TiDi entirely, but at least it could be lessened. If the Sarum>Ihal route had been reinforced it may well have led to less of the tears we have seen on EVEO today. People expected to die when reaching null-sec, they just expected to reach null-sec first!

To close, I feel that events of this scale should continue to be undertaken, – the large scale fights are what make people sit up and look at eve just as much as the intrigue does after all – just CCP should ask the players, especially those of us heavily involved in the EVE community, for some assistance. We wont say no, we wont (well most of us wont) accuse CCP of bias if we get overlooked in favour of others to help out.

 

(Note all of the above is my own opinion not that of Mangala as CSM. Just Mangala as FC, as regular dude.  It should also be noted I have yet to watch any fraps my fleet may have captured last night and my memory is sketchy on a Friday afternoon!)

Nov 052013
 

gankedyr2mk2

Well Ganked had a good week last week thats for sure. We managed 3 roams & events 2 of which were on incredibly short notice.

First up on Halloween we had Ganked: Gank or Gift which attended a player run Halloween event in Tama, which saw a hastily assembled 80 man fleet including my fellow CSM delegate Ripard Teg head into the system and whore our way onto the event Nightmares and many other kills.  Next up on the 2/11, Alphastarpilot organised a sort of pre-ganked pre-game fleet to take on a CCP roam, which also headed into Tama – I was busy FFAing in RvB’s 4th Mass FFA; That little op scored a ton of kills including several CCP kills, so total success.

The main event for the week however was after all of this on Saturday evening. Ganked 90: Hepatitis V, our first serious pirate themed roam, and one that went with Blood Raiders & Sanshas as the primary theme.

I was FCing – my second stint after my return from EVE Vegas (I do have a post coming on this, but I need to sort my photos out and get more uploaded before I sit down & finish it). We managed an excellent turn out, over 160 pilots, with around 50% of the fleet in Pirate vessels.  For a couple of hours we bimbled around lowsec mostly getting this Proteus kill, and eventually a fight with Snuff Box, who brought in 5 Archons – understandable when we had so many of everything else! We had a great time neuting  one of the Archons so much he couldn’t remember what capacitor looked like.  On reflection after a minute or two we should have moved to another, but oh well. We still managed to get a few kills while Snuff focused our Ashimmu’s down, much better than I thought it would have went really. Check the Snuff Box battle report out over on Failheap.

Following this, and the subsequent – but usual – numbers drop we reformed and went out again this time up north. And boy is that a barren wasteland full of nothing except SMA scrubs calling us scrubs from the safety of their station. SMA I’m calling you out as a huge bunch of pussies, you wont even fight a roam that WANTS to die. How your friends in the CFC put up with you is beyond me. Anyway, we managed to find a part of the CFC willing to fight us over in VFK, notably in the form of a multiboxer with 4 carriers & 2 battleships sat on our ingate. Which we proceeded to aggro, and kill, all in the space of 15 minutes or so.  While doing this a couple of random ships jumped in, and died, while others sat at a tac and watched the battle.  I understand now that the fleet that landed AFTER we had left system on a victorious high was after a rumble, they just took too long to form up – then went to camp the WRONG null exit. Next time, just convo me, we’ll wait.

So there you have it, a really good week capped off with 4 capital kills. Whats not to like.

Vidyas:

Ganked v CCP:

Ganked 90 in Lowsec:

Ganked 90 in the North:

gankedsponsor23As usual we had sponsorship from our friends at Somerblink, and the following pilots won the sponsored prizes:

Cruor: Mourning Souls, Veronica Zegna, Mithrawn’arudo, Angeylahdevi, Rodin Kress

Succubus:  John Cadenza, R’ist’gleich ‘U’ durch’I, Pukes Dog, Zar Dada, Tical Davis

(All the above won for various things including pod whoring, being logi, not being dumb etc etc)

Phantasm: Mikeshaw91 Inkura (Videoing and not dieing during it!)

Ashimmu: Maki V (DAT DAMAGE)

Bhaalgorn: paxilexifixi Isu (Top Campaign killer)

You guys will receive your prizes from Somerblink some time in the next few days, so please be patient.

========================

Additionally, we had some prizes passed over to me on the night from Darius Caliente of Certified. Darius has done this before, and I totally recommend his corp to anyone in the US timezones who want competent pvpers to fly with. He even has some Alliance Tournament experience! Anyway, these people won shinies:

Panther: Macout (Because surviving the North in a BS should not be possible)
Dramiel:  Teehee Otomeya (Expending effort to catch us up in round 2)
Daredevil:  Calintor (For giving logi a go)
Ashimmu: Lotta Vegeena (Campaign points!)
Phantasm: Angelus Infirim (Scouting)
Falcon: Noriky (Final Blow on a Blackbird)
Rook: kefahuchi Grey (Final Blow on a Blackbird)
Lachesis: Lemming Malgalad (First Final Blow of the whole night)
Arazu: Nuos Ono (Scouting)
Rapier: House2twist (Just for asking if he can win a prize, he can win the one thats in lowsec!)
Huginn: Grarr Dexx (I want to give him hugs for the fight with Snuff, this is close enough to that)
Curse: Sergant Steel (DAT IMAGE)
Pilgrim: Dirk Magnum (FORNICATION)

You will have these on contract from Mangala Solaris by the end of the day. Congratulations.

========================

Our next roam is on the 9th November, and is a standard two parter.  We will be celebrating my 7th EVE Birthday. Hope to see many of you there for this. Check the thread out on the RvB forums.

Finally, as of today Ganked 100 is 90% set on using Shield Capitals – despite advice to the contrary from numerous sources – some of whom still wont provide actual reasoning (“just because” isn’t enough), but given that all our pilots have different levels of experience and mental capacity, training for more serious doctrines may well be beyond us at this short notice. However it could be that Dan & I are wrong, so to delve deeper into this we will be doing something on SISI on Sunday 10/11 to test these theories out, so if you are cap capable on SISI watch the mailing list RvB Ganked for an announcement. 

Sep 252013
 

gankedyr2mk2

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.

 

gankedsponsor23

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 062013
 

gankedyr2mk2.png

 

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
 

gankedyr2mk2.png

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 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.