Storytime 6: Dreams fade as steel burn

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There is something beautiful about the autumn. The evening gets darker. The leaves start loosing their green colour of summer. A chill wind tell the story of a winter coming.

For me August the 16th started off like any other day. Waking up early and putting on the coffee. No work so when coffee was done I turned on my computer and launched Eve. As my ship is landing inside forcefield I am greated by the sense of panic. The frantic eyes of our few US people and our token aussie scream at me through corp chat. Their hands must still be shaking of the adrenalin that have kept them awake. Ingame mail was blinking red of desperation. A group of capitals was working on reinforcing our last tower. We were being invaded. And this time it was no half hearted attempt either. First thing first. Who was invading us? Semper Ubi Sub Ubi. A us tz c4 pvp corp.

Not even two weeks prior had we taken on one of their members. Hawk Crimson (or better known as Vimple). His claim of boredom in the c4 was to our ears very believable having come from the same class ourself in the spring. His purpose of infiltration was now too obvious but too late to change. Anyway. Removed his roles but he had already deleted all our corp bookmarks. Didnt take long to remake for towers tho. Next thing. Make a custom chat channel as he had access to anything written in corp channel. Time to survey the situation. Now Deathly and the others who had been up during the night had made a good job of noting down the pilots involved. Aprox 20 chars was counted. A quick check on eve-kill revealed them usually flying with only about 10 in fleet. This is not the usual burn and pillage then. They called out every bit of manpower they had. They came to this wormhole to live here.

Now I had been listening to the dtp podcast for some time but never read the blog of their ceo. While researching them tho their battleplan was written in black. They planned to throw all their effort into this operation.As MD74, jeraadt, grimch and manira logged on we started to evaluate what our options were.

Scenario 1
We batphone friends and try to get them in for defense. A full on attack in our prime could break their wormholecontrol and get reinforcement in. They would however be able to return the favor in their primetime and get in reinforcement themself. Furthermore, their connections could probably make our connections want to stay out of the conflict

Scenario 2
We wait for RF timer and go all out attack on their main fleet. However none of us has ever flown a capital in pvp and come out victorious. SUSU have however experienced pilots in this aspect.

Scenario 3
We call it a loss and just move on.

 Think we spent less than an hour debating and decided in the end to go with option 1 and 3. We had the ships and pilots needed to take them on. But the players behind the pilots did for the most part not have the spirit to take the fight. Among them some key members. But if we could get reinforcements that could change. (At the same time I sat with the feeling that every time we got invaded we called reinforcement.) However we contacted some friends in Lead Farmers [KILL] and asked if they would be willing to come. They were very positive and said they would try to rally alliance (possible 100 man fleet. That is huge for wormholespace) but needed a ok from leadership first. Knowing that SUSU had a member that was former diplo in SSC (it was a very known fact at the time that KILL and SSC were best of buddies) made us unsure however if this would work. As the invading force start logging of part of their fleet and move the rest to guarding our entrance we start moving our capitals and orcas to safespots and log them off. And then we start the diplomatic talks.

Out of the blue suddenly a k162 to Exhale (big merc alliance, decendants of the Narwhals empire) open up. We turn around and try to get hold of them. No response. Not in public chat and not to convos. And here comes SUSU closing party. Orca+Moros and the wormhole is gone. So much for that opportunity.

Anyway. The night dwindle away and we just tell people to go to sleep. Nothing will happen for us in their primetime. The next day we get ready for either a slaughter or reinforcement. Some members who lost their will to "live" starts self destructing ships. This spurs a request to buy ships by SUSU. Some members jump on this option. Some just keep selfdestructing.

During the day we get word back from from Lead Farmers. They want to stay out of the conflict. Sooner or later this means the wormhole is lost. No matter what we do. On coms the mood turn to resignation. Some are tired of the situation. Some are tired of the game as a whole. Some want to fight but dont even wish to argue the point when faced with this. So we call it a loss and decide to start looking ahead. To what we will do next. Reinforce timer is still several hours ahead. We start up diplo talks again and arrange a deal for people to move out one ship and firesale the rest.

As we are taking stock of what will be lost of assets we realise the t3 production we had going had been stockpiling assets. Too much assets. In addition to the ships being sold off this will be a huge loss. We try to negotiate for letting towers regen shield to online and take out assets but this is turned down by the attacking party. (They dont fully trust us :o. Who would imagine ) However the deal we get to get out ships let most people leave the wormhole with most of their assets intact, but some of their battlespirit is left behind. I think that goes for all of us. But we were still new to c5 space and we knew this could happen. The loss was accepted and we were planning for the road ahead.

And so it goes. One by one people are escorted out. As reinforcement timer approaches we finalize the agreements. I offer to take down forcefield of the first POS but some misunderstanding happens and I wake up in HS :)

In the end change come to us all. Either willing or forced upon us. You either accept the tide of change or you try to fight it. But in the end change happen anyway. Some things are just beyond your control. And the man who welcome change and learn to live with it goes away the wiser. 

~unknown

And so we decided to call upon the waves of change, as our home was no longer ours. And so ends the story of the corporation known as No Self Esteem. As the leaves of autumn fell to the ground and the sun rose anew we formed a new corporation (after two days of debating the name) known as "Honestly We didnt know" [.ORLY] and again set our eyes upon the promised lands of unknown space. This time we would just get a wormhole where noone lived so we could establish in peace and learn to be better at pvp. At least that was our hope. Thats not how it turned out.


(Read this story from the invaders point of view here and watch here )

Continue to Part 7 >>

Incoming transmission

Capsuleers log 060714 1216

//Entry 003

>Activation from dorment state without detection success
>Scanner detect no ships in central position in solarsystem
>Visual of target structures aquired
>All ships unpiloted
>No lifesign detected

//Active: dorment state
>...
>...
>...
//dorment state aquired

<You have been disconnected>

Cut down all the things

Saturdays usually start early for me. Very early. Having very young kids kinda wrecks your ability to sleep late in the morning. So up we go at 5:30. Oh yeah. Fresh and eager to take on a new day. The moment I open my eyes however that is not how I feel. Suddenly I regret joining in on the farming in static after the lowsec roam. Yeah I need isk. But apparantly sleep is more important. But out of bed we have to get. Put on a cartoon for the kid. Put on the coffee. Crash in the couch and whip up the phone to stay awake while waiting for the coffee to finish. Nothing interesting on eve forum. As usual. Oh wait. Proc has made a post. A serious one. Dont know if he will ever recover to his usual trolling mood from before CSM election. Maybe it has scarred him for life? Thoughts wonder to how a beaten Proc is sitting in his captain quarters watching the latest Razor propaganda to gain the will to undock. This could be true. At least in one possible universe. But this post is about wormholespace. Its about the death of wormholespace. And all the veterans brings out their wall of text. Its that time of the year again.

There are a few interesteing replies, like G0hme's tl:dr of wormholespace history. Let me pull out a quote that I felt hit a important mark:

This past bore the mark of less "big groups" where few of them knew eachother by more than at the end of eachothers crosshair. But as younger corps got bigger and everyone got multiple capitals in their systems, so came the rise of "WH Overlords" ground zero for the political cancer of Wormhole space.

You can ofcourse brush this off as a veterans ramblings about how everything was better in the old days and I think in many aspects it was. It certainly was different. 

This day I took my brand new CEO's example. There was something I had neglected for a bit. And it was time to deal with it.Having neglected it for so long there was only one way to go about it.

CUT DOWN ALL THE THINGS
So I grabbed the trimmer and went out and just started cutting. Everything down to the ground. I am not really a garden guy. Its not something I dream about at work. But sometimes it feels good to do something with your hands, demolish the jungle and then try to shape it into something beautiful. Its not really beautiful to look at yet tho. Work in progress. But actually starting the work is sometimes a milestone in it self. There are enough things one "should" have done that never get done. Life is just to short. The days dont have enough hours. And spaceships are more fun then weeds :P

Doing work with your hands often give your mind time to just think. Theres not much thinking required to cut down thistles and something else you really have no clue what is named. Among other more important stuff my mind wandered back to the state of wormholes however. It is a known fact that theres this mantra about not evicting pvp entities. As long as you play and behave in the accepted manner ofc. If you dont then everyone gang up on you. So theres an ideal that is ment to improve quality of life for the big groups that is part of the same club (WH overlords or whatever channel serves the same purpose). And ofcourse its repeated a few times on forum. But do not be fooled. This mantra only apply to those in the club. If you are a smaller group of players trying to carve your way, without "entertaining" the big groups to make them like you, you are basicly on your own and nobody cares. And there are several lesser known groups that dont mind doing evictions and infact find them fun. They dont go about boasting about it either as that would just make them a target in return. But evictions still happen. Those who can, and want to, do it. And is this really a bad thing? Are evictions and invasions what ruin wormholespace? After being on the recieving end of 4 invasions in the last year and on the dealing end a few times aswell I will VERY strongly object to this nonsense of an idea. In fact I will go so far as to state that invasions and evictions are what actually drive the major content in wormholespace. The attempt to NIP (Non Invasion Pact) everything is one (not the only) of the reasons wormholespace is becoming dull for a lot of people. Yes it sucked to loose 50 bill of assets when we was evicted from our 5-2. It was a difficult time. But for me (and I believe many others) that is what Eve is all about. Sometimes you win and sometimes you get beaten to the ground. But then you get up again and set out finding a new wormhole and start building up again. And even for those who give up, they will always remember the adventure you had, the victories and the losses. Its a story they bring on and remember. THIS is what makes eve the game we all love. Not only the victories but also the losses. And when you go and create a big blue safetyzone around you that feeling of risk, that feeling of adventure and excitement will depart and degrade aswell.

This is also one of the things that is unique to wormholespace. At least now. It used to be like this in 0.0. When ATUK[5] empire fell in the southeast we were a small group of corps that banded togeather and went back out as a new alliance [CHIMP] and took back some of the space without being dropped on by everyone. This was in the time before the big forceprojection. Before Titans. And even dreads was a rare sight.

We still have this opportunity in wormholespace. If you get beaten you can head back out and start fresh in a new system. Noone can stop you. But out of fear a lot of you sign up NIPs and add every diplo in any major group to your facebook page (metaphor). What happened to those who were willing to take a risk? To have no blues and take on the world?

This is why I love my alliance. We have taken our distance from this nonsense politics of wormholespace. We do our own thing. We have no blues. Yes it may be our downfall one day, but until then everyone we meet is a target and we can choose to fight or not as we please.We owe noone anything and nobody owe us anything. If we want a fight there are ALWAYS ways to get one. If the gnosis bait dont work then you up it to a marauder, sitting in their site, in their system. If the chain is empty you roll it or head out to kspace and scout aswell. As long as there is other people playing the game there are fights to be had. Somehwere. Even if its 30 jumps away through highsec.

I would urge anyone who read this post (even tho I dont know if anyone outside my alliance do :P ) to take the step and the risk. Do away with your blues. Drop all your NIPs and do your own thing. Win some and loose some. Bring back that feeling of being unsecure. If you have nothing to fear you have nothing to overcome, nothing to beat. Even an imaginary threat will give you more excitement than no threat at all. Dear to risk some. I promise you its worth it in the end! Cut down all the things!!