Today I saw a pre-ping for 19:00 EVE time that sounded interesting. A FUN fleet (which means nothing else than “not for complete beginners” and not “totally important strategical op”, so the majority of fleets. So I came on and was pleasantly surprised they were handing out ships (I got a Dragoon for ~8m ISK, I guess the Talwars were a little more each) and we were already around 50 people and were about to undock when shit got real really quick and everyone was told to get to the Coalition comms and in an important fleet. We all? kinda did and then some other newbros and I noticed we had no idea what to *exactly* do. And of course the other Mumble server hadn’t remembered my password, so I had to fiddle with the Password manager on one screen, with the route planner tool on the other and I’m kinda surprised I arrived in time…
At least I wasn’t the one being told to shut up in comms, but as I sat there at the staging undock, probably in a wrong ship (it’s cool that they announce “X fleet” but if you’ve never been on one of those because you can’t fly it you probably don’t know which Logi and Tackle are ok to bring) I missed the Titan jump bridge (actually no idea how you’d activate it, or if you need to be near the Titan and I didn’t even see the any Titan in the overview… as I said it was very hectic). So I just stayed on comms and listened and flew back to our staging in hopes that our original fleet would be reformed.
It seemed I was lucky because just 30mins later it indeed reformed and we undocked and went hunting for… something. Oh, of course I got lost before something big happened (I blame some people talking over the FC and I jumped a gate I shouldn’t have) and was killed, so I bought a second Dragoon, minus 2-3 fits that weren’t available and try to catch up to the fleet. That took a while, I avoided a few neutrals and actually managed to find them again. Not sure if there was a real plan but after a lot of jumping (definitely more than usual) we actually got into a fight and maybe we even won the ISK battle. I got on 5 kill mails as a Neut, and only spent like 7m of my own money, yay.
But there’s definitely some things I need to relearn:
- Listen closely and get to know the damn NullSec system names in Catch
- Not overlook broadcast for reps, and actually get into Logi again
- Sort overview “better” so I can lock/align/jump quicker
Anyway, it’s 1 am and I was busy for roundabout 3h and had a lot of fun. As I write this some stratop ping goes out, I think I’d be kept more busy in USTZ or AUTZ, but such is life.
It’s Blapril and this is post number 5.