Eve LOL-sec roam

Below is my addition to the "after-action report" writeup of an Eve Online roam I went on.  This is comparable to a WoW raid, and took about two hours.  There is... a lot of jargon involved.



This was my first PvP roam. It was a lot of fun, and a great learning experience.

I started by asking for advice in Mumble just prior to the start, about what ship to bring. I was told to bring tackle instead of EWAR for my first time. Because I'd skilled up L4 3/3/3/3 for my PvE alt fleets, I was instantly promoted way above my level of incompetence and made Tackle squad leader. This meant I got a key to the executive washroom, invites to the best parties, and access to the command channels. Where else but E-UNI!

After some quick training, my first official act was to set up a T1-tackle chat channel. Then as Tackle x'ed up, I invited them to my squad and the channel. That was a bit confusing as the Alliance window kept scrolling. I had to go back and manually compare the x list against the fleet window to make sure I got everyone. I asked if anyone else was a newb, but no one admitted it. I gave them the good news that I was making it up as we went along. This was recieved with the good grace you expect from LOL-fleet members. I hope one day to learn how to give pep talks as inspirational as the FC's.

Someone with better skills joined, so I was bumped into the EWAR squad in case someone disconnected and needed an invite. Fortunately this never happened, or I would have had to ask "How do I do that?!?" But I was left in charge of the Tackle anyway. Thanks to The_Rookie's_Guide_To_Fleet_Ops I had a vague notion of what I was supposed to be doing. I also got a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain in the Command chat channel. Since this FC believes in transparency, he addressed most things in Mumble. Chat was mostly intel reports from our far-flung scouts, looking for gud fite targets, and me asking more newb questions.

Setup took about 30min. The FC did an excellent job with the first few jumps explaining fleet commands and why not to break cloak. One of the wiki pages mentioned that someone should be typing in the FC commands into chat (for stragglers or people temporarily distracted), so I did so in my squad chat. A kind soul told me that I didn't need to type in the full system name, and the first three letters would suffice. After a while, I was comfortable enough doing so that I volunteered to do so in the Fleet chat, and tried to carry that out as well.

My first fleet combat was intense. All of a sudden, zillions of brackets! The FC is calling out primary and secondary targets. I start locking them up, kick on my MWD, and go charging across space pushing my point and web function keys. I was slow off the mark and thus was not hit by the initial smartbomb cluster. A Hurricane got range so I pointed and webbed him and kicked off an orbit/500 command. But I'm pretty sure I forgot to turn off my MWD in the heat of the moment. Oops! Alarms going off, red stuff all over my screen. Called for armor reps but was quickly toasted.

I used the podsaver tab to zoom off and bounced around while the battle continued to rage. I eventually calmed down and wondered what to do. Aha! I can get a newb ship by docking up! So I found a station and rejoined the fleet once the shooting had stopped. And reminded other tacklers to do the same.

I asked in squad chat how many tackle frigates survived. Only one. Reported same to command channel. This was only a minor setback, because a number of DD ships had points. Scouts reported "Amamake area is dead", so the FC decided to take us back to Hek so we could reship.

Only... there's this stupid suspect timer for logi ships in lowsec, that would allow anyone is hisec to shoot at them. Is this braindead, or what? What was CCP thinking?!?

So we're slowly working our way back when we jump into a gate where a bunch of blues are fighting a bunch of reds. No one broke cloak. Boy, were they in for a surprise. We could hear the FC thinking out loud... "15 minute timers... the chance to shoot things..." The final decider: "F*ck it, they're blue to us!" and called targets. Since I was in a newb ship with a civilian pop gun, I thought to myself "better part of valor!" and orbited the gate at 500m.

And that's how we spent the rest of the roam. We'd wait out the timer, and someone flashy would jump into our gate camp and die, and we'd get another timer. The Myrm and pod were particularly shiny, and that ship alone was just about half our isk kill.

My thanks to everyone who put up with my newb questions like, "What does OGC mean?" and "What's a punt?" I'll certainly be less nervous next time. And maybe I will bring that Maulus next time...