Today is my real life birthday. I mention it not to illicit any cheap "Happy Birthday" sentiments, but simply as another way to mark the passage of time. Plus my birthday always heralds a shift in the cycles of Eve Online that are worth noting. The long summer doldrums are usually wrapping up and space is starting to return to pre-summer activities. The same can be said for this magazine as well. While some years I have more to talk about over the summer than others, this year has been an unusually quiet one.
So I thought today I would talk about a few things stemming primarily from this incident on Saturday. For those that are unaware each Saturday I FC what I call our Flying Circus Fleet. I pick a theme each week for our comp and we undock to spread good fights around low security space. Thanks to Zarzakh our neighborhood has grown to include both warzones these days. This past Saturday we were in one of our favorite comps, Retributions with logi frigs and support. Our pilots have become extremely good at flying this comp over the past year and we enjoy it because it is extremely flexible and gives us a wide engagement profile.
We had just used it to engage a four man Snuff Eos fleet in Martoh, where we had caught this Arazu and one of the Eos. Our scout reported a lot of activity on a gate two jumps away and we started moving in that direction. We knew there was a fight happening on the gate and that a lot of ships were involved, including two Carriers and a Geddon. I made the decision to third party and warped the fleet to thirty off the gate. By the time we had landed most of those involved had vanished or pulled range. As always my decisions at that point are primarily based on opportunities. We had two Carriers in space with fighters out about 60k from our position, or a neut Geddon about 30k from our position. A Geddon that needed to die no matter what happened next. We couldn't spread out to engage two Carriers with those neuts on the field, and it was closer. So we started with the Geddon. The Carriers escaped during the fight.
I'd play it the same way again. The decision to deploy 25 -10 Pirates on a gate is one I never take lightly. Engaging two Carriers without back-up exposes us to all sorts of potential problems over a very long engagement window of time. Maybe that is something that more positive sec status players don't have to worry about as much, but for us it is often a critical concern.
While we were happy with the results (and the loot spread around the gate) others were not. Hence the local talk, the pings I got on Discord, and the Reddit post. Thanks to Angor for making the meme.
Anyway, Eve is always being Eve.
And it feels like it is finally waking up from a long summer slumber. Happy Birthday to me!