[Jester's Trek] COTW: Scouring the Shire
COTW: Scouring the Shire
Mord Fiddle has written a thing, which you should go read, because it basically comprises the longest comment to a blog post around here that I can recall in a while. ;-)
His post, which he calls "Scouring the Shire" (and dear Heaven do I love that reference) essentially makes the argument that Rote Kapelle is angry because people will not PvP in Syndicate the way we want them to. In other words, just like I said yesterday morning he's essentially asking "how dare Rote tell other people how they should play EVE?"
Told you that perception was getting around.
Then Mord accuses me of closing my mind to the argument while at the same time making a series of ancillary points about how:
- maybe Rote Kapelle has outgrown Syndicate; or,
- maybe we shouldn't get angry because people want to moon-mine atmospheric gasses; or,
- maybe people really are fighting us, they're just doing it in tech 3 ships supported by ECM.
Maybe it has something to do with this entire play style getting crushed.
A commenter on Mord's blog named Hoarr summed this up by saying:
Unfortunately, Mord, you are completely wrong. Syndicate actually IS the ancestral home of 'elite ' pvp. The only reason people moved (or at least used to) to syndicate is for the small gang pvp. Shit true sec, shit moons, and really hostile neighbors.
And I think my reply there deserves a hearing here. I've edited it slightly:
Yeah, you've got it exactly Hoarr.Guess I was gonna reply to a question about play styles. Oh well. ;-)
As I as telling someone [outside of Rote Kapelle] yesterday on Teamspeak, while it's fun to hurf-blurf on forums over this, in reality RK has no emotions associated with this maneuver at all. We're not doing this because we hate people but because we love a certain type of play style and we don't want to see it (quite literally!) ganked.
Outside of Syndicate, fights only seem to happen any more because there's a reason for them. Well as the old Billy Crystal(?) joke goes, "Women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place."
Syndicate has always been a good place. ;-)
Mord's article is built partially on the false assumption that bigger is better and RK has somehow "outgrown the pond"... even though we're smaller than we were a year ago. In truth, that's never how RK or Syndicate has operated. One guy contacted one of our "diplos" yesterday or the day before and basically argued that instead of pushing out all of these alliances, RK should be trying to build a coalition out of them to go take some null-sec space.
Something more foreign to an alliance that has lived in Syndicate for years, I can't even imagine. We don't want to NAP our neighbors, we want to shoot them!
Last night, the first Damned Nation POS timer was up and for the first time in memory, I-RED showed up in a fleet with no logi to help DAMN. Of course, they did it three hours before our TZ and they left system the instant our pilots started logging in in any numbers, but hey, you've gotta start somewhere.
In the meantime, RK soloists and one small gang zipped around a system where we were outnumbered 3:1 assassinating stragglers and having a grand old time. I-RED even got themselves a nice kill out of it. Maybe they'll find that addictive and come back, and just maybe next time they won't flee the moment the POS is re-stronted and they'll take their logi-less fleet into a fight with us and get even more kills.
That's what this is about.
At the end of the day, we don't care if people moon-mine, rock-mine, run sites, or grow tangerines, as long as they form up to fight us occasionally. But if they won't do that, then we're going to do something about that other stuff until they do. The RK campaign really is just that simple.
Source: COTW: Scouring the Shire