Mavericks in AAA :: 2 Month Report

I am happy to report that things have worked out very well for The Maverick Navy since our decision to join AAA. Almost no one outside the alliance realizes it, but -A- has an amazing roaming PvP culture, and there are 4 member corps that are extremely active in the U.S. timezone.

This is a huge and very welcome change from IT Alliance, where casual PvP was bizarrely looked down upon and even discouraged at times. The cool things -MVN- has already done in -A-, like ganking a MM Aeon in low-sec, would NEVER have been allowed by the clown-shoes fun-police.

It’s nice not to have to deal anymore with IT’s 200+ member IRC-based “FC” club, of which about 8 people ever lead fleets. In IT, the rest were only there to nay-say anyone other than a very short list of official (but not necessarily talented) FCs. But enough about the past for now!

Eve Kill reports that -A- was #1 in game-wide kills over the last 30 days. That’s even more impressive when you consider that we don’t have a super-huge “forever war” on our doorstep to earn us thousands of fleet kills. Those kills are largely from “just for fun” pvp ops, with a small fraction coming from “official ops.”

As I have mentioned before, this is all nothing new. The “AAA is shit” meme has blackened the public perception of -A-, but the fact is that we are in the #1 ranked alliance of all-time on Battle Clinic.

-A- has always been notorious for roaming gangs in the South. I remember how much fear they stirred up in Provi when I was new to the game, and in the nano-age their gangs were top-notch.

It also helps that they’re very shrewd about when to drop supers, and have never lost a titan. This is something very few major 0.0 alliances can claim.

I’m not saying -A- hasn’t lost good people since the days of Evil Thug, but the current incarnation of the alliance has some very active new blood, and it really shows-through in the nightly activity level and kill-board stats.

Since joining, there have been two kinds of ops our members are flying in regularly: major ops and casual ops.

The first group includes larger ops (first against PL, now against White Noise/DRF). The fight with PL was mostly unexciting. Atlas brought low numbers, even though the war was for their sake, and AAA + Cascade brought decent (but not great) numbers. The CSAA purge in the DRF has been met with “revenge at last!” from the older -A- members while most of -MVN- sees it as “something to do” between roams.

The second kind of fighting consists of small-gang fighting. This is what attracted the FCs in MVN to AAA. -A- space has proved ideal for finding casual “pew pew” with ease. We border a number of very active pipeline systems, and it’s only one jump bridge from our core territory to the border of Curse (current small-gang hotspot and my long-time favorite 0.0 region).

-MVN- was neck-and-neck with The Collective for the most kills in March, leading slightly some days and falling slightly behind on others. In April we were neck-and-neck again for top-killers, but this time BUSA surged in participation due to absorbing another well-known PvP corp, and they beat-out both -MVN- and The Collective for kills.

Regardless of who wins each month, it’s great to be with people who give a shit about something other than making isk and maintaining more regions than they can use. Nearly all of the corps in -A- are active roamers who run a mix of corp-only and alliance-wide ops. The “fun” pvp culture is very strong in AAA, and most long-time Mavericks feel very much at home.

There are also some in the corp, mostly the types who joined in the golden era of Atlas or IT, who simply cannot enjoy Eve without a 1000 man fleet and being told where to be every day. Those people are drooling at NC-DRF war right now. Hopefully the fight with White Noise will escalate and they’ll have mega-blobs to smash into again soon.

As for myself, I have been very pressed for time IRL, but when I do play I have been bouncing between low-sec soloing, small gang roams in curse, and mid-sized “fight-starter” fleets traveling further Catch.

In 2 weeks, I’ll be much less busy and will start blogging about individual fights more often. There have been some very blog-worthy moments in the last couple months, but I simply haven’t had the time or energy to write about them.

Thus-far, I feel the decision to join AAA was the best move for the corp.

Great Success :: Brazen MM Aeon Killed in Yong

A short while ago, in a system dear to my heart, I was visiting for various reasons and happened upon some NC elements camping the station in carriers.

Later I would find them hitting local POSes with a corp I’d not seen before called Benevolence.

For a couple nights in a row, we had cyno ships on field with their supers with hictors logged off in system, but had missed the opportunity both times.

Tonight, it all came together. A Wyvern and Aeon were tackled. The Wyvern was able to escape, the Aeon was not.

FAIL Hotdrop

I logged-in to find some fun, and was quickly invited to an MVN-lead AAA roam that had been killing stuff with great success this evening.

We swept up to Curse and popped a Cynabal who tried to re-approach a gate we had covered on both sides. Right after the nano-cockroach exploded, our FC was contacted by a Cascade Imminent (alliance ticker: “FAIL”) FC about a super-cap kill in progress.

Our light-weight roaming gang burnt at best speed to 5-v in Querious, where a PL Nyx and 8 carriers were bubbled on planet one (the site of the FAIL I-Hub).

FAIL had managed to bubble part of a PL fleet when the rest were jumping, and had quietly on-lined a cyno jammer to “lock out” PL’s other supers.

It was an excellent trap, but FAIL lacked sufficient dps in the system to kill anything, so the call went out to friendlies who began to head for the system in modest numbers.

We started with the carriers who were working hard to keep the Nyx alive. PL had a small number of other supers in the system working to bring down the cyno-jammer that FAIL had quietly on-lined to make this kill possible. It was a race against the clock.

Soon, only the NYX remained, but PL’s other forces in the system were close to bringing down the jammer, and they had a sizable number of sub-caps inbound via gates.

Unfortunately, things had gone too slowly up until this point because friendly supers were facing difficulties getting into the system while the cyno-jammer was still online. A jump bridge into system was being used, but it ran out of fuel and took too long to refill.

We took too long, and PL successfully brought down the cyno-jammer before the Nyx died. PL lit a cyno and jumped in with strong showing of supers. We were out-gunned at this point, so we focused on killing HICs / DICs to save friendly supers.

In the end, FAIL lost a titan. One has to feel bad for Best Path, as they seem to move from one tragedy to the next as a corporation. No other supers died (including the PL Nyx).

These are the relevant battle reports:

PL Board – https://www.pandemic-legion.com/killboard/view_kill.php?id=386990

Eve Kill Board – http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=9292554

AAA Board – http://a-kills.com/?a=kill_related&kll_id=451282

I think FAIL made the right decision to take this opportunity. It didn’t work out the way our side would have liked, but without the jump bridge problems it could have been a great kill. It was also an exciting engagement.

In hindsight, it might have been wise to keep eyes on the jammer and essentially give up once it was clear PL would kill it in time, but I wasn’t involved in the command of this operation, so I can’t say for sure what they knew at the time

In the end, PL got caught in a bad situation, but they made smart moves, and showed once again why they’re the best of the best.