I chuckled when I saw this communication on one of the R1FTA communication channels...
Angron Vail > Jack Dancer i had your corpse then was blobbed
Now, what's the story behind that quote?
Today was the second Tusker Free For All - a chance for people to fly T1 frigates and have hundreds of targets. When I arrived around 19:45 gametime (about 2 hours after the excitement started) there were more than 200 pilots in Jovainnen and the top belt looked like this:
Those are wrecks littering the asteroid belt. The other belts looked similar, but most of the insane action was here at the top belt. And there was still a a few hours of this mayhem yet to come!
I had flown a couple ships to Jovainnen yesterday and had delivered hulls and modules for 6 more to Raneilles (two jumps away in high sec) today. My plan was to use the Jovainnen ships first and then when I needed more to fly my pod to Raneilles and build the ships there. I was just using two models - rifter and slasher - and also just a single fit for each of them. So it wasn't complicated.
On arrival in Jovainnen I headed to a scanning spot that I had set up yesterday and looked at the various belts to see if there was a spot that would be less chaotic than the top belt (I had flown to within 100km of the top belt to get the photo above and to decide that it wasn't where I wanted to spend my time...).
I chose a belt and turned my trusty rifter to land at range and see what was available. It took a while. If you've never been at one of these events (my alt has experienced a couple with RvB so I had an inkling of what was in store) then it can be a confusing experience. Ships flying everywhere. People shooting each other. You chase someone and they're chasing someone different and suddenly a third ship starts tearing you apart from behind. Confusing and fun.
I found a merlin reasonably close and headed for him with everything turned up to 11. He turned my way and the fight was on! I hit the orbit button (nice and close - 500m) and started pounding him with my 200mm autocannons. Things went well. It was a good fight - he was shooting light ion blasters with null ammo and doing me harm. But I was also doing well against him. He had an auxiliary shield booster - so every once in a while the shield would pop back up to recover the damage I had done. But my overheated armor repairer was also keeping up with the incoming damage.
Eventually I think he missed a cycle with his shield booster or something because I suddenly did some serious damage. He was through armor in a second and soon through his hull. He exploded. \o/
A very good start. And it turned out that his was the most expensive ship I would kill during the event.
A few minutes later (after returning to the station for repairs on my overheated modules) I selected a rifter from the options in a belt and had a similar result. He exploded too!
This was going very well! I headed back to the station for repairs and headed out to the scanning spot to look over the belts to see where I wanted to try next. I found a belt with a few frigates and headed for it. Then I found a pilot that had stolen my name (at least my first name) and attacked Jack Valley with everything I had. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough and pretty soon I exploded. My reign of terror had come to an end. But it took 4 opponents to finally stop me!
Things pretty much continued from there. Find a target and either kill it or explode trying. A couple times I was able to warp away in structure and a couple times my target did the same. One battle went to the point that I was left with less than half of my hull (and I was furiously hitting the warp button to try to escape with either my ship or my pod) when my opponent blew up.
There were so many drones littering the asteroid fields that I took them off of my overview. I tried to stay away from any drone boats because I knew I couldn't sort out which of the drones where targeting me. There were literally hundreds of them abandoned everywhere.
At one point I landed and destroyed a tristan in short order. Then a rifter was next to me, so I webbed and scrambled him and took him apart. And then an incursus was there - so I tried the same with him. Unfortunately, I was a bit beat up by that point and it turned out to be a dogpile of ships. Several targeted me and I exploded (it looks like 8 ships damaged my slasher). That incursus that I had gone for blew up a minute later.
On the whole people followed the "rules" for the event. Everyone was in T1 frigates until 2100 when T2 frigates and destroyers were allowed to join the fun. And pretty much everyone, with a few exceptions, stuck to the 1v1 spirit of the event and didn't join forces to gank people. And there were very few poddings (which were against the rules).
Unfortunately, I stuck around until after the event ended at 24:00. At 00:03 I destroyed a cheap slasher (aka "bait") just as his friends (thrasher, thrasher, and a crow) landed in force to tear me apart. And, with the system a bit laggy from all the wrecks and action, my pod was slow to exit the scene and it was destroyed too. Which brings us back to the quote at the top of the page...
Angron Vail > Jack Dancer i had your corpse then was blobbed
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