Transmission Lost

I suppose writing about the disfunction of a major wormhole alliance is just as worthy as anything else. Certainly better than recounting stories of almost catching a hole-closing Dominix this morning.

As a lowly grunt in Transmission Lost my perspective is far from unique. Still, I'm going to vomit up my two cents because that's how wormholers take care of business - spewing out vitriol like a giant diarrhea volcano.

The first thing I heard about all this recent unpleasantness was that KAIRS wanted to leave the alliance and take the alliance name with it. That by itself was annoying because the alliance didn't belong to any one corp. It wasn't and still isn't a piece of property. In my eyes KAIRS wanting to leave the alliance and keep the alliance name was equivalent to wanting to eat their cake and keep it as well.

Now I understand that KAIRS was a founding member of TL. I appreciate their emotional attachment to the name and respect all the work that it took to build such a powerful organization. Ultimately it appears that they lost sight of the fact that despite their having been in TL since the beginning the alliance was still made up of and sustained by other corporations. It wasn't being propped in any sense by KAIRS.

So when they said "we want to leave and take the alliance name with us, do our own thing and anyone who wants to follow us may do so" what they actually communicated was "we want everyone who won't conform to our vision to get out." They managed to frame it very nicely and caked it up with plenty of icing and sprinkles. Well played.

But icing on a turd does not a cupcake make.

As it stands, parties on both sides have been vilified as being responsible for creating this schism. Soon enough LOST and ANGST will meet up and get to settle anything thats been left on the table with fisticuffs. I suspect both sides look forward to that engagement. I know I do.

May the best wormholers win.

Spacerich

Spacewealth. Not every wormholer has it. I would expect that not every wormholer wants it, though they're probably a minority. Generally I'm against minorities. They tend to punch above their weight class when it comes to getting things that they want and the effort to deliver those things, which naturally falls on the majority, usually results in a net loss to the community as a whole.

But back to serious business.

I've recently started gas mining. It is possibly the most boring activity I have ever done in EVE, but I'm strapped for cash. What can I say? I love faction points and webs for my Proteus.

Slowly but surely my Venture is taking me farther away from space poverty to space wealth. It has suffered a few ignominous deaths at the hands of sleepers due to crappy piloting or inattentiveness on my part. Still, those few paltry losses are insignificant compared with how much raw material it can harvest between untimely deaths.

Noob Eyes

The first time I ever heard about a wormhole was back in 2010, maybe a few months after I started playing EVE. Up until that point I'd be running missions and I think I had already started my own "elite" corp, Dead Pool Syndicate, which was pretty awesome at the time because the initials spelled out "DPS" and we all know what DPS means. So cool, right? How could anything go wrong?

http://www.ravestats.com/public/fen/0_08102010045935Corpse_1.jpg

So back to wormholes... Some EVE veteran in our corp (he had well over 10mil SP so that made him a veteran) knew a little about exploration and he asked if I'd ever been into a wormhole before. I probably said something to the effect of "Uhhh, what do you mean?"

He gave me the run down and I was game so he, another corpie and I hopped into one. I don't even know what class WH it was. He pointed out that we could tell the WH was about to collapse because it was "shaky." I nodded and pretended to understand what he was talking about.

Anyway, I think I was in a Vexor or something equally useless at this point, but you know how nubs are: "This meta2-fit ship is 1337! How could anything go wrong?"

While my corpie and I sat on the WH like a couple of douches our explorer "vet" scanned down a site then warped fleet. It should go without saying that I didn't know anything about bookmarks at the time.

We land on grid and I'm convinced today that it was a C1 because we survived the sleepers. I should also mention here that I was thoroughly disappointed by a lack of ransoms for sleepers. "How is this supposed to be profitable?" Our guide had no answer for that brain-buster.

After collecting what loot we could we headed back to the wormhole... and the safety of hi-sec space. I hadn't quite realized it until I got back how much wspace had put me on edge. The idea the wormhole could collapse at any minute trapping me or that we could be attacked by a roaming horde of marauding wormholers gnawed at the back of my head the entire time without me realizing it.

It was another few months and several corporations before I ever stepped foot into a wormhole again. When I did it was for good. Now I'm one of those marauding wormholers roaming Anoikis in search of plunder and tears.

In fact last night we took this fleet in search of those very things.

Strategic cruisers. Logistics support. Dreadnoughts. Unbeatable. What could go wrong?

First

I just set this blog up. I've never done this before - certainly not for EVE Online - so I guess some manner of introduction is in order. I'm Malception. That was simple enough.