What A Mess

Two nights ago we (USTZ-roam/alliance/whatever) SBU'd 9R4 PNQ and 3WE. This was in conjunction with Zammas' op during early EUTZ (Aussie TZ). His op was to kill SBUs and rep some stuff. I figured that we would also give them some stuff to reinforce.
Zammas busted his butt and repped stuff. I get this. I understand it is tedious work. But he was unable to spare any manpower from repping/shooting SBUs to go put TCUs in 9R4 and PNQ into reinforce and kill one TCU in 3WE. And no op was posted when he couldn't hit the TCUs. No FC would take it. In a EUTZ heavy alliance-no FC.

So after a late night, where I FC'd from 6pm to about 3am, and flew a dictor in fleet until 5AM, I get on in USTZ afternoon and guess what?
PNQ/9R4/3WE are STILL vulnerable. Meaning they hadn't been hit, nor had NC hit the SBUs.
The vulnerability was up for 8 hours. 8 long hours with no response from NC or us. I know we were killing SBUs in our friend's constellation. But hot damn... it took 10 min to kill the TCU in 3WE. It wouldn't have taken much longer than that to reinforce 9R4 TCU. PNQ TCU as well.
Anyways.
This realization of still vulnerable systems caused Cardking and myself to use a fleet formed for a possible titan kill (Bundus found a FA Levi camping a drag bubble) to go to 3WE. Goons had not yet started forming for their 9R4 save op when we started hitting the TCU in 3WE. They formed 200 people rather quickly when we did though. We got sys-k on the line and brought 100 drakes up from Period Basis.

We finished off the 3WE TCU and burned to Z3 to wait for Sys k. NC had 250 in PNQ and were (finally) shooting our SBUs. After those were down they moved to 9R4, now up to 350 in their fleet.

SYS K arrived and we bridged into Q-X with decoy cyno in 9R4. NC didn't fall for bait and sat on station. We jumped in, they sat on station. We warped in for the fight.

On station lag was pretty bad. Some body started broadcasting targets as well-which was pretty stupid and uncalled for. I had people sorting A-Z for targets... but due to the lag locking was really slow. As stated later (after the engagement) most Maelstroms had only gotten a couple volleys off when Sort Dragon told everyone to switch from A-Z to Z-A
...

This then wasted the next 30 seconds unlocking five targets and relocking five targets. After the fight he made some rant about "it worked in my fleet fight before, asdjfhalksjdfhalsdf..."

I simply told him it was really laggy and stupid and he wasn't the FC so wasn't sure why he did that. Just because it worked for Zammas' fleet (It was actually Zamma's fleet, Sort is only FC when things go well, when things don't go well he wasn't the FC. Works really well for political cred inside IT where most leadership isn't actually in the fleet).

The 24 Scorpions they had on field were extremely effective. Hats off to the NC guys for that. Assuming 1/3 or 1/2 of their jams were getting off, thats 24 of our Maelstroms that were not working. Just as I and a few other FCs said months ago-Scorpions are effective. They removed over 1/3 of our Maelstroms from the fight before even killing them.

The initial engagement started going downhill at this point shortly after warping in on the station. We warped fleet to a pos and planned exit strategy. I checked out SPLE- and it was clear. We had fleet align to Q-X gate and announced warp out would be to Q-X. We then fleet warped to the SPLE- gate.

We landed on the edge of a bubble.

Shit.

I had gang align to Q-X as Goons would respond quickly (I was told that they were relying heavily on TS spy). Over CC I was told Q-X was clear.

It was not.

We warped right into their waiting fleet. Most of the deaths this evening came from that intel failure. Many safed up in Q-X. Many escaped through SPLE-. Some safed up in 9R4 and got out later. At that point fleet was split and we tried to get as many safely home as we could.
So yeah. Our eggress got screwed. We managed to save a lot of the fleet (all things considered) but it should have been smoother.
If you are FC-you make the calls. If you are co-FC you run ideas by FC instead of blurting out on comms what you think (unless asked by the FC, ie hes not on field or something). There was a helluva lot of chatter. Too many backseat comments and bullshit. One of the reasons I love running my gangs. There are only a couple people who talk on CC-and a couple more on who mainly listen. They know their places and we run smoothly. Huge alliance gangs are like herding cattle... and if you have too many cowboys trying to run the show you get a damn stampede.

However, 3WE TCU was killed.

We gave them a fight instead of running.

Fight was not horrendous, just the egress. We learned some new things in the fight, despite the heavy losses disengaging.
I also got more flak from alliance about "fun roaming" when I complained that SBUs were up for a whole day and no one in ITs notorious "EUTZ advantage" did anything about it. I was told Zammas was burnt out from the repping...

Cool. What about the other EUTZ FCs...?

I mentioned I FC for 4-7 hours a night and was told my "fun roams" don't mean anything and don't count.

Whoooooaaaaa not so fast.

So roaming in hostile space with fast moving ships doesn't count as FCing these days? Damn-I missed that memo. Fun gangs that net kills, gain participation and drop SBUs for an imaginary EUTZ number advantage is useless.

Get this:

IT Alliance considers the cloaky 20 man fleet that sits in the Cloud Ring pipe nightly reimbursible and effective. In fact, they would rather I FC 20 bombers and sit in the pipe all night. Granted, it would be less risky (although we seem to lose quite a lot of ships in those cloaky camp gangs) but talk about boring as hell. I don't know about the rest of IT-but I play EVE to have fun.
So for now, I continue to run the "MVN Roam" each night and get between 25-50 in fleet. The guys in my gangs are getting better and better at following orders. I get fan mail about how fun they are to be in. Imagine that.... fun while playing EVE?

If you value your fleet members, value keeping them alive, call them out when they do dumb things AND teach them to do it right, and just overall not treat them like shit.... its amazing what happens. They actually HAVE FUN and join the next night.

Soap box done. Next post will be about HAC roam last night.