6 days till Quantum Rise

Well this was predictable. CCP does not do updates right before a tournament so the tournament at fanfest can go thru without recent changes affecting it. Looks like that's the date for the speed changes. You have less than one week to enjoy your nano rigs. I'm looking forward to the announcements at fanfest.

Lost two stabbers last night. But again they were fully insured and T1 equipped so it's not hurting as much as the T2 equiped BS killmail I did get on. Once again I'm not flying expensive T2 ships when my fleet role is mainly followon tackle. One of two thing tends to happen to such ships. Either they survive and you get on many kill mails or they get chewed up rather quickly. It's realy all down to luck. We tend to get killed by people trying to get away more often than not. If the enemy is trying to stay and fight it's a different story.

I suddenly realized that I mentioned a pilot by name in my last post without explaining who he is. MirrorGod is a pilot that is a member of Heritic Nation. He was part of the Minmatar Militia and was one of our more popular FCs while he flew with us. Some members have taken his turn to piracy as a bit of a betrayal. Personaly I don't, he was a pirate before FW, he'll be a pirate after FW. He was a decent FC while in the Militia, he'll be good after. This animosity and the fact that he and his pirate buddies tend to fly in Kourmonen and Huola a lot have resulted in some very predictable things happening.

1) He knows he's going to get primaried.
2) He knows that he will get attacked by militia pilots even when we know he's got backup.
3) His tanking skills are excelent.

Basicly you can tell what's going to happen, he flies as bait for any pirate op. We know it. They know it. Some times it works, sometimes it doesn't. Last night they did a better job of getting the pirate numbers in space up. However we could tell what they were flying and compare this to what we had. So I lost a Stabber to MirrrorGod but on the other hand, the Typhoon I was fighting with got out so I consider that a fair trade. We spent the rest of the night dodging his bigger fleet.

Repeated fights with these pirates has honed our judgement of when to engage and when not to. The pirates tend to have the tonnage advantage over us. But we tend to have numbers and ship maneuverability over theirs. They tend to go for DPS, we tend to prefer more EW support. They tend to use more neutral alt scouts, we tend to use more frigate/inty pilots so the scouting is about as good between the two fleets. I suspect we are not great financially for them due to the number of T1 ships we tend to fly and since we tend to take out T2 fitted BS on a semi-regular basis. Continued conflict with these guys is inevitable since they don't shy away from fighting FW ships and they base themselves in systems with occupancy.

The Amarr seem to have lost more of their pilots proportionately (or those that are left fight in different time zones). This means that any large fleet actions tend to be against the pirates these days. We'll see how the next few weeks go after any changes on the 11th.