And a week ago.

Ok, so I haven't been posting a lot lately. Part of that was due to real life part of that due to opsec. It is kind of hard to post about something that may give a clue that we're about to lower the hammer on some idiots. Just in case those idiots are following my blog for intel purposes. As an alliance leader I sometimes have to walk a fine line between letting you guys know about various aspects of life in EVE and operational security to make sure that any surprise we may be whipping up is still a surprise when we execute.

So, at the start of the weekend of the 2nd week of alliance tournament VII, one of my CEOs comes to me and tells me his high sec research corp just got war-dec'ed. Some scouting and intel dump later and "yep, have your corp apply to the alliance - it probably wont' be exciting but things should work out".

Apparently he attempted to talk to the leader and diplomat of the attacking corp, but was simply rebuffed by having his conversations shut down. How rude. So this 24 man corp doesn't realize it but it's just picked on a research tower associated with a wormhole alliance...

So as per policy, what can be shutdown is and the tower is gunned up. The alt research corp applies to the alliance and we settle in to wait for the war to go live first then for the alliance to get sucked into it second.

Phase one of this little jaunt into "Diplomacy and scouting are important in EVE" starts off with a weekend of some of my pilots engineering sneaky kills off these guys, and them damaging the shields and some of the guns at the tower. Note that they are unable to place the small tower into reinforced even during the 6-8h where the alliance could not help to it's full effect (this qualifies as FAIL - as we've seen in wormhole ops, small towers are easy to crack open if you know what you are doing - even when opposed.

Once the alliance joined the war (gotta love inheriting wars on the cheap), what followed were station games and not a lot of conclusive action except for one of my pilots loosing a Megathron to the lack of a headset and the EVE server going down on Saturday.

During this period, at one point the (by then) wartargets split from the area were they were attacking our tower. Judicious use of the locator agents managed to allow us to localize them where they settled down. Humm, Tabbetzur... Some scouting revealed that they had a low sec POS in that system (Thank you guys for leading us straight to your POS).

By this time it was pretty evident that these guys are basically high sec griefers. They amuse themselves by war-decking defenseless research corps and get their shits and giggles with station games. By the end of the weekend the wardec had expired and the PvP was predictably lackluster.

to be continued...