The Rocky Road To Faction Warfare

Ruminations

Since the first couple of week of Hulkageddon, Fancy Hats has been rather dull.  Star and I, with the help of Orakkus were mostly busy getting every door to nullsec slammed in our faces one way or another.  There just isn’t much many nullsec alliances think a corp under 20 (or 50) members can offer no matter what they do.

We considered wardecs, briefly, we considered wormholes, a little more seriously, we even talked very briefly about breaking up the band.  We talked about how to build our membership, we talked about how to make ourselves more interesting and attractive to the kind of players we want to bring into Fancy Hats.  We talked a lot, we plotted we planned.  We finally came down to Faction Warfare, and not without some serious discussion as there are consequences to it.  Yes that “C” word that is EvE’s triumph and tragedy.

Picking Sides

Faction Warfare immediately restricts you to “safely” operating in half of highsec, with the other half now infested with nasty hostile NPCs and even meaner players, who can even operate with some success in your “safe” zone just look at Loren Gallen’s killboard to see the kinds of things people do in space where Faction Police “Chase” them.

You can play FW without tanking your standings with the opposing faction, but I doubt most of my guys will really be able to do that.  We have taken steps to protect ourselves by giving ourselves a “buffer” but again, there’s limits.  In reality we will most likely have most of our guys locked out of Gallente space and possibly Minmatar as well.  This isn’t a minor consideration, although it’s also not as big as it would have been when we considered wardecs a viable strategy.

We also looked at the various factions.  Gallente was out immediately.  We simply don’t have the resources to lock our less capable players out of Jitamart, even if we could latch onto an alliance with a logistical tail.  Minmatar was out for the same reason for all the kinda-friendly contacts we have there.  This left Amarr and Caldari.

Amarr had practically nothing going for it at the point we started our preparation.  They looked like a disorganized mess on a good day and were close to being chased out of lowsec altogether.  FWEDDIT has certainly inspired a culture change in Amarr that has them fighting more actively and successfully, but even with this change, I don’t want to enter an unsettled situation.  Fancy Hats hasn’t prospered in those circumstances, we really are too fragile a tree to withstand a storm like that.

Caldari wasn’t a whole lot more impressive to be honest.  We had very casual contacts who were rejoining the fight, which was helpful, but there were still some pretty negative indicators, especially when it came to the pretty blatant plex-farming indicated by the stats.  All the same they were the best choice for us.

FOR THE STATE!

Having made the decision we did what we probably do best.  Short-term, operational level planning.  We had numerous people come back from stints out of game spanning between weeks to over a year for one gent, so getting them all on the same page has taken some effort and my officers have done a lot of work helping people get ready.

Meanwhile we have to decide how we will screen recruits, as FW is a bit nasty when it comes to spais and such.  We expect to have a lot of rust to blow off the old warp scrams as well.  I suspect the Gallente will fight back a bit harder than the Hulks did.  We plan on flying cheap for a while, no point getting back into rhythm in really expensive ships when we are far more likely to win eggs than see lot of big blue booms for a while.

The main objectives we have are to have fun.  This game is fun goddamnit!

put up good numbers, especially as we get used to working together again, and build ourselves up so that when we want to move on we can pick our destination and not scrabble for scraps like beggars outside a church.

I’m using it every time I can