Do you like bananas?

Greetings everypony.  Its been a while since I've made any blog posts.  Truth be told a lot of this has to do with the fact that my alliance Moar Tears has been going through lots of changes in EVE because of the war dec changes and the fact that I've been having much more fun playing the game than writing about it.  For those who don't know, we recently joined Faction Warfare and are fighting for the Amarr militia.  While it took us a few weeks to get used to the pace of lowsec and fighting against properly PVP fit targets that actually shoot back we're finally getting our footing.  Everyone is having a blast despite the fact that none of us have been able to bust out our T3s since we've been in FW.

When we first joined, the Amarr militia was very disorganized.  None of the groups really worked together and each group tended to do their own thing.  You can read more about this in my blog post from several weeks ago that I wrote but never published.  How times have changed since then.  After several initial difficulties and strong personalities figuring out how to work together with one another, the Amarr militia has turned a corner and things are beginning to look up for once.  There are many reasons for this, the first one I think is discovering that the Goons were pumping LP into the Minmatar militia to keep their warzone control tiers up.  While many Minmatar argue that they can still get to Tier 4 easily without Goon help and downplay the effects of Goon manipulation on the state of the Amarr/Minmatar FW side of things, I would like to point out that even if they can get to Tier 4 with little to no effort whenever they want the biggest impact that the Goon pump and dump had was on the Amarr militia's morale.  When we first started, there was literally nothing we could do to get the Minmatar militia's warzone influence bar to budge.  We would offensive plex their systems down and they were always at a solid T4 warzone control.  It literally felt like banging your head against a wall.  Add that to the fact that whenever we did take a system it was because the Minmatar willing let us in order to farm more ISK, many of us wondered what the point was when everything we did only seemed to do two things, give the Minmatar fun PVP fights and allow them to dance in their ISK fountain.  Now, let me take a step back and remind you that Moar Tears joined for the PVP, not the ISK, so we were more or less apathetic about the FW mechanics themselves, but from a militia wide standpoint it had a very adverse effect, which also impact our fun levels because without a motivated militia to fight with, there was little our 30 man alliance could do against larger better organized fighting groups.

Nonetheless, we kept fighting and then something wonderful happened.  Within the Amarr militia leadership there was an epiphany.  It didn't matter what strategic goals we agreed on were best to fight the Minmatar, it didn't matter that we all had to agree with each other on every decision that was made within our respective alliances, the only thing that mattered was that we work together and learn to support one another.  A few days later I was on a podcast with GSF director Courthouse discussing our FW situation and the first thing he said was how hilariously broken FW was at the moment.  Then, a few days after that Goons came out on the forums about how they had made millions manipulating the FW LP markets.  The next day CCP declared this as an exploit and the massive pumpings had stopped.  For the first time we saw our plexing efforts bear fruit and even though the Minmatar got back into T4 today, you didn't feel like there was this phantom force creating this invisible wall for your militia and we even got them down to Tier 2 warzone control a few times.  A few days after that, Inferno 1.1 came where CCP removed all EWAR from the plex NPCs, which evened the field by allowing the Amarr to solo AFK plex for the first time since ever.  In the past, the Minmatar have been able to solo AFK plex against the Amarr while any plexing efforts for the Amarr generally needed to be group activities.  I still think that the plexing mechanics are terribly broken, which the fine scholar and fellow blogger Poetic Stanziel covers here.

With the Inferno 1.1 patch CCP finally fixed, after 4 years, the bug where you could cause plexes to stop respawning until the next downtime.  This was a huge deal for us because it basically meant that the Minmatar could bug all the plexes in the systems that we wanted to actively plex, thus stopping us from taking them over.  We could also defensive plex where needed, since in the past you could run plexes to take over a system and when you were done for the day, bug all the plexes so the opposing side couldn't defensive plex.  I'm sure this activity went both ways, but in the case of Amarr/Min FW where warzone control was so lopsided it completely stagnated any system takeover except where the Minmatar wanted to purposefully cede systems for the sake of ze LP for taking it back.  The plex bugging was one of the most frustrating things because when TZ activity levels finally flipped in a favourable manner, once the opposing side decided to dock up for the night you couldn't attempt to take over key systems.  Also, attempting to offensive plex deep in their territory to knock their tiers was mostly pointless as well because the Goon manipulations meant that your efforts would have absolutely no impact whatsoever.

Needless to say, now that the Amarr are finally fighting on a level playing field in terms of game mechanics, things have turned around considerably and many of the groups whose member bases had all but given up on the new Inferno FW changes are remotivated and blowing up ships and losing their own in glorious fashion once again.  With a month of FW experience under my belt before and after the scandal/changes I can truthfully say Amarrian "whining" about FW being unfairly stacked against them was completely justified.  I can only help but wonder how things will be for us moving forward.  Despite the propaganda wars and constant smack talk between the two militias, the Minmatar are very worthy opponents and competent PVPers.  I personally am excited and my alliance as having some of the most fun they've had in EVE since the forming Moar Tears.

Also, I <3 Fweddit.  A lot of people have been saying that once they get higher SP and have gotten their feet wet with FW they will be a force to be reckoned with.  I would like to say this is completely fucking wrong and the very definition of understatement.  Everyone should be fucking terrified of the prospect of Fweddit getting a few months of experience and SP.  Big playz.