Alliance Warfare- defending the Distillery

I've decided to correct the name I post under, I am not a new poster, my old name was 'anon'. I am no longer an annonymous pirate, I am mazzilliu of Sniggerdly.

Anyways, we along with several other corps were hired by Interstellar Alcohol Conglomerate to help defend their outpost. Mercenary Coalition and Firmus Ixion recently put all the POSes in G-7WUF into reinforced mode, removing all sovereignty claims on the system, and soon afterwards took the outpost. Soon the IAC POSes were coming out of reinforced mode and would become vulnerable once again to MC dreadnaughts. IAC was calling on as many forces as possible to help them defend their home, and despite the fact that we were killing IAC members only a day previous, the offer of ISK was good and we accepted.

We promised them T2 fitted sniping battleships, and we delivered. We undocked with almost 30 members, and only a few of us weren't in sniping battleships. On the way, we encountered an Interstellar Starbase Syndicate camp between us and our destination. I was scouting at the time, and reported 32 on the gate, half of which were battleships, no dictors so I got away. As instructed I asked in local the name of their gang leader, so that our leader could explain the situation. As a neutral entity, ISS would not ordinarily attack players in 0.0 much less camp gates, but this was a different situation as we tend to practice one of the more extreme forms of NBSI policy. Nontheless, the reason we were there was to help IAC, an alliance friendly with ISS. they refused to relent, offering us the option of ejecting from our ships and escaping with our pods, so, with cries of "prepare to be boarded!", we jumped in. they outnumbered us slightly, approximately 1.4:1 odds, but in the end we held the gate and scooped the loot. According to our killboards, Losses were: tempest, rifter, claymore, scorpion. Kills were: scorp scorp domi thorax thorax cyclone omen and 2 capsules. usually we avoid fighting when its clear we will sustain so many losses but there was no other way for us to get to our destination. We waited in a safe while fallen corpmates refitted. IAC members contacted ISS and told them to leave us alone, so we continued to G-7WUF.

After some holdups involving us avoiding Firmus Ixion gatecamps, we merged with the main IAC gang and arrived in G-7WUF. There were almost 400 people in local. And the lag? That sort of lag is something one should be required to experience before they decide to join an alliance. Perhaps if they did, alliances wouldn't be so big. We were waiting 30 seconds for modules to activate. Gang members were dropping and emergency warping right and left. The node crashed three times as of this writing, perhaps it will crash more by the end of the night. Half the time we spent in that hole of a system was spent logging in. After the first node crash our members which managed to log in met in one place and began looking for targets that emergency warped back from gates(even if a player was in a safespot, after this crash they would be returned to a random place in the system, sometimes to gates). Most of the returning pilots were friendly, but we did manage to find one FIX raven which was the only kill we got under contract that night. It seems that our guns weren't what was needed, it was our mere presence in the system, as there was no real fight that night. From what i gather, the system became too laggy for MC or FIX dreadnaughts to take any of the POSes, and IAC began taking down the outpost's shields to reclaim it, as well as bringing in Ospreys to repair the POS shields. Right after the second node crash a GM- "GM Ginger" spoke in Local asking pilots not to do things that caused lag, in this case referring to cans(specifically, not containing bookmarks) used by IAC members as warping points to defend against snipers. It was to no avail, as the members of Local could not even spam Ginger's comment off my screen before the node crashed once more.

After we managed to log back in, we concluded our contract time was up. We were paid in full and did what we needed to do, so we began the slow arduous task of warping to the gate and jumping through. the lag was so intense it took us a long time to get all of our gang members through the gate and into the next system. On the other side of the gate, it was much better. It was an uneventful trip there(compared to our regular ops), and it was an uneventful trip home. Alliance warfare sucks. So does having so many friendlies.

Cleared for publication by: Ander