Let the Fires Rage

This weekend I had my first real opportunity to truly experience the epic lag that has so many capsuleers up in arms. When I was in college, I actually majored in Multimedia Technologies, with an emphasis in video. I loved every bit of it and had truly intended to continue in that field yet life threw me down a different road. Anyway, reason I point that out is that I’ve wanted to try my hand at frapping a fleet battle and other activities in Eve and possibly see how well I can do at making a video of it. Unfortunately, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to include a large fleet battle with the sort of lag I experienced during the op.

Prime example following.

In the continued efforts by Against All Authorities and Ushra Khan to burn Providence, a fleet was gathered this past Saturday to put an I-Hub into reinforced. Intel had been gained that CVA had amassed a rather decent sized fleet to defend the system so we were expecting a good fight. At one point, I think I heard the FC say something about our opponents having close to 400. (but I’m not positive on that and later found out Atlas was already there. Thus, I don’t know how many they had so can’t really judge by the local count.) Our fleet in itself had roughly 200. Even if CVA did have 400, we were certainly not daunted by their numbers. One thing history has taught us is that CVA lacks in organizational skills to handle large fleet battles. That’s really not the best way to word it as I’m sure they have some great FC’s, but with so many corporations and alliances being mixed together to defend their systems, they lose a lot of the cohesion and organizational training that the other nullsec alliances have.

Anyways, we waited at our staging POS, hovering around the titan, waiting for the FC to give the command for the Battleship and support fleet to bridge in. Soon enough, the order was given and we all jumped.

Things for me got a little crazy at this point. I’m not entirely sure what happened but immediately the FC started calling targets. However, for some strange reason, I’m looking around and seeing absolutely nothing. Everything seemed to be appearing correctly on my overview yet there was nobody around. So I randomly picked another pilot I knew to be in a battleship and pressed the warp to. Sure enough, my ship turns about and soon enters warp. I don’t recall a titan bridge ever working like that before. Dropping people in the destination system at random locations?

Either way, I arrived just in time to see a nice long list of enemy ships and started locking em up one after the other, doing my best to make sure to include the ones the FC was calling as primaries and secondaries. I didn’t even think however that I’d managed to lock any of them fast enough to even get a shot in but the following day, I’m glancing at our corporation’s killboard and realized I was actually the final blow for one of the hostile battleships. Really quite amusing I have to say seen as I seriously don’t recall being able to shoot anyone. Between them running, ships turning to dust in seconds, and the lag itself, hostile ships were just disappearing too fast for my systems to keep up with.

So basically CVA was quickly bugging out. Only ships we really killed were the few stragglers that weren’t quick enough to run. We then warped to the I-Hub, shot that for a bit, got news of some ships jumping in system, warped to that location to engage, they again were popping what seemed like faster than the FC could call em, warped back, put the I-Hub into reinforced, then proceeded to manually fly back to our original staging system and titan bridged the rest of the way home.

So all in all I’d have to say it was probably the fastest CTA I’ve ever been a part of. I think we waited for the jump in longer than we were actually there shooting.

Now lag for me wasn’t as bad as what I’ve heard it being, but it was still a pain the ass. Either way, at this point, for a video I may just have to settle with small gang fights.

I’m also in the process of figuring out a good video editor to get for doing this. Currently, as I’m believing most people use, I’ve been playing around with windows moviemaker. However, I’m considering other options such as Adobe Premier (given my passion for Adobe products) as well as a few others. Any suggestions would be happily welcomed.

Oh, and I have to say that thus far this move by the Corp has been great. I’ve seen more CTA’s and fleet action going on than I have ever recalled. I’m actually beginning to wonder if I’m ever going to find time to carebear and make some isk (something I’m getting to the point of needing desperately as my wallet starts to look a little barren). Given the corp is attempting to prove itself to our new alliance brethren, we’ve established a rule that if your not in fleet during a CTA, you need to log off. This is simply to show that Silver Snake Enterprises is not just going to be a buff in numbers, but an active and useful asset to the alliance. And I’m proud to say we’ve all held to that mindset very well.