Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

Nice blog post over at The Art Of The Gank about Ironfleet’s salvage adventures, even if they are a little shaky on the distinction between salvage and theft:

I hesitate to call this a proper “gank” as it’s really ore can thievery that tumbled into a weird sort of gank thanks to the not-so-brilliant reactions of the miners involved. But it’s still a good read, and a great lesson – for you miners out there – on aggression flagging, timers, and generally what not to do when an ore thief shows up.

Meet Ironfleet Towing & Salvage, an EVE player corp that has taken to blogging about their particular playstyle and experiences. It’s well worth a read and a subscription (and hat tip to them on WordPress theme choice – I liked it so much I decided to play with it here!). Their playstyle seems largely limited to ore can thieving in Empire space, something I generally abhor, but hey, it takes all kinds to keep EVE an interesting place to play. And they write a good blog with a touch of humor, so they can’t be ALL bad.

Anyway, the gank in question – Cruise Missiles Incoming! Again! Enjoy!

Thanks Art, I appreciate the kind words about the theme.

Uh, oh, look what a vanity Google search turned up. This is from the Tweak’n’Co forums (closed, but visible in Google snippet and Google cache). I remember the quoted Braedin character having a big and smacky mouth in local, though I don’t recall the actual incident that turned him away from the mining life:

I’d like to get myself a Rokh.

…

im having trouble decided wether or not i should mine most of the minerals and then refine all but the good loot i get from lvl 4s and buy a one run bpc and manufacture it myself, but after my incident in the belt with the theif marlenus.
ill probably do level4s with you guys to get 200mil

Let me scan the killmails…

Aha! My memory is refreshed. This is the guy who came after my blockade runner in a mining cruiser fitted with a single HAM launcher. Turned out he didn’t have the speed to control range against me, so I kept him warp scrambled but outside the range of his hams while I chewed him up with the missile launcher that fits in the Crane’s one high slot. It was actually one of the funniest combats of my Eve career.

2007.03.18 18:03

Victim: Braedin
Alliance: NONE
Corp: Tweek ‘n’ Co
Destroyed: Osprey
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7

Involved parties:

Name: Marlenus (laid the final blow)
Security: 1.1
Alliance: NONE
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Ship: Crane
Weapon: Havoc Heavy Missile

Destroyed items:

Miner I
Miner I
Expanded Cargohold I
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Inhibitor I
‘Langour’ Drive Disruptor I
XT-2800 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I
Hellfire Assault Missile, Qty: 329 (Cargo)

So I was sitting in a .7 belt in my stealth bomber. Cloaked.

There were some miners in system who had been unpleasant. And there was an Ironfleet can there with some ore they had mined.

I was curious to see whether they would come back for it. (They didn’t.)

I got bored. I blew up some rats. Kaboomski, cheap thrills.

I cloaked again.

I turned my attention to another computer screen.

A long time later, I looked back.

There’s somebody in a frigate, flashing red on my overview. Next to one of my wrecks.

Loot thief? Have I met an enterprising young loot thief?

Maybe there’s hope for the youth of today.

All this passes through my mind as I uncloak, turn on my sensor booster, and start locking. I have nothing but admiration for the aggressive acquisition of loot from whatever source derived, but in EVE the old saying is true: It’s a dog-eat-dog world. And today, my young friend, you seem to wearing a juicy fresh pair of Milk Bone underwears.

Click one cruise launcher. Fly, my pretty, fly true.

Kaboom.

Your Wrath Cruise Missile hits Fett RUS (Ibis), doing 348.7 damage.

Ooops.

Ibis?

Young, I could handle. Valuable lesson and all that. But a baby? Who has (it turned out) been playing less than a day?

My first and only one-shot insta-pop of a player character. Go me.

On the plus side, it was a VERY pretty boom.

I convo’d the guy to apologize and explain, but he seemed not to have any English. So I sent him some ISK for his trouble and went on about my day.

Famous (and famously even-tempered) pirate Tiller posted the following anecdote about a not-so-good day. His opponent made me laugh:

Ahh, can’t beat a gentle midday gate camp, what could go wrong?

No blobs, low traffic… smell of burnt noob filling my lungs.

Erm… not quite.

So there we are, hugging low sec gate, 1 Domi, 2 tackle Drakes, 1 Zealot… Geddon pops up on scanner. JUMPJUMPJUMP. We jump through to get in tackle position on other side of gate.

ERROR1: “He’s engaged me!” One of us fail to jump and sit there instead. Geddon aggros him.

ERROR2: “Scram him!” This now leaves our drake aggro’d, tackled and under sentry and geddon fire without support.

ERROR3: “Get back to gate and jump back to help!” But, we all head back one at a time and each in turn die. One of us even aggro a passing shuttle which prevents jump.

Our Domi is last to die, with the help of some passing falcon pilot….

FINAL SCORE:

Domi, Drake, Drake, Zealot all lost to a single Geddon.

LESSON FROM OP:

Everyone has there ‘time’ to suck at eve, that was ours. YARRRR!!

…

Icing on the cake was some guy in local asked Geddon what he was doing.

Geddon man calmly replies:

“just killing some pirates”

“do you need help” he asks

“no I’m ok thanks”

LOL, the smacktalk has finally reached Ironfleet.com, in the form of this comment on an old salvage report, apparently by the subject thereof:

This is the fuckin sadest thing I have ever seen you sad mother fucker. I will meet you anytime any place and lets se the convo then so I can post my convo of you begging for your life. You are a thief and thats that, dress it up how you want if it makes it easier for you. Anyway if you think your brave lets have it you sad prick.

If you’ve ever wondered why CCP seems unusually committed to reprimanding and banning folks who make real world threats (“I’m going to find out where you live in real life and come kill your pets!”), here’s why:

Mexican World of Warcraft player Bronco Carson reported to local police on Saturday that 3 men broke into his home and beat his arms with clubs and smashed his computer. It was supposedly in retaliation for Carson stalking and repeatedly killing one of the attackers wife’s character during computer video game play.

Carson admitted to police that he had been “making it hard for her to get far in the game.” He said that after repeated online threats from the woman, she sent her husband and friends over to his house to “take care of him.” Carson later said that he had made the mistake of telling her where he lived and “if her husband was man enough to just come meet me to settle this.”

2 weeks leading up to the assault he said he had been harassed by a few characters constantly during game play. “I knew that I might be messed with in the game but I didn’t really expect her husband to come looking for me. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Carson suffered 2 broken fingers and a fractured wrist during the assault. They also destroyed his computer and entertainment center before leaving. No arrests have been made in connection with the assault.

OK, kiddies, what have we learned?

1) Even if you like to play aggressively, spread the love around. Focusing your gankage on one person is (a) being a dick and (b) earns you bad karma, which can come home to roost in unexpected ways.

2) Yeah, it’s only a game. Until you start stalking another man’s wife and insulting his manhood when he tries to defend her. Then it can get personal. Not to mention violent.

3) If you’re going to be an online dickhead who hides behind the safety and anonymity of the internet so that your asshole behavior doesn’t have real world consequences, then (for fuck’s sake!) don’t forget the “hiding” part. Giving your online victims your address and taunting them to come over and fight you? Survey says: STUPID!

4) It’s only a game. Until it gets serious. Which unhappy day may come for the other guy before it comes for you.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing against gameplay that pisses people off and I’m not defending the real-world gank that Mr. Carson suffered. (Quite the contrary, those boys need some jail time.) But I do think it’s worth pointing out that to a very real extent, Mr. Carson appears to have been a victim of his own extreme griefing and smacktalking.

From I Can Haz Cheeseburger? we get Capsuleer Kitty:

Have you ever had that mail bug that mixes together two adjacent mails in your Evemail inbox? I had that today, and it was funny.

A corpmate (who also runs a Level IV mission tanking character) saw yesterday’s big salvage and wrote to inquire about getting some of the items:

you got
1x True Sansha Medium Energy Neutralizer (10+ million ISK ea)
3x E50 Prototype Energy Vampire (7 million ISK ea)
1x Invulnerability Field II (5 million ISK ea)
1x Large Shield Extender II (5 million ISK ea)
1x Warp Disrupter II (5 million ISK)
4x Shield Power Relay II (7 million ISK)

can i Please have the
Invulnerability Field II
and
4 Shield Power Relay II

I SO WANT!!!…… TY

Well, it’s his mission running crew that keeps me in Arbalest missile launchers, so of course I sent him the loot. But the funny part is, he’d once sent me an Evemail sharing one of those funny Mad Lib style “complaint forms” you can send to people who blew you up. And the two mails got mixed the first time I opened my Evemail box this morning. So what I saw was this:

you got
1x True Sansha Medium Energy Neutralizer (10+ million ISK ea)
3x E50 Prototype Energy Vampire (7 million ISK ea)
1x Invulnerability Field II (5 million ISK ea)
1x Large Shield Extender II (5 million ISK ea)
1x Warp Disrupter II (5 million ISK)
4x Shield Power Relay II (7 million ISK)

can i Please have the
Invulnerability Field II
and
4 Shield Power Relay II

I SO WANT!!!…… TY

[] Privateers Alliance
[] D² Alliance
[] Imperium
[] The Kieretsu
[] some other alliance no one gives a toss about

to come and

[] Kill you all
[] Kill you all and your families
[] Stab you all repeatedly with a carving knife
[] *****your women
[] Kill your mothers
[] Have sex with your family dog

[] Other (Please State)

as revenge for you destroying my

[] Ship.
[] Wallet balance.
[] Pod.
[] Implants.
[] Ego.

I sincerely hope you all

[] Get ass raped by big black men,
[] Contract sexually transimtted diseases,
[] Rot in hell,
[] Get podded back to the stone age,
[] Escrow me my stuff back,
[] Go **** yourselves,
[] Get off on killing people,

Because the loss of my stuff in our encounter was
very trauma

I was like, you ask me for loot but you want the former owners to come and be mean to me? Dude, WTF? But then I remembered that this was text from the adjacent mail in the box.

The complete complaint form, which is funny, reads like this:

IF YOU HAVE BEEN ATTACKED AND WISH TO SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCES OF THE EVENT WITH US, WE WOULD APPRECIATE IT IF YOU WOULD FILL OUT THE FOLLOWING FORM, IN ORDER TO HELP US IMPROVE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION.

THANK YOU

————————————–

Hello,

My name is [insert victim name], and I was:

[] Pod Killed
[] Ship Killed
[] Ransomed

by [insert name here] on [insert date] in the system [Insert system name].

I am writing to inform you, that yourself, and the rest of your corp are

[] Bastards
[] ****ers
[] Evil *******
[] Tossers
[] ********s
[] Griefers
[] Pirate Scum
[] ****s
[] Homosexuals
[] ****s
[] Mother*******
[] Lamers
[] Losers
[] *****es

and you

[] Ruin the game for
[] Enrage
[] Bankrupt
[] Give too much grief to
[] Destroy the point in playing for

[] Other (Please State)

people like me. There for, you pack of [insert abusive plural name], I have took it upon myself to enlist the help of my

[] Whole Corporation
[] Whole Alliance
[] Favourite Merc Corp
[] Mate who’s been playing for 2 years and is
uber
[] Main, who’s a member of

[] Xetic
[] CVA
[] U’K
[] Stain
[] Privateers Alliance
[] D² Alliance
[] Imperium
[] The Kieretsu
[] some other alliance no one gives a toss about

to come and

[] Kill you all
[] Kill you all and your families
[] Stab you all repeatedly with a carving knife
[] *****your women
[] Kill your mothers
[] Have sex with your family dog
[] Other (Please State)

as revenge for you destroying my

[] Ship.
[] Wallet balance.
[] Pod.
[] Implants.
[] Ego.

I sincerely hope you all

[] Get ass raped by big black men,
[] Contract sexually transimtted diseases,
[] Rot in hell,
[] Get podded back to the stone age,
[] Escrow me my stuff back,
[] Go **** yourselves,
[] Get off on killing people,

Because the loss of my stuff in our encounter was very trauma

Very trauma, I tell you!

And just like that, it’s over:

2007.04.15 20:46
CONCORD has declared this war invalid as it breaches one or more articles in the Yulai Convention.

And Ironfleet survives yet another war without so much as a scratch in the legendary Caldari paintjobs that grace our vessels.

Eidelon was a class act, if a very quiet one. I confess I’m not sure what the point is of going to war without making any sort of demand first, but I’m sure he had his reasons.

So, since Jim was busy dancing with Vespa IIs (see below), I thought I ought to rondezvous in system with him, just in case he needed some extra firepower. I wasn’t far away, but the Sunday afternoon lag was terrible, and I wound up getting disconnected a couple of times on my way to the excitement. Finally got there (too late to be useful) and warped to the station we use in that system.

Uh, oh, it’s Eidelon again. Like the man says in the movie, “who are those guys?”

I’ll leave the timestamps up so you can enjoy the speedy lock he got on me (remember that I appeared on his screen without warning, so there’s human reaction time in there too):

[ 2007.04.15 18:49:33 ] (notify) Warping to [station name ] prior to making docking attempt
[ 2007.04.15 18:50:19 ] (notify) Requested to dock at … station
[ 2007.04.15 18:50:19 ] (notify) Setting course to docking perimeter
[ 2007.04.15 18:50:28 ] (notify) Requested to dock at … station
[ 2007.04.15 18:50:29 ] (combat) Eidelon [MK1](Rapier) misses you completely.
[ 2007.04.15 18:50:29 ] (combat) Eidelon [MK1](Rapier) lands a hit on you which glances off, causing no real damage.
[ 2007.04.15 18:50:29 ] (combat) Eidelon [MK1](Rapier) barely misses you.
[ 2007.04.15 18:50:29 ] (notify) Your docking request has been accepted. Your ship will be towed into station.

His salvos were “landing” within ten seconds of my appearance on the grid, and I was in a frigate. I know that’s not awesomely fast, but it’s the first time I’ve ever been locked during the time it takes to do an instadock, so it impressed me.

Plus, I had to look up “Rapier” just to find out what it was. (Yeah, after a year I still am a noob when it comes to combat ships, so?) Turns out it’s a Minmatar force recon cruiser, very expensive, very deadly.

Jim says he wants one, and why does this two-bit corp not have one sitting in the hangar waiting for him to learn to fly it?

I told him “bring home better salvage, and lots of it.”

On the bright side, The Rapier has bonuses for medium guns, and they don’t seem to have been landing very well on my disposable salvage kestrel.

Anyway, I’ll keep watching the rear view, Eidelon seems to get a little bit closer every time!