January 23, 2018, 21:51:10 UTC—My Jackdaw fleet just received orders from leadership to jump to 9-4RP2.
For the better part of the evening, we were roaming from Delve to the vicinity of 9-4. We had managed to score a few kills, even faced off against a small neutral fleet…For 30 seconds until they warped off, at least. We had fun, we were organised.
But everything changed when we jumped to 9-4RP2.
Facing off against time
I had participated in the first armor-timer, but this TiDi shocked me. After being inside the jump-tunnel for approximately fifteen minutes, I landed 1,000,000km from the gate, with a few members of my fleet. We we’re the lucky ones, because the numbers in our fleet were dropping fast due to disconnects while jumping.
At exactly 22:12:10 I was warping to a citadel as ordered. When landing four minutes later, I noticed that the few members of my fleet on grid had gone ahead and warped to the Keepstar, in order to get on the killmail. Comms were in chaos, and numbers were dropping, so they had the time.
I decided to do the same. At 22:49:01 I had the Keepstar targeted, and was cycling one of my guns. I flew to a friend of mine, who I soon discovered was a member of an enemy alliance, and I wanted to welp to him.
It didn’t matter. The rest of my guns, grouped, wouldn’t activate, and at 23:40, 50 minutes after attacking the Keepstar, I was back in warp to the Fortizar where the FC was.
And then I disconnected. Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to login, I was going to bed.
If you think this is a bad experience, then try being one the carriers having their fighters bugged out, and slowly seeing that the repair timer was ticking away.
And now an opinion
Avree of Hoover Inc. described it well on Reddit. He said that CCP cheated everyone out of a fun fight, and I agree.
I have been playing MMO’s since I was just a child—literally playing MMOs like RuneScape before I could tie my own shoes, and leading WoW Raids on Black Temple while I was in elementary school…Fortunately without comms.
I have experienced the ups and downs of those games over the years, but never have I seen a game with such an ignorant publisher, and such fundamentally broken mechanics.
In my 3 months in Goonswarm, I have been on exactly nine fleets. In those nine fleets, I had only one propped fleet fight: a Welp Fleet with Clavo Oxadido. I was part of a small engagement in DaBigRedBoat’s “strategic peacetime destroyer fleet” in a stream a month and a half ago. You can see me get a few kills in around 5 minutes. I don’t blame Goonswarm, I’d rather blame the enemies we pay a visit to, all docking up and without a response-fleet.
So I chose to liquidate my assets, except one Jackdaw, and I’ll be quiting soon, unless anyone here knows a way to get fun fleet fights, with an actual undocked enemy fleet.
