I’m a fleet commander in the Imperium. A friend presented me with an idea for a job a week before the end of the NIP.
I was told to gather my pilots. That means people with whom I fly, but also my real friends. I trust them at different levels. Some I would trust with a secret operation, some I would trust with an expensive ship, and some I would trust with my accounts (I even know some of their moms). The idea was to get them ready to do a sneaky, no-one-knows type of operation – entosis.
I hate entosis. But since I was asked to do it, and because I’m glad to help out in any way possible, I accepted, but I don’t want to tell you an entosis history. I want to share the reason why every time I play this game with my community I am still surprised. And it’s why I love EVE.
I was given full control over the way I wanted to organize the operation, and I talked with and invited whoever I wanted. I did so, however, with fear. For two reasons. First, I hate to disappoint. I was asked to do a job and was even given one week to prepare. Second, I hate to make my pilots and friends not have fun, and I don’t consider entosis to be a fun, engaging activity.
Despite what some hostiles have said, none of my pilots cloaky-camped a region associated with the NIP. My pilots didn’t know where they were going when I told them to undock at 23:45. Some of them even thought we were going North. So, no, there wasn’t any cloaky-camper-entosis-naughty-boys type of thing.
When we arrived in Esoteria, I barely saw any hostiles guarding their space, so I just said to my pilots to follow the plan and go wild. Later reports confirmed that the hostiles got 54 notifications as soon as the war started, and that made me smile. My pilots were doing their job perfectly – make TEST rethink their options. I staged one of my characters in a choke point inside Esoteria, and laughed at seeing fleets from the Blue Donut Coalition (several hostile alliances) warping in and out, trying to figure out what to do. I can only imagine the silence in their comms, waiting for someone to step up from leadership to make a decision on what to defend. What made me really crack into sadistic laughter that I didn’t knew I had in me, was when one of my Bifrosts died solo to Vily himself in a Taranis. I couldn’t have been happier.
At the end I complimented my pilots for their awesome performance (we reffed around 40 systems between Paragon Soul and Esoteria), and apologized for using their time in a somewhat tedious activity. This is when I got surprised, and this why I love this community, they thanked me back, saying that they loved it, it was great participating in such a great effort to make the operation successful. They would gladly use their time and resources for the success of an operation even as tedious as this.
To me, that’s a lot. It means they are willing put in the effort, even waking up early or going to sleep late, as a lot of us did, just for the well-being of our coalition – so much so that at the end of everything they even asked to go out again. I couldn’t deny them anything, so we went to find more content. We finished the night in bombers anchoring on a Raven and shooting an Ansiblex just to tease BRAVE (don’t try to make sense out of this last part).
I formed initially at 23:00 on the July 4 and only finished doing operations at 11:00 of July 5 (12 hours later). I was glad to a be a small part of that night, and I am so happy to finally have a gaming community where I can say I belong. A huge “Thank You!” to everyone who was involved.
