As was reported by the Gallente Militia, we ended the war dec in a blob. The defiance fleet was named 'Kitten Squad' and we had a few new faces who were also new to everything. We did have a ten day old character in fleet. He is looking to join Rykki's corporation and we put him into a frigate and dragged him along. He did a good job and I do admit that he was tossed in the deep end.
I logged in to a notification that the war would be ending in the morning
Most adorable quote of the night:
One more fleet. It has been a week and it has been a very long week for me between work, CSM, and attempting to learn how to FC. I had to admit, I was worried about taking them out on my own again. They had such a fantastic Thursday night and I wanted to give that to them again. Fortunately, Snuff Box was enthralled with them and Wex volunteered to take them out for Sunday as well. I can see how a newbie fleet was something new and interesting.
Let me give all of the thanks. So, when I got home from work Sunday evening I got Rykki moving them towards where I was. I was sitting in the system one jump out of low sec fitting up for the roam. I'd not moved since Thursday because work.
I turns out I am crueler to others than myself. Instead of leading the Kitten Fleet (tm by Rykki) I asked Rykki to bring them to where I was fitting out my ship. She is good at what she is doing, so it made sense to me. Yet, I realized, as I sipped my butternut squash soup, that I'd be having a spastic fit if the same thing had been asked of me a few months ago. I'm a jerk.
Perhaps the most unexplained thing that they learned was how rarely fleets start on time. With a new person on board they had to get teamspeak set up and fly the eight systems to catch up. That took a while. However, once caught up we dropped into low sec, consolidated our fleets and went to work.
It turned out to be a busy night. While trying to explain what was going on and not talk over the FC we headed off and started to catch and kill things. We blobbed targets. We got in fights. We held kills for the new players and got them on grid and into the action.
It is an odd thing, running the training fleet. I remember being there and not being able to lock anything in time. i remember always being behind and always being a bit confused as to what was going on. Wex has a very calm FC style and he does not tend to repeat himself. I have taken up the habit of repeating myself. However, riding herd on the newbies I found myself hanging back on the gates and making sure that they were caught up with what was going on.
None of this was about my killboard.
They did very, very well. With the large number of Snuff pilots the fleet tended to lean towards them doing their normal thing. This push meant we warped here and there and people kept getting distracted by everything they saw on dscan in an attempt to kill it. It meant that the newbies were getting confused by the constant warps and rewarps across systems as the destination changed over and over again.
It is easy to forget what you know and hard to remember to explain everything you remember. It took three kills for me to get the youngest pilot on a killmail. But, we got it done and he steadily improved as we went along. He also only got lost once and we were able to fix that quickly.
Speaking of getting lost, Devin wound up lemminging into a system with a flashy red Gnosis camping the gate. He said he was about to lose gate cloak and we realized he was not there. The Gnosis started to shoot him. He tanked it like a boss, the rest of us jumped in and it was a dead Gnosis after that. Pointed, and not really knowing he was pointed, Devin decided to just burn away from the Gnosis until he could warp off. Fantastic job all around.
I ran into Kelon from Eve Uni. He decided to charge the fleet and try to take something down with himself. The kittens are blue with Eve Uni and were told not to shoot them.
I also didn't want them podding people. I did not want them to come out of this with kill rights available to anyone. That involved me snapping at people who thought it would be funny to troll them into pod mails. I really, really try to be polite and inclusive and understand that different people have different levels of fun.
I, however, have been called humorless and when it comes to trolling and giving new players bad advice because 'lol it is funny' that shit is not funny nor is it even vaguely acceptable. I feel like a bitch for snapping at a joke but well, maybe I need to be more of a bitch sometimes.
But, that is why you speak up and that situation was quickly resolved and I explained to them why I was so adamant about it. Right now I am making a lot of choices for them. i have to make the best choices that I can. Choices that will set them up to learn and not accidental ruin their game.
We also lost one to gate guns. They ran AFK for a bio-break right after the fight and they had taken gate guns. Welp. Lessons learned.
Off the fleet rampaged. We bumped into Kirith in a complex. That one was interesting. While deciding if we wanted to take four logistics ships repping a stack of Tristans one of our pilots just goes, "Weee!" and take the gate without paying attention. Talk over.
It was a very productive night. A big fleet, a herd of newbies in the center of it, and a lot of movement and action. I was ready to crawl into a dark corner and pass out after two hours. Two hours really is my fleet maximum. Top it off with working all weekend and I was very, very tired.
We wound up with a stack of loot that was donated to the newbies. With a hundred million in loot I split it between the five members that came to the fleet. They also went home with whatever they had stuffed into their cargo holds from looting the field.
The end results: https://zkillboard.com/corporation/98224451/
The last night was incredibly productive. I hope that they have had fun and will find satisfaction in this last weeks activities. I know that it has been an experience unlike any other I have had in game. I am deeply appreciative that they allowed me to join in and I hope that they've seen a bit more of Eve's potential.
I've convinced Rykki to write a summary and I have my own summary about learning to FC that will be posted shortly.
But for now, I have written this post on my phone due to the house connection flaking out on me and its time to go to sleep at the end of this long, long week.
I logged in to a notification that the war would be ending in the morning
Most adorable quote of the night:
[23:27:39] Devin Tasker > We need to talk to the new guys about orbiting outgoing gates prejump and holding gate cloak after jumpThere were a few newer, newbies in the fleet. People who will be joining tomorrow after the war dec ends and one person who was using an alt. I think that there are few things as healthy for an Eve veteran as a dose of happy, intelligent newbies. They share their joy of Eve in great, spoonfuls of innocent excitement. I'm a selfish creature and I find that I enjoy being reminded of the wonder that the game can bring in its early days. If I could bottle it up and sell it as a motivational drug, I would.
One more fleet. It has been a week and it has been a very long week for me between work, CSM, and attempting to learn how to FC. I had to admit, I was worried about taking them out on my own again. They had such a fantastic Thursday night and I wanted to give that to them again. Fortunately, Snuff Box was enthralled with them and Wex volunteered to take them out for Sunday as well. I can see how a newbie fleet was something new and interesting.
Let me give all of the thanks. So, when I got home from work Sunday evening I got Rykki moving them towards where I was. I was sitting in the system one jump out of low sec fitting up for the roam. I'd not moved since Thursday because work.
I turns out I am crueler to others than myself. Instead of leading the Kitten Fleet (tm by Rykki) I asked Rykki to bring them to where I was fitting out my ship. She is good at what she is doing, so it made sense to me. Yet, I realized, as I sipped my butternut squash soup, that I'd be having a spastic fit if the same thing had been asked of me a few months ago. I'm a jerk.
Perhaps the most unexplained thing that they learned was how rarely fleets start on time. With a new person on board they had to get teamspeak set up and fly the eight systems to catch up. That took a while. However, once caught up we dropped into low sec, consolidated our fleets and went to work.
It turned out to be a busy night. While trying to explain what was going on and not talk over the FC we headed off and started to catch and kill things. We blobbed targets. We got in fights. We held kills for the new players and got them on grid and into the action.
It is an odd thing, running the training fleet. I remember being there and not being able to lock anything in time. i remember always being behind and always being a bit confused as to what was going on. Wex has a very calm FC style and he does not tend to repeat himself. I have taken up the habit of repeating myself. However, riding herd on the newbies I found myself hanging back on the gates and making sure that they were caught up with what was going on.
None of this was about my killboard.
They did very, very well. With the large number of Snuff pilots the fleet tended to lean towards them doing their normal thing. This push meant we warped here and there and people kept getting distracted by everything they saw on dscan in an attempt to kill it. It meant that the newbies were getting confused by the constant warps and rewarps across systems as the destination changed over and over again.
It is easy to forget what you know and hard to remember to explain everything you remember. It took three kills for me to get the youngest pilot on a killmail. But, we got it done and he steadily improved as we went along. He also only got lost once and we were able to fix that quickly.
Speaking of getting lost, Devin wound up lemminging into a system with a flashy red Gnosis camping the gate. He said he was about to lose gate cloak and we realized he was not there. The Gnosis started to shoot him. He tanked it like a boss, the rest of us jumped in and it was a dead Gnosis after that. Pointed, and not really knowing he was pointed, Devin decided to just burn away from the Gnosis until he could warp off. Fantastic job all around.
I ran into Kelon from Eve Uni. He decided to charge the fleet and try to take something down with himself. The kittens are blue with Eve Uni and were told not to shoot them.
I also didn't want them podding people. I did not want them to come out of this with kill rights available to anyone. That involved me snapping at people who thought it would be funny to troll them into pod mails. I really, really try to be polite and inclusive and understand that different people have different levels of fun.
I, however, have been called humorless and when it comes to trolling and giving new players bad advice because 'lol it is funny' that shit is not funny nor is it even vaguely acceptable. I feel like a bitch for snapping at a joke but well, maybe I need to be more of a bitch sometimes.
But, that is why you speak up and that situation was quickly resolved and I explained to them why I was so adamant about it. Right now I am making a lot of choices for them. i have to make the best choices that I can. Choices that will set them up to learn and not accidental ruin their game.
We also lost one to gate guns. They ran AFK for a bio-break right after the fight and they had taken gate guns. Welp. Lessons learned.
Off the fleet rampaged. We bumped into Kirith in a complex. That one was interesting. While deciding if we wanted to take four logistics ships repping a stack of Tristans one of our pilots just goes, "Weee!" and take the gate without paying attention. Talk over.
It was a very productive night. A big fleet, a herd of newbies in the center of it, and a lot of movement and action. I was ready to crawl into a dark corner and pass out after two hours. Two hours really is my fleet maximum. Top it off with working all weekend and I was very, very tired.
We wound up with a stack of loot that was donated to the newbies. With a hundred million in loot I split it between the five members that came to the fleet. They also went home with whatever they had stuffed into their cargo holds from looting the field.
The end results: https://zkillboard.com/corporation/98224451/
The last night was incredibly productive. I hope that they have had fun and will find satisfaction in this last weeks activities. I know that it has been an experience unlike any other I have had in game. I am deeply appreciative that they allowed me to join in and I hope that they've seen a bit more of Eve's potential.
I've convinced Rykki to write a summary and I have my own summary about learning to FC that will be posted shortly.
But for now, I have written this post on my phone due to the house connection flaking out on me and its time to go to sleep at the end of this long, long week.
Sugar and Rykki, I'm a pure noobie who, so far, has spent exponentially more time feeding my training queue and reading Eve blogs than getting out into space to get into the fray. Mostly because I'm still overwhelmed by all the things I don't know and I didn't know what to expect when I venture out into New Eden. Your blogs have really made me less afraid of messing up or being embarrassed.
ReplyDeleteI do belong to an Alliance (most of whom I know in real life) and I don't want to slow them down with my noob ignorance and 179 degrees of learning curve. They're kind and somewhat patient, but they do like to go out and kill big, and I haven't yet got the player skills or the toon training, or the ship fittings to do anything but die immediately if I fleet warped with them on their roams. We all got a great laugh when I set up my TeamSpeak using Ctrl-Spacebar as Push-to-talk, then couldn't figure out why I kept coming to a dead stop in my travels at odd times... whenever I opened my mic. :-) Yes, it's funny, you can laugh too. I still do.
Thanks for this blog thread about the kittens, and what went through your minds, and how your mentorship helped the new players get better and have fun, even while being so new to the game. It's motivated me to suck it up and get out into space, because that's where I'll get the real skills.