Chuck was born in Sept 2012. It was perhaps the third or forth time I tried to challenge myself playing EVE Online. Basically, trying to find out if there was anything besides mining and warping to asteroids. Every time I had tried the game, usually around summer, I had not succeed to go beyond a week before surrendering and deleting the whole stuff. The tutorials were a good start, but they didn't help to really get into the game. I still don't think they show what EVE really is.
After playing for like 5 days, something happened and made the difference, I was recruited by Woolly into Border Enterprises. Border was small corp with helpful people, always patient listening and answering to all my questions. They helped to earn my first "huge amount of isk" by running a mining op where at the end of it, they donated all the ore to me. I was mining in a scythe (no longer has mining bonuses) and they were using retrievers and orca support plus links. It was an amazing team experience for a noob.
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| Mining Scythe |
Mining was good in the first days, I was training my skills, learning a lot and making some ISK. After some days, Woolly had the initiative to run a different set of activities and proposed to move some of us into w-space. The goal was to find a wormhole with a highsec and a C1 static. Highsec to have an easy access to k-space, and C1 to run sites and make some isk. That's how Border DeepSpace Division was born, a fork from Border Enterprises. Those of us who wanted to have the wormhole experience moved to Border DeepSpace with Woolly Thiesant as CEO.
Not much after this, Woolly found a C2 system: J100651 but it was not empty.
The system was occupied by two corporations, SWIFT co. and Omni Corp.
We moved inside their system and deployed a Large Minmatar Control Tower. We started to hunt them, and spoil the fun of both corporations. Basically, we were the invaders and the bad guys.
The first corp, some Japanese, had a large mining operation inside their POS, with a good number of Refining Arrays. They were the first victims of our bombers and attacks. They couldn't mine any longer or in safety as our main activity was to stalk and hunt them. They had some old players that were able to fly some shiny ships, and indeed one or two of them got a good number of kills over us.
In the other hand, Omni corp was more a mix type of players, some people used to do PVP others just run the sleepers site at the C1 static connection.
This was exciting for me as a new player, playing the invader and sometimes pushing the victory in our side. It was also a very instructive time, because I learnt part of the non-standard mechanics of EVE. That was when one day I logged into the game and I found we were being awoxed. The spy was Albogilvus, a new recruit that had joined us recently. We were naive to give access to our POS and obviously give the wrong permissions. He was able to shutdown the POS, steal our ships and tower fuel with the combined help of Omni and Swift. My timing was more than appropriated, as I was able to recover from an indy's wreck enough fuel to enable the Force Field and guns. I remember having my friend James Tague around, but I think he was in a pod, so he wasn't able to do any other offensive activity. After having secured everything (and killed Albogilvus), my reward was to get promoted to Director level.
We found later, by watching the activity of Omni members that Albogilvus was an alt of Ashling Naskingar, member of Omni corp at that time. Instead of using guns to defeat us, she preferred this other method, something more of the style of the Greek Trojan Horse.
After the half failure of this awoxing, half because although we lost nearly all our ships, we didn't leave neither stopped our campaign, our POS was attacked in a combined fleet from Omni and SWIFT. Our POS guns alone, did basically wipe nearly all their ships, with a total loss over 3B ISK. And all of this, without our interaction, as we were offline at that time.
The outcome couldn't be other, a high push in our morale, and the opposite mainly at SWIFT, as most of the losses were in their fleet. Indeed days later, with a good amount of talking with them, we agreed they had lost and I personally helped them to move out from the system. I am proud enough to say, I convinced them to transfer their POCOs to us, so some of my diplo talk did work. Perhaps because I honored my commitment of helping them to move out to High Sec safely.
Next steps from Omni escalated from sending mercs to wardec us. They were hired by Yigal Tzadok, one of the leaders voices at their corp, and someone we got a good number of killmails. It's true the mercs did damage at some of members, but it didn't work to stop us from continuing in our activities.
Meanwhile, in parallel, I worked during days with Ashling to convince her to stop the war, to stop the damage to both our young memberships that were not involved inside the wormhole. This kind of diplomatic discussions with her had as a result that I recovered some of the expensive ships she had stole from us. Besides, I somehow managed to convince her to dismantle her POS and structures, against her corp will. Her intention was to show her corp colleagues the war had no sense, neither staying in the wormhole.
I told Ashling I would help her to haul mods and tower to hisec, and I did for some part, but when I found the opportunity I faked we were attacked by a random pvper in the wormhole and I got her killed. I also took from her mods and tower as compensation for the ships not recovered. The pvper was Galaxier, a good friend of the corp at that time, and someone completely unknown to Ashling.
This was the end of the "battle" and the success of the full eviction at J100651. We won the system for ourselves, plus the POCOs. We kinda felt exultant, and we were just a noob wormhole corp. Time will show, that Bob provided us with the same medicine.
By the way, I kept contact with Ashling, and we both agreed we enjoyed the overall experience. Around two weeks later, I told her the truth about how she ended losing her tower, and Galaxier's involvement.
Border Deepspace Division did not grow much inside the wormhole, the fear to another awoxing was always in mind, and probably we were overly worried about that. We spent days doing a few wormhole pvp hunting, and mostly running sleepers sites in the static C1 connection. With the time I started to feel bored, as many times I was alone, just myself online and I had to spend hours doing solo pvp, solo pve... A feeling of "this-is-not-any-longer-fun" started to swell day by day, and month after month.
One day reading Through Newb Eyes I realized about something that I had not cared before in tgl3's blog: "Wormhole Engineers - Recruiting". I liked a lot the kind of stuff WHEN corporation had done, and what I had read from tgl3 posts, also the content of the recruiting post was very appealing. Additionally, I knew a bit of WHEN thanks to Penny Ibramovic through her blog Tiger Ears.
I contacted tgl3 and asked to apply, he put me in contact with Mick, one of the Directors at WHEN. I supplied the application form and had a talk with him, and finally was accepted. Now it was the moment to announce in my corporation I was leaving. I had built strong bonds with my corp members and it was going to be a difficult situation, but or I moved forward with something different, or probably I would had stopped playing.
Then Bob (our almighty always present Wormhole God), decided to pay us with the same coin. My CEO at that time, Woolly Thiesant, refused to have some fights with some wormholers. In w-space, denying fights it's not something "culturally" well accepted. I wasn't there when it happened, so I only know about what I was told, and told by both sides. These fellows were Elroy Skimms and members of Ocularis Inferno alliance.
The consequence was nothing else than Elroy deploying a tower inside our system to get those fights we denied him. To be honest, we didn't offer later those fights either as a corp, I tried to do it and indeed I won a duel I thought I was going to lose. I never have been a good pvper, but I was lucky to use ECM drones that ended being effective. Initially, there was some heavy discussions according if I had infringed the rules of the engagement using ECM drones, but we never agreed not using ECM drones.
I remember trying to apply some of the "techniques" I used with Ashling in the past, but they didn't work at all with Elroy. He proved to be pretty experienced in these situations, and he had the upper hand.
To make it short, we were evicted, as we did with SWIFT and Omni. Two weeks after Elroy came to our wormhole, we were gone. We were able to haul all our assets out of the wormhole, I am not really sure about this, but I think Elroy and his colleagues allowed us to do it, because if they would had wanted, they would have terminated us.
To be honest, I don't keep any resentment or hard feelings against Elroy and his pals, he played by his rules and he seemed to me a good guy, even if he ended kicking us out of our previous home.
In that state, I was not going to wander around highsec any longer with the same nearly-inactive corporation. I announced I was leaving, and I joined WHEN.
Actually, I don't regret at all that decision. I joined an active corporation with sometimes crazy people (in the good sense) that I really enjoy; and also in a C5 wormhole, a different kind of challenge compared with my previous C2 wormhole. I started to participate in some activities, like running escalations or joining for pvp fleets.
In the other hand, I have enjoyed providing some IRL services to the corporation like forum, Mumble and Jabber.
To make it better, one of my former colleagues (Yamato) that was going to leave Border Deepspace for similar reasons as mine, also joined WHEN.
And this is it up to today, ...
I was actually the only one online at the time Swift attacks and single handily defended with a few well placed bombs.
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