The Expendables: a fun fleet doctrine for young and old

Here's how to fly a very cheap but very effective fleet doctrine.

The idea is to screen your fleet from enemy dps using targeting range damps, then hamper their lock speed using scan resolution damps then zerg them down with small high damage blaster atrons.

The atron is the fastest frigate when microwarpdriving, able to achieve an overheated speed of 6003 m/s without gang links.

Blasters are the highest damage weapon.

This cheap comp packs an effective punch.

Here's how to fly it:

1) use a blank clone or at least a cheap clone - if you have expensive implants your head costs more that your fleet.

2) have a stash of these ships.

3) warp to near a target, range damp and scan res damp the targets. In fleet v fleet combat you should be spreading your damps across 3 targets near your name so Miguel might damp Leo, Meo and Neo.

4) rush in with the atrons and shoot it lots. In most cases you want to concentrate firepower on one target but in some situations you may be asked to spread tackle (against a weaker fleet for instance).

4a) Mauluses can just chill at long range or can come in a little. There's no need to be closer than 30km and it's good to be aligned out. The ecm drones are utterly horrible on some poor shmuck who is heavily damped, he'll never want to fight a maulus again.

Heat early, heat often.

5) Casualties self-destruct, grab a new ship and race after the fleet (the fleet doesn't wait for them).

70% atrons, 30% Mauluses

Both fits cost around 3 million isk. Feel free to use cheaper/easier to fit substitutes or more expensive if that's how you roll.

[Atron, Expendable]

Damage Control II
Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I
Overdrive Injector System II

5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I

Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
[Empty High slot]

Small Transverse Bulkhead I
Small Transverse Bulkhead I
Small Transverse Bulkhead I

Cargo: Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S x960

[Maulus, Expendable]

Damage Control II
F-89 Synchronized Signal Amplifier
F-89 Synchronized Signal Amplifier

5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Low Frequency Sensor Suppressor I, Targeting Range Dampening Script
Low Frequency Sensor Suppressor I, Targeting Range Dampening Script
Low Frequency Sensor Suppressor I, Targeting Range Dampening Script

Drone Link Augmentor I
Drone Link Augmentor I

Small Transverse Bulkhead I
Small Transverse Bulkhead I
Small Transverse Bulkhead I


Hornet EC-300 x4
Hornet EC-300 x2
(use Hobgoblin Is if you can't use ECM drones)

AAR: Strat op EWar 2015.06.26 The Battle of 1-5GBW

I volunteered to do the ewar fleet today alongside Blue Ice's Eagles and Tengus and Scythian Painspike's Bombers. We had been banging the drums for a big form up - no less than a Supercapital Ship Assembly Array was at stake here.

One of me newbros rather plaintively told me that he only had an Atron and could he bring that. Sure he could, I said and fiendishly made him my scout. His confidence wasn't improved by someone explaining that it meant he would be committing suicide on our behalf.

He did a great job and we arrived in system without incident and set up bookmarks all around the POS. Then we just chilled out there and waited.

And waited.

I had someone reporting intel to me as our main fleet engaged on the F-88 but it sounded like caps. After a while I was told there were Legions there too. I keyed up on Global to ask whether they wanted the Ewar fleet there and I think things got a bit flustered as they realised they'd forgotten about us and wanted us there 10 minutes ago.

We had some fun and games trying to position but eventually BL solved it for us by warping their Dreads to the pos we were desperately trying to rep up in time.

Main fleet warped there and then my ewar fleet got there too.

I kept us out a bit waiting to assess what BL had. Dreads close to the pos, a legion fleet covering them.

I put us about 100km off but people were complaining about not being able to target so I burned us in a bit closer. We got a solid 5 minutes of disruption but then we got a bit too close (70km-ish) and the mighty half a billion isk strategic cruisers decided they were fed up of having their fun ruined by T1 frigs costing about 1 mill each.

I made 2 mistakes. I took us in too close and I didn't have my crucifiers on watch list. I asked if they were ok, couple of minutes later I asked if they were ok again, still ok. couple of minutes later asked if they were ok - all dead. I should have used my watch list to help me realise I needed to warp out and reposition.

Bovril had very kindly provided us with 1000 frigates to reship into. Unfortunately the wires must have got a bit crossed because they weren't fit and they weren't crucifiers. Still people cheerfully grabbed them and went back in for another go. Not long after we discovered that F-88 was clear and we could shop there for actual modules, significantly improving the efficacy of our ships.

About that time I was asked to supply some webbing frigates to Blue Ice's fleet and as I only had 38 people and all the Crucis were dead I just told everyone to move over to his fleet and web his primaries.

I refitted my svipul to ecm burst and web and rushed to say hello to my friends in BL but they didn't appreciate being ecm bursted so I found myself in a pod.

I was told there were no Crucifiers in the restock ships but then I happened to find one among the 4 ships I scrounged so I gave that a whirl. I just put 3 targeting range scripts in, a mwd and 3 tds. I then tried simply keeping at range 135km on the legions as I think their max range is 110km or so. It worked like a charm so I'll definitely be looking to do that next time I run ewar.

Now earlier on I had suggested to my guys that they should td Baki Yuku, an old friend of mine with ginormous wallet and a notoriously bad temper, and ask him for 10 million isk to get them to transfer the tds to someone else. He seems to have taken it poorly and apparently many newbros were told to "F*** Off Scrub" then blocked. :(

As I was sitting in my cruci tding Baki and some of the others I had a variation on that idea.

[16:12:52] Callduron > hi
[16:12:54] [redacted] > Damn you. :P
[16:13:01] Callduron > for 10m I'll put it on Baki instead
[16:13:40] [redacted] > Really? Ha! :P
[16:14:01] Callduron > it's a bargain tbh
[16:15:18] [redacted] > Done. ^{^}
[16:15:20] [redacted] > HAHAH!
[16:15:40] Callduron > pleasure doing business :)
[16:15:48] [redacted] > Are you not Fcing?
[16:16:04] Callduron > i was fcing the ewar guys but most of them are dead so we merged
[16:16:18] [redacted] > I see.
[16:16:25] Callduron > overheating triple td on baki
[16:17:13] Callduron > ha ha he broke anchor to try to get in range of me <3 p="">
 [16:17:20] Callduron > give him my love on comms
[16:17:23] [redacted] > ^{^}
[16:17:28] [redacted] > I will after the fleet. :P
[16:17:37] [redacted]> Going to be a while. This is. :P
[16:25:28] [redacted]> GF ^{^}

So guys new strategy for next time - td everyone who isn't Baki and offer to move it to Baki for a reasonable fee.

After the fleet I found this in my mailbox:

:)
From: [redacted]
Sent: 2015.06.26 16:11
To: Callduron,
Hi you are probably busy with the op, just wanted to let you know that youve been nothing but great today. This was my first time ever flying with anybody else and I had a great time. I think I know now what up and down means... and that I should warp to a perch and not into a bubble of death.
Thanks again for pulling me in that way. You are great :)
Regards,
[redacted]

Makes it all worth while.

Brave: The Nennamaila Plan

OK, here's my thinking.

To find the fun again Brave needs a higher proportion of wins. We can yammer on about doctrines and FCs and stuff but simpy we need easier opponents. We're a C league team trying to play in the A league.

What made me think of Nenna was two recent moves - RvB moved to one end of the CalGal zone and Pandemic Horde moved to the other. E Uni were already there, Karma fleet and J4LP aren't far away and other newbie friendly organisations like Stay Frosty are around. Plus of course one of the greatest pvp draws for new players - faction war.

So if we tried living slap bang in the middle of CalGal FW space we'd have fights where we outskillpoint some of the people we fight against. Lots of tiny alliances, freshly formed corps, soloers etc. I've fought against 1 day old characters in this space who have cheerfully burned right at me, guns blazing.

Welcome to Newbie Central

In Fountain where we live now there aren't that many people we can beat except in the relentless grind of the defence fleet, the occasional Bovril heroics and rare strat op wins. People are feeling the grind.

What's more a lot of our small gang stuff we go out ridiculously far on roams. Yesterday I took a fleet to Lonetrek then Deklein, another FC was out in Syndicate, another FC took us to Placid. All of those places are near Nennamaila. It's where the content is. For a newbie FC with a tiny gang of dudes in cheap talwars there's just not all that much we can beat around here (although I gather our newest, Johnny S Foster, just kicked ass with such on his first time FCing in I-C). Even so the odds are stacked against us here. And screw having to go 25 jumps just to get to space where 12 talwars are a threat not a snack.

Of course we bring our own content with us and the much more politically rich nature of low sec space should stop us getting backed into a diplomatic corner. There are 3 powers in Fountain and 2 of them have blued up against us. The only realistic counter is to blue goons and that's distasteful to many people and could have consequences we don't like.

In low sec our diplomats would have to work with a complex patchwork of alliances and old gudges and of course all our nullsec friends take an interest there too with PL and Imperium particularly lurking around this space. It would actually be a much better environment for wheeling and dealing and probably more fun for skilled diplos.

More newbie friendly, newbies would fly to our home easily without much help. Our dojo/HR people will love not having to do trips to Zinkon every day.

More than anything else what the Brave Collective needs is forward momentum.  Stuff to get excited about as we push other smaller weaker people and achieve successes, even if they're only small successes.

The military side

Brave carries around a lot of pvp simply because even in these faded days we're still by far the best alliance to attack. Although battle-hardened we're very much beatable, we will usually take fights (and if we don't form there's still lots of random content around). So part of what we would fight is the usual baggage which will follow us anywhere.

Lowsec makes it harder for those guys to farm us as it's a disadvantage to be -10. because of gate and station guns.

Our richest content is the vast numbers of very pilots swarming around in Faction War lowsec. It's a target-rich environment even without the Brave Effect. And tons of this content is at our level or below - pilots who are poor, low skill points, not expert at pvp and fitting. Some of them have yet to speak to another human in Eve. This means that there's accessible winnable pvp content for any size gang, even down to one pilot soloing.

Moving would spare us from Fozziesov which I'm going to call right now as an impending disaster for HERO as we are currently deployed. The blood is in the water. Not only have the other powers in Fountain ganged up on us,but Pizza and Lowsecnaya are roaming us for content and NC. and Test are in the process of deploying against us. The wolves are gathering and we are the prey - nullsec is a game that draws players towards perceived weakness.

With Fozziesov gangs that want a fight out of us will entosis our stuff. There's nothing particularly grrrr Brave about it - it's just the mechanic, how the game works. A FC will see it as advantageous to force a hurried flashform rather than the current system of sitting on our undock and taunting us in Local. It's tactically superior - when you rush people they fit their ships badly, forget ammo, the fc may make errors with comp or links and you can dictate the terrain (eg force them to burn 2 jumps then jump into you at a stargate).

With as many as 6-8 gangs an hour at times our space isn't defensible and we will lose our current ability to sit things out when they get too hot. Without anyone particularly meaning to all our space will get reinforced and then conquered - they're not bad people, it's simply the game mechanics.

With the Nenna Plan instead of being targets we will be predators. There are 3 entrances to sov null within 9 jumps with owners ranging from a 200 man pirate alliance through J4LP to Goons. Of course it won't be just us hazing these systems - they will become 3, 4, even 5 fleet thunderdomes.

Maybe if we get strong again we can even lay claim to sov Cloud Ring and try to hold it against all comers.  

All around the Cal/Gal Faction Warfare zone there are newbie-friendly organisations like RvB and PH living at a convenient distance so we can roam for content or FCs can easily arrange fights.

Living in FW space allows FCs to control ship size in fights - if we fight inside a novice plex nothing larger than a T1 frigate can join the fight. The factions need to take space and Nenna is right on the front line. That gives us fights we can wreck or even take mercenary contracts for. And the Factions are even easier to infiltrate than Brave is - any FC can roll an alt, join a faction, join the open militia fleets and see where their gangs are without any interaction with another human.

Line member income

- missions from level 1s in nearby high sec to level 5s from an agent 2 jumps away.

- belt ratting. In addition to the regular rats there are clone soldiers and mordus rats around. In fact on a recent roam we picked up a Barghest bpc in Pandemic Horde's staging system worth 400 million.

Nice loot to find on a belt rat

- mining. Low sec mining is not quite as bad as high sec but certainly second rate. I imagine that as soon as we find our feet those crazy Bovril dudes will set something up in Cloud Ring 4 jumps away.

- exploration. Remains a very viable newbro moneymaker.

- huffing gas. 8 jumps to the Assilot constellation in Cloud Ring.
.

- importing. Once we establish Nenna as a market many other players will use it as pirates and FW players have some problems shopping in high sec. This will allow our traders to sell to more customers and the system benefits from discounted fees.

- trading. Renowned traders Gevlon Goblin and Moxnix have made hundreds of billions buying ineptly cashed out FW LP items and selling them at major trade hubs.

- at the alliance level money moons and pocos are legitimate targets. There are 17 r64s  in nearby Cloud Ring listed on Dotlan. Only 1 R64 is listed in Black Rise (there are 20 R32s moon  however!)  but data from the 0.4 systems which quite recently gained moon minerals is missing.

- best of all: cheap ships. Thoraxes talwars and atrons are absolutely fine for pvp in this area although if people want to there are plenty of opportunities to use the bigger toys too.

Faction Warfare

Another option that may bring both line member income and pvp content is joining a side in faction warfare. This is actually quite a complicated topic so I won't go into all the details but it's worked well for several nullsec alliances in the past.

Won't losing sov hurt us?

Yes.

Can't mince words, yes, it will hurt us. Some pvpers only like the big ops and don't want to do  "crappy talwar roams." Some corps are focused on the idea of living in null. We have our coalition to consider and the other alliances may decide not to come with us.

We would probably have to ditch or at least drastically curtail SRP. But if you think about it SRP is basically to bribe people to play the game in a way that isn't their favourite way to play. Suppose we have 80 people who want to undock into a fight plus another 40 who will come along if we pay them to. As a FC and a power gamer if we're doing strat ops in null then please arrange things so I get 120 pilots because I want to win. But I can see that it's crazy to have to bribe people to play the game in a way that isn't their favourite playstyle. We've allowed ourselves to get sucked into an arms race. In fact we're behind in the arms race because our competitors use paplinks and the threat of kicking people for low numbers so if we did want to stay as a sov power we'd probably need to match that to stay in the game.

But Brave - and I say this as someone in a sister corp - is about BNI, is about the newbies. We have to get BNI working right to get the alliance working right and we are not in a newbie-friendly situation. Half the people in Brave don't know what to say when a newbro asks "should I join Brave?" No one outside Brave is recommending us, recruitment has plummeted, people are quitting Eve because it's not fun. We are currently listed on /r/evenewbies as "Not Currently Recommended." Some people are even predicting that Brave could die completely. J3B or Sound would be fine without BNI - most entities in nullsec would love to have them, even the elite Legions.

So it's ok to lose some friends who will go off to new adventures, it's not ok to fail Eve's new players.

Perhaps most importantly doing laid back low consequence pvp might help us find again our classiness and tolerance and see less of people who try to make things happen for us fall out with each other and end our dreadful attrition of capable people.

Anyway that's enough typing, I've got a new Tormentor fit to try out, see you in the novice plexes!

Alliance Tournament: Captain's report stardate 2015.06.23

A massive thank you to Agonist X and Wiros and the Propaganda team for their wonderful work in preparing material for the AT team. I love the stuff they've done and keep getting Wouldn't It Be Cool If ideas. I somehow doubt that my ideas based around England World Cup songs will ever be an actual thing. Still that doesn't stop me from imagining a Brave flag waving in the wind in synch with Three Lions.

We're into our practice routine now. We practice 4 times a week for two hours each. One of these is Test's open practice on Saturday which gives us the chance to test ourselves against other teams. About 6-12 people come to each practice from a squad of around 30.

We're testing different comps and different play situations. We're also discovering and figuring out lots of mistakes - burning out modules with thermodynamics, not noticing we're drifting too close to a big scary battleship because of paying attention to other stuff, boundary violations and so on. We're also seeing some really great piloting - some people on the squad have got some genuine moves, baby.

We've started working on nuances of ewar - that is ewar in the overall match context so that we can learn and practice situations where quite subtle ewar plays can be very effective.

A wild Lychton appeared at our Thursday practice to check everything was going ok -and promptly got roped in to fly a logi for one of the sides. Captain'sVerdict: he needs to come to more practices.

Saturday was the Test open practice but we only had 8 people so we didn't do very well against the other teams until the last match. In that match they brought brawler against our kiters and we flew rings round them. Even though we only had half a team we pushed them close and they complimented us on how hard we were to catch. And nobody boundary violated!

I've been doing a lot of reaching out to other teams to arrange practices. I'm really looking forward to practicing with other teams. Most of them, like us, are new to the tournament. They've all been really friendly - the tournament scene is a community within the community.

I also accidentally arranged us a practice with someone scarily good. What happened was this. I contacted an absolutely expert player and a leading light in the tournament community to ask him some beginner questions about captaining an AT team. He helped me a lot then casually asked if we'd like to practice with them. Not sure what to do, I immediately said yes. So we've got a practice against a really great team which you will read about in 2 weeks time. Welp.

Personnel matters: we've nearly finalised the squad. If you have been asked by me to complete the form and have done so you should hear in the next couple of days. If you haven't heard by Thursday evemail me.

Dojo stuff: we will start doing classes but it won't be this week.

Funding. We have a long way to go with our fundraising.

This is our fundraising site: http://fund.bravecollective.com

Donations can be made by using Give Money with reason "AT team" to the corporation BC Piggy. Check that the CEO is Lychton C Kondur and it's in our alliance before you send the cash, I'm sure this post will inspire some scammers.

We will be doing events to raise money for this project. The first of these will start this week. We will be running inty gangs to hunt ratters in hostile sov. All faction/dead-space/officer loot to the AT fund please from these gangs. Let's go gank stuff and bring back shinies we need the cash.

A defence of Brave

As reddit explodes in response to the latest Brave drama I posted a defence of us on reddit that I'd like to repeat here. If you know anyone who is just starting Eve and wondering whether to join Brave you may want to link them to this post.

There was an alignment chart posted about Eve alliances based on Dungeons & Dragons which had E Uni as Lawful Good, RvB as Neutral Good and Brave Newbies as Chaotic Good. I think that's very accurate.

E Uni offers structure and organisation. They are excellent at the education side of the game and might suit a more reflective player who wants to learn Eve in almost an academic way. They think before they leap.

RvB is a frigate bloodbath. It's all about the pvp. Most new players are best to make some isk, buy 50 cheap frigates, join RvB and pvp your heart out until you're out of frigates then drop alliance and go make isk in safety. It's not safe generally to do missions or mine while with a RvB tag because war targets will kill you. It's kind of one dimensional (or was when I was in it) in that it is purely about the pvp.

Brave is chaos. We are by far the most actively engaged entity in nullsec. There is a continuous 24 hour defence fleet using whatever ship you feel like and FCed by whoever is speaking at the time. In addition we have lots of strat ops and roams and form fleets to take on people who bring fleets to our space for fights.

Brave doesn't suit everyone but for the people that it does suit it's perfect. It's continuous violence with almost no restrictions on your behaviour or on what you fly.

Additionally Brave has a superb teaching and coaching division that operates pretty separately from everything else and helps newbies with patience and generosity.

Brave pays a price for its unrestricted style - we have a lot of people, both our enemies and our own guys stirring up drama for the sake of it. There's always drama. Sometimes it gets too much and can get a bit depressing but it always blows over.

The unique selling point of Brave is that it has more action than pretty much anyone else - in terms of people flying to our space to kill us, in terms of people posting crazy stuff, in terms of our own guys forming fleets and creating content.

One criticism of Brave is that it burns out newbies. I'm sure it does - if you're the wrong type of newbie. If you like structure and calm Brave will make you uninstall your client.

I think the key thing though is that a newbie has options and there really is a corp for everyone. I haven't even yet mentioned excellent newbie corps like PH, KF, Dreddit, Redemption Road - all listed on the sidebar or look in /r/evenewbies or /r/evejobs.

Eve has a wonderful and diverse community and Brave fills an important place in adding to that diversity. A lot of Eve is, frankly, rather dull.

So if you're new my advice is this. Shop around, try several different corps and insist on finding a community that's not just adequate but wonderful.

And because people are all made different Brave, even with all our flaws our craziness our disasters and sudden crises, really is the perfect corp for some people.

Is this the best Eve blog post of the year?

Like the majority of Eve bloggers most of my posts are just your basic keyboard bashes. "You know nothing, CCP," as I react angrily to some game mechanic change. I'm quite happy to weigh in on topics of which I have no experience, setting The Mittani straight about why he's running his space empire wrong.

Occasionally I'll take the trouble to do some actual research to educate myself and to support my reasoning like the graphs on my recent target painting article.

Last month a rather obscure blog, Reckless Abandon, published an article where not only is the writer clearly an absolute expert in his field but the amount of arduous research he put in was outstanding.

For people who enjoy soloing in T1 frigates you're in for an absolute treat.

Don't forget to add him to your blogrolls. Props to my friend Tremer Latan for putting it in his which is how I found it.

Alliance Tournament: Captain's Report, stardate 2015.06.16

10 days ago I was doing a fleet. The conversation turned to the Alliance Tournament and I casually mentioned "I don't think I'm in the squad this year." "Check your evemail," said Avaren.

Now let me explain. I'm a huge Alliance Tournament nerd. The first one passed me by as I ran my missions oblivious in high sec. And the second. The third one was kind of interesting but very confusing because I didn't know the ship names. So I watched it alt-tabbing to Eve to see what a "key-soon" was.

The fourth one I was pumped for and got as far as attending a practice session with Test's AT team but the summer of 2013 was a hectic one for Test FCs and I decided to focus on Tranquility instead.
My fifth year in Eve I missed it because my alliance was in transition and with the relaunch of two merged alliances as The Bastion they didn't want to take on an extra project.

This is my sixth year in Eve. And 10 days ago I opened an evemail which was sent to the pilots who had been selected for Brave Collective's Alliance Tournament team.

WOW!

Oh boy oh boy oh boy.

But hang on, what's this?

"Main captain - Callduron - Not only willing but put forth a damn fine argument for why he should be"

Let me explain.

In the original mail it stated priority would be given to pilots who had been in Brave over a year. I was so disappointed. But never give up, right? I wrote an eloquent pleading case for why I have high sp, have done lots of small gang stuff, am positive and cheerful and would be a real asset to the squad and please please pretty please with bells on can Cinderella just go to one teensy weensy ball?

So.

Here we are.

It's now been a week for me to comprehend the massive task of leading a team that's genuinely good and that will make our alliance proud.

Kelnon gave me a reality check that I'm going to pass on to you. The Alliance Tournament is dominated by obsessive veterans who are really really expert and in our first year we're not expected to make it past the first stage.

However.

We have a squad of amazing pilots, dedicated, skilled, enthusiastic. Some of the newer people, and we absolutely have some low skill point players in our squad are a little lacking in confidence but the team will be picked on how well people fly in our practices.

We have set up a practice schedule that will see us run at least 6 practices a week till August - in the week it's split 2 US and 2 EU so for most of us there are 4 practices available per week.

We participate in Test's open practice on Saturdays because it's crucially important that we play 12 v 12 matches against competent teams.

We are actively looking for practice partners and that's going to be my main focus for this week.
I have one guy who can't make either practice time so I'm looking for someone who does AU
timezone AT practice who could use an extra body. It's important to me he gets a chance to train.
In our first practice matches we lost to Test in a disorganised snafu of a match (I had to grab a Vexor instead of a command ship because I thought we had one fit but we didnt), we beat RvB who were in a rather experimental comp, we lost a really interesting match to Test where they utterly outflew us positionally.

We're learning tons.

Our private AT squad forums have exploded with theorycrafting as squad members passionately debate their ideas, some of which are genuinely brilliant.

Kiu has done a ton of work to set up Jabber, Mumble and Core for us as well as our funding board. Big thanks to him and to Kite Co for hosting our forums.

Kelnon and Lychton have been wonderful in giving me a clear set of parameters, every support I need and then leaving us to get on and make it a success.

Tosan is co-captain. Not only that but he has agreed to be our Compliance Officer carefully checking that everything we do is tournament legal.

We are closed to applications to join us. We have now got about 25 people but there's a few who are somewhere in the process but haven't yet been accepted. If that is your situation contact me, there's probably something needing fixing to get you in. Anyone who is in the works but not sorted out by next Monday will not get in, we'll draw a line under recruitment then.

There is a possibility we might recruit more if people drop out. I have to say so far that seems vanishingly unlikely, everyone's super keen.

Now I'm going to ask for money. First I'll explain our vision which I hope will get the Brave community, hell, the Eve community even, inspired and interested. Then I'll give details of how you can send isk.


THE VISION

Generally speaking AT stuff happens under a rock. Teams do stuff in secret in wormholes on the Test server and the AT is never mentioned in the run up to the event.

Bollocks to that.

Without throwing away our competitive advantage we're going to be much more public. We want our AT project to be a BRAVE project not an expensive treat for a tiny handful of members.

Picture this: a new player starts in August. As she bumbles around the interface and the opportunities a friendly person invites everyone in Local to come to a party. Apparently Eve has some kind of World Cup and these guys their alliance is in it, is about to play and they're going to let newbros join in the fun on mumble while watching it on Twitch. After the party our new player is invited to join this alliance and escorted out to the wild wild west of Eve where she meets the e-sports stars she watched just hours ago on TV.

Pretty awesome?

So we're going to be an outward facing tournament squad in ways that really haven't been done before. I've got several squad members signed up as willing to talk to podcasts, Eve sites and so on so if you are part of the Eve media we'd love to talk to you about the Alliance Tournament.

Squad members will pass on some of the intensive training we receive in piloting and small gang tactics to the rest of the alliance in the form of dojo classes.

We'll also be leading fundraising events. I have some ideas already for something involving arkadian thingys farming and newbro mercenary index raiser Venture fleets.

This project is your project something I hope our whole alliance will get excited about will cheer about will watch us play and will us on. There's a saying in football that sometimes the supporters

can be so awesome that it's as if the crowd sucks the ball into the net. We can't progress without your belief and support.

Further post about it. Let's see questions on /r/eve, let's see AT players in the Eve media. The Brave Collective will be dragging the Alliance Tournament out of the closet in which the bitter vets have been hiding it and making this wonderful content something for all the people of New Eden.

FUNDRAISING

This is our fundraising site: http://fund.bravecollective.com

Donations can be made by using Give Money with reason "AT team" to the corporation BC Piggy. Check that the CEO is Lychton C Kondur and it's in our alliance before you send the cash, I'm sure this post will inspire some scammers.

We will be doing events to raise money for this project.

CONCLUSION

I'm deeply honoured to be given a chance to create something amazing for this alliance. We will be making as strong a run as possible, and go as far as we can this year.

I want this to be a huge deal for our Brave community with people getting excited and passionate. Post your ideas. If you want to watch Brave play in real life meet ups in esports bars, if you want to go collect a bunch of newbros from Arnon and have Brave's AT run be one of the first things they see in Eve that would rock. Get behind us, get inspired post ideas.

Wish us luck!

On BRAVE middle management.

There's a meme, a narrative, going around that BRAVE has some awful, paralyzing, bureacracy that prevents us from achieving anything. Here's my view, just posted in a response to someone parroting it:

Middle management gets used as a buzz-phrase to encourage people to feel contempt for the people who step up.

If you fall for it you've been played.

Who are these middle managers?

People like me, Avaren, Christopher and a couple of dozen others who are stepping up to FC. The guys who oversee us Junior FCs - Extrems and Negativelight - are super nurturing and helpful, I've never seen anyone upset or discouraged by either one.

The Dojo is, imo, quite stunning. I was in E Uni 5 years ago and while very professional it was so much more cold and unwelcoming. Here literally anyone who is unsure can get help with anything, I've been playing 6 years and I still pop in quite often to ask questions. The level of helpfulness - even flying all the way to Empire to guide people - is amazing.

The recruiters seem to be doing a fantastic job, we have a constant stream of new people.

This week I got a new and sort of important job. Everyone I've talked to to get help for running the Alliance Tournament team has been really really kind and supportive. Kiu did a ton of IT setup and we have our own member group in CORE for the squad with private jabber and mumble. Kite Co set up forums. Lychton and Kelnon have done everything I've asked. Wiros and Agonist X have been brilliant - we already have an amazing advert.

The idea that we have some sort of snarled up middle managment bureaucracy that just snaps at each other and wastes each other's time is the complete opposite of my (admittedly limited) experience. It really is just propaganda based on a dreary 4 months old soundcloud featuring mostly people who have left.

I'm not saying it's perfect, there's occasionally things that grate, but for a group of amateurs doing a hobby the organisation we have here is outstanding.


In other news I'm now BRAVE's Alliance Tournament team captain. Welp!