WH PVP Tournament

It's been a long time since Taggart has conducted a pvp tournament. We do them for fun, camaraderie, and to test fits and sharpen skills. We also do them for prizes - in this case first prize was a fully rigged and fitted faction frig.

This was a small tournament, made up of the pilots from just one WH crew. But a great time was had by all. The rules were as follows:

- This is a t1 frigate tournament. Everything must be t1. No meta, no rigs, no t2.

- Limit one entry per player.

- This will be a single elimination, one on one tournament. Brackets will be randomized before the tournament.

- Targeting of pods is not allowed. If you lose a match, warp out immediately. No smartbombs are permitted because of the danger they pose to pods.

- All fights are to ship asplosion.

- Killmails from this tournament are not to be posted anywhere.

- I am not eligible for prizes, but I will compete.

- There will be no fleet boosting from my leadership skills.

First prize as mentioned before was a fitted faction frig. Second prize was some faction mods I had lying around. I also threw in some kicker prizes if all of the invited pilots showed up (sadly this did not happen - one pilot was not interested in participating). There was also

a 100m bounty for asploding the CEO, which is a longstanding Taggart tradition for tournaments.

As you can see in the above pic, most of the pilots flew Punishers, as they have good laser and armor skills. Niama and I flew Caldari frigs instead (I prefer missiles and shields to guns and armor). The first round was Niama vs. eventurer. Even started to microwarpdrive to Niama but Niama seemed confused for a moment and then started flying away. Once even got into laser range, he opened fire. Then Niama brought out his secret weapon: ECM. Even's lasers were no match for his EWAR and he was quickly smoked after barely getting Niama into armor.

The second round was Stealthgogi vs myself. I had fitted a tracking disruptor to my Kestrel and put that on Gogi as soon as he got into range, but it didn't seem to do me any good. We were pretty evenly matched but he managed to asplode me as his own hull was hurting. 100m for Gogi!

The next round was Coop vs Niama. Again, the laser Punisher was no match for Niama's ECM. Coop fared little better than even in the previous round. The last round was Niama vs Gogi. While Gogi had a Punisher with probably a similar fitting as the previous two, he fared better against Niama. Niama dominated the first part of the fight, but as Gogi got into hull, his jammers started to miss. Gogi made up the difference quickly and got Niama into hull himself before he was asploded and Niama was declared the victor.

Niama hasn't chosen his prize yet but it seems to be a toss-up between a Daredevil and a Dramiel, unsurprisingly. For second place, Gogi got some faction mods, including some Dread Guristas jammers I had lying around from an old orca kill - fitting because he lost the tourney because of ECM. Everyone had a great time and we're planning a cruiser tournament very soon.

WH Armor Fleet Basics for Domi Pilots

Dominix Navy Issue

For those of you who have never flown in a TTI wormhole fleet, here are the basics. The core ship of a class 5 wormhole Sleeper op is the remote repair (RR) Domi. In an armor friendly wormhole environment, Sleeper sites can be cleared with a fleet of three Domis, if the pilots have the proper skills and equipment (T2 sentries and faction Domis help quite a bit). More Domis are always better as well as one or two DPS ships in the fleet to speed up site clearing.

Before You Warp

Before any op, always check that your drone bay is full and all your modules are fitted and online. Don't assume they are or you'll end up warping to the site only to realize you never replaced the drones you lost two days ago or someone borrowed a module and never put it back.

The fleet commander (FC) will list the energy transfer (ET) assignments. Each Domi in the fleet shares energy with another Domi, thus keeping everyone cap stable. In Rampart, the ET assignments are done by alphabetical order. For example, if code pink, Cynn, and Dick00 Haus are the Domi pilots, the ET assignment will be code pink -> Cynn -> Dick00 Haus -> code pink.

It's helpful to add your fleet mates to the damage watch list. You do this by right clicking their name in the Fleet Window and select Add to Watchlist. This will open a second window which displays their damage. Fleet mates taking damage will flash red in the Watchlist Window.

The fleet should form up so all ships are within 1,000 meters or so. Domis are slow and remote armor reps and energy transfer arrays have limited range. If the fleet warps to a site and is scattered, any ship outside the armor rep range is likely to asplode before it can get back in range.

As fleet commander, I always provide a link to EVE Survival for the type of site were are doing. Like many empire space missions, class 5 sites have triggers to spawn the next wave. I want my fleet pilots to know what the triggers are so we don't accidentally spawn the next wave before we're ready.

Sleeper Guardian

Arriving at the Site

As soon as you drop out of warp, make sure your defensive modules are on and begin targeting all of your fleet mates. Get your ET on your assigned fleet mate and check your watchlist to see who is taking damage. Put two of your remote armor reps on that person. The fleet commander will be calling out targets, so watch your overview and lock the indicated Sleepers. Launch your drones and begin asploding Sleepers.

Cap Management

Even with good energy skills and using ETs, Sleepers can drain your capacitor if you don't manage your modules. Try to run as few remote armor reps as possible. If you are only facing frigates, you only need to run one rep. If you are facing several battleships, you will need to have all of your armor reps on the pilot taking damage. If you are taking damage, finish repping the last pilot who was taking damage and turn all your armor reps off. Be ready to put them on again if you see someone flashing red in the Watchlist.

If you see your cap is going empty, ask to make sure the pilot assigned to ET you has it turned on. You could also be getting energy neutralized by the Sleepers. Let your fleet mates know if you are going on empty. If you go empty, the first priority is to get your ET back online. Next, start turning armor reps on, one at a time until you have enough cap to run the amount you need without going empty again.

Garde Sentry Drone

Drones

The only way an RR Domi does damage is through it's drones. Sleepers will target drones, so make sure you keep an eye on them and pull them in when they take damage. The more drones you lose, the less effective you are. Also make sure your drones are set to passive, so they only attack what you tell them to.

Use the appropriate drone for the range or type of ship you are attacking. Sentries are for cruisers and battleships. Bouncers are carried for targets 35 to 90 km away and Gardes are for targets in the 10 to 35 km range. Hobgoblins are for clearing out frigates.


Other Things to Keep in Mind

• Make sure you do not move. Watch your distance from fleet mates and let someone know if they are moving.
• Taking damage. Let your fleet mates know when you are taking damage. There's a lot going on and they may not notice when the Sleepers change targets.
• D-Scan, D-Scan, D-Scan. Fleet security is everyone's job. Hit D-Scan as often as you can and watch for scan probes and ships. Let the fleet commander know as soon as you see something.
• You can repair your drones. If your drones take damage, lock it and repair it. It is advisible to wait until you are only fighting one or two sleepers.
• Pre-lock your targets. The fleet commander will designate two or three targets at a time. Lock as many designated targets as your skills allow so you can begin dealing damage as soon as the first target is destroyed.
• Everyone shoots the same Sleeper. If you see two Sleepers taking damage, make sure you are shooting at the right one. Ask the fleet commander to re-mark the target if you are unsure.

The new website: Nuts & Bolts

This post might be boring to those of you not interested in web design; fair warning.

The Taggart website has been around awhile and while its last incarnation was perfectly functional, I've been learning Joomla! lately and decided to upgrade it. Joomla is an open source web design platform. What that means is it's free, and even better, it's a kind of modular system that allows you to pick and choose what you want for your site. And many of the designs that you see on Joomla sites are also free and open source.

I started by choosing a new template. Templates are the kind of overall layout of a Joomla site and everything else on the site is built around them. I recently became familiar with a web hosting company centered around Joomla, called Cloud Access. They have quite a few free templates available and I went with their Cloudbase template. Cloudbase is a Joomla 1.5 template. The latest release of Joomla is 1.7, but Taggart hasn't upgraded because there's no real need to do so yet. The differences between the two are mostly mechanical and behind-the-scenes, and upgrading is a real pain.

After changing the template, most of the menus were already in place, because Joomla's modular nature keeps menus and articles locked together from template to template. I just had to change a few things around and reformat a lil bit, no big deal. The real challenge came from upgrading the menus to work with the increased functionality of Cloudbase's MegaMenu. Hover your mouse over the "Our Corporation" panel in the top menu and you'll see what I mean. It's a sliding menu with submenus and the ability to do other cool things like embed videos and audio players.

For the showcase banner under the top menu, I wanted to make a slideshow, but I could not find a Joomla module that would work. So I pasted together some pictures of Taggart WH operators and a wormhole and put some text on it, and a link to our blog entry detailing the history of our corporation's WH operations. Maybe soon I'll make another one for something else.

Underneath the banner are several small modules, each with a link to one of our features, like forums or whatever. I did this to increase the attention they get and to free up space in our top menu. Underneath these modules are the welcome page (right) and the news ticker (left). The news ticker populates any item tagged as news in our articlebase automatically. All of these modules disappear when you navigate to another article (with the exception of the top menu).

A few months ago, when former CFO Liberty Eternal was active, he was working on a new ad campaign for Taggart with an experienced multimedia consultant. I managed to get in touch with the consultant to get some pics she had made and they were pretty slick, so I added one to the top of the menu. The only other things I did were just sprucing up our content itself, which you can see by checking out our articles! Enjoy, and if you have any questions about the website or Joomla you can post a comment to this blog entry.

WH Payouts

There are quite a few questions in our public channel (TAGGART) about how our WH operators pay out after ops. While I only operate Rapture and the other operators are free to pay out however they wish, we all follow the same basic model.

Our operators generally pay out immediately after an op (well, after they've had some time to crunch the numbers). We have some fancy spreadsheets that calculate everything up. Each pilot is given a share value according to what kind of ship they're flying and the fittings on it. We have precise fits for WH ops, but if you have the right skills, you can upgrade some of your mods and get a higher share value. Share boosts are also given for support activities such as salvaging and spending a significant amount of time scanning in preparation for an op. Unlike many other WH corps, there's no socialist BS; in Taggart WHs you are paid exactly what you're worth on an op - no more, no less.

To pay for the risk and investment that the operators put into their WH (which they own - the corp does not own or operate wormhole facilities), 10% of WH income is required from each crewmember. This number, called a POS fee, is automatically taken out of each pilot's payout after sleeper ops. Just like in real life, you can't live somewhere for free. The operators provide the fuel, infrastructure, and organization that each facility requires to operate smoothly. This fee provides each crewmember with space in the corporate hangar array (CHA) and ship maintenance array (SMA). It also means that crewmembers do not need to worry about fuel or hauling loot. The operators handle all of this.

In Rapture we take the share model to the next level by using micro-shares. Micro-shares, as their name suggests, are small share boosts that are given to pilots who train useful skills to a high level. These skill levels are not required to participate in the ops, but they make it easier for the entire crew. Individually they are small, but train a few of them and they start to add up.

Join the public channel and feel free to ask any of our WH operators in there if you have questions about our payouts.

WHEN ORCAS ATTACK!!!

WH pvp is hit or miss. It's mostly about surprise buttsecks, as one crew tries to trap and take down another crew that's not prepared for pvp. Evenly-matched, consensual WH pvp engagements are rare. In fact I don't think I've ever witnessed or been involved in one.

When you're out running sites or gassing, you gotta spam that dscan or risk getting hit. Dscan is often the only tool that can save you. Having an alt sitting on known holes is nice, but new ones could be opened at any time and let stranger danger into your system. But sometimes, you're the one prowling, and every once in a while you get a sweet kill.

Last night I was in an adjacent wormhole, a C5, when I noticed a POS with only a bubble. That was it; no arrays or other defenses at all. Weird right? Sometimes you see stuff like that out here; I figured it was someone who had been setting up or taking down a POS and had been interrupted. Promising, but who knows when they could be online to finish the job. So I flew off and did some other stuff for awhile and kind of forgot about it. A few hours later I returned absentmindedly and noticed that the force field was gone. I warped to the POS and saw that it was being unanchored, with no ships nearby, and 6 minutes to go on the timer. I raced back willy-nilly to grab my onyx and alerted the rest of my crew that were online.

We came back to the POS just as it was finishing its unanchoring and saw an Orca on dscan as we warped. "ZOMG ORCA KEEL IT!!!" I screamed. As we landed, the Orca cloaked and its pilot attempted to convo me. I ignored him and approached the last known location of the Orca, activating my hictor bubble. I bumped it almost immediately and we opened fire. The Orca pilot immediately started to re-online the control tower in a pitiful attempt to force us out by activating the bubble, but that would have taken much longer than he had available.

It turns out that Orcas aren't exactly the bloodthirsty animals that their namesake would indicate. This guy had a couple of faction jammers he turned onto my crewmember's harbinger with little success, and that was about it for his defenses. Orca hulls are pretty tough, however. We shredded this guy's shields and armor and then the structure took awhile. We did eventually smoke him and with the hict bubble got his pod too. To add insult upon injury, we brought in a dreadnought and took down the POS he had been trying to anchor. This is actually the second orca that the Rapture crew had taken down recently.

After the destruction, the guy convo'd me again and explained that if we had listened to his initial offer, he would have given us 2 billion ISK to not waste him. We would not have accepted; an Orca kill is worth way more to us than that paltry sum, and the wormhole business prevents me from not honoring ransoms. I won't transcribe the convo (full of tears as it may be), but the gist of it was that the guy was a one-man traveling gassing show. He used his Orca to cart his ships around class 5 WHs looking for fullerite-C320, the most valuable type of gas. He simply took down and set up his lil POS whenever he moved. Apparently he had been hit at least 3 times before and had managed to buy his way out for 2b apiece. Seems a little counterproductive. All kinds of strange people out here in w-space.