47 replies to this topic

[Kano Tranker]

Thanks for the roam last night was great fun ... even got my first pvp killmail (not corp tourney or similar).

Main comments that will hopefully help you improve this are;

Coms was difficult/fun to follow but certainly smoothed out through the evening. Main issue is to continually broadcast the next destination as we did jump around quiet a bit. The size of the fleet was causing considerable lag. Even with all the client and overview settings to reduce this. Realise this is as much of an issue with current EVE release, so probably worth telling people how best to deal with it when it happens rather than reducing the size of the fleet.
Would I do it again - definitely! I have left a JC in Stacmon ready for the odd alumni roam

Thanks again, really enjoyed the evening and thanks to all the agony pilots who helped out; you went through a lot of T2 frigs last night.

[Vora]

Wow, Syndicate is a great region. Just a few jumps and you're in a fistfight with a couple of gangs. Great roam. Just two things that I noticed in this roam, and they're concerning communication with the fleet: 1.) It was a busy region. So the FC was in constant conversation with his scouts. In between came the fleet orders. I often saw that only half the fleet was jumping because the "jump-jump" order was nestled between a scout conversation. In a BASIC class a quarter, a third or even more are first-timers in a roaming fleet so they need a clear announcement, best with the signal word "Fleet" in front of fleet orders: "Fleet, jump-jump". The scout conversations (though for me the most interesting part of the roam) might be hard to follow for first-timers, so a clear distinction between them and fleet orders would make things smoother. 2.) We had bad gate lag. So many ships had to keep up with the fleet. Unannounced fleet warps are not very helpful in this situation. The fleet chat was always glowing with "where are you?" after such an unannounced warp. It would have been easier for the straglers to keep up if the warps would have been announced "warping fleet to FD- gate". For an alumnus like me it was 4 hours of pure enjoyment. Very eciting, very interesting (you clearly could see that IT and Goons are playing in totally different leagues !lol) Thanks for that!

[Cicero2]

The class and the roam were great. Thanks a lot for the opportunity Agony. This was my first big fleet with so much action I had problems at first what to do and who to shoot. After the second encounter things cleared up and the use of bubbles was pretty new to me. I will definitely fly again with you as an alumni.

[Ecatherina W]

I missed the telltale words of a rear guard saying "all in" when we were jumping. In days long past * grins * with other Agony roams, the FC would never fleet warp the group until the rear guard was saying "all in" or "rear guard jumping". Just a hint from an oldie..

[Vengencce]

First: The FC did a wonderful job! My gratitude to all Agony pilots involved in Sundays roam. Now for the other part .... My 2 isk, I think the roam was a little chaotic due to all the chatter over voice, it was hard to distingush between the FC and all the recon and others. Most of the time I had to peice together information as to whom was who and saying what. I felt as if this roam was much to large and find that I enjoyed the smaller class on the 17th. Since it was a pvp-basic roam I do understand the need for students to hear the interactions between recon and FC, however I feel that in such a big group that perhaps the group should have been divided up into 2 seperate fleets that worked together. I seemed to have to many people in my watchlist and found myself frantically scrolling threw the fleet list to find the "warp to" person called, this caused me to go down 1 time. The lag was expected and wasn't really significant on my end. Overall a big plus to Agony, Had lot's of fun and educational. A++ Looking forward to Wolfpacks !!!!

[Drmarvin]

Fantastic job FC'ing, Gant. And thanks to all of the skirmisher/interdictor Agony pilots that flew with us, you guys lost a lot of expensive ships getting good fights for us and your hard work and isk is much appreciated. Besides the lag I think we did have good luck, Gant mentioned we had 4 fairly large fights in the first 4 nullsec systems we entered. Thanks again, I can't wait for the next one!

[Carenthor Loon]

It should have been very educational for students to know that the stealth bomber bomb will not kill them if they are moving.

A ship's velocity actually has no effect on the damage taken from a bomb, unless of course your velocity is high enough that you are outside of the bomb's range when it explodes.

Does/Will Agony offer courses for Stealth Bombers? (Are they included in the covops class?)

Engaging with stealth bombers is not covered in the Covops class, however much of the content for safely manoeuvring a covops is equally applicable to a stealth bomber.

There's not really enough material to warrant a whole class on bombers, but a seminar is a possibility; it would be nice if CCP would fix the whole cloaked-ships-decloaking-each-other issue though!

you see them targeting you so you target them back and jam them before they ever get a lock.

Someone needs to retake the Basic lecture! :-p

Can any (students!) tell me what is wrong with what Loki said?

[Azual]

Can any (students!) tell me what is wrong with what Loki said?

Me! Me! Pick me!

[harataka]

you see them targeting you so you target them back and jam them before they ever get a lock.

Someone needs to retake the Basic lecture! :-p

Can any (students!) tell me what is wrong with what Loki said?

Supposed to turn off target back? (As a level 5 mission logistics pilot, target back has nearly gotten me killed a few times!)

[Tea]

Supposed to turn off target back? (As a level 5 mission logistics pilot, target back has nearly gotten me killed a few times!)

Nope, something else.

(Though auto targetback is evil and should be removed by default )

[DaDutchDude]

So I'll guess I'll post some feedback from my perspective as a first time instructor.

First off I want to thank the students for being patient and keeping voice comms clear during the part I instructed (which was the "Hydra Concept and Ship Fitting" section). I enjoyed instructing and answering questions. It was clear a good number of you already knew quite a lot and were getting into more advanced questions, and we tried to answer them as best we can without getting too deep in.

I think an important thing to take away is that what we teach in Basic covers 80% of the general cases, but the more advanced you get, the more answers will become situational (as in: "it depends on what you want to do / what you want to engage / what you are most capable of flying / etc"). Also, I had a hard time keeping up with the wide range of questions in fleet chat, but I hope you got most your questions answered. If you still have questions, pop in the au_pvp_university channel and just ask, there is usually some Agony people and/or alumni who would be happy to help you. It is always a good idea to come back on a Basic class as alumnus, things usually fall into place even better a second time around. And I can highly recommend going on Wolfpacks and Advanced classes, because with those three combined, you'll have a wealth of PVP knowledge. Based on those, you can also sign up for seminars that are more specific to a certain role in the fleet (like FCing or scouting / skirmishing) and ship type (like covops and interdictors).

As for the roam, I only joined somewhere in the middle, so I can't speak for the entire roam. We did have a lot of things going on, so Recon reports were coming in left and right, while at the same time the FC was ordering the fleet around. Combined with the gate lag (worse since Dominion, and it made a lot of people miss out on fleet warps) and many disconnects (more then usual), I can understand that people were getting a bit lost and confused at times. I think Agony could have improved a bit by more formally using the 'rear guard' role: he would wait until all pilots have gone through the gate and calls 'all in' when he went through gate himself and his grid had loaded.

At the same time, this is part of big fleets: an FC will always prioritize the fleet over individual pilots, so if you get lost, you have to rely on yourself more then on the FC to get back. Too often, people frantically started typing in fleet (causing even more 'noise' in communication) instead of listening closely. I know it was easier for me because I know all the voices, I know all the systems and know how Agony operates, but each time people got lost, there were queues on voice on where we were and what to do. So keep this in mind: when you get lost, you need to take care of yourself: stay calm, get to safety, listen carefully to voice comm and only if you are really lost and there is time on come channels, tell in text chat where you are, that you are lost and ask for instructions.

In the fight against the IT HAC gang, we probably would have done things a bit differently with an Agony only gang and maneuvered more, trying to get a more favorable position. With a Basic class however, things will go slower and it would have probably caused more chaos, but it did mean we sacrificed a lot of ships. IT clearly and cleverly went after Agony pilots first, which cost us a ton of ships, but it was fun none the less. Agony wants nothing more then for you to get as many things to shoot at and destroy as possible, so we tend to get quite suicidal when it comes to skirmishing. Again in a normal Agony gang, we would have done things differently.

Syndicate is awesome sometimes and it seems we picked a good night to have the class, because there weren't long stretches without targets. In that sense, you haven't really gotten the true 0.0 experience, because usually there is a lot of boring long dry spells broken up by short time spans of high paced adrenaline rushing heart pumping action.

To end my story: I hope you all had fun and grow from the PVP experience, come back as alumnus and / or student of more advanced classes and start get your pew pew on by yourself.

[Vyktor Volentin]

Praises, Comments and Criticism Pt. 2. After reading others' comments and thinking a bit more, I had a few things come to mind after all the excitement returned back to "low burn". First, I agree with some people above that a rear guard would've been a most definte improvement. With gate lag (is it always so bad? :S ), sometimes the fleet would end up jumping into a next system while some of the guys were still just coming into the system that the "vanguard" is jumping out of. This didn't happen too often and happened only once to me, but it'd be still nice if it could be avoided especially in the light of... ...The names of the systems. To a first timer in nullsec, the names like X-M2-something and F97N-G-some-other, are real strange, and when spelled out to a person not used to hearing that, it's very easy to miss or missinterpret what I'm hearing over the comm (and I so did, quite a few times in the first hour). Especially since English isn't my first language. It would help greatly if commands over the comm are accompanied by broadcasts or a message in Fleet chat, at least initially into the roam, until people get used to the weird names and hearing them spelled out. Which also brings me to warm up. I believe it'd be beneficial to remind people at the start of the roam of some of the lessons learned the previous day. For example: remind them that standing order when arriving at the gate is to orbit at 500, that standing order after a jump is to hold the cloak, remind them to spiral towards enemies right before first encounter and so on. Something like a roam warmup checklist. ^-^ I also believe it'd be beneficial to include the "don't drop cans" rule in the theory part and wiki course materials. This only came to light during the roam because a fleet member was dropping a can at each safespot to orbit around it (instead of orbiting around FC or any other fleetmate). Last is ewar notifications. A few times comms were really swamped with them, and most of them were redundant. At a certain moment I remember the FC saying something like "ok! he's ewared, enough already!" You might consider on how to cut down on redundant notifications in such a large fleet (and teach it to me too while you are at it ). Hope you find my comments useful and thank you again for a great EVE weekend, - Vyk Edit: fixed phrasing leftovers

[Gant Stryker]

Rearguard wouldnt have helped because of the lag, I warped fleet as needed to maintain momentum and allow us to engage.

[Alistone Malikite]

[/quote][quote=Carenthor Loon]

[quote=Loki Malikite]
you see them targeting you so you target them back and jam them before they ever get a lock.
[/quote]
Someone needs to retake the Basic lecture! :-p

Can any (students!) tell me what is wrong with what Loki said?
[/quote]

(Autotarget back was off)

Problem #1 => why wasn't my E-War already applied to the primary/seconday.

Problem #2 => there is a relatively low chance that your racial jammer matches the ship that's targetting you.

Problem #3 => Jamming priority is not based on "which ship is targetting me".

Did I get the answers right?

I could have included the following circumstances as well:

The primary had just blown up, the Secondary (Amarr) was already jammed (with my other 2 jammers). I had not heard a tertiary called.

And the racial jammer matched. It was more a "oh, I have a Caldari jammer to use...which of the 2 Caldari ships should I jam ... oh look that one is targeting me. He wins my jam )

I'm still learning so please tell me what other things I'm missing/forgetting. With the 2-day format I don't usually eavesdrop on the classroom portion of BASIC anymore.

[Zargyl]

you see them targeting you so you target them back and jam them before they ever get a lock.

Someone needs to retake the Basic lecture! :-p

Can any (students!) tell me what is wrong with what Loki said?

...
Did I get the answers right?

Hmmm ... I think what was meant is this: How did you see "them" targeting you? By seeing the yellow blinking bracket? I think that's the sign that they have already locked you :shy: (And the red pulsing bracket is when they are firering at you).

[glepp]

you see them targeting you so you target them back and jam them before they ever get a lock.

Someone needs to retake the Basic lecture! :-p

Can any (students!) tell me what is wrong with what Loki said?

Did I get the answers right?

Hmmm ... I think what was ment is this: How did you see "them" targeting you? By seeing the yellow blinking bracket? I think that's the sign that they have already locked you :shy: (And the red pulsing bracket is when they are firering at you).

Correct!

Thus, you can't see when someone is trying to target you, you only see when they have a lock. And if it's a high alpha sniping battleship like the Tempest, the next ting you'll see is a close-up of your pod.

[Alistone Malikite]

How did I miss that one... I've even seen it in PVE missions with ships that were out of range stay flashing yellow for minutes on end and it never registered. I thought it was flashing yellow when they were trying to target you...not when they had already locked. Though I feel embarassed I'll take comfort in that I'm probably not the only one who made this mistake in EVE before. When they say the flashing yellow means you are being targeted it really means you have been targetted. (Its a fine grammatical line between the "present perfect" tense and the "past perfect" tense; and whether targetted is being used as a verb or as a participle. So many times I've heard people complain about how hard it is to learn a different language because of all the verb conjugations... Usually they forget how complicated English can be.)

[glepp]

I'm probably not the only one who made this mistake in EVE before.

You're not.

[Zhu Wei]

I had a great time on both the Theory Saturday and the Practical Sunday. The theory helped to refresh my memory. I knew pretty much all the material but a lot of it lay dormant ;p The roam was great. It's frightening how effective basic t1 frigs are in numbers and under superb leadership. I will definitely try and come along to as many roams as possible in the future. I suppose if I had to say something negative it would be that I asked to be made a scout as I feel I need the practice since it's the direction I am going with my skilling and was told I would be given scouting orders which never happened. I obviously didn't want to go ahead and do my own thing as it was my first BASIC class, and I also would feel uncomfortable bothering the FC/XO about it as they had a lot on at the time. In the end I switched to my dps frig to do some more for the gang. Still managed to get 10 assisted kills and 1 top damage. I am happy with that Great work Agony and thank you very much!

[Ecatherina W]

Rearguard wouldnt have helped because of the lag, I warped fleet as needed to maintain momentum and allow us to engage.

You warped fleet, but did not say where to, which made those of us caught behind ... frantically asking where in fleet.

When lag strikes, fleet warps is no longer the answer. Trust me, I know lag...

[Ecatherina W]

Addressing some of Lokis questions about jamming (pro Griffin pilot here - just check what ship I have flown most in Agony classes...) When you are flying a griffin (kitsune, blackbird, rook, falcon, scorpion) you often have to use your own best judgement as to what to jam. It is not likely to be neither the primary or the secondary, instead it will be targets like high-dps ships, logistics ships and other jamming ships. In my alliance, t1 frigs is sort of frowned upon, especially with the Old Guard of russians. But I still get away with flying a griffin once in a while, because I do it right - and it is very satisfying to jam a scorpion with your cheap-ass t1 frig. Once jammed, the scorp or the logistics cruiser is dead weight in its fleet. Of course the problem here is that threat assessment needed to be a good griffin pilot isn't taught in Basic. But stick with the Agony classes until you reach Advanced to get to read up on it, if in doubt. In the meanwhile, try to listen to FCs orders (Gant told us to jam the logistic ships, which was the right call 100%) and apart from that, use initiative. Remember that jamming droneboats is not the best choice - the drones can aggro even without orders - but a jammed turretbased ship is dead in the water. Most missile based will be too, as it is not very often they carry FOF missiles. Apply your dps (for me it was 2x standard missiles) to primary and secondary in the meanwhile. And I am deliberately NOT answering Loonies question about what your error in thinking was :amazed: It will be covered by 800 others.

[Ecatherina W]

I suppose if I had to say something negative it would be that I asked to be made a scout as I feel I need the practice since it's the direction I am going with my skilling and was told I would be given scouting orders which never happened.

I obviously didn't want to go ahead and do my own thing as it was my first BASIC class, and I also would feel uncomfortable bothering the FC/XO about it as they had a lot on at the time.

If it was your first basic class, then I fully understand why you were not asked to scout. Agony has some very well trained scouts in covert ops or interceptors... trust me, you would have been so like a fish out of water. I am pretty sure the scouts coordinate in a separate chat channel in game while scouting... among other things.

But try to ask again as an alumni - maybe not your first return run, but later. I know I have been flying scout in some Agony fleets as Alumna.

[Anarius Faust]

First, thanks for the class, is was really well done and informative. Also, the roam really was a lot of fun. Besides the good stuff, maybe some input from me: The Roam felt a bit like you were trying to run it like a 10-man "established" gang. All the ewar calling f.e. covered shit up way to much, its really not needed with 70 people in gang. In the first sniper-gang fight f.e. all the chatter really drowned out primary calling. All the Recon intel really covered up stuff like where the f... is the gang and where am I supposed to be especially with people being left behind in lag jumps / fleetwarps. I do a bit of FW and fleets there are much the same like this roam, tons of random people thrown together with very varying ammounts of experience. In my experience those work best if everybody just shuts up and only the FC (and maybe the 2 or 3 ppl he needs to run stuff) talk. Also, it really helps to give orders in a strong and clear voice, and most important repeat them! Yeah it feels kinda retarded to say "Primary is SomeGuy in a Hurricane" 3 times in a row, but it really helps. Instead of trying to run some nifty ewar-spread-whatever scheme make sure everyone knows the basics (where to be and what to shoot). Also, if somebody is a warpin or whatever, have him X up in fleet, just saying his name on Vent doesnt help if you don't know the people, it takes forever to figure out who exactly was meant in a 70 man gang. So, no offence intended, it was a great class and a cool roam