OP Homulilly: Aftermath of a weekend

[Gareth Correlian]

Oh man an event spanning two days and three evenings is pretty fecking epic and for all those that provided entertainment to the masses I thank you. The music was at some points glorious, at other times utterly horrifying to know that humanity is capable of such hideous travesties of aural displeasure. Though the banter during some of the times I was online was a joy and showed a level of camaraderie, community and friendship that trickled through comms and most definitely stretched uni's comms policy. Mush of this has been captured in a mental story of Zeeba and Grygr in a twisted slash fiction involving moist bhaalgorns and prophecies that if released to this forum would both result in multiple jail sentences and the removal of myself from a university that I am so fond of.

The FC's that ran the event, the scouts and the pre-fleet organisers deserve a lot of respect. I must admit after doing one of these in the past I can safely say that these people did a job that is extremely tough and challenging and for that I can only offer my gratitude for giving content but more importantly your own time to this community …. thank you and I offer you this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Y11hw ... E&index=18

BUT as always this is an AAR and as such the good and the less good must be discussed.

First – the initial hour of hole penetration was to slow. With only three inhabitants in the hole we should have been engaging the POS modules much sooner. There was limited risk and a simple case of having scouts in the adjacent connections would have been enough. Granted an hour was not much in the whole scheme of things but from some of the channels I was in there was a growing sense of frustration and boredom developing. This could have been ameliorated by a later point regarding more open comms////

Secondly – Being an FC is really hard. I mean really fecking hard. People who have dipped their toes into doing this role may think it is challenging but wait till you have over a hundred humans waiting to be entertained AND you have to conduct multiple threads of consciousness going at the same time to control a situation that can change within moments. For this you need a good support team BUT in no way should the support team EVER take over command unless serious situational difficulties arise. This weekend was badly mared with backseat FCing. It was so bad that even experienced players had no idea who was the FC. I was embarrassed by this and felt that the fleets commander was not given the opportunity to think. Titus, I respect your knowledge and know you have skill but you crossed the line and your behaviour was not acceptable in this. Please believe me when I say that this is me at my most diplomatic when I wrote this paragraph

Thirdly – My usual bugbear; command channel usage. I love the idea of command channel to allow a commander to ask questions and to receive support but that is it. After long silences in fleet I ended poking my head in there to see what was being said and I was saddened. There was genuinely some interesting logistical discussions going on that would have been very interesting to budding FC's and general peeps. A lot of glorious details was hidden away and instead, for most people, silence was heard instead. This is the uni – open up comms so everyone can learn. AS a newbro I hated this sub channel and as an experienced FC I utterly despise it for anything other than support reasons.

Lastly – If people are in comms and there is no opsec going on then let people be in comms. Who gives a crap if they are spies or just unistas being nosey or simply interested in an event they are about to join in. Only evoke restrictions on people if it actually matters.

All being said I had some fun times amongst the tedium of waiting and defending. Thank you equally to the command group and the line members that participated.

[Cerulean Ice]

Unfortunately my wife wasn't happy with the situation

This is why I got my bf into EVE. Now we can posbash together

[Tymora B'urri]

Will there be an Op medal for this? Was always kind of sad I never got any of the old e-uni medals for campaigns.

[Coaxster]

I'll just +1 gareth cuz lazy.

but also: GFAggro (some of you know who that is) had some demands right after the bash so I had just enough time to hit warp to the uni pos and went AFK for quite some time. I came back to no pos and just a few ships on grid -- a bit shocked luckily I survived.

[Seamus Donohue]

Congratulations, everyone!

Thirdly – My usual bugbear; command channel usage. I love the idea of command channel to allow a commander to ask questions and to receive support but that is it. After long silences in fleet I ended poking my head in there to see what was being said and I was saddened. There was genuinely some interesting logistical discussions going on that would have been very interesting to budding FC's and general peeps. A lot of glorious details was hidden away and instead, for most people, silence was heard instead. This is the uni – open up comms so everyone can learn. AS a newbro I hated this sub channel and as an experienced FC I utterly despise it for anything other than support reasons.

Can you provide some examples as to what you mean, here?

[Kotoko Hoshina]

Congratulations, everyone!

Thirdly – My usual bugbear; command channel usage. I love the idea of command channel to allow a commander to ask questions and to receive support but that is it. After long silences in fleet I ended poking my head in there to see what was being said and I was saddened. There was genuinely some interesting logistical discussions going on that would have been very interesting to budding FC's and general peeps. A lot of glorious details was hidden away and instead, for most people, silence was heard instead. This is the uni – open up comms so everyone can learn. AS a newbro I hated this sub channel and as an experienced FC I utterly despise it for anything other than support reasons.

Can you provide some examples as to what you mean, here?

I think what he meant (and I noticed this too) was there was a command channel setup that the FC and his support used to coordinate but there was often disjunction between what you heard and what you didn't hear but seemed to be expected to know. I believe what he meant most by it though was that using the command channel is good for organization but being a teaching organization it might be good to keep that info open so aspiring FC's can hear and learn. I think this would have been an excellent chance for people to learn about leadership of a large fleet op like this.

As for the random FC's jumping out of the woodwork.... some of this could easily be attributed to things like people asking "where am I needed?" and hearing nothing for awhile after which a random person would come on comms and give them a location. Also we had people seeming to think that just because you had several different points he fleet was concentrated at that somehow they could step up into a lead position where ever they were if the FC wasn't physically there themselves. I mean simple things like "you guys need to orbit that wormhole" and "please call out activations" are something anyone can do but telling tackle to switch holes when you aren't the FC and things like that is out of your role and shouldn't be done.

[TwilightSazuka]

When will the video be out?

[Goethian]

Thank you to, Jed Ellecon and everyone involved with orgranising the OP! That was my first deployment. I learned a lot about POS bashing, the logistics of operating inside of a wormhole and had an absolute blast flying a DD Oracle.

[HodooOor giant]

For most, Saturday was spent executing the monotonous but vital task of camping the exits of the worm-hole that many of us called home for a brief interlude. However in the bleak and godless space between spaces known as w-space (Bobile thumpers be damned), love between two VNI's blossomed. Maybe it was the listless monotony of what seemed to be a hole camp that would never end; maybe it was the risque talk of tight holes and/or collapsing said holes. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter because true love was born

[Richard Marte]

Logi did a great job in that battle, people were calling for armor like crazy.

Likely the result of smartbombs. On reflection we probably shouldn't have had so many calls, but we do tend to train everybody to broadcast at the first sign of being targeted. It didn't seem like anybody was taking serious DPS. Either that, or once all ~12 of us started reps there wasn't much getting through. I think I had all 8 of my target slots in-use most of the battle, and most of them went to zero shield in the first seconds.

I imagine having a dozen logi isn't too common in fleets, but I'd be interested in how assigning logi to broadcasts is done in advanced fleets when damage is being spread out, or if the enemy is shifting targets to try to confuse logi.

[Mattikus Pathfinder]

Good weekend, great atmosphere. It was really good to be a part of this op. I agree that it would have been nice to hear more of the FC decision making.

[Conci Furiram]

First – the initial hour of hole penetration was to slow. With only three inhabitants in the hole we should have been engaging the POS modules much sooner. There was limited risk and a simple case of having scouts in the adjacent connections would have been enough. Granted an hour was not much in the whole scheme of things but from some of the channels I was in there was a growing sense of frustration and boredom developing. This could have been ameliorated by a later point regarding more open comms////

Secondly – Being an FC is really hard. I mean really fecking hard. People who have dipped their toes into doing this role may think it is challenging but wait till you have over a hundred humans waiting to be entertained AND you have to conduct multiple threads of consciousness going at the same time to control a situation that can change within moments. For this you need a good support team BUT in no way should the support team EVER take over command unless serious situational difficulties arise. This weekend was badly mared with backseat FCing. It was so bad that even experienced players had no idea who was the FC. I was embarrassed by this and felt that the fleets commander was not given the opportunity to think. Titus, I respect your knowledge and know you have skill but you crossed the line and your behaviour was not acceptable in this. Please believe me when I say that this is me at my most diplomatic when I wrote this paragraph

<3 gareth. I was trying to find the most diplomatic way to state those two things. Thank you for doing it in your light-hearted fashion.

As for the random FC's jumping out of the woodwork.... some of this could easily be attributed to things like people asking "where am I needed?" and hearing nothing for awhile after which a random person would come on comms and give them a location.

I think there was definitely a lack of FC'ing at times.

It became really bad right before the first timer when the FC was MIA and, even after I poked around in command and got no response, I made the decision to take the reigns. Sent out timer mail reminder, got people into POS bashing ships, etc.

[Richard Marte]

It was so bad that even experienced players had no idea who was the FC.

It probably wouldn't hurt to stick the FC in MOTD or something. To be honest I wasn't really sure we even had an FC most of the time. It seemed more like a group effort.

Also we had people seeming to think that just because you had several different points he fleet was concentrated at that somehow they could step up into a lead position where ever they were if the FC wasn't physically there themselves. I mean simple things like "you guys need to orbit that wormhole" and "please call out activations" are something anyone can do but telling tackle to switch holes when you aren't the FC and things like that is out of your role and shouldn't be done.

It probably would not have hurt to actually designate a commander for each of the holes. They would make sure that there were enough in each role, call for reinforcements when needed, etc.

Part of the challenge was all the downtime. Nobody wants to bother with having command roles, fleet structure, and all that stuff when most likely the next four hours is going to involve nothing more than watching people come and go. However, if you do suddenly have a fleet turn up in your bubble, having all that stuff already sorted out would certainly be handy. At one point during the action I found myself running out of cap, which shouldn't have happened if I was receiving from both partners, unless I was being neuted (which is possible but I don't think I saw any red boxes).

It seemed like logi wasn't really using the mumble subchannel most of the time. Granted, this should be minimized when there is action, but if somebody arrives on grid and the cap chain needs adjustment it would be better to just hit whisper and call attention to it instead of just posting in chat and hoping somebody notices in the next 10 minutes. There were times where I wasn't where I needed to be (like being ready to jump through in case the Orca gets caught on the other side), simply because until Eileen pointed it out in chat the fact that something might happen on the other side of the hole didn't occur to me, and I figured the best place for logi was away from the action.

There were also times when the cap chain was a bit of a mess, even when we weren't really supposed to be afk (such as when rolling holes). One thing I found useful was to put all the logi in the watchlist, sorted in alpha order (double-checking the count on occassion to ensure that nobody had entered/left chat). Then all I needed to do is look at who was on grid and know where I fit into the order to recognize my cap buddies.

I learned a bit more about logi operations, so thanks to everybody for putting up with the newer player. After I get covops sorted Guardians are likely next on my list.

[Milodon]

Finally! Was looking forward to this AAR.

One of our guys was watching for giggles. Then he got killed by a POS, we may have laughed at him.

Rofl that's what happened?

And I'm going to echo what Gareth said about the command channel and designating an FC. Not so much what he probably said about Zeeba, I can imagine what that was.

P.S. Melkor you gon' die dude...

[Odowan Paleolithic]

Finally! Was looking forward to this AAR.

One of our guys was watching for giggles. Then he got killed by a POS, we may have laughed at him.

Rofl that's what happened?

And I'm going to echo what Gareth said about the command channel and designating an FC. Not so much what he probably said about Zeeba, I can imagine what that was.

P.S. Melkor you gon' die dude...

He almost lost his pod as well