Zen and the Art of Internet Spaceship Maintenance

Well I’ve been in Clown Punchers Syndicate for about 24 hours now. Last night I had my first taste of fleet ops within the corp and I have to say I was quite happy. The fleet was assembled with relatively little fuss even though there were a couple of us newbs who weren’t 100% prepared yet. The FC was clear, concise and easy to understand. This was a big point for me. In the past few months with Atlas I had the opportunity to fly with a number of talented FCs but I found that I often had some trouble understanding orders due to various accents(in the heat of battle some FCs seemed to slip completely into their native tongue which really didn’t help). I understand there isn’t much that an FC can do about this but it still tended to be an issue for me from time to time. This was not an issue last night.

I also found that I was able to keep up much better. In the past I would often be at the rear of the gang even though I was following orders as soon as I heard them.  This may just have been that with EU FCs I was a victim of a high latency on vent due to FCs being on the other side of the planet or I suppose it could have been a byproduct of the lag caused by the size of both our fleet and hostile fleets. Perhaps due to the same issues I often found that with our snipe HAC fleets I would often be unable to fire on a target before it was destroyed. This was often exacerbated by the fact that FCs would usually only call primaries instead of calling secondaries or even tertiary targets as well. These issues were virtually nonexistent last night. I was able to lock, fire and often get in the highest couple damage dealers on most of the targets.

Mostly due to the smaller size of the gang I also felt like I was making a much more quantitative contribution to the fleet. This is something that was somewhat absent when I was involved in 50+ man HAC gangs.

I even got to try my hand at some smack talk.

You can see the results of the op here. There’s nothing astounding here as the the targets were a little scarce but it was a perfect introductory roam for me and I can’t wait to go out hunting again tonight.