Rifter Drifter

On Monday 1st September, 2008 I made a decision. I was going to leave my training corporation and head out to be a full blown pirate. A post on Ka Jolo’s blog had caught my attention and I decided to apply to join his tiny little 3-member corporation. Here’s my application form from way back when:

* Your real-life age and country of residence.

26 years old, living in the UK

* Why do you want to join the Tuskers?

I love roaming low sec looking for PvP so think its time for me to go pirate. I don’t really want to be part of a big, gate-camping pirate corp and prefer something a bit lower key. I’ve really enjoyed chatting to you guys in your public channel and coming out to have a look at your area.

* Tell us about your previous EVE and other MMORPG experience, if any, including any leadership roles you may have held.

Eve is the only MMORPG I’ve played. Since starting I’ve been a member of DGAF, a 0.0 PvP training corp. After 5 months with them I’ve been promoted to the teaching staff but I’ve decided that 0.0 life isn’t for me.

* Successful PvP is more about pilot attitude than SP; skillpoints provide a measure of flexibility to a pilot’s tactics. In lieu of a minimum SP requirement, the Tuskers require recruits to document five solo kills (link to the kills at a killboard such as BattleClinic), including two kills above the candidate’s ship class. We don’t care if you’re a grizzled PvP veteran, a reformed carebear who’s accumulated your kills over time, or if you’re a young pilot just able to fly T1 frigates. (Rookie pilots can read this thread for suggestions on how to rack up the required solo kills.)

You can see my kills at http://kb.tcdcorp.net/?a=pilot_detail&plt_id=41015. For solo kills above my class how about http://kb.tcdcorp.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=3338 and http://kb.tcdcorp.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=3226. I’ve also killed destroyers and cruisers in my Rifter too.

* Candidates for recruitment must use Teamspeak. This program is free to download and install. You will not be admitted to the corporation if you do not have a functional microphone and speakers.

I’ve been using Vent since I started playing Eve and used Teamspeak for joint ops with our blues.

* Candidates must not be alts of other active characters. You may have a trader alt or a mission-runner alt, but they may not be a member of any other player corporation without permission.

I have one trader alt: Allii An’Har

* Provide your Full Access API Key and User ID. This allows us to look at your skills and wallet (which helps to detect ISK-buyers). If you are currently in a corporation, please be aware that we may also be able to see financial data for your corporation; you may want to leave the corp before providing access. If you don’t want to provide this information on this forum, you may EVE-mail it to me.

Eve-mailed.

Sixteen months down the line I have made the equally hard decision to hang up my eyepatch and release my parrot back into the wild. So what happened in the intervening time?

When I first joined The Tuskers there were just six of us: Ka Jolo, Ronan Jacques, Egrat, Joc, Z Rex, and myself. We were based in the Hevrice system and mostly flew T1 frigates, interceptors, and T1 cruisers. Ka Jolo’s former corporation, Ministry of Destruction, still lived in the system and did their best to interrupt our operations. We soon got used to them and our small ship roaming style meant that we rarely ended up in direct competition.

We pretty quickly built a reputation for ourselves and the numbers began to swell. Notable highlights for me include our sneaky sneaky expert Yahrr joining, my old friends from Amamake Burn Mac and Misty Steele, Nupe, Grohalmatar and Who8, and Rylack the Punisher wizard. We roamed in our small ships and got lots of kills. We had fun and began to spread The Tusker brand. We were still pretty small fly in the general scheme of things but it was already obvious that Ka Jolo’s vision was coming together.

Eventually MoD moved out of Hevrice and we had the system to ourselves. By now our main competition was the Roughnecks alliance who lived in the systems surrounding Aeschee. We would make regular roams there in our frigate gangs and pick of a couple of ships before they sent in more than we could deal with and we were forced to disengage. At the same time a new force began to appear in the area. The 22nd Black Rise Defensive Unit had decided to take the war to the Gallente and were basing out of Costolle (two systems from Hevrice) in their bid to capture the Verge Vendor region. Between these two foes we really managed to master our preferred combat style and had many memorable fights that I look back on fondly even now. One real stand out for me was when I took apart an entire BRDU cruiser gang in my Rupture while they hung around desperately trying to capture their installation. Its worth pointing out that our other main sparing partners at the time were Ollie123 and his Flaming Brotherhood.

All of our success really began to enhance our reputation and eventually we decided to limit our numbers to just forty members. This allowed us to have a good number in all the various timezones but meant that we didn’t end up just becoming a huge blob. This was probably for me the absolute best time that I had in The Tuskers. By now Jolo had appointed me as a director thanks to the various operations I was leading and the active role I was playing in corporation life. On top of this some of the best pilots I have flown with in Eve were part of the corporation and we were getting some excellent skills. Caster Rom and Leo Solunar in particular formed an absolutely deadly team in their frigate duos.

Life in Hevrice was pretty stable by now. We had a really good, solid core of members (most of whom are still around today) and while people came and left we had a backlog of quality applicants. So much so, in fact, that we began to get more selective about who we recruited. At this point in our life we were also beginning to regularly fly what we consider to be “large” ships. That is battlecruisers and T2 cruisers. Accordingly we were getting even better fights but also making some pretty silly mistakes. One of the great things about The Tuskers is that if someone makes a huge loss there is little in the way of blame and recriminations and instead a good discussion of how we can avoid such mistakes in the future.

Our public channel had become pretty active with lots of friends that we’ve made along the way. Some were people that we had a lot of fun shooting (special mention for the Blood Money Bootcamp here) and some were friends who we would regularly fly with (and some would eventually come join us). We had even managed to start terrorising Aeschee. A couple of the Roughnecks best corporations had left (the Nightshift springs to mind) and been replaced by poor shadows of the departed. Their mission runners are now constantly falling to our hit and run assaults. While they try and assemble traps they take too long and we have generally already moved on before they are ready.

Eventually Ka Jolo decided that it was time to allow the corporation to expand again. The plan was to establish a second base of operations so that we don’t over-farm Hevrice and reopen applications. Eventually we decided that Bosena in Molden Heath would be a good place to base from and arrangements were made. With an office in the station we reopened recruitment and began a campaign to establish ourselves in the region. At first things were hard. Molden Heath is very different to Verge Vendor and the waters are full of sharks in battlecruisers. It took us a while but we managed to adapt to the way that Molden Heath works and began to modify our guerilla tactics to allow us to get good kills and a healthy ISK efficiency on the killboard.

During this expansion period there are two things that are worth noting. The first is that we gained a couple of excellent probe operators and began to really make mission runners in our local system pay the price. The “mission tax” as it is known has proven to be highly popular with our customers. Secondly several of the guys began to fly logistics ships and, my lord, do we love them. Now we can fight much tougher gangs than we could before and we’ve been having a lot of fun doing so.

So this is where we are at the moment. The corporation now has approximately 60 members and is rising up the Battleclinic rankings faster than we can keep up with. At the time of writing we are at 48. To get an idea of the kind of success this reflects we are behind the united, Veto., Mean Corp, and Invicta but ahead of Exceed Inc., Neo Spartans, Mentally Unstable Enterprises, Murder-Death-Kill, Maximum Yarrage, The Black Rabbits, The Bastards, and many others who aren’t in the top 100. Well done guys!

While I am sad to be leaving so many great friends and comrades behind I am excited both for what my own future holds and to see where The Tuskers can go to next. It really seems that the sky is the limit for Ka Jolo and his boys and I wish them all the best of luck in the future. Thanks for an excellent 16 months.

I am sure that there are tonnes of details that I’ve missed out of this little retrospective – heck, I’ve already thought of some – but this would probably get far too long if I tried to add them all. If any Tuskers or former Tuskers read this please chip in with your memories of the last 16 months of Tusker glory.