Fweddit - Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Some faction warfare changes have rolled out. Mostly to fix alt farming, those folks with no intention of taking part in the PvP side of faction warfare. Which is great. And some changes to loyalty point payouts. I've already discussed both.

Fweddit is back in the Amarr militia. A lot of supposition on why we returned. Our new alliances with Agony and PIE aren't really conducive to us remaining Caldari. Up until this point, the major Amarr corporations were mainly doing their own thing. Agony, for instance, wasn't anxious to set anyone blue. But time, getting to know one another, that sort of thing, it brought most of the major groups together (except TMFED, they're as batshit insane as ever.) The night before the patch was an excellent example. Agony and PIE (newly returned to Amarr) wanted to bunker bust, flip systems. We were still Caldari, so could only help in that regard by offering intel, scouting and protection. But it was a good night of team building. So, that's basically why we've returned. The corporations are coming together as a fighting unit, and all within the Amarr is the only way for it to work.

My Amarr standings are terrible, -7.1 terrible. So ran a couple of L1 missions. Holy shit does the geography of our warzone suck. Both missions sent me to the ass-end of Metropolis. You don't really understand how lopsided the geography is until you play Amarr. Metropolis is guarded by a single chokepoint (Hoffle-gobble), and then it's mostly just a series of cul-de-sacs (dead-ends.) So many jumps just to complete a couple missions. CCP could fix this, oh so easily, by adding a few gates to widen the warzone, get rid of the Hoffle-gobble chokepoint. So many geographical inequities could be solved with just a few new system connections. But that's a discussion to be had on its own.

At any rate, the result, not sure how often I'm going to run missions, considering how poorly laid out the warzone is. (It was easy running missions for the Minmatar, the Amarr section of the warzone is easy and quick to traverse, there are no chokepoints and deadends, and you could complete handfuls of missions within just a couple jumps of each other.)

Kourmonen

Ping-pong Kourmonen. It's flipped, what, four times in the last eight weeks? Seems Kourmonen is one of those systems that everyone wants to control, but no one really wants to spend anytime defending. Blame that on the plexing mechanics, I figure. The Minmatar took it back this week, after the patch. With very little blowback from the Amarr. Oh CCP, why must you force exceptionally boring PvE on an area of the game that should be focusing on PvP. The only active defense by the Amarr was to keep them from getting it before the patch. After the patch, Agony hassled them a bit, to make the process a tad more painful.

Hard to say if the Amarr will be bothered to retake it in two weeks. Agony bases out of Kamela, so they'll probably want it again. PIE, I'm not sure where they're basing out of. And, of course, as you all know, Fweddit and iLaw base out of Egghelende. We've been trying to convince Agony to move up to Egg as well.

Now if Agony did move, what would Late Night do? They'd actually have to travel four jumps to find fights. Would they move to Auga or Dal?

Slumlords

One of our goals, now that we're back to being committed to the Amarr conflict, is to find ways to get ourselves a wider variety of fights. One method we've hit upon is to start attacking pocos (player-owned custom offices). The hope is that it will bring out folks to fight. If not, then we get to put up our own pocos, which should give us some passive income for our internal programs. We've got four up so far. Nobody, so far, has came out to play (four reinforce timers in five hours on Thursday.) We'll be attacking and putting up more in the weeks to come. Building the Fweddit space empire, yo!

Other Fights

We're also branching out our roams beyond the Siseide gate. One of the best fights we've had in months was next door to Egghelende in Aliette. A fifteen minute brawl that was intensity upon intensity. Outnumbered by a fleet with larger hulls, and we prevailed. It was the first major test of our new circle-jerk Drake doctrine (Drakes repping Drakes.) Without the logi Drakes, we would have been slaughtered, but the doctrine held its own and turned the tide.

You fight the same thirty people flying the same thirty ships using the same ol' tactics over and over again ... well, that shit gets boring. The last week, we've been looking for fights elsewhere and finding them. It's really made the warzone more vibrant and exciting for Fweddit. There'll still be fights with Late Night from time to time, but they can come to us for a change, if there's nothing much for them down in Huola.

All that's left is to convince Agony to move to Egg. Late Night has had it easy for far too long. They've come to expect that they'll never have to travel more than a system or two to get a fight. And most times people have been coming to them. Time to change that behaviour from the Amarr, and that expectation of the Minmatar. They can control the warzone, but we're going to control the fights.

Logos

December is  coming quick. And December will mark the six month anniversary of Fweddit. Which means we can submit a logo. So far, we have six submissions. The main design concern is that it look good at a low pixel count. So a lot of detail is a no-no.

Some are particularly bad, like my weight-lifting chicken in position #2. The grilled-cheese sandwich looks surprisingly good, but would likely not be approved by CCP. (Don't ask why a grilled-cheese sandwich has risen as a top choice, because I have no clue as to why.)

For some reason (again, I have no idea why), the chicken as become a mascot of sorts for Fweddit. Choice #6 is so far the leading candidate. It needs some alterations, to make it more apparent that the chicken is wearing a space helmet. But other than that, it has all the hallmarks of a good logo. It has strong meaning within Fweddit. And it's simple and scales well at all sizes.

The whip also looks pretty good, but not many folks seem interested in our logo having a direct correlation with the alliance name.

Activity

My activity this month has been quite high. The game is fun again. The PvP has been great and often. I'm almost triple my previous record for activity and attendance. Up to 137 killmails, nearly triple my previous record. It's been a bit slow this last week for me, but I hope to hit 150 by the end of the month. I'm also thinking I'll start fleet commanding in November. Fweddit is awesome and I want to grow as a player within the organization.