August 13, 2010

Leetcheese has spoken more in detail in his update below about our new campaign, but I wanted to list it here as well. The NC is currently fighting in Cobalt Edge. They've already cleared out a system and taken over a station. A few other systems & stations are in reinforced mode right now. As of today (13th) we will begin a campaign in Cobalt Edge. We will be staging out of A1RR-M and supporting the NC as much as possible in this campaign. It will run for the rest of August before we move on to a new target.

Leetcheese will be the head of this campaign, I expect other FCs to step up and help out though.

We will have reimbursements activate for our capital pilots starting on the 16th and going forward. For now we will use a flat rate for dreads & carriers.

Dreads - 760m Carriers - 625m

We will have a more informative post about this in the capital board, please forward any feedback on that to Tamyris. We will evaluate this policy once we have some feedback and we've done some payouts.

We've updated our membership cap from 1300 to 4300 and created a new training/mentoring program. The recommendation requirement for a Dreddit account has been lowered to 45 days from 90 days. Dreddit will be pushing for a new batch of newbies to join up and move to Deklein so that they can learn the ropes, become spacerich, and participate in our next campaign.

If you have friends in EVE, get them into Dreddit (following proper procedures of course).

TEST has seen good euro participation recently, specifically RIM C & .ESC. but I feel that we need more europeans to round out or alliance combat ability. Corporation recruitment in the alliance is currently frozen (by my order). We will be lifting this late August / early September and specifically seeking euro/rus/anzac corporations.

Several systems are already upgraded and more are being shipped up every day. We will have four systems with Pirate V upgrade in them which will mean several systems with havens/sanctums that we can farm for ISK. People need to rat in systems that don't have the level V upgrades so that we can up the index and install upgrades. Mining upgrades will be done as indexes are increased.

This is what Deklein will more or less look like after all the sov is switched over.

-Montolio

No crossing for you

• Move to Deklein / Sov Handover
• Current Military Operations
• Goals

Aside from the small amount of interference from Ev0ke / Dead Terrorists during the OWXT handover, the sov handover has been fairly uneventful. Although there is a significant amount of station shooting left for the goons, we are nearly finished. I don’t predict much interference from external forces during the rest of the sov handover as Triumvirate mk. 4 really hasn’t made much of an incursion into Deklein aside from small roaming gangs.

Currently we are starting a small campaign in Cobalt Edge. Morsus Mihi / OWN / RZR have already been busy up there. They’ve already reinforced 3 stations (as of this writing), popped a few towers, and on-lined SBUs in several systems.

We’ve ran a few OPs up there, but I’d like to ramp up action over the next two weeks. I’d like to make it completely inhospitable for IRC residents.

 Bombers / Covops Hotdrops - lets dust off these and get things going. 
 Battlecruiser / Logistics Gangs - our bread and butter.  Drake / Scimitar gangs ftw
 Close Range Armor RRBS - something I’d like to see us make more use of

We will some convoy ops this weekend to get ships into place. I would like to work with the logistics team to move some stuff up there on alliance contract (fittings / small hulls). If we can arrange a cyno chain, I am reaching out to carrier pilots to carry larger hulls for your friends up to A1RR. We need to pack at least enough stuff up there for at least 1 week of engagements - this time is dependent of how quickly our goals can be accomplished or by how fast things escalate.

Deklein Police ops have been working fairly well and have seen a lot of participation. One thing Montolio wanted to stress is that we need to attempt to have some type of response for gangs roaming our space. Several people have stepped up to this task and I really appreciate the enthusiasm, props to Xystance, thetrel, TheDreadfulPossum, and Aphalionex (if I missed you, sorry, props to you as well).

Overall, participation is solid, but we can do better. I realize that it is summer and a lot of people are on a summer break hiatus, but we have a lot of people who are online and aren’t active in PVP. We need to keep alive and keep people active in PVP, from bitter vets to completely new characters - let’s keep our characters in EVE the opposite of our real life counterparts (I’m calling you all fat).

• Get all Alpha / Beta / Gamma commanders active in Jabber and in the appropriate rooms.
• Get reimbursement fits for CR RRBS - the NC uses these a lot and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some standardized fits.
• Revitalize the Covops / Bomber wing. I’d like to get some guest FCing from Mister Vee or other FCs that have extensive experience with bombing and hotdropping. We have a TON of pilots that can fly bombers - yet we don’t use them. Let’s change that.
• Military - Industrial complex. We need to help establish supply chains for hulls and fittings to keep our PVP pilots in ships. Do you manufacture? Do you import? Let’s try to get a solid supply for commonly needed parts at non-fucktest pricing. By keeping things in stock at a reasonable price will create healthy market for you to get all of that sweet isk.
• Have a high level of participation from all member corps of TEST. This is already good, but lets make it better! Get involved in the FC division - we need you!

-leetcheese

PROPAGANDA click the header for theme music while reading

The Word of Bort has been reinstated, and the lovely Lady Bort is the editor, compiling a weekly wrapup of news, happenings, funny stories, and propaganda roundups. I'm looking forward to expanding the blog beyond weekly roundups and including other stuff that goes on in the alliance that I think would be fun for outsiders to read (Rick Rothstar's wormhole shenanigan AARs for example). She's been doing an great job so far and is looking for more writers who want to contribute stories/articles. Send her a PM if you're interested.

We've released some videos. A quicky about our Logistics Divison and all the 'hard work' that is done there, a celebratory video about our move to Deklein, a rerelease of an older video that Youtube had previous muted that focuses on mining, and a recruitment video that was Ylca's brainchild augmented with some stellar ideas from Reverted Pacifist. All of these have been well-recieved by allies and antagonists alike, and were apparently seen by over 30,000 people. So the ongoing Operation Keep Us On The Radar has continued being a success.

The Propaganda forum has been abuzz and quite popular over the past few weeks. I started a poll to get input and public opinion on what kind of logo we should use ingame, which devolved into the kind of childish bickering and back-and-forth over unimportant shit that I love to wake up to each morning. While there were some clear favorites, it eventually split off into talking about what TEST's “official” mascot could be and there were a lot of great ideas including some awesome sketches of an adorable space puppy and some horrible MSPaint dinosaurs that I can't help but seriously consider because they are also awesome. With the poll concluded, I'm going to reroll two discussions: one about our ingame logo, and another about our mascot.

Jinli has been doing some kickass work vectoring Bort to be repurposed into many different versions ala the Goon Bee. During the forum blackout, Avalont created a fucking amazing series of photos dubbed the FC Eagles. He's included the source files so you can download and make your own. It's 150% win.

As a final note, we'll be doing a Propaganda Fund donation drive soon so we can continue to fund and reward the folks who do awesome shit like film gamefootage for videos and contribute to TEST propaganda in all sorts of ways. I'll have some neato prizes as well as some alliance-wide rewards for hitting donation milestones. It'll be fun. So look forward to that.

-Tez