Comms Comms Comms

Ever since Black Sail's brief stint in Mean Coalition I have been very strict about people using comms. That last fail alliance would regularly have fleet engagements with multiple corps and multiple comms. It was always a cluster fuck and we usually ended up trying to coordinate through chat windows! I swore that wouldn't happen again while I was running things.

This determination caused a lot of friction with another corp (Sinners) that joined the Yarr alliance. They wanted to use their own comm system while I wanted all joint alliance ops to be on the alliance Vent channel. They saw this as a threat to their independence (or something) and ended up leaving the alliance for this and huge egos a few other reasons.

Whatever. We have a corp policy that if you are going to pvp with us, you must be in fleet and on comms. If you are applying to the corp, you need to have a mic. I used to let a few people in with the understanding that their mic was broke and they would eventually get one. Many times this stretched out and became a real problem during ops. I got sick of this and now we our recruiting forums clearly say that you are not getting accepted unless you have a working mic. It's not like you can't run down to the nearest Wal-Mart and buy a $10 in a pinch.

It's a good policy and it's worked. Last night I had a experience that reminded me of why we have that policy. The (in)famous ex-Python Cartel member and blogger Andrea Skye convoed me and said he was coming back to the game and was interested in joining Black Sail. I immediately set him blue to the alliance and told him to drop an app in-game. I used to read his blog when I first started out with this game and am very excited to have an experienced pirate like him join the team.

A little later a few of us engaged two Solar Fleet battleships (maelstrom and dommi) on a gate. They were pretty tough bastards and we had some trouble breaking the tank of the maelstrom and ended up losing two hurricanes before we killed it. Since we were taking gate fire and I had to warp my tempest away in structure, I brought in my falcon alt to jam the dommi and let some of the battered ships get away. This alt is in a different corp but is still in the same alliance.

Someone said on vent that Andrea was warping in a Gila to help out and not to shoot him. That was cool with me because we needed the DPS. Then my ship immediately got blown out of the water by Andrea. I didn't realize it until after the fight (we still killed the dommi though).

At first I thought Andrea had couble crossed us but it turns out he didn't have a complete picture of what was going on and just been invited to join the fight by "HEY FIGHT AT GATE!! COME HELP! COME HELP". He had set Black Sail to blue but failed to set the entire alliance blue. Upon arrival at the gate he saw an evil non-blue falcon and did what comes natural.

If we had invited him to comms first, we all would have known what was going on and who primary was but since he wasn't...we had another clusterfuck on our hands. Luckily we got it all sorted out and Andrea is still joining us. And we learned a 180mil isk lesson about the importance of using comms.