We bravely ran away....

From a fleet that outnumbered us four to one.

In my alliance, Friday night is Drunk Roam night. The sloshed bros gather, bringing whatever we have in our hangars that we're not particularily attached to. We're lucky if we can get more than a couple tackle, and the odds of people wanting to fly logistics is rather low. It usually takes ten minutes just to talk/cajole/force pilots into support ships.

There's only a few rules for Drunk Roam:
1. When you screw up, you take a drink.
2. When the FC doesn't find us stuff to shoot, we shoot the FC.
3. When we run out of booze, the roam is over.

As usual, I was the only person to show up with a logistics ship, so various others were poked and prodded until we had two more. Finding tackle was even harder, so much so that we set out with only one light tackler. Being Drunk Roam, we left half of our fleet behind, and had to wait for them catch up. Catch up they did, only for us to discover that the FC had wandered away from his computer some time ago. This of course led to the second rule being enacted.

Once the FC had reshipped, we started wandering around, looking for more stuff to shoot. It was beginning to look like we might have to enact the second rule again, when a Tornado let himself get caught 50km off a gate by our scout. The Tornado must not have hit our scout with anything, because I had nothing to rep once I finally landed. We missed his pod, but managed to follow it for another 5 jumps before he finally got away.

We came across a few ships with cloaks fitted. A Tengu and a Loki both slipped past us before we could lock them up. Finally, a Sabre jumped into us. Without a cov-ops cloak, he was easy enough to decloak, so we popped both his ship and his pod. Continuing in the direction the Sabre had come from, our scout found a system with 40-odd people in local. Figuring we might find a decent fight for our 32-man fleet, we rushed in to fight them, only to have local spike to 150.

Our departure from that system was swift, and we started running home. Our scout managed to catch some info on what was chasing us: Battlecruisers (mostly Oracles), up to ten Guardians, a wing of stealth bombers, plus the usual hodgepodge of support. They were catching up with their tackle, so a large portion of our fleet docked up in an NPC system. Our docked-up pilots trolled the other fleet in local chat, naturally, and one of our guys got the bright idea to post something that got him a three day ban less than 5 minutes later. None of us had ever heard of someone being banned that fast, so we naturally responded by calling the other fleet a bunch of pansies who couldn't win at EVE without GMs or blobbing. How many people have to file a petition to get that speedy a response?

The ten or so of us who didn't dock got away without too much trouble, as the other fleet stopped to have a cry about the meanies who were trolling them. We straggled our way home, which cost us our only enemy fire loss of the night, a Tornado pilot who started burning straight home without waiting for the rest of us. He got caught in a drag bubble 290 kilometres behind a gate, where he was quickly burnt down by a waiting Cynabal. An Ares pilot from our fleet landed too late to help the dying Tornado, but nearly suffered the same fate by getting ahead of the fleet as well.

I was the third person to land on grid, and I arrived in time to save the Ares with 34% structure left (I'm still waiting for a high-five). Tackled by the Ares, and unable to break my reps, the Cynabal pilot tried to slow-boat towards me in the hopes of catching my Scythe. Unable to get anywhere near me, and seeing more of our fleet starting to pop up in local, he reversed course and got away from our Ares. By the time some DPS had landed in the bubble, the Cynabal was already in warp to a safe.

Those of us left went traipsing home, only to find that a fleet member had gone AFK at some point and was still four jumps from home, with reds filling the systems between. Since I was one of the few people still on comms post-roam, I got called to scout part of his path home. Fortunately, one Talos is not enough to alpha a Scythe. I had to sit and wait for him to shoot so that he would be unable to follow me through a gate. Even though I was imbibing Drunk Roam, it turned out to be an uncommonly effective bright idea, as it gave me time to get through the gate, safe up, and start D-scanning before he could come through.

Finally, everyone who was still in space got docked up, either at home or in NPC space, and we called it a night. Overall, fleet members violated the first rule at least thirty times, and the second rule once. We were too busy running away to drink heavily over the last third of the roam, so we avoided the third rule. All in all, a successful night. A Tornado, Sabre, and the FC's Drake killed, for the cost of a Tornado and the FC's Drake. Killboard green, thirty people with protesting livers, and a bunch of yellow-bellied blobbers trolled. What more could you want?

- Sam.


Update 30/03/13:

Found out later that someone's buddy in the other fleet had sent over a message explaining what happened on their end. Apparently the stealth bombers were a friendly Black Ops/Stealth Bomber fleet that 'just happened to be in the system' and 'weren't interested in fighting' us at that time. That would mean their fleet of 70 was composed of approximately 50 battlecruisers, 10 tech 2 logistics, and 10 more ships of the tackle/support variety. Our hodgepodge fleet of 30 got called cowards on their comms for running away from a curb-stomp. Guess we're just not as space-rich as them. As for the guy who got banned, well, it was a rather disgusting picture, and there 'might have been' a GM's alt/friend/drinking buddy/neighbor's third cousin twice removed in their fleet.