Last night my wife had something to do for a few hours, so I hopped onto mumble and joined a fleet. Now, this was no normal fleet. This particular fleet had been advertised for weeks, and had a very specific purpose: to let new players see what it is like to kill a carrier.
Its amazing what type of participation you can get when you announce a purpose like that. Our fleet quickly passed the 100 player mark, with some older players deciding to bring out some fancy toys (faction BS, some carriers, and one or two T3s) to mark the occasion. The bulk of the fleet, however, was t1 ships, ranging from frigs to battleships.
Now, I joined late and only had a jaguar in the station with me. But, no one considered turning me down, no matter how little I would bring to a fight like the one planned... the uni accepted every single player who wanted to try some PVP. The cap ships we were going after would be the first pvp kill for quite a few players in the fleet.
Once in the fleet, it was a great mix of strict combat coms when needed, to joking around and linking some pretty funny pictures while we were waiting for the targets to take the bait.
Our opponents, PHEW and RnK, are incredibly talented PVP corps that we were lucky enough to have engage at a time when they didn't have reinforcements available, or scouts to see the main body of our fleet a few jumps away. I can only imagine their surprise when local jumped up by over 100 players, a few of our players jumped in carriers, and their 2 carriers and 2 dreads starting melting.It was a bit close at first, with one of our carriers forced into triage, but we quickly started pulling ahead.
I have no doubts that the fight would have ended entirely differently if RnK had a chance to bring a full fleet instead of the isolated pilots we got, but even with the rather 1-sided fight, they were incredibly classy about the encounter. I already had a lot of respect for them, but that really drove home what a good group of guys they are.
And this is why I love the Uni. We accept anyone, go out into fights that could go either way, and just have some fun. Forget the drama, the forum wars, etc.... I have a lot of fun flying with the Uni, and no matter which way the fights go, meeting some great guys. Occasionally we blow them up, and occasionally we explode, but either way, its fun to do it with my corpmates.
