by Iccyh » August 28th, 2010, 3:57 pm
A few points I briefly made on IRC:
K/SG had been going on before K vs. SH/ASx. STS supported K in that, we allied with Fury 'cause we could see the writing on the wall and knew that we were next on the list for SH or ASx since we weren't pacted to them and we were closer to K than others. SH had been raiding us out already, so we figured it was time to make it official.
I also made some points about the meta-game and mechanics.
1. The average EXP per player was likely higher in 2.1 than in any round ever in TDZK. This was driven by the realization that the level equation gave a HUGE advantage to higher levelled players across the board. It was to the point that in the more elite alliances, people wouldn't bother to reship until they'd hit something like level 65. This situation is what gave rise to DCC and what made players like Jai actually worrisome. Target hunting, or hunting levellers, was incredibly effective as a war-tactic in 2.1 since by killing levellers you could effectively keep them from reshipping into warbirds. While target hunting occurred in rounds other than 2.1, it was mainly for the ego of the individual hunter rather than because it was a useful tactic.
2. 2.1 was the dawn of EMP. EMP weapons were changed to automatically drain power as well as do EMP damage. They went from effectively useless in 2.0 to exceedingly useful in 2.1. Keep in mind that wraith was always the most popular race and that at the time, conventional wisdom was still that every single warbird built should have scanners and cloak as well as SSJD (nevermind that cloak was solid neg-align and so a pos-aligned wraith could access high-align weapons without having to align down for cloak). Wraith bubbles were very common, and they just got eaten alive by EMP.
3. While SH may have had the most effective raid team in the game, it was ASx that forced that the mechanics for raiding be changed entirely in 2.2. High-speed initiative raiders would have been entirely game-breaking and had those raiders of ASx' not died on the second port they hit, the biggest thing we'd all remember from 2.1 was how ASx raided out everyone who wasn't allied to them, and how there was nothing that could be done.
One other thing I'll mention is that as a leader in STS at the time who was allied to Fury, and given that much of STS went to Fury later on:
2.1 led very directly to what happened in 2.6. Both alliances gained a huge amount of experience from what happened in the round, and the main lesson that was taken away was that raid teams win wars. We lost to SH 'cause they could raid, and we couldn't. But, Fury learned that they could do it, and that there were ways to get things done even if they weren't pretty.
Case in point:
While AtM talks about the raids where Artur used his multies to shut down our raids on SH's planets (where moose triple-triggered, we lost our entire raid team, and were reimbursed) the raid I remember the most was actually the subsequent op that we ran. In the first op, STS had actually provided the majority of the raid team since we had more Zalluns at 50, as Fury had been roughed up for the better part of the round, having already been on the receiving end of a number of SH raids while we'd fared somewhat better so far. In the second op, while we provided a number of raiders, it was a mixed team where Fury actually provided the majority of the raiders.
The op was a complete disaster. JustofSpades was STS' raid leader and he just couldn't manage to handle what was going on, he had a lot of trouble getting things running smoothy, and when there were problems he had a tendency to blow up and blame Fury rather than calming down and making things work. On the other hand, Fury's raid leader that day was Nightmyre. As someone watching the op who'd just started that round and who had no real knowledge of raiding (but who knew ton about organizing already) I remember first thinking that the op was a total disaster, as we were running it. Having to use suiciders to clear drones on the level 50 ports was really ugly and inefficient, the triggers were really slow, reloads were slow, and we ended up losing raiders more than once due to errors.
However, every single time there was an issue, Nightmyre, despite his low levels, would redesign his ship, reship, come back, and the raids would continue. When JoS got pissed off, gave up and left, 'myre literally drained the op forward through sheer force of will and made it successful simply by refusing to give up. He knew we could do it, so we did it.
Now, a lot of the leaders in STS, Baron Troskey included, look at that op and thought it meant we'd made a mistake in allying with Fury since these guys didn't know what they were doing. Yes, our own raid team was rainbowssss, but the Fury way of doing things was just so horribly ugly that it bordered on amateur. This wasn't the alliance that we wanted to be playing with, we wanted to be allied with people like K who had big-time experience and who knew what they were doing. Indeed, this is exactly what happened in 2.2 (K allied with STS).
The lesson I took away from that op, though, was that Fury was an exceptional group of people who would fight tooth and nail as a group and who would pretty much never roll over and die. Alliances tend to live and die by their leaders, and I knew that so long as 'myre was there, Fury was going to succeed.
In 2.2, 'myre was highly active and Fury succeeded. In 2.2, Baron Troskey went inactive and STS floundered.
I know this is last bit is really quite a personal tale about the round and those two alliances (Fury and STS), but I'll happily tell that particular story basically any time I get an opportunity 'cause 'myre was and is just that awesome.
<3 'myre.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.