AU History chapter 1

Original text by Rells
Copyright Agony Unleashed

Chapter I: The beginning of Agony

PVP-BASIC had been running quite regularly by spring of 2006. It was starting to become more well known, advertised by word of mouth and a bit of discreet system spamming. The classes were running 30 or so pilots per class. However many of our graduates wanted more and so did I.

I had founded AGONY with my alt Keersom after quitting BSA, another corp in a big alliance. I couldn't get the people in the alliance to respect and invite the newer players to the fleet actions for more than tackle bait. The newer players in the alliance had to earn their keep being basically fodder for 200km sniping fleet flyby fights. Most of them died spectacularly. Shortly before leaving BSA I ran my first PVP-BASIC class for BSA and it was a raging success with 12 pilots showing up and me shooting from the hip on the curriculum. We managed to make two kills of refugees from the big fleet fight but still the brass wouldn't believe small ships could be effective. There were tons of ships in the game but everyone flew battleships. Why? Well that is just what one did in Eve if one wanted to be respected.

So I struck out and had a brief stay with an alliance in curse. I set up bubbles in the entry system to 0.0 on the opposite gate. Pilots that thought themselves lucky to get through the main gate slammed into the bubble. The first crow evaporated to my cormorant like scrap metal in a furnace. I had concentrated my skills not on racing to battleship like others but rather in core skills and the hapless crow pilot didnt stand a chance. At the time Crows were rare and expensive. After camping a while I realized that this crew wasn't going to see the light either so I set out to make a name for my fledgling corp being held by my alt.

So several months later I am sitting in MHC-R3 with the first group of about 12 students for the pvp Wolfpacks class. We had intel that an enemy fleet was coming up the pipe from the far end near solitude and they were blasting everything in their path. Slightly ahead of the main fleet was a single Megathron and his tackling buddy. He was presumedly the bait for the main fleet. Once he got you engaged then he would call in his friends and they would finish you off. He certainly did not expect what happened.

The Megathron jumped into MHC-R3 from 6E-578 and warped after the ship he saw there. He came out of warp 100km off the gate inside a small mobile warp disruptor. Immediately the destroyers on the bubble jumped him, tagging him with EWAR. "Point!!!" yelled an excited Sever Aldaria (nearly blowing my eardrums.) "Damp, Track, Web," the calls came in over Ventrilo. The intrepid mega pilot had been reduced to a paperweight in effectiveness and his valuable tank melted like butter on a hot sunny day. At the same time Rells noticed half the players in he gang were orbiting the mega and in the bubble. Local had already spiked and the relief fleet was in warp. I said over and over again, "get out of the bubble, get out of the damn bubble." As soon as the last destroyer was clear I engaged warp to a safespot, the parting shot from students popping both the pod and wreck. Right as the crew were warping out, the reinforcements were arriving. The landing fleet had to see us flying off grid as they arrived.

What followed was smack talk like you had rarely seen in your life. Of course they blew up the bubble and told us how stupid we were that we couldn't fly a battleship like "real men." However, I was busily trying to calm down my crew who were suffering from the after effects of adrenaline rush. This was 2006 in Eve online. People just didn't PvP in destroyers. Destroyers were a piece of garbage that had no use whatsoever. However, this Megathron pilot learned what happens when people think out of the box and to the students involved, it served as a lesson that you don't have to have the biggest ship to win at pvp.

After the fight we collected ourselves and roamed a bit. We caught a couple more ships and toasted them but then time ran out as the class evaporated to the pressure of duties outside Eve Online. After we broke up Choran posted his video of the incident (which used to be on our server) and I posted about the video to the main Eve forums in order to advertise our classes.

You have to understand that our classes weren't well known and were almost universally condemned as being a scam to rip off newbies or at best devoid of value. Our videos of fights were claimed to have been staged with a throwaway ship in order to bilk players out of isk. You can see on the video post thread what the reaction of the players at the time was. When presented with video evidence they had to believe. However most thought that the Megathron was stupid. "I could kill 14 destroyers in my Ishtar no problem, especially 14 pilotted by relatively new players," claimed one pilot. The thread devolved into a flame war that kept it pinned to the top for a week and filled subsequent classes to the point that we had to upgrade our vent account.

The next few basic classes were packed, Wolfpacks class was even more packed. We were up to 30 destroyers with two covops pilots flying recon. The hurt was put on syndicate. They started avoiding wolfpacks when Carenthor loon dropped us on two different eagles and they blew so fast not even all the cycled guns on the destroyers went off. Wolfpacks was now a bastion of the AGONY curriculum and strangely the laughter at the destroyers in local subsided.