From the Blotter: Rote Kapelle Deploys to Querious!
It should come as no secret that the Querious killboards are painted in dramatic hues of red and green. Generally, these are smaller ships, but recently they showed a number of battleship losses in the area from CSM Candidate Vic Jefferson. Curious to learn why a Syndicate-dweller was losing big ships so far away, we posed the question directly to Vic. EN24 received the following response:
Why battleships? Battleships are AWESOME. I willy fly battleships into camps. I will fly battleships into stations. I will fly battleships into fleets. BATTLESHIPS. For once, the fight isn’t 30 jumps in a slow ship only to get dropped on by the first cap heavy group to get eyes on you, and have a thoroughly depressing experience in a large ship. Rote Kapelle doesn’t have numbers like AFFIRMATIVE., or BRAVE, PFR, etc – so we are going to need to maximize what a few can do, so it really is about time to dust off those battleships and get some good fits out there and roaming. Honestly even when you lose one you really get the feel for some of these ships you never get to use, and its something everyone instinctively wants – Big Game Spaceships that are LARGE and IN CHARGE. Expect to see more Battleship gangs.
Also its for my corp. The gangs we want to fight are out there in Querious. Rote is a shade of what it once was. It’s a shade of what I remember fighting against in Syndicate. Though my ships may paint their killboard red, with each lossmail I show Rote and New Eden that Sov can be fun, and that the future of small gang is in sov. A good deal of people’s disenfranchisement with the game has to do with not accepting this, with not accepting that sov isn’t just about huge collations anymore. When roams don’t find a fight, peoples interest wanes, when they do, it increases – time to go where the gangs are!
For every mom and pop sov holder out there that gets it, and takes sov for its members to have fun with, the game is stronger. For every vassal alliance that is ripped from the clutches of the Imperium, the game is also stronger – sov is for the players, not for the coalitions.
See you in Querious!
Following Vic’s response, I reached out to Rote Kapelle leadership to find out more about what appears to be a deployment to Querious. Ben Booley, one half of Rote’s leadership team, sat down and answered a few questions for me. In many ways, he echoed the words of Vic, stating that they were deploying to Querious because
“Syndicate is no longer a content producing region. The Querious Thunderdome looks like a region just like the old days of Syndicate with constant solo-small-medium gang pvp, frenemies, and no significant structure concerns.” All intel so far points toward Rote staging out of the Red-Frog owned station in P-ZMZV.
Several conversations with Querious residents indicated that they suspected that Rote had moved supercapitals into the area. Ben denies this, claiming that Rote is “happy to have subcap only fights” and that they don’t want to be the ones to escalate.
Rote Kapelle is well known for small gang PvP and has appeared in many alliance tournaments. When asked if Rote saw the deployment to Querious as a chance to test new doctrines, Ben shared his views on AT preparation,
“I see space in general as a practice ground for the AT. The most important thing in winning the AT is having every pilot on the team able to read a fight and instinctively understand what they need to do, and that can be developed in almost any ship.”
He said that we should expect new doctrines from Rote but that is simply related to the deployment and not necessarily AT related since the “tournament is only a few months out of the year” and he wants to “keep generating reasons to undock for the rest of the year.” Given that the slump that Rote Kapelle experienced in 2014 and the first half of 2015, it’s easy to see Ben’s point of view and, so far, it appears to be working – only four days into the month and they’ve killed nearly as many ships as they killed in March 2015.
One of the more interesting aspects of the deployment is that they are three jumps from the capital system of Affirmative., a team they faced, and beat, in last year’s AT. EN24 asked Mr. Booley if this was intentional and he stated that it wasn’t, instead it was “pure coincidence. P-Z is centrally located in the region, had an available office, and is reachable in 1 jump from a lowsec system with a station for JF logistics.”
EN24 also contacted Greygal, CEO of Affirmative., to get their opinion on the move and to see if they were looking to settle old grudges.
“Heck no! The decisions we made before the fight and in the arena cost us that fight. Rote, like the arena pros they are, used our mistakes to beat us, fair and square. Thankfully, they didn’t draw out the pain too long ;)”
Greygal said that they’d had “a lot of fun with Rote’s gangs so far, especially Vic Jefferson and his one-man-army of Ravens!”
While some groups in Querious have stated that they’re looking forward to Rote Kapelle forcing them to step up their game and putting pressure on their lower skilled pilots, there are concerns that Rote Kapelle will decimate on the battlefield. One alliance diplo went so far as to say, “they will outfly us any day of the week.” Greygal, however, had a simple message to Ben Booley and his members, “We’re just a bunch of squirrels hunting for nuts, got any?”
