The rise and fall of Mr Blobby

Spend a few weeks in any militia and you will soon notice the term blob being bandied about quite frequently. It's not a new word of course, the real Blobs of Eve have been around for many years. They consist of hundreds of ships, crash nodes and are generally spotted out in sov holding 0.0 space.

Around the militias the term blob is often used as an accusation against someone who has simply out played you. You warped your 10 man gang into a 50 man enemy fleet? Aww they blobbed you. You got caught on your own by 5 ships? Oh no you got blobbed. You went afk for a poo at a safespot and now you are at home in a new clone? Oh those darn blobbers, may their dicks fall off and their children be Carebears.


Generally speaking, the term blob is used to describe massive fleets, often ones which have become too big to deal with head on.

It is of course frustrating, when the response to your 10 man gang is a 60 man fleet, but I think people forget that we are at war, and war is not fair. If you have a bigger gun than the other guy are you going to turn it off so he has a better chance of blowing you up? No probably not. Equal fights are of course fantastic fun when they come about and a bit of gentlemanly 1v1-ing is often a better way to test your skill. But Eve, as a general rule of thumb is meant to be difficult, challenging and certainly never fair. So, if a large enemy fleet is out steam rolling everything in it's path, well good for them.

In the beginning, the Gal/Cal war (and I suspect this is not dissimilar to what went on with the Amarr/Minnies) consisted of frequent fleets of between 50-100+ pilots (hence the nickname blob wars). Over time numbers dropped and various political events lead to "cycles" of each side having the upper hand.

For example, two things have recently happened in the Gal/Cal war which have greatly assisted the blob pendulum swinging into Caldari favour. Firstly, the power block that was the Mutual Defence Pact is gone and as such so are the big collective ops that previously caused the Caldari so many problems. Secondly the Caldari have finally got their sh!t together, formed their own defence pact and started working together far more effectively. So in a podshell, our blobs are dwindling, theirs have picked up.

So what do you do against these big fleets when you cannot meet them head on? Well much more than station spin, this is the time to get creative!

For SoTF it's meant a return to our roots - at least the roots I am familiar with from when I first joined the corp a year ago. At the time the Caldari had the upper hand and the Gallente were struggling to rally together. I'm getting random BSG quotes in my head as I type this... all of this has happened before... all of it will happen again... well that is very true for Factional Warfare, but alas I digress.

Being out blobbed calls for a change in tactics and so we've been exploring old set-ups and new ideas on harassment style fleets, guerrilla warfare if you like, some of which has gone well whilst others attempts have met with disaster. I'm sure my corpies won't mind me saying that, whilst we have some fantastic pilots, as a team we have become a little fat around the middle. Simple mistakes, selfish actions, things being taken for granted - perhaps a combination of the success of the MDP and the downtime of the Caldari? I am certainly starting to think of this current period as gym time after Christmas.


One big upside to the rebirth of Caldari blobs is that their confidence is soaring. 6 months ago they would spend hours forming a fleet, get to 2 jumps into low-sec and then flee home again as 2 or 3 seperate Gallente fleets raced to engage them. But now, with each Gallente pilot that explodes their bravado increases and so does the good feeling spreading through their general militia. Pilots become braver, old Caldari militia capsuleers will return and new ones will become attracted by their successes. (And this is not mean to patronise incidentally - exactly the same thing happened with the Gallente).

This all means more target fleets in Black Rise - but not just the doom blob, smaller fleets also and plenty of individuals who now feel more confident in stomping about on their own. And of course wherever there is traffic there are pirates.

Being the underdogs gives you the hardest fight, the toughest tests and ultimately the most satisfying victories when you pull it off. There is much opportunity now for the Gallente, but only for those pilots who get off their butts and start thinking out of the box, instead of sitting around bemoaning the lack of a counter blob fleet.