RIP Rainbow Knights

Rainbow Knights was a pretty cool clique of the who's-who of w-space cool kids. You may not have heard of it, cause you probably weren't cool. I know I wasn't until recently. But then I was, and being cool is kind of cool, so there you go.

The cool thing was the wormhole community lives and often dies by the w-space code, and Rainbow Knights was created by Hidden Fremen, I guess, as a place where the content creators of w-space could get together and create content. This content took the form, more often than not, of someone tackling a capital in nullsec and putting up the flag for help - when needed.

Prime example was the caps in Oasa - HK had them tackled, and batphoned, and all sorts of people turned up, mostly via the frig hole and one or two via normal holes. Capials died, content was created, nullbears were taxed and have doubtless ratted their replacements five imes over in the past month and a bit.

Secondarily, the channel was a way of the content creators connecting often after content was created, and saying 'gf'. Or, sometimes, as content seems about to be created, the leaders would ask each other if there was going to be a fight or whether they should roll away. The distinction here is, as much as we all love a gank, we also sometimes don't have the numbers online to fight nicely, and it's pointless blobbing someone else's hole if you aren't evbicting - and given te size and capabilities of most alliances in w-space these days, there could be a hell of a lot more evictions. 

So it is a shame that Hidden, goaded by shitty behaviour on the part of others, has dissolved the channel and decided it's Angry Mode. The community does need a way to batphone for dogpiling nullbears.

Of course, the complaint and the drama that flowed from it revolves around accusations that Lazerhawks batphones everyone else for content, and that the whole of w-space is just a "Game of Phones" and Lazerhawks are amongst the worst offenders.

Firstly, does LZHX batphone? Yes. Everyone batphones, be it picking up to call, or answering a call. So....so what if Lazerhawks answers calls, or makes one or two now and then, for example for the TDSIN quasi-eviction which resulted in a capital brawl bigger than most nullsec fights?

Baphoning can be annoying if your party gets spoiled by a thousand helicopter dicking Ishtars landing on field and catching you napping, resulting in your fleet being dunked by a horde midway through what used to be a nice 10 v 10 small corp spat.

This is one reason I am so cautious about low-class wormhole sieges - the moment there's a sniff of content about, batphones can get wildly out of hand, resulting in for example, the problems faced with Never get in a Land War in J160739....although if you are reasonably good at your job and a bit lucky, the blobbing just destroys content. Had we been dunked by 80 Ishtars, maybe I'd be resuscitating the well-known trope of "SSC blobs". Yeah, no news there, and maybe Xrend et al. would get pissy at the accusation, but that's also been thrown at my feet and I'm used to it.

In this scenario, if you hear about a fight as I sometimes do, you have to sometimes wave off and let people duke it out. But the size of the blobs has nothing to do with bad behaviour beyond people showing restraint and proportionality and respecting a game style and community expectations. The mechanim behind batphones getting out of hand is caused by the ability of people to solve connectivity issues (viz. Siggy or Tripwire) and the size of corporations and alliances in w-space hese days.

So, given Lazerhawks is just like everyone else, but perhaps a bit more restrained (you'll note Prolapse didn't get an invite to the TDSIN eviction, nor SSC, etc) where does Hidden Fremen's anger stem from? I'd argue that it's the fact people attacked him personally, because their in-game attacks are fruitless and everyone remains jellymad and unable to land a decisive blow against Lazerhawks. So now he's angry.

What does angry Lazerhawks look like, if we've previously just seen chilled Lazerhawks? From my limited discussions with him, I expect it is going to see some interesting content created. I'm stocking up on marshmallows and throwing some dessicated corpses on the altar at the sun in J130253, to get Bob all primed and ready for a bloody orgy.