Marmite. Marmite Never Changes

I was really pumped to play EVE today. It was looking like it was going to be a memorable one, an operation that you'd look back on fondly and laugh with your corp mates about later. "Hey, remember that time when we...?" But it wasn't to be. I really shouldn't be surprised, but I guess it's been a while since I've been reminded how Marmite actually operates.

You see, two days ago (August 16) Marmite declared war on us. This in and of itself is not unusual. They sometimes do this mostly, I believe, to be able to tell other people, "Do you see how tough we are? We even have Noir. wardecced!" Nothing ever comes of their wardecs, of course. But then yesterday Marmite hit a bunch of our POCOs in Augnais. Four in total I believe. Now we're talking!

So we prepped to defend them. We expected about the same number of people that attacked them to show up to try and finish them off. We form up a little ahead of time, decide on our doctrine that we're going to use and make sure our fleet is squared away with the proper amount of each role. We had one new Noir. Academy student who needed a quick run down on how to fly a dual propulsion Wolf (or was it Jaguar? All those rust buckets look the same to me), but otherwise it was a fairly smooth set up.

We send one of our scouts ahead of our fleet to try and get eyes on the Marmite fleet. It's only about 15 minutes before the first timer and we're maybe 6 or 7 jumps out. Suddenly our scout reports 11 Marmites in his system. Bingo! I think. "Get eyes on," Alek commands. We continue moving as our scout starts to search them out. I'm getting excited now. Marmite actually formed up to fight! We're going to toast them. "It looks like a gate camp of a bunch of destroyers and crap," our scout reports. Well crap. Our scout is told to keep eyes on them and we'll keep moving.

So we get one system out and we're sending out more and more scouts trying to find any other Marmites. We find Tora Bushido's alt (he's the leader of Marmite) docked in a station. He soon logs off. Well double crap! We're unable to find any other Marmites and the gate camp had dispersed after we had been in our destination system for a few minutes, scattered to their various hiding places.

So instead of fighting Marmite, we ended up hanging out on Teamspeak while we repaired our four POCOs. No Marmites were seen within 100 light years of our undefended Ospreys which I was hoping would draw them out for a desperate attempt at something. As the saying goes: war never changes. But as a mercenary, each day is different. Each contract requires different skills, different tactics, different doctrines. Marmite, however, is not a mercenary unit. Marmite is the same. Marmite never changes.