[ZeroZ95]

Main Entry: wa·ter·shed
Pronunciation: 'wo-t&r-"shed, 'wä-
Function: noun
1 a : DIVIDE 2a b : a region or area bounded peripherally by a divide and draining ultimately to a particular watercourse or body of water
2 : a crucial dividing point, line, or factor : TURNING POINT

All OOC:
Tired of the status quo we've been in for ~6 months? Me too. Frankly, the current realspace story of Quant vs anti-Quant has lost the interest of many directly involved and many more who don't want to get involved.

I have some good news for you. Things are changing in Jumpgate (and even then things are never as bad in space as they seem on the forums...they never are, ever). The Sol revival is well underway now. Solidarity has leveled/stocked and is beginning aggressive operations.

This is changing the dynamic of the current 2 sided war (where both sides' strongholds are intermingled over the 4 sectors around Stith...call it Stith++...and where fights rarely leave that area). Hopefully a strong Solrain will spark the lurking Octs and Quants to get online (in their Oct/Quant accounts) and defend their factions. We've bee fairly careful not to recruit too heavily from existing Oct/Quant pvpers because stealing pilots from them to staff Solrain would be counter productive. So, if you are a current Quant/Oct pvper, we would like you to stay where you are and log in and fight us. We've been having a lot of fun, honorable fighting outside of Stith++ the past week. And it's been very good stuff. We're good pilots, but not a well coordinated fighting unit yet, and we're trying to use a mixed fleet rather than all MF/LF, so you'll probably get a few easy kills to boot. The direction that Istvan has for Jumpgate is a return to factionalism, and he's right on track. OOCly we support a revival of all 3 factions during both prime times.

At least initially Solidarity will not be another LF/MF fleet (we may have to adopt a quick-striking fleet if we get crushed too much...such are the realities). We're not all going to initially /home on the fronts. We want to have room for maneuver, for sneaking, for flanking, for roid masking, for fighting in/around Core stations, and to encourage mixed ship-fleets. We hope to have decisive battles in sectors that are not POS strongholds for either side (except when totally defensive), and thus battles will not be FF-POS-docking competitions. Hopefully that will bring back some fun of pvp in Jumpgate that a lot of people have been missing lately. For us, fighting is more about fun and less about pwning joo.

We won't get involved in the civ wars. We aren't going to kill non-combatants and we aren't going to fly as civs looking for fights. Consensual pvp is the key; right now Jumpgate does not have enough active players to support non-consensual pvp. Dying after you've spent an hour mining or gathering items to produce 2nd/3rd tier commods so that you can spend another hour producing gear is simply too disheartening on an OOC level, regardless of how much "attacking supply lines" is actually valid RP for warfare (and it is).

Solidarity has both US and EU prime time active pilots, the former of which has been lacking so badly that there is no USpt pvp to speak of. Rebuilding Solrain is only phase 1 of the Solidarity project (and I would say we are well on the way to accomplishing that). Rebuilding the other factions' will to log in and fight (by giving them honorable and fun targets to shoot at) is just as important to us.

On the cash front...in an hour, you can easily make 5m either by pure roids (which do not heat up) or team fluxing (5m each on easy nauts, up to 10m/hr if you are up to killing prawns/krill). I've spent this week mining and building stuff and it's actually not nearly as tough as I thought if you just build in small amounts and don't try to stock entire factions' public stations singlehandedly, though FeFis and missiles for Intruder users dying a lot is a tall order. And if you make use of Nanos and hollow ice roids which let you suck down 100u in about 15 min, it's tough but not so bad.


On the RP front, Khronos has been very helpful with the startup of Solidarity (several of the better aspects of our backstory were his ideas, and obviously he provided TRINN support and helped me maneuver a way into getting Zero legitimately returning as a pvper since having at least 1 opti in the core group is so handy). So, if you have an interesting RP idea, I strongly suggest you PM him and you never know what may happen. Plus he's given the Conflux Menace some actual teeth lately, as well as the other interesting pvp related storylines going. Not bad for a part timer in an environment as RP restrictive mechanically as Jumpgate is.

If you want to join us under a new account, you too can be a Pre-Collapse Sol with amnesia (but not a command staff, so no RP obligations other than to try to not be OOC 100% of the time). If you want to join us with an existing Sol, we need supporters and have stuff for both pvp and non-pvp pilots to do. But we also need Quants and Octs to shoot at, so if you are an active Quant/Oct, please don't start a 14th account just to join us (we really have absolutely nothing of interest to spy on anyway...all our cards are on the table already). We need all 3 factions to be strong because Jumpgate needs more than a single 2 sided war right now, and Jumpgate badly needs active US primetime pvpers.

Who is Solidarity? covers our RP backstory, and our 2nd account policy explains a bit more about who we are OOCly (and much of this is copy/pasted from there). Feel free to stop by the forums to say Hi, and once again thanks go to DragonEye for supplying the forum, TS, and supporting the Solrain revival.

As I've told several people: We aren't trying to set ourselves up as heros or the latest saviors of Solrain or Jumpgate. We know Jumpgate is past its prime. We know it's all been tried before, but the time really is right both for a Solrain revival and for Jumpgate to turn the corner on the past 6 months of ugliness. There is still plenty of fun to be had in Jumpgate by those still hanging around and by those who are lurking and looking for a good reason to re-up one more time.

If you can't tell, I'm pretty jazzed about it all. It's been a real honor to fly with the Solidarity group so far, and I expect nothing less as we continue to grow.

Solidarity for Solrain
Solidarity for Jumpgate