Summer Reruns – The War in Fountain

Technically summer starts tomorrow according to the conspiracy of pendants and calendar makers, for whom there must be a set of fixed dates for something as nebulous as a “season,” but I still think of summer as just being June, July, and August, those being the span of “summer vacation” from school when I was a child.

And here we are in the latter half of June, with E3 behind us and the annual Steam Summer Sale under way (see, Steam is with me!) and I haven’t anything new to write about.  Sometimes I just get to the Friday post and draw a blank.

But that is okay, I’m all about nostalgia most days of the week, so it is time to drag out the Summer Rerun post format and bring back some posts on a specific topic.

This time it is the War in Fountain from last year, which ran from early June into August and saw the demise of TEST Alliance as a power on the null sec sovereignty map.

6VDT-H Fight

This is essentially my diary from the war.  I just so happened to “be there” for a lot of the key moments, from the first battles over J5A in Caracals and Tengus to the clean up at L7-APB in Megathrons and dreadnaughts.

• To War! We are Invading Fountain! – June 6
• Deploying to the Front Lines in Fountain – June 7
• TEST at J5A – Saving that Last Rifter for Another Day – June 8
• TEST Finds Their Motivation, Saves J5A – June 10
• Traveling with Caracal Fleet – June 13
• Another Fight in J5A – June 14
• TEST Knocks 7-8S5X Into Unclaimed Status – June 15
• Fountain: Who is Winning Ten Days In? – June 17
• The Strategy for the Conquest of Fountain – June 18
• EI-O0O Down Without a Fight – June 28
• EI-O0O Back in TEST Hands – June 28
• S2N Alliance Brought Down by an Insider – July 1
• A Bit of Quiet in Fountain – July 4
• My Guns Jam at Z9PP-H – July 4
• TEST Stands Down on the 4-EP12 Timer – July 5
• Remember the Lazamo – Bloodbath at 3WE-KY – July 6
• Forty Days in Fountain – July 16
• And Quiet Flows the ‘Thron – July 19
• 4-EP12 – Moving To Fountain Proper – July 20
• A Prophecy of Murder in G95F-H – July 21
• The War in Fountain While I Slept – July 24
• Flying Cover in Kraken – July 25
• 6VDT-H – The Biggest Battle in EVE History Ends the War – July 29
• Fountain – The Fighting Goes On – July 30
• L7-APB Falls – TEST Officially Out of Fountain – August 5

These posts reference a number of other sources and, as is the way of the internet, have suffered from a certain amount of link rot.  The biggest missing pieces are battle reports from EVE News 24, which appears to have purged all of their pre-2014 posts.  So supporting reports are pretty much limited to The Mittani.

In addition, I did a couple of posts about the propaganda war in Fountain, which was as hard fought as any aspect of the campaign.

• The Propaganda War in Fountain
• More Propaganda from the War in Fountain
• TEST Invokes a Star Wars Metaphor, Casts The Mittani as Emperor

And, finally, there is what I consider the video of the war:

•  Boat’s Oddity

There are so many “I was there” moments for me in that video that it, as much as anything, brings back the feelings I had during the campaign.

So that is the war in Fountain.  It represents my high water mark for involvement in EVE Online so far.  While there have been wars and deployments since, including the battle at B-R5RB, nothing has matched Fountain to this point.  It is up there with being in West Karana in early EverQuest or the instance group in vanilla WoW on my list of great MMO times.

Now to go watch Boat’s Oddity again.