I had finally gotten home, and clone jumped to our staging system just in time to catch Oxygen leading a Hurricane fleet to the battle for the M-OEE8 ihub. Oxygen got us out to a titan within bridge range of the 1P-VL2 constellation where the biggest battle in ages was playing. We landed on the titan and waited for a bridge.
Waiting for Jay to bridge us…
And waited.
And waited.
And then somebody linked a post on Reddit.
It was, of course, initially dismissed as a troll. No doubt somebody made a fake account to look like TheJudge. Then I clicked on the name, just to see if it had been freshly created and was greeted by what looked like an authentic history. It looked to be real.
As we sat there, watching the entosis tug-of war swing towards the hostiles, The Mittani sent out a broadcast:
It appears that after spending the entire day with us fighting on their behalf to defend their home, C02 has chosen to reset the entire coalition in approximately the next 30 minutes. That’s a pretty impressive backstab, and it’s apparently all our fault. This is a shame, but there’s no question of right or wrong on this one: we’ve expended a tremendous amount of blood and treasure defending C02 assets in Hakonen and Tribute over the past two months, and this is the spit in our eye after an all-day defense of their homeland.
Apparently C02’s senior leadership met this morning and decided to play this card regardless of how this M-O fight went down. That explains why we discovered this morning to our shock that there were no cynojammers in the target constellation, and that they knew they would flip on all of us even as we were doing our best to be loyal defenders of their territory. It also explains why the hostiles had their capfleets ready and waiting; they hoped for us to risk our supers, in hopes of C02 turning on us. The easter holiday off, the invitation of every random Eve 3rd party to join an otherwise irrelevant ihub timer: all becomes clear. This was a planned trap, one which we thankfully were not dumb enough to stick our super fleet into. This is why it is all the more crucial that we evacuated the LAWN/Bastion superfleet from Vale.
So there it was. Circle of Two let us fight for them all day against impossible odds as every hanger-on within range joined in the fight. Another hammer blow against The Imperium.
Battle Report Top – CO2 gets its own column, as their losses aren’t ours or our foes really…
I would have included the whole screen shot, but the list or organizations arrayed against us scrolls of the page and around the block, and I can’t get the link to work because the battle report generator and the kill board are still working overtime to catch up and generate the final numbers. I’ll put a link here when it settles down. (Turns out that there were so many foes on the list that the URL is too long for the site to parse correctly. The battle broke the battle report generator. Best I can do is link my start point. You have to click ‘Analyze’ yourself.)
So there we were on the titan. The reason we hadn’t bridged was that nobody would light a cyno for us. CO2 wouldn’t, having just publicly announced their betrayal, and no Imperium pilots were keen to bridge in more fellows to be sacrificed for naught. So Oxygen turned us around and brought us home. The ihub was lost, but it wasn’t our problem any more.
Now Tribute has been laid open to our foes and it is TNT’s turn on the front line.
Tribute – March 28, 2016
We shall see how well we are able to defend now that the front line is yet closer to our staging system. Vale of the Silent fell to us back in the day without a fight, but now we are in territory I recall battling for back in the day. UMI-KK, the TNT capital, was our staging foothold in the region after it fell back in 2012. which let us advance from QPO-WI.
At least the evac from Vale seems timely now, as CO2 turning into a hostiles before then would have cut LAWN and Bastion off from the rest of the coalition. Small favors. And the war goes on.
Meanwhile, all of this is likely good news for CCP.
A bloody spaceship battle with thousands of players always attracts attention in the gaming media and gets new players to try out the game.
Skulls for the Icelandic skull throne
We shall see if this battle, which by the count of the battle report I rolled up, had more than 5K individual pilots involved at various points, gets any press come the morning. It has all the usual internet spaceship drama.
Elsewhere on this:
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I love the take on it. With all this news breaking every few hours, I feel like I’m watching the election results pour in. It’s exhilarating and cathartic at the same time. The gun has been hanging on the wall for two acts, now it’s being fired.
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Good luck Wilhelm.
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The standard Imperium procedure will apply to the defense of TNT sov:
You will fight the Moneybadgers at command nodes.
Goons will fight Guristas in Haevens.
Abandon the Evil who already abandoned you!
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Well, you can’t deny that they’ve got panache!
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This happening while I’m reading the Empires of EVE book is some rather great timing.
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@SynCaine – Yeah, Andrew Groen is saying he may have to write a sequel now.
@Rob Kaichin – They have got something, but I don’t think it is panache. Balls, gall, whatever, but panache implies both flair and confidence. Their vague and whiny airing of grievances feels to me more like an attempt to justify what they had already planned to do. And, in the end, nobody loves a traitor. Their former friends won’t ever accept them back and their new friends know they can never trust them. CO2’s leadership has chosen their path. I hope that I Want ISK money was worth it… or that they at least got paid… because IronBank was making it sound like he paid to make this happen in one comment thread.
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This whole war just makes the game more exciting and fun – I wont target you specifically Wilhelm when we pound through your space :) Eve needs more targets not monster alliances/coalitions!
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@Gripper – Your forbearance before I’ve gotten at least some screen shots would be appreciated. Also, shooting me first is unlikely to be hitting the most effective part of any given fleet, so it is a tactically sound proposition.
That said, monster coalitions and alliances are what make for big, headline grabbing battles which, in turn, attract more people to EVE. As I noted the other day, nobody writes books about low sec gate camps.
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Gevlon, there’s something you will never learn : if you can’t even honor your word in a meaningless game like Eve, if you can”t even stand firm when you have nothing else to loose than pixels, who would ever trust you irl ?
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I enjoyed smacktalking to you in local from my Impairor.
10/10 would watch you stand down again.
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We all know how this is going to end. goons will buy off the key people against them, or the allies will simply run out of ISK and /or interest, or CCP will come to the rescue of the RMT cartel.
Any way you cut it, goons powerbase will remain intact, and they will be as stronger than ever once the latest ISK printing press is installed one jump from Jita.
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“Flair and confidence”
Well, quitting a coalition ~5 minutes after that coalition fought for you is some kind of style. Still, I think this whole ‘betrayal!’ angle is a little overplayed: is it really that much of a surprise? C02 have been attracting flack for their low-sec actions from other CFC groups since they started doing it. You treat them poorly, they start looking around.
Still, have you listened to the Capstable interview with The Judge? It’s interesting.
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@Rob Kaichin – Five minutes after? Is that part of TheJudge’s pitch now? No, they announced they were leaving while the fight was still going on. I’m sorry, yanking the rug on your allies while they are actively fighting for your system qualifies as betrayal in my book. You don’t switch teams mid-play and get to claim it’s just baseball.
I’ll find some time to listen to what he has to say.
Edit: Fortunately it was a quick interview, though the obvious leading questions by the host were more annoying than anything TheJudge had to say. Threw him softballs and never challenged a word he said. End summary, TheJudge was looking after himself and his; happy to reap the benefits of the coalition when times were good, less so when things were bad. I doubt he will, for example, decline a spot on the CSM if he gets in on The Imperium ballot.
Not exactly impressed with his sympathy for LAWN and Bastion members, since his alliance, which he promised would keep fighting (us no doubt), threw up a huge barrier between Vale and the rest of the coalition. He did, however, confirm several points of The Mittani’s narrative, which I was writing out last night and was thinking of posting just to have it somewhere I can find it later. The downside is the howls of rage it is likely to provoke, and I am not sure I need that much grief.
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5 minutes was my assessment, I’ve seen 10, 30, up to an hour and so on. Yours is the first time I’ve seen ‘whilst the fight was going on’.
Who knows? It’s a game. If you abandon* your allies, they’ll abandon you.
*Note: It isn’t you who gets to decide who’s abandoned and who isn’t. If I was a C02 guy, I’d rightly feel pissed off about how LAWN and BSTN retreated from an untaken region.
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@Rob Kaichin – We were sitting on a titan while Laz was still fighting and there was still 30% left to hack on the ihub when that post first got linked in chat… I can probably find a time stamp in the logs and pin it down to the second. I was actually calling out the percentage in fleet chat too, so I could sync that up. It was that announcement that ended the fight. (Laz, who is normally very chill, seems pretty annoyed by the CO2 move, especially since they let the fight go off knowing they would be pulling the plug, so it feels like it was done as a big “screw you” from that direction as well.)
Meanwhile, your who gets to decide who abandoned whom statement seems nonsensical. Are you suggesting there is some sort of abandonment board of equalization out there? Or that just specifically *I* don’t get to be abandoned, just other people? Or is it just you who gets to make that call?
One of the more active TNT corps came from CO2. I wonder how they feel about all this.
Timeline:
23:nn:nn – Post goes up on Reddit, not sure how to find a time stamp on that, but it is before the next item
23:22:31 – Reddit link first shows up in our fleet chat, ihub battle is 90%/10%, we’re still fighting
23:25:40 – I blame Xenuria in fleet chat
23:26:11 – Scooter McCabe declares the Reddit post “Fake as shit” in fleet chat
23:28:nn – Sebastien Saintfrusquin broadcasts to all/all that CO2 is leaving the coalition
23:32:17 – Oxygen, our FC, links the Reddit post, tell us its real and that we’re turning around for home
23:33:nn – The Mittani broadcasts the first paragraph quoted in this post
23:33:57 – I ask for a PAP link
23:49:nn – I get a bounty notice for Lazrus Telraven who goes down in a hail of PL fire in M-OEE8
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I wrote that, then looked at the Jabber feed, and there is CO2 attacking our sov. Not Goon sov, their stated foe, but TNT sov. We must not have been one of the alliances that treated them with respect. Neighbors are always problematic. We left a drag bubble in a system of theirs once and it practically became a diplomatic incident. That must have put us on their bad list.
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Hey, with MoA we’ve sent some game content towards your way, I hope you enjoy them:
TCU 2D-0SO Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T16:27:04 1d 11h 1m 5s 60%
Station D7T-C0 Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T16:30:37 1d 11h 4m 38s 60%
Station 2D-0SO Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T16:31:59 1d 11h 6m 0s 60%
TCU D7T-C0 Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T19:40:44 1d 14h 14m 45s 60%
IHub D7T-C0 Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T19:45:41 1d 14h 19m 42s 60%
IHub O-BY0Y Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T19:52:19 1d 14h 26m 20s 60%
Station O-BY0Y Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T20:14:32 1d 14h 48m 33s 60%
IHub KQK1-2 Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T20:17:50 1d 14h 51m 51s 60%
TCU O-BY0Y Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T20:28:21 1d 15h 2m 22s 60%
IHub 2D-0SO Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-03-31T21:08:05 1d 15h 42m 6s 60%
TCU UR-E6D Pure Blind Tactical Narcotics Team 2016-04-01T02:39:09 1d 21h 13m 10s 60%
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@Gevlon – I know, with a giant force helping them, MOA finally undocked and hacked the low ADM systems on their doorstep. I am sure they are all patting themselves on the back for their heroic accomplishment.
A pity they no longer seem to be working for you. Did you stop paying them already? Because according to you, they should be attacking Goons. How many systems did they reinforce in Deklein? Zero? Deklein isn’t even that far from their staging. Sounds like empty words to me.
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“Meanwhile, your who gets to decide who abandoned whom statement seems nonsensical.”
I’m trying to say: “C02 felt abandoned by LAWN and BASTN, which made them consider leaving.” That the only people who can say C02 felt poorly treated is C02, and the people saying “No, no, they were happy” can’t prove as such. It’s clear (to me) that now The Judge Sebastian and GigX have come out with about the problems they were having, there were bigger issues than was let on.
“I wrote that, then looked at the Jabber feed, and there is CO2 attacking our sov. Not Goon sov, their stated foe, but TNT sov. We must not have been one of the alliances that treated them with respect. ”
I N E X T R E M I S attempted to RF the M-0 station yesterday sometime, I think with a Svipul fleet [possible with FCON assistance, there were a lot of groups flying around]. SOLAR Fleet led a camp of the E-0->M-0 gate which was killing ‘Good Guy’ ships (rip my nemesis). In return, C02 formed up a Ishtar fleet and RFed the DBT (?) station and some services.
At the risk of sounding 5 years old, “They started it!” :p.
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@ – I think the fact that I N E X T R E M I S is a former CO2 corp, yet couldn’t wait to get a shot in, says something about our former ally.
Meanwhile, who felt abandoned was pretty far off the topic, since we were talking about betrayal not abandonment. They let us fight for them for hours, knowing full well they were going to change sides for a big pay off (Sebastian was making a big deal splitting hairs about getting paid before or after they left, as though the time stamp on the receipt made all the difference) and then couldn’t even wait until the fight was done before turning on us. Regardless of how they felt, you cannot plausibly tell me we shouldn’t feel a sense of betrayal from that.
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” I think the fact that I N E X T R E M I S is a former CO2 corp, yet couldn’t wait to get a shot in, says something about our former ally.”
I think it says more about Inextremis really: ‘allies until they were allowed to shoot them’ or something…
Anyway, about the abandonment, I was saying that all this ‘how dare they betray us’ is over-done. LAWN and BASTN abandoned them first, then they abandoned your side.
Sure, they betrayed you, but it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise :).
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@Rob Kaichin – “Sure, they betrayed you, but it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise :).”
Yes, I know you’re here to try and minimize CO2’s action by putting the blame on Sion and LAWN and Bastion and former corps and whoever. But you keep saying it couldn’t have been a surprise when it quite obviously was. That is just hindsight and “Grr, Goons” talking, because if you hate them then everybody must hate them and they must know it. But even Sebastian said that The Imperium pulled out all the stops and threw in everything they could for the battle. Is that the action of a group expecting to be betrayed?
CO2 had other options if they wanted to leave. They could have left when they were so unhappy before things got tough. They could have bowed out before the battle. They could have declared themselves neutral for a set period of time rather than letting PL stage in their systems immediately, so they could pass through and attack TNT space.
Instead they waited until we were fully committed, had expended ISK and time defending their system, and were still actively engaged to declare they were not just leaving The Imperium, but changing sides to fight against us.
If you are honest with yourself, you have to admit that course of action sends a very specific message, and it isn’t “let’s part friends!”
Another bit of drama for the war. But CO2 has set the tone of their relationship with Goons now and forever because the Goons sure as hell feel betrayed, and it didn’t have to be that way.
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They also created a dozen timers in PB for Goons and took one system from Goons. The ONLY system Goons lost in this war.
Yes, I want them in Deklein, but they decided to clean PB first from Goons.
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“try and minimize CO2’s action by putting the blame on Sion and LAWN and Bastion and former corps and whoever. But you keep saying it couldn’t have been a surprise when it quite obviously was”
I didn’t mention Sion at all :P. I’m saying it shouldn’t be a *complete* surprise. It should be a surprise, a pretty big one, but you’ve just removed the two flanking alliances and anyone in that position is going to feel exposed, that’s just logic. When you’ve got a real threat on your hands, shifting the boundary of a front from ~20 jumps away to next door isn’t going to please anyone.
“CO2 had other options if they wanted to leave. They could have left when they were so unhappy before things got tough. They could have bowed out before the battle. They could have declared themselves neutral for a set period of time rather than letting PL stage in their systems immediately, so they could pass through and attack TNT space.”
First off, think realistically about what those options would have meant for C02: 1) watch as your corps and players get poached viciously, 2) As with 1, but also the risk that now your Supers/Titans in build are going to get killed by your ‘allies’. After all, they know exactly where each one is. 3) As with 1 and 2, but now you’re getting both sides attacking you, but the ‘good guys’ won’t be focussing on you.
I mean, really? What route works best for C02, not for the CFC?
And, let’s be honest, Option 3 is the one they took: they’ve bowed out, they’ve only reacted when attacked. Hell, they’re only out busting gatecamps which are shooting them.
Where has PL been staging at? YOLOing around in Titans and such isn’t exactly ‘staging’. If we could stage out of C02 space, that’d be really, really useful. But right now they’re in a state of armed neutrality.
“fight against us”
They were attacked first, by TNT. I think that set the tone for them.
“If you are honest with yourself, you have to admit that course of action sends a very specific message, and it isn’t “let’s part friends!””
You have to keep thinking to yourself, their actions are motivated by self interest: the harsh-breakup is probably better for C02 than the “hey, Goons like us, let’s leave C02 and join GSF” routine that FA and others got.
If it serves the interests of C02, they’d still be in the CFC. As it doesn’t, they aren’t.
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@Rob Kaichin – Self-interest is the argument then, is it?
For openers, leaving the coalition during peace time without becoming enemies has happened before. And The Imperium has loose affiliations with other alliances. Arguing that leaving could mean some individuals or corps might way to stay behind is arguing against self-interest below the alliance level.
Meanwhile CO2 was hardly the unique problem child in The Imperium. SMA got roughly handled for a while and put on notice as well. But when things went bad, through what was very much their own action, The Imperium stood by them. If we’re going to argue self-interest, it was clearly in Goon self-interest to throw SMA to the wolves: IWI problem solved! Instead we’re fighting a huge war because we made a commitment.
You make a big deal about LAWN and Bastion abandoning CO2, but those two alliances lost ALL their holdings. Self interest there? They were screwed over way, way, way, way beyond what CO2 was facing. But they have also seen that the Goons style themselves after the Lannisters in their own way; they always pay their debts. LAWN and Bastion feel that GSF is going to make it up to them somehow once the war is over, but CO2 totally just shat all over them in the name of self-interest.
We can go around and around on this. In the end, CO2 made their choice in the way they did and get to live with it. You see them as having made the right choice in the name of their own self-interest. TNT sees them letting hostiles freely transit their space to attack them. LAWN and Bastion see them as cutting off their retreat from Vale. And Goons see a stab in the back that they will not forget.
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Just as an side-note update, we just got a look at the diplomatic chat logs between CO2 and The Imperium reps like Sion, Blawrf, and so on. They are pretty funny stuff. I see now why Wibla happily too ITIA, despite CO2 wanting them blacklisted, as CO2 wanted Tribute for themselves and were being real shits about it us. It will all probably be leaked on Reddit by tomorrow and branded as fakes, but we’ll see who wants to be close friends with CO2 after the war is over.
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