It has been a while since we have had a new Rooks and Kings video, the last one being Message in a Bottle that saw them moving to the Serenity, the server that hosts the mainland China version of EVE Online. (There is a timeline of their videos on the Rooks and Kings site.)
There wars were fought, with battles between supercaps and titans of the like that we are only beginning to experience in the west on the Tranquility server. The wars left the Pan-Intergalactic Business Community alliance, or PIBC, the dominant power in null sec, able to rule in a way that no western alliance has, as the influence maps make clear.
Serenity Server Null Sec Influence Map – August 3, 2018
This led directly to the migration of players from the Serenity server in China to the Tranquility server in the UK that serves the rest of the world. This is the genesis of alliances like Fraternity and Ranger Regiment of the Winter Coalition as well as the P.L.A. corp in GSF.
The new Rooks and Kings documentary, First Light on the Fifth Day, follows the ascension of PIBC, the exodus of its foes, the battle for who represents China, and how the two servers still interconnect.
Available in 5K video, you can click through to watch it in high def on YouTube directly.
Rooks and Kings sent out an email blast to a variety of EVE Online related sites on Friday night, so you will like see this video all over. Still worth reposting here for me to have my own context down the road.
Addendum: There is now an interview with Lord Maldoror over at INN.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Wow, your leader must be frantically trying to get ahold of the leaders of that Chinese RMT machine for explanations on how they achieved such dominance. Actually, I am pretty sure he has already had those conversations.
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@Dinsdale – Why am I not surprised that, after years of throwing around unsupported accusations about RMT, I find that you don’t even understand how RMT works?
If Goons were, as you have often said,selling in-game resources for real world money, then that would actually keep them from assembling dominance in game. You see that right? You need those resources for in-game power and if you sell something then you no longer have it. That is how things work. When you sell something, it is gone. It belongs to somebody else now.
So if what you said contained an ounce of truth, the Imperium wouldn’t be mounting campaigns. Instead they would be sitting quietly in Delve ratting and mining… and not, as the MER shows, importing, producing and selling.
But don’t let reality get in your way now, it has never stopped you before.
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I think I only sent two or three emails: pretty much no one in RnK does Twitter, Facebook or anything like that and we’re rather slow on mail too. So maybe your blog is held in more affection than you realise :)
Anyway, this installment is a little different to previous videos, with the focus dialled out to the macro level. Not many people cover grand nullsec fleet combat in the manner that you do in your blog and therefore I hope you found something of interest.
P.S. Since Fulcrum is after all a core member of RnK, just as he is at the PIBC core, it’s not wrong to say we play on Serenity, even if it involves only a few members most of the time. To add a little colour, though: I’d say Message in a Bottle was mostly a fun way of looking at our exchange of Eve ‘weapons tech’ across the Great Firewall of China (even if condensing down years of friendship to a few scenes).
For example, this week people in RnK are playing R6, Tarkov, building VR Zones in High Fidelity, helping Meissa train his neural net to battle another Hackathon (machine learning), and projects like that. Of course, when Fulcrum asks, I can grab my sword, tweak my momo and log in.
As regards the comments above to do with RMT, botting is definitely a problem on Serenity (and the GM team there has generally been too small to counter it). But it’s fairly distant from the people I have interacted with in PIBC.
For Military Bun, Fulcrum, Romoto, etc., Eve is definitely not an arena for making money and if anything, it’s more about spending it in terms of gameservers, meet-ups, helping people with hardware and the general infrastructure of a large community.
No doubt, though, that botting is something new company Netease will have to pay attention to when they help write the next chapter of Serenity.
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@lordmaldoror – Thank you for the consideration then! I meant that comment only as an explanation as to why I posted the video after I had already seen it posted over at EN24 and The Greybill. It was a fascinating video that drew together some threads of information I had heard over the last year or so along with a lot of new items for me.
On the RMT front, don’t mind Dinsdale. He has been claiming that Goons run CCP and that they make millions from RMT for years now. It is his thing.
As for RMT on Serenity, the second and third hand information I have heard made it sound like Tiancity had done little or nothing to suppress botting or RMT, a state of affairs reflected in the price of PLEX on the server. We’ll see what NetEase brings to the table.
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