The Fall of the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter

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The final story arc of the Tranquility Trading Tower has played out over the last week or so.  Its end was forecast by the update from CCP that disallowed any further XL Upwell structures being anchored in high security space and it ran down from there.  The previous posts covering the day to day updates:

Last night the hull timer came out and it wasn’t clear what would happen in Perimeter.

The calls to join a fleet for the op started just before 23:00 UTC, but I was already logged in and ready, sitting in my Rokh and safeties set to green… because that was where I left myself after the last op and I hadn’t undocked since.  Some weeks I just log in to update my PI.

It was a good a good thing I was ready too, as the fleet filled up very quickly.  A second and a third fleet were called for people who wanted to go to high sec, with Feroxes and smaller stuff being sent to support the Rokhs.

Our FC for the evening was Zintage Enaka, who had some minor fitting changes from the last op, but nothing too drastic.  I mostly needed to load back up on ammo for the shoot.  When we were set, it was off to high sec, warping together as a fleet.

Heading to the shoot

There was a question about what sort of resistance we might face.  Last time the defenders of the TTC out formed us and, had they not messed up on the war dec mechanics, could have made things very difficult for us.

This time around we heard that Pandemic Horde would at least be late to the fight.  Somebody had reinforced their Fortizar in Pochven, the one in Skarkon that we battled over back in January, and they were going to go defend that first, which was certainly the right call from their perspective.  That Fortizar is a bigger asset to them than a high sec Keepstar that was going to be taken down anyway.

But, having formed up and headed to Skarkon, would they then come to Perimeter?  They would have plenty of time.  They just had to babysit a timer for 30 minutes max, while we would be shooting the Keepstar for hours.  They could show up late and still have plenty of time to turn it into a fight.

Meanwhile, we arrived in Perimeter, where there were about 1,800 people already in system… about 200 more than Jita at that moment… with a little over a half an hour to go before it was time.

Arrival in Perimeter

We warped to a Fortizar on grid with the Keepstar and used the Nestors in our fleet to refit from travel fit to combat fit.  Then we hung around watching the timer count down and local numbers climb.

You can see the keep in the lower left

With a few minutes left on the clock, Zintage had us align to the Keepstar, then warped us to a bookmark that put us in a big ball between the uprights.  When the timer finished counting down, we started to shoot.

My spot above the Keepstar, now with a Permaband SKIN

At that point local had climbed up to around 3,400 people, but it was mostly those there to watch the event or try to profit from it.  There was a legion of MTUs deployed, such that they were out in greater force than any fleet trying to assail us.  A small fleet of Tonados attempted to take shots at us… it looked to be all of NCDot’s current active players, which is at least more than TESTs… but failed to have much of an impact.

Time dilation, tidi, was already at 10% and things were moving slowly… though it wasn’t horrible.  Those in the know had their command queue window open and could see that while we were moving at 10%, commands were not in the backlog for long.  Slow but responsive was the order of the day.

And then nobody else showed up to defend.  There is certainly an open question as to what would have happened to the node if even 1K defenders had showed up to contest the timer.  Just us shooting and people warping around and gawking got us to 10% tidi.  But it never happened, so we mostly just sat there for three hours cycling our guns and shooting the Keepstar.

At 10% tidi with nothing else really going on, I got up and made dinner, fed the cats, did the dishes, folded my laundry, while checking in to make sure I was still shooting and that nobody was shooting me.

Later I grabbed my laptop and logged into WoW Classic and did some of the Midsummer Festival on an alt.  The EVE Online app was using enough resources that I didn’t want anything else running on my desktop if I could help it.

At some point people realized that nothing was going to happen immediately and they started to wander off.  Local dropped to 3K.

Local trending down

And eventually dropped to around 2,700 for the middle of the shoot, which eased up tidi which, in turn, sped up the shoot.  Meanwhile, we did everything we could to mitigate tidi, turning off boosts, calling in drones, and just being chill in space shooting a structure.

That got us down from 60% to the 20% range in a much shorter time than the first 40% of the shoot.  But, as the percentage ran down, the numbers in local began to rise again as people wanted to get in system to be there for the explosion and possibly get on the kill mail.

Local climbed back through 3K again, then past the 3,400 high water mark I saw previously, and began approaching 4K.

Local climbing, tidi getting worse

The tidi began to get really bad as we got down around 6%.  Auto-reload stopped working for guns.  People had to manually drag ammo from their cargo to their guns in the fitting window to load them.  The command queue began to back up.  And things felt really laggy.  I couldn’t shift my view of the structure without having the camera move in sudden jerks.

And the primary cause of this was likely Crime Watch being activated constantly as people got in there and shot the Keepstar or somebody else without a war dec and got blown up.  My log window, which had been showing a couple of such notifications between shots went to a stream of them that would push my last shot off the window before the guns could cycle for the next shot.

CONCORD was busy

And we were not done with crazy lag issues.

We got down to the last percent and logi put out a combat drone each to get a couple of hits on the Keepstar so they would be on the kill mail.  Then the last few points of hull were gone, we all lost target lock because the shoot was over… and the structure just sat there.

Come on, do something… blow up already… also, tidi was so bad I couldn’t get the damn thing centered

A minute or two went by as we waited for the usual series of explosion graphics to start running, the bits of fire erupting from different points of the structure, the slow build up of flame, then the big boom.  But nothing was going on.

Then, suddenly, the repair counter popped up again.  It had been stopped at 27 minutes, but now it was back, counting down, like the structure was repairing.

That can’t be right

Also, nobody had seen a kill mail.  Now, it isn’t completely out of the question for a kill mail to fail to generate.  There were four Keepstar kill mails in NPC Delve back during World War Bee that didn’t generate because too many pilots were on them.  But with the repair timer running, and it got down under 20 minutes, we were wary.

The working theory in the fleet was that the delay was related to asset safety needing to process all of the items left in what had been a much used trading station since 2019.  That was a lot of stuff to deal with, and while the server did that its mind was elsewhere, letting the repair timer run.

And eventually it did stop and, after a host of fake links purporting to be the kill mail but really being links to the Pancake Cat video, a kill mail did generate and then showed up on zKillboad.

A kill confirmed

There were no fittings shown, like those ghost titans at the second battle of M2-XFE, but it was dead and a little over 2,500 pilots were on the kill mail.  (I made it in at 12th place in the overall damage, pretty much by cycling my guns regularly.)

The explosion graphics still hadn’t rolled yet, but we had been out for four hours at that point and it was very late for the intrepid EU players who wanted to get in on the kill, so we aligned out to a gate and Zintage warped us off.  It was a long gate jump, but you could tell when we began to load the next system because everything sped up.  The Perimeter node had clearly been reinforced and put on its own server for the battle, and even that felt pretty laggy with more than 3.7K people in system… though Crime Watch does add overhead.

Then it was gate and Ansiblex jumps back to Delve.

Rokhs going through another gate

And that was the end of the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter.  There are other TTC structures around, including some in Perimeter, which I am sure will get blown up in their time.

People are also getting huffy about the Imperium having a Sotiyo in Domain, because there is always the rush to find something to go “Grrr Goons” about.  Leadership has said they are still working out what to do with them.  If they haven’t decided in a month, I’d said calling it hypocrisy might be warranted.

All of this is still the topic of the week over on Reddit.  Somebody even posted a three hour video of the event, just in case you don’t have any grass you can watch grow or paint you can watch dry.  The 4,500% time lapse version is much more watchable.

Meanwhile, Brisc Rubal, who was in our fleet last night, said Vily will be on the Meta Show this Saturday to talk about the TTC and the events around its fall.  Brisc promised to ask tough questions.  We shall see how he responds.  Reports are that Vily did NOT live up to the TTC agreement and failed to pay the Imperium its cut for the final month as stipulated in the rules.

Still time to milk a little more drama out of all of this.

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