We had been warned over the last couple of weeks that a push might be coming from out foes in the north. It is a holiday week in China and we were told that Fraternity would be trying to harness the free time of the core of its membership in order to make gains in Pure Blind and Deklein.
So it was no surprise when the call for fleets popped up on Sunday morning while I was finishing my breakfast. Okay, maybe it was a bit of a surprise because I had forgotten about the whole thing, but I remembered when the fleet ping arrived.
There were a couple of fleets up, Supertrains, our Rokh doctrine, and Techfleet, which has been refined to a Tempest Fleet Issue doctrine. I had one of each up in Pure Blind, so jumped into the Techfleet clone… it requires some implants… got in the TFI, and joined the fleet.
There was the usual fiddling around and waiting for people who were trying to join from Delve to get on up to Pure Blind. But eventually we had critical mass, over 200 pilots in fleet, and it was time to undock and head towards danger.
TFIs undocking
We took gates into Deklein and got ourselves setup on a titan tethered on a Fortizar and waited for our time, knowing we would soon be dropped into battle. Things were happening. We saw the Rokh fleet get bridged out and made sure we were within 2,500m of our titan.
There they go, I’m sure we’ll be next
And we sat there… and sat there… and sat there.
At one point another fleet of Rokhs showed up, out titan changed to their fleet, and then sent them off into battle while we continued to keep at range.
Hey… when will it be our turn?
We did get occasional updates about what was going on. An ihub had been saved, a structure reinforced, somebody made a mistake, the enemy had at least two more fleets out in where ever things were happening than we did.
What about us? We were being held for just the right moment. Mike Flood, our FC, went through the doctrine fighting plan. TFIs with artillery are an alpha strike doctrine. A target gets called and we all lock it up then put an “x” in fleet chat. When enough people have x’d up, the three, two, one, fire count will commence so that we will all activate out guns as close to the same moment as possible.
Done right, with sufficient numbers, one shot is all it takes to blap a hostile and leave a wreck where their ship was just moments ago. No time for repairs to land if they don’t notice they are being locked up early enough.
We sat there for a while longer. At some point after the three hour mark we were told to set destination back to our staging Keepstar and align to the out gate. The fight was over. We would take a couple of gates and an ansiblex and be back where we started. The time was never right for us.
Heading home
We stood down and were given and extra fleet participation credit for the effort.
The time wasn’t wasted. I wrote yesterday’s post about the future EverQuest title while we were waiting. Paid some bills online. Listened to most of the latest Folding Ideas video about the GameStop stock play from a couple years back. It is 2.5 hours long, but I had the time.
It was another time when I was logged in and technically “playing” EVE Online, but was tabbed out for so much of the fleet that ManicTime didn’t even register an hour of play time.
That is the way it goes some days. My wife was just leaving the house as I was getting into fleet and wished me good luck. When she got home later she asked who won. I had to admit I wasn’t really sure, not having seen any of the fight.
This, naturally, seemed crazy to her. How could I be logged in for more than three hours and not do anything? What kind of game is this? I tried to explain that with a PvP title, where you have to depend on other players for content, things do not always work out on demand. A dungeon in Azeroth is always waiting for us, ready to go, if we can get the instance group together. But you get 230 people in a fleet and sometimes you just sit there.
All the same, it did seem to be a bit of a banner day for New Eden. The daily peak concurrent user count hit 31,100 at 18:18 UTC.
The word from EVE Offline
It hasn’t been a good five months… since early May of this year… since the PCU went over 30K.
And it was pretty good yesterday too, passing 27K, which isn’t bad for a Monday that isn’t a holiday. There were, according to pings, more fights to be had. But there was also work. So maybe next weekend.
Addendum: I used this title back in 2017 for a similar situation. Wait long enough and I will probably use it again.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 