Pandemic Horde Breaks, Seeks to Flee the Drones, Allies, and Goons

I can’t even keep up with Gobbins any more.  I was 90% of the way into writing a post about how Gobbins was being a bit over dramatic in pushing out “war updates” when there hasn’t been a real war going on for months.

Then, as I was eating lunch today it came out on Reddit that Pandemic Horde had decided to pack up shop, abandoning all of it space, having not bothered to inform its allies in advance, seeking a better life somewhere else in New Eden with the help of The Initiative.

Soon to be abandoned PH space

So they’re going to go live in Cloud Ring maybe?  I don’t know.  But here is the image of the message from Reddit.

The Announcement Screen Shot

That is some tiny text, so here is a transcription of the message.

**Gobbins** 🏴‍☠️ — *7:03 PM*
**@everyone BIG ANNOUNCEMENT – PANDEMIC HORDE CHAPTER 2**

Guys we are going to do something a bit radical. A plan formed a while back is now ready to fully put into action:

* Pandemic Horde is leaving the Panfam Coalition
* Consequently, Horde is leaving the drone regions, move ops start right now
* We will be working with The Initiative (INIT) while we secure our new space

**Coalitions**
Our ambition is to play the game without being embedded as part of a larger coalition. Coalition gameplay is a race to the bottom where both sides are encouraged to grow as much as possible by conglomerating an infinite number of alliances and corporations. We avoided playing along those lines over the course of this year, through the resets and by maintaining separation even when outnumbered.

Moving forward we plan to approach this challenge differently, by mutually protecting other large but independent entities from being forced into the coalition infinite growth cycle, thus allowing more groups to emerge.

Playing without a large coalition also reduces the effort required to manage and coordinate several other entities and personalities, and avoids generating as many truly server-breaking TiDi set pieces. Hopefully these steps will encourage other coalitions to shrink in size given there is no need to maintain excessive numbers.

**Cost (dronelands)**
There is a cost to every big idea and in this case the obvious cost is we will have to rebuild our space. On a more individual level, there is a cost in terms of potential assets safetied and structures lost, especially indy parks. There is also a cost in terms of effort to move across many regions. We believe the tradeoff and the risk are worth the benefits that this opens up, both in terms of content and quality/distribution of space we own.

In addition it was announced that Gobbins would be stepping down as leader of Pandemic Horde, a job he has been barely fulfilling for years now.

This all comes on the heels of Pandemic Horde making the coalition pull back to a new staging system in Perrigen Falls. as well as offlining their oldest standing Keepstar, forcing people to move accumulated assets or have them sent to asset safety.  Another ping from Gobbins around that.

Corporation Assets from MJ-5F9 – MOVE OUT S T A R in MJ-5F9 are being moved by the Asset Safety system. In 5 days (at 2025.11.09 03:24), the assets can be manually delivered to a location in MJ-5F9. Control over manual delivery is only available to Directors.
In 20 days (at 2025.11.24 03:24), the assets will be automatically delivered to Odebeinn V – Moon 5 – Kaalakiota Corporation Factory. A fee will apply when retrieving the assets.

Clearly Gobbins and the rest of PH leadership had been planning this move for a while now.  These moves did not make a great deal of sense on their own, but in light of their desire to flee the dronelands for greener pastures, the story has now aligned.  Move ops were announced.

Move Ops Planned

Meanwhile, in the Imperium, the response from Asher was:

Resub your accounts. We are gonna push into their stager with titans and supers. These cowards don’t get to walk out for free.

A couple of fleets were called up immediately to begin a hell camp of the Pandemic Horde Keepstar in R-AG7W where PH line members are now stuck trying to get their stuff out after leadership has taken care of themselves.

Reaction on Reddit has been as expected.  Gobbins and Pandemic Horde are being pilloried for running away yet again.  They have also abandoned their long time allies, so there is a big question mark as to whether or not we’ll see NCDot or Slyce running to aid PH in the evac.

And then there is the question of PanFam.  The concept was a bit of a hollow shell when Pandemic Legion left back in August.  With the exit of Pandemic Horde there is no “Pan” left in the “Fam,” so there will likely be a new coalition emerging from the remains.

We will see how this plays out, but I expect to be on the hell camp later today for a first hand view.  Null sec drama continues.

Update: A video about the whole thing.

Related:

• Reddit – PANDEMIC HORDE TO LEAVE PANFAM
• Reddit – Asher: Attacking the PH Stager
• Reddit – Unfortunately sometimes you get the leaders you don’t deserve
• Pastebin – Text of the Gobbins announcements
• A Pixel Nomad – Frustrations with Ops

Musing on No Man’s Sky and it Not Being an MMORPG

I am sure somebody is going to read that title and immediately say, “Well, duh!  Of course it is not an MMORPG!”  And yes, No Man’s Sky is very single player focused game.  The thing is, as time has gone along, it has started to present itself in a way that “feels” very MMO-like.

Join Friends in Space

I an going to stipulate up front that my whole “What is No Man’s Sky really?” discussion is both somewhat esoteric… it doesn’t really matter outside of the need of humans to categorize things… and not exactly cut and dried.  So this will be more of a philosophical post to try to help me think this through.

At launch, of course, it was very much a single player game as players sought to prove/disprove the statement by Sean Murray that you could run into other players.  That seemed to have been pretty definitively concluded back in 2016.  You were alone in the universe.

Since then the game has evolved.  You could, very early on, see where others had been, systems discovered, planets named, the touch of others on the universe… which went along with the fact that you connect to a common server to track those things, which strongly suggests a multiplayer model… even something like an MMO model.

These planets… I have discovered them

And while most of the time while I am out in my current galaxy among the plethora of algorithmically generated planets it is extremely rare to see even another soul in space, it does happen now and then.  I also run into systems and planets discovered by other people and see their names and and approximately how long ago they first arrived in the system, so we do leave markers behind for others to see.

You may debate what is a garnish I suppose…

Then we get to the anomaly, where you can almost always find other people, and expeditions, when planets start to feel less enormous and more like West Karana on a Saturday night in 1999 because, while there are plenty of wide open spaces for you, you also keep bumping into other travelers.

Other people visible in my play space

As such, I started mentally comparing it to other titles I play, or have played, in order to scratch that space and science fiction itch.  Those are:

• EVE Online – An actual MMORPG

This is also likely the most dissimilar title.  EVE Online has its own level of complexity, but it is neither a flight-sim like experience nor is landing on planets a thing.  All space in the game is “known” and somebody has been there before you at this point, so exploration is more about finding discarded objects in space in relic or data sites.  And, of course, it rewards playing with others, having multiple accounts, blowing things up, and PvP is not optional once you undock.

For overlap of experience this is probably the furthest away.

• Elite Dangerous – The docking nightmare

ED has a lot in parallel with NMS.  Space stations and ships and having to dock… though the couple of hours I spent trying to learn how to dock about eight years back was enough to sour me on the game and keep me from ever returning.  But in theory it has some overlap, with ED ramping up the difficulty relative to NMS, where things are more automated and if you bump into the station when you’re trying to dock nobody minds, rather than having a warrant issued for your arrest.  I respect the game and what it has accomplished and delivered… but it is also clearly for a more dedicated space flight sim player than I.

• Star Citizen – The hobbyist button approach

I have played a bit of Star Citizen over the years… maybe not enough to get very far.  I have never flown my 2014 vintage Aurora MR ship.  But I have stumbled about it awkwardly enough to get a sense of what it is going for, which is the more of an “all the buttons on the control panel work and you had better remember what they all do” level of simulation.  You need to be into it or go home.  It is certainly more simulation than I am ready to take on.  It does, however, do a lot of the things that NMS does, if in greater and more intricate detail, including ground vehicles.

• Stars Reach – Another procedurally generated universe

This is the one that really got me thinking because the high level description of the two make them sounds quite alike.  SR aspires to have spaceship travel, though they have been solely focused on planetary aspects of the game so far, with exploration as a career path.  So flying a spaceship and discovering new planets and going down to chart them… sounds very similar to some of the NMS game play loop.

The flip side is that this will be a Raph Koster production and he does dislike the idea of anybody playing solo, so you will need to interact and cooperate with other players if you want to get anywhere.

Those are the titles that spring to my mind that might fight for the same audience as NMS.

Of course, the one thing about NMS that both does and does not link up with any of them is the multiplayer aspect.  Part of the reason I started thinking about this was seeing somebody over in the comments at Massively OP upset about the game because they thought the game required you to play with other people.

Here is the thing… it absolutely does not require that.  There is a setting where you can turn off multiplayer and tune out everybody else.

Also, PvP is a thing in NMS… who knew?

In addition, players have considerable freedom in selecting the difficulty for their game.  There is some syncing that happens when you join friends in the game, but for the most part you can be playing with a very different set of rules from another player you might bump into in the anomaly.

And, of course, there is the fact that when the game does get too many players in proximity it does start to fall apart.  Other spaceships fail to draw, leading to the Wonder Woman invisible airplane “woman squatting in mid-air” effect.

Potshot being Wonder Woman in her invisible plane

And even when my own ship was drawing… it was sometimes only “mostly” drawing.

Did somebody break in and steal my control console?

But the fact that a site like Massively OP, which is mostly about MMORPGs and adjacent titles, is covering the game also seems to press the point about multiplayer view.

So it makes me think about what other titles are in the niche, where flying spaceships, exploring, and even some base building are group in with multiplayer or at least co-op options.

Planet rising as night falls

What else is out there that bleeds into this corner of the genre?  Where is the line between MMORPG, MMO, and just wider world co-op player titles?  Do these have any meaning anymore?