06 | November | 2025 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

After getting the news that Pandemic Horde was attempting to exit the dronelands and abandon its allies (and line members) in order to enter into a coalition elsewhere with The Initiative, The Imperium sprang into action.

Fleets were pinged out and filled up, GSOL rapidly deployed POS towers in which to hide bridging titans on the path to R-AG7W, including a couple in the system in which to safe up if you had to leave, and interdiction bubbles started going up around the Keepstar to pin down Pandemic Horde as much as possible.

The PH Keepstar in R-AG7W

That went on while I was at work. I saw news start to pop up in pings while on my lunch break and got out yesterday’s post about this bit of breaking news as I ate.

I did not get out to the camp until much later in the day. In the gap of time between the end of the work day and dinner I got into a fleet that was sending some Cyclone Fleet Issue ships forward, so I jumped into game, joined up, and got onto the chain of stops that would get me to the action.

So many of my big moments in New Eden start with me sitting on a titan waiting to bridge

Once we arrived and dropped the move op to join the appropriate fleets in system there wasn’t a lot going on. But that is the nature of a camp like this. There can be long stretches where nothing big happens, though there are always careless people who wander off tether or who decide to break their safety by shooting some target of opportunity only to discover that we’re not all asleep. In fact, some of us are obsessively going up and down the list looking for somebody to target and shoot.

But we didn’t all need to sit there and the CFI fleet was tasked to go do a few other things, starting with covering the entosis operation working on the systems Sovereignty Hub, that bit of infrastructure that bestows ownership of the system on a group and allows one to fiddle with the settings.

The Sov Hub in R-AG7W

The ADM was fairly high in the system… though not as high as one might expect for a stager… so it took a while for the magic entosis fairies to finish their sov wanding, but we had time and nobody was keen to interfere. A few PH ships landed on grid, but turned tail when they saw 100 or so CFIs minding the scene.

When that was done we went off to reinforce an Azbel in the system, a matter of sitting and shooting a structure while remembering to cycle launchers on after every automatic reload.

After that we were brought to one of the safe POSes that GSOL had laid down and given a break. I chose that moment to safe log out and go have dinner and watch a bit of TV with my wife.

When I returned a couple hours later I found I had missed a big clash. I had gotten in on the tail end of the excitement, arriving back in the POS to find time dilation down at 10% and a scroll back of pings about dropping dreads and capitals being called to the front.

The fleet I had left was still up, with the same FC. I salute the dedication of our leadership who stay up and online all sorts of crazy hours so we can wander in when we can and join in on the fight.

I arrived on grid to find a second Keepstar. This turned out to be both something of a coup as well as a screw up.

The COOKD Keepstar on grid

We wanted to get a structure on grid with the PH Keepstar from which we could assail it safely for the final two timers. However, there is a six day timer to online a structure in hostile space. That was too long. So apparently we found some disgruntled PH members to drop a structure for us… a Keepstar no less, because if you’re going to ride the merry-go-round, you might as well ride the white horse.

Cool plan, bro. However, the mechanics of the situation were not clear to somebody and the Keepstar ended up with a six day timer all the same. I mean, hilarious that we were able to cover that sort of op right in front of PH, but not so useful all the same.

I initially thought it was a CONDI (GSF) structure, but then noticed that the ticker was COOKD. They are no longer in PH.

Anyway, I had arrived in time to cover the capitals pulling back. We still had a pile of Zirnitras on grid spooling down. Those are the Imperium’s new favorite dread. I am training up to fly one right now.

A mass of Zirns sitting at the Keep

Most of those jumped out and we were left circling the undock area trying to bump stragglers out of bubbles and shooting anybody who decided to try and get on an easy dread kill mail.

I stuck around for a couple hours doing that and listening to a couple of podcasts. Despite there being no real action, I managed to get on a dozen more kills just flying around.

Just me and my CFI in the thick of things

The camp wasn’t perfect. There was a gap in the bubbles for a bit and I saw two dreads managed to jump out. They got clear because a pair of titans started motoring towards the edge of the bubbles above the undock, which got the bubblers to chase them. Then the dreads went low and found a hole in the coverage. There is a plan for camping possible jump target systems and to shoot all cyno ships to help keep the ring as tight as possible.

As things wound down I headed back to the safe POS and let my logoff timer run down. If you’ve been in any sort of combat you can’t safely log out of the game in space for 15 minutes. So I sat in the POS and orbited the stick then went to brush my teeth and get ready for bed.

Sitting in the POS with others who were AFK

The camp went on and was still going strong when I got up and checked this morning.

There is a running battle report tracking how much damage has been done. The total count is up at 1.3 trillion ISK lost, 1 trillion of it on the PH side of the ledger. Among other things they have lost two titans and three supercarriers.

Battle Report Header

Over on Reddit, r/eve is awash in commentary and meme about all of this, topics including what went wrong, what PH should have done, and who should run the alliance when Gobbins finally steps down.

I stuck to the meme side and added my own somewhat innocuous entry to the mix. (Click and upvote!)