Daily Archives: November 24, 2025

Leaving the Drone Regions

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Our work in the Drone Regions is done for the most part.  The Imperium did not burn down every single structure.  I am sure there are still Athanors, Raitarus, Skyhooks, and other medium structures left over from PanFam’s time in the Drones.  You stay some place for as long as they did and you start to collect stuff… and even more so when you’re renting space and every renter feels they need their own structures in the systems they’re living in.

That can be for the new owners of the space, something for them to work on, a bit of a distraction from the labors of moving in and setting up shop in a new system or three.

Structure shoots carried on through the weekend, but the pace was clearly tapering off from the almost manic run that we going on in the middle of last week.  Thursday night USTZ was something of a crescendo with the Keepstar kills, and there were bursts of activity after, but the end was in sight.

As noted in a previous posts (linked below at the end) the Imperium plan has been to clear out PanFam’s structures and to make the Drone regions an open area for non-aligned alliances to jump into null sec and claim space.  This will be enforced by the Imperium, and will include  Freeport Keepstars in LXQ2-T, 9WVY-F, and F9-FUV in order to facilitate movement and supply operations as well as to give something akin to NPC space in the region so it won’t be as secure as it was under PanFam.

And people have been moving in.  We’ve mostly not shot them as promised, and they have mostly not shot us, but mistakes have been made and everybody is always on their guard.

The early arrivals in the Drones include:

Some of those will hold on, at least for a while.  Others will likely be swept away as the land grab continues on to its eventual conclusion, and at least its initial stable state.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the Daily Sovereignty Map to see who survives and who else shows up.

Meanwhile, the members for the former PanFam coalition are moving to their respective corners of the map, with most taking up positions along side Fraternity in Winter Coalition, with some grabbing space in the north.  Slyce has the spot in space that TEST had way back in the CFC days before they moved to Fountain, including the five linked systems referred to at times as the “Pentagoon” or the “TESTagram.”

The Slyce-ahedron maybe?

Pandemic Horde, who precipitated this whole collapse, is still headed to Cloud Ring.  Their agreement with The Initiative is temporary, so they can’t stay there forever. Meanwhile, as an alliance, it has lost more than half of its members at this point.

DOTLAN Alliance Movements – Nov 22, 2025

Pandemic Horde remains the fourth largest alliance in the game by member count.  That means they have enough mass that could break back into null sec somewhere.  Generally after such a mass exodus of players you’re left with the hardcore who will undock and go places and the AFK who probably don’t know anything has happened yet and will be surprised when and if they finally log back in.

The question is where they will go.

The Imperium’s policy on the Drone regions is that any non-bloc alliance can set up shop, with Pandemic Horde being the one specific, hard exception.  They may no longer be in a bloc, but we won’t let them back in.

Which does not leave them with a lot of choices for null sec destinations.  They won’t be allowed back into the Drone regions and they don’t have the might to threaten any of the remaining three large entities, Fraternity/Winter Co, The Initiative, or the Imperium.  So there is no space for them there.  Neither will any of those three groups ally with them.  Those bridges have been burnt.

If you look at the map, the places where non-bloc alliances live are Providence, Querious, and Delve.

Sure, there is also some space in Esoteria and Omist held by neutrals, but they live next door to the Imperium and I don’t think we’d let PH move in next door… and I am pretty sure they wouldn’t want to.  They just ran away because we were their neighbors.  That makes the other choices a bit dicey as well.  Delve would probably be about as far away as they could get… and it would be no easy job taking the place.  The couldn’t finish the job the last time they invaded, even with 3 to 1 odds in their favor.

But the other option is to setup shop in low sec, where at least you have NPC stations everywhere, so assets will be safe.  But low sec isn’t a pushover, and even at their size they would have some work to do.

And there is also NPC null sec, like Outer Ring or Syndicate.  They could make a home in Poitot, the only named system in Syndicate.

We will have to wait and see what more they make next.

Meanwhile, at the fireside on Saturday, Asher was able to tell us one of the humorous side stories of the war.  The one battle that Pandemic Horde put in the effort on and actually won was the Keepstar fight in K-IYNW in the Great Wildlands.

The Imperium had put down a Keepstar there and PH blew it up before it could come online.  This was a win for them.  They apparently thought they were stopping a staging system for an invasion of their space.

Instead, Asher told us that one of PH’s corporations wanted to defect to us and bring their supers and titans with them, but there was no safe jump route for the.  So that Keepstar wasn’t an invasion jump off point, it was a way station for the corp to help them escape.

However, PH did not know this and, in an attempt to secure the system, they put up a Fortizar.  The defecting corp simply used that to jump to when getting their big ships out… so mission accomplished in the end.

As for me, I got in on a few more fleets over the weekend.  The final fleets were all structure kills, payment for all the past timer setting.  There were no more Keepstars on the menu, but there were still Fortizars, Azbels, and Tataras to be found.

Another Azbel to shoot

One of the twists was a character named Odyssey 2049, a member of Snuffed Out, who appears to have scouted out almost all of the big timers and managed to slip in and tag the structure, so as to end up on the kill mail.  We were not the only ones racing between two Keepstar kills the other night.  Odyessey was along for the ride as well, getting on both, plus a third one earlier in the day that I missed out on.  That is how you get a total lifetime ISK destroyed count over 120 trillion ISK.  (My own lifetime total is about 14.5 trillion ISK after all of this, a number reached largely by having just been around for a long time.)

A Tatara brewing up, viewed from above

Eventually though we were done.  I was on the last fleet on Saturday night with Reagalan.  Then, on Sunday morning my time the move ops home began.  Capitals jumped first, but I was in on the initial subcap move op.

Undocking on the Keepstar

We were clearing stuff up behind us.  The Keepstar itself was in the midst of its unanchoring cycle, soon to be taken down and hauled off.

No timer for unanchoring

We got a titan bridge that covered most of the space home, and just had to gate a last half dozen or so.  Then it was into Insmother and through one last Ansiblex to home in C-JMT6.

The home Keepstar in Insmother

Among other things, Sunday saw the peak daily concurrency hit 41,322.  That is the highest number since the peak during Covid, back in May of 2020, when the game hit 41,562.  To see more than that you have to go back to 2017 and 2016 and the great surge that happened with Alpha clones and free to play. (Data from EVE Offline.)

I am not saying our operations were solely responsible for this five year peak.  There was a lot going on this week, including the Catalyst expansion, which came with the usual 7 days of free Omega time.  In the last couple of years the peak concurrent has coincided with the launch of the Q4 expansion, hitting in 37,488 in 2024 and 40,165 in 2023, that last being the Havoc expansion, which seemed to finally break us free of CCP’s bad economic moves in New Eden that had been depressing user logins.

But surely some of the turnout yesterday was because of the Drone regions and people moving in and us heading out.

We shall see what happens next.  Meanwhile I am back home from the wars, such that they were.

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