Category Archives: Null Sec

EVE Online’s Equinox Expansion to Arrive June 11th

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The Upwell Consortium is at it again, with new structures poised to change New Eden.

Yesterday, after a short teaser countdown, CCP released a video and a dev blog announcing the next expansion for EVE Online.

Equinox – Seize Control – June 11, 2024

Named Equinox, it is slated to go live on June 11, 2024 and bring with it some of the promised/threatened changes for null sec.  All of it is somewhat vague and hand-wavy at this point, but there are some general features that have been announced.

So what is in store with Equinox?

  • Harness Planetary Power with the Skyhook

Planets are going to be expanded in usefulness, though whether this means an expansion to the current planetary industry mechanics or something new isn’t exactly clear.  Nor is there an answer yet as to what resources this will provide.  Will this fix the isogen problem?

What we do know is that there will be an Upwell Structures available to exploit this new resource pool, the Orbital Skyhook!

The Orbital Skyhook… totally not half a Heron repurposed…

From the Upwell brochure:

A marvel of engineering allowing direct access to a planet’s resources, the orbital skyhook is central to Equinox. Anchored near planets within sovereign nullsec space, these skyhooks provide access to power, workforce, and reagents necessary for the empire-building aspirations of nullsec organizations. 

Empire building further enabled I guess.  Also, do people live on planets out in null sec?  Do they come and go with the rise and fall of empires?  Or do they just stay in place and hope the new boss is better than the old boss?

  • The Return of Passive Moon Mining

One of the great tragedies of our time… if you were listening to Pandemic Legion a few years back… was the end of passive moon mining.  The need to undock and harvest resources every time your huge non-denominational space laser carved off a chunk of a local moon.  That was time not spent involved in elite PvP and meant that such groups had to put up with all those neo max zoom dweebie miners and industrialist, which just ruins everything.

Well, worry no more.  Elite PvP focused organizations will be allowed passive income again with the Metenox Moon Drill, which will automate the whole process.

The moon drill in operation – artist’s concept

From the Upwell brochure:

Another revolutionary innovation introduced through Equinox is the Metenox Moon Drill, an automated resource extraction structure allowing organizations in nullsec and lowsec to streamline in-system operations and focus on expansion and strategy, rather than manual harvesting. Like the orbital skyhook, these structures are robust and resilient, able to withstand most dangers, allowing industry leaders to rest easy. 

Elite PvP can flourish again and weed out all those non-hackers who are keeping the kill board from being as green as possible.

  • The Sovereignty Hub

Since the advent of Aegis sovereignty almost a decade back we have been stuck with the Territorial Control Unit (TCU) and Infrastructure Hub (ihub) structures that were introduced with the Dominion expansion back in late 2009.  They were reworked to sort of fit with the new sovereignty mechanics, but were always a bit of a relic, with the TCU basically setting the ownership flag for the system and little else.

These will be replaced by the new Sovereignty Hub!

The new Sov hub over a blue star

From the Upwell brochure:

The new sovereignty hub promises to become a new cornerstone of territorial dominance. With upgradeable options depending on the star system’s topology and the planets within, it offers a nuanced approach to sovereignty that reflects each star system’s physical characteristics, allowing you to shape space in your image. 

This sounds a lot like the ihub, but we’ll have to see.

Once again, information available is sparse at this point and essential details, like how null sec sov holders will transition from the old to the new system are as yet unknown.  Presumably there won’t just be a mass sov drop on June 11th.  Then again, Hilmar loves chaos and bad ideas in general so maybe there will be.

  • Upwell Goes into the Ship Design Business

In addition to these new structure, Upwell is introducing a line of ships to support the new functionality being introduced.

New Upwell ships… are not pretty

From the Upwell brochure:

The Equinox suite further empowers the capabilities of capsuleers in this new era of space colonization by introducing four new ships, specialized in the transport of planetary resources, and capable of being fitted with defensive weaponry. Tailored to navigate the new dynamics of resource gathering and sovereignty, the unveiling of these new vessels underscores Upwell’s commitment to revolutionizing nullsec operations.

On the expansion page the ships to be introduced are listed out as follows:

  • Squall – Entry level reagents hauler.
  • Deluge – Hauler with covert ops cloaking capability, high warp speed and mobility, and immunity to cargo scanners.
  • Torrent – Tough deep space transport vessel with micro jump drive capability.
  • Avalanche – Massive freighter with a huge reagent hauling capacity.

That means there are probably going to be some new Spaceship Command skills introduced with the expansion, so maybe save up some of your skill points just in case.

  • Motivating the Cadres

Upwell is also promises to be able to mobilize the workforce required to support all of these changes, with the following statement:

Equinox is spurred on by a scientific milestone in cloning technology, ushering in a paradigm shift in how populations can be mobilized and utilized across the vastness of space, empowering the colonial aspirations of nullsec leaders with access to a highly skilled workforce.

Clone armies worked out so well for The Old Republic, so why not give that a go?  I suspect this is in there for lore purposes, but who knows.

The Upwell digital sweatshop of the future!

Maybe null sec entities will need to entice, recruit, or press gang workers to support these new systems.  We shall see.

  • New Colors, Better Corps, AIR Goals

CCP is also promising to extend the custom skinning technology used to customize Upwell structures to ships, a better corporation management UI, and more advanced AIR goals that go beyond the current daily configuration with an eye towards longer term goals for ongoing completion.

A taste of goals to come

There are still seven weeks to go before this all goes live, with plenty of time for build up activities and more detailed dev blogs about what we are getting.

Much of this has been wrapped up in the video that went live yesterday, pitched as an advertisement for Upwell Consortium.

So we have a hint at what might be coming, but the reality is still a ways off.

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Two TTC Sotiyos Destroyed in Perimeter Brawl

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There has been a low level conflict going on in null sec, with Imperium and The Initiative facing off against Pandemic Horde and Fraternity for a while now.  Neither side has been stoked for a full scale invasion… in part because CCP has said they will be making changes to null sec, something that makes everybody nervous… so there have been clashes in the southeast, where Pandemic Horde had already been in violation of the now lapsed agreement.  They and Fraternity have pushed into Catch, where the latter dropped a Keepstar then did a whole lot of nothing.

The Imperium, in a counter move, dropped a Fortizar on the grid with their Keepstar in F4R2-Q, which literally caused PH to evac a bunch of ships back to their previous forward base.  Both structures have been reinforced multiple times but neither side has managed to blow up the other’s citadel.

The stalemate in F4R2-Q

I do not have much first hand information about this conflict because it has primarily been taking place immediately after downtime, which is the only time zone PH can get Fraternity support, so is the only time zone they will engage in.   Since downtime is at 4am local time for me, I have been giving the whole thing a miss.  You can tell the conflict is mostly posturing because the propaganda on Reddit has been horrible all around. There really hasn’t been anything worth alarm clocking over.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I woke up and logged into various apps and noticed reports of a fight going on in Perimeter, a busy high sec system one jump from Jita and one time home of the Tranquility Trading Tower, the one time high sec Keepstar trading hub, the wreck of which still haunts the system.

Remember the TTT – Once it was anchored here

Even the official EVE Online Twitter account took a moment away from promoting Vanguard to make mention of the fight.  I knew that the Tranquility Trading Consortium’s structures in that high sec system had been one of the fronts that we had been pushing back against.  But now I saw there were something around 5K pilots in Perimeter and that the pair of Sotiyos the TTC still had anchored there were under attack.

Their two Sotiyos on the old Keepstar grid

For those needing to come up to speed, the TTC broke up when the Imperium pulled out of the agreement, which was supposed to lead to its dissolution according to TTC leader Vily.  That led to the destruction of their high sec Keepstar, but Vily wanted some more ISK so reneged on his statements that the whole thing would fold up shop.   That was all hot news last summer and I have a series of posts about it for those wanting a recap with links out to other stories.

I was immediately looking for a character close by in a clean… thus expendable… clone that I could jump into the system.  As it turned out, my main had a clean clone in Jita.  I was able to get into Jita 4-4, pic up an Ares travel-ceptor I had sitting there, undock, and slip past the PH camp on the station and the Fraternity camp at the Perimeter gate, and jump into the system where the fight was going down.

That didn’t work out so well.

Things not going well

In EVE Online when you get disconnected you don’t disappear from the game.

I went to log back in and spent about 40 minutes waiting for that to happen, at which point I found that my ship had been blown up.  Oh well.  That put me on the battle report, a win of sorts I guess.

Proof I was there

They did not pod me.  That is fairly common in big tidi fights because it delays your ability to get a fresh ship and get back into the fight.  Even if you self-destruct, that two minute timer runs at 10% tidi, so it becomes a 20 minute timer.   Tidi does funny things.  I got a double notification of my destruction when I was back in the game.

I did not get two payouts, too bad

Having my pod still in tidi was fine with me.  I had no ambitions when it came to the fight, save for seeing a bit of it go down.  I had put on a couple of civilian weapons on my Ares in case there was an opportunity, but that was not longer in the cards.

My first move was to warp to a nearby neutral Astrahus at which I could tether.

Landing on the Astrahus

That was just the first place I could find to warp to.  There were still ~4,200 people in system and the overview was too long to find things since the whole thing was happening on the same grid as the Perimeter gate.  On the Astrahus I loaded up a structures only overview and found our Fortizar on the overview and warped to that.  That was on grid with the fight, so I could sit there and watch.

By that point PH had decided to take their remaining Paladins and leave, with a couple of those unlucky enough to be tackled getting worked over.

That one didn’t get away

By that point the first Sotiyo was already dead, it just didn’t know it yet.  As happened when we blew up the TTC Keepstar, the tidi and the need to process the kill and the asset safety moves meant that the Sotiyo just sat there for a while with zero hit points on the counter, untargetable, but claiming it was repairing.

When a Sotiyo doesn’t know it is dead yet

Eventually there was a wreck on the field where the first Sotiyo had been.

The other Sotiyo was now the focus of the attacking fleets, including a mass of Praxis battleships that were spread out on the field.

The Praxis fleet in the sky

At that point I decided to dock up.  While tidi was at 10% still, the player count was dropping and it seemed I might be able to dock up, get in a ship, then get in a couple of cheap shots just to get on the kill mail.

It took a while to dock, but it finally happened.  Once in the Fortizar I was disappointed to find that there were no ships available on contract.  What kind of a staging Fort was this?  In the end, I had to hit the “board my corvette” button and undock in an Ibis, the least imposing of all the in-game ships that can carry a weapon.

You go to war with the ship you have, not the ship you want I guess.  So I warped over to the remaining Sotiyo and got in there with the many Praxis battleships, set myself to orbit at 500m, turned on my civilian afterburner, and let loose with my civilian gatling railgun.

I’m in there somewhere… maybe…

“Pop! Pop! Pop!” went my gun as I circled the structure… or would have probably, if I had sound turned on.  EVE may have sounds, but I couldn’t testify in court to that.  After a bit of that, I decided to warp back to the Fortizar and watch things play out.  I did succeed on getting on the kill mail.  Way down the list of the 1,907 attackers you will find me and my Ibis.

I got in .0001% of the kill!

Things were still lightening up in system.  The defenders had all fled by that point.  Certainly nobody bothered with by little corvette.

Meanwhile, the battleships finished off the second Sotiyo.  Like the first, it paused for a bit, as if in contemplation of its end, as the results were processed, the changed over to a wreck.  Maybe there was an explosion, but if there was I missed it.  I looked over and just saw the remains.

The Sotiyo wreck

Since you can no longer anchor Sotiyos (or Keepstars) in high security space, there will be no replacement of thes losses.

The battle report showed 4,126 pilots counted as involved, with 1,020 kills.

Battle Report Header

The attackers, Team B, lost more ships, but the defenders lost both the objective and the ISK war.  That isn’t the best battle report.  There are a lot of third parties on it.  But that is the best you generally get in a busy high sec system.

There was a bit of chest thumping on /r/eve from PH about their Paladins taking out a lot of Imperium Rokhs.  And they did take out 131 Rokh battleships, which totaled up to 63.6 billion ISK in losses.  But they left out that they ended up losing 62 Paladins, worth 131 billion ISK.  Trading 2:1 against an opponent when your ship value is 4:1 against the foe isn’t the best trade in my book.

On a side note, Stargrace over at Nomadic Gamer, who has been playing EVE Online recently, stumbled into this fight and reported on what she saw.

I saw her mention the tidi lag on Mastodon and replied with the traditional meme for such occasions.

Time dilation is around our necks in every fight in null sec

MMORPG.com also has a post about the clash yesterday.

So it goes.  The conflict will continue I am sure.  The only question is where the next battlefield will be.  Maybe PH and Frat will attack that Fortizar in their Keepstar’s front yard.

Friday Bullet Points with EVE Online Summits, Patches, Kickstarters, and Treaties

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Once again I have some bullet points about New Eden related topics on Friday.  The EVE Online login server was down earlier today (I had half a dozen updates in my email from the EVE Status alerts page) but things seem to be up and running, so off we go to the bullet points.

  • The Expiration of the Null Sec South Eastern Agreement

A year back, with the collapse of the FI.RE coalition and their retreat clockwise through null sec, where many of the parties landed in the now defunct B2 coalition (though a few kept on going clockwise and passed into alliance with Fraternity and PanFam), there was a question as to what would become of the power vacuum left in the southeast of null sec.

That led to the South Eastern Agreement, in with the major null sec coalitions pledged not to attack, take space, or put allies into that area with the idea of letting new non-bloc aligned organizations get a footing in null sec.  The agreement was set to last for one year, a timeline that ran out last week.  Some details:

The agreement was not renewed mostly because neither side in the current bi-polar bloc structure of null sec felt it was in their interest.  Pandemic Horde attacked, took space, and put allies into the are during the agreement, letting everybody know they could not be trusted, and the Imperium had no interest in protecting the space or being the enforcer, especially since PH seemed keen to provoke a war out of the situation so they could get their allies to assist.  So the agreement ended.

Did it do any good?  Maybe.  Some groups lived there in fairly relative peace.  Now, however, unless they are well out of the line of fire, they are likely going to have to pick sides or be ground down in the ongoing PH attacks on the Imperium down there.

  • A Successful EVE Online Kickstarter

The War for New Eden Kickstarter campaign ended earlier this week as well, with the project successfully funded, bringing up the success/failure ratio for EVE Online related campaigns a bit.

EVE Strategy Board Game

The campaign closed out with a number considerably over their initial goal.

The final totals for the campaign

If you are just hearing about this and feel like you have missed out, you can still put in a post-campaign pledge at the War for New Eden web site.  Some links for those interested:

Now, of course, the question is when are backers going to get this rather large board game with so many pieces and board segments?  The promise is by Christmas, but I will be surprised it that happens, even with 10 months to go.  We shall see.

And what were the other EVE Online Kickstarter campaigns?  There are a number of failed ones including the EVE Online Control Panel, a spiffy bit of hardware, and the badly mishandled Fountain War Book campaign.

And the successes?  Andrew Groen’s Empires of EVE Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

  • Havoc Patch Notes

CCP did a fairly big update that included the return of LP trading and a balance pass through a several ship classes.

Honestly, this felt like something that would have been a dev blog in the old days, but they just stuck it in the February patch notes and rolled on.

There are changes to command ships, marauders, entropic disintigrators, and rapid light missile launchers at the top of the list, along with a host of smaller items.  You will, for example, now be able to pre-heat modules while still cloaked and invulnerable after a gate jump, so you’ll be ready to rock when you break invuln and decloak.

You can find all the updates in the patch notes for February 20th here.

There is also a write up over at TNG about it.

  • CSM 18 Winter Summit

I haven’t thought about the CSM since the last election, but they are still at work and went to Iceland for the winter summit.  CCP Swift posted the summit agenda back at the end of January, and we have been getting some updates and peeks into what happened over on Reddit, including the following posts:

Since the EVE Online news ecosystem has pretty much collapsed I am not sure how much else we’ll hear about the summit.  CCP has run hot and cold on minutes of the meetings over the years, so maybe we’ll get something, or maybe we won’t.

Anyway, it is Friday, the weekend is at hand, and it is going to be warm and sunny here in Silicon Valley, all the better to dry us out after the most recent atmospheric river pass.

The Battle of B-R5RB a Decade Down the Road

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If you go to zKillboard and look at my top all time stats page you will see that it features along the top six titans.  Those were the six titan kill mails I managed to get on during the battle of B-R5RB.

The expensive six

I can’t claim to have done much in the way of damage.  I was motoring along in a Dominix battleship armed only with energy neutralizers in order to drain the capacitors of these titans in so as to speed along their destruction.  And I was but one of a cloud of Domis allowed into the battle as there was a fear that too many people in system might crash the node and save the hostile titans from destruction.  We were told not to launch any drones.

My Dominix in the middle of things

I took an absolute multitude of screen shots during the battle, thinking it likely I would never see so many titans squaring off ever again.

Unfortunately, the hard drive that had all those screen shots… and pretty much all of my screen shots from 2011 to about the end of 2014…. died and was never recovered, so all I have is what I posted on the blog in the days after the battle.  But, I did post a lot of them.  And there were others posting and even a host of videos.

It is strange to see so many 4:3 screen shots.  I’ve grown so used to 16:9 these days.

That battle kicked off ten years ago this past weekend and when it was done it was the pinnacle of destruction in EVE Online, a benchmark that stood for years.  Other battles would garner larger numbers, including the infamous “million dollar battle,” which did not meet its price target, but which did get 6,142 capsuleers in system for the fight.

It was a crazy time and some people who should have known better made some regrettable declarations about war being over in null sec as Pandemic Legion, NCdot, and their allies could never recover to sufficiently catch up after such a loss, comparing it to the battle of Leyte Gulf in WWII. (Reminder: As soon as somebody starts in on a WWII analogy about EVE Online you should shout “bullshit.”)

And the news about the battle was everywhere.  The Associated Press picked up the story and put it out on the wire so that my home town paper published it.  Let me pull out the links from my own post about the battle:

And then, of course, we have the battles at M2-XFE during World War Bee and past records for destruction were eclipsed.  That war, with almost all of null sec engaged, with PAPI following Vily in his war of extermination, brought their weight to bear on the Imperium and, with numbers in the favor by at least 3 to 1… screwed it up and lost.

But as a war it reset the benchmark for destruction, setting or renewing Guinness World Records for EVE Online with its scope.

Largest Battles by ISK Destroyed

The obsession for doing things by the alleged cost in dollars, for which headline writers clamor, means that there was also a chart for that as well.

Largest battles by USD destroyed

The gap between M2-XFE and B-R5RB is a lot tighter when we get to dollars because the price of a titan in 2014 was a lot higher.  My zKillboard stats up at the top put the six kills I was on all over 400 billion ISK each.

Those two charts compared display the sometimes paradoxical nature of what has been called “mudflation.”

B-R5RB is close to M2-XFE in real world currency value because the amount of ISK it costs to buy PLEX in game has gone up over time.

PLEX price at introduction

PLEX in Jita, as I write this, is at 5 million ISK per.  That 300 million PLEX price in that ancient screen shot is before the 500 for one split, so the comparable price is about 600,000 per post-split price.

So the real world value of ISK was simply higher in 2014.

But EVE Online has its own strange twist.  The in-game ISK value lost is also skewed due to changes in the economy .  B-R5RB saw an astonishing for the time 75 titans destroyed.

M2-XFE as measured on that chart saw 257 titans destroyed, so a ratio of about 3.5 to 1.  But the ISK lost ratio is under 3 to 1 in part because, in game, titans got cheaper.  If I look at titan kills for the later battle zKillboard values them all under 100 billion.  While the 400 billion ISK mark for zKillboard for the earlier battle seems inflated… likely by the rarity of titan kills and titan market transactions in general… those titans cost more to build, acquire, and train into.

B-R5RB titans were harder to replace than M2-XFE titans… the latter having problems merely due to the scale of the losses rather than the cost.  The market for titans is predictable and when there is a surge in demand they become like toilet paper during the pandemic.

Anyway, there is a lot more that could be said when comparing those two events, but I am going to go off in another direction.

When starting off playing EVE Online in the summer of 2006 it was already a game that produced stories of amazing things that simply didn’t happen in other online games.  I did not join for that reason alone, but it was an influence, and it seems likely something that influences many other people who try the game out.  There is always a spike in new accounts and new player creation when an event like B-R5RB makes the news cycle.

And there is always some disappointment when you find out that it isn’t something that happens regularly, or even on a predictable schedule.  B-R5RB was completely a happenstance occurrence, an event that should not have come about if somebody had pressed the right button in the UI (or, to hear that person tell it, if the UI had correctly processed their button press).

So I went a good seven years… during which several in-game events made headlines… before I was actually involved with something on that scale.  I have changed, the game has changed, and players have come and gone, my memories of that day have faded, and my actual influence on the battle was microscopic… but I WAS THERE!

In being a part of such a storied event you feel like you’re now part of the history of the game… and it is a bit addictive.

Many will tell you that the actual mechanics of being in such a battle, with time dilation unable to hold back the crushing lag as you sit there for 5-10 minutes waiting for a module to activate, frustrated that things just won’t work, is not at all fun or engaging game play.

But EVE Online, even when it is working well, isn’t generally fun or engaging.  It is a lot of tedium, and all the more so because the payout for the effort is so very unpredictable.  I’ve been in many form-ups for what could have been an epic battle, only to stand down or have the other side stand down, or to have the game decide that the server is going to stand down, such that I can’t predict what is going to be that next big event any more accurately than the horoscope in the paper.

However, for many of us, EVE Online transcends that tedium and uncertainty.  Every ping COULD be the next big event, every undock could be the start of something epic, every time you log in it could be the beginning of the next exciting chapter in the ongoing story of New Eden.

Because I am always keen to continue to see and be a part of the history of the game I’ve managed to show up at ten of those “largest battles” on the charts above, and a few more news making events along the way.  Being a part of the story, even as a very small cog in a very large machine, is absolutely part of the draw of the game.

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EVE Online Eyes Null Sec Space for 2024 Updates… but EVE Vanguard is the Most Important Thing Really

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I had a very mixed reaction to the EVE Online director’s letter that was published yesterday indicated that CCP was looking at null sec as a focus for changes in the coming year.

I mean, on one hand, there are things that could be better out in null sec.

On the other, many of the things that could be better are leftovers from previous attempts by CCP to make null sec pilots play how CCP wants them to play as opposed to how they end up playing.  From Aegis sovereignty forward the litany of CCP null sec projects can start to sound like a variation of “the floggings will continue until morale improves.”

I mean, Aegis sov, meant to make things more “fun” and encourage lots of small battles, made sovereignty warfare a nightmare slog unless you outnumber your foe significantly.  Having been in six hour plus long ping-pong battles over an ihub, fun stops entering into it about two hours into things.  It also did much to encourage the mega alliance because any alliance can show up to attack sovereignty, but only the owning alliance can defend, so even a small alliance with big allies can end up in a bind.

Aside from the crazy Rorqual super-mining patch, most everything since then has either been an indisputable nerf of null sec or a relaxation of a nerf because CCP realized they went way too far and people simply stopped undocking.

So when the unblinking eye of CCP Rattati can pull its gaze from EVE Vanguard for a moment to fix on null sec, I start to worry that we’re going to be the victim of another chaos era experiment or that there will be some idea to make big battles more likely that will only end up with everybody afraid to undock because CCP has once again made everything too expensive to lose.  I mean, the mineral price index is still near its all time high because CCP still hasn’t sorted out the isogen shortage from their economic starvation plan… also meant to somehow drive conflict… of a couple years back.

Have I editorialized too much already?  Yeah, sorry.  When you are on the front lines of these changes, when you see CCP decide to screw up the economy in the middle of one of the largest null sec wars ever, arguably ending it because nobody would risk their titans after that, it is hard to tear yourself away from that mindset.  See, I can’t help myself!

So what did CCP say in this letter?  Well, we got a very low res image of some sort of high level roadmap that contains some fairly generic milestones.

The wee 2024 roadmap

There are eleven items in that image, and four of them are devoted to EVE Vanguard play tests, which is a waste of three images at best… or all four images in my opinion because I am unlikely to ever play that very different game no matter how hard CCP tries to pretend it is now part of EVE Online.  Let the first person shooter have its own space.

Wait, it does have its own space.  It has its own freaking play test roadmap image in the post.   A six month roadmap, because they feel they need to get into that much detail with it.  So why does it need to be in the EVE Online roadmap too?

Then we have four more images devoted to events I could have told you were going to happen before they posted this; capsuleer day, the Alliance tournament, the Crimson Harvest, and the Winter Nexus.

So that leaves THREE images for… you know… actual new stuff in the spaceship game.  And one of them is Havoc updates, which was kind of a gimme.

And the other two are Summer Expansion and Winter Expansion, which again I could have guessed were part of the plan based on past company statements.  Right?  There was a whole “we’re going back to two expansions a year!” announcement three expansions ago.

So I have to admit, I am underwhelmed so far.

The actual text of the letter isn’t much more enlightening.  I mean, as expected, they are all agog over EVE Vanguard and how great it is going to be and how it is totally going to be an EVE Online thing we will all have to play.

Then there is more about AIR programs, corporation goals, personalization, and the SKINR thing.  These are not bad, but feel like continuations of current projects and not anything new and/or exciting.

Then there is the big quote about “The Future of Warfare” stuck in the middle:

In the lead-up to the summer expansion, a new era will begin to unfold in New Eden, details of which will start to be revealed in-game shortly. What we can say is exciting new technology and resources will give players the opportunity to build and customize their space in nullsec, creating new conflict drivers and objectives. Bold and lucrative opportunities will arise for established corporations and alliances, but also for small opportunists that can attack vulnerable areas to gain resources. One thing is certain, the value of owning and defending space is set to rise.

They had to inject the current null sec sovereignty map in below that paragraph, I guess so we would be sure what in the hell they were talking about.

Over all, there wasn’t a lot of “there” there to get excited about.  Things are coming in 2024, but anything besides EVE Vanguard playtests aren’t worth anything more than vague mentions.

At least one can see CCP’s priorities in this.  CCP Rattati gets his first person shooter and it is more important than anything else, while spaceships will get whatever free cycles are left over.  That is what I am getting from this letter… that and that EVE Vanguard won’t ship in 2024, which was one of my predictions, so I guess I should go start my scoring spreadsheet.

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Some Days it Doesn’t Pay to Undock in New Eden

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One of the problems of EVE Online is that events happen in their own time and not necessarily on your schedule.  I had a big open gap of time one evening this week and I sat down and logged in… only to find not much was going on.  Sometimes Delve is quiet and there just aren’t any ops going on.

Well, it is a big universe, there are other things to do.  So I grabbed my main high sec alt who I had set up with a ship to go do some Winter Nexus sites.  That should be fun and lucrative, right?

The Winter Nexus in a Paxis

I filamented and flew around high sec for two hours without finding a single site that wasn’t down to the last NPC and somebody in there finishing that one off… except once, when I landed in a site where nobody was there and the last NPC was 500km from the landing spot.  I feel for the person who got that one.

So aside from getting credit for entering an event side, the whole thing was a fruitless ordeal.  I slow boated back to the high sec system my alt calls home and wondered what else to do.  I figured I could do some Abyssal filaments.  That is something easy to do while listening to a podcast or an audio book.  Sometimes I think I do them just take screen shots.

Every time I am headed toward the gate it just looks epic

Then, looking at the daily tasks, which were all for evermarks, I thought I should get my main out there and have him do a few Abyssals and earn some evermarks.  I actually want the alliance logo on his ships and he only ever gets evermarks from login rewards as the agents for that are nowhere near Delve.  I happened to have a clean jump clone up in high sec not too far away, put in place when we were up to something in high sec… probably when we were shooting the TTC or something.

So I clone jumped up there, flew over to where my high sec alt was and traded for the Gila I used to run T3 exotic and firestorm Abyssals.  I made a safe in the system, filamented into a T3 firestorm pocket, and promptly lost the ship… like, in the first freaking room.

This is NOT supposed to happen

I have had that Gila with that fit since 2020 or so, during which time my alt… who isn’t even really a combat alt, but an alt I trained up to ferry ships out to deployments so they can fly a lot of hulls but don’t have all the weapon support skills trained up… ran over one hundred T3s without a loss.  But my nearly 260+ million skill point combat main who has 270 skills at level V… boom.  A real AYFKM moment.

I guess I should have gotten that Harrowing Vedmak earlier, but I had to shake the pair of webbing Trigs.

Then, on being podded, which is always the end result, I found myself back in 1DQ1-A where I realized I hadn’t installed a new clone when I jumped into the other one, just in case something like this happened.  I swear, I am a hazard to be around.  I trained up Elite Infomorph Psychology V just so I would have enough clone slots to leave them around in convenient spots.

No evermarks for me.

I would have been more upset if that very same alt hadn’t fished up an 8 billion ISK item hiding in the couch cushions at the back of a hangar last week.  But that is another story.  So the ISK to replace the Gila was there, no problem.  The question is always what fit to use.  I had to shop around for that for a bit until I found one that fit my need.

And then I had to buy some more filaments and get everything back out to the system where I like to use them.  Everything takes time in New Eden.

Once I got my alt set back up I logged out.  It seemed like a whole lot of nothing gone right.  It isn’t the ship loss so much as the time expended for no fun or profit.  This is, as noted at the top, a prime issue with the game.  Oh well.

And then there was a Zungen ops ping.  There was a target for us.  So I logged in another alt that was logged off out in the drones, got into the fleet, and we all dropped on a Phoenix Navy Issue and blew it up… and the CRAB beacon as well.

Scratch one Phoenix

However, that didn’t count as undocking.  That alt has been logged out in space for well over a month now, just waiting for the call for targets.  Still, that was a bit of salve at the end of the evening.  For me at least.  Probably less so for the Phoenix pilot.  But at least they didn’t lose their ship to NPCs.

The Scope Covers the Jay Amazingness heist and the Pirate Faction Structure Attacks

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Alton Haveri is back with another report for The Scope in New Eden, this time covering the betrayal of the  Imperium by Jay Amazingness and his defection to Pandemic Legion with the ISK and items he stole.

There is, of course, speculation as to why Jay betrayed his long time comrades and moved to rival alliance Pandemic Legion and questions as to whether he acted on his own initiative or if his friends in PL planted the idea and supported its execution in order to strike out at the Imperium.

Pandemic Legion and Goons have a long and complicated history, and were at one point strong allies in the war against Band of Brothers and its successor, the IT Alliance.  That started to fall apart after the disaster at Y-2ANO when IT Alliance destroyed PL’s capital fleet and displaced them from the Fountain Region.

Since then PL has become more and more of a foe of Goons and, later, the Imperium and there is always the persistent story that PL still wants revenge for the savage losses it faced at the hands of Goons and the Russians at the battle of B-R5RB over a decade back where PL lost 25% of its titans.

While PL has been overshadowed in recent years by its fellow PanFam alliance Pandemic Horde, it apparently still has… the coolest station environment?

Jay in the Pandemic Legion lounge

I can already tell this will lead to another round of requests for the return of the captain’s quarters.  EVE Vanguard will get you walking on planets, isn’t that enough?

The video also covers the results of the attacks on the player owned Upwell structures that were anchored “too close” to the ancient Jovian stargates that now bring capsuleers to Zarzakh.

A Guristas Gila aligned out as explosions rock the Fort

I previously covered the initial attacks on the Fortizar in Alsavoinon that was owned by The Initiative. It turned out that INIT was not actually unanchoring the Fortizar, the just renamed it, appending “[UNANCHORING]” to the name, in an attempt to fool the pirates.

Meanwhile, somebody over on Reddit has transcribed all the items that scrolled by on the chyron during the video, which I have copied below.

  • Republic Fleet Confirms Vard Prototype Stellar Transmuter was Scouted by Angels but No Attempt to Capture Facility Made by Pirates
  • CONCORD Assembly System Security Subcommittee Fast Tracks Applications for Status Changes by Repubic and Federation
  • Mordu’s Legion Increases Recruiting Efforts as Demand for Security and Military Contract Services Increases due to Insurgencies
  • Looters and Black Marketeers Reportedly Rounded Up and Shot by RSS on Several Planets in Hed Constellation
  • Empress Catiz I Authorizes Creation of Several Dozen New Fiefs in Ardishapur Demesne as Lord Arim Ardishapur Seeks to Ennoble Ammatar Loyalists
  • Aftermath of Imperium Cloning Sabotage Reverberates Through Markets as Volatility in Cloning Sector Markets Due to Investor Panic
  • Khumatar Allek Berialsh Appointed as Republic System Governor of Hek by Order of Sanmatar Maleatu Shakor with Mandate to Secure System
  • Guristas Insurgents Preparing New Assault on Asakai System Following Raids Across Aokinen and Kurala Constellations
  • Kor-Azor Police Guards Intercept Cargo of Proscribed Luxury Goods Escorted by Royal Uhlan Frigates Through Kor-Azor Region
  • Minmatar Republic Command Reports Vital Facilities on Vard Planets Remained Secure Despite Angel Cartel Commando Landings
  • Refugees from Militia Warzones Hit by Insurgencies and Border Warfare by Empires Straining Resettlement Capacity Warns CONCORD Assembly
  • Angel Cartel Insurgents Operating Out of Bosboger Terrorize Alakgur IV Following Raids on Dammalin Industrial Colonies
  • President Celes Aguard Authorizes Further Emergency Appropriations to Increase System Defenses and Garrisons in Federal Branch Capitals
  • Underworld Rumors of Arkombine Warclone Organization Breaking with ORE and Mordu’s Legion Spread on GalNet Conspiracy GroupNets
  • CONCORD and EDENCOM Officials Holding Discussions on Further Planetary Fortification and Structure Defenses with Upwell Consortium
  • Wiyrkomi Corporation Denies Excessive Reponse and Harsh Reprisals by Peace Corps Troops in Uchomida Industrial Colonies
  • Imperial Navy Resupplies Garrisons in Remaining Fortified Bases Across Eugidi as Militia Warfare Rages in Constellation
  • Sporadic Unrest on Intaki Prime as Nationalist and Religious Militants Opposed to Federation Military Presence Clash with Federal Marines
  • Genolution and Cromeaux Inc. Call for Cloning Industry Security Summit as Upwell Consortium Joins Efforts to Allay Investor Fears
  • Private Military Companies See Surge in Demand for Low Security and Border Colony Defense Contracts as Pirate Raids Expand
  • Director Lars en Ramon of Upwell Consortium’s Department of Friendship and Mutual Assistance Refuses to Comment on Arkombine Rumors
  • Caldari State Peacekeepers to Investigate Allegations of Massacre at Wiyrkomi-Seituoda Heavy Industries Colony on Uchomida III

I have said this before I am sure, but I will say it again; The Scope is one of my favorite aspects of the EVE Online ecosystem in that it often takes player actions and fits them into the overall lore of the game in a way that just doesn’t happen in many other titles.

Getting Home From the North

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The map in the north is settling down since the announcement that B2 Coalition was done fighting up there.

Those groups formerly in the B2 Coalition have mostly moved south or made their peace with the new overlord in the north.  The new Phoenix Coalition, made up of Synergy of Steel, Banderlogs Alliance, Razor Alliance, and Game Theory, will remain in the northeast, having signed an agreement with PandaFam declaring they will not assist the Imperium in any way, including allowing the Imperium access to their structures.  A version of the treaty with suggested edits was posted to Reddit if you want the details.

The Initiative has pushed its border up out of Fountain and into the bottom of Cloud Ring to give itself some buffer and to better be able to sortie into the north for fun.  The coalition map shows where things are currently.

Null Sec Coalitions – Nov 27, 2023

The new members of the Imperium have abandoned their sovereignty and remaining assets up there.  The last remaining bit of space in Pure Blind are being taken.  Move ops have continued south, but no doubt some stuff was left behind as we retreated back down to the southwest of null sec.

The first structure to go in the wake of our departure was the Brave Keepstar that we had been staging out of in DO6H-Q up in Fade, which was blown up mid-month.  The first move ops were to get us from there to the Imperium Keepstar at 6RCQ-V in Cloud Ring.

The staging Keepstar in DO6H-Q

In one of my classic “not paying attention because I was in a hurry” moves I managed to get my ships out, but left my Tech Fleet pod with Amulets sitting in the clone bay in that Keepstar.  I was logged in when we got the warning that the clone bay would be offline shortly due to the structure being reinforced and thought to myself, “Sure glad I got everything of MINE out of there!”

Then I checked, just to be sure and saw my second most expensive pod still parked there.  Doh!

I quickly clone jumped into the pod and, seeing that things were mostly quiet, took an Ibis out of the station and a couple of jumps to an Astrahus that had yet to be reinforced.  I let it sit there until late in the evening, then slipped into an NPC station in Pure Blind.  From there I had an alt on a second account fly up in a shuttle then scout my pod back to 1DQ1-A, where it got home well ahead of my ships.

Why yes, I do have SKINs for shuttles and I use them

Luck was with me too, because it managed to survive the Wrath of Jay when he pulled the clone bay module before downtime before fleeing the Imperium for Pandemic Legion.  That clone would have been home by then no matter which route it had taken, so at least I didn’t rush it into harms way I suppose.

And I forgot to check on an alt, so when the Keepstar did get blown up some items went to asset safety all the same.

Stuff was left behind

I am sure there will be some people camping that low sec station when the timer runs down and the asset safety items are delivered.  Fortunately, judging by the character this was on, it is probably a couple of tech I logi cruisers I left behind.  Nothing expensive.

From 6RCQ-V the next round of moves in Cloud Ring were a single jump to F7C-H0 and the next Keepstar in the chain.  This one had been transferred over to The Initiative who, as noted above, have expanded their frontier into Cloud Ring.

We lingered there for several days while waiting for as many as possible to make the move.  Then the first move op back to Delve was announced.  However, the first step of that move op was to go back to 6RCQ-V to cover the Keepstar there, which was being unanchored.  Capitals and sub caps gathered around to cover the operation.

Sitting on the Keepstar, waiting for the moment

There is no external timer for an unanchor, so we sat around watching the structure… or more likely, were tabbed out of the game and doing something else… until the time came and the structure went away, folded up in a nice little box… or, at least a box much smaller than the structure.

Bubbles up on the spot

There is a whole process for taking down a big structure, and the end includes having a freighter on hand to haul off the smaller than it was, but still sizable box that a Keepstar comes in.

Pandemic Horde had some bombers in the system as well as some interdictors and they swooped in to disrupt the proceedings.  I was looking away when a big explosion lit up the capital ships.

They killed Kenny!

They managed to blow up the freighter… and the Keepstar did not drop from the wreck.

The freighter kill

That is probably the fastest way to kill a Keepstar, though you don’t get a nice kill mail for the structure.

The quantum core dropped, but those have a 100% chance of dropping and we were able to recover that.  But to add insult to injury, while a bunch of PH ships were bubbled up and less than 100km away, well within the engagement range of the Tempest Fleet Issue fit we were using, all attempts to target them were thwarted with a message about them being the 172km reach of our guns.

The fickle nature of “server weather” was rolling against us.

After that was cleared up, we sat around for a while, then moved back towards home, taking the well trod path through Fountain home to Delve.  I’ve been up and down this route many times in the last dozen years.

From our staging to home

It was a slow drive down because we had to cover the capitals and super capitals, but it isn’t that many jumps all the same.

Down in the south the new alliances in the Imperium are taking up new homes.  Brave is moving into Querious, IGC into Period Basis, and so on.  There is a lot of space in the southeast.

Will it remain quiet?  PandaFam has shown a willingness to try to put itself up on our frontiers, dropping structures as they did at W-4NUU a week back.  They have said they want to come get us, either through Cloud Ring in the north or via Catch in the south.  There is rarely anything like peace for long, even if there isn’t a big war going on.

Action in Cloud Ring at W-4NUU

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The two major null sec blocs, PandaFam and whatever we’re calling the Imperium plus The Initiative these days, clashed at W-4NUU up in Cloud Ring on Saturday over a Fortizar that Pandemic Horde had dropped in the system.

On grid with the Fortizar

During the whole fight, mistakes were made.  PanFam certainly made some.  But I made even more.  We’ll get to me in a bit, but first an overview of the fight.

With the collapse of B2 Coalition earlier this month, the situation in the north has been in flux as those B2 groups joining the Imperium have been evacuating down through Fountain and into Delve and the south while PandaFam, which is primarily made up of Fraternity and Pandemic Horde, have been attempting to consolidate their gains.  The current coalition map from the daily null sec sovereignty page.

The bi-polar state of null sec – Nov 19, 2023

The Imperium, through its new members like Brave and We Form Blob, still technically owns space north of Fountain, but is in the process of giving it all up to consolidate back in the southwest.  Cloud Ring, the last buffer region before Fountain and The Initiative is in the process of being drawn down.  Structures there are either being unanchored or sold to The Initiative, which has a vested interest in its norther boarder.

Pandemic Horde has been pushing ahead with a goal stated to their membership of bringing the Imperium to battle.  From Gobbins, the PH leader.

Gobbins states his intent

They want to drive conflict in the Cloud Ring and Catch regions.  They are looking for fights.  They want to “find ways to drag goons to the battlefield and kill them.”

Towards this end the dropped a Fortizar in W-4NUU, a system held by SL0W CHILDREN AT PLAY, who isn’t actually allied with the Imperium, but who is now in the way between two giant coalitions.  That developed into a fight on Saturday, November 18th, which went poorly for PandaFam.

They showed up early, in force, with capital ships on the field.  The Imperium and The Initiative arrived later, and bridged onto a neutral Astrahus that the locals owned and warped into tackle the Fortizar to deny PandaFam that foothold in Cloud Ring.

The Imperium and The Initiative brought with them one major advantage… about a thousand more people.

The battle report tells the tale.

Battle Report Header

PandaFam began to lose and then started trying to extract from the fight as the Imperium and The Initiative… can we call them I2 or IL2 or Sturmovik Coalition or something… tried to pin them down and destroy them in detail.  PandaFam lost both the objective… their Fortizar was destroyed… as well as the ISK war.  They were losing dreads long after they had given up.

After the fact Gobbins attempted to wave this away by saying that The Initiative formed unexpectedly well, though I might direct him to the DOTLAN alliance page that shows them being in the top five alliances by membership. (Also, what does it say when an alliance with less than half as many members out forms your alliance?  There is a rich vein of snark to be mined there.)

Top five Alliance by membership – Nov 19, 2023

Gobbins saying that Asher paid them off for a win to keep The Mittani from retaking Goonswarm (Mittens was on The Meta Show to talk about the Jay Amazingness betrayal) was clearly a joke, though a bit lame.

So PandaFam got its clock cleaned and and pushed back in Cloud Ring for the moment.  The saddest part for Imperium members was that, even though Jay’s Nightmare and Succubus were blown up, he escaped being podded by making it into tether range.

If there was a pod people wanted to destroy, it was that one

My own participation in the battle at 4-WNUU was perhaps a bit less glorious.

The whole thing kicked off in EU time while I was still asleep and by the time I was up and at my computer there was a call going out for reinforcements.  I got in that fleet and we made our way from 1DQ1-A up to J5A-IX and then into Cloud Ring where we bridged in on that Astrahus I mentioned.

Waiting to bridge, always the prelude to battle it seems… also, POS forever

I was in a hurry and didn’t have one of the main line doctrine ships handy, so grabbed an Oneiros that had just arrived back home in the SMA of somebody’s capital ship.

From the Astrahus we had to warp to the TCU and then to the fleet commander, who was NotAlvin.  However, when we landed in system… the servers were bearing the brunt of the fight.  It was time to get the server calls window up to see how long commands were taking to respond.  It took quite a while to even get on grid, during which time I posted a Tweet about the situation.

Let me tell you how it is going

In something of an experiment, I was posting to BlueSky and Mastodon as well.  That it got traction on Twitter and little response on the other services… because the EVE Online community is still heavily on Twitter… explains a lot about why I remain on Twitter.  (This Tweet got even more traction.  I feel like I could build a post out of that one.  Of course, I built a post out of the first one, this post.)

I managed to get on grid and tried to get myself anchored up.  Things were difficult because fleet chat was intermittently broken, broadcasts were taking a long time to get through, so my attempt to rep people who needed it was largely ineffective.  My contribution to the effort was minimal at best.

That is the sum total of my successful reps – 131 armor points repaired

Meanwhile, I was having trouble staying with the fleet.  I seemed to be about 40-75km away, only catching up when myself and the fleet commander ended up on reciprocal courses.

Here they come!

It was about then that I decided to check my fit.  Like most of our doctrine logi fits, the Oneiros is supposed to carry with it both afterburner and microwarp drive fits.  Apparently the last time I used this ship it was for an AB doctrine.  I was never going to keep up with the MWD Sacrileges.  So, after having flown so deeply into the bubbles on grid, I turned around and headed out again.  That took a while, but I was eventually able to warp off.

Heading away from the battle

Getting docked up in the Astrahus was its own test of patience and refitting… oh my, let me just say that the server was not happy with the fact that I had repackaged and stacked three modules I wanted to fit to the ship after unfitting what was in the high slots.

Finally refit, it was time to undock and warp back to the battle.  Somewhere in there I took a break to take a shower and get dressed for the day.  I left myself on grid, burning to catch up with the fleet, half hoping somebody would pop me and I could get a quick ride home.  But you can never depend on your foes for even that.

I never really got caught up again, and our fleet stopped taking so much damage in any case, so there wasn’t much to help out with.

Meanwhile, real life was looming.  We were now past noon at my end and I had things to do.  Once again I pointed myself at the Astrahus and motored through all the bubbles until I was able to warp, dock up safely, and log off.

The neutral Astrahus

Things went on from there.  I missed the delayed Imperium fireside where Asher reviewed the battle and made announcements about changes to doctrine and such.

Later in the evening I got back online.  I was still in 4-WNUU and local was still broken, but it seemed quiet enough.  I decided to exit through the back door to Okagaiken because Cloud Ring is usually full of camps, especially on a Saturday night with 25K people online.

This violated my usual personal rule of never trying to do this sort of thing unless the online count is under 20K and, to punish me for ignoring this, and for foolishly warping straight to the Okagaiken gate, I got caught up in a drag bubble.  Well, I figured at least I had insured.

But the bubble was being run by the locals and they opened up a chat and wished me a safe journey home after the big fight of the day.  That was very kind of them and I wished them luck and happy trails in return.  Once in low sec I set my course for home.

Going through high sec a lot of the way

I made it out of low sec and into high sec, when I was held up at the expected choke point of Ahbazon, the low sec choke point between The Forge and Genesis region.  It is that first orange square on my route.

Again, a busy hour, so of course somebody was camping the gate, but I saw them as soon as the overview loaded and was able to MWD back to the gate with my hardeners overheated.  I docked up back in Hykkota and did something else for a while.

On returning I found the gate in Ahbazon clear and made it to the other side safely and began heading towards Querious.  But in the pipe between Kihtaled and Badivefi I got caught by an interceptor with a war dec against us.  Him I was not too worried about.  One again I turned on my hardeners and MWD and headed back to the gate.  He forgot to web me until I was almost to the gate, something I commented on in local.  But even had he done that, he was never going to peel away the armor on the Oneiros with just his ship, and if he had friends they were late coming.

Off to do something else for a while, then back to it.  Once I was into Querious and onto the Ansiblex network, it was smooth sailing.  I was back home and safe, ready for whatever was next.

All of which is another example of how, behind every big battle or event, there are a thousand tales like my own about what happened to each and every one of us who, however briefly, came into contact in our journeys.  My tales are just more mistake prone than most.

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EVE Online Down the Rabbit Hole – Watching the Six Hour Documentary

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I will say up front that when I first saw that this documentary stretched out to just shy of the six hour mark, the first thing that jumped into my mind was a meme I saw about Netflix at one point, which I will alter slightly to fit the circumstances.

Netflix: How about a six hour movie?

Me: Six hours? I ain’t spending six hours on a movie!

Netflix: Okay… how about a series with eight 45 minute episodes you binge in one sitting?

Me: You son of a bitch!  I’m in!

My initial thoughts were why make this one super size video rather than breaking it up in to six, eight, or even a dozen more manageable bits?  That feels like a better way to deliver this sort of content.

Looking at the Down the Rabbit Hole channel, it isn’t as though huge long monolithic documentaries are Fredrik Knudsen’s thing.  The next longest I saw there was just two hours long.  His Down the Rabbit Hole on Star Citizen was just 32 minutes.  Maybe he was just sticking to saying something nice about Chris Roberts?  I don’t know, I’m not interested enough to watch that one.

But who am I to tell him how to present his material?  And this is EVE Online, where literally everything takes more time than you think it will.  So maybe a video that is as long as some fleet fights I’ve been in is appropriate.

I will admit that the video is divided into an intro, outro, and 15 sections, but they are not meaningfully labeled so that doesn’t really do much.  Chapter headings would have made the break points more effective.

A very deep rabbit hole indeed

Anyway, a six hour YouTube video, even with break points, does not exactly mesh well with my attention span.  Even in that eight 45 minute episode binge watch scenario… I think we did that with season 2 of Ted Lasso… I still find myself looking at my iPad to check out who that actor is and what they were in or to play some Pokemon Go or get up to go to the kitchen for a snack.

There was no way I was going to sit at my desk and focus on this video for six hours.  So I decided to treat it more as an audio book or a podcast, something to listen to while I was doing something else on my computer.  I put it up on my second monitor so I could glance at the visuals now and then, set it going, and logged into Wrath Classic and spent some time leveling up yet another alt through the soon to be gone vanilla content.  (Cataclysm is coming.)

I played WoW and listened to EVE Online.  There is a deeper meaning in that I am sure.

Anyway, that worked.  Grinding out some quests in the Western Plaguelands required very little active thought, and is actually very calming in its way, so my brain could take care of that while its language processing center took in the video.  I did this for three night last week, ending up finishing Hellfire Peninsula in WoW by the time I was at the credits.

Overall, it was pretty good.

I think the main flaw in the video is the same thing you find in any general history book about something like World War II; there is just so much information that could be covered that the author needs to pick and choose what to go into and what to gloss over.

And this issue is multiplied because the video attempts to simultaneously track the development of the game, from its roots through until around the pandemic, the company itself and the other titles it has pursued, as well as the events within the game that players have created.

That is a ton of material.  For comparison, the audio version of Andrew Groen’s first Empires of EVE book, which really focuses on the development of null sec and the Great War, a span that only gets the story into 2009, runs seven and a half hours.

So there are a lot of omissions and summaries that gloss over details in favor of keeping the narrative running.

And that is fine, but may leave you feeling a bit left out if you were looking for mention of some specific event… or you want to read about in game events outside of null sec conflicts.

Signal Cartel and Katia Sae are probably the big exception.  Katia’s journey to visit all the systems in New Eden is covered as well as Signal Cartel and its mission.

The great war is covered pretty quickly and most of null sec between that and the end of the Fountain War is passed over, first to hit the Incarna release, then to cover the root causes of the Casino War, where the video slows down to take its time, digging into the Imperium, the viceroy program, the Fountain War Kickstarter, and SpaceMonkey’s Alliance conflict with I Want ISK which was the match that set off the full conflict.

Having been very active in the game during that whole time… the Casino War tag here will bring up all those posts… I had no issues with how it was presented.  It omitted the whole alleged “sexual encounter gone wrong aspect” of the SMA/I Want ISK conflict and it did kind of Yadda Yadda its way out the war and some of the post-war fallout, opting to get right into the banning of casinos, the wealth and power of which were explored more thoroughly than most sources have done.

It also explored the Tranquility Trading Consortium in Perimeter, though production wrapped before this year’s fallout over it, which led to the destruction of the Keepstar.

Things sort of peter out with World War Bee and the whole aspect of CCP hamfisted attempts to “fix” the economy were left out.  But every documentary has to end somewhere.  Even Ken Burns would run out of hard drive space trying to bring together something about New Eden.  And there was still a lot there to learn and absorb.  I was at least reminded of a bunch of things that I had long forgotten.

And, of course, I was happy to have the blog quoted twice, once around the Incarna issues (post here), and once about the Betrayal at M-OEE8 during the Casino War (post here).  Of course, Gevlon got as many mentions… so I guess voices from all sides.  And a lot of more knowledgeable people were given voice in the video, so it wasn’t just hacks like Gevlon and I.

I also recognized a few screen shots from here, such as that PLEX market image from 2009 that I always re-use when I am on the topic.

Imagine buying 500 PLEX today for 300 million ISK

I think it is unlikely that anybody else has that exact Jita market screen shot.

And then there was an image of the bubble wrapped Keepstar in YZ9-F6 that looked like it could have been mine, zoomed in somewhat.  But there were a lot of screen shots of that, so I’ll only mark that as a maybe.

Bubble wrapped Keepstar

There were a couple others that might have been from here.  I’m not trying to own them though, I am just happy that they found some use elsewhere to promote the story of EVE Online… and to remind people that New Eden is full of stories.  The large ones get wide coverage because they are often on a scale other video games can only fantasize about.  The smaller ones… the every day stories… most of them are never told.  I try to tell some of mine here, even the more mundane ones, because even those stories can equate to a win, to a feeling of satisfaction in the game.

Should you watch it… or perhaps listen to it, the way I did?  Certainly if you’re interested in a somewhat removed look at the scope of the game.

If you want something a little lighter about the development of the game, there is always the 53 minute documentary, The Making of EVE Online, from The Escapist.

And if you want to really delve into the politics of null sec, there are always the audio book versions of Andrew Groen’s Empires of EVE series which are available over at Audible.com.

After Down the Rabbit Hole I was keen for a deeper dive into null sec, so have started in on Empires of EVE Vol. I.   I own the physical books from the Kickstarter campaigns, but I also bought the audio books just to support the cause.  In fact, the Vol. II audio book came out at just about the same time as the Down the Rabbit Hole video.  Seems like good timing.