The Imperium Dials Back Operations in Pure Blind

I made it to the weekly coalition fireside talk on Saturday, and it was a good thing I did.  I haven’t done much since I alarm clocked for that last Keepstar kill.  The word passed down was that we were pulling back in our commitment to the war.

We are not done up in the north, but rather than having capitals and a half a dozen or more doctrines to hand and everybody’s death clone set in the DO6H-Q Keepstar, the whole thing was going to be reset to be a jump clone effort with two doctrines left behind and everything else being hauled home.

And move ops home were to commence after the fireside, once a cyno vigil to a fallen member of the coalition was concluded.  That gave me enough time to get back to the Keepstar and get packed, because I had parked my main and my alt out Venal at 92D-OI and WLF-D3, a good dozen gates away from our staging, in anticipation of there being another set of Keepstar fights.

But Fraternity has been getting its act together, working to get gate and grid control going in advance, making it unlikely for us to succeed.

Warp bubbles deployed in WLF to hinder attacker movement

That and the whole time zone difference… you can only get your coalition to alarm clock so many times before it becomes a real drag… were big parts of why we were dialing things back.

I got both my characters back to the Keepstar safely, the route home being fairly empty.  I was even back in time to fly around the cyno vigil for a bit.

When the ping for fleets went up there were three, which filled up pretty quickly.  I had to leave one to get both characters in the same fleet.  We were told to have at least 60K of isotopes, the fuel that capital ships expend for jump travel, to be sure we could make it home.  I had 100K on each of my capitals, because I had TWO capital ships up in Pure Blind, an Apostle and a Ninazu.

The Apostle had been in Pure Blind for a Reavers deployment that never really came together.  It turns out that if your SIG leader is also the coalition leader, then your SIG doesn’t end up doing much… though we are always around for special tasks.

The Ninazu, meanwhile, is what I flew up to this deployment, a fleet hangar full of sub caps, most of which I never undocked.  So it goes.

The move op home was… well… exceptionally smooth.  It is almost like we’ve learned something since the trail of tears and the doomed convoy op at KVN-36 back in the day.

The classic Trail of Tears move op, an obligatory reminder for every cap move op

Once in the fleet there was already a cyno target in the MOTD.  We were told to undock and jump right away.

That put us at another Keepstar where we waited a bit for red timers to count down, then it was time to undock and jump again.

Jumping from the undock

We had to stop along the way at a couple of Fortizars, which meant that the supercarriers and titans had to sit out on tether while the rest of us docked up.

Landing on a Fortizar

Fortunately, the capital ship bumping mechanics have changed over the years.  I remember back in Delve in 2012 witnessing two titans bumping at a POS and that causing one of the titans to be flung more than a hundred of kilometers out of the safety of the forcefield.

Sent way down town

Now, while there is still bumping and you can get pushed off of tether quite easily, bumps are not that crazy.

Supers around a Fortizar in Cloud Ring

The whole thing was very low key, though I was sitting in the No Chatter channel which meant I only heard orders from the fleet commander, Apple Pear, about when to dock, undock, and jump.

I spent the intervals while we waited for jump timers to run down playing Civ II.  ManicTime says I spent a lot more time playing that than in EVE Online during the move op, which is a good sign for a move op in my opinion.

Apple Pear was encouraging people to get at least as far as J5A-IX in Fountain on the move, because that would put them back in friendly space.  Also, there was a surprise for us once we gated from Cloud Ring into that system in Fountain.

We got through and were bubbled on the gate, which is usually a serious faux pas on a capital move op.  Cap pilots get very anxious when unexplained bubbled pop up.  And then we were told to lock up a titan with the pilot Voltran and shoot him.  He wasn’t broadcast in our fleet and I couldn’t find him, get him locked up, and drop some drones because he was dead before I cold get my act together.

Voltran destroyed

Apparently Voltran was one of Pandemic Horde’s big spies in our super capital group and we were using this moment to purge him.  The bubbles were up to keep him from getting away.  It all happened so fast I didn’t even get a screen shot of the explosion, just the greasy smudge of smoke in space where his Avatar had been.

What remains of Voltran is a dissipating cloud of black smoke

If you go find his character in game you will see that he did, indeed, end up in Pandemic Horde once he was purged.  I would link his EVE Who profile, but the API end points are still disabled, so nothing is getting updated.

Other spies were reported purged as well, but none so dramatically.

Then it was to the Keepstar to wait for another jump timer.  We had two more jumps until we ended up in Delve on a Keepstar one jump from 1DQ1-A.  We were left there, but that was fine.  I had a long jump timer at that point and there is a safe cyno on the 1DQ Keepstar most days.  I came back later that evening and jumped myself home.

I ended up using about 47K isotopes, oxygen for the Ninazu and helium for the Apostle, because each NPC empire powers their jump drives with their own special fuel.  I am sure that makes logistics lots of fun.

Now we are back at home.  I have a couple of ships and two jump clones still up in Pure Blind should something happen, but most of my assets are now back down in Delve.

Refilling My Wallet Again in EVE Online

Money makes New Eden go ’round, that is for sure.  The economy, as I have probably said countless times at this point, is the beating heart of EVE Online.  And, frankly, my money was starting to dwindle as we headed towards the new year.

My only regular income is the monthly dividend payment on the 5 Imperial Treasury bonds I hold from the coalition fundraising effort during the last war.  I paid in 5 billion ISK for five shares which, in turn, pay me out 41.67 million on the first of every month as interest on my loan to the alliance.

The monthly dividend, in with some expenses

That will have added up to about a billion ISK come next month, the two year anniversary of the offering, but it comes in T1 cruiser sized increments, so it never seems like very much when it lands.

I do also have planetary industry, when I remember to keep it going.  I have mine set on a seven day cycle because about once a week is all I seem capable of, and even then I have a couple of planets where I should just redo my layout, or move it to a less heavily farmed area.  I am also not very ambitious, producing just P2 components.  But demand for those has gone up over the last few months, so with two null sec characters working away I do bring in close to half a billion ISK from that of late.  Not bad.

But the way things go that was refilling my coffers a bit slowly.  I have not been anywhere close to my pre-war level of ISK, so started working on how to raise some.  It has been quiet for a while, the economic situation isn’t as dumb as it was a year ago, and who knows… maybe a war will come along.

So the I started digging through all the stuff I had stashed away.  I suppose one of the nice things about the war destroying so many of our structures is that just about everything I have in Delve is in the Keepstar in 1DQ1-A now.  Or in Jita.  I have a bunch of stuff squirreled away there as well.  So I started listing stuff on various markets.

Then I went and did what null sec players traditionally do, I went out to do some ratting.

Out in my Ishtar, now with the Fat Bee logo on it

It has been a while since I’ve ratted.  The last time I ratted deliberately was back in early 2019 when I decided to see how long a Myrmidon would last doing semi-afk ratting. (I made 1.6 billion ISK before I lost that ship.)  Back then the Myrmidon was the ratting hull of choice and people were discouraged from risking the ISK to rat in an Ishtar, because tech II HAC hulls were pricey.

The economy has turned upside down since then and now the Ishtar is, once again, the aspirational solo ratting vehicle since HACs are cheap because moon goo is over abundant.  So you get out there, launch your five heavy drones and let them do their thing while you keep an eye on local and the intel channel… or, if you’re sophisticated, you use TACO, which is a chat log parser that will beep at you if systems near your current location are mentioned.

I am not sophisticated and just put the client in the background, full screen, then do things like work on this blog post in a browser window which lets me see the overview on the right side of the browser and local and the intel channel on the left side.  Then your drone just blow up the NPCs as they spawn while you fly in circles.

Another Blood Raider battleship brewing up

With the changes to the dynamic bounty system that came back in October, the bounties have a floor of 100% payout, so there are no longer dead, ratted out systems that will never recover because nobody will ever PvP there because there are no targets.

The ESS still grabs half your bounties and holds onto them for almost three hours if you time things badly, which means somebody can come along and steal them.  But, in Delve, there are enough combat pilots hanging around waiting for somebody to hit an ESS that is has not been a problem for me.

Some ratting ticks, with the ESS payout later on

The other thing the coalition has suggest is to bring an mobile tractor unit to haul in drops and to fit some salvagers on your ship to grab salvage from the wrecks.  I’m good with the MTU thing, but the salvaging requires me to get too involved.

My MTU collecting wrecks in a forsaken hub

The drops actually earn ISK not for what they are… most of the time at least, there are exceptions… but because you can reprocess them for minerals, and the economy is still screwed up just enough to make that pretty lucrative.  CCP put in a band-aid to try and alleviate the shortage of isogen and nocxium, but it hasn’t been enough yet and mineral prices are still on the rise, as the December MER shows. (I’ll have a post about that this coming Monday, once I’ve had time to go through the data.)

All of which, together, has revived my ISK balance quite a bit over the last month or so.  I’m still nowhere near the liquid ISK I had in the run up to the war, but I am at least more comfortably situated to deal with things like new doctrines and the tax on things that even playing the game hits you with.  And, in the end, whatever I am earning I hope to invest into PvP ships to lose gloriously in the sort of fights that make EVE Online the game it is.

Back Home in Delve Once More

As I mentioned last week, the Imperium has given up on its war in the southeast of null sec.  So the main effort since then has been to get people and their ships back to Delve safely.

FI.RE and PanFam has been dogging this retreat, camping the route, and trying to make move ops as annoying as possible.  By the time I had written that previous post I had already moved all of my assets out of Tenerifis to Catch.  And it is a good thing too, because our Tenerifis staging Keepstar was destroyed not too long after.

Only three Keepstars have been destroyed in 2022, and all of them belonged to the Imperium at the time of their destruction… though that one back in January hardly counts against us.  Army of Mango gave us that loot pinata, and we had fun blowing it up. (I’m on the kill mail for that Keepstar for sure.  Also, this whole war was due to the power vacuum left between us and FI.RE after Army of Mango self-destructed.)

I had also moved my more expensive ships home.  But I still had a few left in Catch and PanFam seemed intent on chasing us all the way home.  The allied Keepstar in GE-8JV had a PanFam Fortizar anchored on grid with it and had its armor timer set the last time I was there.  So it was both time to leave and not a good time to go alone.

My one valuable ship left behind was an Eagle heavy assault cruiser.  I would have asked somebody in a capital ship to carry it in their SMA hangar, but our Eagle doctrine requires a bunch of module refits in the cargo, and you can’t have those in the cargo hold if you want to put the ship in an SMA.  It was easier to just fly it than try to sort that out.

So a move op came up one evening last week and I happened to be online and ready to go.  I figured I could get it and my other ship, an Oneiros that I had YOLO’d across Catch to get to the deployment (then never used) back home and be done with it.

That was when I ran into some problems.

The first was solvable, but a bit embarrassing.  I could not find the move op fleet in the fleet finder.  I refreshed it, logged out and back in, and it would not show up.  I finally asked on voice coms if the advert for the fleet was up and eventually the FC asked me to X up in alliance chat to contact me directly.  It was then he asked if I had blocked him in-game.  I checked and… yeah, I had done that.  I seem to recall some fleet during World War Bee where I might have had enough of him spamming fleet chat.  Anyway, it is never a good move to have to tell the person who is leading you home that you have blocked them.

That solved, I ran into the second problem, which was that my second account had lapsed.  For the war I had taken advantage of CCP’s multi-account price offer to subscribe it.  However, when I did that, it was a non-recurring offer, so when the time ran out, the account went Alpha clone and I couldn’t log it in with my main online, or even fly the Oneiros even if I could.  And I wasn’t going to resubscribe for one move op.  So figured I would deal with the Oneiros later.

The move op itself was not particularly eventful.  It was slow, given that it is only ten gate and Ansiblex jumps back to 1DQ, but PanFam had a fleet out to mess with us and we had some stragglers and the occasional disconnect.  Still we got home safe and sound.

Eagle on the way home

That done, I looked an realized I had an alt on my main account parked in the GE-8JV Keepstar and he had just enough skills to fly the Oneiros.  So I swapped around logins to contract it to him from my lapsed second account, then got him in the ship.  Most of the modules were online.  He could get it home with the next move op.

Or… I could just YOLO that ship again and get home right then and there.  It was late, there were only 11K people logged in, and I had been lucky flying that particular hull in stupid circumstances previously, so why no just go for it?

This was a bad idea, especially with a PanFam fleet known to be out and about… but maybe they had stood down.  So I undocked and off I went.

The Oneiros flies again

And I made it, though not without some anxiety.  The game seemed to be in one of those moods where it didn’t want to flag blues in local as blue, so everybody had no status, so they could have all been hostile.  But nobody tackled me on a gate and I docked up safely in 1DQ.

Then I looked at his assets and realized that he had been out in the Keepstar in Catch because he had flown out there in a Vigil, and that Vigil was still out there.  I supposed I could have just left it there, but I contracted it to my main who still had his death clone set there, logged him back in, claimed the ship, death cloned back, and decided to make the run again.

This was a very bad idea.  I can occasionally get lucky and make a run through space and make it, but when I get cocky and decide to repeat it, I get nabbed by somebody who noticed the traffic and set up a gate camp about half the time.  It never pays to push your luck.

On the other hand, this was a T1 frigate that I was never going to bother retrieving from asset safety if it went there, so what the hell.  Better to lose it now than have something sitting in yet another station I was never going to visit again.  So off I went.

The Vigil on the move

The Vigil made it home safely as well.  I was done with my evac from the war and had everything back at home.

At the fireside yesterday Asher noted that we were now in peacetime mode in the Imperium.  We are not, as a full organization, engaged in operations outside of our space.  It will be back to SIGs and squads and small group actions or homeland defense fleets for those looking for a bit of action.

He did make it clear that we would be defending the Keepstars on the periphery of our empire with maximum efforts if it came to that. [Edit: Well, not that one I guess.]  But for now, the war is off and we’re back in Delve.

Summer Reruns – Delve 2012

Ten years ago this month I went to Delve for the first time… the first of a number of times as there seemed to be an almost annual Drang nach Delve tradition in the CFC and Imperium, at least until we got thrashed in the Casino War and went there to live full time.

But back in 2012 Delve was a whole new region for me.  I had never visited.  I had been in null sec for about six month and had gone through the war with White Noise and Raiden, so I wasn’t a complete novice anymore; I had seen capitals, taken titan bridges, been on fleet ops, suffered through that brand new time dilation mechanism, and learned to wait two beats before following any instruction DBRB shouting into voice comms.  But I was still prone to getting lost and the naming convention for null sec systems meant I constantly had DOTLAN EVE Maps open… though that is still mostly true a decade later.

It was also a different landscape in New Eden null sec.  A coalition map of the time.

Null Sec Power Blocks – July 2012

There was Southern Coalition with AAA and Nulli Secunda among their numbers… and also the defiant Walltreipers Alliance, who are now a part of The Initiative… whom we were attacking.

There was Solar Fleet in the east holding the traditional Russian regions and fighting with Northern Coalition, which held Geminate, Vale, and Tribute.

Of course there was Provi Bloc doing its thing in Providence.

And then there was the Bropact, the combo of the Clusterfuck Coalition, or the CFC… Goonswarm Federation, Gentleman’s Agreement, Circle of Two, Executive Outcomes, Fidelas Constans, Get Off My Lawn, RAZOR Alliance, SpaceMonkey’s Alliance, Fatal Ascension, and Tactical Narcotics Team… and the Honeybadger Coalition, or HBC… TEST Alliance Please Ignore, Pandemic Legion, The Initiative, Tribal Band, and some more I cannot remember… who got together to invade Delve and have a good time.

Delve – Summer 2012 Poster

Viewed from 2022, that is kind of a strange mix.  TEST and Pandemic Legion from the HBC… along with RAZOR from the CFC… were part of the PAPI tide that tried to wash us out of Delve in World War Bee.

At the time Vily, who led the war against the Imperium in 2020, was a Goonswarm FC and the captain of the GSF Alliance Tournament team.

But this was the beginning of the estrangement of TEST from Goonswarm.  When TEST arrive in null sec Goons the two were pals after a false start. (TEST heard Goons were bad, so decided to go to the part of null sec furthest from Goons when they arrived in 2010.  But, due to an ongoing competence problem they have the map upside down and planted their first flag 9 gates from the Goon capital.)  TEST grew up in the “Testagram,” the five pointed star in the RFY-QB constellation.  By the time the Delve 2012 war had begun that had moved to Fountain and were making new friends and growing apart from their CFC allies.  They actually asked the CFC to go home once Delve had been taken while they pursued AAA into Stain and Querious.

As things would work out we would eventually take Fountain and Delve from them in the Fountain War and, after World War Bee, TEST would finally move into the region of null sec furthest from Goons, their initial ambition finally achieved.

Meanwhile, some of our enemies in Delve 2012 would end up on our side come World War Bee.  The Stain Russians preferred us to TEST and PAPI.

Anyway, it was a new war for me back then.  It was a time of MWD Drakes and station camps and fights over a region that would eventually become our home.

Posts from Delve 2012:

• Getting to the War in Delve – First Attempt – July 3, 2012
• In the Logi Channel at C3N-3S – July 5, 2012
• RAZOR Alliance Glorious Informational Film #1 – July 5, 2012
• When Titans Get Bi-Querious – July 6, 2012
• Delve 2012: Urban Spacemen – July 6, 2012
• I Came to 319 for the Conga Line, But I Stayed for the Kills – July 8, 2012
• Watching the Alliance Tournament in 319-3D – July 8, 2012
• BSC Legion Alliance Tournament X Ad – July 9, 2012
• 49-U6U – Another Night, Another Boat Fleet – July 10, 2012
• Notes from the War in Delve – July 12, 2012
• Warned by CCP for Attempting to Cause Lag – July 13, 2012
• Walltreipers Alliance Defeated – Conquest of Delve Complete – July 16, 2012
• DSS-EZ – Facing Stiffer Resistance in Stain – July 17, 2012
• The War in Delve Ends… For Some of Us – July 20, 2012
• Convoy Ops – Home From Delve – July 23, 2012
• The Hot Spot in New Eden – August 7, 2012

Vale of the Silent Leads Null Sec in the October EVE Online Monthly Economic Report

The Monthly Economic Report for October dropped last week and, while Delve is back near the top of the charts for economic activity in null sec, the Imperium’s recovery is still lagging behind Fraternity’s economic efforts in its main region.

EVE Online nerds harder

So we might as well get right into the numbers.

Mining

In September we saw Genesis at the top of the chart with 2.15 trillion ISK mined.  The region is made up of both high and low sec empire space, and it vaulted to the number one spot with a combo of high sec mining along with Dock Workers attempting to set up a low sec mining operation.

October changed the picture, with the top ten regions being:

1. Vale of the Silent – 2.67 trillion (Fraternity)
2. Delve – 2.11 trillion (Imperium)
3. Branch – 1.96 trillion (Fraternity)
4. Etherium Reach – 1.80 trillion (Pan Fam)
5. Fountain – 1.51 trillion (Imperium)
6. Querious – 1.37 trillion (Imperium)
7. Catch – 1.36 trillion (Imperium & neutrals)
8. Outer Passage – 1.29 trillion (TEST)
9. Malpais – 1.27 trillion (Pan Fam)
10. The Kalevala Expanse – 1.21 trillion (Pan Fam)

It looks like the Dock Workers plans fell through, and for the first time in a long stretch null sec again occupies the top ten slots for mining.  There was a point during the war when high sec completely dominated the list, but the war is clearly over.

Fraternity led the way in Vale of the Silent, which is their primary home region now which, along with Branch mined a combined 4.63 trillion ISK.  While Vale of the Silent eclipsed Delve, overall Imperium mining exceeded 5 trillion ISK in value if we add in a bit from Catch. (4.99 trillion without Catch.)  PanFam pulled a good 4.28 trillion ISK in minerals out of their regions, while TEST, alone in Outer Passage, is trying to crank up to recover from its complete defeat in World War Bee with 1.29 trillion ISK mined.

Overall mining output in October was valued at 45.72 trillion ISK, up more than 12 trillion ISK from September.  That means the total m3 mined was probably considerably more than the previous month because the price of minerals, and ore has no value aside from what the market is willing to pay, was down a bit in October.

Oct 2021 – Economic Indices

It is possible that we will see the total amount mined go up when we get the November MER next month as people try to grab what they can before the New Dawn “age or prosperity” lands and solidifies the starvation economy with nerfs and time sink mechanics.  There is not much time left to mine with Rorquals.

Or maybe the number will go down if all those people who said they were unsubscribing their Rorqual alts carry through on the threat.  Mineral prices will probably hold or even go up a bit as people stockpile due to uncertainty.

Production

Where mining leads, production follows… sort of… or not really.

Production, which saw a bit of a rise due to the post-war building boom as regions… mostly Imperium… had to be rebuilt, slid back a bit as that tapered off and no large war stepped in to consume ships and materiel.

Oct 2021 – Production vs Destruction vs Mined

Capital ships remain too costly to build so few are being risked, and those that do die on the field are being replaced by stocks built before the huge industry nerf hit in April.

Overall production totaled out to 92.59 trillion ISK, down by about 8 trillion from September, with the top ten regions being:

1. The Forge – 17.54 trillion
2. Delve – 8.72 trillion
3. Lonetrek – 6.86 trillion
4. The Citadel – 6.23 trillion
5. Vale of the Silent – 5.76 trillion
6. Sinq Laison – 3.72 trillion
7. Fade – 3.67 trillion
8. Domain – 3.03 trillion
9. The Kalevala Expanse – 2.74 trillion
10. Malpais – 2.43 trillion

The Forge, Lonetrek, and The Citadel are always the big three as they all serve the Jita market.  Delve remained strong, though it was down from more than 11 trillion ISK last month.

Destruction

Destruction drives production, but while production was down, destruction remain flat, totaling up to about 31.78 trillion ISK, close to the 31.41 trillion ISK destroyed in September.  That likely means that the decline in production was more about the post-war building boom fading than the lack of a serious war.

The top ten regions for destruction were:

1. The Forge – 2.04 trillion
2. The Citadel – 1.65 trillion
3. Lonetrek – 1.49 trillion
4. Vale of the Silent – 1.31 trillion
5. Delve – 1.21 trillion
6. Pochven – 1.11 trillion
7. Metropolis – 1.04 trillion
8. Genesis – 993 billion
9. Pure Blind – 987 billion
10. Sinq Laison – 950 billion

The Forge, Lonetrek, and The Citadel are big in production and destruction as traffic to and from Jita provides the most lucrative targets for suicide gankers.

Trade

Trade totaled up to 591.65 trillion ISK in value, down about 16 trillion from September, which isn’t a huge drop.  The top ten regions for trade were:

1. The Forge – 436.66 trillion (Jita)
2. Domain – 43.21 trillion (Amarrr)
3. Delve – 15.30 trillion (Imperium)
4. Sinq Laison – 15.07 trillion (Dodixie)
5. Lonetrek – 15.07 trillion (Caldari High Sec)
6. Metropolis – 8.83 trillion (Hek)
7. Heimatar – 7.74 trillion (Rens)
8. The Kalevala Expanse – 6.27 trillion (PanFam)
9. Vale of the Silent – 4.53 trillion (Fraternity)
10. Essence – 4.04 trillion (Gallente High Sec)

Those are the same ten regions, in the same order, as last month.  Trade hubs and large coalitions will tend to dominate this list, though Jita alone is more than 70% of the total.  I do still wonder what is driving trade in Essence.  It isn’t a region I know.

ISK Faucets

And, finally, the “show me the money” part of the summary, though some of the “show” part requires me to put on my glasses because the charts are in tiny eye-strain inducing font sizes.

The cropped off top of the big sinks and faucets chart shows commodities still at the top of the list.

Oct 2021 – Faucet end of the chart big chart

That shows commodities ringing in at 35.2 trillion ISK, while Bounty Prizes and ESS payouts combined add up to 31 trillion ISK.  Bounties are catching up again.  Then there are incursions and Triglavian invasions, which add up to 21.9 trillion ISK.

Here is the chart of the top ten sinks and faucets over time.

Oct 2021 – Top Sinks and Faucets Over Time

You can see… if you click on it to see it full size… that the commodity line tends to be some what bursty, which is probably due to the nature of the rewards, which have to be brought to an NPC station in empire space to be converted into ISK.  Bounties tend to be smoother over time, only changing rapidly due to CCP intervention (you can see the blackout dip and where the ESS system was made mandatory), and a few peaks that probably related to wars, but otherwise it tends to be smoother on a day to day basis.

The other line of interest on the chart is the transaction tax, which got a huge spike after a three month tax holiday.  CCP changed around the tax structure so now broker’s fees, the bit that players can collect in player controlled stations, are lower while the transaction tax, which is a sink everywhere, is much higher.  More of CCP trying to fix the economy, though in a more benign way in this case.  Making the Tranquility Trading Tower such a lucrative enterprise was probably a mistake on CCP’s part.

On the commodities front, Sleeper drops from wormhole ratting remain the top commodity.

Oct 2021 – Top Commodity Items Over Time

Then, for NPC bounties, the top regions were:

1. Vale of the Silent – 2.15 trillion (Fraternity)
2. Delve – 1.72 trillion (Imperium)
3. The Kalevala Expanse – 1.53 trillion (PanFam)
4. Fountain – 1.31 trillion (Imperium)
5. Outer Passage – 1.15 trillion (Fraternity)
6. Malpais – 991 billion (PanFam)
7. Esoteria – 978 billion (Army of Mango)
8. Querious – 976 billion (Imperium)
9. Oasa – 932 billion (Fraternity)
10. Insmother – 901 billion (FI.RE)

Vale of the Silent took first place in both mining and ratting this month, but that was mostly due to activity dropping in Delve, which had 2.22 trillion ISK in September, than from any increase from Fraternity.

The regional data shows a total of 29.64 trillion ISK gained from bounties and ESS payouts, which is close to, but not the same as, the 31 trillion the sinks and faucets chart and data shows, and I don’t think we were even mission a region in the data this month.  Either way, that is pretty close to what is was in September.

And so it goes, another month in New Eden.

As usual you can find this information and more by downloading the raw data and charts from the MER dev blog.

Related:

• TNG – The Velocity of ISK

The View From Delve as YC123 Draws Towards an End

YC123, the 123rd year since the Youli Conference, which marked the founding of CONCORD and the establishment of the current status quo of the empires of New Eden, opened with null sec space locked in a titanic war.  The second day of the year saw one of the biggest battles ever witnessed in the star cluster as the system of M2-XFE again became the place where many titans were destroyed.

That battle was at the end of a crescendo of spectacular, trillion ISK clashes in Delve that set world records.  October of YC122 saw thousands of ships destroyed and trillions of ISK vaporized in the vacuum of virtual space.

To put those ISK amounts into some context, using a scale I saw somebody using to make a very dumb political point, a million seconds ago was less than two weeks in the past, a billion seconds ago George H. W. Bush was still president of the United States, and a trillion seconds adds up to over 30K years, which would put us back in the late stone age when Fred Flintstone worked in a stone quarry and attended meetings of the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo.

So a trillion ISK is kind of a lot, and to commit that much ISK in assets across multiple battles takes some stamina.

The from late April of this year until the beginning of August, just three months back now, the Imperium holdings in Delve were just the O-EIMK constellation.

O-EIMK Constellation from late April forward

That was the great stalemate, where the might of the Imperium, focused in such a small area proved to be more than PAPI could manage.  There was a lot of talk about being contained and the threat of blockading the constellation by camping the NPC stations in Delve, but the will of PAPI as a coalition wasn’t up to the task.  Only Legacy Coalition had real skin in the game, having committed themselves to live in Imperium space.

On August 2nd, at the start of week 57 of the war, PAPI made one last attack on the Imperium stronghold, then started unanchoring structures even before the fighting was done.  By the end of week 57 of the war all of the ihubs in Delve were back in Imperium hands and the clean up of PAPI structures was well under way.

The war cost a lot in ISK, but there were other casualties.  The online user count suffered, especially towards the was entered its second summer.

Over the timeline of the war

While the PCU recovered as both sides reoriented themselves, it remains below where it was before the war started.  Some put blame on CCP and their economic starvation plan for that.  But a lot of us are also tired out after more than a year of war.

And now, in Delve, normalcy has returned.

The view from Delve

After many months of having content on our doorstep, of minor clashes happening multiple times daily just a gate or two away, it is kind of quiet.  People rat.  People mine.  Somebody in a Rorqual gets tackled about once a day and Delve 911 lights up.  The intel channels are active and some of the usual suspects from before the war appear now and then.

I went on an op last week, the first op I had been on in over a month, that was set to blow up a Fortizar in Cloud Ring.  As I got into fleet and the FC asked us to set our destination to J5A-IX I groaned a bit and the thought of that journey.  But once I adjusted my route settings to include friendly Ansiblexes, which is a hugely underrated feature in my opinion, it was just seven gates away.

A seriously excellent feature

The Eye of Terror Mk. IV was setup and in business, its Ansiblex highway ready to take me from Cloud Ring down to Period Basis or across Querious and into Catch, the last being a new outpost for the coalition since the war.

New Eden with Imperium space highlighted in red

It isn’t all peace and crabbing.  The combat pilots who still crave action are out with the various SIGs and squads making sure the rest of null sec, the bloc formerly known as PAPI, remembers that we’re still around and looking for revenge.  Meanwhile, our enemies have fragmented somewhat.  They have reset some of their blue standings and some of their own frictions are coming to the surface.

War will come again to null sec.  But for right now Delve is a pretty quiet place.

Also, as an aside, I made that “The View from 1DQ1-A” image with the intent of making a New Eden version of the famous (to those of us of the right age) cover from the New Yorker, View of the World from 9th Avenue.  However, my limited artistic skills haven’t gotten me very far.

The Crimson Harvest Returns to EVE Online

Halloween festivities have arrived in New Eden as CCP with the return of the Crimson Havest event.  Regarded by some as one of the better annual events, it is arriving a bit late this year, possibly due to the data center upgrades being performed by CCP earlier this week.

The Return of the Crimson Harvest

The Crimson Harvest comes along with other treats, all of which are included under the Halloween Horrors banner.

This year players will be able to choose which side of the event they wish to support.

EVE’s premiere Blood Raider seasonal event has begun once again, starting today and running until 9 November! This year, Capsuleers will be met in battle by the forces of the Order of St. Tetrimon, an Amarr religious order dedicated to the preservation of the scriptures of the faith. Join the Order in their campaign to drown this sanguine spectacle in laserfire, or for the first time ever take the side of the Blood Raiders, venerating the Harvest and painting New Eden in crimson!

Somebody will side with the Blood Raiders I am sure.  You get to pick which side in The Agency.

Sites for the event show up throughout New Eden, but some locations are better than others according to the patch notes.  Here are the details:

• Crimson Gauntlet and Tetrimon Base combat sites can be found in most areas of space. These sites should be approached with caution, and capsuleers are advised to fly a battlecruiser, battleship, heavy assault cruiser, or even more powerful vessels if they wish to investigate these locations. Rewards for looting the battleship NPCs found at the end of the sites include items that can be traded for isk, skins, boosters, clothing and more!
• Crimson Harvest Network Node and Tetrimon Network Node data sites are also appearing across New Eden. These hacking sites contain network node structures that can be accessed for more great rewards!
• Advanced versions of the combat and hacking sites can be found within the areas containing the most heated fighting between Blood Raider and Tetrimon forces: the Blood Raider controlled systems within the Delve region and the low security systems within the Derelik region. These advanced sites are rarer and more challenging than the standard versions of the sites but they provide much greater rewards. Bringing a friend or two helps reduce the risk immensely, but beware of other capsuleers who may be searching for the same loot!
• The most elusive and valuable strongholds of the Blood Raiders and Order of Tetrimon can only be found by obtaining a rare escalation from the advanced combat sites.

In addition there are the now traditional login rewards running during the event.

Crimson Harvest Rewards

The prizes include skill points, training accelerators, SKINs, and some fireworks.  As usual, Omega accounts get all the prizes, while Alpha accounts only get the top row.  Be sure to log in every day if you want to collect them all.

In addition, the popular Trick or Treat PvP flag has been set for the event, which boosts the drop rate for items for ships destroyed in PvP, with the dial being set to 90%.

More loot on the field

This will no doubt make some pilots quite happy.  Be extra careful flying your freighter through Uedama, the suicide gank capital of New Eden.

There are also various discounts on upgrading to Omega which include SKINs as well as some event theme SKINs returning to the in-game store.  There is also a a destroyer focused Proving Grounds event running that features boosts to Stasis Webifier range, Nosferatu and Energy Neutralizer strength, and Laser turret damage just to maintain the Blood Raider theme.

In addition to all of that, the patch notes also show that CCP is still adjusting the CRAB beacons introduced with last week’s update, with rewards and the requirements to build the beacons being changed up.

There was also an exploit notification posted about CRAB beacons.  Don’t get caught doing that trick now.  CCP is watching.  (Also, another reminder that players will find every flaw in CCP’s plans.)

Related:

• CCP – Halloween Horrors Announcement
• CCP – Patch Notes
• The Greybill – Crimson Harvest 2021 Event Guide
• TNG – The Crimson Harvest, 2021 Edition

58 Weeks of World War Bee

The week of maximum Imperium smug may have passed, what with all the PAPI structure kills being racked up.  The main battles have been fought, the outposts of our foes that haven’t been destroyed yet are on their way to that fate soon enough.

The war is starting to feel over.

The enemy has fled, the invasion is no more, and the coalition that joined together to attack us hangs together loosely at best.  I might be at the last weekly update.  We’ll see what happens in the coming week, but I could be done.

Not that I ever meant for this weekly post routine to become a thing.  It sort of just happened and, once it started, it seemed like a good idea to just carry on.

There is still a lot going on.  PAPI forces are bunched up in a few systems trying to get out and have moved at a slow enough pace that, thanks to CCP having systems with very similar names in Catch, other groups have been able to setup bait cyno beacons that continue to provide juicy targets like this FinFleet Ragnarok.

And, with thousands of capital ships in motion across null sec, there is now apparently a jump fuel shortage with isotopes of all four flavors being scarce, which has caused prices to jump dramatically. (It isn’t all Imperium spies in Pandemic Horde relisting things on the market.)  The CCP scarcity drive made ice mining less productive and broke ice belts in some places so that there just isn’t anywhere close to enough supply arriving on the market to cope with the huge demand.

The PAPI trail of tears back to the Dronelands may be an extended journey.

Then there are the organizational shakeups underway as various groups shed members or recruit from traumatized alliances whose members are fed up.

Sov losses and member movement

There will also no doubt be a shift in the alliance coalition structures as PAPI breaks up into smaller regional groups.

The Mittani announced a general moratorium on accepting members of PAPI alliances into the Imperium for the next couple of months.  We are not seeking fair weather friends.  I am not sure how diligently this will be enforced, but you can expect that if you were in PAPI then KarmaFleet won’t be recruiting you for the time being. (Unless you made the Operation PAPIclip list.)

One Year Ago

The CCP update included armor plate tiericide and EDENCOM turned hostile towards anybody supporting the Triglavian invasion.

We lost the Keepstar in IGE-RI in Fountain and our tactics did not extract much of a penalty from the attackers.

When we got to the Y-2ANO Keepstar we had changed up enough to make PAPI pay for reinforcing it.

In the Week 6 Update I noted that Fountain was almost completely lost to the Imperium, that Legacy was getting pushed back in Querious, and we dropped 70 Athanors in Esoteria just to annoy TEST. (68 anchored successfully.)

Delve

As I mentioned last week, all the ihubs in Delve have been taken and the focus has turned to clearing out structures left behind by PAPI in their retreat.  There have been lots of structures to kill, with resistance by PAPI tapering off to almost nothing.  There are a few PAPI members who are out there trying to grab the cores when the structured die, and they have had some success, but mostly it is just things getting blown up.

Of course, the big kill of the week was the Tower of Legends, the primary PAPI staging Keepstar, but it was hardly the only Keepstar to die this past week.

The Tower of Legends brought down

The Delve campaign report shows this, with more than 3.5 trillion ISK destroyed in the region over the past week, 94% of which has been PAPI ships and structures.

Delve Campaign Report – Week 58

Listing out just the PAPI losses by type, you can see that structures dominated the list.

Week 58 – Top 15 PAPI Losses by Type

That is a lot of structure bashing that went on in Delve, including 7 Keepstars… and apparently a lot of expensive capsules.  I read somewhere that defense was so easy that nobody should ever lose a Keepstar.  Maybe TEST will defend some of theirs.

Other Theaters

Fountain has been purged of PAPI ihubs, save for the constellation that LowSechnaya Sholupen (LSH) has.  They should not be confused with NullSechnaya Sholupen (NSH) who were part of the PAPI coalition.

Querious has been getting cleared out.  Brave still holds some ihubs and has structures all over… again, they were clearly committed to living there… but have mostly fled the region.  There are unreinforced Brave structures in Querious just sitting there, not unanchoring, waiting to be blown up.  We even got on in an abandoned state the other day, an Athanor, which turned into a 3 billion ISK loot pinata for GSOL.

Period Basis has also been getting some attention, but a lot of the focus has been on Catch, where TEST had to retake an ihub in a system where they had a Keepstar for the evacuation route.

Catch – Aug 15, 2021

I’ve marked the travel waypoint and the system with the bait beacon, CCP having nicely put two systems in the same region that have very similar names to help make this possible. (There are also two systems that start with “GE-” in Catch, so CCP had something in mind or the random name generator blessed the region twice.)

My Participation

I went on quite a few fleets this past week.  As I have said, there were a lot of structures to kill.  While I was out in my Bhaalgorn a few times, most of the week was work for bombers and blops.  My Purifier undocked over and over.

Another structure out there to bash

And then there were the blops pilots who were ferrying us all over Delve and Querious.  I will say that conduit jump, where the black ops battleship and 30 bombers go in one jump, has become a useful features.

A Redeemer blops lighting a covert cyno

While there were a few attempts to interfere with our shoots, I made it through the week without loss, leaving my war time total as:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 7
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Sabre interdictor – 1
• Eagle heavy assault cruiser – 1
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The propaganda party never stops as Srsli put together another music video for the Imperium.

CCP has gone into its August hibernation mode and the patch update for August so far was pretty minor.  They haven’t mentioned the war lately, but they only seem interested in it when it produces a couple of Guinness Book world records, which happened at FWST-8 and M2-XFE.

This is in contrast to the Casino War where CCP covered events, mentioned it in their video series The Scope, and even tried to name the war.  Now CCP seems more interested in stagnating the game by strangling the economy.

On the weekly peak concurrent user numbers we crossed the 29K line again.  Oddly Monday was close to that peak number, hitting 29,033.  It wasn’t a holiday anywhere that I can recall, so it must have been the continuation of the Sunday peak and the orgy of entosis and destruction that was going on as the Imperium worked on clearing out Delve, Fountain, Querious, and Period Basis.  But Sunday just eked the top number for the week, hitting 29,111.

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
• Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
• Week 21 – 34,888
• Week 22 – 33,264
• Week 23 – 33,149
• Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
• Week 25 – 31,611
• Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
• Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
• Week 28 – 34,713
• Week 29 – 35,996
• Week 30 – 38,323
• Week 31 – 38,167
• Week 32 – 37,259
• Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
• Week 34 – 35,626
• Week 35 – 35,379
• Week 36 – 35,085
• Week 37 – 34,394
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290
• Week 54 – 24,922
• Week 55 – 26,259 (Saturday)
• Week 56 – 27,176
• Week 57 – 29,953
• Week 58 – 29,111

Related

Surprise! The change in fortunes in the war generated a lot of writing!

• INN – Beeitman: Week 58
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 8
• NN – What Daedalus Can Teach Us
• INN – PAPI’s Failure to Rationalize Defeat
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 9
• INN – Vily, Manny, the Council of Wardens, and the Lies That Led to Beeitnam
• INN – The End Is Here: Three Reasons Why
• TAGN – Destroying the Forge of Heroes
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 10
• PC Gamer – EVE Online’s record-setting war ends with a whimper
• Reddit – zKillboard Number Crunching (The WWB ISK War)
• INN – How to Win a Narrative War
• TAGN – Towards a New Delve
• INN – The Tower of Legends Falls
• TAGN – The Downfall of the Tower of Legends
• TNG – EVE Online ACU/PCU Climbs as War Activity Continues
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 11
• INN – Dreadbomb Dreadbombs
• INN – The Battle for Hearts, Minds, and Butts
• INN – Joining EVE In Wartime: Fluffeh’s Story

Towards a New Delve

There is a bit of a tug of war about whether or not World War Bee is over.  PAPI is certainly keen to close the books on war now that they are headed home while the Imperium wants to keep counting coup as they clear out all the structures that Legacy in general, and TEST in particular, dropped in Delve.

Seriously, if anybody ever tries to dispute that Legacy was fully committed to moving into Imperium space to live there, the amount of stuff they anchored in Delve confirms their intention, misguided though it ended up.

At some point though, the current wave of destruction will wrap up, PAPI sovereignty will be taken and their structures all smashed and the war will be over in Delve.

And then there will be a new Delve to build.

The view from 1DQ1-A and old Delve

The old Delve, the Delve before the invasion, came about after our retreat from the north at the end of the Casino War, a conflict we unambiguously lost.

Back then citadels were new and lacked some of the modern conveniences which we have grown to expect in places where we dock up… things like the ability to insure your ship.  We had to go to a old style station to do that back in 2016.

So there was some learning to do and mistakes to be made as more structures were deployed in our new home region.

And then came the era of the Delve Time Unit and the Imperium went a bit crazy.  Mining and ratting was huge for a while and the wealth and resources led to a building boom where we were dropping new Keepstars just to say we had another one.  Every corp wanted to have their own.  It was chaos.

If was had come to Delve towards the end of that era, there might have been a different tale to tell.  I am not saying we would have lost, but we would have been a lot less ready to defend ourselves.

Oddly, a couple of things CCP did helped us prepare for war.

The first thing was the Drifter invasion.  We were in the midst of glassing Tribute and Vale of the Silent when CCP launched the Drifter event that had powerful NPCs attacking Upwell structures in null sec.

Drifter Forces Hitting a Raitaru

We bitched and moaned about that turn of events.  It decided the fate of that war, sending us home to defend our structures from NPCs.  It also looked like a heavy handed jab at the Imperium as the Drifters seemed to be focused on Delve to the exclusion of other null sec regions.  The Goon identity in EVE Online holds the belief that CCP is always ready to work against them, so there is nothing like a CCP launched event that seems to be targeting Goons to spur their already acute paranoia.

But there was an upside to the whole thing.  Having NPCs hitting structures, NPCs which could be defeated if the structure was setup right and a gunner could get in place, meant an overall review of structure requirements in the coalition.  There were standard fits laid out and every structure had to subscribe to the right access control list so that gunners could drop in at need, even if the owning corp wasn’t online.

Then there was the Forsaken Fortress update from CCP.  That still seems like a bit of a betrayal, the removal of asset safety, but the new abandoned state was necessary to thin out some of the structure spam that was becoming a blight in New Eden.

That led to another review and purge of structures in the coalition, as we went out to blow up our own abandoned structures before anybody else got the idea in their head.

So we had done a bit of work before World War Bee kicked off, but the structure situation in Delve was pretty chaotic, and 1DQ1-A was ahead of the pack in that department, with three Keepstars… expanded to five during the war… several Sotiyos, and a constellation of faction Fortizars, prizes from the war against Guardians of the Galaxy in 2018.

The 1DQ main grid with 4 Keeps, 2 Sotiyos, a Tatara, and some of the Fortizars

Outside of our final constellation everything that we couldn’t pull down was razed.  The one minor benefit was that a lot of the structures went down without cores, which made their loss a bit cheaper, but it was still a large hit.  If the PAPI war objective had been to glass Delve, they could have claimed victory in the war and gone away unassailable in their arguments.  Instead there was the whole war of extermination and Legacy moving into our space to live, which tainted their gains and gave the Imperium both an attainable win condition as well as plenty of targets to shoot in revenge.

But now that the cleansing of Delve is reaching is crescendo, with hostile Keepstars starting to fall, it is time to look forward to the new plan for Delve.

I had been thinking about what we would do after the war, long before The Mittani said this past weekend that things would be different in the region when it came to structures.  To start with, we are well past the era of the Delve Time Unit I linked above.  We have been in an era of scarcity and resources are no longer ready to hand the way they were back in that time, so there would naturally be a more conservative approach to structures going forward.

There are already some structures on the main 1DQ grid being unachored for deployment elsewhere in the region, a cheaper solution than building and deploying new ones.

But there are also the lessons of the war.  Loss teaches lessons that victory might otherwise hide, and we lost a lot in the war.  I am sure the big brains in the coalition have already worked out how to set things up more optimally for defense.  The Mittani promised a new plan that would make Delve even more difficult to attack should we face an invasion again.

And then there are the changes that may come from CCP.  PAPI blaming citadel mechanics in part for their loss is probably overstating the problem, but there are likely some changes in those mechanics coming in light of what happened.  It remains to be seen what conclusions, if any, CCP might draw from the war, but I might guess at a couple.

The first likely candidate would involved carriers and supercarriers and how they can stay safe and tethered on a structure while sending their fighters out to guard a gate, attack a fleet, or burn down a structure on grid.  Both sides used this in the war and it was one of the key defensive features of the final Imperium constellation in Delve.

A second might be another review of structure density, perhaps limiting the number of structures on a single grid.

And then there are the usual parameters around defense, offense, and cost that CCP might take a swing at as well.

But a new Delve is coming.  I will be interested to see how it shapes up.

Destroying the Forge of Heroes

Last night saw the first big structure big structure kills in PAPI’s staging system in Delve.

It was just a few weeks ago that we were prodding the already somnolent PAPI by gating into T5ZI and and shooting their structures while they sat around and watched, unable to form up enough pilots to stop us on a Saturday night.  Now we were back into the viper’s nest to blow up some of those very same structures.

A TEST Sotiyo waits for us

With PAPI’s failed assault on 1DQ last week and the subsequent announcement that they would be withdrawing from Delve, the Imperium moved into high gear to retake the region.  As I mentioned in yesterday’s war summary, but Sunday afternoon the Imperium had recaptured all of the infrastructure hubs in Delve, the critical piece of the sovereignty mechanics that gives an alliance control over a star system.

In addition to that, the Imperium had also been busy reinforcing hostile structures across the region in order to keep them from being unanchored and carried off by the retreating PAPI forces.  That included the key structures in their staging system of T5ZI.

Those timers started to come due last night, with two Sotiyo engineering complexes and a Tatara mining and refining platform on the menu.  One of the Sotiyos carried the rather dramatic name “Forge of Heroes,” which alone paired it with the Keepstar, named “Tower of Legends,” as a primary target.  Hubris must bring down wrath.

As the time approached the capitals and super capitals undocked and jumped one system over, going from 1DQ to T5ZI.  There is no cyno jammer there any more and it is easier to spend the jump fuel than try to shove all those big ships through the gate.  They landed at cynos on the Fortizar that was anchored on the Keepstar grid in T5ZI, which is where all the targets were located.

The big toys jumping in

The first target was a different Sotiyo with a less pretentious name (Mad Scientist’s Lab or something) to which all the supers warped to in order to start the attack.

Open fire on the Sotiyo

The titans are big and obvious, but up above them is a flat formation of supercarriers who were there to add their fighters to the mix.

Closer up on the supercarriers

As that was under way there was also a Tatara was also out and available.  Some of the subcaps went over to start on it in order to pause the timer.

The first Sotiyo was beaten down, though it took some time in no small because there were so many ships in on the shoot, which turned the tidi up effectively slowing everything down.  But it was worn down and exploded nicely.

The first Sotiyo blows up

You can see the bubbles put up during the last could percent of hull in order to keep any any PAPI ships from slipping in and grabbing the quantum core, that valuable “always drops” item that has been required to activate all citadels since the update in January added in grandfathered structures.  The Sotiyo core is worth 10 billion ISK.

From there everybody shifted over to the Tatara and applied fire to it.

A new target for the big toys

That too blew up nicely.

The Tatara begins to brew up

Once again you can see the bubbles up to thwart core theft as well as the two Rorquals that GSOL jumped in to collect the core, any loot, and salvage from the kill.

During this the Keepstar, the “Tower of Legends,” came out for its armor timer.  We were not going to get to kill it, but fighters were sent out to hit it so as to advance the destruction cycle to the final phase, the hull timer.

And then the “Forge of Heros” hull timer came up and that was the next target for us.

The turn of the Forge of Heroes

I have a picture from the other side with overview brackets turned on, which marks every ship, fighter, and drone with an icon.  You may need to click on it and view it full size to get a good look at how many ships were on grid.

Brackets on showing ships on grid

The Sotiyo was gunned and even managed to kill a few of the attacking ships, including a carrier.  But the outcome was ordained.  The Sotiyo blew up.

The Forge of Heroes undone

Unfortunately, neither Sotiyo generated a kill mail.  That sometimes happens when there are a lot of players on a kill mail.  We had that same issue with the four Keepstars we blew up in NPC Delve back in Octobers.  We would have to content ourselves with the Tatara kill mail and some of the fighter kills.  There were also a few ships in build in the Satiyo that showed up as kills.

After that the show was over.  The system went from about 1,200 people down to a few hundred pretty quickly as the capitals jumped out and the subcaps headed for the gate.

A crowd at the gate… and a Trig dread coming to take the gate with us

The next big show will be the Keepstar.  That timer is set.

The time is foretold – Thursday at around 23:59 UTC

I am sure the crowd wanting to join in on that kill will be even bigger, and the carnage even greater as a Keepstar’s defenses can be quite formidable.  Killing that will terminate a lot of clones locked up in the station along with sending a lot of left behind gear to asset safety.

All of that will end up in Irmalin, in the Khanid region, 30 days down the road.  I am sure there will be some camping of that station when the time comes.