Tag Archives: Fraternity

Fraternity’s Pochven Fortizar Destroyed

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I want to note this event both because it is kind of a big deal and because I referenced the Fortizar in a post last week and we attacked another such structure in Skarkon back in late January.  Otherwise, this is another second hand report, meaning I wasn’t there.

The Fortizar in the dark red space of Pochven back in January

Fraternity’s Fortizar was in the Nalvula system in Pochven.  They deployed this Fortizar before the systems being battled over during the Triglavian invasion event were absorbed into the new Triglavian region of Pochven.

Once Pochven was formed, players have not been able to deploy structures in that region, so any legacy structures from the before times are extremely valuable as bases from which to farm the profitable Triglavian sites in the region.

As I mentioned, we took a run at it in cooperation with B2 and some low sec people, which was something of the nascent coalition that formed later for the current war.  So while we were messing with Fraternity Keepstars, Snuffed Out and the Freemen of the North, a group who Fraternity blobbed out of Tribute a couple of years back and who have been fighting a low level conflict against them ever since, went after that Fortizar.

That led both sides in the war against Fraternity to pile into Pochven once more to lay siege to the irreplaceable Fortizar.  And this time it was destroyed.

But, the battle report looks a little crazy.  I was tempted to go with a headline about 7,000 ships being destroyed.

Battle Report Header

That header, divided into Fraternity and its allies, the loose association that is the Freemen of the North, and then the B2 Coalition and the Imperium, appears to show that the latter two won a victory against astounding odds.

The thing is, Pochven is like wormhole space, and when you kill a structure all the stuff in it drops into space rather than being sent nicely packaged to asset safety.  So, shortly after the Fortizar was blown up, the field looked like this.

The Pochven loot pinata pays off

Those are all the hangar containers and ships and whatnot that were kicked out into space, and anything that wasn’t valuable enough to be scooped up and hauled off was blown up.  So if you run down that battle report you start seeing a lot of shuttles, corvettes, and other small ships as part of the destruction.  And whoever those ships belonged to get counted as being part of the battle, even if they were not logged on.

So, it sorting out the battle report losses for Fraternity and allies, aside from the Fortizar itself, there were 7,051 ships and capsules lost, broken out by the following groups.

Type                  Involved      Lost      Value
Shuttle               3,598         3,597      843m
Frigate                 845           843     5.35b
Corvette                616           616      202m
Destroyer               373           363     9.03b
Cruiser                 263           254     6.35b
Capsule                 229           228      327m
Interdictor             223           216     12.0b
Heavy Assault Cruiser   144           142     29.3b
Stealth Bomber          127           113     4.99b
Interceptor              95            92     2.71b
Logistics                64            64     13.4b
Hauler                   64            63     1.91b
Command Destroyer        61            61     3.61b
Tactical Destroyer       60            53     4.82b
Assault Frigate          45            41     1.48b
Battleship               41            40     24.6b
Covert Ops               39            39     1.84b
Combat Battlecruiser     39            38     3.84b
Expedition Frigate       35            35     1.08b
Command Ship             34            34     10.8b
Mining Barge             29            29     1.26b
Logistics Frigate        23            22      819m
Mobile Tractor Unit      18            18     2.85b
Electronic Attack Ship   13            13      497m
Blockade Runner           9             9     1.47b
Combat Recon Ship         6             6     2.61b
Attack Battlecruiser      7             6      724m
Industrial Command Ship   5             5      455m
Strategic Cruiser         4             4     2.15b
Marauder                 11             3     5.49b
Flag Cruiser              1             1      211m
Force Recon Ship          2             1      199m
Deep Space Transport      1             1      119m

That is quite a list.  The capsules is probably much closer to the count of those involved on the side of the defenders, since you can only lose a capsule if you are logged in.

Still, reports were that the fight was pretty spectacular, with Rote Kapelle even bringing in a titan to pile on… a titan that managed to get the final blow on the structure.  CCP was on the scene and grabbed a screen shot of the Erebus unleashing its lance doomsday weapon on the Fortizar.

A hit on the Fortizar

So their Pochven Fortizar is gone.  As I noted before, it is now a question of where the war goes next.  Fraternity has lost three Keepstars and more Fortizars in Pure Blind, which has been a blow, but which also reduces their distractions.  The Keepstart in X47 is now the core of their line.  Will they continue to defend it, or will they be worn down and evacuate it to its fate?

Related:

Three Fraternity Keepstars Down in Pure Blind

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The fallout from the weekend clash, where more than 6K capsuleers clashed carried on into the week.  Fraternity chose to defend only their Keepstar in X47, which meant that the other three Keepstars advanced to the hull timer, the final step before destruction.  Meanwhile, B2 and the Imperium went back and set the armor timer for the X47 Keepstar again.

So, come the morning of the 15th, there were more timers to fight over.

Fraternity and its allies in PanFam were clearly split over what to do.  Previously, with four equal choices, X47 was their answer, it being their primary staging base, the location with the most member stuff to, if not lose, at least get sent awkwardly to asset safety.

This time, there were three final timers that would end up with structures being destroyed, which is never a good look, and their most valued structure at risk of being put into its final timer.  Fraternity was not helped by the fact that two of the timers, the X47 timer and the final timer for the 5ZXX-K Keepstar coincided.

The Imperium and B2 chose to exploit the issue by pushing some fleets into X47 to keep that timer in play while throwing the hard hitting Leshaks at the 5ZXX target, making the defenders choose between the two.  This let the Leshaks tear through a good chunk of the hull hit points.

A Leshak on the 5ZXX Keepstar

That image is from CCP who is, surprisingly, sitting up and taking notice of the war.

The defenders managed to win the timer in X47 and started to pile into 5ZXX in order to try and save that Keepstar, leading to another savage tidi slugfest.

Frat and PanFam even dropped capitals into the morass, and it was said to be touch and go because the server performance was so bad that the Entropic Disintegrators weapons that the Leshaks use would fail to cycle and have to be constantly restarted.  The real damage from a Leshak builds up over time, but that build up is cancelled if the weapon does not cycle, forcing it to start over again.

However, the Imperium had other choice on the field and were able to keep the timer from counting down long enough that the defenders, fearing they would end up losing the structure and be stuck in the middle of angry hostiles, began to extract.  This led to the Imperium and B2 tearing apart the defenders and they tried to get away.

The battle report shows that across the four systems in play the defenders lost more than a trillion ISK in ships and structures.

Battle Report Header

That battle report is broken out into four groups, with Team B representing Faternity, PanFam, and allies, and Team C representing the combined forces of the Imperium and the B2 Coalition.

More than 600 billion in losses were in the form of structures, as three Keepstars total were destroyed, the later pair with minimal defense.

Keepstars destroyed

The kill reports:

Meanwhile, another two Fortizars were also destroyed, all with considerably less in losses for the attackers this time around. (Plus, Snuffed Out used this distraction to put PanFam’s Pochven Fortizar, the one we took a shot at back in January, into hull timer again.)

Unfortunately, I missed the whole thing, so this is a second hand report.  It wasn’t just that, once again, a timer was coming when I have no business being anything but asleep, and doubly so on a work night.  The weather was against me as well.  Tuesday saw a strong storm hit Nothrern California, dropping lots of much needed rain, but the high winds knocked down a tree that took out an electrical transmission tower that was key to my end of Silicon Valley.

So the power was out and isn’t expected to be restored until Saturday.  That explains the rather bland post I put up yesterday… I had a lot more I wanted to get into it… but the power was down and I ended up wrapping it up on my iPad tethered to my phone.  (Of course, that post got nine comments, which is a lot more than usual lately, proving once again what I want to write and what people like are clearly different things.)  Now I’m on a short trip for work, so in a motel room with power and Wi-Fi.

However, it wasn’t difficult to find sources.  There was a nice post by Kunmi on the Imperium internal news site. (Why it doesn’t get posted to INN I do not know, but there is some rumor that INN is still controlled by The Mittani and that limits it to a few Twitch shows.  I don’t know, it is just a rumor.)

And, of course, there was r/eve.  After the weekend battles partisans of Fraternity and PanFam were working hard to spin a narrative of a fatal loss by B2 and the Imperium.  Like we haven’t thrown away way more than 300 billion ISK on risky experiments before.  So the B2 and Imperium posters were ready to remind them of their smugness of just a few days ago and how they were promising their line members another big Goon feed.

All of which puts the focus back on X47.  That is the linchpin  of Fraternity’s position in Pure Blind.  Again, this isn’t the first time we’ve been in the north battling over a critical Keepstar in that system.  The question is if there is a way around it that can force Fraternity to fall back, or will they evacuate on their own if we keep putting pressure on it?

Addendum:

Images of the fight from CCP Aperture.

A video of some of the fight.

Another epic night in New Eden.

More than 6,000 Players Clash in X47L-Q as Keepstar Battles Commence in Pure Blind

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Yesterday’s post recounted how the Imperium and B3 coalitions had spent the afternoon setting timers on multiple structures, including four of Fraternity’s Keepstars in Pure Blind.

Fraternity Keepstar Locations in the region

The Keepstars were all set to enter their armor timer events, the second of the three shoots required to kill these structures today.  The first event, shooting the shields, can happen at any time.  But subsequent events are set to occur in the time zone the defender has chosen.

Fraternity, the defender, is a largely Chinese based alliance, so their choices were well off of normal business hours here in the US.  The times were:

  • ROIR-Y – 08:34 UTC – 04:34 Eastern / 00:34 Pacific
  • X47L-Q – 10:08 UTC – 06:08 Eastern / 03:08 Pacific
  • F-NMX6 – 12:39 UTC – 08:39 Eastern / 05:39 Pacific
  • 5ZXX-K – 13:48 UTC – 09:48 Eastern / 06:48 Pacific

This was further complicated by the fact that at 2am local time in most locations in the US  Daylight Savings Time began, so the clocks did their annual “Spring Forward.”

Imperium leader Asher Elias asked us to “alarm clock” these ops… get up early, stay up late, whatever… in order to push these structures into their next timers.  I opted to take a nap on Saturday afternoon and then stayed up past midnight to try and go on at least the first op.

When I got on we had more than 2,000 people in our staging system, a number that grew past 3,500 as the first timer approached.

It looked like Fraternity and its allies were not going to contest the first Keepstar in ROIR-Y.  Leshaks were sent in to shoot it for the armor timer.

Leshaks at work on the first Keepstar

I was in Asher’s fleet of Stormbringers, and we jumped in when a small fleet of Tengus from Siege Green, and Frat ally, showed up and picked off a couple of Leshaks on the edge of the formation.

When that was done, we moved on towards X47L-Q, taking up station at one of the gate leading into the system.

Waiting on the X47 gate as bombers took runs at us

X47 is a location where we have fought over Keepstars before.  Back in 2018 we fought many of the same people over a Keepstar in this very system.

This looked to be the system where Frat was going to contest the timer.  As we lingered outside waiting for the timer to get close, Frat and PanFam had collected a good 3K players of their own on the Keepstar.

The X47 Keepstar Awaiting our arrival

Then the word to jump into the system came and the game’s troubles began as more than 6,000 players attempted to have a battle in X47L-Q.  CCP had reinforced the node for us, and was clearly keeping an eye on things.  But past history indicated that we were likely in for a mess.

CCP unironically using the word “Breaking” as we tried to set fire to the server.

Things were moving very slowly as we tried to load into the system, and once people got into the system, commands were taking up to ten minutes to get a response.  The savvy in the crowd had hit shift-control-alt-M to bring up the Outstanding Commands window to keep an eye on if the server was processing inputs.

past 6 minutes trying to lock two targets

Our structure shooting fleet, the Leshaks, got into the system and got with range of the Keepstar, but ran into one of our old known issues.  While everybody else was moving at 10% speed due to Time Dilation, which CCP uses to slow things down so the server can try to keep up, structure timers do not slow down.

So we had 15 real time minutes to start shooting while 6 seconds of game time was taking 6 minutes to execute… if your commands made it into the queue to be processed… so by the time they could start locking up the structure it was too late.

6K people in space around a structure though, a fight was going to happen and the Leshaks started brawling with a Paladin fleet.  We were going to get something out of all of this.

However, we were heading for another timer.  at 11:00 UTC every day is downtime, when CCP restarts the cluster.  Everybody gets kicked off the servers when that happens, and that time was rapidly approaching.

I was within range of some stuff on the Keepstar and trying to lock up some of the Paladins when downtime hit.

As close as I got

And the big log off came.

Downtime arrives

Pings went out to log back in as soon as possible to continue the fight.  We had invested the time, we were going to blow things up or go out in a blaze of glory.  The server, however, had other ideas.  While the cluster was up again soon enough, X47 itself was having problems.

At first the server was still loading.

Character selection failed

Then it was reporting as stuck.

The server is not happy

The EVE Status Twitter account was reporting that they were working on the issues, but that they were present.

I was able to get in fairly soon, maybe 20 minutes after downtime ended, when a lot of other people were piling in as well.  The server number climbed well past 3K again and I was on the Keepstar watching people who had been safety warped off returning to their locations, landing on grid.

And I decided it was time to call it a night.  Or a morning, it being nearly 04:30 local time.  I set myself to dock in the Fortizar we had in the system and was able to warp off and get tethered, but I declined to wait to get docked and went to bed, leaving the game up.

I came back this morning to find I had been disconnected.  But I was safely docked up.  I can leave my ship there and jump clone back to our staging.

You can see that there were a lot more people online than usual before downtime on the server graph from EVE Offline.  There were 26K people online then, and more than 6K were in X47, with even more in surrounding systems.  Pure Blind was a popular location.

EVE Offline player graph

You can see people trying to get online, then some trouble as we all got kicked out of the system again later on.

At its peak I saw numbers in local well past 6.1K.  The highest I screen shotted was 6,115.

Character in the system – 6,115

In the end Fraternity and its allies saved their Keepstar and without a doubt won the ISK war, as a lot of us were blown up on the Keepstar or trying to escape.

But the evening was not a total loss for the Imperium and B2 Coalition.  We managed to set the timers on the other three Keepstars, so the final hull timer fights will be coming this week at some early morning hour.  We shall see.

There is more to this story, including some word of a roll-back for the X47 system that did not restore ships that were destroyed but which pulled back people who had escaped from the system.  I do not know any details, but I suspect there will be more news about this as the day unfolds.  This, however, is all I have in me for the story this morning.  I may need a nap today.

Addendum:

Early battle reports for the active systems in Pure Blind show close to 370 billion ISK destroyed.

Battle Report Header

The Imperium and B2 Coalition make up almost 300 billion of that amount, most of it no doubt on the Keepstar grid in X47.

Somebody worked on another battle report that filtered out the third parties into their own column (Team A) and expanded the range of the battle to include the systems where four Fraternity Fortizars were lost during the same time frame.  There was a lot going on.

Realted:

Setup for Conflict in Pure Blind

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In Reavers Asher used to always talk about “putting money in the bank” for our preparatory operations.  We would spend evenings flying around, shooting structures, setting timers, and laying the groundwork for potential battles.

And, of course, having deployed to Fade to bring war to Fraternity and its WinterCo allies, we were clearly going to be out putting money in the bank on a lot of structures in Pure Blind and Tribute.  So I was right there and ready to go when Asher wanted to take out some fleets for that purpose.

There were a couple of fleets going out, but I went with the Leshak fleet that Asher was leading.  It is a sign of Asher’s reign that we’re getting some interesting and expensive doctrines in the mainstream of the Imperium.  Leshak’s were once something that were tolerated in a couple of fleet comps, then became a SIG specific fleet comp for structure bashes, and now it is open to everybody who has the ISK.

Leshak fleet on the way

I do not have that much ISK to spend, so I joined up on the logi side of things.  A tech II logistics cruiser is more in my price range.

The Leshak is fun to watch.  Triglavian ships have a single beam weapon that spools up damage over time.  Asher warped us in a wall formation to our first target, a Fraternity Keepstar, and I tried to capture what it looked like with a host of red beams reaching out to hit the structure.

Red beams reaching out

Unlike lasers, the beams are on all the time, so there is a convergence of them on the target all the time.  Because of the way EVE Online targeting works, you quickly get a sense of the points on a hull or structure that weapons are allowed to hit.

Or everybody is just aiming for that one spot

And the damage output from a wall of Leshaks is pretty fierce.  We burned through the shield timer on two Keepstars in record time.

We also spent a little bit of time reinforcing a Fortizar or two.

Brackets on, walls of battleships hitting a Fortizar

We spent some time traveling around to our targets, setting up timers that will come up deep in alarm clock time for those of us in the US.

Leshaks moving again

The locals did a little to respond to our efforts.  They were waylaying some stragglers who fell behind at one point and Vily was out with some bombers trying to catch us on gates with a bomb run.

Bombs landing as a fleet gates away

We made our rounds, did our shoots, then got a ride back towards home on a titan.

Sending us home

We happened to arrive back at the same time that some titans from The Initiative were landing back on our staging Keepstar as well.

Everybody landing between the uprights

They had been out doing their own reinforcement ops.  All told, we set armor timers on four Keepstars in Pure Blind along with a series of smaller structures.

But the big newsworth item that got pinged out for our op was that we somehow managed to ALL be aligned for a warp.

Asher lets everybody know about our achievement

This seems like trivia, and it certainly isn’t the FIRST perfect fleet warp I have been a part of, but when you have a full 255 member fleet with a battleship doctrine in time dilation… because pushing a few full fleets around Pure Blind was dragging the servers down… and having everybody actually paying attention and doing the right thing at the right time, that is a rare event.  There is almost always somebody who didn’t hear or had to step away or for whom the UI failed to register the align command.

Of course there was the ping and now a Reddit thread, which includes an image from the internal new post about the miracle warp.  It was an event.

Somebody also happened to catch a screen shot of our fleet ball in the Cloud Ring nebula looking like a menacing eye.

The Leshaks are watching

Now we just have to get back online for the next timers which will be around 10:00 UTC on the day most of the US leaps forward into Daylight Savings Time.  That means… it will be either a really early morning or a really late night for those of us in the US.

We will see who shows up to fight over the timers soon enough though.

Addendum:

Somebody put together a quick video of some of the structure shoot ops.

You can, if you look carefully and the quick camera moves haven’t made you ill, spot Asher leading the Leshaks, and a couple of the battleship walls including the one I have a screen shot of above around the Fortizar.

War Looms for the Imperium Once More

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As I noted at the end of my month in review post earlier this week, the Imperium has a State of the Goonion (SotG) address coming up this weekend.  Unlike the weekly fireside meeting, a SotG has evolved over the years to have a simple purpose: to kick off a deployment.

Despite a reputation for bloviation that past Imperium leaders may have developed due to their time spent on Twitch, these meeting have for years been short and to the point.  They are about deploying to a war.  They run for as long as it takes the essential information to be announced, then move ops are put together, and the coalition begins deploying for a new conflict.

Generally the announcement of a coming SotG comes with an reminder to be there and be ready to for move ops immediately following.

This time around any attempts to be coy have been dispensed with.  New doctrines were announced and contracts for the required ships were put up on the market while the call to poke you inactive corp mates, resubscribe alts, and get your last bit of crabbing in have been part of the messaging in the run up to the SotG.

The only things that have not been announced are who the target will be and where we will be staging from.

And even the former seems knowable with a bit of logic applied.  There are a limited number of possible opponents in null sec that would call for a full Imperium deployment.  Basically, there are three. B2 Coalition, PanFam, and WinterCo.

It says “B2 Coalition” but it is BOSS, Brave, and BL0B I thought

The Imperium, while not blue currently, has been cooperating with the B2 Coalition in the northwest of null sec, allowing the remnants of FI.RE to pass through Imperium space to join them and coordinating on the occasional fight, like the Fortizar fight in Pochven.  We do not have any real beef with them.

Meanwhile, the Imperium and PanFam have come to a settlement on the southeast of null sec, the space that FI.RE abandoned when they moved to join B2 which, among other things, set up a neutrally aligned buffer zone between the two blocs, securing that flank for both parties.  Why squander the diplomatic effort used to create that if we were just going to attack?

Which leaves WinterCo, headed by Fraternity, which holds a lot of the north and northeast of null sec.  They are also involved in an ongoing struggle with B2 Coalition, so there is a conflict already in progress.

So I suspect that we will be joining B2 Coalition in a temporary alliance to push back WinterCo.  More than suspect, really.  There are not any other logical options.  Certainly r/eve seems to have jumped straight to that conclusion.

The Keepstar where our move ops will start on Saturday after the SotG

Then there is the question about where we will be staging.  That is one thing the line members are never told until we arrive there.  But even that offers up some limited choices.

There are, of course, some low sec avenues of approach to Fraternity’s territory which, among other things, have the advantage of being easily resupplied from Jita.  Always a plus.  So we could come up from Hakonen like we tried back in 2017, to assail Tribute from the south.

Or we could try to set up shop near Obe in The Forge to take a run at Fraternity’s core territory, which would draw forces away from B2 Coalitions front, granting them more likelihood of success.

But I think we are more likely to want to coordinate directly with B2.  That means, following the paths of past campaigns, setting up in Pure Blind in the NPC null sec systems and driving into Tribute from there.

There are other options… I could see us using a B2 system for staging if we were going to blue them for the duration of the conflict… and other routes we could possibly pursue.  We might be set to squash that pocket of space WinterCo holds in the south of null sec.  But Pure Blind seems the most likely.   And handy.  I still have stuff sitting in an NPC station in Pure Blind.

The question is what will PanFam get up to if things play out this way.  They have been saying they are not allied with WinterCo, that they have been showing up at fights between WinterCo and B2 just to “third party,” though they seem to favor shooting B2 targets.

If they show up on the side of WinterCo we could see some serious battles in the north in the coming weeks.

Southeastern Null Sec Declared Open to Non-Bloc Alliances

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With the exit of FI.RE from the southeast of null sec, the open question has been what will happen to the territory that they evacuated?

Null Sec Coalitions Map and the FI.RE exit route

Neither adjacent bloc, PanFam in the northeast and the Imperium in the southwest, seemed interested in the space and but were unhappy with the idea that it would fall under the control of the other.  Meanwhile the area has already started to fall apart after FI.RE’s departure looking at the sov maps.

The Coalition map of the southeast

It was announced yesterday that PanFam and its allies and the Imperium have come to an agreement, along with WinterCo, and signed a treaty that will limit bloc expansion into the southeast of null sec.

The treaty covers the following regions in the southeast:

  • Scalding Pass
  • Detorid
  • Wicked Creek
  • Immensea
  • Omist
  • Feythabolis
  • Insmother (partial)
  • Tenerifis (partial)

The partial zones are due to Pademic Horde and Slyce taking some systems on their boarder in Insmother.

PanFam’s cut of Insmother from DOTLAN

Likewise, the Imperium is taking some systems in Tenerifis that are adjacent to its territory.

The Imperium’s grab in Tenerifis from DOTLAN

The agreement states that Those regions are now open for unaffiliated alliances to use, meaning alliances that are not affiliated with any of the four major blocs (B3, Imperium, PanFam, Winterco).

The major blocs can still roam through the area for content, but they have agreed not to take sides in any conflict within the area and to not attack sovereignty or structures of those who take up residence in the area.

In addition, no rental activity of any sort will be allowed within the designated region.

The agreement is slated to last for one year, at which point those party to the agreement can decide whether to extend it or not.

The signatories to the agreement are:

  • Asher Elias of The Imperium
  • Dark Shines of The Initiative.
  • Gobbins of Pandemic Horde
  • Hedliner of Pandemic Legion
  • Noraus of Fraternity, leader of WinterCo
  • Riotrick of Slyce
  • Vince Draken of Nothern Coalition

Not represented as signatories were any of B3 coalition’s leadership.  B3 resides in the northeast of null sec and includes many of the former FI.RE members who fled the southeast, so perhaps their agreement to leave the area alone was implied already.

The idea seems to be to allow space for smaller groups to come to and explore sovereign null sec.  How it will play out remains to be seen.

Before World War Bee the Imperium used to use Querious as an incubator region for small alliances wishing to try and spread their wings.  Querious Fight Club, as it was called, had specific rules to keep groups from being destroyed quickly, enforced by the long arm of the Imperium.  However the war washed all of that away and Querious has since become a home to core Imperium members.

How the southeast will fare under the new treaty remains to be seen.

Blowing Up Stabbers in GE-8JV

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War is on in null sec… two wars actually.  There is the Imperium, which has mobilized and moved into Catch in a war declared against null sec rental empires, which is currently focused on attacking FI.RE in Tenerifis and Immensea.  And then there is Fraternity, which has decided to stomp on V0LTA and Brave in Pure Blind, which seems like it should be a route, but the defenders get to defend in their own time zone, which is not Frat’s core time zone, so the underdogs have been hanging on for now.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a lot of time for war.  Things at home are such that carving out a few hours to go on a strat op to take sovereignty… that takes a while… just hasn’t been in the cards.  I see strat ops get announced and go off knowing I just don’t have that much time.

Every so often though, there is an op that comes up that I can join in on.

Pandemic Horde has been making regular runs at the Ansiblex in GE-8JV, the staging system we are currently using.  They pull together a fleet of Stabbers, inexpensive but fast and reasonably hard hitting cruisers, and zip into the system to take a shot at the jump bridge network.  They usually show up in significant numbers, which means we have to form a counter fleet in order to chase them off, lest they succeed in burning down our travel network.

Stabbers hanging around the acceleration gate to the ESS

Those fleets are short and sharp and can be a lot of fun.  There is room for us to get screw up, and the Stabbers have gotten the best of us a few times, inflicted some damage and gotten away without paying much of a price.  But sometimes we land on them, bubble them up, and then there isn’t much guesswork in the outcome if we’ve brought the right ships.

Eagles, a heavy assault cruiser, is overkill for the job, but offsets the numbers if we come up short.  If we undock Eagles their job becomes getting away and some skill or luck… or both… is involved in pinning them down.  But when we manage it, it tend to be a slaughter.  The go after our logi when cornered, which are much more expensive hulls.

I have been in a few of those fleets now, not all of them successful.  Sometimes you log in and they get away.  Sometimes you land on top of them, bubble them up, and start burning down targets.

Chasing them through a bubble and a gate

One of those fleets was a bit of an old time revival, as Dabigredboat (DBRB) showed up as FC.  He was a regular FC in many of my early ops in the coalition, but has had a career and marriage and all the usual complications of life take him away from the game.  But there he was, as boisterous as ever, flying us around in Eagles chasing Stabbers.

Who is leading the fleet? DBRB!

So I haven’t been doing a lot in the war and I don’t have much to report that you can’t just figure out by going over to DOTLAN and looking at who owns the ihubs in the northwest of Tenerifis.  But I have managed to pad my killboard with some Stabbers this month, so I have that going for me.

The Army of Mango Alliance Attempts a Self Destruct to Flee Fraternity

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World War Bee has been in the past for months now, but that doesn’t mean null sec space is quiet.  Nobody is assaulting Delve at the moment, but there are still many stories unfolding in the space noir epic that is the wilds of null sec as we settle into the post war reality.  Brave has been trying to establish a home, TEST has been falling apart in Outer Passage, and for some reason we’re fighting with Triumvirate in Cloud Ring.

It has all been relatively low key, at least when compared to the war, and out away from Delve, which means I haven’t seen much of it in person.

And then this past weekend The Army of Mango Alliance got caught trying to reverse merge themselves into the Imperium and… well… I’ve read the reporting over at the New Eden Post and have heard The Mittani try to explain it twice, once on the Meta Show and once at our weekly fireside and I am not sure I understand how the plan was supposed to work or who exactly they thought it was going to fool.

But let me reel that back in for a minute to set up the situation.  One of the post war events that had comes to pass recently was a war breaking out between Fraternity and Army of Mango.

This was not a huge surprise to anybody paying attention… or even people like me who were simply not asleep that day in class.

Faternity and Army of Mango are, along with a few other corps and alliances, part of the great exodus from Serenity, the mainland Chinese EVE Online server, which occurred when one group, the Pan-Intergalactic Business Community, won the game by becoming the single unassailable dominate power in null sec.  The influence map was them and those who paid tribute to them.

Some of life on the Serenity server was covered by the Rooks & Kings videos Message in a Bottle and First Light on the Fifth Day, the latter covering a final battle in wormhole space.  But the end of the war led many to exit the server… though, as I understand it, the Chinese company that had been running it at the time wasn’t helping much.

And many pilots who liked the game on Serenity came here, where there was not a single dominant power.  (So, among other things, the player count on Tranquility was boosted by players from Serenity.)

Those players brought with them the grudges from Serenity and can generally be sorted out into the winners and losers camp if you know who is who.  Fraternity and Army of Mango have generally been the two groups most at odds, and while they managed to cooperate during World War Bee, joining the PAPI coalition against the Imperium, things have been tense and some wondered if they might start fighting each other there on the front lines.

But at week seventeen of the war Army of Mango stepped back from the front lines to assume stewardship of the Legacy Coalition’s backfield, trying to tamp down the then incipient harassment as The Bastion rolled into Esoteria to take a few systems and be an annoyance.

When PAPI gave up the invasion and turned for home, Army of Mango managed to scoop up much of the territory TEST left behind as Vily and PGL sought shelter as far away from angry Goons as they could.  There AOM began to form a new coalition with some remnants of Legacy, bringing back the Pan-Intergalactic Business Community name from the Serenity server, which was pretty much the same as waving a red flag and shouting “come get me” at Fraternity.

Once alliances were settled and rested, Fraternity went straight for Army of Mango and, though they were rebuffed on their first assault, the writing seemed to be on the wall that Frat was going to win over time.

Army of Mango decided they needed an out and sought to sneak into the Imperium.  They transferred some structures, including their main staging Keepstar, to GSF and told their members that they were going to disband the alliance and fold themselves into Ranger Regiment, another of the Chinese diaspora groups from the Serenity server.

Ranger Regiment, which joined the Imperium as a candidate member back in February of 2020 when they were driven out of their space by Fraternity, was already in a bad odor in the Imperium for low participation in the war.  To hear the leadership of Army of Mango go on about it to their members, it seems that Ranger Regiment was at least aligned with, and possibly being run by, Army of Mango.  Kind of a bit of interesting post war news.

So the plan, as explained by the leadership of Army of Mango, was to ditch their alliance and move their existing structure, including their leadership, into Ranger Regiment, taking over the alliance and carrying on from there, safe from Fraternity.  How very sneaky.

Unfortunately for Army of Mango, the leadership of the Imperium did not just fall off the back of a turnip truck, so this did not go unnoticed as the structure transfers were noticed and spies reported back with with what was going on and, soon enough, full translations of what was said.

Pancake Wolf got a medal for work on intel

Once the attention of the Imperium was focused on what was happening, updates began flowing back in near real time as Army of Mango tried to carry on, then found themselves in a bind as the Imperium wasn’t having it.  We were not going to be a patsy for Army of Mango or allow ourselves to be dragged into the middle of their war with Fraternity.

The Imperium honored a short period that had been negotiated to allow Army of Mango line members to evacuate from their staging, and then the hammer fell, zapping the clones left in the Keepstar.

3,277 clones about to be destroyed

(image courtesy of The Mittani, who pressed the “yes” button.)

Meanwhile, Ranger Regiment is being kicked from the Imperium for their part in this.  They were already in trouble, but being involved in this scheme was too much.  This has led to a scramble for homes for a large number of players from both alliances.

Army of Mango down 3,800 and counting

Dracarys, another Chinese alliance in the Imperium, has picked up quite a few new members due to this shift.  They put in a strong performance in World War Bee and hold some former Legacy Coalition space in Catch along with connecting space in Querious.  However, the word is that groups coming into the Imperium must be vetted thoroughly and nobody in the Army of Mango or Ranger Regiment leadership team is welcome.

So there looks to be a shake up coming on who owns what in the south end of null sec as it does not seem like Army of Mango and Ranger Regiment are going to be able to hold onto that space.

South null sec – Jan 10, 2022

Ranger Regiment is set to disband and Army of Mango, which now has no place to land so has to carry on existing, is planning to head to low sec space for now.  The Pan-Intergalactic Business Community coalition has effectively been destroyed. Fraternity wins this round.

This has also led to what is set to be a major null sec event.

The Imperium pulled the fuel from the Keepstar in R-ARKN so it will go into an abandoned state and will be blowing it up this coming weekend.  Unlike an normal Keepstar destruction in null sec, this will lead to everything left in people’s hangars being ejected into space when the structure blows up.

This could turn out to be the ultimate New Eden loot pinata.  Every player’s stuff gets launched into space in a station hangar and people will be rummaging through them looking for ships and modules and anything of value.

I’ve seen something like this before in wormhole space when we got to go along with The Initiative to blow up a couple Hard Knocks Keepstars back in 2018.  There, in the J115405 wormhole, sometimes known as Rage, we first blew up Fort Knocks.

The loot ball with markers on

Then we blew up Unassailable Wealth.

The Initiative showing off with their logo in spaceships

That was a huge amount of loot on the field, and it was a crazy time.

I suspect that the Keepstar in R-ARKN will throw a few times as many station containers into space when it blows.  It seems likely that the server will just crash when it happens.  But if the server holds, we’ll be out there scooping loot for a long time.  Imperium leadership is already planning out how to deal with it.

Of course, other groups might want some of that loot as well, so the whole thing could simply devolve into an ongoing slap fight over who gets what.

I wonder if CCP should contact Guinness Book for this.  Is there a world record category for most loot on the field in a video game?

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The Fraternity Alliance Update and the Direction of the War

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…but this tireless swarm of maniacal bees is somewhat unexpected

-Noraus, Fraternity Alliance Meeting (translated)

In the week 54 war summary I mentioned that there was a big war related announcement expected for this Saturday, July 24th.  Earlier this week Fraternity had an alliance meeting to prepare its members for this announcement, as well as bringing up a couple of additional topics.

Fraternity is a primarily Chinese alliance and so a transcript was posted to Reddit initially in Chinese with a brief summary.  Translation from Chinese to English is problematic both due to the lack of exactly parallel idioms and the jargon laden nature of the New Eden, and the Google Translate attempt to bridge the gap is hilarious. (The quote at the top becomes “The tireless raging bee colony is indeed beyond everyone’s expectations” via Google.)

There have since been a few translations.  I am going by this one that appeared on Pastebin.

Fraternity is also the third largest sov null alliance in the game when it comes to membership and the largest when it comes to total systems held in New Eden.  So what they are up to matters to the rest of New Eden.

The Top 5 Sov Null Alliances

The meeting started with a summing up of the current situation, recognizing that the Imperium has held out for more than 90 days in the 1DQ1-A constellation and shows no sign of breaking.  The Mittani is said to have cultivated a group of diehard loyalists.

This is what happens when you declare a war of extermination.  If you say there are no terms save destruction, there is no reason to for us to give up.

So the failure to break us is because of maniacal bees and game mechanics, the latter being TEST’s favorite “why PAPI hasn’t won yet” hobby horse.

Faced with the stalemate, Noraus says that there are two paths forward.  They either have to go all out to destroy the Imperium regardless of the costs or they have to somehow break up the blue donut that is PAPI to foster null sec content while maintaining the containment of the Imperium in Delve.

The goal is to end the war in 60 days.  The announcement about which path they will take comes on the 24th.

I want to say that, to actually end the war, they have to go with the former.  They have to go all out and attack the Imperium and evict us from 1DQ.  There is no undisputed victory without that.  Fail that and the Imperium will never let anybody forget that all of null sec blued up and couldn’t take us down.

So it has to be an all out attack, right?  Why bother if it isn’t going to be an immediate all hands onslaught?  Nothing else wins the war in 60 days.  They have to be going on the offensive.

Maybe?  Maybe not.  Winning the war and ending the war in 60 days could be two different paths completely.

PAPI has been reluctant to commit to a big fight since the battles at M2-XFE more than six months ago.  They have been careful, using their numbers to squeeze us down to the last constellation in Delve, since which their progress has been stymied.

O-EIMK Constellation – The situation since mid April

Given this hesitance and the regular reference to game mechanics and servers favoring the Imperium, it is kind of a hard sell that PAPI has suddenly decided to go all-in on taking 1DQ.  Certainly this past weekend they demonstrated levels of torpor in the face of Imperium actions we had not previously seen as we ran around their staging system setting timers, then sent in a salvage fleet uncontested to clean up the battlefield.

And Fraternity itself has reportedly withdrawn its capital fleet from T5ZI already.  Not that they could not return, but that says something about their level of commitment to taking 1DQ.  Then again, Fraternity has used the war to expand its holdings and enrich itself in the northeast of null sec, so their level of commitment seems very much related to their own interests.

But breaking up PAPI in any serious way means disaster for TEST and some of its Legacy allies.  If Pandemic Horde leaves, PAPI’s conquest is over and the Imperium will retake Delve.

Perhaps this means a reduced PAPI with some of the alliances leaving the war.  I suspect FI.RE in the southeast and Fraternity will pull out along with some of the smaller alliances that were tagging along.  But PAPI has to keep a critical mass of player… Legacy and PanFam… to have any hope of keeping Goons from rolling back into their old holdings.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out on Saturday that the big announcement is that PAPI will no longer be however many alliances they have left in the war.

Adding to that is the next item on the agenda for the Fraternity meeting, the TTC.

The Tranquility Trading Tower, the trade hub located in Perimeter, one jump over from Jita, controlled by the Tranquility Trading Consortium which is run by TEST, Pandemic Horde, and the Imperium.

The continued existence of the TTC, which sends trillions of ISK to the three partners over the course of a year, in the midst of a war where one of the partners joined the other to exterminate the third has raise questions.  There were one or two threads a week about it on Reddit for quite a stretch.  There was a point when Snuffed Out threatened that Keepstar, after destroying the low sec TTC Keepstar, where it looked like we might be at war in Delve and fighting shoulder to shoulder with TEST and PH in high sec in order to preserve the status quo in Perimeter.

The existence of the TTC has been used to suggest that the war is fake, but it is really a matter that all three partners know that one of them could make the situation untenable and they would all rather collect the ISK than fight the war in high sec.

Fraternity is not happy with the TTC because they feel they deserve a cut.  Their move from the drone regions into Vale of the Silent and Geminate was in part motivated by a desire to set up a competing marketplace under cover of their own forces.

So they have set up a Keepstar in Oijanen, which is in The Forge region, so checking region-wide market orders from Jita will show items listed there as well as those listed in Perimeter.

While there is a skill limit on setting up sell orders remotely (Marketing V lets you do so region-wide) buying is available region-wide by default, and for things like PLEX or Skill Injectors, which can be dealt with remotely (and which make up much of the Perimeter trade), means that Fraternity will be setup to compete with the TTC.  Their Keepstar being two jumps into low sec is mitigated somewhat by it being one gate from null sec and one of their home regions, so it can be defended.

What does all of that mean?

I’ve said a number of times over the past year that Fraternity has used the war to expand its own power while its allies were committed to attacking the Imperium.  The MER shows them amassing wealth every month and the sovereignty map has shown their expansion.  Now Fraternity is set to assail the golden goose of the TTC, pitting them against TEST and Pandemic Horde.

I think, at a minimum, it means that Fraternity will be stepping back from the war… stepping back more so, since their level of commitment had be fairly low.  Maybe if there is a last big offensive they will contribute some, but they have been hanging around the exit for a while now.

Barring any sudden PAPI military victory, the question becomes what happens when the third largest null sec alliance assails the combined income stream of the first, second, and fourth largest null sec alliances?  Does ISK trump war?  Do TEST and PH stick with the Imperium as a partner or do they kick Goons and maybe invite Fraternity into the agreement to keep a cartel going?

There is no possible peace with PAPI in T5ZI.  There is absolutely no peace with TEST in Delve.    There is likely no peace with TEST anywhere close to the Imperium.  Can the warring factions find a compromise?  Can the war end in 60 days?  Is Fraternity going to be the big winner of World War Bee?  Does the war conclude with Fraternity becoming what PAPI alleged the Imperium was threatening to become?

We’ll have to wait and see what gets announced on Saturday.

(The final topic in the meeting was related to the reserve bank keys that will go live next Tuesday.  As rumors suggested, they are nationalizing the output from a couple of regions for the alliance and encouraging their members to go steal from other people.)

Robbing Some Space Banks

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I mentioned in Tuesday’s post the introduction of the newly revised and now mandatory Encounter Surveillance System that was foisted on null sec with this months update.  There was a whole dev blog about it if you want to read up on it.

To me the whole thing seemed silly in that familiar way when CCP introduces a contrived mechanic and their expectations as to our behavior appear unrealistic.

To put it simply, when you rat in null sec now about a third of your bounty payments go into the ESS “bank.”  The ESS runs on a cycle where it will pay that out every three hours.  The timer is for everybody, so if you just missed it you’re waiting the whole time (though you do not have to be logged on to get paid), and if your tick hits just before it pays out, you get paid right away.

The ESS bank is in deadspace behind an acceleration gate, so you can warp directly to it, and inside of a warp disruption bubble that keeps people from warping or cloaking and from using MWDs or MJDs.  You also cannot light a cyno or set off a filament.  Afterburners are okay, and once you are out of the bubble, which is 75km in diameter and centered on the bank, you can warp off.

Also, the acceleration gate will only let in cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships, which narrows down the options and keeps little fast things from zipping in to do the steal.

I have already seen people working on min/max ideas for both defending and attacking the ESS bank.  This what players in EVE Online do, and some winning tactic will emerge soon enough and CCP will either make changes that will simply start the search over again or ignore it an that is the way things will be.

Since I don’t really rat, I can sit on the outside and admire the solutions players craft, and I was treated to a trial run Wednesday night.  Asher pinged out to Reavers that he wanted to go out and try stealing some ESS bank loot.  I was down with that, as I wanted to see how the whole thing really worked.

He had some fits for us to buy and use and the plan was to use a Needljack Signal filament to yeet us into hostile space… which is pretty much all out null sec for us these days… so we could go find some banks to rob.  We undocked, grouped up on Asher, and off we went.

Y is for “Yeet!”

We ended up out in Tenerifis, Legacy Coalition territory.  There we had to go find a bank worth robbing.

In what I consider a great injustice, the search function for finding ESS banks is in The Agency, and interface not commonly used out in null sec.  It is like CCP was trying to hide it from us.  Fortunately we had Dawn Rhea with us, who actually does some high sec stuff that uses The Agency, so she was able to search for some close by banks while some of us were still figuring out where to find this functionality.

The Agency -> Encounters -> Electronic Surveillance System

That will give you some details and you can narrow your search using several parameters.

Dawn had a system for us, so off we went to get it.

Flying through Tenerifis

Every system in null sec now has a little bit of the UI devoted to the ESS.

all about the bank

Near the top you can see the bounty risk modifier, which is part of the Dynamic Bounties feature also introduced on Tuesday,  At the bottom is the ESS info, which shows you how much money is in the bank.  The aqua colored bar is a visual indicator as to how long before the next payout is due.  When it fills up, it is payout time.

The location of the ESS acceleration gate shows up on your overview if you have beacons set to show.  Likewise, the acceleration gate is just another of a class already around, so no new adjustments need be made.

Overview viewed

You just warp to the beacon, take the acceleration gate, and you’re sent into the big bubble around the ESS.  That, however, is a new item that you will need to add to your overview.

The bank revealed

Once you spot it, somebody has to get within 10km of it.  Then you can right click on it… or on its icon in the overview if you have added it there… and select the Access ESS option.  From there you get the ESS window, which shows you the details.

Somebody is robbing the bank

The main bank is what you can rob.   The reserve bank has yet to be made accessible by CCP.

In that window you click on the “Link” button… why link?  I don’t know.  CCP being CCP… and that starts the theft.  You then have to wait for a five minute timer before you get the loot.  If you’re not the one doing the stealing, you get that nice, small red count down bar.

When it starts, the system owners and anybody in the system gets an alert pop up that the bank is being robbed.

We’re stealing, not intruding

Up on the main UI the attempted theft is note, indicating who is doing the stealing.

Theft in progress

In our case Merkelchen, head of KarmaFleet and CSM member, was our test case.

You will note that the ESS interfaces indicates that the bank is 70% “convertable.”  That means, in robbing the bank, you only get 70% of the value of what is in the bank.  Furthermore, it is paid out in bonds of specific denominations that need to be taken to CONCORD stations to redeem.

We had 18 people in the fleet to do the robbing, which meant that the locals in Tenerifis, who were few and far between, let us get away without our theft.

After a couple of runs there we used another filament which sent us up north.  We rolled into Vale of the Silent and robbed some more banks.  I took a turn at a smaller total that appeared in a bank we had just looted just to try it out.  I got to see the UI timer you get when you’re the one doing it.

Now I am the robber

The main difference is that as the one doing the intrusion you get a larger time that isn’t red.  I kind of like the small red one better, but whatever.  I also got my name up in the UI.

The big score

A ratting tick hit while I was waiting on the timer, so the total went up to 8 million ISK before it was done, boosting my haul.

Bank successfully robbed!

I was in the system alone with five ratters and nobody came to get me.

The bonds come in standard denominations (you can see them on the market if you search for “bond”) that add up to the amount you’ve stolen.

New Eden bearer bonds

five 1 million bounty bonds, six 100K bounty bonds, and three 10K bounty bonds will get me 5.63 million ISK when I go turn them in.

After getting the easy bits in Vale, we used another filament to jump to another area.  Over time we jumped about, ending up in Omist, Malpais, and The Kalevala Expanse, and finally Oasa.

It wasn’t until we got to Oasa that the locals really began to get feisty.  We had a couple of supercarriers on a gate and a Sabre bubble us, but Oasa was where the real fun began.

You might recognize Oasa from the Monthly Economic Report.  It is the home of Fraternity and is the crab capital of New Eden currently, topping the charts for bounties and null sec mining.  They are serious about their ISK and the did not like us showing up in their space.  On starting to rob a bank there with 357 million ISK, they started jumping right in with us.

Locals came to fight

Our fleet had numbers, but not enough firepower to burn down a couple of marauders.

We got out of the bubble and ran off to another nearby system where the bank had 120 million ISK and was very close to payout.  We started the robbery and setup to pop anybody who warped in prematurely.

There was less than five minutes on the clock for payout, but we found that if you’re in the middle of a robbery, the payout is suspended.  You can start an intrusion with fewer than five minutes on the clock.

The bank has a hold on that payment

We managed to blow up a couple of eager pilots, including a Cynabal that came for us, but the locals quickly piled on.  We lost a couple of ships on the way out, including Asher, at which point Tom Flood took over.  We ran from the locals for a few gates, heading towards Venal, waiting for our timers to run down so we can use another filament.

We had been out for a while at that point, and had said that any filament that got us close to home would be the end of the op, but they kept pulling us deeper and deeper into hostile space.  This last filament was no exception.

The filament lined us up on landing

There was, however, a Thera wormhole not too far from where we were.  We flew to that and jumped through just as it collapsed of old age.  Most of us docked up in Thera to call it a night.

The next day the EVE Scout site said there was a wormhole from Thera straight to Delve, so I took that using their shared bookmark library in-game and was safely back in 1DQ1-A in almost no time.  I am not very adept with wormholes, but EVE Scout makes it easy.

Home with my bonds, I realized I probably should have first taken one of the wormholes to high sec and dropped off the bonds for an alt to pick up, but I am not sure I’ll miss that big 5.6 million ISK payout.

But now I can said I’ve robbed a bank in EVE Online.  I’m not sure if that is the way it works in GTA V, but it can still lead to a bit of conflict… up until somebody figured out how to defend the ESS with smart bombing battleships or rail tengus or something else that will pop people coming in to steal.