Reavers Gnosis Racing

As happens, every so often Ranger Gama sets up another race event for Reavers.  The last one had us flying around in Drakes back at the end of December.  This time around the Gnosis, the Society of Conscious Thought battlecruiser, was the hull of choice.  We gathered together at 02:00 EVE Online time and Ranger Gama handed us the ships for the race.

Gnosis with the Icecloud Investigator SKIN

The Gnosis is a bit of an odd bird, one of the rare faction battlecruisers… I think it was the sole such example until we got the Triglavian Drekavac recently… along with having very low skill requirements to fly as well as bonuses to which ever weapon system you prefer to mount.  Rails, projectiles, beams, missiles, and drones all get a boost on this hull.

Of course, for a Reavers race the fit is always part of the equation, though weapon systems rarely come into play.  We got our ships and found the usual odd set of modules.

Mix of all sorts of modules

For those who want the details, here is the EFT block:

[Gnosis, Reavers Race]
Damage Control I
Reinforced Bulkheads I
Nanofiber Internal Structure I
Inertial Stabilizers I
Overdrive Injector System I
Warp Core Stabilizer I

Medium Micro Jump Drive
10MN Afterburner I
50MN Microwarpdrive I
Cargo Scanner I
Ship Scanner I
Survey Scanner I

Miner I
Salvager I
Small Tractor Beam I
Festival Launcher
Cynosural Field Generator I
Core Probe Launcher I

Medium Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer I
Medium Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer I
Medium Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer I

Mining Drone I x1
Light Armor Maintenance Bot I x1
Light Shield Maintenance Bot I x1
Salvage Drone I x1
Light Hull Maintenance Bot I x1

Liquid Ozone x249
Core Scanner Probe I x8
Sodium Firework x100
Barium Firework x100
Copper Firework x100
Mobile Medium Warp Disruptor I

There was also an Ironblood SKIN in each so people could spiff up their ship.  I already had that SKIN.  In fact, I was a bit surprised to find I had four SKINs for the Gnosis already.  I am not sure I’ve ever bothered to fly one, other than to undock one back in the day just to see it in space.

Fireworks are the usual fit.  A miner, a tractor beam, and a salvager are not unheard of.  The cyno was an interesting touch, though in the cargo we found ourselves one unit of Liquid Ozone shy of being able to light it off, so nobody would be coming to our rescue that way.  And we had probes.  I guess we could wormhole our way home if we survived.  The Gnosis gets a bonus to probe strength as well.

There was also a medium warp bubble in the cargo.  Those are fun at parties, though I wasn’t sure how one would fit into the race.  Theoretically, if you could get far enough ahead, you could drop one to annoy the people behind you.  But they take 240 seconds to deploy and if you’re that far ahead you might as well just carry on flying.

Otherwise the ship was at least fit for speed.  The hyperspatial rigs meant we would be warping fast for a battlecruiser.

The rules for the event were the usual; only standard star gates allowed.  No Ansiblex jumps, no titan bridges, and no wormholes.  The payout for the winners was set as:

• 1st Place:  50% of the pool
• 2nd Place:  30% of the pool
• 3rd Place:  15% of the pool
• POD:  5% of the pool
• Harlyq Prize: Something special

The Harlyq prize, named after a Reaver for reasons I’ve no forgotten, required you to stop and mine 500 units of Scordite along the way and have that in your hold at the finish line.

Unfortunately, the timing for the race was not optimal.  It was Saturday night before Easter, the second day of Passover, and a Liberty Squad op had just formed up minutes before the race ping… and there is a lot of overlap between Liberty Squad and Reavers, so much so that the two groups pretty much cannot run fleets at the same time… so that turn out for the race was pretty low.  There were just five of us.

Still, we were game.  We all had our ships in 1DQ1-A in Delve and were ready to go.   Ranger Gama had us undock then warped us to a celestial while updating the message of the day with the route.  When we landed, we were off and running.

Gnosis Race is On

The route was essentially the same as the last one, landing us in HED-GP, a location which usually has somebody camping it.

Race Route

As tends to happen, with all things being equal, the person with the best connection to the data center starts to pull ahead as they transition through gates faster.  As it so happened Zarakik is close to the London data center and, when we all announced our client latency, was showing an easy 10ms advantage over the next person on the list, hitting 6ms to 16ms or more for those of us in the US.

Somebody did a long post at one point about the dynamics of EVE Online and specifically how to be that person who always gets the kill at a gate camp, the summary of which was “be close to the London data center.”  Same thing here.

We could see Zarakik gaining a lead with every gate.  Our only real hope was for him to go AFK for a bit or to run into a gate camp ahead of us.  And the former wasn’t going to help me much.  Being on the west coast of the US I was the furthest from the data center and was falling behind everybody ever so slightly, so I would still be in last place if I just did gated and warped with the rest of them.

Destined for last place if nothing got in our way, I decided to stop and mine so at least to get the Harlyq prize.  The problem was just finding some Scordite out in null sec.  That doesn’t spawn in mining anomalies, or so I observed, so I had to start warping to belts to find some.  Eventually I spotted an asteroid in a belt without rats and ran a cycle that got me what I needed.

Gnosis mining

That accomplished, I was way behind the pack.  My main hope was that they would hit a gate camp.  They were far enough ahead of me that I would hear about it long before I got there.  But I decided to hedge my bet and pick a route to get to HED-GP via another route.  So I looked for a waypoint on DOTLAN that would get me around the straight path.  It would take me longer, but last race the winner was the person who did not run the shortest path.

My proposed alternate route

So I set 4-07MU as my destination and started taking gates.

After a bit I started to suspect I might have made an error as I noted along the way some of the things the people ahead of me had mentioned.  I then realized that I had simply made 4-07MU my destination and that the shortest path there was to go through HED-GP and back around through Querious.  Navigational error on my part.

But it did not matter.  As it turned out nobody was camping anything along the route.  TEST and its allies have a campaign of their own going on in the east and were probably all deployed out there.  So the five of us just flew through their space, all arriving in HED-GP unscathed, without much of a scare.  I think somebody saw an Onyx along the way, but it didn’t come after us or anything.

Throwing fireworks at Ranger Gama

The results were:

• 1st Place:  Zarakik
• 2nd Place:  Ranger Gama
• 3rd Place:  Hoff Talvanen
• Harlyq Prize:  Wilhelm Arcturus

Then there was the question of what to do when you don’t lose any ships.  Ranger Gama did not want them back.  I flew mine back to 1DQ1-A through Querious, half hoping to get caught along the way.

Gnosis on the way home

The main highlight on that trip was discovering that SpaceMonkeys Alliance was a thing again and part of the Querious Fight Club.  I had not heard much about them since they collapsed from exhaustion during the Casino War. (They helped start the whole thing, or so the story goes, and were fighting for months before it became the big conflict it ended up as.)

The SMA logo above a gate

I arrived back in Delve intact, missing only the mobile war disruptor, which I dropped along the way during the race.  I aligned for a gate at one point, triggered my micro jump drive to put me 100km off the gate, and set it to deploy.  I figured that would annoy somebody.  And somebody did take the time to kill it.  Ranger Gama also dropped his and it was popped by a couple of the same people.  Zarakik dropped his in TEST space where it got solo’d.  EVEBruceL and Hoff Talvanen either didn’t drop theirs or dropped them some place where they simply expired before anybody felt like shooting them.

The final aspect of the race was to find out what the Harlyq prize would be.  “Something special” covers a lot of ground.  But later that evening a contract popped up from Ranger Gama.  I figured out what he did with the spare Gnosis hulls he had.

Some Gnosis hulls for me

They were all set up as mining ships, with cargo expanders in the low slots and mining lasers in the high slots.

Mine my own business

I doubt I am going to mining in them.  I’ll have to find a decent PvP fit and take them out to get blown up… once I’ve insured them.

Of course, we’re back to what to fit.  The Gnosis works with so many weapon systems.  Maybe lasers.  At least those are pretty.

A Venture to HED-GP

Ranger Gama was back again with another frigate race for Reavers.  You may (but most likely do not) recall the race I wrote about back in December that had us racing Daredevils about the north.  That was enough fun that Ranger has made it a semi-regular thing in Reavers.  There was a second race a few months back that I missed, but I was around this weekend for the third one.

As has been the case in the past, Ranger Gama wouldn’t tell us where we would be headed in advance, nor what we would be flying, aside from the fact that he figured some of us might need to train up the skill.

That prompted me to see if there was any frigate that I could not fly.  Aside from the new Triglavian frigate, the Damavik, I seemed to be covered.  But if I had had to guess, I would have said the Venture was a likely candidate, being a mining frigate.  And, sure enough, when the time came Ranger Gama had some specially fit Ventures for us.

A Venture waiting to race

Ranger only had a few to hand out, so only the first 9 people who joined fleet were going to get one, which led to me hitting refresh on the fleet finder until his fleet advert popped up, at which point I joined (followed shortly by a couple other people) before the ping for the fleet was even sent out.  The fleet had to be disbanded until the ping, at which point people piled back in.

There were more people than frigates, but the fit was simple and cheap, so a couple people were allowed to buy their own in order to join.  As you can see from my eventual kill mail (we’ll get to that) it just fit a pair of mining lasers, a festival launcher, an MWD, an AB, a survey scanner, and a Nanofiber in the low slot.  We did get rigs to let us warp faster, so at least we had some speed.

There were questions about what we were allowed to do.  Not allowed was changing the fit.  Everybody had to race with the fit provided, though a couple of people felt that meant they could add some drones.  But otherwise people were allowed to run with implants if they so desired and take any route or mode or transportation they wished, so long as they stayed in their Venture.  We were then given the route and were sent on our way.

The race route

We started in 1DQ1-A, the capital of the Imperium, and our first waypoint was HY-RWO in Catch.  Most people headed straight down the most direct path, but four of us, myself included, got out GARPA to check the local jump bridge network, and turned the other direction to catch a jump bridge that shaved nearly a dozen gates off the route.  That put the four of us, Sicarius Bile, Grodd Gandar, Zarakik, and myself, way out in front of the pack.  In that group of four I was the second through the jump bridge.

The gate route, all 52 jumps

Part of the idea of the race is that hostiles along the way will cause trouble for the leaders who may (or may not) choose to share intel on what is happening.  However, Saturday night in Catch seemed to be pretty quiet.  TEST and their allies in the Legacy Coalition were not out roaming their space along our route, so the four of use made it to U-QVWD without incident.

Sicarius Bile got there first, and I jumped into the system just after.  I waited until he said he was on the TEST Keepstar in the system before warping to him and then moving off to pull distance while staying on grid.  Since grids… what is essentially the local bit of space where you can see other players and structures… are pretty huge now thanks to citadels, there is a lot of room to work with.

Nobody came out to molest us however.  I did see that there were a couple of player corpses on the undock of the Keepstar, which I suggested ought to fetch a prize bonus if collected (which somebody then did, because of course they would) but otherwise not much happened.

On grid with the Keepstar in my Venture

As we were winding down our five minutes on the Keepstar those who did not take the jump bridge began to arrive.  Asher seemed to be at the back of the pack, but unperturbed, with a calm in his voice, which made people suspect that he had a plan.

Then the early four headed out for the loop around TEST space.  During that run the lineup of the first four changed as Zarakik passed me.  I suspect that he might have opted for the warp speed implants.  But later he said that he was physically close to the London data center where the EVE Online servers are, giving him a consistent 7ms ping, which basically allowed him to load system faster than I could, eight time zones away from London, allowing him a small but tangible head start through each gate.

We started arriving back at the Keepstar for our second five minute stay on grid just as the last of the second group was leaving after their first.  Somebody in the second group tried to use the drones they packed to thin out the pack, but that did not work out.

I made a bookmark on the first stay so was able to warp straight in and start my five minute timer.  Again, there was little to remark on during our stay.  An interceptor undocked, but didn’t seem to have any use for us.  We speculated what they might be saying on their intel channel about a small gang of mining frigates hanging out around their Keepstar, but whatever it was, nobody came to get us.

So after our five minutes elapsed, we headed out for the final waypoint, Sicarius Bile in the lead, Zarakik next, and myself and Grodd Gandar close behind, smug with the distance of our lead.

And then we all died in SV5-8N, just one gate shy of the finish line.  Brave had a gate camp with drag bubbles up on the HED-GP gate.  Sicarius Bile died first and told us about the gate camp.  Then we proceeded to pile on and die, one by one, until eight of us were down.

Who is missing a jacket?

We didn’t all just bumble in with a direct warp.  I, like most of the later group, tried to find a bounce point which might bring me in behind the camp and let me get to the gate without getting caught.  But they had four drag bubbles up arrayed about the gate so that there was no joy on that front.

That left Asher Elias, Locke Erasmus, Elisha Okaski, and Boris Agnon (who got away in his pod) still in the race.  Back in 1DQ1-A I asked if I refit a Venture if I could just race to HED-GP, but the ruling came back that I would need run the whole route again for it to count.  Given that the alternate route to HED-GP was another 34 gates, I didn’t think it was worth the effort.

It got quiet on coms as those left considered their options.  A long diversion from the easy path seemed to be the choice.  And then Asher called out that he had made it, long before he could have run the full way around.

He told us that he looked at the killmails that we had linked and started convo’ing the FC of the gate camp to bribe him to be let through.  As it turned out the FC just wanted Asher to bring a fight, and since Saturday Night Swarm was starting in HED-GP in just a bit… that was why it was the end point of the race… he was able to offer that up.  So they let him through and he won.

We asked what other plans he might of had, since he seemed to linger behind as the race started, so there was speculation that he might have been looking for an opportune wormhole to get an edge.  However, it came out that he convo’d TEST (and former GSF) FC Vily to ask him to set Asher blue to TEST so he could use TEST jump bridges.  Vily told him he couldn’t do that himself, but would try to find somebody who could.  It looked like Vily was good to his word and actually did get Asher set blue, but nobody got back to Asher so he ended up not using the jump bridge network.

Then after a time, Locke and Elisha made it to HED-GP via the long route and we had out winner.  The prize pool of 1.5 billion ISK was divided up, with 50% slated for the winner, 30% for second place, 15% for third, and 5% set aside for the first person to arrive in a pod.  Those finishing the race were:

1. Asher Elias
2. Locke Erasmus
3. Elisha Okaski

Boris Agnon opted not to take the long way around in his pod, so the 5% for that was rolled over into the prize pool for the next race, along with Elisha’s prize money at his insistence.

And so the third Reavers frigate race ended, with most of us dying quickly at the gate camp in SV5-8N.  Brave popped me so fast I did not have a chance to launch fireworks at them.  Somebody had enough time to grab a direction scan of the camp, but that was about it.

What was waiting on the gate?

Despite not getting a prize I ended up 103,545.20 ISK ahead for the evening, that being the payout for losing an uninsured Venture.  I went with a clean pod, so losing that cost me nothing.

There was some talk as to what else we could have done with the race.  Since we were in mining frigates it was suggested that filling our ore holds ought to be a requirement… something Locke said he did anyway… but as not everybody had mining skills (the advent of skill extractors meant a lot of combat pilots ripped out the mining skills they trained as newbies back in the day) that was set aside.

Ranger Gama has promised to hold another race in the future.  We will have to see how that plays out and what surprises he comes up with.

A Structure Fight in Catch

I could have had another EVE Online post yesterday, but I thought I would break up my seven post streak.

Tuesday afternoon a ping had gone out to Reavers asking who had ship ready for a new doctrine.  It turned out we had enough people ready and a ping went out for a “short” op that evening.  It was time to get out our Sleipnir doctrine.

Sleipnir riding through a fleet boost burst

The word “short” used in reference to a fleet op in EVE Online is generally deceptive.  There can be short ops, especially if they are homeland defense ops where you are chasing off enemies already near your staging.  But for an offensive operation where you are going to travel somewhere and shoot something or somebody, you should probably block out three hours for the whole thing.  It might take less, but these things have a way of stretching out.

For our op, getting close to our destination was easy as Thomas Lear had a wormhole connection setup for us.  As somebody noted, we were playing at PL, flying a command ship doctrine and traveling by wormholes.  Our destination was the system E-YJ8G in the Catch region, where we were going to help Volition Cult take down an Astrahus that Honorable Third Party had anchored in their space. (We crashed a node in that system about three years ago, back during the drone assist days!)

With the wormhole path, which started just one jump from our staging, the ride out was quick.  However, the wormholes shrank as we went through, indicating that they might not be able to accommodate us for the return trip.  But there is no point in worrying about that on the trip out.  The whole thing might be a trap so we could be going home the fast way in any case.

When we got there we found an Astrahus already under fire from our temporary allies in the fight and a POS with carriers and faxes in it on the same grid, though about 900km off the citadel.  The capital ships were sitting off in the POS with fighters deployed, and were the juicer target.  So Thomas led us to the POS to see if we could catch a capital kill.

Our foes in HTP were no fools, as their carriers and support were close to the POS shields.  In order to get a kill we were going to have to bump one of the carriers away from the shields and fax support.  That takes a bit of skill, a department in which we proved lacking for a bit.  We failed on a Nyx and a couple more before we managed to get a Nidhoggur away from the pack.

Nidhoggur out on its own

We managed to kill that, which gave us a warm feeling, until we realized that we had lost a couple of Sleipners along the way.  Sleips are expensive ships and we don’t have to lose too many in order to balance out the ISK value of a carrier.

We took a run at another target, but it didn’t look like it was going to happen, so Thomas had us pull range on the POS and we contented ourselves with killing their fighters.  That was what we ended up doing for a stretch.

We warped over to the Astrahus and put drones on that to keep it ticking down to destruction, then continued working on fighters.  We did warp back to try and get another carrier that looked like it was straying from the POS bubble, but that did not pan out.  Then it was back to work on fighters and the Astrahus kill.

All in all a decent little fight which yielded a “we all had fun” thread on Reddit which seemed to have gotten ignore by the usual hate crowd.  Or maybe I’ve just blocked all the Rob Kaichin’s there finally.  The battle report is a little wonky… fighters get counted as kills, but only if you take out a whole squadron of them… but it was generally a pretty even outcome and both sides got to kill a few expensive thinks without taking huge relative losses.

Null sec working as designed.

Of course, then we had to go home.

Thomas said that anybody who cared to could zip back to the wormhole, but it was not at all clear if it would stay up long enough to allow the whole fleet to pass, even with some losses, so he was going to lead people home the long way.  He had us set our destination to Keberz and let us off the leash to free burn.  I must have heard him first because when the fleet got tangled with some locals in ERVK-P, I was already at the gate two jumps down the road.  After some “stay where you are” and “jump back in” over coms, I decided to just wander on down the line, stopping in HED-GP.

HED-GP is one of those border system, this one representing a direct transition from high sec to null sec, which are natural choke points if you want to set up a gate camp to zap passers by.  The system, as expected, had a small crowd. (It is also another place where we killed a server in the drone assist days.)  After trying to bounce off of a celestial… no corp tactical bookmarks in the system… and finding that blocked by a drag bubble, I warped off and safed up to wait for the fleet to catch up.

I wasn’t really watching local… I tend to have it as narrow as possible so I can just see a total number and a compact list of names… so I didn’t notice that the people in the system were asking after me.  I eventually got two private convo request from what turned out to be the tow groups squaring off around the gate.

One was from MIC Improvise, who was with the group who had just been at the Astrahus fight earlier and who kindly gave me a celestial to bounce off to get cleanly through the gate.  I assume it was legit, though you never know, and our temp truce for the fight was over.  But the fleet had unstuck itself from whatever it had been doing back in ERVK-P and was closing in on the system, so I opted just to move with them.

The other was from Madmatt Otsito, a local give his corp name (HED Hunters) who seemed to want me to join up with his group to fight the other group around the gate.  I think.  Voice coms were busy.  I let him know that the gate would probably be hot in a bit as a couple dozen more Sleipners were on their way.

The I warped to our in gate in HED-GP and rejoined the fleet as they jumped into the system.  I am sure everybody could see local more than double and when we warped to a perch over the Keberz gate, most of the people on grid thought it was about the right time to get the hell out of the way and warped.  As we landed on the gate, somebody called a Harpy that was in range and that got quickly blapped.  Then somebody pointed out that there was a Cormorant at the extreme edge of lock range.  I happened to already have long range ammo loaded, so I locked him up and took a shot.

And that is how I got on Madmatt Otsito’s kill mail.  Ah well.  I didn’t even hit him, but I had projectiles down range for him.

From there we were off to Queious and the route back to Delve and the jump bridge network.  The route was quiet so aside from a side trip to kill an ESS, we made our way back to staging and called it a night.  Another small op, no tidi, no drama, just a good clean fight.

Some screen shots from the op:

Sleipnirs around the POS

Sleipnir riding through a fleet boost burst

Nidhoggur out on its own

Nidhoggur on fire

And it explodes

The Astrahus brewing up

And it blows up as well

B-R5RB and the Death of Drone Assist

Or how I will end up  pressing F1 again.

Drone assist is going to be brought down to size by CCP in a somewhat blunt force sort of way.

But this is a good thing… at least in my opinion.

I have mentioned drone assist in passing before.  I even predicted the nerfing of drone assist in my 2014 predictions post, though that was an easy one. (Though I am still only partially correct at this point.)  But I figured it might be time to talk about what drone assist really is and why nerfing it might be a good thing, as well as why CCP waited until now to announce they were going to do it.

Drone assist first showed up on my radar back in the Fountain war as part of TEST’s “we can’t seem to stop being poor, so no more expensive ships” Prophecy fleet doctrine.  They tried to use it at G95F-H and had little success.  But it was clearly a coming doctrine.

So what is drone assist?  For the purpose of illustration, I will describe what I have experienced.

After the war in Fountain, when drone assist was making its self felt, CFC high command declared that the feature was over-powered and that we would prove it by abusing the feature until CCP fixed it.  We docked up our Baltec Fleet Megathrons and bought new ships for two new drone doctrines, Prophecy fleet and Dominix fleet.

As far as I can tell, my investing in a Prophecy was a waste of ISK.  I have never undocked it. (Same with the promised “non-ironic” Ferox I bought.  I suspect now that the Ferox doctrine was just a troll to unload some excess hulls.)  But Dominix fleets became quite the thing and I flew with the great green space potatoes on several occasions, tearing up a hostile fleet now and again.

Dominix fleet ahoy

Here is how a Dominix fleet operation plays out.

We moved to our destination.  The FC warps us around until he finds a good spot for us.  When he is satisfied, he calls for the fleet to stop in space and deploy the drone indicated.  For Dominix fleet, this means either Bouncer II or Garde II sentry drones.  Everybody then assigns their drones to the designated person, usually the FC.  And then we all sit around while the FC kills stuff, getting on kill mails via our assigned drones.

The fleet generally sits idle, though the doctrine has energy neutralizers fitted on each Domi, so sometimes we fly into range to use those.  That was what we were doing at B-R5RB.  (In fact, that was all we were doing in B-R5RB.  Drones were veboten.) But usually we just sit.

We just sit because sentry drones are special.  They are long range sniping drones with negligible mobility.  They have enough motion to get back to your ship, but only if you haven’t strayed very far.  So unless we want to abandon the drones… which we do when the situation calls for it… we just sit on them while the FC does his thing.  No pressing F1.  No aligning.  No nothing.

A Domi and a pair of Garde sentry drones

What the FC does is target hostiles.

Every time the FC targets a hostile, all of the sentry drones assigned to him align and shoot at the target in mass volleys of firepower.  In a Dominix fleet with 150 Domis along and on station, which is a good but not great fleet turn out, that means a potential 750 drones acting on the FC’s command and putting out something like 250K hit points worth of damage with each volley.

That is enough damage to sweep battleships and battlecruisers off the field with a single volley, and sufficient to worry any capital ship pilot that doesn’t have logistic repair support.

This is, of course, any fleet commander’s ideal situation.  It is what we always try to achieve in any fleet doctrine, the focus of fire by the whole fleet on a single target in order to blow it out of the sky.

But with guns or missiles, human factors make this concentration of fire difficult.  People have to be in position, have to lock up the designated target, and have to fire all of their guns or launchers at that target when the FC says to.  But people won’t see the target, or will be out of range, or will have the wrong ammo loaded, or will split their guns and shoot multiple targets, or will just be slow in performing even if they do everything correctly.

So damage output from a standard gun or missile doctrine ships tends to look like a bell curve, with more and more guns getting on target over time until the maximum amount of damage is being put on the hostile ship.  This gives the hostile fair warning.  He will see a bunch of ships in his overview locking him up.  He will see damage start to build.  If he is on the ball and has decent logistics support, he will have to time to call for reps and will have a decent change of survival.

With drone assist, damage comes on like a wall with all drones firing as one for all practical purposes and, with only one person targeting, any warning of the incoming pain likely lost in the clutter of the overview.

This advantage made drone assist fleets the way to go.  The CFC did it, and our enemies in the south, N3 and Pandemic Legion did it as well.

In fact, our foes were using the feature much more effectively than we were.  Their slow-cat carrier fleets, with a spider-web of self supporting armor reps and remote capacitor boosting, and a mass of drones on drone assist, were pretty much unassailable by sub-caps.  Some changes to Domi fleet went through to try and counter this, as well as a push towards dreadnoughts, but the only way to break the slow-cat doctrine was with super captials, super carriers and titans.  And our foes held the advantage on that front.

So CCP had a problem.

First there was the effect drone assist had on combat, with the perfect FC alpha attacks by obedient drones while most of the players sat about waiting for orders.

And then there was the load problem.

HED-GP keeps getting better and better, 3800 pilots, over 1000 capitals and over 11,500 drones #eveonline #tweetfleet

— Chribba (@chribba) January 18, 2014

For purposes of combat, each drone is a ship, and the server running the system where the battle is running has to keep track of each and every one.  And with drone proliferation, server load went up.

Each little “X” is a drone…

And so we ended up with fights like the one at HED-GP or at E-YJ8G, where there were a lot of pilots involved and where the number of drones being launched just compounded the server load issues.  We fought the node and the node won.

I am sure CCP wanted to do something about drone assist because of the server load issue alone.  They put up a Dev Blog about HED-GP and the load caused by drones. It was clearly an issue, and the predictions seemed to favor more node crashes as the war went on.

But, for in-game political reasons, CCP could not tinker with drone assist.  While both sides were using drone assist, it was clearly working better for N3 and Pandemic Legion.  So to nerf it in the middle of the Halloween War would mean nerfing the prime effective doctrine of one faction.  That in turn would lead to very shrill cries of favoritism in the forums and elsewhere.  So CCP had to sit on their hands and hope that the nodes would hold.

Then came the titan bloodbath at B-R5RB.  (Now in infographic form.)

Wait, what?

In the wake of that, Pandemic Legion and Northern Coalition pulled out of the war, pretty much deciding the outcome.  There were battles left to be fought, but the course of events had achieved an inevitability.  The colors on the influence map would move, systems would change hands, and the war would splutter to an end.  Side agreements kept some areas untouched while the heavy weights extracted concessions from the lesser alliances.

CCP could safely announce that drone assist was being nerfed.  After the next Rubicon patch, a single pilot will be limited to having 50 drones assigned to him.  That isn’t the most elegant of solutions, being rather a “one size fits all” sort of thing that impacts carriers, which can launch more drones, than sub-caps.  But it will complicate the use of drone assist in large fleets and remove the “all drones on target” aspect of the feature.  The hope appears to be that we will all go back to other fleet doctrines.  I still have a couple Megathrons tucked away.  And there is that Ferox.

I think they could seal the deal on drone assist by changing things so that only the pilot assigned the drones gets on the kill mail.  That would cause a good deal of internal pressure in various alliances for dropping the doctrine… or at least people would stop assigning all their drones, holding some back to get on kill mails.  We do love our kill mails.

This seems like it might be enough for now.  I still fully expect to see a further run at this, with perhaps new skills that handle both the ability to assign drones and how many drones an individual pilot can can control through assignment.  Maybe we’ll see that in the fall expansion.

Of course, the fact that the war was in its denouement did not stop shrill complaints about favoritism.  This is EVE Online, where the forums will get shrill about most any issue… or non-issue.  But the comments were probably less shrill than they might have been.

So it looks like the writing might be on the wall for drone assist.  Unless/until somebody figures out a loophole to exploit.  This is EVE Online after all.

In the mean time, we will all have to pay attention in fleets once the change is in place.  Even having to stay engaged enough to target the right hostile and press F1 will be a step in the right direction for me.

The Malthusian Trap of HED-GP

I rolled over and looked at the alarm clock Saturday morning.  I had just enough time to get up, start up my computer, and get into one of the fleets headed for the battle over the timer in the system HED-GP.

Instead, I went back to sleep while something like 4,000 ships converged on that system in the Catch region.

I was tempted to go along.  I was in the staging system and I had ships ready. And I think it is pretty obvious by now that I don’t mind going on a big event like this, even if it has fiasco painted on the side in large neon letters.  But I stayed in bed while many of my comrades in arms… or foes… took up the battle cry.

HED-GP keeps getting better and better, 3800 pilots, over 1000 capitals and over 11,500 drones #eveonline #tweetfleet

— Chribba (@chribba) January 18, 2014

The fleets clashed, and the result was a system lost and a great big red spot on the recent kills map of New Eden.

The red spot in Catch

Kill charts from DOTLAN

Like many others, I watched from the outside as the battle was streamed.  Twitter was alight with updates.  And on Jabber updates and calls for pilots, first to get into the system and then to cover the extraction of capital ships, went on for 10 hours.  EVE Online did not handle the battle… gracefully.

HED-GP: 2008-era #eveonline where nothing loads properly and bloc-level fights are functionally impossible~ #tweetfleet

— ~GOON-EMPEROR OF DELVE~ (@TheMittani) January 18, 2014

Null sec blocs are in a Malthusian Trap of sorts.  The performance improvements done by CCP back in 2012 allowed fleet engagements to be bigger.  And so they got bigger as the null sec blocs engaged in their own version of the race to the sea, with each side adding allies and piling on with more ships in order to win the important fights.

Up through the war in Fountain, which culminated in the giant battle at 6VDT-H, things held together.  There were warning signs however.  CCP fumbling the node management at Z9PP-H and just the general behavior at the peak of the 6VDT-H fight indicated that we were nearing another limit.

Waiting on 6VDT-H station

But since then, big fights have pushed nodes beyond their limits.  Nodes dying, or behaving badly, have become the norm.  The null sec blocs have expanded their operations to consume whatever extra room time dilation offered.  The spirit of Malthus is no doubt laughing happily that he has been proven right yet again.

Time dilation was a good idea, but it did also contain within it the seeds of its own demise.  Yes, we can harp on about drone assist and how that has sped up the problem.  Both sides have been profligate in their use of drones and show no sign of cutting back.  But I am pretty sure that if CCP turned off all drones in the game tomorrow that it would not buy us all that much time before we started hitting the node barrier again.  Time dilation slows down the area of the fight, but allows the rest of space to solider on at normal speed, so the ability for alliances to pile on while a fight is still in progress has been greatly enhanced.

And pile on we have.

Asakai, already a year old in EVE lore, was a prime example.  The allure of getting on a titan kill mail put pilots in motion all across New Eden.  Back in November there was the Long Guy Fawkes Day, where I was in a fleet that pretty much crossed half of space to arrive in time for the fight.  And crash the node.  And we have carried on, with node crashes, or at least performance degradation to the point of the game being unplayable, becoming more common as battles become giant pile-on affairs.

And so CCP sits in the middle, having tried to make things better, but ending up with nearly the same problems they had two years back, compounded by a few new twists.  The forums seem full of people either indignant that CCP hasn’t fixed this yet or very smug because they knew this was how things had to end up.

So CCP is in a bind.  If there was an easy fix, they would have done it already.  There are a couple band-aids they could apply.

Nerfing drone assist was on many lips even before this fight.  I am not sure how much that would change things for N3, which favors capital ships in general and carriers specifically.  They will still use drones either way.

They could put population caps on systems, as they have done with Jita.  Of course, that would just lead to both sides rushing to pre-fill contested systems in advance of timers.

Or they could just tell the null sec blocs to “suck it” for now.  Null sec players aren’t any sort of majority in the game.  But then CCP loves to use those big fights and changing colors on the sovereignty map for publicity.  Your low sec gate camp, your wormhole fight, your factional warfare gains, they do not get covered by the BBC.   Big fights in null sec get coverage.  And I am sure CCP is loathe to let go of that publicity.

So I suspect CCP will spend a lot of cycles looking into the problem, which will take time and pull people away from other potential features, which in turn will make nobody happy in the short term.

Posts with actual details or observations about the battle at HED-GP:

• The Day the Server Didn’t Die – Looking at the battle
• HED-GP? More Like HED-GG – Elise Randolph’s battle report
• The Real Losers in HED-GP: CCP – A plea to fix big fights
• AAA Reaction to the loss of HED-GP – Intel from Against All Authorities
• Soul Crushing Lag – Jester’s takes on the Malthus role, laughs
• EVE Online’s Two Biggest Factions Had an Enormous Battle Yesterday – Kotaku ponders
• CCP Response to Reimbursement Petitions – Large scale engagements are taken on at your own risk
• CCP Apologizes for Server Performance at HED-GP – But what will be different next time?
• Only You Can Prevent Hamster Fires – CSM Trebor takes a stab at what CCP might change
• Sov Warfare: What Can Be Done? – More ideas for change
• HED-GP Technical Retrospective – CCP reviews what happened, blames drones