The February EVE Online Monthly Economic Report and the Build Up to War in Pure Blind

We had the Monthly Economic Report for February 2023 land the week before last… I’m only just now getting to it due to a several day power outage… and it was tempting to once again declare it to be something of a benchmark to consider before events.  In this case, the Imperium moving north to war in Pure Blind.

EVE Online nerds harder

Except, of course, that the Imperium is joining a war already in progress.  Fraternity and its WinterCo allies have been going after B3 in the north and things have advanced to the point where even CCP has taken a moment out of their usual blinkered focus on their marketing plan to note that null sec was up to something again.

The region of Pure Blind has seen a massive uptick in activity, with Winter Co, Panfam, B2, and Imperium brawling outrageous.

As the large ships clash, industrialists and traders of all sorts get ready to match the demand. #Tweetfleet #EVEOnline pic.twitter.com/qRodzHMbcJ

— EVE Online (@EveOnline) March 7, 2023

So we should go straight into destruction.

Destruction

And, after all of that, destruction overall was down in February.  You can see the blue line representing destruction trending down in the back half of the month.

Feb 2023 – Production vs Destruction vs Mined

The data for that chart shows the total value of destruction at 34.97 trillion ISK in value, down from 41.09 trillion ISK in January.

Likewise, the region stats also show about a 6 trillion drop in destruction, with the total there being 34.54 trillion ISK.  The top ten regions for destruction were:

1. The Forge – 1.67 trillion 4.82% (Caldari High Sec)
2. Pure Blind – 1.61 trillion 4.68% (B2 Coalition)
3. The Citadel – 1.52 trillion 4.40% (Caldari High Sec)
4. Vale of the Silent – 1.45 trillion 4.19% (Fraternity)
5. Fade – 1.43 trillion 4.15% (B2 Coalition)
6. Sinq Laison – 1.40 trillion 4.05% (Gallente High Sec)
7. Lonetrek – 1.38 trillion 3.99% (Caldari High Sec)
8. Delve – 1.32 trillion 3.83% (B2 Coalition)
9. Perrigen Falls – 1.23 trillion 3.56% (PanFam)
10. Metropolis – 1.08 trillion 3.12% (Minmata High Sec)

While The Forge remains on top, Pure Blind is in the second spot.  All told those ten regions made up 40.79% of the destruction in February.

So it feels like Pure Blind was indeed warming up when it came to the war, really there appeared to be less destruction elsewhere.  PB was in fifth position last month, with 1.57 trillion ISK destroyed, very close to the February value.  FI.RE and their move op disasters last month were no doubt part of what built up those numbers.

The security band chart shows null sec was still the place for destruction, though it was down by a bit.

Feb 2023 – Destruction over time by Security Band

CCP has also included a new graphic this month in an attempt to illustrate the largest battles every month.  Unfortunately, the version I can post here, the PNG graphic, is pretty useless.  It does not impart any information of value beyond something akin to a heat map.

Feb 2023 – Battles in New Eden by Participants

The HTML version has data embedded in it that gives more information and context.

A battle example from Pure Blind

But I cannot embed that in the blog because it would be too large to fit in my format and WordPress.com doesn’t allow that sort of thing in any case. (Too easy to embed trojans and such.)

However, they do provide the data for the charts.  If I get to another look at just kills in another post this month, I will draw some data from it.  I have already pulled the data into Power BI.  The main pain is that they don’t map the system IDs to their names in that table, so I have to go elsewhere to find the mapping.

Production

Meanwhile, production numbers were also off a bit, though not by as much as destruction.  The regional stats recorded 152.90 trillion ISK in production in February, off by a little less that 3 trillion, with the top ten regions being:

1. The Forge – 22.49 trillion 14.71% (Caldari High Sec)
2. Delve – 20.74 trillion 13.56% (Imperium)
3. Vale of the Silent – 16.34 trillion 10.68% (Fraternity)
4. The Citadel – 10.00 trillion 6.54% (Caldari High Sec)
5. Lonetrek – 7.99 trillion 5.23% (Caldari High Sec)
6. Heimatar – 7.72 trillion 5.05% (Minmatar High Sec)
7. Perrigen Falls – 5.13 trillion 3.35% (PanFam)
8. Fade – 5.12 trillion 3.35% (B2)
9. Fountain – 4.86 trillion 3.18% (Imperium)
10. Deklein – 4.12 trillion 2.70% (Fraternity)

As usual, the regions feeding Jita remain at the top of the list, while those ten regions made up 68.35% of the production in New Eden.

Trade

February saw 736.23 trillion ISK in trade value, down 61.35 trillion from January.  That feels like a lot, but the total averaged out over 28 days is about 26 trillion ISK, so that drop could very much just be the fact that February is three days shorter than January.

1. The Forge – 494.07 trillion 73.21% (Jita)
2. Domain – 40.52 trillion 6.00% (Amarr)
3. Delve – 22.04 trillion 3.27% (Imperium)
4. Lonetrek – 19.68 trillion 2.92% (Caldari High Sec)
5. Perrigen Falls – 14.45 trillion 2.14% (PanFam)
6. Sinq Laison – 13.30 trillion 1.97% (Dodixie)
7. Metropolis – 12.09 trillion 1.79% (Hek)
8. Heimatar – 7.74 trillion 1.15% (Rens)
9. Vale of the Silent – 7.06 trillion 1.05% (Fraternity)
10. Fade – 5.28 trillion 0.78% (B3)

As always, The Forge, home to Jita, tops the list representing almost 3 out of every 4 ISK spent on trade.

And, furthering my statement about the lower value being more a matter of fewer days in the month, the velocity of ISK continued to rise.

Feb 2023 – Velocity of ISK

That points to a healthier economy, especially after the doldrums of the economic strangulation era that CCP went through a while back.  We still haven’t full recovered… you can see grim moments in CCP decision making in the big dips in the line… but we are at least back on the rise.

Still, the bottom line on that chart, the one absent PLEX or contracts, isn’t rising all that much, so the activity of the top line, which includes PLEX, is something CCP can manipulate with in-game sales on game time for PLEX.

ISK Faucets

Here is where we talk about the money and where all that ISK comes from.  The top faucets for February 2023 were the usual suspects.

Feb 2023 – ISK Faucet Totals

Commodities remained above the combo of NPC bounty prizes and ESS payouts, but only just.  Commodities were actually down by about 8 trillion ISK in value when compared to January, while bounties were up a bit.  Commodities are always a bit odd though, because they only get counted when people cash them in to an NPC, while bounties are collected and counted immediately.

Feb 2023 – Top Faucets Over Time

You can see that, after the big climb for commodities in December and January due to the holiday event, there was a fairly big dip in both commodities and bounty prizes, followed by a resurgence for both, with commodities leading the way again.

Drilling in to commodities over time we see the holiday event spike and then the rise in Sleeper drops.

Feb 2022 – Top Commodity Items Over Time

Breaking that out to the total values for the month shows us this.

Feb 2023 – Commodity Value by Type

Then, on the NPC bounty and ESS payout side of things, the top regions on that front were:

1. Vale of the Silent – 4.29 trillion 10.26% (Fraternity)
2. Delve – 3.73 trillion 8.93% (Imperium)
3. Perrigen Falls – 2.94 trillion 7.04% (PanFam)
4. Fountain – 2.66 trillion 6.36% (Imperium)
5. Querious – 2.59 trillion 6.20% (Imperium)
6. The Kalevala Expanse – 2.27 trillion 5.43% (PanFam)
7. Deklein – 1.73 trillion 4.15% (B2)
8. Branch – 1.69 trillion 4.05% (Fraternity)
9. Tribute – 1.39 trillion 3.33% (Fraternity)
10. Malpais – 1.36 trillion 3.26% (PanFam)

Overall the regional stats showed the combined bounties and ESS payouts added up to 41.77 trillion ISK in value, about a trillion less than January.  Those ten regions added up to 59.00% of the total payouts.

All of that drove the money supply up in February.

Feb 2023 – Money Supply

The big jump was still in November, when we got the Uprising expansion and CCP loosened up on the dynamic bounty system.  In December we saw a flat month due to money being taken out of the economy due to players who came back for the 7 days of free omega leaving again.  But since then the money supply has continued to grow.

Feb 2023 ISK Balance

This is not a bad thing.  Players with ISK in their pockets feel better about putting assets at risk.  The whole CCP scarcity theory, that making us poor and resource starved would drive conflict, proved to be false.  I have said this before, and will no doubt say it again, but applying real world economic theory to a game like this comes with risks.  The players don’t live in New Eden.  If life gets expensive and miserable for them in game, if they feel poor and are afraid to lose the assets they have, that doesn’t drive them to conflict, that drives them to log off and play something more fun.

Mining

Mining remains as boring to write about as it is to do for me, but still I have some numbers.  From the regional stats, the top ten regions for mining value were:

1. Delve – 1.49 trillion 6.79% (Imperium)
2. The Forge – 1.14 trillion 5.19% (Caldari High Sec)
3. Vale of the Silent – 1.07 trillion 4.86% (Fraternity)
4. Lonetrek – .99 trillion 4.49% (Caldari High Sec)
5. Metropolis – .93 trillion 4.22% (Minmatar High Sec)
6. Domain – .87 trillion 3.97% (Amarr High Sec)
7. Aridia – .75 trillion 3.40% (Amarr Low Sec)
8. The Kalevala Expanse – .73 trillion 3.31% (PanFam)
9. Sinq Laison – .71 trillion 3.25% (Gallente High Sec)
10. Perrigen Falls – .68 trillion 3.09% (PanFam)

Those totaled up to 21.95 trillion ISK in value and 42.58% of the mining value done in New Eden.

Overall, mining was broken out in February in the following security bands.

Feb 2023 – Mining volume by security band

That might be a little hard to read, but you can click on it to see it full size.

Loyalty Points

And then there are loyalty points, which I started listing on a whim, but which don’t really change enough from month to month to really be worth writing about.  So, for one final list from the regional stats, here are the top ten regions.

1. Lonetrek – 1556.97 million 16.15% (Caldari High Sec)
2. Venal – 1491.29 million 15.47% (Guristas)
3. Metropolis – 1274.95 million 13.22% (FW low Sec)
4. Placid – 851.11 million 8.83% (FW low Sec)
5. Delve – 427.98 million 4.44% (Blood Raiders)
6. Curse – 344.73 million 3.58% (Angel Cartel)
7. Stain – 343.42 million 3.56% (Sansha)
8. Aridia – 332.41 million 3.45% (Low Sec Paragon Agent)
9. Essence – 322.24 million 3.34% (FW low Sec)
10. Pure Blind – 286.73 million 2.97% (Mordu/SOE)

There was a total of 9,641.26 million loyalty points earned, with the ten regions above accounting for 75.01% of those earned.

And so it goes, another month in the books.  All of the sources and other places I could find where this was being discussed are linked below.

Related

• CCP – February 2023 Monthly Economic Report
• CCP – February 2023 MER Forum Thread
• Reddit – February 2023 MER thread
• TNG – Looking at EVE Online in February
• TAGN – Last month’s MER Post

Three Fraternity Keepstars Down in Pure Blind

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:

• 5ZXX-K
• ROIR-Y
• F-NMX6

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.

Rescue from X47L-Q

Battles in EVE Online are not like WoW battlegrounds or things like that.  There is no mechanism to teleport you into the event and certainly nothing to extract you once you’re done.  In New Eden everybody has to walk uphill in the snow both ways and events don’t just happen.  Every big battle and every event, including things like Burn Jita or the Frigate Free for All, involve a lot of up front work by a dedicated crew invested in making something happen.

A battle where 6K people show is the result of considerable effort, both setting up the supply lines and resources as well as simply getting people into and out of the battle.  There are often whole side battles going on to interdict reinforcement or catch stragglers trying to leave the field.  I’ve spent my time off the periphery as often as I have been in the main scrum, stopping people from joining or leaving the fight.

For example, back at B-R5RB, I was able to join the battle late in the evening as part of a subcap fleet sent in to drain titan capacitors, but only after hours of fights between reinforcement ops clashing around the constellation.  And that opportunity started in so late on a work night that I couldn’t stay up until downtime at 4am local, so I left myself logged in and, the next day when I had some time, got back in game and docked up at the station in system.  I then jump cloned back to our staging and picked up another ship.

I left my Dominix and a jump clone in that station for over a year and was never able to extract that ship.  Eventually I put it up on contract at an attractive price and somebody bought it, but it was deep in hostile space and while I might have YOLO’d it out on some quiet week night, it was easier to just sell it at some point down the road.

And this is hardly the only example of things I have left behind in battles or deployments where extraction hasn’t been viable.  I have stuff littered about New Eden in NPC stations… some where we stayed, others where asset safety sent things… so make an effort to try and not leave things behind.

As I mentioned, with last nights battle in X47 I ended up docking in a friendly Fortizar in system and heading to bed.  I was somewhat resigned to leaving my Strombringer there to linger until the time was right to try and get it back out.

The X47 Keepstar where stuff happened

X47 isn’t far from our staging.  It is just eight gates between there and or current home in DO6.

The straight route home

But that route was guaranteed to be camped for days.  The gate out from X47 to J-CJIV was sure to be bubbled and watched by those eager for a few more easy kills.

Alternate routes were possible, and not even that many more gates in distance.

Avoiding the straight route

But anything I can think of somebody else no doubt has marked down and camped for now.

The camps do die down.  Eventually those in a hurry to get home stop taking the chance, the people on the gate camps get bored, and opportunities arise.  But it can take a while and, in a war where we’ll be back and forth to X47 again soon, the risk will remain higher than one would like.

If I had gone out in a Scythe logi cruiser, which I felt like doing because they are so cheap and insure so well that the loss would be negligible, I might have just tried to blast out right away.  But I was in my Stormbringer, kind of a pricey cruiser for me.  So I was set to let thing lie, jump clone back to staging, and worry about it later.

But that morning, as I was writing up yesterday’s post about the battle, a ping went up for a fleet set to go rescue people who were trapped.  It didn’t specify where, but there were not a whole lot of options besides X47.  So I logged myself back into the game and got on voice coms to listen to their progress.

They did indeed come to X47 and began clearing away bubbles and shooting the cyno jammers and generally making a path for egress.  I had to hold tight because I was tempted to just warp to them and follow them around while they did their stuff.  But that isn’t always helpful.

Other people had the same idea and we were soon told to just hang on, a plan was under way.

Once that fleet had cleared a path from the Keepstar to the Fortizar where I was now undocked and sitting on tether, more pings went out telling people to log back in and warp to the Fortizar.

Meanwhile it was clear that other groups were part of the same plan.  I saw The Initiative undock their Navy Apoc fleet from the Fortizar, where they must have safed up earlier, and head off to the Keepstar to help clear.

INIT Apocs undocking

We had to sit around for quite a while while things got sorted, and it is possible that at least one group went off to shoot the Keepstar again to set a new timer, though I cannot confirm that on my own.

Eventually though there were last calls to get everybody who wanted to go home on the Fortizar.  Then titans started to drop in, one for each fleet, in order to bridge us home.  Another aspect of this war is that our front line staging Keepstar and theirs are a single jump apart for capital ships.

We all got on our titans and when the bridges went up, we were sent back to our staging system.

Fleets bridging back to staging

I am sure there are still people stuck in X47.  We never get everybody out in one op, so there will be more ops later.  But a bunch of us got back and are ready to undock again.

Meanwhile, I am a bit surprised at the lack of response this whole extraction operation got from Fraternity and PanFam.  There are a few of their partisans on r/eve posting about a “hell camp” and Imperium ships being trapped in X47, but the actual action in the system was fairly low effort.  A couple of small groups put up some bubbles and grabbed a couple of stragglers, but when one fleet can drop in, clear the undock of your Keepstar so that people can log in and warp out, a “hell camp” it is not.

And the lack of effort in trying to extract more losses from trapped ships makes me wonder how committed Fraternity and PanFam are to the war.

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

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.

BREAKING

Over 6,000 pilots from Imperium, B2, Winter Co, and PanFam are currently battling it out in X47L-Q!!

Check out live coverage from The Imperium perspective: https://t.co/fJpVNmNdJY#Tweetfleet #EVEOnline pic.twitter.com/STB1sotHPo

— EVE Online (@EveOnline) March 12, 2023

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.

We are currently investigating ongoing issues in the system of X47L-Q – there are heavy loads in the system and a few are experiencing disconnects and long login times, we are working to get normal service restored as quickly as possible. #tweetfleet

— EVE Status (@EVE_status) March 12, 2023

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:

• Massively OP – 6000 EVE Online players and four alliances went to war over the weekend
• TNG – A Bad Weekend For Internet Spaceship Servers
• TAGN – Rescue from X47L-Q
• CCP – Regarding the Fleet in X47L-Q (explains the non-rollback rollback)

Setup for Conflict in Pure Blind

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.

Rebuffed Again in X-7OMU

We had another op out of Cloud Ring run last night.  The ping popped up as I was sitting down, so I logged right in and got in the fleet.  We were once again headed out in Sacrileges, so I went with the logi wing in my Guardian.  As we were getting ready I stepped away for a minute, got distracted, and when I got back I heard the FC, Kocicek, telling us to align for the Ansiblex.  I quickly hit the undock button and got out just in time to pick up the warp and follow the fleet, jumping through not too far behind.  By the next gate I was caught up.

Sac fleet outbound

We took the same route we took the other day after the move op, heading up to 6RCQ and into Pure Blind.  It was gate, Ansiblex, gate, and so on until we hit our first waypoint, KLY-C0.  There an armor timer was coming out on a Pandemic Horde Raitaru, which we formed up and shot, sending it to the final timer.

Just a blob of us flying around

That done, we warped off to a Fortizar of our own and met up with a titan who quickly bridged us off to our next destination, X-7OMU.

Off we go

There again.  That was where we had a tough time after the move op, and PanFam and the locals were formed up and waiting for us again, with Abaddons and Muninns and capital support, again.  This was another armor timer, thus not the final fight for the structure, so I suppose there was some question as to whether they would show up.  Question answered.

We got on grid with the Astrahus, as we did back on Saturday, and started putting damage on it as the time came out.

Circling the Astrahus

Unlike the last fight, where we left the citadel grid to take the fight elsewhere, this time we stuck it out.  It did not go well.  The gunner on the Astrahus was throwing a mix of damage and void bombs at us, the latter which can disrupt even cap chaining Guardians.  The void bomb hits and your capacitor is suddenly empty to the point that your cap transfer modules turn off and if you’re not paying attention you can find yourself drained and falling behind.

Meanwhile the damage bombs were keeping everybody broadcasting while the web on the Astrahus was on our anchor to slow us down, though we kept swapping anchors in order to mitigate that.  And then the hostile fleets came out to get us.  Things seemed to fall apart about then, though I was very busy following broadcasts for damage.

At one point Kocicek warped us and I caught the warp just as an interdictor bubbled the fleet, so I was alone until I could turn around and warp back to the fleet with a couple other ships that happened to be as quick to align as I.  That broke the cap chain where I was until I got back in range, by which time one of my cap buddies was down, as were two of the alternate anchors.

Kocicek told us to starburst as a bubble went up and warp to a safe.  I was getting yellow boxed as that happened, but had quickly scooted out of the bubble that was on us and was warping off as damage began to hit.  I was going to get away.

Almost on my way out… just pixels left on that align bar…

And then another bubble went up and I was just inside of it, cancelling my warp.  I scooted out of that, overheated my hardeners, and set myself to warp once more.  Damage was landing and I had to move to align and things looked pretty dicey for a bit there.  And the warp drive kicked in and I was off.

The hull is still half full, right?

I had warped to a planet, but wanted to get away from there, so warped to another in order to make at least a mid-point bookmark.  But X-7OMU is one of those huge systems and I fell out of warp before I made it to my destination, my capacitor drained.

So there I was, wandering at a mid-point in the system, halfway into my structure, heat damage on my lowers (and no nanite repair paste, I seemed to have forgotten it), and not really in any shape to do anything but hide.  However, Kocicek spoke up and told us to warp to him when he said to… so I got that up and ready to click… and he said “Warp to me…” and I was off.  And then he counted down from three, so I landed way off from him, but still on grid and close enough to get the fleet warp that pulled us all off to the J-CIJV gate, where we jumped out of the system.

An unguarded way out

We went from there to G95-VZ where we tethered up on yet another Fortizar we have hanging around the region and the repair function slowly took care of my hull, armor, shields, and heat damage.

Repairing on the Fort

From there the way home was pretty straightforward.  Once everybody was ready we made our way back to the end of the Ansiblex network and headed back to Cloud Ring from whence we had started.

Back in the Cloud Ring nebula

The fight, such that it was, did not go well for us.  The battle report, which looks incomplete to me… though if you don’t get on a kill you don’t appear on the list and we got precious few kills… shows us taking a pasting for very little gain.  We lost the objective and over 100 ships for only 9 real kills.

Battle Report Header – Click to Enlarge

But we cannot win them all.  Mistakes were made, ships were lost, and hopefully some lessons were learned, as I am sure we will be back again.

During the fight I did see Riverini get called as a target, one of the few I I recall coming up.  The experience of the fight was invigorating enough that he actually wrote about in on EN24, his first post in quite a while.  There was also a short AAR on Reddit, again highlighting that this was not a shining moment for the Imperium.

Lurching into Cloud Ring for War

As I mentioned in a previous post, the promise of a deployment was set to be fulfilled this past weekend.  The Mittani told us that come the Fireside on Saturday we would learn our destination and foe and the Goon Expeditionary Force would sail off on a new adventure.

The left bee is the official one, but I still like the CompuServe logo on the other one…

And then we got to the Fireside and he didn’t tell us.  We were still going.  It was still the traditional short speech and then into fleets to head out.  But he declined to tell us our destination or foe.

His justification was that some of the null sec watchers had declared that they knew exactly where we were going, but wouldn’t say where or even hazard a public guess, so Mittens said he wanted to keep them guessing since that was a pretty sure sign they didn’t know.

This sort of thing happens every time the word is out that we are going to deploy.  I was writing about the same thing almost exactly a year ago in the run up to our deployment north to glass Tribute.  So I don’t doubt that this time was any different.  And we would find out soon enough as the meeting ended and pings for move op fleets went up.

The doctrines for the deployment had been announced, the the usuals taking the lead.  I got out a Guardian for the Sacrilege fleet doctrine, loaded it up with extra drugs and replacement drones and a few other special refit items and got undocked and ready to go.  I always want to go in the first move op.  That is usually where you learn the most… and where the most screw ups happen.

Once again on the Keepstar undock

You can see a bunch of capitals… dreads, carriers, and faxes… on the undock with me.

I put my alt in a bomber as there was a special ping for those, so I figured that would be the next most important doctrine to get up there.  I was wrong on that.  Something for the Jackdaw fleet would have been better, but there is always time for another run.

The capitals jumped to their first destination while the subcaps formed up on a titan to be sent on our way.  It was quickly clear we were headed north, going up the Eye of Terror towards Cloud Ring and points north.  This is a well worn route for me these day.  When we lived up north we flew to Delve or Fountain to fight every summer.  Now we live in Delve and we fly north to fight every summer.

So we landed in ZXB-VC to cover the capitals as they took the gate into Fountain.

That gate sees a lot of traffic

The trip through Fountain can be short.  There is an Ansiblex from the first system to a mid point, where everybody takes a gate to get on the Ansiblex to the last system and the gate to Cloud Ring.  This can be a 2 minute run in an interceptor.

Pushing a thousand people… and there were over a thousand in the ops channel, which means there were more ships passing though as many of us were flying two or three… through the pipe ends up with time dilation hitting pretty hard.  At times we saw it drop well into the teens.

That is some slow times

So we shepherded the caps as they moved along.  For the Anisiblex jumps they had to put their armor plates offline in order to get under the maximum mass limit for the jump bridges.  This was where we found a few people who brought the wrong ship, like the guy in the Nyx who complained on coms that the Ansiblex wouldn’t let him go through.  Supers and titans cannot pass though, so he was stuck part way up the pipe with a convoy that was going to leave him behind.

Others had to be prompted to offline their plates repeatedly and there was the usual person who decided to AFK in their capital mid-op or who ended up going the wrong way.  There is always room for confusions on these ops.

There was also a bit of waiting for a few titans that were coming with us, no doubt to bridge us places later, who had to make the jumps themselves rather than using the Ansiblex jump bridges.  So it was a slow time getting to J5A-IX at the far end of the region.

Hanging on the gate to Cloud Ring

Once the last big boy passed we were finally able to move into Cloud Ring.

And it fits?

There, if anything, the tidi got worse.  This was no doubt because the fleet was all together again and because Cloud Ring isn’t really a busy region, so it doesn’t have the most robust servers running it.  We turned to take the jump bridge, which sent us to F7C-H0.  At that point I thought we were going to head into low sec, which is even worse when it comes to tidi and moving big fleets.  Our jump got us to max tidi.

The system is working hard now…

But rather than venture further, we settled into the Keepstar there.  This was our destination, at least for now.

On the Keepstar

That told us our destination, but I wasn’t exactly clear who our foes were going to be.  From that location we could move into Fade or Pure Blind, but we were also on the boarder of low sec regions Placid and Black Rise.

And the first op I went on didn’t help out much on that score.  We formed up a Sacrilege fleet and flew into Pure Blind, passing through 6RCQ-V where we have a Keepstar from a past deployment already.

Sac fleet going through the gate

From there we flew to X-7OMU to attack a Pandemic Horde Astrahus that was at the armor timer.

Astrahus in sight

They were waiting for us and we ended up in a brawl with a fleet of Muninns and some Abaddons with Fax support.  Some Jackdaws showed up to help us, and it turned into a running fight over a few systems.  We lost the objective and the ISK war, but it was a pretty intense brawl.

It was in the middle of that brawl that I realized I hadn’t taken all the extra stuff I had packed along out of the cargo hold.  However, I managed to survive my turn as the primary, though we ended up losing half of our Guardians along the way.  The Muninn fleet logi was also hard hit as the same people in fresh Scimitars was killed a few times after reshipping.  Towards the end of the fight they started showing up in Kirins, frigate logi, as the word was that they had run out of Scimitars.

Most of the fight took place in KLY-C0, but it ran across a few systems.  I think I caught it all in the battle report.

Battle report header – click to enlarge

The odds were pretty even, and the enemy was able to reship and rejoin the fight, so you’ll find a few logi who were blown up a couple of times.  The joy of fighting on your own turf.

Despite a couple of close calls, and that guy at the end in a Cynabal who chased me for a bit, I was able to get home with the remains of the fleet, where I pulled all the extra baggage out of my cargo hold.

So I guess we’re fighting… whoever is near by.  Pandemic Horde and the Conifers and their allies.  We shall see.  More move ops happened as the weekend went on and the order is to get the market stocked for people to be able to reship.  So as long as CCP doesn’t go full Hurricane Hilmar on us again, like they did last year, we seem to be stuck in for a fighting deployment.

Somebody did a video with some scenes from the move op, if you want to see it in action.

 

There is a section in the video of some subcaps sitting on the ZXB gate. (It is the small gate, a smuggler’s gate, that is different from the empire gates.)  I am in that fleet.

So we’re up north.  At least we made the move without getting ambushed, which was what happened during a similar move op five years ago this month.

Fortizar Defense Brawl in JE-D5U

Another trip up north, up the Eye of Terror and into Pure Blind.  I’ve been up north a few times to defend one structure or another and a fight has yet to show up for me.  Not that there haven’t been some fights lately, it just hasn’t seemed to happen when I’ve been on the op.

But last night things finally rolled my way.  There was yet another Fortizar to defend up in the north and the word was that PanFam and the locals were going to form for it.  Maybe the other side was emboldened by killing our Keepstar. (Unanchored, and in a freighter, but they still killed it in the end.)

Anyway, the call went out for the op, but Asher had pinged Reavers a bit before looking for some people to fly ECM burst interceptors.  I’ve done that before and not many people were X’ing up, so I figured I had best jump in to help there.  Also, the ships are handed out for free and during the battle you get to sit above it all and see the whole thing… not that the view helps me much, I still never get what is going on half the time even when I can see it.  I took an Ares from the offer and got ready.

Asher was set to lead the Sacrilege fleet, so he had a newer FC, Kappa Hutt lead us on to the field.  So the Sac fleet and a Baltec fleet set off for the north with our interceptors flying along, peeking ahead to scout, then letting the others catch up.

My Ares in with the battleships

As we made our way along the route we caught up with some bigger ships that had started out ahead and were also making their way to the fight.

Some dreads in the mix now

We zipped ahead though… there was a gate that had been seriously bubbled, but that doesn’t bother interdiction nullified interceptors… and arrived in JE-D5U up in Pure Blind ahead of most of our fleet, but there were already over 300 hostiles in the system according to local.  There was going to be a fight it seemed, and the timer was counting down.

Less than six minutes to go

As the other fleets arrived we set about bookmarking our perches over the potential battlefield.  The plan is generally that we sit cloaked on a perch while the FC scans down a potential target, often the FC of a hostile fleet who is usually out in front of the pack.  Then we get the word to uncloak, overheat our burst jammer, and align, at which point the FC warps everybody beside himself onto the target.  We land, started warping back to a bookmark, then set off our ECM burst.  If the warp was good we’ll be in the middle of some hostiles and break some of their target locks… this is especially good if we land in the logi… and be warping back before anybody has a chance to take a shot at us.  Done right you don’t even get any heat damage on your mid slots because the burst goes off as you’re going into warp, which shuts down the module.

So we got ourselves in place as the timer counted down and the fleets got into position.  A fight seemed guaranteed as there were quickly over a thousand people in the system, with TEST dropping in to third party on the event, and even some notable PanFam FCs on grid like Vince Draken and Headliner leading Muninn fleets.

Hostile Muninn fleets getting ready

The timer hit and the repair cycle started, which meant we had to defend the Fortizar for 30 minutes while it repaired, though that 30 minute timer could be paused or pushed back by hostile fire on the Fort.  It was on.

Fight around the fort begins

Kappa Hutt was having a bit of a problem getting a probe signature on a good target.  Time dilation and system responsiveness was really bad, with the tidi number well below 30% for most of the fight, and into the 10% for some stretches.  Still, he got something and we got ourselves ready to go.

Uncloaked on a perch above the fight

We were then thrown into the fray to set off our jammers.  I landed pretty well the first time and got off some jams.

In with the hostile logi even

Meanwhile, the forces on the fort broke tether and were shooting up the attackers as they ran past the structure.

A Baltec Megathron on the fort

We warped off and back to our perches where we waited for the next target.  The scanning interface was acting up for Kappa still and for a few runs SpyFly Catharsis found wrecks for us to warp to, which worked as well if we timed it right.

Once again into the mix

We were getting good warps and I don’t think I went in even once where I didn’t get at least break a few target locks on hostiles when I landed.

Along the way I got a pop up that a bounty had been collected on Nkosis when his Sacrilege went down.  I think I have mentioned him before, but he is a newer addition to the coalition who is so enthusiastic and positive about the game that he has become something of a celebrity in his own right in the Imperium.  But being a celeb means he gets razzed as well and at some point he got a bounty place on him, which he didn’t like and said so, at which point everybody started adding to his bounty total with an eye towards getting him to the number one spot.  He was into the top ten last I checked.  I, too, put a bounty on him, so now I get a notification every time he gets blown up when I am in game. (I used to put bounties on our FCs as that pop up was often the quickest way to find out the FC was down.)

We had a bit where we had gone so many times in a row that we didn’t have enough capacitor to make a run, the ECM module needing over 200 units of power to activate on top of the bit you need to get your warp in and out.  This was when the system was into the 10% tidi zone, which is the slowest the game will go and, if that isn’t enough, controls begin to lag and your commands may get ignored.  Waiting for cap to refill during that was excruciating.  Somebody suggested we wait for our weapons timer to go down and just warp to the fort to tether and fill up our capacitors, but at 10% tidi having just 15 seconds left on the time meant nearly a three minute wait.

Still, tidi hits everybody.  The targets were as slow as we were and were not going to get away.  Cap was restored and we were sent in again for more runs.

Aligned for another run

By the the tidi was starting to relax a little bit, or at least get up into the low 20s, and Kappa was able to get good probe locks on some likely targets, so we spent some time dropping on names I recognized.

Coming for Vince

Down around the fort, the repair timer vacillated between running down and being paused, but kept moving slowly towards the structure being repaired.  By the time we got past the worst tidi it stood at around ten minutes.  We kept on going.

Landing on the hostiles again

At about the eight minute mark on the timer it seemed like the battle had been decided.  The hostiles pulled some distance and “gf” for “good fight” started getting spammed in local by them.  Some “fofofo” appeared in local as well, which I am going to guess was from Asher’s sac fleet as he is the only FC I know who still does the “fofofo” for victory.

From that point tidi began to ease up and we were released to go loot the field if we wanted.  Being in interceptors would seem to give us an advantage, but Goons will plunder like no others.  I didn’t come up with anything.

Somebody dropped an MTU, which is always a target on a battlefield no matter which side drops it.  I zipped over and got in on that kill.

Not that I needed another kill mail.  Landing on fleets and setting off an ECM burst puts you on the kill mail of anybody you jammed should they get blown up after you’re there.  My kill board was well padded by the end of the battle, with 111 new entries, enough to get me momentarily onto the top ten for KarmaFleet.  (The last time I did that I was also doing ECM bursts.  It is a kill mail whore’s dream.)  Most of them were hostile ships, but there were not a few blue targets on the list and quite a few pods.  A few of us even got the final blow for pods that were self destructing when we hit them.

The timer ran down and the fort was safe.

Tethered off the save Fortizar

At that point we were done.  Kappa set us free to head home, which should have been a quick ride in some interceptors.

Back through gates towards Delve

There were some bubbled gates along the way, but an Ares just passed through bubbles.  I was feeling somewhat invulnerable flying home, which I should recognize by now as a sign of impending doom.

My usual travel Ares has a 1.83s align time, and the game lore is that if your align in under 2 seconds you cannot be caught unless you are extremely unlucky.  But this Ares, fit for ECM burst runs, had a 2.03s align time, which means 3 seconds by the way EVE Online calculates, which means it can be caught.  It isn’t likely, but somebody who is good in the right ship can get you.

And they got me in Cloud Ring with a camp that was primed and ready to catch anything possible.  Normally I am inclined to attribute losses to my own incompetence rather than claim my foe was really good, but I think this crew was actually pretty good at this.  I was toast and knew it almost instantly.  Kind of a sour point to end the evening and I always feel bad when I lose a hand out ship, but it happens.

As for the fight, it seemed to be lauded by both sides as a good fight.  Asher posted a salute to the attackers on Reddit and other related posts seemed to be similarly warm and fuzzy about a real fight going down, which was a bit of a change from the acrimony over the Keepstar thing I mentioned earlier.

The results… well, pick your battle report generator and get your results.  EVE Battle Report Repair Tool seems shy of the mark for totals while the zKillboard report is detailed but has a habit of pulling in things outside of the fight.  For a report header image I am going to go with EVE Fleet Manager, which is close to the zKillboard totals, but which lets me pull out a few oddities.  I don’t think the Guristas, for example, really took sides in that fight.

Battle report header – trimmed to the top 7 alliances –  click on it to enlarge

Overall quite a fight.  A big brawl, fairly evenly matched, lots of losses on both sides that went largely our way as we had the Fortizar to tip the balance.  And there was quite the array of space famous names from both sides.  I even saw Bad Juice, who once challenged Asher to an MMA style cage match back during a Reavers deployment.  I was happy to report in the Reavers channel that he was still around and that I managed to get on his kill mail.

That battle would probably be the beat event of the month for me, but the word is that the Goon Expeditionary Force will be deploying later today, so the promise of more fights is out there.  Or at least more structure shoots.  Mittens was using the term “glassed” again, so we might just be burning down structures somewhere.

Northward for Structure Defense

There was supposed to be a big USTZ op on Friday night, but it didn’t come off.

That was fine by me as I hadn’t been on Jabber for a couple of days so totally missed the build up.  But on the Fireside on Saturday The Mittani brought it up, apologized that it  didn’t happen, but assured us that an op would be coming up at 02:00 EVE time in order to defend timers on a couple of Fortizars up north that are part of the coalition power projection network.

The primary doctrine was to be the Sacrilege fleet, which was hyped a few times during the Fireside and in pings as the day went along, so it was probably not surprising that when 02:00 came around and the ping for the evenings fleets went out, that is the one that filled up almost immediately.

Asher was our FC and while the speed with which the fleet filled might not have been surprising, the fact that we were all in the right ships, with sufficient mainline DPS ships, boosters, and enough logi did seem to surprise him a bit.  It is a rare thing for everybody to show up on time with the right fit.  I guess if you ping at us enough about getting ready for a fleet some of us pay attention.

I opted to go with the logi wing for this op, refitting a Guardian I had in my hangar in order to meet the changes that the Surgical Strike update made necessary.  And naturally I went with the  Frontier Safeguarder SKIN from the Generosity Celebration event.  I collected the whole set for subcaps as well as a couple for force auxiliaries.

Bright and flashy

I like those SKINs even more than the Emergency Response set.  They are loud and colorful and the red and blue lights flash and it is a pretty obnoxious package, which is what I look for in a SKIN.

Meanwhile Asher was having to tell people there was no room in the fleet.  We were at 256 and he needed space to get scouts in with us.  People went off to the Munnin fleet, which I might have done as well, but I always fly with Asher when I can so I stuck with it.

We later found out that somebody in a Sacrilege joined the Munnin fleet but stayed on our coms and somehow made it through the whole evening without realizing they were messed up.  John Hartley, the Munnin FC said the Sac just carried on with them, sometimes on anchor, sometimes not, but never seemed to be fazed by their predicament.

The Munnins filled up too and a third fleet, this time Jackdaws, was formed up to handle the overflow, and then a bomber fleet for people who wanted to go that route.  This was a pretty big form up considering it was well outside of EUTZ and well into Saturday night… though I guess people aren’t really going out on Saturday night right now.

Asher was especially happy with the fleet composition as it only had a single Vigil frigate.  The Vigil is a newbie friendly option that lets people target paint to help the main line apply damage.  But you only need a few and there are times when vets pile in with them just to go along for the ride.  But when you have just one Vigil in the fleet, that pilot suddenly becomes special, their ship is the fleet morale ship, and ends up on the logi watchlist, and so it was with M4X HEADR00M.

Pilot of our morale Vigil

Once important issues like that were settled it was time to undock and start heading north.  Our destination was Pure Blind and we were off down the Eye of Terror network of Ansiblex jump gates.

To the Ansiblex

The route, at least to the Pure Blind boarder in Cloud Ring is generally a quick run… it is only 11 gates or so… until you start pushing about 700 pilots through it at the same time.  There were a lot of us jumping through together.

Gate activation for a fleet, each line representing a ship landing

And things got progressively worse as we moved along.  Delve is always active and so gets processing resources assigned to it that meant we only saw a little time dilation kicking in.  Through Fountain, a quieter region, it was more noticeable.  And then we hit Cloud Ring and we were clearly stressing the system.

Tidi hitting us hard

That is the game slowing down to 17% of normal speed for us.  We weren’t shooting anything, we were just using gates to travel.  But loading into a system is a heavy task and with three fleets going though at once.

But we pressed on, getting to the Keepstar on the boarder.

Sac fleet in warp

It was about then that information began to get passed along about the disposition of the enemy fleets.  Pandemic Horde had put together a Harpy fleet with about 100 pilots, while NCDot had wrestled together around 50 pilots for a Munnin fleet, which meant that the likelihood of there being a big fight was about nil.

At that point the fleets split up.

The Munnins went off and found a Naga fleet to wreck, then headed back home.  I never heard what the Jackdaws got up to, but word was that the bomber fleet managed to get itself wrecked shooting a structure.  And so it goes.

And the Sac fleet, we stood to and watched over the repair cycle of the Fortizars that had been reinforced.  We saw Horde in their Harpies come by a couple of times, but they didn’t want to close with us and were more than quick enough to stay out of our way.  We sat on a gate hoping to maybe catch them, but it wasn’t to be.

Sprawled about a gate in Pure Blind

At that point Asher sought to entertain us with story time in fleet.  He asked people to x-up in fleet chat if they met certain criteria for a miss-spent youth then called on people who did x-up to have them tell their story.

I thought this was going to be the time to go to the no-chatter channel, as the average person has trouble keeping stories of their life short and to the point.  My experience in life is that when somebody finally gets to the phrase, “to make a long story short…” it is far too late to hit any definition of the word “short.”

But Asher was a pretty good emcee for this, and kept people from getting too far into the weeds.  And we all learned about Jason Padgett, who became a mathematical savant after somebody beat him up.  Only one person ended up saying, “…to make a long story short…” at which point several people keyed up to say, “Too late!” as the tale had already rambled into the weeds.

The Forts repaired themselves and the hostiles didn’t look like they had much fight in them, so we flew off to reinforce a Pandemic Horde Astrahus, just to leave a calling card.  The Astrahus hadn’t even been fit yet, so we were able to knock it down through shield and armor.  Meanwhile, the “describe your crime” show went on.

After that we went over a couple of systems and shot a United Federation of Conifers Fortizar.  This had been fit, but nobody was home so we just put drones on it.  Then somebody from the UFC flew in to gun the Fort, so people who were paying attention pulled their drones.  Those who were asleep at the switch promptly lost their when the point defense system, the PDS, was switched on, wiping them all out.  So it was on to missiles to set the first timer.

Sacs firing away

Meanwhile the gunner started launching bombs at us, which woke logi up as we had to start repping people as they took damage.  I got  a good look at the logi wing around then, and was happy to see that my cap transfer buddies were both using the same SKIN I had chosen.

Cap buddies represent

Apparently we were shooting this because Brisc Rubal said on the Meta Show that he does not like the UFC, to the point that he has a coffee mug in support of his statement.  I guess they shoot at him or have some TISHU refugees or something.

Brisc, who will be running for CSM15 I hear

That kept us busy for a while, though at one point, just as we were done, M4X HEADR00M veered off and took a lot of damage from a bomb or the PDS or something got him.  It looked like the morale Vigil might go down.

Vigil in trouble!

However, he managed to survive by warping off.  At least I think he did.  I checked over on zKillboard and didn’t find a kill mail.

After that Asher warped us to one of the Guristas sites from The Hunt event, not knowing that you needed a key to get past it and had to be flying a destroyer or a frigate even if somebody had a key.

The Gate to nowhere

That lesson learned, we turned for home.  With just out fleet coming back we put less stain on CCP’s servers and did not invoke as much tidi as before.

Back home through Cloud Ring

Once you get through Cloud Ring it is just a few gates and you’re back home in Delve.

The last gate home

Overall the fleet lasted about three hours, which was kind of long.  We got two PAPs for it, which was good for those who need more.  And we even had the swarm DJ spinning for us, if you cared to tune him in. KarmaFleet has a regular Saturday Night Swarm op that usually includes him, but that had been cancelled in favor this.

It would have been better if we had gotten a fight, but it wasn’t too bad and the story time was amusing enough to keep us going.  And, of course, our structures were saved.  Op success.

Defending Distant Sovereignty

The ping was later in the evening on Saturday night.  It was a call for a Jackdaw fleet with Oxygen as the FC.  Jackdaws are usually quick to get places so I figured I might as well get my duty to the state validated yet again.  I logged in, got in a Scalpel I had to hand, and joined the fleet, settling into the logi channel.

When it was announced over comms that there was a need for a few entosis Drakes as part of the fleet I was tempted to just log off then.  Entosis ops are often quite dull.  At least I was smart enough not to volunteer for one of the Drakes again.  And I figured we couldn’t be going very far.  The requirement specified GSF pilots for the enotsis Drakes, which meant defending GSF sovereignty specifically, and that is pretty much limited to Delve, Period Basis, and a bit of Querious.  Somebody must have set a timer on us and now we had to go out and make sure nothing was turned.

So it still seemed like it might be a short op.  We hung about a bit as things got put together, but even with the entosis ships it was a small fleet, with about 30 of us rolling out when Oxygen finally called for us to undock and get on the titan.  At least we would be getting a ride to where we were going.

A grinning Avatar sends us on our way

We were sent off to ZXB-VC, which is the boarder system with Fountain.  We jumped into that region and took the Ansiblex jump gates to the boarder with Cloud Ring in J5A-IX.

Taking the Eye of Terror

From there it was into Cloud Ring and a couple systems over to get the Ansiblex that would take us to 6RCQ-V, the staging system for the past wars in the north.

But we were not done yet.  From there it was into Fade then Pure Blind, where it turns out GSF still holds the sovereignty in KQK1-2, the staging system setup for the “glassing of Tribute” campaign back in the Spring.  That is kind of a long way from home.  Sure, the Aniblex network, the “Eye of Terror Mk III,” makes the trip fairly quick.  But that is still a distant point to be holding relative to our home.

On the map from DOTLAN

And we were out there because somebody set the timer for the territorial control unit, or TCU, for the system.  In the age of Fozzie Sov, the TCU just marks ownership on the map but otherwise does not come with any benefits.  It is the infrastructure hub that is the important one.  But the rules of power are that if you let somebody get away with little things like taking your TCU then they will just be encouraged to move on to bigger things.

So the bulk of the fleet, such that it was, sat in the middle of the constellation where the entosis event was running while interceptors fanned out to scout and Drakes turned on their magic sov wands.  As we hung around the gate some Sleepers rolled up and scanned us.  We had the sense not to shoot at them and nobody had any corpses in their cargo to set them off.

It is just what Sleepers are into

If you go orbit them they will scan you.  I got a couple scanning me at one point.

Scanning my Scalpel

But even they got bored hanging around the gate and warped off to find something else to scan.  The NPCs of New Eden have their own lives.

We did managed to catch and kill one of a group of ships that passed by our little camp, a Tempest that was tackled and dispatched.

Not so fast Mr. Tempest

Of course, with a drone bay large enough for a single light drone on my Scalpel I chose to put a combat drone in it.  Sure, I could have gone with the doctrine specified armor repair drone, but then I wouldn’t have gotten on the kill mail, the proof of life assignment I have for myself every month.

Of course, I wasn’t the only Scalpel so armed.  Three of us each had a different drone too.  If only a fourth had shown up with a Hornet we would have had the light drones from each empire.

That kept us busy for a little bit, but we were soon back to orbiting the gate and waiting for things to wrap up.  Fortunately nobody showed up to contest things… a sizable fleet might have just brushed us away… and the whole thing was wrapped up with the minimum number of entosis operations.

Of course, after that we had the schlep all the way back home, which would have been quick in frigates, but we had those Drakes to carry along.  And then, back in Delve, I found out why we got a titan bridge on the way out.  It looks like GSOL was in the process of taking a bunch of Ansiblex jump gates offline to move them due to the changes that went in last week that require them to be at least 500km off the nearest Upwell structure.  So there were a few more gates to take, though it is still pretty quick to get from Cloud Ring to Delve.

And so it goes.  I have seen a few sovereignty defense fleets going on this month, so apparently we’ll saddle up and ride out every time somebody trolls us by hitting a TCU on the other side of New Eden.  It keeps us busy I suppose.