Tag Archives: Querious

37 Weeks of World War Bee

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When the headline topic for the Meta Show is the red dot (which I mentioned last week) and the New Eden Post up and disappears itself, it might be a sign that the war has become less than exciting, at least on the main front in Delve.

There the Imperium is still holed up in 1DQ1-A with the bulk of its forces and a dizzying array of citadels on the main grid, while PAPI scrupulously avoids any direct confrontation in that entire constellation, busying itself with destroying Imperium structures with its supers and titans in cyno jammed systems.  They blew up the D-W7F0 Keepstar and started attacking the F2OY-X by gating their supers in so as to avoid any possibility of having to face another titan battle after M2-XFE.

I went out to watch at F2OY-X

That doesn’t bode well for any hope that there will be a battle over 1DQ1-A, where even a cyno jammer won’t prevent Imperium titans from showing up, as they are in system already.

The Imperium plan is to out last the invaders while simultaneously burning down as much as their backfield as they can.  Vily’s plan of driving Goons from the game seems less likely now than it did back in September when that was his main talking point.  Likewise, the stated plan to take Delve, Fountain, Querious, and Period Basis while keeping all of their old territory seems to have fallen apart since Progodlegend laid it out three months back.

So I am left wondering what the end of the war will look like.  The Imperium isn’t leaving 1DQ1-A without a fight.  Vily and Progodlegend have invested their reputations in an unattainable victory.  PanFam and Fraternity, the least invested in the war, and the group still able to mine and rat in their own space, seem the likely overall winners in the long term.

Delve Front

The invaders retook the PS-94K ihub in the SG-CTQ constellation and, as noted above, blew up the Keepstar in D-W7F0.  Smaller structures died as well, but those were the two major events.

Delve – Mar 21, 2021

Otherwise it is skirmishes and structure bashes and attempts to annoy the invaders by making them defend the ihubs they have taken.

Other Theaters

In Querious Brave went on something of an ihub spree.  They took two ihubs away from the Imperium and planted 17 more in systems that were otherwise empty, so the map of the region looks solidly Brave and Severance.

Querious – Mar 21, 2021

Meanwhile, in Catch, the former Brave capital system fell.  The Brave SOTA last week as much as said they were simply over extended and were going to lose their backfield, so they are focused on Querious while their old territory burns.

Catch – Mar 21, 2021

Likewise, Immensea (and Impass) are both being taken apart by the Imperium and their co-belligerents in those regions.

Immensea – Mar 21, 2021

In Esoteria, Army of Mango alliance and Evictus are stepping in to take the remains of TEST space.

Esoteria – Mar 21, 2021

That has led to fighting between The Bastion and allied forces and AOM, giving whatever TEST has left in the region.

There isn’t much left in those regions to be burned at this point.  Whatever you think of Legacy Coalition’s plan to live in Delve, Querious, Fountain, and Period Basis, they are now committed to it.  And, speaking of Fountain, that appears to be where Federation Uprising has been promised space and now that they have been burned out of Immensea, they are starting to take ihubs there.

Fountain – Mar 21, 2021

The Initiative retook a bunch of ihubs in the region once the invasion moved on to Querious, and not much has happened since.  PanFam announced a re-invasion of Fountain back during week 20 or so, but by week 23 it had petered out.  Now it looks like somebody is finally going after the region again.  The Initiative is also done with their work in Legacy’s backfield, we’ll see if they come back to Fountain to push back in Fed Up.

My Participation

Once again I did get out and go on a few ops.  They most exciting was probably the spectacular Tom Flood Muninn welp in GY6A-L.  I was out with the logi wing and we were getting chopped to bits after Tom brought us into a fight with the odds stacked against us. (The HAW dreads were a nice touch.)

I actually thought I was going to get away.  I did, initially, finally getting out of bubbles and eluding the Malediction that had me tackled, getting into warp with 53% of my hull remaining.

That feeling when you’ve escaped the trap

Unfortunately, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire as I landed in a bubble on more hostiles.  I nearly got away again.  I was out of the bubble and aligned and almost in warp… and then my ship exploded.  Actually, due to tidi, my capsule was ejected and I got to sit and watch my ship explode.

Watching my ship brew up from my pod

The battle report shows what happens when you throw a fleet in to face odds 2 to 1 against.

Battle Report Header

At least I got my SRP by the next day.

I also managed to lose two Ares interceptors doing other operations, which brings my loss totals for the war up to:

  • Ares interceptor – 17
  • Malediction interceptor – 7
  • Crusader interceptor – 5
  • Atron entosis frigate – 6
  • Rokh battleship – 5
  • Scimitar logi – 4
  • Ferox battle cruiser – 4
  • Drake battle cruiser – 4
  • Purifier stealth bomber – 3
  • Guardian logi – 2
  • Scalpel logi frigate – 2
  • Raven battleship – 1
  • Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
  • Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
  • Bifrost command destroyer – 1
  • Cormorant destroyer – 1
  • Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
  • Sigil entosis industrial – 1
  • Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP announced a Quality of Life patch coming this week that will have an impact on null sec.  They key item is the ability to have multiple clones in a single citadel.  For people who have clones with implants for specific doctrines or roles, it has been a pain in the ass to have to undock and warp to another citadel to swap clones every time you were doing something different.  I have clones in 4 different citadels in 1DQ1-A and I barely do anything special at all.

In addition, there will be some nerfs, because there are always nerfs.  This time around ECM burst interceptors will be taking a hit.  I gather few people like those… but I am one of those few.  That is the way it goes though.  Everybody gets their turn in the barrel.

Also on tap is Friendship week.  Not really in sync with a war, but there it is.

As for peak concurrent users for the week, that fell before 35K, supplying further proof I suppose that the war in Delve isn’t exactly lighting a fire under anybody at the moment.

  • Day 1 – 38,838
  • Week 1 – 37,034
  • Week 2 – 34,799
  • Week 3 – 34,692
  • Week 4 – 35,583
  • Week 5 – 35,479
  • Week 6 – 34,974
  • Week 7 – 38,299
  • Week 8 – 35,650
  • Week 9 – 35,075
  • Week 10 – 35,812
  • Week 11 – 35,165
  • Week 12 – 36,671
  • Week 13 – 35,618
  • Week 14 – 39,681
  • Week 15 – 40,359
  • Week 16 – 36,642
  • Week 17 – 37,695
  • Week 18 – 36,632
  • Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
  • Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
  • Week 21 – 34,888
  • Week 22 – 33,264
  • Week 23 – 33,149
  • Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
  • Week 25 – 31,611
  • Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
  • Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
  • Week 28 – 34,713
  • Week 29 – 35,996
  • Week 30 – 38,323
  • Week 31 – 38,167
  • Week 32 – 37,259
  • Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
  • Week 34 – 35,626
  • Week 35 – 35,379
  • Week 36 – 35,085
  • Week 37 – 34,394

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34 Weeks of World War Bee

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This past week saw Snuffed Out carry on with their prodding of the Tranquility Trading Consortium, the null sec coalition that runs the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter, among other things.  Having destroyed the TTC keepstar in Ignoitton last week, the group declared war on the TTC, leading people to wonder if they were going to actually assail the high sec trading hub.

This led to the push/shove scenario and answered the question as to whether the owners of the TTC… which includes both sides of World War Bee.. would cooperate to defend their lucrative market situation.

The answer was “yes” as both TEST and The Imperium joined the war to defend the TTC, leading to a set of instructions going out to Imperium pilots about how to setup their overviews so they could be allied with TEST in high sec yet still see them as hostile targets in Delve.

In order to declare a war in high sec a group has to designated a war headquarters.  In this case, Snuff’s HQ was an unfit (and perhaps unfueled) Raitaru in Ichinumi, which the TTC forces promptly destroyed.  That meant that the TTC “won” the war and kept Snuff from declaring war again for two weeks.  This quick resolution led some to believe that Snuff was just in it for the memes.

Meanwhile, in his weekly fireside chat on Saturday, The Mittani announced the F2 program, a call for members of the Imperium to step up and be more than just F1 monkeys in fleets.  The idea is to take an organization that, since the levee en masse inception of KarmaFleet, has often been seen to simply be about simply getting more people into fleets and pulling the few who show some talent into positions of responsibility, and get more people to step up into support roles in addition to going on fleet ops.  Scouts and spies were mentioned specifically, but were not the sole possible paths.  Mittens banged the drum for this through his whole speech and, though he vowed there would be no shaming of people who did not step up, wandered perilously close to that position a few times himself.

In the traditional Imperium way, having long adapted to the daunting complexity of life in New Eden and the running of a space empire, there was a promise of guides to help line members find that second role… the F2 button on the space career… to help support the coalition.

Delve Front

As we enter the eighth month of the war, Delve has now been in play for almost half of that time.  PAPI put down a Keepstar successfully in NPC Delve on their fifth attempt back in October.  That means that the invasion of Delve, the alleged final stage of the war, has now gone on longer than many past wars have taken all told.  I know everybody loves the “not winning fast enough” meme, but public promises as to when 1DQ1-A would fall have all proven to be pipe dreams so far.  The system, and the constellation behind it, remain in Imperium hands and largely unscathed.  But for PAPI to take Delve, they must evict the Imperium from 1DQ1-A.

That said, there isn’t a lot left of Delve in Imperium hands.  PAPI came in and took the 1-A81R constellation, home to The Bastion and Get Off My Lawn.  Aside from a few outlying systems near Querious, the 1DQ1-A constellation is all PAPI has left to take.

Delve – Feb 28, 2021

The hellcamp in M2-XFE carries on.  There were some operations by PAPI against the bubbles over the week, but no real break out attempts have come.  And the two metaliminal storms continue to wander the region, though the electrical storm looks like it might be out the door and into Fountain if it carries on in its current direction.

Other Theaters

In Querious Brave has managed to hold on to the systems they have been trying to claim.

Querious – Feb 28, 2021

That said, Siberian Squads hasn’t gone away either and remains in their own constellation as well as staging out of the Keepstar in W6V-VM.

In Catch however, Brave’s holdings are under siege as The Initiative and other groups have laid siege to and started taking what one might consider Brave’s core home systems in the region.

Catch – Feb 28, 2021

Brave is committed to Querious now because their backfield is on fire behind them.  Likewise, Immensea remains under pressure, and Federation Uprising is down to two ihubs and Warped Intentions has lost all of theirs.

Immensea – Feb 28, 2021

And down in Esoteria The Bastion has kept the pressure on TEST, though an incursion popping up in the region probably hasn’t made their life any easier.

Esoteria – Feb 28, 2021

There is word that Impass and Feythabolis may also start getting the torch soon, once some of the above regions are wrapped up.

My Participation

I was a slacker yet again this week, though I have to say that a lot of the ops I saw pinged were in EUTZ, which I cannot really go on unless I know they are going to be short.  I can’t go missing in the middle of the work day for long.  I did jump in when PAPI made a run at the bubbles at the M2-XFE camp, which put me on some fighter squadron kills.  I also got the final blow on a TEST Scimitar, so my Rokh has a kill mark on it now.

The M2 Keepstar abides

Other than that I ran around Delve and collected my PI.  PAPI hasn’t been after the customs office in the region, or at least not in the systems where I work, so that trickle of income has remained steady.  Oh, and I was on the Theta Thursday show on INN last week, proving that they are getting low on available guests.

With that my losses for the war remain:

  • Ares interceptor – 15
  • Malediction interceptor – 7
  • Crusader interceptor – 5
  • Atron entosis frigate – 6
  • Rokh battleship – 5
  • Drake battle cruiser – 4
  • Scimitar logi – 3
  • Ferox battle cruiser – 3
  • Purifier stealth bomber – 3
  • Guardian logi – 2
  • Scalpel logi frigate – 2
  • Raven battleship – 1
  • Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
  • Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
  • Bifrost command destroyer – 1
  • Cormorant destroyer – 1
  • Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
  • Sigil entosis industrial – 1
  • Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

This past week saw the Bastions of War update from CCP which introduced improvements to marauder class battleships.  Buffing 2 billion ISK hulls in the middle of their economic crunch seemed a bit comical to me, but the left hand rarely seems to know what the right hand is doing at CCP.  We will see if that changes anything in the game meta.

The update also nerfed heavy assault cruiser survivability, which will no doubt change the null sec war meta, which has largely been “HACs online” for most of the conflict.  It seems that Muninns and Eagles might fall by the wayside, though the speedy Cerberus might still be viable.  What will replace those as ships of the line remains to be seen.

CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson gave an odd interview about the EVE Online economy which was published over at The Gamer in which he went on about the New Eden economy in attempt to play up some bizarre connection to the GameStop short selling event earlier in the month, by describing things that don’t or can’t really happen in the game.  Has anybody, as an example, really been banned for margin trading?  It was really every bad interview I have ever witnessed where the CEO proves he doesn’t know his product and nobody is there to stop him.

And then CCP posted their Expert Systems dev blog, which in classic CCP fashion, uses words that sound cool but which do not mean what they seem to think they do. (see “logistics” meaning “repair” for another example.)  While lacking in details, this came off as a “rent a skill” program to get new players to pay money for temporary access to skills to try them out.  It seems like a complete non-starter to me, but I’ll have more words about that later.

And the peak concurrent users for the week rang in about where it did last week, with Sunday being just slightly ahead of Saturday this time around:

  • Day 1 – 38,838
  • Week 1 – 37,034
  • Week 2 – 34,799
  • Week 3 – 34,692
  • Week 4 – 35,583
  • Week 5 – 35,479
  • Week 6 – 34,974
  • Week 7 – 38,299
  • Week 8 – 35,650
  • Week 9 – 35,075
  • Week 10 – 35,812
  • Week 11 – 35,165
  • Week 12 – 36,671
  • Week 13 – 35,618
  • Week 14 – 39,681
  • Week 15 – 40,359
  • Week 16 – 36,642
  • Week 17 – 37,695
  • Week 18 – 36,632
  • Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
  • Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
  • Week 21 – 34,888
  • Week 22 – 33,264
  • Week 23 – 33,149
  • Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
  • Week 25 – 31,611
  • Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
  • Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
  • Week 28 – 34,713
  • Week 29 – 35,996
  • Week 30 – 38,323
  • Week 31 – 38,167
  • Week 32 – 37,259
  • Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
  • Week 34 – 35,626

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32 Weeks of World War Bee

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This past week saw drama in Brave Collective, the fifth largest alliance in the game currently and a member of Vily’s Legacy Coalition.  On Wednesday morning US time they had an alliance meeting where it was announced that they would be moving into Querious.  The fact that this was going to be fun was repeated frequently.  Other groups were reported to want to come live nearby and be close to Brave.  They were going to total take out Siberian Squads, who announced last week that, after having left Legacy Coalition, they were joining the Imperium and going to stage in Querious.  And taking and holding Querious was going to be in addition to maintaining their presence in Catch and Immensea, along with whatever commitments they might have to the war in Delve.  Nothing was being abandoned, there was no evacuation planned.

This seemed like a late point to make this sort of commitment.  As late as Week 24 of the war Brave held significant numbers of ihubs in the region.  They have since lost all of those ihubs, but now they were going to move in and start all over.

A while later a leak showed up on Reddit dumping internal leadership discussions about the state of the alliance and the move to Querious that was very much at odds with the happy, upbeat tone of the alliance meeting.  The outlook there was bleak and the ability to hold their old space while moving into Querious seemed unlikely, while the cost of all of this was going to be prohibitive.

This led to another alliance meeting that evening where Dunk Dinkle admitted up front that the leaked discussion was real.  He said it was embarrassing, but then commenced to hedge and try to paint a rosy picture once again.  Everything will be fine.  The M2-XFE hell camp is dragging the Imperium down.  Goons will collapse soon.  Victory is close at hand.

That prompted further leaks which reinforced the idea that Brave’s finances might be at the breaking point, along with some memes.

Meme’d… nice use of @dril for it too

One of the strange bits was the need to pay 12 billion ISK to TEST to be able to receive Imperium ping relays for intel.  But then Vily said on Discord that TEST pays that too and that it is just some guy in TEST that runs the service.

Sure thing

Looking over from the Imperium, that seems like a pretty ad hoc way to run a coalition.  Whatever.

Despite financial problems and too many commitments, Dunk echoed Kerensky in 1917 in saying that he has to keep Brave in the war.  But the fact that somebody in leadership is leaking these discussions indicates that there is discord within the ranks.

And then it sounded like there was discontent over in Federation Uprising, another Legacy Coalition alliance.

Admittedly this war is different than past wars.  Seven months of continuous fighting at this scale is unprecedented in New Eden and the obvious assumption on the PAPI side was that this would be the Casino War all over again with the Imperium falling back to low sec in a few weeks.  But Vily declared repeatedly that this was a war of extermination to drive Goons from the game because they are all bad people, and few things will make Goons dig in and hang on than making things personal.  Welcome to Delve.

Delve Front

PAPI continued to field large fleets and push on Imperium space in Delve, successfully taking ihubs in the SG-CTQ constellation.

Delve – Feb 14, 2021

PAPI also managed to destroy more than 20 large structures like Fortizars, Tataras, and Sotiyos in the region.

The hellcamp in M2-XFE carried on.  No serious efforts were made to try and break out the remaining ~130 titans and myriad smaller capitals trapped in bubbles around the Imperium Keepstar.  There was an uptick in capitals logging and getting destroyed as some players apparently were getting tired of waiting (some have been trapped in there since Dec 31, 2020) for the rescue that does not seem to be coming.  The big break out two weeks back apparently got enough leadership titans out that the rest of the trapped ships do not seem to be a priority.

Then there is the metaliminal storm, which has wandered down and has removed cloaking as an option in the staging systems for both sides in the war.  That is likely going to make things interesting, and all the more so if it keeps on moving down the path to 1DQ.  It does, in some ways, help the defender, as cloaky camping eyes cannot remain hidden.

Other Theaters

In Querious Brave started laying down ihubs as part of their move-in plan.

Querious – Feb 14, 2021

Since there were no ihubs in place, there was no contest over deploying them.  They just had to spend the 500 million ISK per ihub… if the Jita price is any indication… and carry them out there.  That is more ISK they are spending.  And, as you can see, they ended up getting reinforced.

Siberian Squads (SB-SQ), which joined the Imperium last week and which Dunk Dinkle was saying they would simply brush aside, took ihubs from PAPI during the week as well.  Brave did take the GOP-GE ihub, which is an Imperium Keepstar system, but they failed to take the Imperium Staging system in Querious, W6V-VM.  That also has a Keepstar and is where Siberian Squads is now based.

Back in Catch and Immensea The Initiative and their friends continued to make life difficult for Brave, Warped Intentions, and Federation Uprising.

Catch – Feb 14, 2021

Immensea – Feb 14, 2021

Out there structures and ihubs continued to be reinforced regularly and lost fairly frequently.

And then down in Esoteria The Bastion has kept on pushing against TEST, so that this week I not only have to put up a new map, but I have to change over to the whole region rather than just the northwest corner.

Esoteria – Feb 14, 2021

The Imperium continues to try and make Legacy Coalition regret their plan to move into new space in Delve and Querious while holding their old space.  Again, hearing the heart ache this is causing Brave, the second largest member of TEST’s Legacy Coalition, will only make the Imperium increase its efforts to disrupt their backfield.

My Participation

I will admit that I used most of my available game time to play Valheim last week.  That meant EVE Online (and World of Warcraft) didn’t get a lot of attention.  I did go on a couple of fleets and did some time on the M2 Hellcamp… missed a carrier kill when I  was in the bathroom… but wasn’t all that invested.

Well within range of my Rokh

So my losses for the war remain:

  • Ares interceptor – 15
  • Malediction interceptor – 7
  • Crusader interceptor – 5
  • Atron entosis frigate – 6
  • Rokh battleship – 5
  • Drake battle cruiser – 4
  • Scimitar logi – 3
  • Ferox battle cruiser – 3
  • Purifier stealth bomber – 3
  • Guardian logi – 2
  • Scalpel logi frigate – 2
  • Raven battleship – 1
  • Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
  • Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
  • Bifrost command destroyer – 1
  • Cormorant destroyer – 1
  • Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
  • Sigil entosis industrial – 1
  • Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The Mittani announced the Silver Ticket program last week.  The Golden Ticket program was an offer to any alliance with capitals trapped in M2-XFE to negotiate a price for their release.  Only one Golden Ticket was available and TEST was the only alliance barred from the plan.  This seemed largely a troll and nobody has taken up the offer that I have heard about.

The Silver Ticket program is an offer to individuals still trapped in M2-XFE to contact Imperium diplomats in order to sell their trapped capitals to the Imperium at a modest discount so that they could get out of the bubble camp with some ISK in hand.  This offer has netted the Imperium a Leviathan already.  (A ghost titan too, one from the second fight that showed up as an unfitted kill.) The pilot, who had gone over to Brave from GSF to play with a friend was apparently treated badly by Brave due to his corp history, which certainly motivated him to sell.  You can argue that he is the exception due to his background, but that is one more titan in the ranks of the Imperium.  But Brave has been having some troubles keeping up with its “Stay Classy” motto of late.

CCP also announced the Reign Quadrant this past week with the first February update which, as I mentioned, seemed to be dedicated to the Tactical Supremacy alliance, which has been one of the groups attacking Catch.  Another blow to Legacy Coalition there.

Tactical Supremacy is Victory, CCP says so

We also got the annual Guardians Gala event along with a login campaign.  Reports are that the sites pay off fairly well, but that they are more difficult than last year.

The war and the holiday event were not enough to boost the weekly peak user count, though it did not sag by much compared to the previous week and it is still up some from the holiday doldrums:

  • Day 1 – 38,838
  • Week 1 – 37,034
  • Week 2 – 34,799
  • Week 3 – 34,692
  • Week 4 – 35,583
  • Week 5 – 35,479
  • Week 6 – 34,974
  • Week 7 – 38,299
  • Week 8 – 35,650
  • Week 9 – 35,075
  • Week 10 – 35,812
  • Week 11 – 35,165
  • Week 12 – 36,671
  • Week 13 – 35,618
  • Week 14 – 39,681
  • Week 15 – 40,359
  • Week 16 – 36,642
  • Week 17 – 37,695
  • Week 18 – 36,632
  • Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
  • Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
  • Week 21 – 34,888
  • Week 22 – 33,264
  • Week 23 – 33,149
  • Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
  • Week 25 – 31,611
  • Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
  • Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
  • Week 28 – 34,713
  • Week 29 – 35,996
  • Week 30 – 38,323
  • Week 31 – 38,167
  • Week 32 – 37,259

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30 Weeks of World War Bee

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After a couple weeks of what one might describe as malaise on the part of PAPI, they finally came back strong this past week, taking advantage once again of their overwhelming numbers.

The big news for the week was probably the M2-XFE titan breakout.  After several feints and aborted attempts, PAPI finally committed to freeing their titans and went all in on it just after downtime on the 27th.  It was a costly operation for PAPI, which sacrificed more than 2 trillion ISK in losses… an amount made up largely of 400+ destroyed dreadnoughts… as the battle report shows.

Battle Report Header

But they managed to extract ~170 of their trapped titans, losing only 6 along the way, leaving 130 or so still in M2-XFE.  That can only count as a significant morale win for PAPI as they now have that many more titans to bring to bear if the situation calls for it.  The remaining titans are estimated to belong to the following groups:

  • Test Alliance Please Ignore – 47
  • Pandemic Horde – 39
  • Northern Coalition – 29
  • Brave Collective – 9
  • The Army of Mango Alliance – 8
  • Evictus – 2
  • Already Replaced – 2
  • Eternal Requiem – 1
  • Sev3rance – 1
  • VENI VIDI VICI – 1
  • Federation Uprising – 1
  • Fraternity – 1

PC Gamer’s Steven Messner wrote an article about the M2-XFE situation and the breakout which even mentions me briefly. (Wish he’d linked to the blog and not just the image, but whatever.)

The breakout coincided with a noticeable rise in participation on the part of PAPI pilots, demonstrating the morale boost the escape has given them.

Delve Front

Delve was far and away the most active area of the war, as one might expect.  After allowing the Imperium to push back some of their gains, the resurgent PAPI began successfully defending ihubs in the region.  One of those was in the system 1-SMEB, where PAPI was able to put up cyno jammers successfully and destroy the Keepstar there without opposition.

They also began to put in a lot of effort retake ihubs in Delve that the Imperium had snatched back.  They have been keen to get ihubs in systems with Keepstars and have been especially invested in reinforcing the ihub in M2-XFE, no doubt to keep their remaining trapped titans from having to extract from under a cyno jammer in another ten days.  After failing on the 28th, managed to secure the grid and reinforce the ihub on the 29th by dropping carriers to support entosis faxes on the ihub, finally claiming it after almost an hour over overtime in the contest.

Battle for the ihub in M2-XFE

That led to another battle yesterday over the ihub, one that ground on for hours because of Fozzie Sov and the fact that the RNG put multiple nodes in the M2-XFE system, which meant that a couple hours went by before even a single node was hacked by either side.  But, after the long tidi grind, PAPI numbers won the contest and now their trapped titans need no longer fear the looming cyno jammers in the system.  Looking at the battle report, compared to some other battles in this war, the cost seemed not so bad.  I supposed when you consider a quarter trillion ISK destroyed and nearly 1,500 kill mails “not so bad” you might be a bit jaded.

That leaves the ihub balance in the region looking like this.

Delve – Jan 31, 2021

PAPI has pushed back and taken ihubs in Keepstar systems.  If they can keep up their numbers advantage it seems likely that we will lose all of those Keepstars.

Also, we now have two metaliminal storms running through Delve, both of which found their way in through the same door.  Given the breadth of null sec, ending up with two such storms in the primary theater of operations… well, if I were a more suspicious person I might think CCP was pushing the RNG just to see what would happen.  They created the feature, no doubt somebody there wants to see how it might affect the war.

Other Theaters

I am demoting Catch to the “other theaters” category, not because of a lack of action there but because it most of the focus is on Delve while Catch is now in there with Esoteria and Immensea and other PAPI backfield regions that are under attack from specific Imperium groups.

In Catch The Initiative has been setting up in U-QVWD, dropping its own structures and sieging  the Legacy Coalition structures located there.

Catch – Jan 31, 2021

Near the connection to Querious Imperium and allied forces have continued to attack ihubs in order to force Legacy to respond.  Operations in Catch have spilled over to the neighboring region of Immensea, where ihubs have started to fall as well.

Immensea – Jan 31, 2021

Meanwhile, the metaliminal storm that had been hanging around in the region took the exit to Stain and is now meandering there.

Over in Querious the dead lands in the east remain unoccupied as neither side has any interest in dropping any further ihubs there it seems.

Querious – Jan 31, 2021

The metaliminal storm that came in from Catch has now moved on into Delve, as noted above.  An incursion has also shown up in one of the eastern constellations.  We shall see if anybody can be bothered to try and fight it.

And, finally, I am going to re-run the same Estoteria map again.

Northwest Esoteria – Jan 31, 2021

The ihub ownership has not changed despit some action over structures in the region.

And up in the north, a small unaligned group operating under the name Freemen of the North has been using the war as an opportunity to assail Fraternity, which has a large number of players back in the home space ratting and mining according to the MER.

My Participation

I did not get into many of the big fights over the past week as a lot of the action was happening in EUTZ.  Downtime is at 11:00 UT, 5am my time, which pretty much guarantees I am asleep when it passes.  But that is when a lot of the action around M2 occurs.  I did get into the big siege of the M2 ihub on Friday with two characters at different times.  At the end, during the “overtime” period, I flew in some ECM burst interceptors to try and help break the locks that hackers had on the ihub.  That ended up costing me three Maledictions, so my losses for the war are now:

  • Ares interceptor – 15
  • Malediction interceptor – 7
  • Crusader interceptor – 5
  • Atron entosis frigate – 6
  • Rokh battleship – 5
  • Drake battle cruiser – 4
  • Scimitar logi – 3
  • Ferox battle cruiser – 3
  • Purifier stealth bomber – 3
  • Guardian logi – 2
  • Scalpel logi frigate – 2
  • Raven battleship – 1
  • Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
  • Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
  • Bifrost command destroyer – 1
  • Cormorant destroyer – 1
  • Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
  • Sigil entosis industrial – 1
  • Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The Imperium finished issuing shares related to the war bond sales.  The UI for handling shares has been unsurprisingly described as “clunky.”  I now have my five shares.  The first dividend payment is due today.

Visible in my wallet

CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson participated in the Venture Beat’s Into the Metaverse summit, speaking about EVE Online.  He tried to jump on the GameStop frenzy by claiming that New Eden faces market manipulation as well, though he apparently couldn’t sight any examples. (pssst: the ice interdiction or Hulkageddon would have done)  He also said that EVE Online added 1.3 million players in 2020, for specific definitions of “added” no doubt.  The online user count certainly doesn’t seem to reflect much in the way of a dramatic influx of users.  But he also didn’t mention how many of them logged in once and never returned, which is the usual problem with the game.

Still, while we’re nowhere close to the record peak users of 2013, this past week did see numbers rise on Sunday at the prime time when both EUTZ and USTZ overlap.

  • Day 1 – 38,838
  • Week 1 – 37,034
  • Week 2 – 34,799
  • Week 3 – 34,692
  • Week 4 – 35,583
  • Week 5 – 35,479
  • Week 6 – 34,974
  • Week 7 – 38,299
  • Week 8 – 35,650
  • Week 9 – 35,075
  • Week 10 – 35,812
  • Week 11 – 35,165
  • Week 12 – 36,671
  • Week 13 – 35,618
  • Week 14 – 39,681
  • Week 15 – 40,359
  • Week 16 – 36,642
  • Week 17 – 37,695
  • Week 18 – 36,632
  • Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
  • Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
  • Week 21 – 34,888
  • Week 22 – 33,264
  • Week 23 – 33,149
  • Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
  • Week 25 – 31,611
  • Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
  • Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
  • Week 28 – 34,713
  • Week 29 – 35,996
  • Week 30 – 38,323

Related

World War Bee Six Month Review

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Time to sum up the story so far, if only to organize what I have written.

Munnins and Ishtars together in EI-O0O

The war officially started on July 5th with the end of the non-invasion pact between the Imperium and Legacy Coalition.  But nothing like that just happens on a single day.  The roots of the war go back much further and various points have been pointed to as where things began to head towards the state of affairs today.

I am not going to go down that rabbit hole.  Instead, I am picking as the start of things, the date when it became public that Vily and Legacy Coalition had been working PandaFam to attack the Imperium.  That extends the timeline by a couple weeks, but that was when things started moving… and when I started writing about the war and tagging it as such

Below is my post journey through the war so far in headline form.  This includes some events outside the war zone that involved the involved parties.  Each link goes out to the post named naturally, and often the headline is sufficient to tell you what to expect.  But somehow… and this was entirely unplanned… I ended up writing a weekly summary post.  For those posts I have added a few sub bullets to hit on the topics mentioned beyond just the state of the fighting.

And that is where we sit some six or so months into the war, with 71 posts documenting the path I’ve taken.  The battles over the M2-XFE Keepstar has given the Imperium some breathing room to push back on the invaders, but the war is still in Delve and PAPI still has a Keepstar one gate over from our capital.  There is much left to do.

Related:

24 Weeks of World War Bee

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We are at week 24 of the war proper, having started officially back on July 5th, but it has been a full six months since the invaders were caught out in their plans and the two week count down to the start began, so I am celebrating six months of writing about World War Bee.  Compare that to the Fountain War back in 2013, which covered just two months, or the Casino War, which started in earnest in February 2016, had us in Saranen by mid April, and in Delve come July.  And we’re not done yet.

This week saw an address by Progodlegend to Legacy and TEST where he both said the war was pretty much a foregone conclusion and that we will all soon begin to abandon the Imperium.  The Initiative attacking in Catch was held up as a prime example of the Imperium collapsing.  Once the war is over Legacy will lay claim to both its old territory, such Esoteria, which they previously said they were abandoning for Delve, as well as Delve, Querious, Period Basis.

Basically, all they need to do is wrap up the Imperium pockets in 1DQ1-A and E3OI-U and they’re done, the war is over.  Those will be the last big fights of the war.  The timeline for that, however, is fairly vague.  Progodlegend says the will come very soon at one point and maybe in  a couple more months elsewhere.  Goons being driven from the game is assumed in there somewhere.

Pandemic Horde had a town hall meeting last week as well, where they distanced themselves from the Vily message of driving Goons from the game.  They are just in it to damage the Imperium economically.  They seem less patient when it comes to assaulting 1DQ1-A and E3OI-U, suggesting if the current strategy wasn’t working in the first few weeks of December that they might try something different.  Also, the second pass on Fountain has been seen to be something of a wasted effort which will likely not continue.

On the comedy front, there was this 5.3 billion ISK Vince Draken pod that got caught trying to slip through Delve in a covert ops frigate.

Delve Front

The Delve front saw quite a bit of action.  Also, that metaliminal storm has found its way into NPC Delve, keeping people from cloaking in the systems marked around it.

Delve – Dec. 20, 2020

The Imperium strategy of retaking ihubs before the 35 timer runs down and allows PAPI to cyno jam the system has not been working out for us.  We were not able to retake the ihub for NOL-M9 as they were able to put many more people on the field to defend it that we would manage.  NOL-M9 now has a cyno jammer setup and the Keepstar there seems likely to be destroyed this week.

PAPI titans at the armor timer shoot

A similar fate seems likely for the Keepstar in D-W7F0, where PAPI also holds the ihub.

The strategy, or that aspect of it which I can see, appears to have moved to preventing enotsis ops on the ihubs that remain in our hands where Keepstars remain.  This had led to a number of fierce skirmishes, like the ones that have happened around 5-CQDA.

Battle Report Header

The other twist that has been coming up more recently is forcing PAPI to choose between objectives.  PAPI can put enough pilots in Delve to force an objective there, but a simultaneous timer elsewhere, like Catch, will be lost because they had to make the choice.

Catch Front

This week I am elevating the Catch region to have its own category as it remains the most active theater outside of Delve and is the place where Legacy is being forced to make choices.

Legacy came back and reinforced the staging Fortizar of The Initiative, but were distracted by a Delve objective that allowed The Initiative to put down a backup Fortizar in their staging in 0SHT-A.  The odd thing was that, when the final timer came up for the original Fortizar, Legacy started to commit to it, lost a bunch of ships to The Initiative, then stood down, losing both the objective and the ISK war.

That left The Initiative with two Fortizars in 0SHT-A after the fight.

Meanwhile, ihubs in Catch, and even next door in Immensea, have been falling.  We took the DY-P7Q ihub and then blew up the no longer operational Ansiblex jump gate and Pharolux cyno beacon on the grid with the Keepstar anchored there.

The Ansiblex blowing up, taking over a billion ISK in fuel with it

The Initiative now holds the ihub and TCU for HED-GP, the gateway system into the region from high sec.

And, as Progodlegend said, Imperium SIGs have been active in Catch as well.  Asher, accused of abandoning the war to hide in Catch, had gathered up the Reavers SIG to deploy out to 0SHT-A along with The Initiative, so I have been out there some myself.  We have been shooting structures… like the two above… as well as doing some of our own entosis work.  Not bad for a “30 man SIG.”  (We have Dawn Rhea of Theta Thursdays with us as well, so add at least one woman to the total.)

Popping a node during an entosis event

Things do not look so bad for Legacy when you look at the map of Catch right now.

Catch – Dec. 20, 2020

They have taken back some ihubs, including the one at 4-07MU, which connects to Querious.  But having lost them, they have to wait 35 days after restoring them before they can install Ansiblex jump gates to restore their easy travel routes.  Instead they either have to gate, use titan bridges, or jump clone between Delve and Catch.

Furthermore, rumor has it that The Watchmen alliance, which holds a large section of Catch for Legacy, is about to fold up shop and disband.  That would set quite a few systems back to the 35 day clock before they can be used for travel infrastructure.

Other Theaters

Despite Progodlegend declaring the Esoteria efforts a failure, citing The Initiative’s move to Catch as evidence, the groups remaining down there, The Bastion, Ferrata Victrix, and the Stain Russians who hate TEST, have continued to make a nuisance of themselves.  They have pushed back on The Army of Mango’s attempt to assert itself in the region and have expanded to hacking new systems.

NW Esoteria – Dec. 20, 2020

Then there is Querious, which is largely a dead zone as both sides have tired of planting new ihubs in the region.

Querious – Dec. 20, 2020

A range of systems remain empty while those still occupied by Brave continue to be assailed, meaning Brave has to deal with entosis events both here and in Catch.

And then in Fountain, as noted above, the PAPI invasion has pretty much ceased, with NCDot left holding a single ihub in LBGI-2 for now.

My Participation

I was able to jump in on a few ops, including two fights in 5-CQDA, including the one mentioned above.  I was also off on a few side missions over in Catch.  I ended up losing a few ships, including two Malediction interceptors that were used for burst jamming in one fight (the hostiles love that), a Scimitar in another fight, an Atron entosis frigate, and a Drake.

Probably the most amusing fight was in Catch on Saturday night when we landed on a gate with a Maller gang fit with smart bombs who were looking for ESS banks to rob.  We murdered them.

Murder report header

The one ship of ours they got was a Griffin ECM frigate.  Otherwise they were tackled and blown up.  In that quick clash I somehow managed to get the final blow on five of them with my sentry drones, which gave me a nice little line of five kill marks on my Ishtar.

5 orange kill marks in the upper left on my Blaze SKIN Ishtar

I do not think I have ever had a hull last long enough to earn five kill marks.

Anyway, my losses for the war so far now are as follows:

  • Ares interceptor – 12
  • Crusader interceptor – 5
  • Atron entosis frigate – 6
  • Rokh battleship – 5
  • Drake battle cruiser – 4
  • Malediction interceptor – 4
  • Ferox battle cruiser – 3
  • Purifier stealth bomber – 2
  • Guardian logi – 2
  • Scalpel logi frigate – 2
  • Scimitar logi – 2
  • Raven battleship – 1
  • Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
  • Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
  • Bifrost command destroyer – 1
  • Cormorant destroyer – 1
  • Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
  • Sigil entosis industrial – 1
  • Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP did a Fireside Chat on Twitch with CCP Burger and CCP Hellmar where they mentioned, among other things, that more than 1.9 million new players had logged into EVE Online in 2020, a number greater than the previous three years combined.

That seems like amazing news, though the fact that the online numbers peaked back in April and have been slowly sliding down as the year has begun to fade suggests that CCP has not solved the player retention problem they brought up at EVE North back in 2019.

The CSM 14 summit meeting minutes had a list of priorities that were:

  1. Stop the bleeding
  2. Fix the stupid
  3. Excite and teach
  4. Incentivize return

It feels like they haven’t really addressed the first point yet as 1.9 million people have poured into the game this year and apparently right back out again.  This number of new players was so huge that I had to check to see if they were including EVE Echoes in their count, but EVE Echoes has claimed more than 2 million players on its own, so I couldn’t tell you where those 1.9 million went.

And that brings us to this week’s peak concurrent user number, which was down again.

  • Day 1 – 38,838
  • Week 1 – 37,034
  • Week 2 – 34,799
  • Week 3 – 34,692
  • Week 4 – 35,583
  • Week 5 – 35,479
  • Week 6 – 34,974
  • Week 7 – 38,299
  • Week 8 – 35,650
  • Week 9 – 35,075
  • Week 10 – 35,812
  • Week 11 – 35,165
  • Week 12 – 36,671
  • Week 13 – 35,618
  • Week 14 – 39,681
  • Week 15 – 40,359
  • Week 16 – 36,642
  • Week 17 – 37,695
  • Week 18 – 36,632
  • Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
  • Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
  • Week 21 – 34,888
  • Week 22 – 33,264
  • Week 23 – 33,149
  • Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)

That is now the low water mark for the war, with even the holiday events and the Luminaire snowball fight failing to entice people into the game.

Related

23 Weeks of World War Bee

We lost another Keepstar while trying to unanchor it.  This time we managed to unanchor the structure ourselves, so PAPI didn’t steal it, but the jump freighter that was sent to scoop it got popped and the Keepstar was destroyed with the ship.  Some day we’ll get one unachored successfully

Then we lost a second one down in Period Basis and the one in NOL-M9 looks to be in danger.   It was not a good week on the Keepstar front for us.

This has added up to a lot of low effort trolling in /r/eve about why Goons won’t admit they have lost the war.  That makes we want to pull out the quote from early in the war, which Vily has reiterated over and over with the full support of his alliance and coalition:

When we started this war, we knew that we were fighting this to the end,” Vily told Polygon. “For us, this is a war of extermination. This is a war to the death. We are aiming for the removal of Mittani and The Imperium from Eve Online. […] We are here to purge them.

-Vily, in an interview with Polygon about the war

Leaving aside the fact that so long as we are still in the game we haven’t lost according to Vily’s stated victory condition, there really isn’t another exit from the war for us.  If Mittens said we’ve lost, that wouldn’t stop the invasion.  If you don’t leave somebody an out then they have nothing to lose if they keep fighting.

You might think that some moderation may have entered the picture since that Polygon article, which ran back in September.  But you would be wrong.

IGN published an article about the war this past week which offers a good summary of what is going on.  But within it you will find Vily bringing up the same end goal.  The war of extermination is still on.  Vily has set the parameters of the war and we have no place better to be.  1DQ1-A is where most of our stuff is now, so that is where we’ll stay.

CCP has also turned its eye back to the war.  With the Triglavian event over they found time to write up a post about the battle at FWST-8, which renewed two Guinness World Records for the company back in early October.  Lots of charts and graphs.

On another front, Massively OP named World War Bee as the Best MMO Event of 2020.

And then there is the ongoing forgotten rigs meme, which hit Vily again this past week.  Madcows of Elitist Ops was nice enough to contract them back.

Available for pickup

We’ll see if he picks them up from our Keepstar in D-W7F0. (Which you can do, it would just be risky.)

Delve Front

The week opened with a bang.  Pretty much as my Week 22 summary post went live PAPI tried to break down the door to 1DQ1-A with their headshot plan to take out the cyno jammers and reinforce the ihub.  We managed to thwart their attempt, but it looked like it was finally going to be Game On.  They were finally going to come and get us.

On the ihub grid

This was what we were waiting for and people on our side were itching for a return bout.

And then everything went back to the slow skirmishes over ihubs and small structures and whatever in Delve.  Not much happened.  Some ihubs changed hands, we botched the Keepstar scoop, and Vily forgot to fit his rigs again.

Delve – Dec. 13, 2020

One environmental change occurred however.  That metaliminal storm I mentioned in Querious last week got on its bike and rode into Delve, landing in SVM-3K.  It is an electrical type storm, which is the one that disables the ability to cloak.  If that keeps moving into the region it could mean some fun times.

Other Theaters

The re-invasion of Fountain announced which I mentioned last week seems to have fallen flat, likely due to lack of interest.

Fountain – Dec. 13, 2020

NCDot had a dozen ihubs there last week, now they have three.  The Initiative, the alleged target, has deployed elsewhere, but somebody seems to be pushing back in their space time.

Also, the metaliminal storm in Fountain, unlike the one now in Delve, seemed content to just meander about its pocket.

Querious remains an entosis skirmish zone.  Systems sit with no ihubs installed as both sides seem tired of them changing hands.

Querious – Dec. 13, 2020

The metaliminal storm in Delve is still on the border with Querious, so its effects still spill into the region despite the distance that regional gate spans.  New Eden storm logic I guess.

In northwest Esoteria, while The Initiative has moved on The Bastion, Ferrata Victrix, and the Stain Russians continue to keep the region from being a safe spot in the Legacy backfield.

Northwest Esoteria – Dec. 13, 2020

And this week we have a new entry in the secondary fronts, which is Catch.  I mentioned this in a post on Saturday and indicated that it too would now have to be included on this list.

The Initiative has set up shop in the system of 0SHT-A (universally referred to as “Oh Shit!”) in the NPC null sec region of Curse, which puts them a single gate from the center of Catch and very close to Brave’s home, route to the war, and supply route from high sec.

Action in Catch

They have used this position to reinforce and kill structures, reinforce and take ihubs, gank the locals, and disrupt life for them behind the lines.

Catch – Dec. 13, 2020

While derided as another pin prick, Legacy Coalition is moving assets and setting jump clones to Catch in order to counter this new fire in their rear area.  This will degrade their efforts in Delve and generally make the war more effort for them to prosecute.

And, just to make things interesting, there is also a storm in Catch, a Gamma storm, which has a penalty to remote reps.  There is also a Winter Nexus event ice storm, but that has no penalties.

Keep up to date on storm locations… at least the non-event ones… over at EVE Scout.

My Participation

I got into a few more fleets over the week than I had in the past couple.  I was lucky enough to get into the PAPI headshot fight in 1DQ1-A, so saw some actually fleet combat.  Otherwise I was mostly along for fleets out covering entosis or shooting people trying to entosis our stuff, though I may have spent some time in Catch.  But none of my ships exploded, so my losses for the war remain:

  • Ares interceptor – 12
  • Crusader interceptor – 5
  • Rokh battleship – 5
  • Atron entosis frigate – 5
  • Ferox battle cruiser – 3
  • Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
  • Purifier stealth bomber – 2
  • Guardian logi – 2
  • Malediction interceptor – 2
  • Scalpel logi frigate – 2
  • Raven battleship – 1
  • Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
  • Gnosis ratting battlecruiser – 1
  • Scimitar logi – 1
  • Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
  • Cormorant destroyer – 1
  • Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
  • Sigil entosis industrial – 1
  • Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP introduced some changes with the December patch last Tuesday, among the biggest was the change to PvE drone aggression.  Feedback… and the fact that it broke PvP drone functionality… got CCP to roll back the change.  We’ll see if they try this again once they have their code figured out.

They also un-fixed the fix that stopped people from setting their home stations in NPC stations without cloning services.  This bug was around so long that it became a feature.  The real question for me was why NPC stations don’t all have clone services at this point?

Unannounced in the patch notes, or anywhere else, was a new character generation process.  This only affects newly created accounts and there is already a forum thread complaining about it.  To me it feels like an attempt to simplify the character creation process to get people actually into the game without getting bogged down in avatar creation.  We’ll see how that plays out.

They also kicked off the holiday event, the Winter Nexus.

And this week CCP faced another foe; the launch of Cyberpunk 2077.  Given how many people are talking about this game… it shattered Blizzard’s claim that Shadowlands was the fastest selling PC game ever, moving 8 million pre-orders, including 4.7 million on PC… the PCU dipped only slightly on Sunday.

  • Day 1 – 38,838
  • Week 1 – 37,034
  • Week 2 – 34,799
  • Week 3 – 34,692
  • Week 4 – 35,583
  • Week 5 – 35,479
  • Week 6 – 34,974
  • Week 7 – 38,299
  • Week 8 – 35,650
  • Week 9 – 35,075
  • Week 10 – 35,812
  • Week 11 – 35,165
  • Week 12 – 36,671
  • Week 13 – 35,618
  • Week 14 – 39,681
  • Week 15 – 40,359
  • Week 16 – 36,642
  • Week 17 – 37,695
  • Week 18 – 36,632
  • Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
  • Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
  • Week 21 – 34,888
  • Week 22 – 33,264
  • Week 23 – 33,149

Of course, Legacy was supposed to be conducting that big move op in order to defend Catch, so that and the holiday event might have been enough to keep the numbers from tipping too far.  We’ll see how it goes next week.

Related

22 Weeks of World War Bee

One of our Keepstars has gone missing.

The Imperium Keepstar in K-6K16, one of the systems on the Doomclock, was allowed to unanchor at an unplanned time and NCDot swooped in and scooped it up. By the time anybody noticed what was going on it was too late to do much besides try to shoot the freighter carrying it off, which failed.  PAPI gets some pay back for losing a titan and a super on their own Keepstar in T5ZI-S last week I guess.

Still, that didn’t stop the PAPI team from losing more expensive stuff.  They managed to get another titan blown up, a Ragnarok that for some reason though it was a good idea to jump the gate into 1DQ1-A.  At least they can claim they were attacking something.

Then there was the more than 20 billion ISK TEST Legion that got caught.  Gating BPOs into hostile territory is probably not the brightest of plans.

Also in the news was PandaFam member Fraternity who, after CCP came in with the botting patrol to ban players and take back ill gotten gains, found their executor corporation 1 trillion ISK in the negative for the corp wallet.  They didn’t just lose a trillion ISK, the balance was negative 1 trillion ISK.

Delve Front

Delve is still where most of the action is.

The view from 1DQ1-A

The back and forth continues across the T5Z-1DQ gap.  Small fights and ganks of opportunity occur pretty much from the start of EU prime time to well into the Australian time zone.  That means there is always an opportunity to shoot something if you’re game.   However, you might be hard pressed to find any meaningful big objectives, if that is what you want out of a war.  No Guinness World Records are going to fall in this situation.

Delve – Dec. 6, 2020

And, of course, I took a moment to mark where an incursion was taking place, then it was finished before this post went live.

Other Theaters

Querious remains what it is, the main side show, but still a side show.  The Imperium managed to take the ihub in P-ZMZV which snapped the jump bridge network supporting PAPI’s supply lines into Delve.  They’ll work around it quickly enough, but it was an annoyance.

According to the EVE Scout Storm Tracker there is a metaliminal storm in ES-Q0W down in the southern part of the zone.  It is an electrical storm, which according to the info I posted back when they were introduced, is the type that prohibits cloaking.

Querious – Dec. 6, 2020

That will probably suppress any activity around there, but it would be amusing if it rolled into Delve.

Proof that there isn’t enough going on in Delve?  I think the fact PandaFam decided to actually start their promised re-invasion of Fountain is a convincing argument in favor of that.

There is also a metaliminal storm wandering Fountain… it has been there for weeks, but since something is happening there I might as well put it on the map.

Fountain – Dec. 6, 2020

The storm is of the exotic variety that boosts scanning and warp speed while debuffing reps and kinetic resists.  It has a long way to go to reach Delve, but it started back in Cloud Ring, so it could get there.

And then there is Esoteria, where the Army of Mango Alliance has been pushing back on the Imperium and Stain Russian forces that have been attacking the area.

NW Esoteria – Dec. 6, 2020

AOM has been working at it, but systems keep changing hands and the core defense of the interlopers remains strong.  The Imperium and the Stain Russians also managed to knock off three supers, a jump freighter, and a Rorqual that Siberian Squads had nearby in Catch.

My Participation

After my Thanksgiving holiday gaming binge I had to get back to focusing on work.  That meant less play time on all fronts, but I still managed to get a couple of ops in and got on a few more kill mails to prove I still exist.  I also managed to jump through the T5Z-1DQ gate just as PAPI was massing for a quick jab and managed to lose my Ares, so I will add that to my loss tally for the way.

It was only then that I realized that I was in a pod with implants, but I managed to warp off and jump out the other gate and get to a station that would let me put on an Ibis.  I sacrificed that to get to Helm’s Deep and the Ansiblex home, but I am not counting rookie ships.

So my loss total now stands at:

  • Ares interceptor – 12
  • Crusader interceptor – 5
  • Rokh battleship – 5
  • Atron entosis frigate – 5
  • Ferox battle cruiser – 3
  • Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
  • Purifier stealth bomber – 2
  • Guardian logi – 2
  • Malediction interceptor – 2
  • Scalpel logi frigate – 2
  • Raven battleship – 1
  • Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
  • Gnosis ratting battlecruiser – 1
  • Scimitar logi – 1
  • Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
  • Cormorant destroyer – 1
  • Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
  • Sigil entosis industrial – 1
  • Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP made a few tweaks to the Dynamic Bounty System and mandatory ESS changes introduced last month.  They are:

Dynamic Bounties System (DBS) parameters adjustments:

  • Equilibrium value increased from 115% to 135%
  • The maximum output of the DBS increased from 150% to 180%
  • The recover to equilibrium rate for states below the equilibrium value has been increased, making it easier for systems to recover.

Encounter Surveillance System (ESS) parameters adjustments:

  • The time required to hack the main bank increased from 5 minutes to 6 minutes and 30 seconds
  • The auto payment timer reduced from 3 to 2 hours
  • The radius from the ESS where Cloaking is restriced increased from 75 km to 150 km. All other effects remain at a 75 km radius.

Given the enthusiasm I have seen at our end for running off to rob banks, I can why they might want to work with that.  Six and a half minutes is more time, and can seem like forever when you’re sitting there, but to get a defense fleet together for anything bigger than randos passing through takes time as well.

CCP also announced they were going to go back to native support for MacOS.  Expected to arrive in 2021, CCP mentioned the Metal graphics system and the Big Sur operating system update as specifically being supported.  A likely incentive for this move was Apple’s move to their M1 processor on systems going forward.  Given even Linus Torvalds said that Linux support for the M1 was unlikely, CCP couldn’t just rely on Wine to keep MacOS players in the game.

This will probably also be a bit of a blow to those still running EVE Online on various Linux distros, an unsupported configuration still used by a small group of players, unless CCP continues to contribute to the Wine project after the new native MacOS client is released.

And then there was the weekly peak concurrent number, which was down again this week.

  • Day 1 – 38,838
  • Week 1 – 37,034
  • Week 2 – 34,799
  • Week 3 – 34,692
  • Week 4 – 35,583
  • Week 5 – 35,479
  • Week 6 – 34,974
  • Week 7 – 38,299
  • Week 8 – 35,650
  • Week 9 – 35,075
  • Week 10 – 35,812
  • Week 11 – 35,165
  • Week 12 – 36,671
  • Week 13 – 35,618
  • Week 14 – 39,681
  • Week 15 – 40,359
  • Week 16 – 36,642
  • Week 17 – 37,695
  • Week 18 – 36,632
  • Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
  • Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
  • Week 21 – 34,888
  • Week 22 – 33,264

That’s the lowest number of the war so far.

Related

21 Weeks of World War Bee

We’re getting to the point where numbers have hyphens and such, but the AP Style Guide says I can just use numerals past 10, so I am swapping to that for titles now.  Also, this week’s update is a day late because I had my usual end of the month post queued up for yesterday.

Welcome to December I guess.

That at least gives us a chance to look at November as a whole as another overall loss report has been put together.  This covers losses all across New Eden and not just on the battle fronts and shows the losses by the two sides to be fairly close, with the Imperium losing 6.2 trillion ISK to PAPI’s 5.7 trillion ISK in losses.

Losses in November by alliance

While TEST has been mocked for leading the war and then letting PandaFam do the heavy lifting, they at least can claim they topped the loss chart for PAPI.

November losses by ship/structure class

When sorted out by what was lost by value for each side, you can see the Imperium losing structures dominating their top five while PAPI losing ships, including some supers and four titans, is what made up the top of their loss list.

While last week was a normal week in most of the world, it was Thanksgiving week here in the US, which meant you likely either had a lot more time to play video games or no time at all, depending on your circumstance.  There was even a hint that an agreement had been reached to not set timers to come out on Thanksgiving Day, though I couldn’t tell you if anybody paid it any mind.

The Mittani posted a war update that invoked Churchillian “finest hour” imagery as we fight to defend what remains of our space in Delve.

Our finest Imperium hour

I’m thinking Stalingrad memes might be more appropriate.  That seems to be what we’re shooting for, a grinding battle that wears the invaders out.  Or maybe Verdun.

He also brought attention to the DOOm Clock, which tracks the time left in PAPI held systems which contain an Imperium Keepstar until they can put up a cyno jammer.  The basic plan is to get everybody to put their assets in Keepstars and deny PAPI the favorable circumstances they demand before they will attack one.

PAPI continued to push their narratives.  We’re broke.  We’ve lost.  The war is essentially won.  (So Progod has time to go play PlanetSide 2.) It will all be over soon.  And, of course, the constant drum beat from Vily and Legacy coalition that we’re all horrible people with horrible leaders and need to be driven from the game.

One of their key articles of faith seems to be that if they constantly concern troll The Initiative about how they are suffering due association with the Imperium, they will split off and leave the fight.  That is just the way their leadership rolls.

Delve Front

Delve remains the focus of the war, with PAPI staging in T5ZI-S and the bulk of Imperium forces based next door in 1DQ1-A.  This has made combat a daily occurrence as both sides are too close to ignore or avoid each other.  The friction which this causes will keep losses up for both sides.

Delve – Nov. 29, 2020

While PAPI has continued to grind down smaller structures and a few Fortizars, the Imperium has continued to make them pay for being lax, including catching a Leviathan and a Revenant untethered on the Keepstar in their staging.  Given the exploding price of minerals we saw in the October MER, capital ships are going to start getting expensive to replace.

Other Theaters

With war on our doorstep The Imperium spent less time trying to push back Querious.  There are still quite a few systems with no ihub installed, but the flips were less frequent last week.  The main focus for the Imperium has been ihubs for systems that still contain one of our Keepstars, per the DOOm clock mentioned above.  W6V-VM, for example, got reset on Saturday when we blew up the ihub there.

Querious – Nov. 29, 2020

In Esoteria it appears that TEST has made a deal with Army of Mango Alliance (AoM).  You may remember that AoM decided to opt out of the war for the most part back in week seventeen, going home to crab.  TEST has convinced them to defend Esoteria, no doubt promising them the space if they can hold it, against the Imperium forces that have set up shop in the region.  That has led to some push back against The Initiative, The Bastion, and Ferrata Victrix.

Northwest Esoteria – Nov. 29, 2020

While both sides work on wresting ihubs from each other, the locals managed to lose a Nyx, a Hel, a few Rorquals, and some structures.  It isn’t a safe place to crab at the moment.

And then there is the promised PandaFam invasion of Fountain that was mentioned last week.  That hasn’t materialized so far, there not being much there to invade I suppose.  A few targets of opportunity have been hit, but nothing taken.  Maybe next week.

My Participation

Last week I probably had more time for video games overall, though it was broken up by family and holiday activities, so there were not so many large blocks of time, the usual requirement for fleet ops.  Also I played quite a bit of the new Shadowlands expansion in World of Warcraft and not so much EVE Online.

But, as always, I found a time for a few fleets.  The week started off with a Mister Vee fleet that ran into T5ZI-S and blew up an Athanor while about 1,200 PAPI pilots sat around trying to figure out what to do about it.

Athanor starting to brew up as we fly past

They eventually tried to block the way back to 1DQ1-A, but we got out the back door and were able to get a bridge home off the Keepstar in D-W7F0.

I was in a few other ops on the gate between the two forces, including another John Hartley “you’re all dumb” op where some people didn’t follow instructions and got blown up by a Chemo Proteus gang and he left the fleet.  While I understand his frustration, being among those who did follow instructions and being abandoned doesn’t make me want to log in when I see his ops pinged.  And those of us on the ball actually killed a Chemo Proteus.  Oh well.

I thought I might have a loss to report after an unfueled Raitaru was blown up in 1DQ1-A, which dumped its contents into space, there being no more asset safety for such structures.  I was in a fleet that chased off the attackers, then began going through the station containers to see what there was worth rescuing.  I grabbed some nocxium and ejected some ships into space, then dropped my own ship off at a nearby structure and warped back to jump in a couple of the ships to see if they were fit.  They were not, but my boarding them flagged them as mine, so when we blew them up, I got the insurance payout.  However, no kill mail was attributed to me, so no loss I guess.  I also carried off an empty Tristan, just because I could.

All of which left my loss count the same as last week.

  • Ares interceptor – 11
  • Crusader interceptor – 5
  • Rokh battleship – 5
  • Atron entosis frigate – 5
  • Ferox battle cruiser – 3
  • Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
  • Purifier stealth bomber – 2
  • Guardian logi – 2
  • Malediction interceptor – 2
  • Scalpel logi frigate – 2
  • Raven battleship – 1
  • Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
  • Gnosis ratting battlecruiser – 1
  • Scimitar logi – 1
  • Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
  • Cormorant destroyer – 1
  • Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
  • Sigil entosis industrial – 1
  • Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

Last week CCP also brought us the Explosive Velocity update which tweaked a few ships and is alleged to have fixed the server problem that ruined the Imperiums trap in YZ9-F6 back in October.  We shall see if anybody is willing to gamble some more titans based on that fix.

Meanwhile, the weekly peak concurrent user count dipped a bit, landing on Sunday below the 35K mark.

  • Day 1 – 38,838
  • Week 1 – 37,034
  • Week 2 – 34,799
  • Week 3 – 34,692
  • Week 4 – 35,583
  • Week 5 – 35,479
  • Week 6 – 34,974
  • Week 7 – 38,299
  • Week 8 – 35,650
  • Week 9 – 35,075
  • Week 10 – 35,812
  • Week 11 – 35,165
  • Week 12 – 36,671
  • Week 13 – 35,618
  • Week 14 – 39,681
  • Week 15 – 40,359
  • Week 16 – 36,642
  • Week 17 – 37,695
  • Week 18 – 36,632
  • Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
  • Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
  • Week 21 – 34,888

No doubt the US holiday, the start of the shopping season, and/or the launch of the World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion ate a bit into the user base.

Related

Nineteen Weeks of World War Bee

Almost to 20 weeks and I haven’t given up on this weekly post yet.  We’ll see who lasts longer, me or Ban Syrin at INN. (Not that my posts are as detailed as theirs, but I do mark up a lot more maps.)

A bit of news hit late in the week when a disgruntled director in Requiem Eternal decided to defect to the Imperium.  They brought with them a reported a trillion ISK in assets, including a Moreau faction Fortizar and all the ISK the alliance had in its wallet, then disbanded the alliance as they left.

Rest in Peace for sure

That destroyed all their ihubs, dropped their sovereignty, and left almost two thousand pilots without an alliance.

Top of the charts

TEST had to get into its backfield yet again and cover the open sovereignty in the Impass region.  It will now be 35 days before any of those systems can host an Ansiblex jump gate.  The corporations in the alliance are all still safe and there appears to be a move to create a new alliance, Eternal Requiem, but this was another disruption.

On the press coverage front, CCP sat down with Game Rant to discuss the game and the war currently in progress.

Delve Front

Delve has become a back and forth slog over ihubs in a number of constellations.  The map as I write looks like this.

Delve – Nov. 15, 2020

However, if you compare it with my map from last week, you will see various systems in the highlighted constellations have changed hands since then.  In fact, the ihubs in those contested constellations change hands daily, so by the time this post goes live the ihub map of Delve will no doubt have changed yet again.

That has made fights sporadic as both sides seem okay with letting individual systems get flipped, knowing they can just come back tomorrow and flip them back.

That is the way it has been going and likely will continue going until one side gets tired and either gives up or decides on a different tactic.

Meanwhile, the gate camp in E3OI-U continues.  That system, and the systems behind it, have all had cyno jammers turned on in order to protect them.

Other Theaters

There was the potential for a big fight in Querious as the final timers hit for the Imperium Keepstar that was left behind in 49-U6U.  There were plans to defend the armor timer and pings went out to that effect, but the defense operations never came to pass.

The defense was based on a plan Asher Elias had formulated and, when yet another storm came ashore near his home a tree fell and knocked out his power just before the op.  Or so the story goes.

Since it was his plan, nobody else was ready to take up the reigns.  In the end, the Keepstar was destroyed, with the gunner taking out a couple of attacking capital ships, giving the invaders their seventh Keepstar kill of the war.

Otherwise Querious remained a low intensity war zone as both sides set about reinforcing and destroying each other’s ihubs, with many systems left without ihubs.

Querious – Nov. 15, 2020

The Imperium did manage to take back “fake” Querious, the set of systems assigned to the region but which are an enclave within Delve.

Then there is Esoteria, where The Bastion and Ferrata Victrix have been waging a guerilla war against TEST to distract them from their main effort in Delve.  After weeks of holding on to their foothold and Fortizar, they have started making more progress against TEST, adding four more ihubs to the list that they have taken.

Essoteria – Nov. 15, 2020

Adding to TEST’s problems on that front, The Initiative announced that they are deploying to Esoteria to join the campaign.  I may have to start using the whole map of Esoteria rather than just the northwest corner when the force there really gets to work.  I may have to give Esoteria its own section soon.

My Participation

I stood by on a couple of strategic ops, but the enemy declined to show up and we either saved the structure or took the ihub and were done without firing a shot.  As such, my loss tally remained unchanged.

  • Ares interceptor – 11
  • Crusader interceptor – 5
  • Rokh battleship – 5
  • Atron entosis frigate – 5
  • Ferox battle cruiser – 3
  • Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
  • Purifier stealth bomber – 2
  • Guardian logi – 2
  • Malediction interceptor – 2
  • Scalpel logi frigate – 2
  • Raven battleship – 1
  • Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
  • Gnosis ratting battlecruiser – 1
  • Scimitar logi – 1
  • Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
  • Cormorant destroyer – 1
  • Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
  • Sigil entosis industrial – 1
  • Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The past week saw some distractions in New Eden.

First, there was the November update aimed at further nerfing null sec, with the Dynamic Bounty system, aimed at making null sec empires spread out (again), and the mandatory Encounter Surveillance System changes, which encourage null sec empires to consolidate, all in the name of making us fight more in the middle of a war that has already set two Guinness World Records.

That got people out robbing banks as part of the new ESS system.  I saw more action doing that than I did in the actual war last week.

Hello ESS Bank!

And then there was the EVE-NT Alliance Open.  CCP is still unable to run the alliance tournament themselves, so have let EVE-NT run one again this year.  That kicked off on Saturday and pitted 32 teams in a double elimination tournament. Both Goonswarm and The Initiative lost their first round matches, making it unlikely that the two alliances will come to blows, something the invaders have been having wet dreams about since the fighting in Fountain started, even in the tournament.

Two losses

Goonswarm actually lost their second match as well, so are out of the tournament, while The Initiative carries on into next week.

While I’m not a huge fan of the tournament, I did watch a bit of it.  Probably the oddest thing I saw was the Rote Kapelle vs Dock Workers match where both teams fielded identical fleet compositions, consisting of 3 Barghests, 2 Caracals, 2 Scalpels, a Stormbringer, a Hyena, and a Stork.  I know the point system and the meta tend to push teams in similar directions at times, but I cannot recall seeing a mirror image fight when it came to hulls.  That Rote Kapelle won handily indicates that fittings, tactics, and pilot skill were the more important factors.

All of that seemed to add up to a weekly PCU that was fair to middling for these times, and this week fell on Saturday rather than Sunday:

  • Day 1 – 38,838
  • Week 1 – 37,034
  • Week 2 – 34,799
  • Week 3 – 34,692
  • Week 4 – 35,583
  • Week 5 – 35,479
  • Week 6 – 34,974
  • Week 7 – 38,299
  • Week 8 – 35,650
  • Week 9 – 35,075
  • Week 10 – 35,812
  • Week 11 – 35,165
  • Week 12 – 36,671
  • Week 13 – 35,618
  • Week 14 – 39,681
  • Week 15 – 40,359
  • Week 16 – 36,642
  • Week 17 – 37,695
  • Week 18 – 36,632
  • Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)

Related