Tag Archives: ROIR-Y

Three Fraternity Keepstars Down in Pure Blind

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

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

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

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

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

A Leshak on the 5ZXX Keepstar

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

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

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

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

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

Battle Report Header

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

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

Keepstars destroyed

The kill reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addendum:

Images of the fight from CCP Aperture.

A video of some of the fight.

Another epic night in New Eden.

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

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

Fraternity Keepstar Locations in the region

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leshaks at work on the first Keepstar

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

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

Waiting on the X47 gate as bombers took runs at us

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

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

The X47 Keepstar Awaiting our arrival

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

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

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

past 6 minutes trying to lock two targets

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

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

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

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

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

As close as I got

And the big log off came.

Downtime arrives

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

At first the server was still loading.

Character selection failed

Then it was reporting as stuck.

The server is not happy

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

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

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

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

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

EVE Offline player graph

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

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

Character in the system – 6,115

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

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

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

Addendum:

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

Battle Report Header

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

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

Realted:

Exchanging Citadel Kills in the North

In the north the Guardians of the Galaxy and their allies and their newly hired mercenaries Black Legion…, and no, that isn’t an ellipses, their name on DOTLAN actually has three dots after it because they lost the old alliance after it broke up some time back.  A dot after an alliance or corp name is supposed to indicate a PvP focused organization, so three dots says they are really, really a PvP organization… or that they lost their old name.  I’ll just refer to them as Black Legion however so I can end a sentence with their name without causing confusion.

Also I’m still not sure what to make of this after action report that starts with everybody there to shoot one of our citadels in DO6H-Q and ends up with Black Legion shooting GotG after which PL dropped supers on them.

The upshot of all of this is that the locals and their mercenaries are starting to show up for timers in force again.

We found this out last night when they showed up with nearly 200 pilots to take out an Astrahus of ours in ROIR-Y.

Astrahus getting hit

GotG showed up in ROIR in with their Eagle fleet doctrine, a Monitor FC ship leading the parade again.

Monitor out front

We, on the other hand, had about 50 people to hand so were not going to be able to defend the Astrahus in a straight up fight.  Asher had us form up bombers instead to see if we could wear them down or at least make them pay a price for showing up.

Bomber lurking cloaked, waiting for a warp in

Unfortunately as we were forming up on a perch before the fight one of the pilots warped directly to the the cloaked up bombers while trying to cloak up themselves in warp and managed to uncloak the whole fleet as one of their scouts was on grid with us, pretty much declaring aloud our plan of action.

That meant when the Eagle fleet showed up they had their interdictors start bubbling up the fleet as they shot the citadel.  That would catch bombers on their runs, allowing them to pop any bomber that decloaked to bomb.  Still, Asher had us give it a try, throwing us into range a few times to see what we could kill.

It did not go as well as planned.  I managed to launch my bomb on the first run but was inside a bubble for subsequent runs until I ended up getting decloaked in a bubble and blown up.  That fate befell many of us, but in the end the battle report said we didn’t do too bad.

Battle Report Header

We lost more ships, plus the objective, but extracted a bit more in ISK from them than we lost, Astrahus included.

While that was going on another group was out shooting citadels the locals has sitting around, popping a couple of those while they were away.  And after they were done and stood down we formed up again and went to kill yet another Astrahus of theirs.

Astrahus right on a planet

I had not seen a citadel quite so close to a planet before.  The picture doesn’t do justice to the enormity of the planet relative to our tiny ships and the equally tiny citadel.

Seeing the planet’s atmospheric layer

Then again, we might have been a bit too close to the planet as the texture on it was pretty rough at that distance.  Not quite 1999 EverQuest quality, but it did look awkward.

Astrahus going up

We blew the Astrahus.  It was Pandemic Horde owned, but it was a spot where they could have tethered and repaired or docked up.  Now it is gone.

On the way out we also sent an Athanor into reinforcement, setting up a follow up later.

The Athanor was setting up a frack

None of this was interrupted in any way by the locals.  And so it goes.

Meanwhile the TNT deployment has started doing some entosis work on Pure Blind and has captured a few systems.  We’re not going to hold them I am sure, we’re just here to blow stuff up and make life rough.  But given that the final details for the faction citadel conversion has been announced, taking and holding some stations until that is done might very well be part of the plan.

A Tower Without Stront

The ongoing skirmishes in the north continue in and around Pure Blind.  Some times they are big.  More often they are more modest in size.  With the departure of Pandemic Horde from the area, the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition has had to pick up the slack.  That started off aggressively.   During the time of the failed million dollar battle, when our attention was elsewhere, GotG and PH cleared out all of our citadels and towers and dropped their own, towering up all the moons in the system.   On our return to Pure Blind they started bubbling our station in an attempt to camp us in.

The situation upon our return

Their resolve in this seemed to waver as we showed up regularly to break their camp and clear out the bubbles.  Their aggressive stance slackened and responses to our activity dropped off, allowing us some nice kills now and then.

Meanwhile Pandemic Horde left behind a bunch of POS towers that slowly but surely ran out of fuel and became regular targets for us to shoot.

Drones tickling an unfueled tower

We also began the slow process of rebuilding our structure base, dropping citadels and engineering complexes.  Those were contested regularly… until they weren’t, and slowly we’ve added more structures to the mix.

There was a gap in the back half of March that I missed, which included that fight where GotG lost five titans, but I’ve been back and on ops since the weekend and the pace of things has changed.  Getting capitals and super caps dropped on us was a regular event before, now we seem to be able to roam in numbers often without that.  Also, NCDot has starting getting involved, looking for some fights close to home no doubt.

They were the ones who showed up to shoot a Raitaru we had dropped, a fight that would have happened had Comcast not dropped Asher just as we were forming, leaving us without an FC.

The next night though we were back again, with another structure coming online and nobody around to oppose us.  Formed up to cover that, Asher took us to one of the towers that NCDot had dropped so we could shoot it to see if anybody would show up.

Shooting a tower with lots of hardeners

At a glance this fresh tower in our midst looked formidable, with many hardeners to up its damage resistance, portending a long and dull shoot to put it into reinforced state.  However, the person who put up the tower had placed the hardeners but hadn’t gotten around to putting them online.  So they were merely decorative.

As nobody seemed to be forming to fight us, Asher called out a bit of heavy support to speed things along.

Nags add their weight to the shoot

They came in for a siege cycle then docked back up as the shield quickly approached the 25% level, at which point the tower would be reinforced and become a target for another day.

And then the tower dropped to 24% and we realized that, in addition to the hardeners, the tower also lacked any strontium clathrates, the ice mining derivative that fuels a towers reinforcement mode.  Without that we could just sit there and burn the tower down and kill it.

That’s right Pee-wee, the secret word is “Unstronted!”

And, in a moment of things just not rolling NCDot’s way, seemingly just seconds after the shields dropped below 25% an NCDot pilot warped into the POS shields, no doubt carrying some stront with which to fuel the tower.  However, once the shields are below 50% you can neither add nor remove any stront, so he was already way too late, but it seemed especially galling that he should arrive just when the tower’s fate was sealed. (The amount of stront determines how long the tower will remain reinforced, so defenders will tinker with the amount in a tower being attacked to get a favorable time period for the next round.)

We kept on shooting, all the more enthusiastic now that a kill mail was on the menu.

My alt in a laser Vexor adding to the firepower

Once we were past the shields, where the bulk of the Caldari tower’s defenses lay, things went much more quickly and we were rewarded with that tower kill mail along with kill mails for all of those hardeners.

The hardeners being popped

The day when POS towers will be removed from the game is still coming.  In a way I will miss their quirks compared to the citadel defense mechanics.  And few things can brighten up a structure shoot than learning that the tower you’re shooting won’t require a second visit because the defenders forgot to fuel up with stront.

And so the game goes on in the north.  We shoot their stuff and drop our own structures.  If they don’t come to defend, then we move outward to shoot stuff closer to their home.  If they do defend then we get a fight.

Guardian with a Kill Mark

You know you’re in a target rich environment when even logi manages to get a kill mark.

Our fleet at the scene

A Nidhoggur tried to interrupt what was supposed to be a quick bubble clear op, got trapped, got a Lif dropped for support, then dreads, and then a fleet of bombers.  The latter dropped piecemeal at fairly close range and engaged us with torpedoes leading to a situation one might call a “feed.”

The end was a bunch of dead ships on the field, most of which were theirs.

Wrecks around the station, our cap chain visible in the distance

We escalated as well and sacrificed some dreads to kill their caps, but the end result was very much in our favor according to the battle report.

Battle Report Summary

And we got all the bubbles cleared in the end as well.  Op success.

And, since I mentioned it in the title, I suppose I had better show it off in the post.

Kill mark in the red circle

That little mark means I managed to get the final blow on somebody’s ship.