59 Weeks and the End of World War Bee

One last weekly update.  There is rarely a clean transition from war to peace.  The Imperium will be clearing out left behind PAPI structures for a while still.  But the pace of things has wound down significantly over the past week.

PAPI forces are all returning to their respective homelands.  Brave is clashing with Psychotic Tendencies in Geminate, and I can only wish them the best in that fight.  And they have their first ihub in NBPH-N in the region.

TEST though seems to be struggling to get to its new home in Outer Passage.  They do not appear to hold any ihubs there yet.  The word is that they have made it at least as far as A24L-V in Insmother on their route home, but that fuel constraints are hitting hard.

TEST has also dropped out of the Alliance Tournament.  I hadn’t heard why… probably ISK… but when they were pulled by CCP in the Alliance Tournament Feeder draw stream (you can see that at the 30 minute mark when they draw for spot 17), CCP Aurora said that TEST had asked to be left out.  They are still listed in slot 17 (see brackets here), but I guess they have decided to forfeit.

Progodlegend got up at another TEST town hall to motivate the troops during their retreat.  He once again tried to sum up the war favorably, declaring that 4,500 Goons just sat in 1DQ for 13 months.  I guess the battles in NPC Delve and M2-XFE, and the Guinness Book world records that went with them, were all just some sort of collective Goon fever dream.

You tell yourself whatever story you need to in order to get to your objective I guess.

And the rest of the former Legacy coalition is scattered about, settling into new homes or looking for a couch to crash on.

The overall PAPI coalition looks to be breaking up.  Pandemic Horde reset a large number of other null sec alliances, while the PAPI Assemble Discord server looked to have been taken down.

No more honking

Without PAPI there is no blue donut to fight for now.

One Year Ago

Niarja fell to the Triglavians, and the WWB participants were involved.

CCP added metaliminal storms to null sec so we could have space weather to worry about.

We fought over the O-PNSN Keepstar and lost, but at the fight over the KVN-36 Keepstar it was a server crash that saved the day for the Imperium.

In my week seven summary I looked at what coverage the war was getting, our losses, and Legacy getting pushed back in Querious.

Imperium Space Cleanup

In the Imperium regions of Delve, Fountain, Querious, and Period Basis all of the ihubs have been retaken and we’re in the count down to when GSOL can start installing Ansiblex jump gates again to facilitate movement around our space again.  Right now, if you don’t have a bridger and a cyno handy, moving around means taking a lot of gates.

TCUs, or territorial control units, are getting cleared out as well.  Those are less critical as their primary function these days is to act as a flag on the map for a given system.  They are a legacy of Dominion sov.  If you go to the null sec influence map for yesterday you will see that Delve TCUs have been retaken, but that TEST and Warped Intentions still have some down in Period Basis.  Those will be taken care of soon enough, but the ihubs are what matter.

Delve is Goons, Anime is Cartoons

And now it is the rebuilding time.  Structures are being put down again.  ADMs need to be raised in some systems to support infrastructure hub upgrades.  A new standing fleet for home defense has been arranged.  A list of supplies went out that the coalition will need to help rebuild.  I got my Planetary Industry stuff rolling again to help fulfill a few items on the long list of needs.

There is a lot of work still to be done, but plans are rolling out to focus our efforts in building a new Delve.

My Participation

I went out on a few ops this past week.  The pace of operations definitely started to taper down as the week went along.  The almost constant tempo of pings showing up for structure shoots fell off noticably.  Still, I got in on a few of them.

An Astrahus blowing up

We also got to run out and blow up a Hel supercarrier, which was a fun distraction.

Hel tackled in Catch

I did lose one ship this week, a Purifier to a gate camp.  It was a dumb, avoidable loss where I immediately said, “Why did I do that?”  But I am not going to count it as a war loss because the group that got me, Pax Sex and his gang, are neutrals that used to hunt in Delve in peacetime.  Losing ships to them is a normal thing now and then.  So my total losses for the war are:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 7
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Sabre interdictor – 1
• Eagle heavy assault cruiser – 1
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

That is 86 ships and a deployable.  I am surprised I didn’t lose more really.

Other Items

CCP release the Monthly Economic Report for July, which I covered a bit.  It generally showed that July was kind of a slow month.

We also got a quick, three day login campaign for some skill points.  CCP hands those out like candy these days.

And CCP did the draw for the Alliance Tournament brackets.   The feeder round starts on September 4th.

The Final PCU Report

With each of the weekly updates I have reported the peak concurrent user count for that week, mostly as a record to see if those numbers tracked along with the intensity of the war.  There are a lot of other factors that play into online numbers, but they did seem to generally follow the war.  CCP reported that at one point during the second M2-XFE Keepstar battle more than one third of accounts logged into the game were in that system, T5ZI-S, or 1DQ1-A.

Anyway, I made a little chart out of the data with some annotations.

Over the timeline of the war

Over the 60 data points… I counted day one of the war as the “zeroth week,” which means that the numbers at the bottom of the chart are offset by +1… the following states can be derived:

• Average weekly PCU – 33,893
• Maximum weekly PCU – 40,359 (Week 15)
• Minimum weekly PCU – 24,262 (Week 52)
• Median weekly PCU – 35,075 (Week 9)

Weekly PCU isn’t all that accurate of an indicator.  It is more of a flavor for how each week went.  But it doesn’t reflect well if a whole week was busy or if we just had a busy day.  You can go to EVE Offline for a more granular look at the war.

The last year chart via EVE Offline

My chart lines up somewhat with that chart, though that cuts off the start of the war, which probably drops the average a bit when compared to mine.

And, of course, the final data set listing:

• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290
• Week 54 – 24,922
• Week 55 – 26,259 (Saturday)
• Week 56 – 27,176
• Week 57 – 29,953
• Week 58 – 29,111
• Week 59 – 29,749

Related

• INN – Beeitman: Week 59
• INN – Horde Resets Dozens of PAPI Members
• INN – Progodlegend’s Disingenuous Test Townhall
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat: The Final Butcher’s Bill
• INN – Top Ten Things for the Imperium to Consider
• NEP – Legacy’s Breakup
• Polygon – Eve Online’s Yearlong War Ends with an Epic Retreat

58 Weeks of World War Bee

The week of maximum Imperium smug may have passed, what with all the PAPI structure kills being racked up.  The main battles have been fought, the outposts of our foes that haven’t been destroyed yet are on their way to that fate soon enough.

The war is starting to feel over.

The enemy has fled, the invasion is no more, and the coalition that joined together to attack us hangs together loosely at best.  I might be at the last weekly update.  We’ll see what happens in the coming week, but I could be done.

Not that I ever meant for this weekly post routine to become a thing.  It sort of just happened and, once it started, it seemed like a good idea to just carry on.

There is still a lot going on.  PAPI forces are bunched up in a few systems trying to get out and have moved at a slow enough pace that, thanks to CCP having systems with very similar names in Catch, other groups have been able to setup bait cyno beacons that continue to provide juicy targets like this FinFleet Ragnarok.

And, with thousands of capital ships in motion across null sec, there is now apparently a jump fuel shortage with isotopes of all four flavors being scarce, which has caused prices to jump dramatically. (It isn’t all Imperium spies in Pandemic Horde relisting things on the market.)  The CCP scarcity drive made ice mining less productive and broke ice belts in some places so that there just isn’t anywhere close to enough supply arriving on the market to cope with the huge demand.

The PAPI trail of tears back to the Dronelands may be an extended journey.

Then there are the organizational shakeups underway as various groups shed members or recruit from traumatized alliances whose members are fed up.

Sov losses and member movement

There will also no doubt be a shift in the alliance coalition structures as PAPI breaks up into smaller regional groups.

The Mittani announced a general moratorium on accepting members of PAPI alliances into the Imperium for the next couple of months.  We are not seeking fair weather friends.  I am not sure how diligently this will be enforced, but you can expect that if you were in PAPI then KarmaFleet won’t be recruiting you for the time being. (Unless you made the Operation PAPIclip list.)

One Year Ago

The CCP update included armor plate tiericide and EDENCOM turned hostile towards anybody supporting the Triglavian invasion.

We lost the Keepstar in IGE-RI in Fountain and our tactics did not extract much of a penalty from the attackers.

When we got to the Y-2ANO Keepstar we had changed up enough to make PAPI pay for reinforcing it.

In the Week 6 Update I noted that Fountain was almost completely lost to the Imperium, that Legacy was getting pushed back in Querious, and we dropped 70 Athanors in Esoteria just to annoy TEST. (68 anchored successfully.)

Delve

As I mentioned last week, all the ihubs in Delve have been taken and the focus has turned to clearing out structures left behind by PAPI in their retreat.  There have been lots of structures to kill, with resistance by PAPI tapering off to almost nothing.  There are a few PAPI members who are out there trying to grab the cores when the structured die, and they have had some success, but mostly it is just things getting blown up.

Of course, the big kill of the week was the Tower of Legends, the primary PAPI staging Keepstar, but it was hardly the only Keepstar to die this past week.

The Tower of Legends brought down

The Delve campaign report shows this, with more than 3.5 trillion ISK destroyed in the region over the past week, 94% of which has been PAPI ships and structures.

Delve Campaign Report – Week 58

Listing out just the PAPI losses by type, you can see that structures dominated the list.

Week 58 – Top 15 PAPI Losses by Type

That is a lot of structure bashing that went on in Delve, including 7 Keepstars… and apparently a lot of expensive capsules.  I read somewhere that defense was so easy that nobody should ever lose a Keepstar.  Maybe TEST will defend some of theirs.

Other Theaters

Fountain has been purged of PAPI ihubs, save for the constellation that LowSechnaya Sholupen (LSH) has.  They should not be confused with NullSechnaya Sholupen (NSH) who were part of the PAPI coalition.

Querious has been getting cleared out.  Brave still holds some ihubs and has structures all over… again, they were clearly committed to living there… but have mostly fled the region.  There are unreinforced Brave structures in Querious just sitting there, not unanchoring, waiting to be blown up.  We even got on in an abandoned state the other day, an Athanor, which turned into a 3 billion ISK loot pinata for GSOL.

Period Basis has also been getting some attention, but a lot of the focus has been on Catch, where TEST had to retake an ihub in a system where they had a Keepstar for the evacuation route.

Catch – Aug 15, 2021

I’ve marked the travel waypoint and the system with the bait beacon, CCP having nicely put two systems in the same region that have very similar names to help make this possible. (There are also two systems that start with “GE-” in Catch, so CCP had something in mind or the random name generator blessed the region twice.)

My Participation

I went on quite a few fleets this past week.  As I have said, there were a lot of structures to kill.  While I was out in my Bhaalgorn a few times, most of the week was work for bombers and blops.  My Purifier undocked over and over.

Another structure out there to bash

And then there were the blops pilots who were ferrying us all over Delve and Querious.  I will say that conduit jump, where the black ops battleship and 30 bombers go in one jump, has become a useful features.

A Redeemer blops lighting a covert cyno

While there were a few attempts to interfere with our shoots, I made it through the week without loss, leaving my war time total as:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 7
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Sabre interdictor – 1
• Eagle heavy assault cruiser – 1
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The propaganda party never stops as Srsli put together another music video for the Imperium.

CCP has gone into its August hibernation mode and the patch update for August so far was pretty minor.  They haven’t mentioned the war lately, but they only seem interested in it when it produces a couple of Guinness Book world records, which happened at FWST-8 and M2-XFE.

This is in contrast to the Casino War where CCP covered events, mentioned it in their video series The Scope, and even tried to name the war.  Now CCP seems more interested in stagnating the game by strangling the economy.

On the weekly peak concurrent user numbers we crossed the 29K line again.  Oddly Monday was close to that peak number, hitting 29,033.  It wasn’t a holiday anywhere that I can recall, so it must have been the continuation of the Sunday peak and the orgy of entosis and destruction that was going on as the Imperium worked on clearing out Delve, Fountain, Querious, and Period Basis.  But Sunday just eked the top number for the week, hitting 29,111.

• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290
• Week 54 – 24,922
• Week 55 – 26,259 (Saturday)
• Week 56 – 27,176
• Week 57 – 29,953
• Week 58 – 29,111

Related

Surprise! The change in fortunes in the war generated a lot of writing!

• INN – Beeitman: Week 58
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 8
• NN – What Daedalus Can Teach Us
• INN – PAPI’s Failure to Rationalize Defeat
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 9
• INN – Vily, Manny, the Council of Wardens, and the Lies That Led to Beeitnam
• INN – The End Is Here: Three Reasons Why
• TAGN – Destroying the Forge of Heroes
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 10
• PC Gamer – EVE Online’s record-setting war ends with a whimper
• Reddit – zKillboard Number Crunching (The WWB ISK War)
• INN – How to Win a Narrative War
• TAGN – Towards a New Delve
• INN – The Tower of Legends Falls
• TAGN – The Downfall of the Tower of Legends
• TNG – EVE Online ACU/PCU Climbs as War Activity Continues
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Day 11
• INN – Dreadbomb Dreadbombs
• INN – The Battle for Hearts, Minds, and Butts
• INN – Joining EVE In Wartime: Fluffeh’s Story

57 Weeks of World War Bee – Victory in Delve

The tide certainly turned this past week.

The battle of 1DQ1-A on August 2nd, the final assault on the Imperium capitol, turned out to be the high water mark of the PAPI invasion.  Even as PAPI forces, trapped in the bubble field, were being routed, alliances in the Legacy coalition began to unanchor structures that they wanted to save from any Imperium counter stroke.

This mid-fight move caught Legacy’s allies in the PAPI coalition by surprise, so rather than getting word from their leaders many PAPI coalition members found out due to Bjorn Bee mentioning it on his stream.

PAPI started trying to pull out of Delve gracefully as the Imperium did its all it can to hinder tham.  PAPI told their line members they would have two weeks to get their stuff out of the region, but the Imperium’s pressure moved that up to “get out this weekend or asset safety!”  And even then some groups, like Pandemic Horde, just punted on their late subcap move ops, leaving some of their line members to fend for themselves.

As for TEST, whose leadership were the ones to declare the war of extermination, they have been offered a home in Outer Passage, possibly the second furthest region from Delve, and only because somebody else wants Cobalt Edge, the furthest region.

To get there they have a long march ahead hauling all of their stuff. (Sometimes in the wrong ship for the job.)

The TEST Route from Delve to Outer Passage

Once there, behind the bulk of WinterCo, Fraternity has promised to remain blue to them.  In return Fraternity will now receive a share of the Tranquility Trading Consortium profits, presumably out of TEST’s cut, TEST no longer being the leader of a major coalition, but a supplicant.  Legacy Coalition is dead.

Brave is said to be set to take up some space in western Geminate, under the cover of PanFam.  Evictus is going to head back to Esoteria where they still hold some space, while rumor has it that Federation Uprising and Eternal Requiem might just disband, though they seem to be holding together for the moment.

Then, in a sign of a conflict to come, the Army of Mango Alliance that it was also leaving Legacy behind and forming a new coalition under the Pan-Intergalactic Business Community banner, the PBIC.

Those who pay attention may recall that is the name of the alliance that “won” EVE Online on the Serenity server by becoming the all powerful ruler of New Eden there.  That is sure to draw attention and ire from some of the other Chinese alliances on Tranquility.  AOM, Fraternity, Ranger Regiment, Dracarys, as well as some corporations like the People’s Liberation Army all came from the Serenity server in China.  I don’t recall who was on vs. against the PBIC there, but I suspect that this move will make them choose up sides.

And, finally, there has been a lot of talk in the Imperium about historical analogies and the name of the war.  I have favored Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, but it lacks meme-ready imagery and a snappy name.  Things that have floated around include Afgoonistan and Dumbkirk.  But the one that has gained some traction is Beeitnam, so now INN is rebranding the war as that.  I’m sticking with World War Bee for the sake of consistency, as I did with the Casino War when everybody was trying to rebrand that further down the road.

One Year Ago

CCP announced Metaliminal Storms, some of which would keep you from cloaking.

We were running out to Stain to work with the Russians who were happy to take shots at TEST.

The ihubs in Fountain were largely lost and we were starting to fight on Keepstars in the region.

In my week five update I noted that French ConneXion had joined the Imperium and that PAPI was already confused about who was invading whom, demanding that we attack them.  Also, Fountain Frank made his meme debut.

The latest update on 35m ISK Corms

He is now Frank triumphant.

Delve Front

The situation went down hill fast for PAPI in Delve.  But at least we’re done with that Siege of 1DQ map that I have been running every week since late April.  The bubble sphere around the T5ZI gate in 1DQ is gone as the Imperium no longer wants to hinder traffic through the gate, since traffic is pretty much all us going out to attack PAPI.

There is an Amarr jump gate in the middle of that

The week started with the final assault on 1DQ that I mentions above, which went south fast and led to PAPI declaring that they were leaving Delve.

PAPI, attempting to keep their evacuation route secure, formed up multiple fleets when the Imperium went to contest the ihub in 1-SMEB on Tuesday.  This also went poorly for PAPI.

They continued to put up fleets to skirmish with us up into Wednesday, then ihubs began to fall and the rush for the exits began.  By Friday Imperium fleets were moving about the region unhindered save for the occasional gunner in a citadel.  Even in T5ZI, where they occasionally put up a small gate camp, structure shooting fleets went about their business with impunity.

I was considering dragging out the old Delve map template I had with each of the constellations named and highlighted in order to chart progress made on ihubs, but then the Imperium went all out with fleets around the clock for structure bashes and entosis ops and… well… there are no PAPI held ihubs in Delve any more.  The last few fell Sunday afternoon.

Delve – Aug 8, 2021

I haven’t spent this much time in fleets since the M2-XFE hell camp.

TEST, who had planned to move into Delve and live there after the war, left structures all over the region and was in the process of trying to unanchor most of them.  That takes almost a week and has to start over again if the structure is reinforced, so we have been interrupting as many as we can.  It seems unlikely that TEST or PAPI will be around in force in Delve by the time the unachoring process can cycle through again.  TEST is going to lose a lot of structures as they seemed to have dropped things as haphazardly as we did back in the day.  That will be the first payment extracted from TEST.

The Delve campaign report for week 57 bears out how much went on this week.

Delve Campaign Week 57

The report broke because Pandemic Horde and/or capsule counts caused an error, but rolling back a day puts the total losses at 1.6 trillion ISK, with PH accounting for 232 billion.  TEST rang up an amazing 322 billion ISK in additional losses on Sunday, so the total for the week is probably close to 2 trillion ISK.  The is a 4x increase and the structure losses are still coming.  Fortizars are being dropped on grid with each of the PAPI Keepstars to serve as platforms from which to destroy them.

Other Theaters

The Initiative went to town in Fountain, starting to purge ihubs from west to east on the map, starting with the Federation Uprising space.

Fountain – Aug 8, 2021

They have vowed to cleanse the region of PAPI.

Over in Querious, Imperium forces have taken the ihubs in “Fake Querious,” the portion of the region that is an enclave within Delve space, as well as driving along the north of the region, which happens to be the PAPI evacuation route.

Querious – Aug 8, 2021

It may not be the Brave route though.  I was in Badivefi on Sunday and there were a lot of Brave pilots docked up in the NPC stations there.

And even down in Period Basis PAPI ihubs have started being purged.

Period Basis – Aug 8, 2021

The 13 month long assault on the Imperium is being rolled back in just days.

My Participation

A busy week.  I was there for the grand assault on 1DQ, the fight over the 1-SMEB ihub, and for a bunch of structure shoots.  I did lose a Sabre in the 1-SMEB fight, but that is what Sabres are for.

In tidi you get to watch your ship go boom

I also lost another Atron entosis ship along the way.  I got a bit ahead of the pack.  But mostly I was out helping tear down PAPI structures.

Shooting PAPI structures in T5ZI in my Bhaalgorn

The Imperium is very serious about making all those structures explode.

A TEST faction Fortizar explodes in 39P

At the end of the week, my total losses for the war added up to:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 7
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Sabre interdictor – 1
• Eagle heavy assault cruiser – 1
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

Amarr Foundation Day arrived, with login rewards and events for players.

Your Foundation Day login rewards

Then there was good news on the peak concurrent user front this week, with the uptick in war activities driving the number up to nearly 30K concurrent on Sunday.  After several weeks where the count never topped 25K, week 57 saw every day in the 26-28K range.

• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290
• Week 54 – 24,922
• Week 55 – 26,259 (Saturday)
• Week 56 – 27,176
• Week 57 – 29,953

Related

• INN – Beeitman: Week 57
• INN – Legacy Failscade as Rout Continues
• NN – 1DQ Status: It’s Happening
• INN – BlackOps In The Backfield
• INN – Progod announces TEST moving to Drones as PAPI Allies abandon war
• Reddit – Transcription of TEST Post-Town Hall Statement
• INN – Silver Linings for PAPI; Considerations for Goons
• INN – The Unfettered Flame
• INN – Honey-golden linings: A Response to Seir
• NEP – PAPI Forces to Seek Withdrawal from War, Null-Sec Shakeups, Disbands, and More
• TNG – The Siege Of O-EIMK Effectively Ended Yesterday
• TAGN – PAPI Begins Pulling Out of Delve
• TAGN – Operations in Delve as World War Bee Continues
• Reddit – FRT and Winter Co Plans
• INN – PAPI’s Retreat Daily Report: Days 1-7

56 Weeks of World War Bee

While we spent much of the week waiting for PAPI to prepare for the coming onslaught on the Imperium capitol, a true hero of the PAPI coalition emerged in the form of one Syrio Ikunen of TEST who managed to launch an electron bomb from their Purifier that caught a John Hartley Kestrel fleet dead on, destroying 119 Kestrels and two support ships in one go.

They were not the only attacker on the battle report, but their bomb was the most spot on and a majority of the Kestrels blown up were marked as solo kills attributed to them.  That Purifier has a lot of kill marks on it now.

Who got all the kills?

XtraSquishy captured a bit of the bomb run on video.

I am actually kind of bummed I missed that because I had one of those Kestrels sitting in my hangar waiting to get used. (I have now named it “Syrio Ikunen Target.”)  They’re zippy fun to fly around, but clearly they are a bit thin on the tank end of things.

One Year Ago

CCP did some updates to command ships, though I couldn’t tell you if that changed anything.

In the war I was out on a fleet in Paragon Soul with Dabigredboat chasing TEST dreadnoughts.

And in my summary of week four of the war it looked like 10 trillion in ISK had been destroyed so far, split fairly evenly between the sides.  Fraternity and PanFam had broken into Fountain and we were falling back.  Legacy was deep into Querious.

Delve Front

Since this was just move op and re-subscribe week for PAPI, the strategic situation in Delve did not change, so I can once again re-roll the same image of the front lines.

O-EIMK Constellation – Aug 01, 2021

The expectation, given the PAPI announcement last week, was that, come the weekend, things would heat up, that the actual assault on 1DQ1-A would begin.  And it seemed for the briefest of moments that this was going to come to pass.

As I got up and got online Friday morning I opened up Jabber and there were pings about hostiles in 1DQ.  I logged in, but all the fleets were full, so I undocked in a Kestrel to see if I could get a shot in on something.  I managed to get missiles away on one target before it blew up… my one kill mail in 1DQ for the week… before the whole thing was over.

But it wasn’t even a real attack on us.  Some Imperium pilot in a Nyx warped into a bubble and PAPI tried to take advantage, as we would in a similar situation.  It was just another minor skirmish in a week that was mostly minor skirmishes.  The weekend saw no assault, and every time PAPI pinged for a fleet we stood to with a counter and they declined to come to us.

There have been rumors of move ops heading away from Delve, rumors of structures being unanchored, and somebody noted that there were a number of titans for sale in the T5ZI Keepstar, the Tower of Legends as it has been named, just across the way from the Forge of Heroes Sotiyo, but there has been no official announcement that PAPI has called off the assault on 1DQ yet.  Even some PAPI members are getting tired of their inability to commit.

Meanwhile, the NPC Delve interdiction campaign, aimed at cutting off 1DQ from the rest of New Eden petered out when Imperium pilots shot up the first few bubbles deployed to the NPC station undocks.  Nobody seemed interested in maintaining the watch on 11 different camps.

As for the weekly Delve campaign report, numbers were up again as the Imperium prodded PAPI and shot structures and generally tried to be a pain.

Delve Campaign – Week 56

So there were a half a trillion in ISK in destruction, and that doesn’t even count all the clashes in E-VKJV, because that system is in Querious.

Other Theaters

Do we care at this point?  Something might be happening in Feythabolis, but no ihubs have changed hands.  Likewise, whatever was going on in Catch appears to have tapered off.  All eyes were supposed to be on Delve.

Really, the only interesting bit was Snuffed Out baiting Fraternity into another fight in the northeast.

My Participation

After hitting the 5K kill mail mark last week I was able to go back to flying logi… and promptly lost a Scalpel in a skirmish in E-VKJV between an Imperium Harpy fleet and PAPI Retributions.

Scalpel still alive

I also lost an Eagle late on Friday night when we went into E-VKJV to reinforce the Ansiblex jump gate there to make any attempt to go around the back on Saturday, when we expected that the assault might begin, a little more awkward.

Tidi makes for nice explosion shots

Given the lateness of the hour, I was surprised how on the ball the reimbursement team was.  I got my payout in under a minute.

Eagle loss paid out 47 seconds after being submitted

I am pretty sure this is becoming a point of pride for the Imperium after we keep hearing that some PAPI line members wait for weeks to get something.

I was actually fairly active as we went to visit PAPI in their space multiple times.  I was there in a Scalpel, an Eagle, a Ferox, a Kestrel (long after the fleet mentioned at the top of the post), and at one point we took a wormhole out to Insmother to try and nab a capital, but were too late so we caught a Thera connection back to Fountain and gated through T5ZI without incident.

Kestrels escaping from T5ZI

As a measure of the tide of the war, I was on 98 kill mails in week 56 and only one of them was in the pocked of space the Imperium still holds.  We spent a lot of time poking PAPI.

Anyway, the two losses above bring my total loss count for the war to:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Eagle heavy assault cruiser – 1
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP dropped the expected Grand Heist patch on Tuesday, releasing the reserve bank keys into New Eden.  I hope we get some report later on about how much of that ISK gets harvested by the groups that own the systems they are in.

The Grand yet Slow Heist

The whole thing got off on a bit of an awkward foot as the low sec sites with the keys were broken when the update hit and it took CCP the rest of the week to get things corrected.  I think things are good now.

CCP also started straight up giving us ISK in a login campaign.  I’ll take 235 million ISK thank you.

Collected them all

I wonder how this will influence the July MER?

They also reduced sales tax and broker’s fees in NPC structures by 50% for the next three months.  Again, I don’t think anybody is going to complain about making more money on market transactions, but I do wonder what the goal here is.  Are they trying to stimulate the economy, jump start production, or undercut the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter?

The latter would be amusing for the Imperium.  Even if it wasn’t the intended effect, CCP made NPC stations cheaper to sell from if you have all the right skills, so a lot of trade moved from Perimeter to Jita.  While we get a 20% cut of the TTT, Pandemic Horde and TEST are much more dependent on it for income.

When it comes to the peak concurrent user number for the week, New Eden was up again.  No doubt the promise of a huge battle got people to peek in.  We’ll see how the failure of that to materialize affects numbers next week, but we saw the numbers pass 27K for the first time since week 49.

• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290
• Week 54 – 24,922
• Week 55 – 26,259 (Saturday)
• Week 56 – 27,176

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 56
• INN – PAPI’s Perfunctory Plan
• INN – WinterCo Town Hall
• INN – The Assault Begins (but not really)
• INN – A “Humanitarian” Effort in T5ZI-S

55 Weeks of World War Bee

The week was largely spent speculating about what big plan PAPI was set to announce come Saturday… to the point that I was half convinced that PAPI made the pre-announcement to see if Reddit could come up with a plan for them.  So many posts.

The Fraternity alliance meeting early in the week suggested the point was going to be to end the war in the next 60 days, though after the announcement it seemed more like Fraternity gave notice that if WWB wasn’t wound down in that time they might move on to other tasks… like assailing the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter.

When the announcement came on Saturday it managed to be both exciting and disappointing in one blow.  Yes, PAPI was going to go all-in on taking 1DQ.  Yes, capitals, supers, and titans were mentioned.  The possibility of headline grabbing giant battles was waved before us as PAPI seemed ready to pay the price to break into the O-EIMK constellation.

Only we would have to wait a week before any of that could get under way.  The previous message from PAPI was that they were taking the summer off so they need a week to get people re-subscribed and their ships back in T5ZI-S.  So we’re back to PAPI moves op.

To be fair PAPI won’t be idle for a week.  They have things to do, like cleaning up NPC Delve, from which the GSF BlackOps SIG has been making its presence felt.  But waiting a week to get ready also gives the Imperium a week to get ready as well.

Still, maybe something exciting will happen come week 57 of the war.  Maybe August will be the war’s final crescendo.  But what happens if PAPI doesn’t win in time?  Do they disband and go home?  Do groups like Fraternity leave while other try to carry on?  Does TEST look for some space as far from the Imperium as possible?

One Year Ago

PanFam and Fraternity were pushing into Fountain while TEST was being pushed back out of Period Basis.

Legacy then swept into the eastern half of Querioues, notably the the part most distant from the gate connection to Catch where they had set up their staging at the start of the war and where they actually lived.

In my Week 3 update I was covering multiple active fronts and noting how the PCU was climbing.  How things change.

The June MER showed mineral prices sagging a bit and CCP gave use a new monument in Molea, making the cemetery there a permanent feature.

Delve Front

The strategic situation in the region remained unchanged.  Roll the same map I’ve been using for three months now.

O-EIMK Constellation – July 25, 2021

The Imperium did take advantage of PAPI’s state of torpor to continue with hot drops as well as setting timers, shooting bubbles, killing a couple of structures, and generally reminding the enemy that we are not so contained as they might believe.

PAPI did rise to the occasion now and then and skirmishes were had, so not every kill mail was a gank or uncontested.  The Delve campaign report shows an uptick in losses, with the total once again passing the half trillion ISK mark.

Delve Campaign – Week 55

With people coming back that number should keep trending up.

Other Theaters

In Feythabolis Red Alliance is still holding on to two systems, having lost two more ihubs to the Warriors of the Blood God.

Feythabolis – July 25, 2021

Re Alliance’s holding in Impass remain intact, though that may be the next target.

And in Catch Dracarys and Siege Green look to be in a stalemate in the southwest of the region, on the route to Querious.  Dracarys is pushing on Siege Green but took back no additional ihubs over the week.

Catch – July 25, 2021

In Catch Dreadbomb Alliance scooped up the remaining unclaimed ihubs save for that one on the way to Impass.

There were also reports of war adjacent fighting going on in Fountain around the J5A-IX system, while Snuffed Out opened up their campaign against Fraternity which led to a dread brawl.

I expect that other theaters will be static while PAPI works on assembling for their final assault on the Imperium… at least if they manage to get everybody on board and focused.

My Participation

I hit a minor milestone in my EVE Online career, getting on my 5,000th kill mail.  It was, rather unspectacularly, a Mobile Large War Disruptor II, one of about 40 we shot in PAPI’s staging system while they sat around and watched one afternoon.  Our Harpy fleet was mostly unhindered. (Overall I think we blew up about 400 PAPI large bubbles alone last week.)

Harpies in T5Zi killing bubbles

I had mentioned before that it was low key goal of mine to hit 5K before my 15th anniversary playing the game.  5K isn’t a particularly impressive number.  There is a player in Fraternity who has nearly 74K kills, with more than 9K of them coming in the last 90 days, and they’re not even at the top of the list.  But 5K is a nice round number and, now that I have made it, I can go back to flying logi more often.

Aside from harassing PAPI bubbles, when the big announcement came on Saturday I was out in a fleet with Asher to entosis a couple of TEST systems in Delve… multiple groups went out to hit ihubs so that they would get a bunch of notifications during their alliance meeting.  There were a few clashes along the way, but mostly it was the first time I had flown a Tengu since the nullification nerf and the removal of skill point loss.

Tengus waiting for the blackops trip

Fortunately I didn’t lose my ship, so I didn’t have to test that last change.  I did get to try out the interdiction module when I jumped through a gate as instructed, only to be waved off when it was too late, arriving in the middle of a hostile gate camp.  I was able to trigger it, align, cloak, and warp off safely, though my pulse had increased noticeably  when I loaded grid.

With no losses for the week my total remains as:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 2
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

We got a July Update from CCP that announced the end of the starvation economy… some time in Q4.  It is good that there is now a faint light at the end of the tunnel, and we assume it isn’t an oncoming train, but CCP wasn’t forthcoming with details and we know they still want to keep the economy in check, so celebrations were muted.

Meanwhile, though the June MER, which was posted last week, showed mineral prices coming down, there was concern about morphite prices, critical to production, the supply of which seemed to be drying up, keeping the price of it rising rather even as production continued falling.

Focus returned to the Tranquility Trading Consortium, the shared venture between Pandemic Horde, TEST, and the Imperium.  It has long been called out as an oddity of the war that this agreement has held while PH and TEST have been attacking the Imperium.  The explanation has been that the deal is too lucrative to all the parties to let the war mess it up.

Now Fraternity has announced their plan to set up a competing trading outpost in Oijanen, a low sec system adjacent to their holdings, to get a cut of the easy sales tax money.

Meanwhile, The Mittani explained on the special Friday night edition of The Meta Show that the Imperium isn’t really a partner in the TTC deal.  Rather, we get a 20% cut to not make trouble.  So there isn’t any reason for the Imperium to leave, and if PH and TEST kick us out then we will go log in all the alpha clones we stashed in Jita and Perimeter back when the trading outpost situation was being contested.  That would be very bad for business, and would be all the more so with a competing venture coming online.

The TTC deal cannot last forever, but it will be interesting to see who finally breaks it knowing that it will all three members a lot of ISK.

Hy Wanto of Snuffed Out posted a long essay to Reddit about the problems with citadel game play which came with endorsements from other null sec luminaries, and even got a serious follow on post.  At least one person at CCP wasn’t interested however.

Somebody posted the manual for the Black Hand, the GSF spy organization.

On the PCU front, as I noted yesterday, the PAPI announcement at least had the effect of pulling the week’s peak user count up above the 25K mark for the first time in four weeks.  Big battles, should they come to pass, will help on that front as well.  But there is still more going on than just a slow war to keep the PCU down.

• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290
• Week 54 – 24,922
• Week 55 – 26,259 (Saturday)

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 55
• INN – Decadence, Not Might, is the Answer
• INN – PAPI’s Big Announcement: Some Speculation
• TAGN – The Fraternity Alliance Update at the Direction of the War
• TAGN – PAPI All In to Win the War in Four Weeks
• Reddit –PAPISnowden Leaks #2

54 Weeks of World War Bee

We got trolled for a bit on Friday when Hy Wanto announced on Pando’s FC Chat show #79 that Snuffed Out was set to join the Imperium since they were already mounting a campaign against Fraternity.

A wild Snuffed Out appears!

The Mittani was on the show and rolled with it, but later on said it was just a troll.  But the bit that made it believable was the fact that it would involve the return of Elitist Ops.  An early GoonSwarm corp, they were blackballed by Darius JOHNSON back in the day and went off to have adventures with Pandemic Legion before following their destiny with We Form Volta and Snuffed Out.

With the onset of World War Bee they came back to fight with their long estranged Goon brethren and were almost immediately causing headaches for the enemy, like when Madcows swiped a TEST Leviathan from an unfueled POS was back in week three of the war.  They were awesome to have around.

The war was a drain on them however and they went back to their home with Snuffed Out during week 36.  They left on good terms.  They made the war more enjoyable for us but we understood that they needed their space.   So to think that that might return for a bit for some more adventures lent some credibility to the troll, in my eyes at least, because I am sure they would be welcomed back if they wanted to come.

Compare that to the strife I mentioned last week in NCDot when two major USTZ corporations, Criterion and Original Sinners were apparently bored with the war and wanted to leave to join up with the NullSechnaya Sholupen alliance, which has been off doing its own thing.  While NCDot leader Vince Draken declared them personae non grata in PanFam space and structures, no decisions seemed final when I was writing that up.

This week saw both Criterion and Original Sinners in NSH, so the deed was done, with Vince burning their bridge as promised.  The thought seems to be that if you just let people leave, then the good people will wander off when they’re bored and how can you keep a war going under those circumstances.  The Original Sinners web site has a write up covering their view of the situation if you are interested. (And if you really want to dig into it, last week’s Trash Talk Tuesday goes into it.)

There is clearly a lesson to be drawn from the two situations.

Meanwhile, with two major corps out of the coalition, PAPI announced yesterday that planned town halls were canceled and that there would be a big announcement this coming Saturday, July 24th, regarding a unified plan for the coalition.  Given the reluctance so far to pay the price required to make headway against the Imperium capital constellation, my expectations are pretty low.

And, finally, I was told that this is what PAPI fears most.  This:

Set loose in their space

Yes, non-affiliated pilots in rookie ships.  I don’t get it either.  Maybe it is the name?

One Year Ago

CCP kicked off the Zenith Quadrant.

Legacy forces, after having setup a staging system in Catch on the border with Querious started some attacks in the region.

Meanwhile PandaFam, having staged in Aridia, began their attack on the Fountain region via the Taurus constellation.

I spent a bit of time in an alt being an entosis annoyance in Catch.

The good old POS, and POS shoots, were still a thing in World War Bee.

And I had my second weekly war summary post where I noted that CCP’s video titled War Ravages New Eden had nothing to do with our war.  It was about that Triglavian event where the outcomes were most predetermined.  The lack of coverage of what has been the largest war in New Eden was getting me down.

Delve Front

Strategically, the same map I have been using for months now still accurately describes where both side stand.

O-EIMK Constellation – July 18, 2021

PAPI gave up trying to break into the O-EIMK constellation back in May and things have fallen off since.   But that doesn’t mean that everything is quiet.  Hot drops and counter drops and skirmishes do happen.  And there was the clash on Saturday night when the Imperium sat around in T5ZI-S long enough to reinforce a Fortizar and their main Sotiyo.  Ships keep blowing up even if the map of Delve hasn’t changed.

So the Delve campaign report for week 54 shows a bit of an uptick in ship losses and, although a glitch last week prevented me from getting an accurate count, the ISK value of losses was up considerably from the ~270 billion ISK I estimated, ringing in at nearly double that.

Delve Campaign – Week 54

Other Theaters

In Feythabolis Red Alliance continues to hang onto the northwest corner of the region, which acts as a buffer to their holdings in Impass.  They did not lose any further systems, though one system they had lost to Vindictive is now in the hands of Warriors of the Blood God alliance, which is purple on the map.

Feythabolis – July 18, 2021

Who they are, who they have sided with, or where they even came from is beyond me.

Meanwhile, in Catch Imperium member Dracarys continues to push back against Siege Green’s attack on its holdings.

Catch – July 18, 2021

Dracarys took back 8 ihubs since the last update and looks to be continuing after Siege Green.

My Participation

I already wrote up a post about the big fight on Saturday night, the first war event I’ve bothered to post about in a while.

Other than that I went on a couple of smaller ops.  Jackdaws seemed to be the flavor of the week for a bit.

Jackdaws securing the bubbles again

I had no losses over the course of the week… lucky me… so my losses for the war remain:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 2
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP announced the return of the Alliance Tournament with a surprise count down to a video that backfired on them a bit.

Coming this November

While people seemed happy enough to see the return of the event, there was clearly a feeling that giving back something that had been taken away did not perhaps warrant the big count down surprise treatment.  There are enough other things that players have been looking for… like an end to scarcity… that the AT seemed like a pretty low effort announcement.

CCP also announced that the ESS reserve bank keys would be live in New Eden before the end of the month… look for them on July 27th would be my guess… and that they have been deployed to the test server for people to try out.  A leading rumor is that the PAPI announcement on this coming Saturday will be that reserve banks will be considered coalition ISK to be farmed for SRP funds.  We’ll see if that comes to pass.

Dunk Dinkle wrote a piece about the need for new challenges in the game.

And then there is the weekly PCU.  I have been informed that any discussion of the PCU is Goon propaganda, so add that to my list of sins I suppose, at least so far as CCP’s white knight brigade is concerned.  I just started capturing it every week to see if it showed a correlation between player counts and significant war events.   And it has, passing the 40K mark during the early flurry of war fever.

Of late though, things have been down.

This past week saw another failure to crack the 25K mark, though the count did come close on Sunday.  That is three weeks running falling short of 25K.  It was just six weeks ago that the peak being under 30K was an oddity.

• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290
• Week 54 – 24,922

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 54
• Reddit – Sunday Night Delve Campaign
• TAGN – Saturday Night Action in Delve
• Reddit – PAPISnowden Leaks #1

53 Weeks of World War Bee

We’re now past the one year mark and nothing special happened to magically end the war.  I guess we’ll just have to carry one.

Which didn’t mean there wasn’t some drama.  This past week saw two corporations in NCDot, Criterion and Original Sinners, discovered in their plans to jump ship and join NullSechnaya Sholupen (NSH) due to boredom with the war.  NSH, part of PAPI, has grabbed a corner of Fountain in which they have set up shop and spend most of their time battling in low sec.  The two corps, which have some key FCs on their rosters, want in on those fights.

The discovery of this plan initially drew a sharp rebuke from Vince Draken, leader of NCDot, that proscribed the two corps and hinted that they might even go to war with NSH over the whole thing, but so far nothing has changed, so that might have just been an opening bid.

As I wrote last week, the war effort breaking down would run against the current interests of PandaFam and possibly lead to the ruination of TEST and Legacy, so both groups are motivated to hold the PAPI null sec blue donut together.  It has been suggested that once one major party walks away from the war, the rush to the exits will follow, so anybody trying to leave the front lines should expect an array of threats and promises from their current allies.

One Year Ago

CCP cancelled all live events for the remainder of 2020.  That was hardly unexpected.  In fact, they seemed a bit late in calling it.  They also started straight up selling skill points for cash in the web store, something hardly unexpected in hindsight either I suppose.

Here I was looking into the different theaters of operation in which the PAPI invasion might take place.  It was also time for entosis warfare again.  TEST managed to take an ihub in Period Basis, which seemed like a strong start, but the Imperium wasn’t going to let that stand.

And then I summed up the first week of the war.

Delve Front

Once more, this image pretty much sums up the situation in Delve.

O-EIMK Constellation – July 11, 2021

Hot drops and skirmishes were the tale once again.  The Delve Campaign report for the week shows that the total ships destroyed was down by about 1,500 hulls.  Unfortunately, there is some glitch in the report and GSF losses don’t show.

Delve Campaign – Week 53

Adding up the losses by ship type it looks like the losses totaled up to about 270 billion ISK total and GSF losses, by subtracting everybody else, look to be about 100 billion of it.

Other Theaters

In Feythabolis Red Alliance continues to hold out in the corner of the region they captured.  They lost an ihub over the course of the week, but took another back, so they remain with the same number as before.

Feythabolis – July 11, 2021

Word is that The Initiative, back from a break, as setup to start harassing Legion of xXDEATHXx (X.I.X), which is invested in taking a big chunk of the region right now.

Over in Catch, the PAPI efforts to get back into the one-time Legacy region have stalled as Dracarys pushed back on Siege Green, retaking one of their ihubs.

Catch – July 11, 2021

The push into Catch seemed more an effort to push Imperium systems away from Querious to keep them from dropping on Legacy ratters and miners.

My Participation

I got in on an op early int the week when a there was a call for bombers to log in and join a Welp Squad operation in a wormhole.  They had found a Lazerhawks crabbing op in progress and we managed to kill a Minokawa, a Golem, and a pack of Lokis, along with some expensive pods.

Minokawa under attack

There is also a John Hartley video of the fight.

That wasn’t just the high point of my week in New Eden, but just about all of it. Otherwise I managed to miss any further skirmishes in Delve, so my losses for the war remain as:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 2
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP invited new players to “Seek your Destiny” in another attempt to make the game less opaque.

CCP also launched Minmatar Liberation Day which include login rewards, in-game events, and the usual sales in the store.

Have a Brutor Libre, the official drink of Minmatar Liberation Day!

And then there is the state of the player base.

The “summer of rage 2.0” meme keeps coming up related to the game.  Kotaku had an article last week exploring the whole lead up to where we are today.  But “rage” seems like an overreach.  Sure, some people are angry at CCP, but some people have been angry at CCP literally every single day since the game launched back in 2003.  And compared to the Incarna crisis, the rage feel pretty muted.  But, as I pointed out in the previous weekly update, it is more than monetization that is suppressing the PCU.

CCP’s response in the article seemed quite unconcerned about… everything.  They say their internal numbers are fine and this will all pass… no need to speak to the players, they’ll get on board, a sentiment that does feel remarkably reminiscent of CCP’s response to Incarna.  But CCP has a history of being dismissive of their player base.

As for the PCU this past week, we saw another of seven day run of not cracking the 25K mark, though the top number on Sunday was up a bit from the previous total.  We could blame it on US Independence Day the week before and an EU soccer match yesterday.  What will next week bring?

• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 53
• INN – A Retrospective on M2-XFE
• Kotaku – EVE Online Facing Second “Summer of Rage”
• Reddit – Ongoing activity metrics for WWB #12
• Reddit – Killmails vs Online Players Comparison

52 Weeks of World War Bee

This week saw the non-aligned AUTZ null sec alliance Tactical Supremacy give up on its free range lifestyle of the last five years and joined The Initiative.

Put on ice for now

The stated reason was a lack of content for its members.  The move shores up The Initiative’s AUTZ presence, allowing them to work more effectively around the clock.

There were also town hall meetings for NCDot and Pandemic Horde, with the former being pretty down to earth and the latter trying to find something to keep the war going.  In furtherance of keeping the war going, PAPI has formed a high sec SIG to gank Goons and anybody suspected of being Goons, including the new player training group KarmaFleet University.  Gobbins also told his members to stop using the term “contained” when referring to the Imperium’s situation in 1DQ because it becomes a propaganda victory for Goons every time they kill something outside of that constellation.

One Year Ago

It has been a year.  One year ago today the non-invasion pact between the Imperium and Legacy coalition officially lapsed and the war began.

Two days before the start I was still fiddling with stuff in my hangar and wondering what was to come.

When the day hit there were moves/counter moves including the rushed PAPI Keepstar drop in FAT-6P.

And the first of my Monday summary posts went up about the events of day one of the war.  I did not intend for them to be a regular thing, but here we are a year later.

Delve Front

For another week this map fragment, first posted on May 2nd, accurately describes the state of the war in Delve.

O-EIMK Constellation – July 4, 2021

Otherwise is was a week of skirmishes, shenanigans, and avoidance.  One of the highlights of the week is summed up in this video from John Hartley, and Imperium FC.

Still, despite  the situation in the constellation remaining unchanged, looking at the Delve campaign stats for the week the level of skirmishing saw more than twice as many ships and capsules destroyed when it came to total numbers and almost twice in ISK value.

Delve Campaign – Week 52

If you go to the report and change the view to show by ship types you can see the dreads that PAPI lost before that video above along with a few other expensive assets they lost.

Other Theaters

Esoteria is done for the Imperium now while Legacy and FI.RE are pushing on the Imperium holdings in Feythabolis.

I had wondered last week if Red Alliance would come to some sort of agreement with their fellow Russians, and perhaps they did, but Legacy still wants them out it seems.  Red Alliance is down two ihubs and their other four are at risk, along with their holdings in Impass.

Feythabolis – July 4, 2021

It also looks like there is some TCU cleanup going on in the region (orange highlighted systems that otherwise have no ihub in this view.)

In Catch Legacy pushed further into the region from Querious, taking eight more ihubs from Imperium member Dracarys.

Catch – July 4,2021

Looking at the ADMs, Dracarys has been active in these systems.  We will see if Legacy keeps pushing into the region.

My Participation

As with the past few weeks I went on a few small ops, but nothing very exciting.  The biggest op was probably a Cormorant fleet called by Tom Flood to escort Jirai Grepher on his birthday op.  For their birthday, Jirai decided to gate a Naglfar dreadnought into T5ZI, PAPI’s staging system, to see how long he would last.  We went along to give him a bit of cover.

Into T5ZI

Jirai got a few kills before a PAPI Ragnarok hit him with a doomsday… PAPI undocked a titan… blotting him out.  I got on a few kills as well before my Cormorant got splashed.  That added one more to my list of losses, though the op qualified for SRP so I got the ISK to buy a new Corm.

My war losses so far:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 2
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP announced some graphic updates that are available on the test server that are supposed to make space bright and more colorful.  I’ve been around long enough to remember the graphic updates that were aimed at making some areas of space darker and less colorful.

Then there is the PCU.  I have been tracking the top weekly player count during the war, which usually occurs on Sunday. (I note when it is a different day.)  The decline in  the PCU has been noted by many and seems to be something of a perfect storm of conditions.  First, there is the coming of summer, which people always say heralds a decline, except when it doesn’t.   Then there is the end of pandemic restrictions many places, which has led to a surge of people eager go somewhere, anywhere, the hell away from home.  My wife noticed over the last week or so that luggage sections at various stores were almost completely shopped out.

Need a bag? Not going to find one here!

The war is not helping.  Stalemate and stagnation hasn’t given people a reason to log in. CCP’s economic starvation plan is piled on top of that.  It has made things more expensive so far, and capitals almost irreplaceable for some, so people are becoming more risk adverse.

And then there is the outrage at the pop-up ad that CCP has introduced to the game to encourage people to buy PLEX has encouraged a pile of people to say they are quitting.

Use your credit card to finance your revenge!

Add in a holiday week… yesterday was US Independence day… and this past week had the lowest weekly peak concurrent user count of the war so far.  The Blackout was a big worry back in the day because daily PCUs were down around 25K.  That is up from where we are now most days of the week.  The question is, when will this bottom out and begin to recover?

• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 52
• INN – Horde’s Town Hall – June 27
• INN – Containment Breach: Grand Theft Astra
• INN – Booshed in the Blender
• INN – TIKLE Merged into The Initiative
• INN – World War Bee: One Year of War
• Reddit – Ongoing activity metrics for WWB #11
• Reddit – Comparing EVE and Steam player activity

51 Weeks of World War Bee

We’re about to turn the corner and head on into a full year of war.  Just one more week to go.

There were preparations for war going on as the Imperium pulled in forces and structures and got itself ready for the coming fight.  And, of course, the propaganda machine started cranking up, calling out the attackers for the blue donut coalition they were even before the attack began.

Also, we finally got character logoff.

Next week I’ll start a new “One Year Ago” section in the weekly post with links out to the wider coverage of the war.

Delve Front

The stalemate that is the Siege of 1DQ carried on for another week, with PAPI making no serious attacks on the remaining Imperium constellation in Delve.  My map fragment from May 2nd remains accurate.

O-EIMK Constellation – June 27, 2021

Combat in the region consisted of skirmishes and hot drops.  Legacy seems to be getting sensitive to the Imperium pinging for bombers.

From Legacy Discord

PAPI did come through into 3-DMQT with a large fleet at one point and word went out that they had EDENCOM Skybreakers included, but hopes that we might be facing a meme fleet offensive proved false.  There were only five mixed in with a mostly Svipul fleet composition.  Five does not a meme fleet make.  They tried this again on Saturday with a few more EDENCOM ships with similarly bad results. (Late addition: Now this was a meme fleet coming into 1DQ.)

Vily did say on the Legacy town hall that they were indeed planning to try and camp all twelve systems in NPC Delve in order to interdict the Imperium supply chain.

NPC Delve

The structures are in place, they just need to actually commit to the task.  Otherwise Delve was not exactly the hot spot it was just a few weeks back.  It

There is a rumor that PAPI splurged and spent some of its ISK reserves on mercenaries to come in and help break the stalemate in Delve.  We shall see how that plays out.  They were supposed to attack this past weekend, but PAPI told everybody about the plan which meant we knew and would be ready, and they seem to have figured out that jumping into prepared defensive positions is a costly idea.

Overall, while little changed in Delve, there was more fighting than last week according to the campaign data.

Delve Campaign – Week 51

While the value of losses wasn’t much more, the total ships and capsules destroyed was up by nearly two thousand.  Cheaper ships were expended.  You can see what the Imperium has been up to as stealth bombers were the hulls most lost by them over the course of the week. (Also, I took that screen shot a bit early, but if you go to the link you can see the final weekly numbers.)

Other Theaters

The Bastion has finally been evicted from the corner of Esoteria where they have been holding out since Week 14 of the war.  A hell of a run.  The Army of Mango Alliance has taken the last ihub from The Bastion and is besieging their remaining structures.

Esoteria – June 27, 2021

Likewise, the tide has rolled against the Imperium in Feythabolis, where the Russian FI.RE coalition and Army of Mango Alliance have been rolling back Imperium gains.

Feythabolis – June 27, 2021

Red Alliance remains up in the northwest corner.  They are Imperium allies, having defected from PAPI back in week 17.  But they are not in the Imperium, having gone to work with the Stain Russians, so they may be secure in their corner.

And then there has been some activity in Catch, once home to several Legacy alliances including Brave.  Severance and Siege Green have been coming up the path from Querious to attack space currently held by Imperium member Dracarys.

Catch – June 27, 2021

I do not know if this is Legacy trying to simply push back the Impeirum from Querious or a serious attempt to retake the region.  Legacy does still have a couple of Keepstars in Catch.

My Participation

As has become something of the norm, most action in Delve has been on demand, where you have to be ready to login and go on very short notice to participate.  Still, I managed to get in on one good bomber drop where we toasted quite a few PAPI Caracals and helped reinforce one of their Ansiblex jump gates.

Purifier on the job

That put me on another 48 kill mails, moving me a bit closer to my goal of being on 5,000 before the end of August.  We’ll ignore the blues that got hit… most of the kill mails were PAPI.

I also lost my Purifier on our last bomb run.  I didn’t even have a bomb at that point, but went along to spread the enemy’s attention and, since no good deed goes unpunished, was tackled and blown up.  So I filed for SRP and bought a new bomber.  And then I lost that bomber on a later op, another SRP claim another bomber acquired.   So my losses for the war total up to:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Cormorant destroyer – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 2
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The results of the CSM16 elections were announced.  The results were not particularly surprising.  Some people are mad about them, but for the usual reasons.  Large organized groups get candidates elected.  So we got to hear the usual complaints and demands that CCP rig the system so this person or that can win, as though electing a focus group through a popularity contest was a good idea.  It wasn’t in 2008, it isn’t now.

We also got the Black Ops update from CCP.  And the Monthly Economic Report for May showed up as well.  Something about that here tomorrow.

Overall a loud slice of the community seems to be upset at CCP with their new monetization ideas, the state of the in-game economy, the CSM elections, the way the war in Delve has petered out topping the list of complaints, and have been pointing at the PCU as proof that CCP has dropped the ball. (example of very mad person post that is mad about everything)  In response the usual Pollyannas have said the PCU isn’t a valid measurement and anyway this is just the usual summer lull, nothing to see here, go on about your business, everything will rebound come autumn.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out who is right is to wait it out and see if things do bounce back.  But either way, the weekly PCU still seems to be sagging, with another week where cracking the 25K mark was the exception, not the rule:

• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 51
• INN – The Imprisoned Flame
• INN – Reframing the Delve Miracle
• INN – Reframing Goon Identity
• Reddit – Ongoing activity metrics for WWB #10
• Reddit – Comparing EVE and Steam player activity

50 Weeks of World War Bee

We are just two weeks shy of the one year anniversary of the start of the war.  But that doesn’t mean we’re not hitting any “one year ago” events yet, because it was a year ago this past week that The Mittani held an emergency mid-week Fireside to announce that PandFam and Legacy were rounding up as many allies as possible to come and attack us.

Legacy and PanFam denied everything and called Mittens paranoid.  But then logs leaked… logs always leak because three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead… and Vily made his “The Die is Cast” post, announcing that the non-invasion pact between Legacy and The Imperium would end on July 5, 2020.   And so the start date of the war was made clear to both sides.

The Goon Expeditionary Force, a SIG meant to keep pilots like me who only want to go on campaigns and fleet ops, was pulled back from Cloud Ring where it had been clashing with some low sec entities, to Imperium space as plans were being made to tighten up our perimeter and prepare for the coming onslaught.

Then there is my question of the week, which was “Who is Silent Company alliance?”  I noticed on Dotlan that they lost 3,655 members this past week, something that put them on the front page of the site, and which brought their member count to 31,696, a number still big enough to make them the largest alliance in the game.

I hadn’t actually noticed them before because Dotlan’s alliance view defaults to a list of alliance who hold some null sec sovereignty.  When you view all alliances they are there on top.

Top Ten Alliances by Members

I know that there are tons of alliances in the game, with more than three thousand on the Dotlan list having at least one corporation and player, but I wasn’t aware there was one so big.  Silent Company, if my Google research is accurate, does a lot of things, just not the null sec sov thing.

When you look at sov holding alliance the total is just 134.

Top Ten SovHolding Alliances by Members

My world view in game tends to be focused on the list of sov holding alliances as they tend to be the players I run into in game… and because so many of the alliances on that list have joined in on invading our space.

Delve Front

The Siege of 1DQ remains static.  PAPI has basically given up on attempting to gain a foothold in the constellation at this point, so my map of the siege from May 2nd remains accurate.

O-EIMK Constellation – June 20, 2021

There have been some skirmishes, but PAPI has not been big on commitment.  They’ll form, then we’ll form, and then they’ll find something else to do because they don’t want to commit to the losses needed to break into the constellation.  As such, the campaign stats for the Delve region were way way down this past week.

Delve Campaign – Week 50

Week 49 saw 9.6K ships destroyed for close to half a trillion ISK in losses.  Week 50 is about 3K ships and shy of 200 billion in losses.

Instead PAPI has gone to the trouble of anchoring Fortizars in NPC Delve, placing them off of the NPC stations up there.

Fortizar on grid with the station in PR-8CA

This is suspected to be part of a plan to try and blockade and starve the Imperium out of the O-EIMK constellation by camping the stations in order to intercept jump freighters flying in supplies.  But, if that is the plan, the effort so far has been so low as to give words like “desultory” a bad name.  There were literally no PAPI pilots in a number of the systems when I passed through to take a look.

In order to run this sort interdiction operation you need to have people out and on the station undock with bubbles and tackle ready to go.  And there is an additional issue in play here.

NPC Delve

There are a dozen systems with a station in NPC Delve, all of which are within jump freighter range of 1DQ1-A, which means you need a dozen camps active pretty much around the clock to make this sort of effort effective.  PAPI doesn’t need a thousand people to make this work, but they they need enough people on at all times on each camp to kill a jump freighter and ward off any Imperium response to a camp.  One pilot can kill a jump freighter but cannot hold the undock if a small response force shows up to drive them off.  Anyway, I suspect we will see if PAPI is up to the effort or not soon enough.

Other Theaters

Out in Esoteria Army of Mango Alliance has continued its drive to evict The Bastion and its allies from the region.

Esoteria – June 20, 2021

With just one ihub left in the region The Bastion looks to be on the ropes in the region.

Likewise, things in Feythabolis look grim as The Bastion as they lost all of the ihubs they held there to the Russian Legion of Honor Alliance.

Feythabolis – June 20, 2021

I am not sure where the RLH alliance fits in, but I suspect they are part of the PAPI allied FI.RE coalition, a group of Russian speaking alliances that grouped together a couple years back when the Winter coalition was attacking their space.  Red Alliance still hold part of the region and they are an Imperium allied group.  We will see if things end up in the region with Russians fighting Russians.

Elsewhere things seem fairly static.  The Initiative does something in Etherium Reach now and then, a new group moved into the formerly Legacy held region of Catch, which is now held by Imperium groups along with some non-PAPI alliances, and the rest of New Eden carries on.

My Participation

The week was definitely off to a slow start for me and it was mid-week before I even undocked.  As noted, ops have tended to be quick defense sweeps or hot drops where you have to get in right now in order to participate.  Still, I got lucky and happened to sit down as there was a rage ping going out to get into bombers and get on the blops and take a bridge.  I got in and was able to fire a few salvos at a Severence Hel that had been tackled ratting in Fake Querious.

The Hel is going to… well, you know

That was a decent kill and was a follow on to a Wyvern that had been caught just a bit earlier that day.  Delve (and Querious) are safe though.

I also managed to get in a John Hartley Harpy fleet that zapped some PAPI pilots who made a visit into 3-DMQT, putting me on a few more kill mails.  I have a low key goal of getting on 5,000 kill mails before my 15th anniversary, and looked on track coming into June within 200 kill mails of making it.  I was on 187 in May after all.  Then the war slowed down and I am not sure I’ll get there.  Oh well.

No activity means no losses I suppose, so my loss count for the war remains:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Cormorant destroyer – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Purifier stealth bomber – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 2
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

This past week was Federation Day… which makes me think there might be a naming issue for the event… which included a bunch of little events and some specials in the store.  I did the login campaign daily on all my accounts and launched fireworks daily with one high sec alt, but otherwise it didn’t register much for me.

The CSM16 elections wrapped up on Tuesday at 11:00 UTC.  CCP Swift, who promised “teases throughout the week” said that there were more votes than last year… then gave us no more teases.  I submit this as proof that he is now fully integrated with CCP.

This week saw CCP Rise on Pando’s FC Chat Twitch show talking about recent changes and plans.  You can find the whole stream here or you can read the summary over at INN.

Meanwhile, the daily player count continued to falter, with mid-week numbers failing to crack even the 25K mark.  The chart of the last three months over at EVE Offline is trending down.

Not a happy PCU trend

I hope this is just summer and everybody just happy to leave the house, because the week’s high was kind of low, just barely cracking the 26K mark on Sunday, the peak of the 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
• 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
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 50
• INN – What’s PAPI’s Casus Belli?: Too Big To Fail vs. Allowed to Lose
• INN – Deconstructing Seir: Truth and “Truthiness” (response to above)
• INN – Strength Through Unity, Unity Through Faith
• INN – The Speech Vily Should Give to End the War
• Reddit – Ongoing activity metrics for WWB #9
• Reddit – Examining the PCU