The Imperium Picks Itself Up, Dusts Itself Off, and Drops Two More Keepstars

Leave a reply

Did you expect anything less?

But there were things to do first.  The battle over the first Keepstar in Atioth ended at downtime, when CCP restarts all the servers and everybody gets logged off.

Most of the Imperium pilots got the message and did not log back in when the servers came back up.  The instructions were to stay logged out until cover fleets could be organized.  Generally the winning side likes to press their advantage when they hold the field and pop anybody who logs back in.  WinterCo did that for a while, but by the time the afternoon came around they had headed for home or logged off.  Our foothold in Atioth was uncontested by the time the first sub-cap rescue fleet was put up.

I logged in my combat alt who had been out for a while in an Cyclone Fleet Issue, joined the fleet and docked up at the staging Fortizar.  Easy enough.

Not too much later there was a call for capitals to get on the login screen and be ready.  We controlled the grid from that point forward and had our own fleet camping the main site of the action to pop WinterCo stragglers who logged in.

I logged on with my main and found myself still in my carrier.  Once it landed from the warp off location, I aligned to the Fortizar where everybody had been instructed to go.

Landing on the fort and safety

I was interested to see that, while my fighters had been recalled on my disconnect… after which my main say on the black login screen for hours… again, not being able to log into the game was less frustrating that the complete lack of feedback you get from that black screen… I had sustained some damage, with shields down and a bit of my armor having been nibbled on.

The carrier’s state on logging back in

I am going to guess that was due to the proximity of friendly titans who had been smart bombing.  That was what had done in my initial fighter groups, which did not get recalled automatically because the server crashed.  They were just sitting in space to get popped.

I sat on tether a bit to fix that sliver of armor damage, then docked up with the rest of the capitals. While we docked up, the supers and titans had covering fleets so they could gate back to K-IYNW and dock up in our Keepstar there.

More rescue operations came up over the next day.  But as those settled down, move ops resumed in earnest, moving subcaps and capitals to the front line in Geminate.  I spent time in cover fleets on the regional gate watching ships pass into Geminate.

Watching the K-IYNW side of the gate as caps move through

While WinterCo still held the sovereignty in Atioth, with Insidious picking it up from TEST, we had grabbed the rest of the constellation.  That meant no seven day timer for dropping another Keepstar, so long as we did it in one of those systems we now owned.

KR-XF4 constellation – 20260409

And why drop one Keepstar when you can drop two?

Meanwhile, WinterCo had a choice.  To keep us from moving fully into Geminate they now had to contend with two Keepstars and an Imperium that was keen to not repeat the mistakes of earlier in the week.  Or they could do something else.

They chose to start falling back to their Keepstar in 7-K5EL in Vale of the Silent, ceding the Keepstar fights to us.   TEST sent out a Discord ping for that.

Several Bothans were mildly inconvenienced to bring us this information

The message in the image above transcribed:

Hello TEST,

Given recent light of the new KS anchoring in geminate we are going to make the call to push back all assets to 7-K including doctrines and the market. We will be placing deathclones and staging from here

Capitals please follow capital pings soon to follow

Fleets will be going up to assit in the move.

Please start moving all ships when you can, set your deathclone to 7-K and continue the work youre doing in geminate, but from 7-K

We still fully intend to defend geminate and hold the line!

It was suggested by our own leadership Norus, leader of Fraternity and WinterCo, was spending the political capital accrued by their victory on Monday to cover the retreat of forces from Geminate.  Better to make a move when your side is up than look like we drove him to it.

That they are moving back does not mean that they won’t contest the rest of Geminate or show up to defend their structures, which are timed to land in the time zone that favors them over us.

That said, when the Keepstars were set to come online yesterday, the Imperium still formed up in a big way, sending subcap fleets to cover while piling up the capitals and supers in Atioth, ready to jump in should the situation call for it.

A lot of supers and titans tethered on our Fortizar

However, nothing came up.  Both Keepstars finished their deployment, repaired, and were fully online without interference.

Then the cover op became a move op for some of us.  I was in a carrier fleet and we were still docked up, so the word came down to pack up our stuff to move it to the new staging.

From there it was jump time, fleet by fleet.  We were back in the line for take off, so we got to watch the supers light off their drives and jump to the new Keepstar.

Clearly somebody said “Jump” in that fleet

In our fleet we had some subcaps, because our combat carrier doctrine has a subcap logi element as we’re supposed to be somewhat mobile, and faxes just don’t work so well for that.  But that meant The Llama, our FC, needed some volunteers to conduit jump the subcaps, and I raised my hand right away for that because I had yet to use any of the new abilities that CCP has been pilling on carriers in an effort to make them viable, and also I had just finished training up Capital Jump Portal Generation V (you can see it in my queue from my post about EVELens last week), which meant I could carry the most subcaps with me.

So when the FC said to conduit jump, off I went, carrying 28 passengers with me.

Conduit jump in progress

We landed on the new Keepstar without issue.  I added our fleet cyno to my watch list and did the conduit jump from there.  This is in contrast to some pilots moving, who right-clicked on their capacitor and jumped to the beacon in BWF-ZZ, the staging system that TEST is leaving.   But they hadn’t left yet and were happy to scoop up some free kills on the beacon, as documented over at Reddit.  (About 14 years ago I got on my first super kill with DBRB in BWF-ZZ.)

It isn’t as though I haven’t jumped to a beacon by mistake myself… I just did it on my own when nobody was watching, so got away with it.

Meanwhile, over on Reddit, the tide also turned on the meme front, with the Imperium loss having been taken over by observations about WinterCo retreating while we dropped two uncontested Keepstars in the region.

So I started blasting

That is actually part of a video that was posted that is worth a peek.

Now more move ops are being called and ops are forming to set timers on structures.  The Imperium is moving forward into Geminate despite Monday’s setback.

No Man’s Sky Meets Pokemon with the Xeno Arena Update

2 Replies

Do you long to capture exotic xenomorphs and train them up to engage in intergalactic blood sports?  Have you always wanted to be Ash Ketchum, but in space?  Did you once discover a planet populated by Snorlax-like beings and are aching to do something with them?  Are you hungering for an overly complex new play style in NMS?  Are you concerned that the NMS wiki isn’t big enough yet?

Today… well, yesterday by the time this post goes live, unless you play on a console in which case it might be tomorrow or next week… may be your lucky day as No Man’s Sky has launched the Xeno Arena update!

Welcome to Xeno Arena!

What does this all even mean?  I don’t know, but I expect there will soon be an expedition devoted to all of this pretty soon.  Until then I am just reading the update notes just like everybody else.

I will say that at least feature list sizeable with brief descriptions, so I will quote it in full rather than trying to make a bullet point list out of it.

  • Creature Battles
    • Adopt the wild fauna roaming planetary landscapes, and assemble them into battle teams to fight in simulated combat. Each creature has a unique set of battle moves, ranging from straightforward attacks to powerful status effects, and will perform differently based on their personality, battle traits, and physical characteristics.
  • Hundreds of Battle Abilities
    • The species and native climate of a creature will shape its catalogue of battle abilities. Deal devastating attacks, heal away injuries, cripple your opponents or morph them into vulnerable forms, augment your combat effectiveness and more!
  • Morphogenetics
    • Earn experience through battle to unlock genetic mutations for your creatures. Veteran battlers have the opportunity to enhance their likelihood of moving first and dodging incoming attacks, to increase their durability in battle, and to upgrade the overall effectiveness of all their combat abilities.
  • Challenge Other Players
    • Visit the station between realities – the Space Anomaly – to meet other Travellers and face off in a creature battle. Knock out their entire team to win!
  • Holo-Arena Tables
    • Beloved creature companions can engage in safe holographic combat against other creatures at Holo-Arena tables, now found at planetary buildings, space stations, some planetary settlements, and aboard the Space Anomaly.
  • Refine Your Tactics
    • Amass a broad array of creatures to form battle teams for any tactical situation. Inspect the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team, and deploy your creatures wisely. Fire-based companions may excel against frozen creatures, but find themselves vulnerable to radioactive attacks. There are 8 affinities to learn; experiment to discover your favourite synergies!
  • Breed Prize Battlers
    • Create a legacy of champions. Enhance and modify the offspring of your creatures using the Egg Sequencer aboard the Space Anomaly. Their personalities will influence their behaviour in battle, while physical characteristics such as size may influence their durability and how easy they are to target.
  • Arena League Medals
    • A new faction has been added to the Catalogue & Guide: The Arena League. Achieve excellence in battle and breeding to rise through the ranks.
  • Battle Alien Lifeforms
    • Gek, Vy’keen and Korvax Arena League players can be found at planetary buildings all across the galaxies – and more challenging system champions will play at space stations. Alien players will form their battle teams from locally-sourced fauna. Discover local creatures to help inform your strategy!
  • Creature Survey Mode
    • Hunt for new companions with the specialised creature survey mode in the Analysis Visor. In addition to species information, this mode displays the potential battle traits of wild animals.
  • Daily Challenges
    • Each day, Oceanus challenges Travellers to a unique daily battle, the same battle for Travellers the world over. Oceanus is a formidable opponent, so be prepared to discuss strategies and lineups with other players.
  • A New Traveller Arrives
    • Iteration: Oceanus, the collector, has made the Space Anomaly their new home. They eagerly await the company of fellow creature collectors, hoping to share their enthusiasm for games and strategy.
  • Guidance Missions
    • As you work your way through the Arena League ranks, pin medals to access step-by-step guidance from the Mission Log.
  • Expanded Companion Register
    • The maximum number of tamed creatures has been increased from 18 to 30. Collect a wider range of fauna as you explore the universe, for both companionship and battle!
  • Play and Ascend
    • Claim victory in Creature Battles, and be invited to play against a range of challenging opponents. Earn nanites to accelerate your journey, and gene-altering retroviral pellets to more efficiently upgrade the battle traits of creature companions.
  • Titles For Battle Achievements
    • Exceptional players in the Arena League can display their status with an all-new set of titles.
  • Unique Companion Prizes
    • Impress Iteration: Oceanus with accomplishments in the Arena League to qualify for their collection of strange creatures. Included in their eccentric menagerie are the Corrupted Quadruped, Geno-Prawn, Wandering Shrimp Tank, Boundary Horror, and Aeron Crab.

What have we got then?  Finding, catching, breeding, battling  and a rock/paper/scissors array of strengths and weaknesses, a tutorial, some quests, an arena, an NPC to guide you (Call them Professor Oceanus!), a league, medals, titles, and unique prizes.

So yes, we have Pokemon… in SPACE!

There is also a promo video for the whole thing, if you want to see it in action.

I have logged into the game, but only enough to see the in-game prompts, like the initial splash screen.

In case you missed it, Xeno Arena!

And, of course, once you get past that, an additional prompt… because players can lack object permanence.

Did I mention Xeno Arenas?

In addition, there in your tasks is a new one prompting you to speak with Professor Oceanus in order to get you started on all things Xeno Arena related.

The task awaits… Xeno Arenas!

So it goes.

Looking at Reddit, there are some of the usual expected issues.  I might give this a peek come the weekend.  We shall see.  I am already playing Pokemon LeafGreen and Pokemon Go, do I need Intergalactic Pokemon as well?

Related:

The Case for Outland in Retail WoW

5 Replies

We continue on as a group, moving into retail WoW and trying to figure out what characters we are going to play.

We took a couple more runs at follower dungeons with mixed results as we tinkered with our group composition.  We seemed to have the best luck in Neltharus, where NPC tank Captain Garrick ebbed and flowed between indifference and avoidance and managing to aggro every mob in sight.

At the end of Neltharus once more

Things seemed to go best when I ran with my Death Knight Tokarev, and all the more so when I moved from the two button play style of last week to a three button layout.

Three buttons, I can handle it

For whatever reason the attack with a big self heal doesn’t come up in the rotation, so I gave that its own slot on button 4 to grab a little health back when things were getting rough.

Also, that button in the control-1 slot is the one that turns on and off NPCs guiding the direction of the group.

The run was enough for me to go off later on my own in blood spec, which is his usual spec, made myself tank, and ran the instance as tank just to see if I could do better than Garrick… and it went pretty well.  I mean, it is still a PUG-like experience with the DPS attacking whoever they damn well please, but Crenna the druid is such an OP robo-healer that it was pretty fun.

So I think I’ll just tank for the group next time.

If I want to play Tokarev.  We shall see.

I did notice a couple of things.  The first is that you do level up pretty quickly.  While he started with a full blue bar, that quickly ran out but he still kept leveling up.  He was 50 when we first kicked off and he is well into 56 after basically three dungeon runs.

The second was that he got the same item drop on all three runs, Sargha’s Smasher, a drop from the final boss.  It is a nice 2H hammer, cool looking, hits hard, I like it.  But in the era of personalized loot it had slightly different stats at each drop as I was a different level.

Which isn’t so bad at level 56 I guess.  Moving at that pace he’ll get to level 70 soon enough and then have to commit to TWW content I guess.  More follower dungeons are possible, though I think you have to unlock them by playing the expansion.

But what if I don’t want to play Tokarev?  What if I want to play my Dark Iron warrior Dargan?  Because he is kind of cool looking and the Dark Iron have some interesting housing stuff only they can buy.  The only thing is that he is level 10.

And at level 10 you don’t get any follow dungeons unless you group with somebody higher level or who has unlocked them in Dragonflight.  You can’t just follower dungeon yourself to 70.

No follower dungeons for you

I mean, you sort of can, but it requires you to pick Dragonflight from Chromie as your timewalking experience.  The problem is that… I really don’t care about the story in WoW, and the further along the expansion trail you go the more the game absolutely insists you pay attention to the story.

I am even now working my way through Midnight and looking bored because here is another cut scene telling me thing beyond where to go and who to kill.

Why does this guy keep talking? Can we get on with it?

This is a personal flaw of mine, and not something that applies just to Azeroth.  As I have said no doubt ad nauseam here on the blog, I care about the story of my character and the group I am playing with.  Putting me in the cut scenes is cool… I appreciate the effort, honestly…  but I am going to forget whatever was said the moment some NPC with punctuation over his head tells me to kill some people.  Me completing the task is the story that interests me and not the NPC and his complaints about the world.

This is why I play EVE Online, and more specifically play in null sec in EVE Online.  The story of my character and his corp, squad, alliance, or coalition is something I can help shape and it doesn’t matter what CCP or some random NPC wants.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about the story and the lore the devs have provided, I am saying that I seem to lack the gene that allows me to care about that sort of thing.

Which is why I probably keep ending up in Outland.

This may seem a bit off, given how often I have ranked The Burning Crusade as a middling expansion, problematic in its approach and unrelentingly grindy in its execution.  As I have said in the past, the lesson that Blizz took from vanilla seemed to be that if killing 10 rats was good, then killing 15 or 20 much bet better.

The thing is, for an expansion, it doesn’t seem to mind if you don’t want to pay attention to the story.

It was also the absolute peak of the maximum quest hub experience, where you could pick up 5-10 quests at one go and just spend time out in the field killing stuff or whatever.

Also, my criticism of TBC has been largely in the context of it being the current live expansion.  I don’t want to go back to 2007 and run that, we punted on running it in 2020, and when it went live on classic classic earlier this year it still had no appeal to me.

But as an experience in the context of something else being the live expansion, and all the more so in the post-level squish world where there are nine expansions after it, Outland is just a chill place to go kill stuff and not worry about the story.

Just killing some orcs out by Honor Hold

Of course, I say that right now.  I just launched into Hellfire Peninsula and everything is simple and I have a side bar full of quests that I have done many times before so I know exactly where to go and what to do.  We’ll see how I feel when it is time for Terokkar Forest.

But I can just skip that if I don’t like it.  Everything just scales to my level as I go.  I can just go back to my Outland Zones Ranked post from 2022 and pick my favorites.  I can avoid Terokkar… which honestly isn’t that bad… or the Blade’s Edge Mountains… which are totally as bad as I suggest… and go straight to Nagrand I guess.

Though that feels like going straight to desert.  But I might do Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, and then Nagrand.  I’m feeling like I might have overrated Shadowmoon Valley on that ranking.  But rankings are like that, very in the moment.

At least the way I do them.

So I have started down that path.  We’ll see how long it lasts.  I think he is 16 now.

But that brings me back to a problem I alluded to above with my Death Knight and getting the same drop three times with three different stats.  As I level up, and the zones level up with me, my gear is going to be in an almost constant state of needing replacement.

While TBC is pretty good about shoving gear at you regularly, is it paced well enough to get me from 10 to 70?

That brought to mind heirloom gear, which was a thinking about heirloom gear.  That was supposed to be the solution to alt gearing, giving them the equivalent of blue gear that would level up with them.  Around since WotLK, heirloom gear has clearly gone through some changes.

To start with, the level squish messed everything up so I have a bunch of items in the gear tab that are good to a range of levels.

A glance at the heirloom tab

There was stuff in there that was good up to level 24 through to 59.  I could get Dargan started with that, but I kind of wanted him to be able to get at least to level 50.  Maybe even level 70.

I did remember that you could upgrade heirlooms, though the how I had to look up.

It turns out that buying them can be done in many currencies.  I seem to recall buying quite a few via Darkmoon Faire.  However, that route only lets you upgrade to level 35… or 34.  There is a disconnect between what the gear says (e.g. level 49 above) and what the upgrade options say.

I have no level 50s, only level 49s

I mean, I am sure that somebody at Blizz has a long winded, hand waving explanation as to why they couldn’t match up the levels in two different views, but it seems dumb to me.  Also, when you upgrade it then says level 59. not to 60.  Do they just want us to feel cheated?

Speaking of feeling cheated, I found the vendor who sells heirloom upgrades for gold… and that shit ain’t cheap.  The 50 to 60 upgrade and the 60 to 70 upgrade both run 7,500 gold.  So 15K gold to get a level 49/50 piece of gear to level 69/70.  And, while the price is lower for the previous increments, needing to go from 24/25 to 29/30 to 34/35 to 39/40 to 49/50 to 59/60 to 69/70 is quite and investment.

They also changed heirloom gear benefits.  No longer does one piece give you a bit of an xp bonus.  Now the whole thing is set based, and you need to have six pieces to fill out the set, which means given the ideal end state of just using heirloom gear to level 70 quickly runs into the barrier of me not having anywhere close to enough gold to cover that sort of thing.

The heirloom set bonuses

You need 2 pieces of heirloom gear for the first bonus, 3 for the second, 5 for the third, and 6 for the final bonus.  And the bonus is now a reduction in the consumption of your blue bar bonus rested xp.  I guess that is fine.  Still, if you want the full blue bar protection, you need six pieces.

I have never been good at pursuing gold, and felt kind of rich having 126K gold on my main, until I started doing the heirloom upgrade math in my head.  Even if everything I had was only two upgrades from 70, and I was not close to that being true, the upgrades would cost 90K gold.

So maybe just two pieces of gear to level 70.  Probably a weapon and then an armor piece.

Or maybe I defer that buying decision until I hit the cap for the first piece of gear.  That sounds like a plan.  There is no point in blowing a load of cash because I am suddenly starry-eyed about an alt.  I’ve been there before… note the 42 characters I found when I did my play time inventory… and I have lost interest more often than not.  So I loaded him up with heirloom gear and sent him off.

Dargan all decked out on the character select screen

For now though, it feels almost like freedom to just be roaming around Hellfire Peninsula seeing the old sites.

I have come to slay you… how many times have I been here

So I like Outland I guess… just not when it is the primary focus.  Or such is my theory of the moment.  Felt old school.  Might delete later.

The Imperium Loses 33 Titans Battling WinterCo and the Server in Atioth

15 Replies

TL;DR – 10K capsuleers in local turn Asher’s cunning plan into a disaster.

Edit: Title changed to 33 titans to reflect addition kill reports showing up.

The Imperium’s attempt to deploy a Keepstar in Atioth was set to be the first real struggle in the conflict between them an WinterCo.  The gauntlet had been thrown down.  Asher asked if WinterCo was a sleeping dragon or a paper tiger and so it was on yesterday morning.

We did move ops on Friday and through the weekend into Monday morning to get people lined up for this fight and the coming campaign.

Docking up in Atioth on Friday

We had Fortizars in system already, but a Keepstar was necessary to keep the supers and titans safe, giving them a place to dock up and resupply from.  The Keepstar had been deployed and was going to come out and start anchoring at just shy of 19:00 UTC.

Three days to come online… from when I arrived on Friday

On our end pings went out over the weekend saying that we would be forming up at 16:00, well in advance of the timer and that WinterCo was also planning to line up in a big way for this.

There were a last few move ops, but come 15:45 UTC the pings went out for fleets, two for our carrier doctrine, and two for smaller support doctrines.  Then on capital coms, more pings went out for all the remaining capital ships.

I had already been logged in for an hour at that point.  I got up, logged in my client, then got ready for the day.  There were 3,350 people in local at 14:10.

That had jumped past 4,000 by 14:49.

At 15:36 I saw the numbers in system pass 5,000, and slowly rose to close to 5,500 as people got in fleets and undocked to get into position.  A host of bookmarks had been laid out on the Keepstar grid and we warped off to our assigned positions.

Or fleet bookmark array

By 16:15, when the supers and titans started gating in the number rose to 6,000, which rose to 7,000 by 16:30 as we got ourselves arrayed around the Keepstar.

The might of the Imperium arrayed about the Keepstar

And that was before WinterCo had started to show up.  At that point I was wondering if they would bother to show up, remembering the second battle at M2-XFE where PAPI made the mistake of jumping titans into us for the Keepstar timer when we were already there in huge force.

But I was wrong, WinterCo did begin to show up.  By 17:20 they were coming in and local was up to 8,500, and another ten minutes got us past the 9,000 mark.

At 18:25, less than ten minutes before the timer was set to finish, I saw local move over the 10K mark.

10K spotted at 18:25

That said, local counts get notoriously unreliable in these situations where the server is straining and people are getting disconnected.  People were reporting local counts of nearly +/- 500 users when I saw that.  Still though, a lot of capsuleers in system.

As time counted down WinterCo began landing on grid, ready to start the battle.

Fleets landing with three minutes to go

There was an enormous amount of rubber banding, with fleets landing, then suddenly back and landing again.  Also, people began to disconnect, with my local count dropping by almost 500 as WinterCo landed on grid.  But even ~9,600 people in system and tidi firmly at 10%, it was still pretty amazing that the game was playable at all.

And then the timer hit zero and we started to try and shoot at each other and the whole server took a dump, kicking everybody out.

The dreaded message

There were 38,605 accounts logged into the game… pretty big for a weekday, with about 25% of the game in and around Atioth… and then, splat, suddenly there were only 27,414 according to EVE Offline.

The evening dip visible

The server that Atioth had been hosted on for this battle was down, and remained so for about an hour, giving people trying to get back in a very specific message.

Yeah, you’re in Atioth, you’re screwed

This would have been very much to our advantage had we been able to put the core in the Keepstar to start the final timer.  However, we had not gotten the core installed.

After about an hour people were able to log back in.  I got in and found that I had lost my fighters, which had been launched and ready for a fight, so I spent 45 minutes getting another set of fighters loaded in the launch tubes and out into space again.  Then my client lost connection again and I seemed to be done for the day.

As the post crash fight wore on, we found ourselves in a difficult situation.

Usually in these fights, being there first with the most is the key to success.  However, we were now in a situation where people getting disconnected in Atioth could not log back in, but reinforcements that could log in elsewhere in the game were seemingly able to jump into Atioth and join the fight.  This started to very much favor WinterCo as they had not initially committed so heavily, while we had put everything on grid right away and now people were reporting sitting at a black screen waiting to get logged in for hours.

We had something of an M2-XFE in reverse… including a dead, unfit ghost titan… with those trying to log back in ending up stuck while those jumping in were getting the kills.

Asher started calling for any alts or anybody not currently committed in Atioth to log in and jump into the fight because that seemed to be the only path to get into the system.  Those stuck in the system were hosed.

The Keepstar went down.  We were never able to get a core in it.  With that done WinterCo saw an opportunity to get some titan kills. Past 01:00 there were still between 6-7K people in system.

Overall, a bad day for the Imperium.  Even my meager goal… to actually use my 13 year old carrier in combat and get on a kill mail… fell short.  I mean, technically there were kill mails.  The first batch of fighters I launched were killed.

My fighter losses

And even those were blown up by our side, with smart bombing capitals and supers doing them in.

Of course, all of this is nothing new.  I was writing about this sort of thing back in 2014 when the battle of HED-GP was another server straining exercise.  That post links out to a bunch more that would mostly apply to what happened yesterday.  And the whole issue wasn’t new back in 2014.

And the responses to the battle over on Reddit are nothing new as well.  There is the usual blame cast at players, calls for CCP to break up large player blocs, calls for CCP to make the servers run better, and the rest of the usual suspects that always show up when server problems turn a battle into a fiasco.  Oh, and TEST trying to make it all about them.

This has all happened before.  It will all happen again.  CCP isn’t going to break up blocs or re-introduce scarcity or upgrade their servers.  We’re just going to have to be aware of the technical limitations and deal with them… and maybe not pile 10K people into a single system.

But the headline is that the Imperium lost and WinterCo won.

However, the Imperium generally doesn’t get going until they’ve screwed something up.  On the move ops there were questions as to who would end up sacrificing a titan to the blood god.  Well, we gave up two.

Wait… I am being handed a new report… make that 31 33 titans as early battle reports this morning begin to reveal the magnitude of the setback. [Edit: Alternate graphical report here]

Atioth Battle Report Header

It was two titans down when I went to bed at 4:00 UTC, but the battle carried on to downtime at 11:00 UTC.  And the killboard still hasn’t finished resolving.  I was in the system again with an alt from 2:30 to 3:45 UTC that got on a half dozen kills, only one of which has registered so far.

Just pulling capital ships and the Keepstar off of the report, here is the tally of losses so far:

Hull Lost Cost
Keepstar 1 172.5b
Azariel 2 1.6t
Erebus 8 1.3t
Leviathan 8 1.4t
Avatar 8 1.3t
Ragnarok 7 1.1t
Vendetta 1 132.2b
Hel 3 180.2b
Zirnitra 17 114.3b
Naglfar Fleet 2 8.32b
Revelation Navy 6 31.6b
Moros Navy 4 19.5b
Naglfar 2 9.63b
Archon 5 26.3b
Thanatos 13 64.9b
Nidhoggur 10 46.4b
Apostle 5 32.8b
Minokawa 3 18.4b
Ninazu 1 4.14b

EDIT: Table updated to reflect further kills showing up.  Now 33 titans destroyed.

That isn’t all that much when you consider what we had on grid, but we lost it in exchange for a lot of very cheap ships.  WinterCo won the objective and had a landslide in the ISK war.

Again, early results.  More may show up later.

I do wonder if we’re in Guinness Book World Records territory.  Back in October of 2020 at the second battle of FWST-8 a record was set for “8,825 players taking part overall and 6,557 playing concurrently.”  We seem to have surpassed that.  We shall see.

Now we’ll being doing rescue and extraction operations, probably into the weekend, so the war will slow down for a bit.  31 titans may have died, but there were a lot more on grid that were logged out at downtime or that could never get back in after the first crash.

As usual, the losses were not the frustrating part.  You don’t risk assets without the expectation of loss, and losses in a standup fight, or even a trap, you get used to and learn from.  It was the fighting the servers for half a day that made people angry.  And what did we learn from that?

Well, maybe don’t park all our expensive toys on grid when there are already 5K people in system?  That might be a starting point.  Expect to see different tactics going forward.

Asher posted a statement after downtime hit and logged everybody off.  It was posted to Reddit so I feel okay repeating it here:

Post DT report: We held the line against an incredibly stacked situation. We brought our super and titan fleet in to defend the keep. We had a strong feeling that WC would try to cheese the objective and not look for a fight so we prepared to be there early with more ships to defend against the cheese. We got in with an amazing form and spent 2 hours carefully launching our fighters in waves per fleet, per birth month. WC formed a few HAC fleets and a huge amount of vexors. The system was actually pretty snappy, then WC warped in all their vexor fleets and dropped drones simultaneously and the server crashed.

We relogged but the server was deeply broken on the grid we were in which contained the anchoring keepstar, our staging fort, and the K-I gate. Many ships were black screened with aggro that never dropped and could not be fixed. Personally my carrier got blackscreened and I spent the next 13 hours trying to log back in but was never able to. Many of us had the exact same story. Basically what happened was if you were on that grid and you got DC’d you could never log back in successfully until your ship died. Unfortunately for us many of us were in titans, supers, and caps and many of the other side were in vexors.

We lost half the titan and super fleet to black screens immediately after the system crash never to return. I want to be clear that no amount of relogging, killing the client, warping them, visiting the NES, adding and dropping fleets, or any of the other tricks would bring them under control. During the keep fight we were unable to ever core the keep, but we knew at this point we were in far deeper trouble.

Because the grid was deeply broken if you were able to cyno in or enter the system off the grid you could load fairly normally. However if you came in through the K-I gate which was on the grid you would load the grid just like a disconnected ship with no overview ( https://i.imgur.com/d2oknD5.png ) although others could see you on grid you could not see anything or target any ships or initiate warp.

Because of this the only reinforcements we could bring in had to go through lowsec, around into Geminate, and enter through the D-I gate from WC space. This meant that anything we logged into the system was already on the grid either in space or in the fort and we had no way to log in any reinforcements. At this point we made the call that if we warped off the working half of our titan/super fleet the entire other half would die so we decided to stay in system as a deterrent.

What WC didn’t know was that as you had the normal kind of deep tidi disconnects or server hiccups we kept losing titans who could log back in but could never control their ship again. By the time the enemy attacked us we only had 15 pilots in control of their titans and able to fire guns. Thankfully by bluffing them we delayed them coming in and turkey shooting half the fleet, but if they had come we had essentially no defense. The “faithful fifteen” stayed and shot till the end, helping lower DPS on our unpiloted titans.

Also, Goon hero FC Sir Yohnny took a flycatcher fleet around and through the backdoor of Geminate to be able to actually load in system and his fleet landed the moment Casadorr’s hictor died on top of the WC titan fleet. Yohnny’s fleet was able to hold the enemy titans for another 45 minutes of real time, delaying more DPS from hitting our fleet. Another commendation to Dragonfleet for staying here practically DT to DT and forming huge numbers.

Because of the clever thinking of our leadership team we were able to delay the enemy enough that our losses, while frustrating, are not in any way debilitating and it won’t stop us from pushing forward. I also want to point out that I don’t in any way believe that WC attempted to knock the server offline, I think they had a strategy and they pursued it without malfeasance. Please do not go out publicly and complain about the server weather, you wouldn’t complain to God that he rained on your parade, you would just throw another parade. We got quite unlucky here but that is Eve. Sometimes you get unlucky and you adapt the best that you can, so we praise our enemy for fighting us, this is what we always wanted. We praise our leadership team for making the very best of a bad situation, and we move forward to the next fight. I’ll see you all extremely soon!

So it goes.  We’ll be back.

Related:

Valheim and a Trip to the Mountains before Bonemass

Leave a reply

Having upgraded my food and started mead production, I was left pondering the coming fight with Bonemass.  Checking the wiki, Bonemass is weak to blunt and frost damage.  Our traditional method for taking him on has been to build a tree house to stay up and out of range of his poison and just pepper him with arrows, but the best arrows are frost arrows.

And to get frost arrows you need to go to the mountains and collect obsidian and drops from the frost drakes.  That seemed like something I could manage… with some preparations.

By this point I had smelted enough scrap iron to go well beyond my immediate needs, so I crafted a full set of the iron armor to make sure the mountain mobs didn’t just eat me alive.  I don’t like the movement speed penalty, but the troll hide armor is a bit light.

Now clad in iron armor

I also had the recipe for the frost protection mead, some sort of frost protection being a requirement of traveling in the mountain biome.  You can see my fermenters brewing up mead behind me as I enjoy a horn of ale.

Then I needed to find some likely mountain locations.  There was a tiny one near The Elder, but I saw what looked to be the edge of a better location over by where I had found Haldor the vendor.  I had dropped a portal there in my exploration, so headed that one armed and with mead and some high stamina food to hand.

The test of the mountains is stamina management.  Even getting up to the peak I had spotted took some effort as it rose right up out of the middle of some black forest.  But I got up there.

Up in the snow in the mountains

Armed with an upgraded iron mace I was able to take on the first few wolves I encountered easily enough.  Again, combat set to easy mode.  The wolves got back at me though and as I was shooting at a frost drake, and low on stam, while standing on the edge of a rise, two wolves came up behind me and hit me, sending me flying down the side of the cliff to my death.

So went day 64

So I had to mount a recovery operation, as I had collected some obsidian and some drake glands, which are what you need for frost arrows.

Once I recovered my stuff I kept poking around to see if I could chance on any lucky finds.  I even got out the iron sledge to hit the ground, that being a trick to find hidden silver as it will respond with a “no damage” message.

No such luck.  But this was a small patch of the biome.  But in moving around I noticed there was a larger patch to the west.  Off I went to explore.  There I had quite a stroke of luck when I found the tip of a silver vein exposed on the surface.

Some silver peeking out

I looked around for a place to put up a portal and found a ruined stone tower not too far away.  I built a work bench and then a portal, then returned to the silver vein to start digging around it in order to reveal it.

Clearing away around the silver vein

It was in a nice spot and I was able to clear all around it until it was floating in mid-air, not touching anything.

Unsupported silver

If you do that right, and I managed to do so, then when you hit the vein with your pick long enough to break off a piece, the whole thing then explodes and dumps the whole vein of silver onto the ground.

I now had a lot of silver to work with.

I collected it all and brought it back to base to begin smelting.  The first thing on the list was the wolf hide cloak, which grants frost protection.  That meant I would not need those meads anymore.

That left me enough silver to make Frostner, the 1h silver mace, and the Draugr Fang bow, each serious upgrades over what I had been swinging.

Thus upgraded, I was back to the mountain top where I was now able to take on most everything, even the stone golems.  Certainly the wolves were not a threat anymore.

Come at me wolves!  You should be frightened!

I did not have enough silver to upgrade my armor however.  So I went scouting about again to see if I could luck out on a second silver vein.  But that sort of luck wasn’t forthcoming.

However, I did have a different sort of luck.  In one of the buildings I found a chest that had some onion seeds.

Onion seeds found

As with the turnip seeds of last post, these unlocked a few recipes, including one to use with the wolf meat I had been collecting.

I headed back to base and planted a crop of onions and waited for them to become ready for harvest.

Onion finally ready… in the rain… but whatever

I also grabbed plenty of obsidian while I was up there.

I’ll need this for later

There were also a couple of other points of interest.  I marked an ice cave for later exploration and picked up a couple of the eggs that I will need later.

That will come in handy down the road

But by that point I had kind of worn out the bit of mountain biome I was exploring.  No more silver was jumping out to grab me.  It was time to go finish off Bonemass to get the wishbone that helps you find silver veins.