Tag Archives: Geminate

Friday EVE Online Bullet Points in a Wet Spring Season

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Well, it has been wet here in California, or wetter than usual.  And that is a good thing, since dry years tend to end up with a good portion of the state on fire come the summer.

Wet weather also means an extended allergy season, but I guess having a runny nose and sneezing when you go outside is better than being on fire.

Anyway, enough of the idle banter, I have some bullet points about EVE Online.

We’ve heard about this already, but CCP is back to tell us a bit more about their plans to introduce a new, 53 system region dedicated to making for a safe new player experience.  I posted about this back in March (linked above) at which point the the region was already in the API and somebody had shown us the map.

Exordium is Coming

Well, now the map appears in game.  You cannot go there yet.  That is coming this summer.  As always, details might change, but we did get a few informational tidbits.

For the safety aspect, the region will be all 1.0 security space and will require capsuleer safeties to be set to green.  This is apparently being accomplished programmatically by just turning safeties green when you are in a 1.0 system, which means that all 1.0 securities systems outside of the new region will be downgraded to 0.9.

The general message seemed to be that the current system, where you pick an empire and get tossed into a training system in that point of space is confusing and divides new players up all over space.  The plan is now to group all players up into this new region so they can meet and form bonds and gain an otherwise unrealistic impression of what life in New Eden is really like.

CCP map Exordium

Still, they have a point on that, and it isn’t like the starter systems have any of the lore setting vibe that starter zones had in WoW or starter towns did back in EQ.  And each empire will have its own chunk of the new zone that will be able to launch players into their respective chosen empire space.

There are some other bits of information, but we’re not really going to be able to tell how this works until it goes live.

Meanwhile, is Katia Sae in danger of losing their monument if they don’t go visit these 53 new systems?

Not a very exciting report.  I mean, look at how quiet the Reddit thread about it is.

CCP points out the following:

  • Production Value has stabilized, while Mining and Destruction Value declined.
  • Total ISK Faucets increased by 17%.
  • EDENCOM Data entered the Top Six Commodity Faucets, displacing Bounty Encrypted Bonds. In March, the EDENCOM Data faucet was 14% higher than the Bounty Encrypted Bonds faucet.
  • All indices continue to decline.

I don’t think destruction being down is ever a good sign, though that should change for April!

Also, Bounty Encrypted Bonds are what you steal from ESS sites, a play style that was always a bit dubious.  In null sec, where you have to have an organized defense plan, stealing from an ESS tends to get a strong response.

The indices going down at least implies that things are getting cheap.  Except PLEX.  But that is the next point.

  • PLEX Price Spike

CCP has worked hard over the last nine months or so… well, worked some, in any case… to bring down the price of PLEX, which had gone past the 6 million ISK mark at one point.  They had managed to get it as far down as 4.2 million ISK last month by injecting PLEX into the game via event rewards and by not having big sales in the New Eden Store, the in-game shop where you spend PLEX.  Everything was nice and calm.

And the somebody felt they needed to juice the revenue engine so they had a big sale and the price popped over 5 million ISK.

PLEX Price Chart – 16 APR 2026

Now I’m not mad.  Please don’t put it in the newspapers that I am mad.  I just want to point out that one of the things I brought up last July was that the unified PLEX market wasn’t going do anything about price spikes if CCP continued to drive those spikes with sales in the in-game store.

I did not, however, consider the idea that such spikes could be drive by sales on items besides game time.  It turns out heavy discounts on old SKINs, MCT certificates, and hypercores will drive a spike as well.  Go figure.

I guess we have a winner, the benefit of having the best officer module option I bet.

The election results

That nearly two-thirds of votes were for somebody besides the winner seems like it might cause a bit of outrage in the electorate, or at least undermine the credibility of the winner.  I feel like, in the real world, no vote would be that evenly split and that such a result would lead to a run-off between the top two.

But what do I know?  I am not even sure how votes were counted.

Anyway, the event is over.  I hope you made some money or got some goodies.  I completed it on four accounts, so it clearly wasn’t too difficult.  If nothing else, I came out 300 PLEX to the positive… which is about 1.5 billion ISK give the price point of PLEX listed above.

Not bad for the effort, and that was just one of the rewards.

That said, CCP had a to put in a fix and a clarification around the event.

The fix involved the login reward claim failing a few days before the end of the event.  From the patch notes:

Fixed an issue that prevented the Gallente Election Daily Login Reward from being claimed. To compensate affected players, the subsequent reward has been upgraded and the login campaign has been extended by one day.

This was actually a bit of a boon because it meant if you somehow missed a day, as I did on one of my two accounts, you were given a bonus day to catch up.

Also, it was initially stated that the campaign outreach centers for the three candidates would go away as soon as the event ended.  I think this made sense in the “political favor = voting” view of things, but less so from the “this is a goddam video game” view of the world.  So we now have a few more days to redeem our political favor.  Again, from the patch notes:

Capsuleer Outreach Centers will remain active in Dodixie until April 23, giving capsuleers one final week to trade in their Political Favors and Presidential Candidate Favors.

I will probably do a summary of the event at some point… maybe.  That will be more likely if there is some follow on lore related game changes based on the election.

This came up yesterday and I wanted to mention it, lest somebody think I missed it, but I also plan to do a post about it next week as well.  There are a few things I want to consider.

The whole thing doesn’t make me happy.  It seemed like a bit of a light overview on the technical side… a bit passive voice too… and I am wondering how to account for the differences in the ISK values assigned to battles.  The chart they posted gave some different, sometimes drastically different, values when compared to the one we got after M2-XFE.  Here is that chart, from back in 2021.

Largest Battles by ISK Destroyed – Chart from 2021

Then there is the chart they posted yesterday.

ISK Lost by Battle – April 2026 version

For comparison, the battle of B-R5RB is listed on their new chart as having cost a mere 3.04 trillion ISK in losses, compared to the 10.5 trillion ISK recorded above.

I think somebody took a shortcut and just used today’s hull and module values.  Doing that hides the impact of the battles on the economy.  Back at B-R5RB titans were valued at over 400 billion ISK each.

The Superlative Six from B-R5RB from my zKillboard page

As such, battles where titans were lost are now undervalued because the price of a titan, while no longer under 100 billion, is still considerably less than what one cost back in 2014.

Anyway, There will be that and more next week after I fully digest that post from CCP.

Notes from the War in Geminate

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It has now been over a week since the Imperium’s shaky start in the Geminate campaign, where we lost 33 titans and assorted other capital ships and subcaps totaling up to around 8 trillion ISK in value in our first attempt to deploy a Keepstar in Geminate.

One of my few screen shots from later in the fight

The more superstitious in the Imperium claim this is because we neglected to sacrifice a titan in the moves ops leading up to the battle, leaving the blood god demanding  a much greater sacrifice.

Some after action reports have popped up as to how much worse it could have gone for us.

The fight however was one for the books.  I have a post with some graphics that CCP did after M2-XFE that help put the fight into the scale of the history of New Eden.  For ISK lost, Atioth looks like it is pretty close race for third place with ~9.1 trillion ISK lost, putting it just behind X-47L-Q.

Largest Battles by ISK Destroyed – As of early 2021

The values are based on the ISK market prices at the time of the fight, so inflation (or deflation) adjustments to normalize those amounts would likely change the ordering of the list.  Titans were just a lot more expensive back during B-R5RB.  (Also, I have posts about at least nine of those fights.)  This also means that post starvation economy fights, when CCP tried to drive everybody away by wrecking the economy and making battleships and above too expensive to undock, get weighed more heavily than those 2020-2021 fights when titans were at their cheapest.

For actual pilots involved, Atioth looks to have exceeded all past records.  The new graphical battle report tool shows me the following totals.

Atioth – Pilots Involved

That totals up to 12,073 pilots.  That is a lot when you look at the previous chart CCP provided, after M2-XFE.

Player counts at the Largest Battles

It sure feels like a new record was set.  I hope CCP will end up doing a dev blog about the fight.  I know things went bad for us, but I want to hear the full story all the same.

The (Not) Two Keepstars

The second Keepstar… is in my heart.  That is where it always was.

-Asher Elias, April 11 Imperium Fireside

As I wrote in a previous post, the Imperium’s response to the loss at Atioth was to loudly announce that we were doubling down and had dropped two more Keepstars in the KR-XF4 constellation in Geminate, which is where Atioth is as well.

This lit Reddit up with memes.

This also may have caused WinterCo to pull its staging back.  Unlike the first Keepstar, they declined to contest the two additional.  The theory is that this was because they couldn’t find the second one.  So we were able to move capitals and supers forward into a new staging Keepstar.

As it turns out, there was no second Keepstar.  We only dropped the one, but kept on acting like there were two, to the point of Applepear, an Imperium FC and director, calling updates on coms about the status around anchoring and deploying the second Keepstar.

I appended this to my post about the Keepstar deployment and move op after the fact, but I figured it deserved a mention of it own.

The Fortunes of TEST

The hardest hit by the decision by WinterCo to pull back was TEST.

DOTLAN numbers from earlier in the week

TEST alliance has been removed from the sovereignty map once again.  This has happened… three, maybe four times since I have been in null sec; after the Fountain war for sure, and after the Casino War when PanFam turned on them and CO2 and kicked them out of Tribute and Vale.  Then there was the loss of all their space after World War Bee (or WWB2 or Beeitnam, there are multiple names for it, but I stick with what I called it at the time) when they fled to as far away from us in New Eden as they could.

Anyway, if you look at that zippy new sov visualization site you will see TEST is missing.

Frat, GSF, and some randos now

I would have used DOTLAN for the map, but it seems to be having some issues in its map rendering.  It still shows TEST in a few systems even though when you look at the details it makes it clear that they are no longer there.  I hope that site isn’t falling apart.

As a reminder, TEST decided to put themselves there as Pandemic Horde was falling apart.

TEST locations, November to January

So anybody feeling they got the short end… well, we didn’t design their cap badges or whatever.  They chose that bit of space, next to us, the people with a simmering grudge against them from the last big war, which was why they had stayed far away from us for the last few years.

That said, when it came out that one of their members was hacking our authentication site… probably looking for information about that second Keepstar… they kicked him right away.  So full points for that.  Maybe they don’t have to be “next” anymore after all of this.

Ongoing Battles

There have been a lot of fights going on.  WinterCo, despite pulling back, seems keen for some action.  A lot of them have been in early EU / late Chinese time, which doesn’t do me a lot of good here in California.  But I did manage to get into one good brawl.

Typhoons in a bright orange explosion

I mean, we did get our asses handed to us, but engaging in a battleship brawl in Frat’s peak weekend play window and then bringing some faxes was us shouting “treat!” just a little too loud I suppose.  From the battle report.

SR-KBB Battle Report Header

Also, some dreads showed up and got zapped.

Still, it was fun.  I lost a Typhoon, but actually remembered to fit my rigs and insure when I undocked, so I was made whole on the loss by the next day.  I had hauled out another Typhoon in any case, so I was able to rejoin the battle, get in a few more shots, then run away with the rest of the fleet when the odds got too bad.

We do seem to do better when I am not around.  Also, if that linked fight were in low sec there would be an all caps headline topping a post on Reddit about a trillion ISK fight.  In null sec that we’ve been to the trillion ISK party too many times to get too excited about it.

The Keepstar Count

Meanwhile, there is our war objective, which I quoted back when the campaign was announced:

Our objective is straightforward: we will attempt to destroy their staging Keepstar in Geminate.

We’re not their to take space and keep it… though we installed ratting upgrades for anybody who misses the old days of Guristas ratting back in Deklein… we’re here to kill structures.  Specifically, Keepstars in Geminate.  We’ve killed two so far with one loss.

The Keepstar Score So Far

There are at least two more out there to blow up, including the one in BWF-ZZ.

The coming weekend promises to have a few fights and maybe another Keepstar timer to fight over.  The struggle continues.

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

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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.

Addendum: After action report from Asher was that there was NO second Keepstar.  This was just a ruse to keep WinterCo anxious and their inability to find the second Keepstar that we kept pinging about may have influenced their decision to not contest the deployment and instead retreat back to Vale of the Silent.

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

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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.  [Prediction Rated: Correct]

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The Imperium Marches on Geminate

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For years, the people of EVE have said that your only true advantage was your time zone. They said you could top the MER, but not win a real war. Now we are giving you your chance. We are coming into your space, on your terms, in your strongest hours. Are you a sleeping dragon, or a paper tiger? Show us what you are made of.

-Asher Elias, to the pilots of WinterCo in the SOTG

Imperium leadership had been pinging for most of the week to be ready for a State of the Goonion (SOTG) update on Friday at 20:00 UTC.  Everybody was there, straining mumble or watching on Asher’s Twitch channel.  People were logged into the game as well.

At the C-J6MT Keepstar During the SOTG

The intent was clear; SOTG events usually mean we’re going to war.

Given our disposition staged in Insmother, our proximity to Geminate and WinterCo space, and the fact that we had been happily sparring with them until they decided to escalate to capitals for every fight, the direction we were going to head was not in doubt.

The question was how far would we be going.

My personal bet was that we would be there to push TEST out of their position next to us, a position they chose to occupy knowing full well we were only a few gates away and that we still hold a grudge.

TEST locations, November to January

However, the target given us was more specific than that:

Our objective is straightforward: we will attempt to destroy their staging Keepstar in Geminate.

One structure.  Not too far from home.  But the locals know we’re coming and we were told during World War Bee that defense is overpowered.  Or that was PAPI’s excuse for not taking 1DQ.  And, as will no doubt be repeated over and over, WinterCo times their structures in the Chinese time zone, which means being up awkwardly late or extremely early for most of the Imperium.

Still, nice to have a specific goal.

As happens with SOTGs, move ops commenced once the announcements were over.  In anticipation of this I had my carrier and a fax fueled up with some obvious doctrine ships loaded.  The forum post indicated a couple of additional ships I should pack, but the upgrade to the carrier and its ability to haul subcaps meant I had room.

My main combat alt, in an Apostle, carried a couple more ships, leaving space for the inevitable ship purchases that will happen at the staging system.

Fleets went up about 30 minutes after the SOTG and we were under way about 30 minutes after that, with Asher’s fleet of capitals undocking first.  We were sent to the Ansiblex to jump through, but it took a bit.  There were nearly 3,000 characters in local and a move op undock brings tidi with it.

The first capital blob to the Ansiblex

I was a little worried.  While I had clicked the jump button en route, my alt caught a bad bounce that sent his Apostle tumbling end over end.

Not the usual Apostle orientation

But the jump had already been logged I guess, because he was yanked through and into the next system despite having gotten pretty far off of the gate.

On the other side of the Ansiblex it was through another gate, then to a Keepstar to wait for the following fleets to catch up.

Aligning to the Keepstar waypoint

There we hung out as other fleets, including supers and titans, made their way to the Keepstar.  Then, once everybody was settled and docked up, it was time to start undocking by fleets again to jump to the next point on our trip.  That was another Keepstar, where the titans and supers docked up and were done.

The rest of us went on into Geminate, into Atioth, where we have previously destroyed the TEST Keepstar and, more recently, dropped one of our own.  Once that comes online the supers and titans will catch up and that will be our staging point.

Three days to come online… closed to two when this post goes live

Until then the capitals and subcaps have a Fortizar to work out of and to cover the Keepstar as it comes online.

Doscking up in Atioth

So that is what is coming up in our corner of null sec.  We’re not invading all of WinterCo’s space or trying to evict them.  But they wanted to escalated to capitals, so we called their bet by bringing our own out to play.

I am deployed, but there are more move ops to come.  Meanwhile, it looks like the first challenge is to make sure that Keepstar comes online.

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