Monday, February 27, 2017

Reflections and Postcards from Burn Jita 2017

(7:28:12 PM) directorbot@goonfleet.com: MORE THAN 700B DESTROYED NOW – THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE BURN JITA IN HISTORY – WE DO IT FOR THE KIDS~

~~~ This was a broadcast from the_mittani to all at 2017-02-27 03:28:11.474368 EVE ~~~

Burn Jita should be wound down by the time this post goes live.  The plan was for it to run from the end of downtime on the 24th of February through until the start of downtime on the 27th of February, New Eden time, and it does not seem like there is any reason to extend it further.  The goal was to set a record for destruction and that mission was accomplished with hours left to go before downtime.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that freighter ganks have stopped.  CODE and MiniLuv are still out there.  They just have more discerning taste in ganking.  They gank for fun and profit, so choose valuable targets.  With Burn Jita the goal was more quantity of ganks than quality.

As I mentioned in the previous post about Burn Jita 2017, one of the gimmicks was to get people to make a new character with the first name “BJBee” and then get them into the corporation Suddenly Seamen – A Naval Charity.  If nothing else, this made it easy to track kills for the event on zKillboard, as the corp was only active for Burn Jita.  The total stands at 747 billion ISK in ships destroyed.

Many Coercers died to kill those freighters

Many Coercers died to bring us these freighter ganks

Somebody needs to convert 747 Billion ISK into dollars so Massively OP will post about the event.  They like a nice dollar amount for their headlines.  Actual media coverage of the event was minimal, with no mentions I saw outside of the EVE Online focused sites and Reddit.  Remember the news coverage the first Burn Jita got?

EVE News 24 logo right at the top...

Le Figaro covers Burn Jita 2012

I wonder if even CCP will even bother with a dev post or the like this time around.  With the node going down I would think they might want to go over that aspect at least, why we saw that this time around relative to past events.  As for who “won” Burn Jita, I’ve been down that rat hole before.

I did join in for a bit.  I had renewed my alt account early to take advantage of the multi character training deal that CCP was offering, so used about a week of that time to build up an Amarr alt that could fly the basic Coercer fit.  I didn’t quite follow the guidelines, which suggested that your character’s last name should be a number, so went off with BJBee Amerika.

My event character

My event character

I ran through the NPE, which I will have to write about later, used the mini-skill injector, then rounded off the final skills needed with a couple days to go.  I also fitted out a few Coercers on my own in advance, just to make sure I was able to jump into fleet and go when I had time.  After I used those up I took the hand out ships as I could get them.  All in all I was on 16 of the kills over the weekend.

I will say that I was very impressed with the efficiency of the operation.  I have to applaud the MiniLuv people, as they really know their stuff and there was no slack in the operation.

There were bumpers out there wrangling targets, so a fleet would undock with 100 or so Coercers as soon as suspect timers were down, quickly warp off to an insta-warp location, then either to a perch if the target was in Jita, or a gate if it was in one of the adjacent systems.  Then from there it was generally a warp onto the target, the green light to shoot, and then a dead hauler.  Only once did I witness a bad warp in, and likewise I only saw a single freighter survive a first pass, and both of those were quickly rectified with the target going down.

The only real mess up I saw was when we sat on the insta-warp spot for too long and the Caldari Police showed up and started picking off people with very low sec status.  We had to dock back up, let those who got popped re-ship, and the go again.  But we still got our assigned target.

Sixteen kills moved my guy from 0 to -3.0 security status, not enough for me to worry about anything in high sec.  Now I just have to figure out what to do with him post-event.

Those attempting to fight against our fleets were pretty much limited to shooting us once we had a criminal flag, by which point it was generally too late and the target was dead.  Mostly that padded some people’s kill stats, as CONCORD was going to blow our ships up anyway.  It was amusing to have somebody occasionally shoot at us early and get hit by CONCORD themselves.

That does bring up the whole defense question.  You can defend a freighter by simply putting enough reps on them to boost their effective hit points beyond what the attacking fleet can put out.  But that takes time, coordination, and doesn’t get you on any kill mails.  Most people just wanted the latter, while the freighter pilots didn’t seem very interested in coordinating with defenders.  Of the 16 kill rights I earned, only one freighter pilot chose to activate it.  I guess when you are faced with 100+ such that might be a bit of a chore, but if my freighter got hit I would activate them.  I certainly activated the two kill rights I got when people shot me early, for the deluxe price of 1 ISK each.

Anyway, as with most everything in EVE Online, some people love Burn Jita, some people hate it, and most people don’t even notice… except when the Jita node goes down.  That happened at least four times that I know of, which was a hindrance and not a goal.  We were there to blow up ships, not break the game.

Yeah, that wasn't good

Yeah, that wasn’t good

I wonder if CCP learned anything new from this stress test of the game.

Of course, the best part for me were the visuals.  CCP makes a beautiful game and I fly around with the graphics turned up and my UI turned off more often than is probably healthy.  This year the new explosions really stood out as well as the lighting.  The way explosions lit up surrounding ships and wrecks… when the light hits just right…

I need an EVE Online version of this meme

I need an EVE Online version of this Pacha meme

So on to a gallery of screen shots I took.  You can click any of them for a larger view, and can flips through the whole gallery in that mode.  And if those are not enough, Razorien has a Flickr gallery of screen shots in much larger format.

Coercers undocking Hitting an Ark A big, electric explosion A Charon taking hits The Charon brews up with explosions My Coercer with infrared crystals just to be different Everbody explodes! Coercers heading to a perch An Obelisk blowing up The wreck of the Obelisk Undocking as Dreddit looks on My Coercer about to be done in A Charon coming apart as we're all webbed Another explosion Close up on the target A ball of Caldari police camping our insta-warp spot Bright flast off the wreckage An Orca bites the dust And Ark about to go critical On target as our pickup Charon heads into to scoop loot A Mastadon looking to look wrecks Mira Fluxion smart boming our fleet to whore on our kill mails Wreckage lit by explosions

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