This past week saw Snuffed Out carry on with their prodding of the Tranquility Trading Consortium, the null sec coalition that runs the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter, among other things. Having destroyed the TTC keepstar in Ignoitton last week, the group declared war on the TTC, leading people to wonder if they were going to actually assail the high sec trading hub.
This led to the push/shove scenario and answered the question as to whether the owners of the TTC… which includes both sides of World War Bee.. would cooperate to defend their lucrative market situation.
The answer was “yes” as both TEST and The Imperium joined the war to defend the TTC, leading to a set of instructions going out to Imperium pilots about how to setup their overviews so they could be allied with TEST in high sec yet still see them as hostile targets in Delve.
In order to declare a war in high sec a group has to designated a war headquarters. In this case, Snuff’s HQ was an unfit (and perhaps unfueled) Raitaru in Ichinumi, which the TTC forces promptly destroyed. That meant that the TTC “won” the war and kept Snuff from declaring war again for two weeks. This quick resolution led some to believe that Snuff was just in it for the memes.
Meanwhile, in his weekly fireside chat on Saturday, The Mittani announced the F2 program, a call for members of the Imperium to step up and be more than just F1 monkeys in fleets. The idea is to take an organization that, since the levee en masse inception of KarmaFleet, has often been seen to simply be about simply getting more people into fleets and pulling the few who show some talent into positions of responsibility, and get more people to step up into support roles in addition to going on fleet ops. Scouts and spies were mentioned specifically, but were not the sole possible paths. Mittens banged the drum for this through his whole speech and, though he vowed there would be no shaming of people who did not step up, wandered perilously close to that position a few times himself.
In the traditional Imperium way, having long adapted to the daunting complexity of life in New Eden and the running of a space empire, there was a promise of guides to help line members find that second role… the F2 button on the space career… to help support the coalition.
Delve Front
As we enter the eighth month of the war, Delve has now been in play for almost half of that time. PAPI put down a Keepstar successfully in NPC Delve on their fifth attempt back in October. That means that the invasion of Delve, the alleged final stage of the war, has now gone on longer than many past wars have taken all told. I know everybody loves the “not winning fast enough” meme, but public promises as to when 1DQ1-A would fall have all proven to be pipe dreams so far. The system, and the constellation behind it, remain in Imperium hands and largely unscathed. But for PAPI to take Delve, they must evict the Imperium from 1DQ1-A.
That said, there isn’t a lot left of Delve in Imperium hands. PAPI came in and took the 1-A81R constellation, home to The Bastion and Get Off My Lawn. Aside from a few outlying systems near Querious, the 1DQ1-A constellation is all PAPI has left to take.
Delve – Feb 28, 2021
The hellcamp in M2-XFE carries on. There were some operations by PAPI against the bubbles over the week, but no real break out attempts have come. And the two metaliminal storms continue to wander the region, though the electrical storm looks like it might be out the door and into Fountain if it carries on in its current direction.
Other Theaters
In Querious Brave has managed to hold on to the systems they have been trying to claim.
Querious – Feb 28, 2021
That said, Siberian Squads hasn’t gone away either and remains in their own constellation as well as staging out of the Keepstar in W6V-VM.
In Catch however, Brave’s holdings are under siege as The Initiative and other groups have laid siege to and started taking what one might consider Brave’s core home systems in the region.
Catch – Feb 28, 2021
Brave is committed to Querious now because their backfield is on fire behind them. Likewise, Immensea remains under pressure, and Federation Uprising is down to two ihubs and Warped Intentions has lost all of theirs.
Immensea – Feb 28, 2021
And down in Esoteria The Bastion has kept the pressure on TEST, though an incursion popping up in the region probably hasn’t made their life any easier.
Esoteria – Feb 28, 2021
There is word that Impass and Feythabolis may also start getting the torch soon, once some of the above regions are wrapped up.
My Participation
I was a slacker yet again this week, though I have to say that a lot of the ops I saw pinged were in EUTZ, which I cannot really go on unless I know they are going to be short. I can’t go missing in the middle of the work day for long. I did jump in when PAPI made a run at the bubbles at the M2-XFE camp, which put me on some fighter squadron kills. I also got the final blow on a TEST Scimitar, so my Rokh has a kill mark on it now.
The M2 Keepstar abides
Other than that I ran around Delve and collected my PI. PAPI hasn’t been after the customs office in the region, or at least not in the systems where I work, so that trickle of income has remained steady. Oh, and I was on the Theta Thursday show on INN last week, proving that they are getting low on available guests.
With that my losses for the war remain:
- Ares interceptor – 15
- Malediction interceptor – 7
- Crusader interceptor – 5
- Atron entosis frigate – 6
- Rokh battleship – 5
- Drake battle cruiser – 4
- Scimitar logi – 3
- Ferox battle cruiser – 3
- Purifier stealth bomber – 3
- Guardian logi – 2
- Scalpel logi frigate – 2
- Raven battleship – 1
- Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
- Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
- Bifrost command destroyer – 1
- Cormorant destroyer – 1
- Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
- Sigil entosis industrial – 1
- Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1
Other Items
This past week saw the Bastions of War update from CCP which introduced improvements to marauder class battleships. Buffing 2 billion ISK hulls in the middle of their economic crunch seemed a bit comical to me, but the left hand rarely seems to know what the right hand is doing at CCP. We will see if that changes anything in the game meta.
The update also nerfed heavy assault cruiser survivability, which will no doubt change the null sec war meta, which has largely been “HACs online” for most of the conflict. It seems that Muninns and Eagles might fall by the wayside, though the speedy Cerberus might still be viable. What will replace those as ships of the line remains to be seen.
CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson gave an odd interview about the EVE Online economy which was published over at The Gamer in which he went on about the New Eden economy in attempt to play up some bizarre connection to the GameStop short selling event earlier in the month, by describing things that don’t or can’t really happen in the game. Has anybody, as an example, really been banned for margin trading? It was really every bad interview I have ever witnessed where the CEO proves he doesn’t know his product and nobody is there to stop him.
And then CCP posted their Expert Systems dev blog, which in classic CCP fashion, uses words that sound cool but which do not mean what they seem to think they do. (see “logistics” meaning “repair” for another example.) While lacking in details, this came off as a “rent a skill” program to get new players to pay money for temporary access to skills to try them out. It seems like a complete non-starter to me, but I’ll have more words about that later.
And the peak concurrent users for the week rang in about where it did last week, with Sunday being just slightly ahead of Saturday this time around:
- 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
Related
- INN – World War Bee: Week 34
- TAGN – Bastions of War Update Summary
- INN – The Role of Tribe in EVE
- INN – Snuff Bluffs
- INN – WWB Thought Experiment
- They Greybill – The “Real Delve” is not in New Eden
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