Welcome to my week 45 summary.
Look, it was this or a wild west revolver
In just a few more weeks I will be able to add the inevitable “One Year Ago in WWB” section to these weekly posts. Let’s just all hope I never need to fall back on an Olde English 800 image for the opening section. Even 800 days might be too much.
The stalemate in Delve, the so-called the “Siege of 1DQ,” appears no closer to reaching and end.
The grind of war appears to be wearing on some of the attackers. Kel Drosto, one of Brave’s FCs, sent this out to the alliance:
The other thing for us winning this war…
Our current clone deployments should be as follows:
Deathclones: T5ZI (Delve)
Jump Clones: P-ZMZV (Querious) GE-8JV (Catch)You might think to yourselves “But Kel, Why? Im so bored of tidi slugfests”
Yes. So am I. I am bored stiffless of this war and want it to be over.
However. I have noticed a huge trend in our participation in main coalition fleets. I just led a fleet out of T5ZI… 160 in fleet. Guess who had the most? Test with 100+. Guess how many I had from Brave? 28. 28 people from Brave actually turned up to that fleet.
Now. Say we do indeed lose this war…. Who do you guys think, honestly, has the most to lose? Do you think it’s Frat? Do you think its Horde? Absolutely not. It is us.
If we, and those of you reading this, want to maintain the cushty little nullsec homes we have then it is ESSENTIAL to go on the main Delve fleets. Because, Horde, NC, Frat, they all have homes very far away from here to return to. We dont. This war, we are ALL IN.
We lose this war. Test is first, then the rest of Legacy is next. And you thought Catch was bad. Delve/Querious would be hella worse.
So. Yes, it is a slim chance that we lose this war, but it is still a chance.
You want to maintain where we live? You wanna keep having those fun standing fleet fights with kitey nano bulshit gangs? Then get into Delve. Get into this war.
You guys have all done so well so far. The resilience and perseverance demonstrated by you guys, everyone in this community is some of the best I have ever witnessed in my entire life. Thats not an exageration. This war is tiring. It’s dull. But there is an end. We just have to keep fighting it. The only people prolonging this war right now, is us, ourselves.
So, my challenge to you guys. I want to see a full fleet of Brave. 256 Brave people in a fleet in Delve. We’ve done it before and very recently. I have witness a full fleet of literally 99% Brave. Lets do that again. Lets smash goons into the ground and so we can get back to our Null Carebear Lifestyles.
Peace out
Brave, with close to 14K member currently, is the fifth largest alliance in the game, the fourth largest in PAPI, and the second largest in Legacy Coalition, so them not showing up in numbers relative to the base saps the strength of Legacy’s commitment to the war. And this isn’t the first time it has been noted that Brave has been lagging.
It is leaks like that which strengthen the resolve of the Imperium line members, because we’re pretty sure we can hold out longer than they can.
Delve Front
As I said above, the stalemate continues, so I get to re-use my map of the area of conflict in the region yet again.
O-EIMK Constellation – May 17, 2021
That nothing has changed on the map does not mean nothing has happened.
PAPI has continued to drop (and lose) Azbels now and then and attempt to reinforce structures, including POS towers, in the 3-DMQT system, which remains the focus of the siege. A particularly bloody battle broke out not too long after downtime on Friday that saw a lopsided loss for PAPI as they faced both Imperium supers and bombers from The Initiative. There is a write up here, but the battle report shows the numbers.
Battle Report Header
They reportedly did at least reinforce the POS tower. But that means they need to come back for another run at it. And even if they kill it, they then have to put their own tower down, defend it as it deploys, and keep on defending it from Imperium attack. So we will see how that goes.
Undeterred by the by the morning losses, PAPI formed up again at close to 00:00 UTC for a surprise rush at various targets in the constellation, including the ihub in 3-DMQT. They got on grid with that and put entosis ships into action, but with the ADM of the system at six, they needed to sit there and cycle for an hour to reinforce the hub. That gave the Imperium plenty of time to spin up fleets and turn off the cyno jammer again to jump in carriers to defend.
And as tidi kicks in, the timer slows down
There is an Imperium Fortizar on grid with every ihub in the constellation, so carriers tethered up and sent waves of fighters at the attackers, wearing them down and eventually stopping them.
At that point, even though PAPI was clearly going to lose the objective, they were well ahead when it came to the ISK war so could have come away with able to claim victory on that front. But then they did the same thing they tried to do earlier in the day and warped all their fleets back to the E-VKJV gate to jump everybody through all at once. Stuck on the gate, choking the server as it struggled to handle the surge, The Initiative lined up another bombing run on them in exactly the same fashion as earlier and scored a huge hit. I was logged off already, the whole thing came at an awkward time for me, but I still had the Mind1 stream up and got to see the PAPI fleets blowing up on the gate.
Watching PAPI burn on Twitch
There is a post up describing the fight. The battle report before the bombing run had PAPI comfortably ahead in the ISK, afterwards the battle report showed they had lost more than 200 billion ISK to the Imperium’s 85 billion in losses.
Second Battle Report Header
There is a nice video of the bombs landing and ships blowing up in a building crescendo of light.
There is also a Fountain Frank version of the video if you prefer.
PAPI is salty about this bombing loss, blaming the servers again, despite having made the same tactical error twice in one day. I have been on enough Imperium ops where we have staggered fleets and had to sit around off grid while other people jumped so as to avoid just that sort of issue. But PAPI thought trying to jump 6,000 capitals into a system with 4,000 people already present was a good idea, in a game where the all time record for a battle was 6,142, and paid for it dearly. You have to fight in the environment you have, not the environment you wish you had. Ignoring the realities of the New Eden servers is not a wise strategy.
Vily has reportedly been telling PAPI to petition CCP for reimbursement, the way he did when he tried to have PAPI jump 6000 people into M2-XFE when there were already 4,000 Imperium pilots there. CCP has already stated their policy on that sort of thing, but Vily has to blame somebody I guess.
Meanwhile The Mittani pretty much broke the smug meter on the Meta Show on Saturday, not that making the exact same mistake twice in one day didn’t deserve some mocking.
The Imperium capitol constellation holds out for another week. PAPI’s stated plan to take the final Imperium systems with subcaps alone has not paid off so far.
Otherwise the week was mostly skirmishes and the occasional destruction of a PAPI Azbel in 3-DMQT.
I think that was Azbel kill #6
So it goes.
Overall the Delve regional campaign stats showed that the week ate up 14K ships and capsules for a total of 1 trillion ISK in losses, with the ISK was tilted in favor of the Imperium.
Week 45 Campaign in Delve
That is still fewer ships than two weeks back, when the number was past 16K and 1.5 trillion ISK lost, but it is still proof that the war remains hot in Delve.
Other Fronts
My view into other fronts has been mostly based on the maps over at DOTLAN for a while now, at least since Brave abandoned Catch, because I am not in any of the groups involved in those campaigns.
This week however I ended up hearing some chatter about PAPI jump cloning or flying out to the space that Legacy Coalition had otherwise abandoned to defend the remaining Keepstars, help with sov contests, and reinforce Imperium and allied structures in those regions. This included a Fortizar I had ships in, which I ended up gating one system over to park in an NPC station just in case.
The most noticeable effort is in Esoteria, which The Bastion has been assailing since we lost Fountain months back, where PAPI has been helping out Army of Mango to push back on that incursion.
Esoteria – May 16, 2021
The Bastion and its allies are back into just northwest Esoteria and lost another four ihubs since week 44.
In Feythabolis the struggles continues, though there Army of Mango lost an ihub over the past week.
Feythabolis – May 16, 2021
Elsewhere, The Initiative continues to try and gain a foothold in their target region of Etherium Reach. While they have not been successful, they have gotten PanFam and its associates in the northeast of null sec to jump clone back home to form up against them. Being a threat to which PanFam must respond makes them a nuisance.
My Participation
I missed both of the big fights on Friday as one came very early in the morning my time and the other landed just about when we were talking about dinner and what to do on a Friday night. I did jump into the second fight in an interceptor to nose around and see some of the action. I missed the big bombing run finale, as noted above, but I did get in and tackle Pittsburgh2989 because he is so perpetually salty about the Imperium that it is hard not to take an opportunity to annoy him. (Like Vily, he has a completely made up, “Goons done me wrong” tale to tell.)
Grabbed him for a bit
He painted me and I had to warp off as I got down to about half armor, but I had fun.
I did get out on some of the skirmish fleets over the course of the week. I got to use my Drake for a short bit, and got a kill mark on my Bhaalgorn, but mostly flew in the ever forming cormorant fleets that have been clashing. This is the level of commitment both sides can afford I guess.
Cormorants in 3-DMQT
Corms are fun, light, and easy. I still miss the old hull model though. But at least I have some fun SKINs for it.
I ended up losing not one but two corms during these skirmishes… actually, in the same skirmish… but that is the way things go. I also lost an Ares trying to get to the new battle monument in M2-XFE. I’ll have to go scope that out later. I will just add those to my loss list for the war.
- Ares interceptor – 18
- Malediction interceptor – 7
- Crusader interceptor – 5
- Atron entosis frigate – 6
- Rokh battleship – 5
- Scimitar logi – 5
- Ferox battle cruiser – 4
- Drake battle cruiser – 4
- Cormorant destroyer – 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
- Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
- Sigil entosis industrial – 1
- Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1
Other Items
CCP announced their planned changes related to warp core stabilizers and interdiction nullification.
In Testing
The changes are up on the test server and they have update their proposal a couple of times, adding some new ship types, removing stealth bombers, and changing the default strength value of warp core stabilizers. The forum thread is contentions, but not nearly as long as I might have expected.
The applications to run for CSM16 also closed this past week. We should get the vetted candidate list soon.
And on the peak concurrent front, week 45 saw the top count stay on par with the last few weeks:
- Day 1 – 38,838
- Week 1 – 37,034
- Week 2 – 34,799
- Week 3 – 34,692
- Week 4 – 35,583
- Week 5 – 35,479
- Week 6 – 34,974
- Week 7 – 38,299
- Week 8 – 35,650
- Week 9 – 35,075
- Week 10 – 35,812
- Week 11 – 35,165
- Week 12 – 36,671
- Week 13 – 35,618
- Week 14 – 39,681
- Week 15 – 40,359
- Week 16 – 36,642
- Week 17 – 37,695
- Week 18 – 36,632
- Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
- Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
- Week 21 – 34,888
- Week 22 – 33,264
- Week 23 – 33,149
- Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
- Week 25 – 31,611
- Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
- Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
- Week 28 – 34,713
- Week 29 – 35,996
- Week 30 – 38,323
- Week 31 – 38,167
- Week 32 – 37,259
- Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
- Week 34 – 35,626
- Week 35 – 35,379
- Week 36 – 35,085
- Week 37 – 34,394
- Week 38 – 36,319
- Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
- Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
- Week 41 – 33,708
- Week 42 – 33,521
- Week 43 – 33,731
- Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
- Week 45 – 33,758
Then again, a conspiracy theory emerged on Reddit claiming that CCP is falsifying those numbers because a single person could figure out where nearly 34K people were hiding in the 7,805 star systems in the game because there they felt they hadn’t seen enough people when traveling from Jita to Amarr, so who can trust anything anymore?
Related
- INN – World War Bee: Week 45
- INN – Narratives Go Nuclear
- INN – PAPI’s O-EIMK Invasion Bombs at the Gate
- INN – Star Snooze Episode VI, Who Will Log the Least!
- INN – Blue Donuts, The Apocalypse, And You
- Reddit – Ongoing activity metrics for WWB
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