50 Weeks of World War Bee

We are just two weeks shy of the one year anniversary of the start of the war.  But that doesn’t mean we’re not hitting any “one year ago” events yet, because it was a year ago this past week that The Mittani held an emergency mid-week Fireside to announce that PandFam and Legacy were rounding up as many allies as possible to come and attack us.

Legacy and PanFam denied everything and called Mittens paranoid.  But then logs leaked… logs always leak because three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead… and Vily made his “The Die is Cast” post, announcing that the non-invasion pact between Legacy and The Imperium would end on July 5, 2020.   And so the start date of the war was made clear to both sides.

The Goon Expeditionary Force, a SIG meant to keep pilots like me who only want to go on campaigns and fleet ops, was pulled back from Cloud Ring where it had been clashing with some low sec entities, to Imperium space as plans were being made to tighten up our perimeter and prepare for the coming onslaught.

Then there is my question of the week, which was “Who is Silent Company alliance?”  I noticed on Dotlan that they lost 3,655 members this past week, something that put them on the front page of the site, and which brought their member count to 31,696, a number still big enough to make them the largest alliance in the game.

I hadn’t actually noticed them before because Dotlan’s alliance view defaults to a list of alliance who hold some null sec sovereignty.  When you view all alliances they are there on top.

Top Ten Alliances by Members

I know that there are tons of alliances in the game, with more than three thousand on the Dotlan list having at least one corporation and player, but I wasn’t aware there was one so big.  Silent Company, if my Google research is accurate, does a lot of things, just not the null sec sov thing.

When you look at sov holding alliance the total is just 134.

Top Ten SovHolding Alliances by Members

My world view in game tends to be focused on the list of sov holding alliances as they tend to be the players I run into in game… and because so many of the alliances on that list have joined in on invading our space.

Delve Front

The Siege of 1DQ remains static.  PAPI has basically given up on attempting to gain a foothold in the constellation at this point, so my map of the siege from May 2nd remains accurate.

O-EIMK Constellation – June 20, 2021

There have been some skirmishes, but PAPI has not been big on commitment.  They’ll form, then we’ll form, and then they’ll find something else to do because they don’t want to commit to the losses needed to break into the constellation.  As such, the campaign stats for the Delve region were way way down this past week.

Delve Campaign – Week 50

Week 49 saw 9.6K ships destroyed for close to half a trillion ISK in losses.  Week 50 is about 3K ships and shy of 200 billion in losses.

Instead PAPI has gone to the trouble of anchoring Fortizars in NPC Delve, placing them off of the NPC stations up there.

Fortizar on grid with the station in PR-8CA

This is suspected to be part of a plan to try and blockade and starve the Imperium out of the O-EIMK constellation by camping the stations in order to intercept jump freighters flying in supplies.  But, if that is the plan, the effort so far has been so low as to give words like “desultory” a bad name.  There were literally no PAPI pilots in a number of the systems when I passed through to take a look.

In order to run this sort interdiction operation you need to have people out and on the station undock with bubbles and tackle ready to go.  And there is an additional issue in play here.

NPC Delve

There are a dozen systems with a station in NPC Delve, all of which are within jump freighter range of 1DQ1-A, which means you need a dozen camps active pretty much around the clock to make this sort of effort effective.  PAPI doesn’t need a thousand people to make this work, but they they need enough people on at all times on each camp to kill a jump freighter and ward off any Imperium response to a camp.  One pilot can kill a jump freighter but cannot hold the undock if a small response force shows up to drive them off.  Anyway, I suspect we will see if PAPI is up to the effort or not soon enough.

Other Theaters

Out in Esoteria Army of Mango Alliance has continued its drive to evict The Bastion and its allies from the region.

Esoteria – June 20, 2021

With just one ihub left in the region The Bastion looks to be on the ropes in the region.

Likewise, things in Feythabolis look grim as The Bastion as they lost all of the ihubs they held there to the Russian Legion of Honor Alliance.

Feythabolis – June 20, 2021

I am not sure where the RLH alliance fits in, but I suspect they are part of the PAPI allied FI.RE coalition, a group of Russian speaking alliances that grouped together a couple years back when the Winter coalition was attacking their space.  Red Alliance still hold part of the region and they are an Imperium allied group.  We will see if things end up in the region with Russians fighting Russians.

Elsewhere things seem fairly static.  The Initiative does something in Etherium Reach now and then, a new group moved into the formerly Legacy held region of Catch, which is now held by Imperium groups along with some non-PAPI alliances, and the rest of New Eden carries on.

My Participation

The week was definitely off to a slow start for me and it was mid-week before I even undocked.  As noted, ops have tended to be quick defense sweeps or hot drops where you have to get in right now in order to participate.  Still, I got lucky and happened to sit down as there was a rage ping going out to get into bombers and get on the blops and take a bridge.  I got in and was able to fire a few salvos at a Severence Hel that had been tackled ratting in Fake Querious.

The Hel is going to… well, you know

That was a decent kill and was a follow on to a Wyvern that had been caught just a bit earlier that day.  Delve (and Querious) are safe though.

I also managed to get in a John Hartley Harpy fleet that zapped some PAPI pilots who made a visit into 3-DMQT, putting me on a few more kill mails.  I have a low key goal of getting on 5,000 kill mails before my 15th anniversary, and looked on track coming into June within 200 kill mails of making it.  I was on 187 in May after all.  Then the war slowed down and I am not sure I’ll get there.  Oh well.

No activity means no losses I suppose, so my loss count for the war remains:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Cormorant destroyer – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Purifier stealth bomber – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 2
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• 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

This past week was Federation Day… which makes me think there might be a naming issue for the event… which included a bunch of little events and some specials in the store.  I did the login campaign daily on all my accounts and launched fireworks daily with one high sec alt, but otherwise it didn’t register much for me.

The CSM16 elections wrapped up on Tuesday at 11:00 UTC.  CCP Swift, who promised “teases throughout the week” said that there were more votes than last year… then gave us no more teases.  I submit this as proof that he is now fully integrated with CCP.

This week saw CCP Rise on Pando’s FC Chat Twitch show talking about recent changes and plans.  You can find the whole stream here or you can read the summary over at INN.

Meanwhile, the daily player count continued to falter, with mid-week numbers failing to crack even the 25K mark.  The chart of the last three months over at EVE Offline is trending down.

Not a happy PCU trend

I hope this is just summer and everybody just happy to leave the house, because the week’s high was kind of low, just barely cracking the 26K mark on Sunday, the peak of the week:

• 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
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 50
• INN – What’s PAPI’s Casus Belli?: Too Big To Fail vs. Allowed to Lose
• INN – Deconstructing Seir: Truth and “Truthiness” (response to above)
• INN – Strength Through Unity, Unity Through Faith
• INN – The Speech Vily Should Give to End the War
• Reddit – Ongoing activity metrics for WWB #9
• Reddit – Examining the PCU