Losing 600 Billion ISK on Your Own Cyno Beacon

I have to laugh at us in the Imperium.  The past weekend’s big story was the huge, hours long time dilation Keepstar battle in M-OEE8 that had over 4,400 people in system at one time and where an estimated 266 billion ISK in ships were destroyed.  That was Sunday.

And then on Monday the Imperium lost ~600 billion ISK in ships destroyed in its own staging system on its cyno beacon, including a Revenant super carrier, the second one we’ve lost in a week. (The first one.)  Remember when losing a Revenant was a rare and newsworthy event?

Sir Edmund’s Revenant on the field in happier times

I was at work when all of this went down, and I haven’t seen anybody try to sum things up in a single post anywhere yet, but the story on comms seemed to run liked this:

-There was a known hot dropper in the system watching the cyno beacon (a POS module that allows jump drive capital ships to jump to it, which makes it an obvious spot to watch) waiting for some unsuspecting capital to jump in, at which point he would light a cyno and his buddies would drop in and kill it.

-Knowing this, somebody decided to bait the hot dropper with an empty industrial of some sort.  I saw a jump freighter mentioned, but am not sure if that was true or not.

-The camper took the bait and cyno’d in his team.

-We responded with a huge overkill force including titan pilots looking for kills.

-Pandemic Legion, which had bought a pile of dreads that TEST left behind after Progodlegend’s  ill fated “let’s attack Delve” campaign earlier this year, dropped the whole lot, with some support (e.g. faxes and tackle Rorquals), on the fight.

While PL lost their entire force, which was expected, they managed to take out 3 titans, 4 super carriers, 2 carriers, a fax machine, and some small stuff including a number of fighter squadrons, which count as kills.  That left a battle report which summed up as:

D-WF70 – Dec. 5, 2016

My summary is probably off.  There was something about how the forces were positioned that helped out PL, but nobody has written up yet that goes through the battle in detail.  Reddit is just full of well earned smugness at the moment.  I’ll update this with links should somebody break the situation down.

But the net result is that the Imperium lost a lot of ISK in the form of supers yesterday.  We would own the whole “most valuable kills in the last seven days” banner on ZKill if it hadn’t been for Wolverine007Miner’s Viator.  Meanwhile, most of the initial hot droppers got away.

So that was a moment worth noting.

The Mittani has been saying that since Ascension and the update to Rorquals, we have been mining the shit out of Delve, an assertion supported by the November economic report, which shows over 2 trillion ISK in value having been mined out of the region.  The next closest region was The Forge, in high sec and close to Jita, which saw 1.35 trillion ISK in mining.

With all those minerals, and the new engineering complexes, which let you queue up many super caps for production, it seems like super proliferation is going to be a worse issue than ever.  I am sure we will be adding to the problem.

A New Broom at Daybreak?

This past weekend I started the process of building up the usual end of year posts.  Those are less like the random creative writing assignments I churn out daily as they require some data collection.  The easiest of the lot is the review of my annual predictions.  You can find the 2016 batch here.

I was going down the list zeroing out the ones that were clearly wrong… start with the easy stuff… which included the fifth entry on the list.

5 – Daybreak will get a new head honcho who will be selected from another company and will have little or no experience with the fantasy MMORPG genre that has kept the team in San Diego funded for most of its existence.  Expect this person’s past experience to be the hammer and any Daybreak problem to be a nail.  They’ll be just like that VP we once hired from Oracle, for whom every solution required a database.  So if, for example, they have a history with first person shooters on the XBox, you’ll know what to expect.

I marked that as a miss.  I hadn’t seen any news pop up to indicate that long time SOE/Daybreak guy Russell Shanks wasn’t still running the show.  I mean, when Smed “left” there were stories everywhere.  No change meant no points for that prediction.  Daybreak abides.

The angry eye of Daybreak Game Company

A bit later I was looking for something else and hit the Wikipedia page for Daybreak and noticed that the summary side bar did not list Mr. Shanks as a key person.  So I ran down the article and found this buried in the lower text:

In October 2016, Russell Shanks left Daybreak. Ji Ham is the current acting president.

Oh ho, there was a change!  Maybe I was right in that prediction after all?

It also seemed I didn’t miss any headline articles about it in the gaming press as the supporting attribution for this was Russell Shank’s profile on LinkedIn.  You can go find it if you like, but this is the key item.

Long time COO of SOE and Daybreak

So Mr. Shanks was out in October, which leads us to the next question; who the hell is Ji Ham and where did he come from?  Well, I was already on LinkedIn for the first bit, might as well continue there.

As it turns out, Ji Ham is a Columbus Nova Prime operative and his profile lists him as being “Co-President” of Daybreak since the date of Smed’s departure.  From his profile.

Principal and Co-President

Odd that we haven’t heard of him before.  Did I miss that somewhere along the line?  Has he been actively involved with Daybreak up to this point or has he been more behind the scenes?

And, of course, the bigger question is, what does it mean now that Russell Shanks is out and Ji Ham is in?  The Wikipedia article says he is the “current acting president,” which sounds temporary, but the article also has no source to back that up.  And given that Ji Ham is listed as having been Co-President since July 2015, it would not be a stretch to assume he has simply taken over the role rather than keeping the seat warm for some new hire.

So what does it mean to have Ji Ham in charge?  Googling him puts him with the Special Opportunities fund at Columbus Nova.  His Bloomberg profile says that he was head of Columbus Nova’s renewable fuels group at one point, which seems to connect into the Russian Renova Group.  Is Columbus Nova Prime now poised to frack Daybreak hard?

Or is Ji Ham just the watcher for Columbus Nova Prime, the on site enforcer, there to keep an eye on whoever they put in charge?  And, if so, can we expect a new leader with video game industry experience?

And, finally, how do I score my prediction?  Russell Shanks is out, so I don’t feel this is a complete miss, but is Ji Ham really a new head honcho?  He is certainly from a company different that Daybreak.  I’m allowed partial credit, so what should it be?  8 points?  2 points?

You can probably expect the prediction scoring post next week.

Titans Down in Okagaiken Trap

GRINDR FLEET TIME, NEED MAX NUMBERS IF THEY ENEMY COMES TO FIGHT NUMBERS WILL BE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WINNING AND LOSING

FC: Asher Elias
Op 1
Strat Op
Grindr battleships + logi + loki + support
(Also 20 free anti-fighter armour caracals will be given out for those of you who can’t fly battleships)

~~~ This was a broadcast from asher_elias to all at 2016-07-01 01:00:37.694040 EVE ~~~

I almost did not go on this op.

I saw the ping come up just after dinner, but was still talking to my wife and was planning to have some desert, so let it be.  So I ignored it.  Eventually though I was done and sat down at my desk to find that further pings had gone out for the fleet, including a RepSwarm ping from Arrendis asking for more logi.

So, more than an hour after the first ping had gone out I decided to log in and see if I could catch up.

Once in the station in Saranen, I grabbed an Oneiros out of my hanger.  Grindr Fleet is an armor battleship doctrine, effectively our old Baltec Fleet doctrine revised for the current meta, which meant armor logi.  I could have gone with Guardian… they are preferred, and I think I still have my infamous Higgs Anchor Rig Guardian, now fit correctly… but I wanted a slightly more independent ship if I was going to catch up.  Guardians need to be on a cap chain to be effective, while an Oneiros does not.  That meant I could catch up without worrying about capacitor and leave early if I wanted without breaking the cap chain.

In my ship, I then opened up the map, which I keep set to show the locations of members of my current fleet, and saw that most everybody was just one jump away in 93PI-4.  Since Saranen was almost completely blue, I undocked, and warped off to join the fleet.

I found them in 93PI-4 shooting another POS, just as we were doing with Asher the other night.

Always another POS to shoot

I got on the logi anchor and took stock of the situation.  I had the right fit.  I hadn’t bothered to check until then, but I was close enough to change out if I needed. I had mostly armor drones in my drone bay, with a few Acolyte IIs in case there was a combat target to whore on.  I launched one of those just in case somebody showed up.  And I noticed SynCaine was on, in the fleet, and flying a REAL ship now, a Megathron.

SynCaineThron

I opened a convo with him and said hello.  We left that open during the evenings events.

Asher did not have us hanging out on that POS for long.   Well, the rest of the fleet might have been there for a while, but I wasn’t there for long.  He had us align to the Saranen gate and warped us off to a bounce, then to the gate, where we jumped through.

Of course, about the time we were jumping through I reailzed I had left a drone behind.  Three Acolyte IIs left in the drone bay.

In Saranen we found another POS to shoot, then spent some time tethered on one of our citadels in the system, then started shooting another POS.

Sitting on another POS, this time in Saranen

This went on for quite a while, and Asher was pretty quiet for long stretches.  Some people asked for a participation link because it was getting late for them.  It was well past midnight for the Euros.  They got one and a few people wandered off to bed.  SynCaine and I were speculating on what was up in our convo, where I noted that Asher is quiet when he has business cooking in other channels.  Another ping went out to help keep the fleet full.

Some dreadnoughts were called out to join the shoot.  Then hostiles finally showed up.  A group of NCDot T3s arrived and went straight after the dreadnought.  We moved around and took a couple of shots at them, but they were hard on the dreads, taking them down.  It was disheartening.

A doomed Moros at the POS shoot

Then Asher warped us all back to the station and told the dread pilots they were on their own.  We sat there in space for a bit before Asher warped us off again, this time to one of our POSs, where a titan was waiting.  Asher told us to get in range of the thing, and before we got very close the titan put a bridge up.  The call was to turn props on and take the bridge, go go go go go!

Because on the other side of that titan bridge was the main course of the night’s meal.

Titans on grid in Okagaiken

We had bridged into Okagaiken at the W-4NUU gate where a supercapital force had been building up to come and drop on us.

Asher began giving orders, Apocs were to go after one titan, point it and neut it, while Megas were to go after another.  A titan was called as the primary.  We see hostile titans regularly enough.  We’ve even seen them in Okegaiken before.  But calling one as a target with a subcap fleet is generally just a defiant gesture.  I anchored and launched one of my Acolyte IIs and put it on the primary just in case things got real.

Of course, it wasn’t just a subcap fleet for long.  Cynos were up and dreadnoughts began landing on grid with us, friendly dreads that joined us in the fight.  I was busy answer the call for reps, but I kept that titan targeted and watched its status.  The shields were stripped away, but it was likely armor tanked.  Then the armor began to get peeled back, slowly but steadily.  When it finally hit structure, it was like an adrenaline surge, we were going to get a titan kill.  And sure enough, that first target exploded.

Opus Congelatio’s Erebus goes up

By that time the enemy too was bring in help and some Fax Machines landed on grid with us to try and tip the battle.  They were immediate targets for our dreads and we bent ourselves after the second titan.  (The Apostles went down quickly, but I still managed to put my drone on two of them in time.  Bad logi pilot!)

The second titan was another Erebus, and I told SynCaine that if we got this second kill, the fight would be paid for.  The slaughter on grid continued, the hostiles potting dreads as fast as they could, but more kept arriving.  Then the second titan became the focus and, like its predecessor, was whittled away until it exploded before us and became another wreck on grid.

Caoni Mar lights up the grid with his death

In that picture you can see the wrecks of the original Apostles at the top, more on grid, the Erebus exploding, and yet more ships being cyno’d into the fight.

The third titan was a Ragnarok and everybody was soon focused on him, yielding another explosion and wreck on the field.

Kamikaze Doomchild lights up space

By this point the dread wrecks were starting to litter space.  We were way ahead on points with three titan kills, but Asher still had enough dreads on grid to go for a fourth.  Dreads who jump into this sort of fight have pretty much bought a one-way ticket, so they insure (if they remember) and keep shooting until blown up.

The fourth titan was another Ragnarok, but the enemy seemed to have him covered.  Our initial burst of damage actually got him into structure, but then he got armor reps and his armor belt was restored.  To get him Asher told his subcaps to go at him, props on, in order to bump him away from his support.  I enthusiastically joined in on this in my Oneiros because we were anchored up out of drone range of the fourth titan.  So I sped off, even after Arrendis told logi to stay on anchor, in order to get within drone range.

As I got close enough, I launched my last Acolyte II, the other having been eaten up by smart bombs over the course of the battle, and sent him off as I turned to anchor back up.

That last Ragnarok was slowly but surely driven away from his allies, remove his support and leaving his exposed to our fire.  After almost ten minutes of this… a long time in a battle… he was finally far enough away and obliged us with one more big explosion.

NiceandRed goes critical

At that point, we had gotten all the titan kills we were likely to get.  The enemy was there in force, the T3 fleet we saw in Saranen had joined the fight, it was time to leave.  It was “fofofo” in local then, plus some “Blap Blap Blap toot toot” from Xel for good measure. (Xel was up past 5am local time for this fight.)

Let us “fofofo”

Asher had the subcaps align and warped us out, leaving the remaining dreads to their fate.  Then we warped to the station and docked up for about 45 minutes as we waited to the hostiles, bent on revenge, to wander off.

At about this point it came down through intel that Darkness had finally formed for the fight and was undocking.  I heard the fleet got a gold star for an excellent form up.

In station people linked battle reports, though those were lagging behind as the kill boards updated.  We knew we were going to come out ahead with four titan kills, the question was more of how much ahead.  This morning the numbers on the battle report I was looking at were in our favor.

I put Snuffed Out and Project.Mayhem on our side as they were part of the whole plan.

It was clearly a bloodbath, with a lot of sacrifical dreads going down to get those kills, but the ISK was was our, plus we killed some titans.  A single titan kill is headline news most days.  I expect to see posts up on multiple sites as the day goes foward.

While we were docked up, Asher told us about how he had worked to set this up over the last week or so, working with Snuffed Out, to bait out supers with another battleship fleet and some sacrificial dreads, only to have Snuffed Out and Project.Mayhem in place to tackle the supers when the showed up and let the piling on begin.  One NCDot pilot had some prophetic words earlier in the week about titans.

With the plan sketched out for us, somebody who had been looking at the kill mails wanted to know if anybody had gotten some good loot.  There was some expensive stuff dropped on the field.  As it turned out, the REAL winner of the battle was one Taylor McNinch, who was the looting God according to this pic up on Reddit.

Once things died down in system, we headed back to Saranen.

It was a hell of a night, and a hell of a fight, the kind you go out on fleets waiting for.  And SynCaine got blooded with his first titan kill, in a proper ship, as did a three day old character in KarmaFleet according to coms.

People already have some videos up of the fight.  Here are a few I’ve seen:

• Imperial Snuff causes Mayhem on NC/Tishu [DREAD POV]
• Snuff/PM/IMP Okagaiken Dread Bomb against Tishu/NC (or how to lose 4 titans)
• Just Brawling it Out
• TISHU and NC. titans dreadbombed in Okagaiken (with Asher’s fleet coms, so you hear what we’re doing)

I am sure there will be more tales from this fight, which I will link below as I see them.

And then, of course, my screen shots from the evening.

The YC118.6 Release in New Eden

It is now possible to reprocess Rorquals and Titans in Citadels.

–YC118.6 Patch Notes

Bridge burning rage quit capabilities now fully enabled for titan pilots!

Time for another monthly EVE Online patch update sans code name.  We did get a real name worthy update back in April with the Citadel expansion, but the May patch update was thin enough that I didn’t even bother with a post about it. (Though, as always, there was a theme song for the release.)

This month however, the patch notes go on and on.  Some new things along with lots of fixes.

First, and foremost there is this item:

• The number of possible overview tabs has been increased from 5 to 8

More overview tabs is a boon for me at least.  This is likely to have the most immediate impact on me in the game.

Also high on the list of stuff is the Serpentis Event, Shadow of the Serpent, which goes live with today’s update, and which should be plastered all over the UI in various places just to make sure everybody knows about it.

Serpentis Menace

Among the new items coming with the event are three Serpentis capital ships, a dreadnought, a supercarrier, and a titan, plus a whole new set of faction implants.

Drugs are now legal in New Eden.  The space war on drugs having be declared futile and a waste of ISK, CONCORD will no longer confiscate your combat boosting drugs when you fly through the space they nominally control.

Choose your poison…

I’m more of a Quafe Zero fan myself, though living in the back of their warehouse for the last few months might have influenced that.

As I noted last week, CCP is removing the recurring opportunity daily quest and its 10K skill point reward.  No more Thrill of the Hunt as of today.  On the other CCP has tried its hand again at the New Player Experience, making the following changes:

• Opportunities have been revamped, rewritten, and reordered.
• Implemented ISK rewards for completing opportunities.
• The Opportunities window and icons have been redesigned.
• Starter system NPCs have been rebalanced:
  • Greatly increased hit points
  • Improved loot tables to better fit opportunities
  • Increased number of NPCs in starter system sites
• Players who log out of the game while still being in the starting site will now log back into the site.
• Reduced the cycle time and mining output of Civilian Miners.

That isn’t exactly the sweeping changes alluded to in the Fanfest keynote back in April.  Then again, CCP has been working to find a decent NPE for the entire life of the game.  What I faced back in 2006 is arguably better than the opportunities system that was in place up until today, so maybe they’re stepping in the right direction this time.  One can always hope.

Then there is one for our logistics people… logistics by the actual, real world definition and not the CCP “repair, let’s call that logistics” view of things… that will make their lives better.

• It’s now possible to fit multiple repackaged ships at a time.

Bulk fitting of ships.  Being able to fit from a saved fitting was huge, but for our importers who haul in dozens of ships and have to fit them out one by one still, I expect that this will be a big quality of life improvement.  Also, preparing for Burn Amarr/Burn Jita just got a lot easier.

There have been a number of graphical updates.  Jump gates got the physically based rendering treatment, so now Amarr gates will be just as shiny and gold as some of their ships. (And, is it just me, or does it look like some of those Amarr gates were made out of Apocalypse hulls?)

The tactical overview will now give more details about items when you hover over them and a vector line for your own ship.  There is a new camera view to “give a more cinematic view of docking and undocking” from stations and citadels.  When you are docked up, there is a new lighting scheme (DirectX 11 only.)  And there are a host of new effects including black ops cynos get their own new look.

Cyno comparison – Current and new Black Ops

Then there is a long list of items that, to me, basically add up to “fixing stuff from the Citadel expansion” that address carriers, fighters, citadels, and some more of the oddities and issues found with them over the last two months.  As a subcap line pilot, most of that is over my head, though I think, if I read things correctly, that Svipul pilots won’t be calling insta-locking carriers over powered anymore.

I am sure there is more to it than that, but that is all I am going to try to summarize.  For those looking to delve through the data themselves, there are the YC118.6 Patch Notes and the June 28, 2016 Updates page as starting points, along with CCP Seagull’s Producer’s Update video.

There is also the feature tour video for the update:

And, of course, there is the update’s theme, a fast yet soothing piece, available over at SoundCloud for your listening and downloading pleasure.

The whole thing is reported as live on the servers now, so let the comedy commence.

Foothold in Pure Blind, Path to the Future

Summer has arrived! Following the closing of World War Bee, the north continues to be quite active…

Updates Blog, June 20-26 Summary Post Opening

I am still not convinced that one side in a war, much less those calling things safely from the sidelines, can declare a war is done and pretend that ongoing fighting is something else entirely.

Perhaps one might say that the operation, styled as “World War Bee” by one side, is over?  Some of us in the north have been fighting since before that name was even a thing, and we carry on fighting now that the operation has been unilaterally declared done.  Certainly plenty of individuals have said they are done with the war, but some of the same old names have carried on since January.

The again, we haven’t been doing ourselves any favors when it comes to reminding people that the war is still ongoing and that we form up every night.  The Mittani dot Com, or however you’re supposed to write that out (I usually just refer to them as TMC), has barely made a passing reference to the war in the last few weeks, with the last actual post about the war being Matterall’s article way back on the third of June.  Some organ of the state we have there.

TMC seems far more focused on its streaming channel.  Even there, the Meta Show this past weekend was more focused on TMC’s ArcheAge promotion than anything in New Eden.

Of course the flip side of that is, if some of our foes wish to declare the war over and move off to other places, that certainly seems to be to our benefit.  Maybe letting the war be “over,” for whatever definition of over one might care to choose, is a better plan.

And on the “over” front, Pandemic Legion has been reported to be pulling out of Saranen in what one wag over the weekend referred to as the “PLExit.”

The most common response to this pull out that I have seen is that PL always holes up some place to prepare for the Alliance Tournament.  Of course the dates for that were just announced, putting the whole thing out in November.  Does PL really go dormant for a third of the year over an event that requires maybe 50 people tops out of an alliance of more than 2,000 characters?

Anyway, war or not, tournament or not, the pressure on Saranen has relaxed noticeably, leading to GSF taking a system in Pure Blind over the weekend.

93PI-4 is on the other side of Saranen’s gate to null sec, and was once PL’s base of operations.  Now it is in Imperium hands, the station, ihub, and TCU having been taken and held.

Close to Saranen

A small start.  We shall see if it develops further.  NCDot is still in the neighborhood and we continue to fight them on a nightly basis.

Meanwhile, in another corner of Pure Blind, Imperium alliance LAWN, whose numbers were cut in half recently when the corporation The Graduates moved over to The Initiative, taking 368 characters with them, still managed to find the wherewithal to take not just one system, but a whole constellation in the region.

LAWN’s 300 hold this currently

Dare we draw hope from these minor gains?

I doubt we will have the forces to reconquer even half of the space we lost over the last few months, and all the more so if we plan to do it the hard way.  I have said in the past that I am not a fan of The Mittani’s book of grudges, where he has declared we will seek revenge on every last group who fought against us.  That isn’t practical, and even the new occupants of our space, who complain loudly and at length when called the CFC 2.0, are still blue-ish to each other.  They are okay fighting each other, but territory is inviolate, indicating that the age of coalitions and agreements is far from gone.  Different, but not so different.

There will have to be some coming to terms with the new state of affairs in the north, and we will have to have the flexibility to make new agreements if we can.  We are going to want some territory back, one way or another.  The only group that is completely beyond the pale is Circle of Two.  I would personally endorse any agreement or alliance that allowed us to send them packing after their betrayal.  I would ally with TEST or anybody else and forswear any claim on Deklein to take Tribute.  But that might just be me.

And any of that is all out in the future.  Nobody is going to deal with us because we captured a system or a constellation.  So we form up every night to press forward.  The war still goes on for us.

Thrill of the Hunt Not Thrilling Enough, Being Removed from New Eden

About a month ago I posted about how CCP had added what they called a “recurring opportunity” to EVE Online in the for of a daily quest called “The Thrill of the Hunt.”  All you had to do was undock and blow up a single NPC ship and you would be rewarded with 10,000 skill points.

The offer…

The plan seemed to be to entice more people to log in, to get more people to undock, and to provide a reward that would be significant for newer players.

The move was controversial… though, I say this in the context of EVE Online, where some pretty trivial stuff seems to get people inordinately worked up on a regular basis… with people angry about other people getting free skill points, about the skill point reward being too much, or not enough, and about the mere idea of introducing anything that looked like a daily quest into the game because then we will all be “forced” to go do it.

With nearly 160 million skill points in the bag already, I wasn’t dying to undock my main just to get another 10K.  But I played around with a couple of alt characters.  On my main account I ran one out daily to see if just that 10K daily feed would get me anywhere useful.  On my alt account I switched the training queue from my main alt… sitting at 115 million skill points and training level V skills just because… to a new character to see if that added 10K would be worthwhile.

I gave up pretty quickly on the character without a skill queue… 10K a day is like the skill queue running at 20% of normal speed, which is to say very slowly… but kept logging in with the other, running a level 1 mission daily to get that kill and earn a bit of ISK.  Getting what adds up to about 5 hours of free training a day… or a skill injector every 50 days… did make a noticeable difference in the skill climb from new player into being able to do something.

In a game that puts you in space and then makes you wait while skills train almost immediately, being able to dump 10K SP into a new skill, bumping it up to level II or III right then, can be quite the boon.

Apply skill points now

However nice that might be for new players, or the obsessives with alts like myself, it became clear yesterday that new players were not the goal here.  Getting more people to log in was the goal, as noted in this post by CCP Rise:

I’m here to let you know that on Tuesday, in the 118.6 release, we are planning to remove the recurring opportunity “Thrill of the Hunt”.

Our hope in releasing this feature was to gain insight on how direct, daily rewards might effect and improve engagement in EVE. I can’t go into too much detail about results but I thought you guys might like to know a bit about what did happen after it launched. The biggest conclusions we can draw so far (though we are still gathering and analyzing data) are that recurring opportunities did have a significant effect on player activity in game. We saw a pretty big bump in the share of folks heading out to kill something each day, and we heard some feedback that this in turn led to some pretty funny situations (read: kills). On the other hand, we saw very little change in login behavior, i.e. if you weren’t planning to log on anyway, the 10,000 free SP boost wasn’t really going to change your mind. This is really important for us and by collecting solid data with a fast and simple feature like recurring opportunities we will be able to make better decisions as we work on larger things in the future, such as the Shadow of the Serpent event, which begins on Tuesday in the 118.6 release.

I want to thank all of you for taking the time to talk with us about the feature, both online and in person at Fanfest. While there were certainly concerns from you guys, the conversation stayed mature and productive which is fantastic for us and we really appreciate it.

Basically, nobody logs in just to get the 10K SP, so CCP is killing the feature.

I cannot say that I will miss it personally.  I’ll just stop working that character as diligently, since it will go back to being easier to just setup a long skill queue and come back in a few months.

But I am a little disappointed that the sole metric that mattered to CCP was people logging in, that no other benefit was deemed to be worth the effort.  As I wrote above, for me playing a new character with the default set of skills trained, having that 10K boost was an almost immediate thrill.

But I have so many skills trained on my main that I might also be a bit more aware of all the skills I didn’t have.

Anyway, you have until the patch deployment on Tuesday to collect your daily 10K.  That is an extra 40K SP just waiting for you.

Hurricane Massacre

Expecting another run with Nagas again, I logged into EVE Online early to grab two off of the contracts available in Saranen.  There seemed to be plenty available, so somebody had worked to restock the market over night.  Pick your favorite quote about logistics and war.

But when the ping went out to form up for the 02:00 op, the call was for Hurricanes alone.  No Nagas would undock, so I had to grab a Hurricane off contracts in order to go along.  Plenty of those were available as well. Thomas Lear was the FC and, by way of indicating what we might be up to, the message of the day in the fleet window asked that we bring extra T1 ammo.

We were going to shoot a structure.

Thomas would neither confirm nor deny this allegation, just telling people to bring extra ammo.  I had shipped out plenty of cheap ammo for Hurricanes, so I was covered, but people who went to the market in Saranen were faced with some very expensive choices.  Somebody had bought up the T1 ammo and priced it way above market, making faction ammo cheaper by comparison.  A bit of economic warfare.  So people bought faction ammo instead.  I listed some of my T1 ammo and mentioned it in fleet chat, however nobody seemed to notice and I wasn’t wearing my headset with a mic, so couldn’t shout about it in voice coms.  Ah well, somebody will buy it at some point… it was still listed last I checked.

After boosters were setup the fleet, approximately 100 people, undocked through the cloud of Abaddons sitting on the undock and warped off to a gate.  A couple people got tagged and had to dock back up, but most of us had no problem.

We traveled a few jumps to pick up a titan that bridged us up into Pure Blind where we did indeed setup and start shooting a tower.  It was an NCdot money moon in U-INPD in a MOA owned system.  So we went into orbit of the tower and started shooting it while sending drones after the offensive modules to incapacitate them.

Hurricane fleet blazing away at the stick

We had a couple of hostiles in system scouting us, but things were quiet for a while until a group of hostiles showed up in local.  NCDot had put together a small bomber fleet to disrupt our POS shot, and disrupt us they did.

When the NCDot bomber force uncloaked and launched against us, the call went out to overheat hardeners.  That I did overheat saved my ship, as I was square in the middle of where they had aimed.  I saw my shields stripped away, then my armor burned off, and finally the very structure of my ship began absorbing the incoming explosions.  I thought I was done for, but the damage stopped with 8% of my structure remaining.  A couple of Hurricanes went down in that run, but most survived.  However, like my ship, the survivors were still heavily damaged.

Meanwhile, reinforcements were coming in to help our foes.  NCDot had put out the call to the other members of the We-Are-Not-A-Coalition Coalition and they were showing up in system.  Thomas warped us off, then brought us to a GSF POS in the system.

However, the POS password wasn’t the standard one you can find by googling “Goon POS password” and he did not know what the actual password was.  So anybody who was in GSF, which was most of the fleet, could safely hole up in the POS while those of us in other alliances had to go make safe spots and bounce around.

While Thomas was trying to get somebody from GSOL maintenance out to reset the POS PIN to let us in, a Guardians of the Galaxy T3 fleet showed up at the POS and started shooting our tower.

A blob of T3s outside of our POS

Meanwhile, somebody woke up MOA and told them they had an Imperium POS in one of their systems, so they dragged out a couple of Revelation dreadnoughts to join in the shoot.  Things had turned around and our own tower was the focus.

MOA Revelations exist

Pandemic Horde also filtered into the system with a mixed frigate and interceptor fleet.  All sorts of people were showing up.

I saw Hendrink Collie again

In the mean time, the GSOL service tech had made it out to the POS and had set a temporary password so those of us warping between safe spots could rejoin the fleet.  Soon we were all huddled together, orbiting the stick at 500m, and wondering how long it would take our foes to get bored and go away.

Sitting in the POS

At that point we were out numbered and out gunned, but in addition to that we were all still heavily damaged.  Ships orbiting the POS tower all showed visible armor damage.  We looked like a fleet of the undead shambling about the stick, giant patches of burned armor exposed.

Skins can’t hide the damage

We were a shield tanked fleet, and shields do regenerate.  However, we still often count on armor and hull to act as a buffer while we hope that logi can get to us and start repping our shields.  And, for me, that secondary buffer was mighty thin indeed.

No armor, 8% hull, and heat damage on the hardeners

So we sat in orbit for a while inside the POS shields and waited.

Then Thomas told us all to wake up.  Asher Elias had pinged for a reinforcement fleet and was going to be arriving shortly.  At that point we were going to leave the POS shields and engage the enemy.

We stopped orbiting the stick on our own and anchored up on Thomas.  He made a few turns back and forth as we waited, then headed for the edge of the shields, then end of safety, and started calling targets.

I had managed to lock up and hit a Guardian before it exploded, then moved on to a Devoter where I scored the final blow, giving my Hurricane a temporary kill mark.  Very temporary indeed, as the NCDot bomber fleet had uncloaked already and bombs were on their way.

I overheated my hardeners again, annoyed that my ship hadn’t come with any nanite repair paste and that I hadn’t bothered to check and grab some before we left, and waited for the hammer to fall as I started shooting the next target.  My shields went down by leaps as each bomb hit.  There was a short pause in the pulses of the attack as my shields lingered at the hairy end of being gone.  I thought for a brief second that maybe I might survive a bit longer.  And then another bomb pulsed and the ship disintegrated around me and I was in my pod.

I am sure I was not alone.  Those who did not go with me on that round no doubt went soon thereafter, as the bombs were not done hitting and my pod was destroyed with the next explosion, putting me back in the station in Saranen.

There were calls on coms to reship and be ready to return, but I doubted that we were going to go back.  The bulk of our fleet, damaged earlier by a well aimed bomb run, had been finished off by the same bombers.

The battle report shows that we lost almost all of our ships in the engagement, totaling up to 15.3 billion ISK while only inflicting 4.43 billion ISK in damage on our foe, a ratio of almost 3.5 to 1.

Not a good day for the USTZ 02:00 op.  And the daily Astrahus in Saranen was destroyed as well.

We shall see what tomorrow brings.